The Accidental Spy

by Sean O'Driscoll

  The gardaí rushed into the house and up the stairs. They knew from Rupert that Bernie kept the sensitive information on an external drive that could be easily removed. The children were asleep in their rooms upstairs.

  In the home office, as Rupert had predicted, there were guidebooks to Yugoslavia, where McKevitt had set up arms deals, and a detailed map of Belle-Isle-en-Terre, the Breton village that McKevitt loved.

  The forensics team removed McKevitt’s Compaq computer, a gift from Rupert, the external drive and Bernadette’s home computer. Rupert had installed all the programs on both computers, and his description matched what the gardaí found.

  Mickey was read his rights and taken from the house. Bernie just had time to call a friend and tell her to come and look after the children, that she was being taken away.

  They were both driven in a long convoy to Balbriggan garda station in north County Dublin for questioning. Senior gardaí made the decision to stay clear of Dundalk for security reasons.

  In three jurisdictions, Real IRA members named by Rupert were being arrested.

  The owner of the house where the army council meetings took place was also arrested, along with Eoin Quigley, whose home was used by the engineering department.

  In Massachusetts. James Smyth was roused from his bedroom to his girlfriend’s protests and taken away by the FBI.

  Never before in Irish history had simultaneous arrests taken place across such a wide area.

  Eleven arrests in Ireland, one in America and more to come.

  Rupert had made the gardai and the FBI promise him that Frank and Joe O’Neill would not be arrested, becasue they were old men and would not survive prison. Besides, they were old friends who brought him into the republican scene in the US and Ireland. The gardaí and the FBI kept their word to Rupert – they were not arrested, despite extensive evidence of their role in funding terrorism and, in Joe O’Neill’s case, planning attacks.

  In Boston, James Smyth picked a spot on the wall and stared at it, refusing to say anything except his name and address.

  All of the other arrestees answered only to deny IRA membership.

  In Balbriggan, there were frantic last-minute preparations before the formal questioning of McKevitt. Special Branch officer Peter Maguire had put a team together to prepare over 700 questions for McKevitt. They knew he wouldn’t answer them, but his silence would be used as an inference.

  At 4.40pm, Diarmuid O’Sullivan was ready. The questioning of McKevitt began.

  McKevitt looked very relaxed. He had been arrested many times since the early 1970s and had never done any time in prison.

  He was not a member of the IRA, he said flatly.

  The questions continued, all about IRA membership, each time O’Sullivan warning him that an inference could be drawn from silence or a failure to give a material answer.

  “I am not a member of the IRA,” he repeated.

  The gardaí then came to the main point.

  “Michael, do you know David Rupert from the USA?”

  There was a pause.

  “I don’t know him by name,” said McKevitt.

  O’Sullivan was surprised. He expected McKevitt would deny IRA membership and nothing further. He sensed unease.

  “Down through the years, McKevitt had the normal approach to An Garda Síochána from Provos [Provisional IRA members] – don’t communicate, don’t talk, don’t tell them anything,” Diarmuid O’Sullivan later told me. “He did answer a lot of questions during interview when Rupert’s name was brought up, which was surprising enough.”

  Was he surprised to be linked to Rupert?

  “He let on he was surprised. His answers were that he didn’t know David Rupert, which, to me, was a big mistake.”

  The gardaí wanted to pin him down on accepting their description of the very distinctive looking American, someone whose appearance he would surely know.

  “Michael, do you know a person by the name of David Rupert who is about 6 feet 7 inches in height and is from the USA?”

  Again, a pause.

  “I know nobody of that name,” he said. His response was a little more curt this time.

  He gave rote answers, knowing he had to answer them. “I don’t know a David Rupert,” he repeated over and over.

  In another interview room, Bernadette gave similar answers. She knew nothing of a David Rupert, she was not a member of the IRA, or the Real IRA, or Óglaigh na hÉireann.

  They were taken to holding cells for the night.

  The next morning, gardaí met in the station again and reviewed progress. Bernadette was released – leaving the children without both parents would be heavily criticised by human rights groups and they could always interview her again.

  Just after 2.30pm, an interview with Mickey McKevitt began. It was time to focus solely on his relationship with Rupert – now they would produce real evidence.

  “Do you know David Rupert?”

  “I don’t know a David Rupert,” he said again, “I can’t recall any meeting with David Rupert.”

  Then they hit him with it – receipts, in McKevitt’s handwriting for money he received from the IFC in Chicago for war expenses, all of which Rupert had saved and given to the FBI.

  One said, “Received from IFC the sum of $6,500”. It was signed Pat O’Hagan but it was McKevitt’s writing and his fingerprints.

  They had another piece of paper with the name and address of James Smyth in Massachusetts, again with McKevitt’s fingerprints.

  McKevitt sat back.

  “I don’t know a David Rupert,” he said.

  O’Sullivan could see that, through the mask, he was starting to look concerned.

  The gardaí were in a difficult situation. Despite a major operation mounted outside the bomb-makers’ meetings, and watching Rupert and McKevitt outside the house talking, they had no photos of Rupert and McKevitt together.

  After the second session ended, he was taken back to his holding cell. He had guessed by now that Rupert had turned. Every single thing, every secret of the Real IRA, he had shared with Rupert – from the valet business where the weapons were shipped, to the entire structure and names of the army council. The engineering department meetings, and every piece of bomb-making equipment they were looking for. A disaster.

  There was also the ship on Carlingford Lough. No sooner had McKevitt said to Rupert he wanted marine magnets to blow it up than the ship was moved out to sea.

  Every email was running through computers Rupert gave him, everything on the 32CSM website was coming through the system he set up. Even the engineering team’s encryption software had come through Rupert.

  But he didn’t know about the Iraqis. McKevitt never had time to tell him that Saddam’s people were in touch. Saddam would save the day.

  That evening, he was allowed a meeting with Bernadette. He told her about Rupert. Bernadette was furious that Rupert had been in their home, had spoken at 32CSM meetings at her insistence and had set up their computers.

  She went home and immediately called some of the tech team to help her dismantle the 32CSM website.

  It was being taken down because of “a sinister element” that had infiltrated the webpage and would be back up at a later date, the website said.

  At 8.10pm, McKevitt was released when the legally permitted time was up. As soon as he left the garda station, surrounded by gardaí, he was immediately rearrested and told he was to be taken to the Special Criminal Court in Dublin, a three-judge, non-jury court that handled only terrorist and organised crime cases.

  Sometimes the court sat at midnight, sometimes on Sunday mornings, but the person had to be taken there directly under emergency anti-terrorist legislation created in the 1970s.

  The motorcade of cars and motorcycle escorts with sirens blazing rushed down the motorway to Dublin, arriving at the court at 9.15pm. It was ink-dark outside.

  It was the first time that any of the media present had seen McKevitt when he wasn’t wearing
a jacket with the collar pulled up past his chin and hat pulled down low over his face.

  He was remanded in custody until the following Tuesday. He was driven under heavy escort to Portlaoise Prison. The prison housed the south’s IRA prisoners, who were kept in the E-wing. They were given special privileges – they could order in food from wherever they wanted and didn’t have to do prison work. McKevitt was greeted by his men as a hero and immediately took command of the dozens of Real IRA prisoners.

  The next day, the case was front-page news.

  Bernadette, known as the head of the 32CSM, was already a national hate figure. She had been on TV and radio many times, denying that she or the 32CSM had any connection to the Real IRA and saying that they were simply concerned about Irish sovereignty. Now the truth was emerging. She didn’t just know about the leadership of the Real IRA, she was married to it – a cottage industry of death and its justification.

  Every newspaper in the country was calling around to any Special Branch contact they had, desperate to find out if the gardaí had any big information that led to the arrest.

  That night, Maureen went out to dinner with her father and her brother. Her father was in a reflective mood: he could now accept that his daughter had meant the best, that she had not abandoned her family and that David was on the right side. Still, she wrote in her diary, he looked sad.

  Back at the house, Maureen’s friend Sue came over. She peered in the door and pretended to be looking for an assassin. It began a series of jokes that lasted the night. Maureen was falling sideways laughing – it was a relief.

  On Monday morning, Maureen hugged her family and flew back to Florida to be with David.

  It felt good, she wrote, to be back with him and in the warmth of Florida. Mark called from Chicago. The Chicago newspapers were asking questions; it was only a matter of days before something very big broke.

  “Could be national news by the end of week,” he said. In other diary news, coming straight after Mark’s warning, Maureen wrote, “Didn’t fill the salt and pepper shakers!”

  On Thursday, eager to see family before the media descended, they flew from Florida to Massena, then drove to Madrid to see Rupert’s siblings, Dale, Bob and Betty.

  David sat them down and explained everything and told them not to be alarmed. The media would surely break the story soon and then journalists will swamp the town.

  Betty was the most concerned. “I had no idea of any of this,” she said. “We knew David was going to Ireland and there had been some article about him in the papers over this, but FBI and all that – I didn’t know what the heck was going on.”

  David and Maureen came back to the hotel and checked the 32CSM website. David read for the first time about the “sinister element” that had infiltrated the group and that the website had to be shut down.

  Most people wouldn’t take insults from a terrorist website all that seriously, but he did. He became extremely angry, pacing up and down. He was inordinately sensitive to personal slights, a trait that he’d carried with him since high school. How could Bernie? And on the internet.

  That evening, Bernie called a member of the Real IRA army council and demanded a meeting.

  The army council member remembers it well. “She was surprised, yeah, for sure. But mostly she was very, very angry. She couldn’t believe David did this to her, after they invited him into their house.”

  Across Ireland, there was a frantic series of calls.

  Vincent Murray, the now peace-loving republican bar owner in Sligo, who had been David Rupert’s first step into Irish republicanism, got a call from Joe O’Neill.

  Murray: “Joe said, ‘Did you hear about David Rupert? I can’t believe it. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. He must have got himself in some mess, he’s messed up with the FBI.’”

  “I wasn’t concerned for myself, not in the slightest. I had no interest in armed struggle, I didn’t see the point, so Rupert lost interest in me. But people like Joe O’Neill were getting worried.”

  Joe took it worse than almost anyone. It was a personal wound. He clung for the next year to the hope, and the often-expressed belief, that Rupert had got himself into trouble in the trucking world in America and was forced by the FBI to turn on the republican movement.

  Michael Donnelly was very worried but said it was fortunate that he had fallen out with McKevitt. “To be honest, I was really panicked for the first week. I thought, ‘What is he saying about me?’ But I also felt vindicated – I knew he was a spy. I knew it.”

  According to a republican source close to Liam Campbell, he was far more relaxed. He was already facing IRA membership charges. They already had their evidence against him. Would they really risk bringing Rupert back for his case?

  David and Maureen flew from Massena back down to Florida. When they got home, they checked the Irish Independent online. There were two articles about the operation but no names. It said that the Real IRA had been compromised by a major US donor following an FBI operation. The public was fascinated. It made the top of the news bulletins on Irish state radio that night. But who was this spy?

  A few hours later, Mark called from Chicago. The early edition of the Sunday Times in Britain and Ireland, already in the news stands by 10pm on Saturday night, had a massive front-page story with a picture of David Rupert. The photo, soon to become iconic, was from an IFC fundraiser in Chicago.

  There were pages about the case on the inside of the paper.

  The article said that David Rupert, from upstate New York, was an MI5 and FBI agent who had penetrated the Real IRA army council and had brought on the arrest of its alleged leader Mickey McKevitt.

  All the digging in Madrid had paid off – the article said that Rupert was a trucker with a “shady past” who had been married four times.

  Mark said security was now key – if David and Maureen wanted to leave their Florida home right away and move into a motel somewhere else, the FBI would pay for it.

  He called back the next morning. His boss in the Chicago office, Kathleen McChesney, had rung around to the Syracuse, New York office (the closest to Madrid and Massena), warning officers not to talk to the media.

  Friends and family started to email. David Rupert, international spy, was becoming a global story.

  I was living in Ballsbridge, Dublin, at the time. I walked down to my local Spar shop. People were lifting up the Sunday Times and staring at Rupert, then turning the page. It was less than three years after Omagh and here was an American who had infiltrated the Real IRA and knew everything about the organisation. Who was he? Why did he come to Ireland? I bought a copy of the paper. It seemed nobody else was buying any other paper. His name was all over the radio all day. So was McKevitt’s. More and more newspapers piled in over the next few days. Rupert was part native American, they said, from a reservation in upstate New York.

  They all repeated the same lines – he had been married four times and been bankrupt three times. In Ireland, where divorce had been legal for four years, and where there were some of Europe’s tightest bankruptcy laws, Rupert was a bizarre and exotic character. His personality fuelled more and more thirst for information. Interest was also fuelled by something else, a John le Carré/John Grisham fusion of international spying and terrorism, with a mysterious central character.

  The FBI was calling every day to check in on them. Maureen’s diary notes expressed her frustration. “‘They’ want us to leave ASAP,” she wrote. “‘They’ want us to get new identities. ‘They’ want us to have surveillance.”

  In the following days, it was like the caverns of David Rupert’s mind were falling inwards. His mood darkened, his thoughts became paranoid and suspicious. He was a blue-collar man who ran a trucking company and now every detail of his embarrassments and failures was international news. And the headlines: Rat. Informer. FBI. M15. Trucker. Divorced. Bankrupt. Sinister Element. Shady Past.

  He became convinced the FBI would abandon him. It became an obsess
ion. He was screaming with them on the phone and ranting about it to Maureen every day. “The FBI are going to screw us,” became his mantra. His financial mistakes came back to him. It would be the Drowes all over again, it would be his bankruptcies all over again, but now with added foreign terrorists. He was losing it.

  Maureen: “I honestly don’t know if I would go through it again. I was very worried because he was so stressed.”

  She told the FBI about her fears. Mark called back – they had an idea. They would book a big group into a fantastic resort in Wisconsin. The FBI bosses would come, and the gardaí bosses would fly in from Ireland and they would relax, just chill out and discuss what happens from here.

  When David heard it, he screamed at Mark down the phone. What did they mean?

  Maureen was with him in the car at the time.

  “So I’m sitting there, listening to this on speaker phone and David says, ‘I know why you want to bring me in – so one of you can pin me down while the other one fucks me in the ass.’”

  David: “Yeah, that happened.”

  Maureen: “I couldn’t believe some of the things he was saying to them. I’m trying to keep the peace between them.”

  For David’s increasingly paranoid mind, the Wisconsin trip was a kidnap with smiles. The FBI and gardaí would keep him there until they got him to agree to testify. They were just trying to scare him with talk of the Real IRA searching for him so they could trap him.

  Rupert: “Just when Wisconsin came up, the FBI said they had some ‘overhear’ from the Real IRA that they were really worried about. It was National Security Agency-type information. Nowadays you’d call it ‘chatter’.”

  Both Maureen and Mark tried to convince him to come to Wisconsin. The following day he relented, but warned them he was going to leave whenever he wanted.

  David didn’t sleep that night. He got up at 3am and was pacing up and down their room and pacing in the kitchen. The FBI was going to screw them out of money. The FBI would always be around, watching them, judging them. The Real IRA would get them. After testifying, wouldn’t it suit the FBI to have him bumped off? No awkward questions about its methods.