The Accidental Spy

by Sean O'Driscoll

  He looked at the judges as he spoke. How come a full team of gardaí sat outside the bomb-makers’ meeting in Dundalk, supposedly saw McKevitt and Rupert together, yet mysteriously never took any photographs?

  The defence was determined to concede no ground. They stuck rigidly to the story that Rupert and McKevitt had never met, that Rupert was a dishonest person who would do anything for money and had fed fanciful spy stories to the FBI and MI5.

  Every aspect of Rupert’s life was to be turned over, analysed, dissected, reviewed and held up to the court as evidence of dishonesty.

  It began with his childhood.

  He grew up in a “Christian Protestant New York household” where he learned the importance of honesty, Rupert said.

  When Hartnett snapped back that Rupert didn’t learn the Ten Commandments very well, judging from his business record, Rupert kept in his anger. He looked towards McKevitt and said that the Ten Commandments clearly forbade murder.

  “Hartnett dropped that line of questioning immediately. He knew if he went down the religious route, I’d bring McKevitt along with us,” Rupert recalled.

  As he had hoped, Hartnett suggested Rupert must be a smuggler across the Canadian border.

  Rupert was waiting. The only thing he’d ever smuggled from Canada were fireworks, when his father asked him to stuff them in his pockets when he was a kid.

  Hartnett soon jumped on to Rupert’s four marriages.

  In a country where divorce had been legal for just seven years, Rupert’s wives were a source of great public fascination.

  At one point, Rupert was talking about one of his exes.

  “And which particular wife was that?” asked Hartnett.

  “Number Two,” said Rupert. Some in the public gallery erupted into giggles. One of the judges smiled broadly and tried to keep in the laughter.

  Diarmuid O’Sullivan felt that the defence was making a major mistake by denying that Rupert and McKevitt had ever met.

  “It was very silly of the defence to go down that road,” he said. “Far be it from me to make judgment calls on how the defence run their case but I don’t think you should be disagreeing with the obvious.”

  Much of what Hartnett threw at Rupert was minor, or was different in an American context, such as bankruptcy filings.

  Some of what the defence had on him, and which Rupert had disclosed, required serious explanation. How come, in the 1970s, his co-driver was in the company of a 16-year-old girl?

  Rupert explained that he had told the driver that giving a lift to a runaway hitchhiker was a bad idea but the guy didn’t listen.

  Hartnett wouldn’t let it go.

  “It really had nothing to do with me,” said Rupert, who was able to show that the police had no problem with him, only his driving companion.

  Days and days went by, accusation after accusation. Two bounced cheques. No charges. Didn’t pay his father-in-law back. Didn’t have the money at the time. His driver was involved in a fatal accident. It wasn’t the driver’s fault. What was he doing in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven? On holiday with Linda Vaughan.

  How come the Drowes burned down just after he owned it?

  Rupert thought that one was ridiculous. “I said to Hartnett, ‘Listen, if a business owner is going to burn down some place, it’s for insurance. I didn’t have a penny insurance on the place so I would gain nothing from its destruction and I wasn’t even renting it at the time.’”

  At the end of the first day of cross-examination, Rupert was depressed. He didn’t expect the process to be so searing, for Hartnett to be so aggressive.

  He ate in silence in the safe house. So did the FBI.

  “I don’t like to be in front of people. I don’t like being in the spotlight and there is nothing as public as being in the witness box.

  “I was shook up that night. One of the garda said that Hartnett was always going to throw everything he had at me on the first day, anything he thinks will get to me.

  “By the second day, I’d found my sea legs and I was able to hold my nerve. By the third day, I was able to figure it all out.”

  As the days of cross-examination dragged on, Rupert noticed an American attorney on the defence benches. He jokingly called her the Wicked Witch of the East. The FBI agents were dismayed to see her. She specialised in FBI cases and had beaten them in the famous Wen Ho Lee case, in which a Taiwanese-American scientist working at a New Mexico nuclear installation had been cleared of espionage.

  The FBI discovered that she had hired one of the private detectives, Paco Chavez, to dig up information on Rupert.

  It was Rupert who was now trying to reassure the FBI.

  “The FBI were real worried about her. I kept saying, ‘There’s nothing I’m gonna say that’s not the truth.’”

  He began to notice the size of the defence team.

  “They had enough lawyers with them to choke a horse, it was unbelievable. There was one in the benches, I don’t know what his role was but I used to call him the Dweeb. He would sit there pulling faces, with his eyes wide open and his mouth open, trying to throw me off, but I kept my eyes on Hartnett.”

  At the end of each day, journalists tried to get close to Rupert but they were blocked by gardaí. As the days went by, the journalists hoping for an interview with Rupert became more and more female, as his womanising days became a feature of the defence evidence.

  “It was never going to work,” said Rupert. “Even if I wanted to talk to them, the FBI and the prosecutors would never have allowed it.”

  Under Hartnett’s increasingly testy cross-examination, he agreed that he once owned a maroon Rolls-Royce, which he drove around Massena. That was when he was going well in trucking and it wasn’t new, he said. He also drove a DeLorean, but said it was too small for him. Again, it drew sniggers from some in the public gallery. Some of the press were smiling broadly at the image of 6ft 7 Rupert trying to impress the ladies in a tiny gull-winged DeLorean.

  Hartnett went for it: “Isn’t it true that people say the DeLorean was “built by a crook and driven by a crook?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rupert.

  He was pressed and pressed about his first wife – a decent, religious woman – and why they broke up.

  Rupert said that their relationship wasn’t easy at times and that she could be “a bit of a bitch”.

  The loan from his father-in-law drew one of the flintiest exchanges from Hartnett.

  When Hartnett pressed him, Rupert retorted that non-payment of the loan was far short of murder.

  He looked over at McKevitt, the only time he did so in cross-examination.

  The private detectives had discovered that wife number two, Julie Smith, was now a masseuse. Hartnett pressed the point.

  “Hartnett was trying to make out that Julie, a masseuse, must be involved in something more than massage. That was ridiculous. She’s totally straight up. He was just throwing stones. Shots like that made me more comfortable because there was nothing to it.”

  Through it all, McKevitt wrote and wrote into notebooks, sharing his thoughts with the defence every day. Mickey McKevitt, Real IRA leader, was now replaced by Mickey McKevitt, legal analyst. With his legal pad, suit and gold-rimmed glasses, he had transformed himself into what he saw as a great legal mind.

  As the cross-examination went on, one republican prisoner noted, Mickey’s demeanor changed. He was hoping that Hartnett could make that big land and destroy Rupert’s credibility, but nothing major had emerged.

  A week into their exchanges, Rupert and Hartnett had broken the record for the longest cross-examination in Irish legal history and still there was no end in sight. The court was looking concerned. The judges began to ask, politely, how much longer the defence expected to keep Mr Rupert.

  A strange Stockholm Syndrome began to envelope Rupert. The longer the cross-examination went on, the more he seemed to gain respect for Hartnett, like two heavyweight boxers hugging each other through a gruel
ling 12th round.

  “The way I saw it,” said Rupert, “Hartnett knew Mickey was guilty but had to go out there and do his best. I liked him. He was just doing his job and he was damn good at it.”

  When they moved on to his meetings with McKevitt, Rupert’s recall of number plates and the exact position of people in a room appeared to throw the defence. He wasn’t being coached, he said, it was the memory techniques he learned in school to overcome his reading problems.

  “I was probably a whole lot smarter than they thought. They expected this dumb truck driver and they had no previous contact with me,” said Rupert. “I had an excellent recall and I also tried to be likeable, which they also probably weren’t expecting.”

  By the end of the first week, the media were reporting it as not so much as a cross-examination as a never-ending freak show. David Rupert, four times married, twice bankrupt, who didn’t pay his dentist, attempted to be a professional wrestler, and tried to set up illegal gambling with the mafia.

  David Rupert who was womanising in South Florida when he hit upon an IRA lobbyist, then became an FBI agent.

  Some reporters, consciously or subconsciously, sided with McKevitt – because his sins were already well known, there was nothing to gain professionally from uncovering them.

  Rupert, on the other hand, was a huge man in a tiny DeLorean, a blue-collar man with aspirations, stumbling through life trying to find the answer to some unknown question.

  Outside of court, his affability was still winning people over. By the second week, he was good friends with the Emergency Response Unit who escorted him to court. On the way to trial one day, one of them mentioned that Bobby Sands was a good republican and an honourable man, whereas Bernadette Sands and her personal army were not good people.

  The comment shocked Rupert. “Here I am with these guys, armed with Uzis, and one of them is telling me what a good guy Bernadette’s brother was. I thought, ‘Jeez, you generally don’t hear that at anti-terrorism trials in the US.’ There was this ambiguity in Ireland that worried me at times. I knew Mickey and James Smyth enough to know that if they could find a way to kill me, they would do it.”

  Hartnett asked Rupert how he reconciled moral teachings in school with his business dealings with a mafia lieutenant like Guy Scalzi. “I had no known association with mob lieutenants,” he said.

  He could see that Hartnett tended to back off if Rupert switched it from his own life to McKevitt’s, so he tried to hit back with references to the IRA.

  Asked if Scalzi looked like a mob lieutenant, he replied: “I have no idea. That would be like asking what a republican would look like, they come in all shapes and sizes.”At one point, Hartnett managed to rile him. Rupert was very sensitive about the humiliating bankruptcy of his trucking company.

  Hartnett asked him who paid for him to lie on a beach in Florida, sipping a cocktail and smoking a cigar after the bankruptcy. Rupert retorted that the question was “improper and wrong”.

  “When I was in Florida I would have had for all intents and purposes no money,” he said sharply.

  Feeling he might be admonished by the judges, Hartnett came as close to an apology to Rupert as he would ever go. “I withdraw the cigar,” he said.

  “By 11 or 12 days, it was getting old,” said Rupert.

  Hartnett wasn’t able to get Rupert sufficiently annoyed but he did land some good comedy lines.

  He challenged Rupert on whether he was going to make a movie about his life as a spy. Instead of Rupert the Bear titles like Rupert and the Giant Sunflower and Rupert and the Snow Globe, the next works of fiction could be “Rupert and the IRA” or “Rupert and the Mafia”, he said.

  Hartnett: “The Rupert the Bear comparison line was an obvious one to make – it seemed to go down well.”

  Liz Walsh, now herself a barrister, remembers hearing it with a group of other journalists. “It was the funniest line of the trial. We were falling sideways laughing. Hartnett was good at little asides like that.”

  Every weekend, Rupert would be brought to the Irish air force’s base in Baldonnel under heavy escort and flown by royal plane to the American airbase in England. Most weekends, if he and the FBI men wanted, Scotland Yard would take them on day trips – more palaces and gardens – always with heavily armed detectives walking close by.

  Every Sunday night, he was flown back again to Baldonnel and then taken again by escort to the safe house in Dublin.

  Every Monday morning, he was back in court again. In the second week, Hartnett appeared to get more and more frustrated, and the witty asides disappeared.

  One day, Hartnett was doing his characteristic head turn to the side while asking a question, as if addressing the imaginary jury of his mind.

  Rupert complained to the judge. “I said, ‘Look, the defence counsel doesn’t have to look at me but I need to know what he is saying’. Hartnett got mad, he just sat down. The judge looked over at him and said, ‘Are you finished?’

  “Hartnett said he wasn’t done yet. And he pops back up and the judge tells him that when a defence counsel sits down it usually means they are done. I liked that from the judge.”

  On the eleventh day of cross-examination, it was finally winding down.

  Hartnett had closed his case. He talked with another barrister and a solicitor and then asked if he could have one more question. The chief judge asked Rupert if he accepted. “Sure, go ahead,” said Rupert.

  Hartnett stood up and said that he had to put it to Rupert that he had never met McKevitt and that all his evidence was a concocted lie.

  Rupert, looking a little stunned, retorted, “That’s foolishness.”

  That was the end of cross-examination. There was a palpable sense of relief in the courtroom, not least among the journalists, who had grown weary of the ordeal.

  40 witnesses were lined up to confirm Rupert’s story, including Martin Callinan and Diarmuid O’Sullivan, who testified that Rupert and McKevitt were seen together, and Breda McNulty, wife of the owner of the Drowes, who confirmed that Rupert did have the lease, as he had claimed.

  Rupert didn’t wait to hear their evidence. He was exhausted and eager to go home. MI5 signalled ahead. A Hercules transport plane, with SAS soldiers on board, flew to Cork, in the south of the country. The Irish air force did not want a British military plane on its runways and flying out of Cork would switch the routine.

  While still in the court building, packing up to go, Rupert asked for a garda baseball cap as a souvenir for Dan, the former next-door neighbour and banker, who collected them.

  There happened to be a uniformed garda standing near him. Callinan asked him for his peaked, formal garda hat and gave it to Rupert. “I’ll get him another one,” he said.

  Rupert got into the bomb-proof car with the Uzi-carrying emergency response unit. A car led ahead of them and there were two cars behind and two garda motorbike escorts, blaring sirens as they drove from Dublin all the way to the very south of the country.

  Rupert knew this was the last trip he was ever going to make in Ireland. He looked out at the green fields and the people stopping to watch the motorcade.

  Along the way, there was a sudden emergency.

  “We were on our way out of Dublin, with three or four cars in line. Suddenly there were two guys on a motorcycle, with dark helmets on. I didn’t see them at first but the gardaí did. They were trying to come up beside us to pass us. So the garda escort car behind us pulled them up and blocked them.” A garda jumped out, holding a gun and flashed his badge.

  “I never knew if it was bad guys or just two guys on a motorcycle trying to check us out,” said Rupert. “But they were very close to us, coming up on the inside.”

  At Cork Airport, they got out of the car.

  There was a delay while the British turned the Hercules. On board would be three passengers – an MI5 agent, Rupert and Mark, the FBI agent.

  “Everyone else on board were SAS who were deployed for us. They were worried about
a potential rocket attack, so they told us the plane was loaded with chaff, which is big loads of distracting material that can be released if there is a missile coming our way.”

  It was time for Rupert to go home. He shook hands with the gardaí. “Fair play to you, boy,” said one of them.

  The ramp on the back of the Hercules was open and he walked up it, holding his garda hat and travel bag, never to return to Ireland. He turned around for a last wave and the ramp door lifted.

  CHAPTER 25

  Paxil. Valium. Prozac. Zoloft.

  The drugs began to mount.

  Post-trial was the worst time of Rupert’s life. He, Maureen and Dorie were all taking prescription drugs to get over the fear and anxiety, and most of all for David, the ennui.

  Dorie, the most stable and grounded of attorneys, found that she was physically dependent on Paxil.

  “It was real hard to get off it. It was a struggle. Eventually, I got it down to liquid-form with smaller and smaller doses. It wasn’t easy.”

  Rupert, who once had 50 trucks running for him and employed dozens of people, could never go back to trucking again. He was too much of a target for the Real IRA, too easy to find through the trucking networks. Even if Irish Americans didn’t know which trucking company he was with, truckers could soon identify him by appearance.

  “The FBI basically bought out the rest of my life. I got a lot of money, but I was bored and depressed.”

  By that point Rupert had made over $3m from his spying work, through direct payments, tax write-offs and expenses.

  He spoke to Kathleen McChesney about it. She knew he needed adrenaline again. No matter how much he complained about the FBI, he needed them.

  That summer, they were running an operation at the docks in Los Angeles to find huge drug routes coming from South America and to investigate a major fraud case.

  The Chicago FBI office called the Los Angeles office – they had a man with more than 20 years’ truck management experience, an excellent reputation as an on-the-ground agent and courtroom experience.

  LA liked it straight away. They would set him up in a trucking office in the port. It would be far from the trucking networks of Chicago, New York or Boston, where he might be identified.