The Accidental Spy

by Sean O'Driscoll

  Rupert flew into Los Angeles and met Kathleen and another agent at a coffee shop.

  They walked together to the FBI Los Angeles office and were led in. The office was set up in cubicles, and agents moved between them. As they stood in silence, Rupert overheard a conversation. One agent was talking to another about the port operations. “Yeah, we’ve a snitch coming in today about it,” he said.

  That old wound – being looked down on, being dismissed, compounded with the hurt that he would now be informing on his fellow truckers.

  Rupert exploded. He started shouting. McChesney tried to calm him down. “How fucking dare he say that. I’m not a fucking snitch,” he said. “If that’s how professional they are, they can fuck it.”

  He stormed out of the building, leaving McChesney behind.

  As the door slammed behind him, his nine years as an FBI agent ended.

  Back in Ireland, McKevitt fired his defence team and withdrew from the trial. Until now, he had hoped that Hugh Hartnett would destroy Rupert, but it wasn’t to be. McKevitt delivered a speech to the court, thanking Hartnett for his diligent work but said the odds were impossible, that MI5 and the FBI had set him up and there was no way he could get a fair trial.

  It was clear that Rupert was being paid huge money and the trial made a mockery of justice.

  He saw himself as a Nelson Mandela figure fighting the state.

  “I withdraw with my dignity intact,” he said. When he finished speaking, he handed his speech to a reporter. “For your records”, he said, and left the court, back to the court cell with the prison officers.

  For the rest of his trial, he was taken from the republican wing, to cheers, to the holding cell of the court, where he read books and newspapers, never to appear upstairs.

  On 6 August 2003, the three-judge court delivered its 43-page ruling. McKevitt was brought to the court building but refused to come upstairs to listen, despite being ordered to do so. He sent up a written note denouncing Rupert, which was not read out in court.

  Mr Justice Richard Johnson, presiding, said the court was satisfied that David Rupert was “a very truthful witness” with a considerable knowledge of republican groups. He had clearly identified McKevitt’s house and other houses at Oakland Park, Dundalk, and Greenore Road, where he had attended Real IRA engineering and army council meetings.

  “Overall he had very considerable knowledge of the facts to which he testified,” Justice Johnson said.

  The court was particularly struck by Rupert’s ability to twice recall, 15 days apart in the trial, the exact seating arrangements in the Four Seasons Hotel in Monaghan the first time he met McKevitt along with Phil Kent, Michael Donnelly and Seamus McGrane.

  The considerable sums he received from the FBI were as a paid agent and he was not an informer but someone employed to do a job.

  The lengthy cross-examination had not in any way impugned the compelling evidence that Rupert presented to the court and he had not told any “deliberate untruths”, the court said.

  It was a resounding vindication for Rupert.

  McKevitt became the first person in Ireland to be convicted of directing terrorism and was jailed for 20 years.

  His sentencing was the main story on the news in Ireland that evening.

  From his home and farm in the Midwest, Rupert got the news from Mark.

  “I felt real happy after all that I went through with Hartnett. I told Maureen and she was thrilled too. Like I said at the time, if I had tax problems or went through three divorces, it didn’t make McKevitt any less guilty of what he was doing.”

  In prison, McKevitt could see for the first time how hated the Real IRA were, and how small and irrelevant they were in the national political discussion.

  Other imprisoned members of the army council, especially Liam Campbell, were adamant that the fight must go on.

  A Real IRA member who was in prison at the time sums it up: “We couldn’t believe it. As soon as McKevitt went to prison, he wanted to end the campaign immediately.”

  Was there an element of “my way or not at all”? “Absolutely, it was always like that with him. He couldn’t handle not being in charge.”

  Tensions rose in the prison. There were now more than 150 dissident republicans inside.

  Army council member: “I felt that prisoners had no right to tell the army leadership what to do. It was clear that the leadership wanted to keep fighting and he had no right to tell them what to do.” A split occurred. Those loyal to McKevitt told those loyal to Campbell to get off their wing in Portlaoise.

  Campbell was beaten with a snooker ball in a sock and taken to the prison hospital, then placed in solitary for his own protection.

  McKevitt and his men blamed Campbell for disobeying orders, and for Omagh, from which the organisation had never fully recovered. Campbell blamed McKevitt for Rupert, whom he let in to the very centre of the organisation, despite everyone’s misgivings.

  McKevitt left the 32CSM, and so did Bernie, who had devoted the last six years to building it up.

  Within a few months, McKevitt was allowed out to see his mother, who was dying.

  For Americans, who didn’t understand the nuances of Irish life, it was unthinkable.

  Rupert: “I’m reading the Irish news sites online. McKevitt was close to his mother and she was dying. Over there, they just let you go home and see your mother. I got hold of the FBI and said, ‘Hey, your man is out to see his mother.’”

  It was just so funny to me, the difference in thinking. The FBI said, “That wouldn’t be the case, that’s not possible.”

  Then they called me back a few hours later and said, “Well, yeah. He went home to see his mother but he would have had guards with him and stuff.”

  They thought it would be like in the US with handcuffs and chains. I said, “No, he just went home to see his mother. That’s the way they do it over there. There was so much the FBI didn’t understand about how things operated in Ireland.”

  Rupert’s name continued to make headlines in the Irish courts.

  He was mentioned as the source of information for the arrest and conviction of Noel Abernethy for importing a huge haul of 15 million cigarettes seized by the Northern Ireland police.

  Rupert was puzzled by this because he knew nothing about the day-to-day operations of the Real IRA’s cigarette smuggling.

  According to a very well-placed security source, Rupert’s name was being used to cover for another mole deep within the Real IRA and who was well known to Abernethy’s group.

  Among those detained in this fresh wave of arrests was Gareth O’Connor, a Real IRA member from South Armagh. He was due to go on trial on Real IRA membership charges and had to sign on at Dundalk garda station every day.

  One day in 2003, a group of men set up a checkpoint as he was returning from the garda station. He was never seen alive again. Two years later, O’Connor’s badly decomposed body was found inside his car, which was dredged from the bottom of a canal in Newry. The Real IRA has since confirmed that it killed him as an informer and rolled his car into the canal.

  “If I had been caught, that would have been me, but worse,” said Rupert.

  Very soon afterwards, and without McKevitt’s strong personality to hold it together, the Real IRA began to disintegrate. McKevitt’s faction called for peace.

  The Real IRA itself split, with Seamus McGrane and several leaders carrying on as Óglaigh na hÉireann (Volunteers of Ireland). Until they finally called a ceasefire in 2018, they had killed nobody, but had blown the legs off an Irish-speaking, Catholic police officer to warn other Catholics not to join.

  A separate group, the Real IRA, carried on, eventually coalescing with Republican Action Against Drugs and independent former Provisional IRA members in east Tyrone. A seemingly endless round of splits followed, and an endless round of new political fronts emerged, without popular support.

  Things were getting worse for McKevitt.

  The victims of the Omag
h bombing sued him, Campbell, Colm Murphy and Seamus Daly, the Real IRA man who delivered the bomb.

  Never, anywhere in history, had the victims of a terrorist outrage sued their bombers. The burden of proving that the defendants were members of the Real IRA and that they committed the Omagh bombing would be extremely difficult.

  Murphy had been convicted of causing an explosion in Omagh but it was overturned on appeal because gardaí had falsified part of his confession.

  The lawyers for the victims urgently needed Rupert to give evidence.

  He, Mark Lundgren and Doug Lindsey flew to London for a meeting with MI5. The FBI’s reaction to the conviction of McKevitt had been one of satisfaction; MI5’s had been one of elation. Rupert was greeted as a hero by Paul and the other agents in the London office. Those who had worked on the case were eager to meet him.

  “There was an older guy who had been covering Northern Ireland for MI5 for 25 years. He had been chasing McKevitt all that time. He was so excited to sit down with someone who was involved with McKevitt personally.”

  A dozen MI5 agents invited the visitors to the Buck’s Club, made famous by PG Wodehouse and a favourite meeting place of the Tory establishment.

  “One of the agents went up to the door. A little slot opened, like you see in the movies, and all 15 of us were let in. There was a picture of the Queen Mother on the wall. She had belonged to the club, I believe. It’s a pretty uppity place.”

  One of the agents told David that MI5 was against him testifying in the Omagh case, because evidence might emerge that could give McKevitt grounds for appeal in the criminal case. Rupert: “He said, ‘McKevitt is like a fish that has been caught and is mounted on the wall. We don’t want to do anything that might make the fish come alive and jump off the wall.’

  “It wasn’t like I didn’t want to give evidence, but both the FBI and M15 were really against it. But I worked very hard for the Omagh people to get the emails from M15 – I really insisted on it and that wasn’t easy.”

  He met the Omagh lawyers in Chicago and swore an affidavit, confirming the emails as genuine and retelling what he knew about the Omagh bomb.

  It was by far the most important piece of evidence in the lawsuit.

  As Justice Declan Morgan, hearing the case, put it:

  “By far the greatest volume of material upon which the plaintiffs rely is the hearsay evidence of David Rupert. David Rupert made an affidavit on 24 June 2004 in which he referred to various statements and emails generated by him and indicated his wish to give evidence in these proceedings.”

  Under public pressure, the Irish state allowed the Omagh lawyers to have a transcript of Rupert’s evidence from the McKevitt trial in Dublin for free, saving them £40,000.

  The court in Belfast accepted the transcript, and the emails, as evidence, to the many objections of the defendants’ lawyers, who wanted Rupert in court for cross-examination.

  The decision not to have Rupert give direct evidence was probably a wise one. The Belfast court accepted the 11 days of Rupert’s cross-examination in the McKevitt criminal trial as evidence that his version of events had been adequately tested.

  In 2009, Justice Morgan ruled in favour of the Omagh families, in a global precedent. Rupert’s evidence was credible, he said, and he cited the many times that McKevitt, Campbell and Murphy had discussed the Omagh bomb with him.

  “The suggestion by McKevitt that he could not remember meeting Rupert, which he made at interview after arrest, is plainly false, as is the case put at his criminal trial that he never met Rupert,” he ruled.

  He also said that Rupert’s evidence that McKevitt was seeking a foreign sponsor showed that he was controlling the Real IRA and so was personally responsible for the Omagh bomb.

  Rupert’s emails about Murphy were “significant and cogent evidence” that Murphy was involved in the Omagh bomb, the court ruled, while the emails also showed that Campbell’s involvement was beyond doubt.

  McKevitt, Campbell, Murphy and Daly were collectively ordered to pay the Omagh victims £1.6m. Michael Gallagher and the other campaigners hugged each other outside the courtroom in Belfast. It became a global story.

  Other good news came through. The FBI Chicago office had applied to the federal Rewards for Justice Fund, which gave money to civilians who helped the war on terror.

  In the summer of 2005, it paid out $5m to David Rupert without declaring it publicly.

  Still, he was waiting on a final lump sum from MI5.

  Norman Baxter, a senior Northern Ireland police officer, came over to Las Vegas to meet Rupert, along with an M15 agent and an officer from Scotland Yard. Rupert helped as much as he could with the Omagh investigation and, over drinks, they discussed the final payment from MI5.

  Rupert won’t say how much it was. Baxter says it was “generous but dwarfed by what Rupert got from the FBI”. It was about $750,000, an informed source said. To date, Rupert has received about $10 million in total from US and UK authorities.

  Since then, he has lost some major sums of money on the stock market, mostly trading on oil futures.

  “I came into the market and then oil shale came along and prices went south. I got burned but we’re still comfortable,” he said.

  With the money, he was able to buy Doreen a house and his sister Betty a car.

  He also gave Maureen and Doreen weapons training out the back of the house, in case McKevitt’s US supporters, or James Smyth, caught up with them.

  Family photos of the target practice show Maureen, Dorie and David posing with their guns and firing at a cardboard man.

  Only David has a gun today.

  Dorie: “I do not want a gun under any circumstances, and my mom, no way. Outside of practice, the only time she fired a gun was twice, indoors, by accident. I don’t want us having anything to do with it.”

  The threat is not idle. In 2008, according to a Northern Ireland police source, an Irish American republican visited a leading dissident paramilitary leader in prison and was asked to try to get David Rupert’s social security number in preparation for an assassination.

  The police passed on the information to the FBI, who contacted Rupert immediately.

  They didn’t tell him what it was about, only that there was a “credible threat” to his life and to be extra cautious.

  He and Maureen did more target practice and continued their life of relaxation, marijuana, enjoying friends’ company and holidays. Both found that marijuana helped reduce their anxiety since trial and its use became almost medicinal.

  Maureen complains repeatedly that she cannot visit her grandson at his kindergarten. The other grandparents go and have lunch with their grandchildren, but not Maureen, because entering the school grounds would require a background check. David believes that a background request from the school would be flagged by the FBI which would then call the school and start asking questions about who was checking out Maureen Rupert.

  Dorie sighs. She would love her son to spend his lunchtimes with her mother. “This is what I call a David Created Problem. I don’t see any problem with it whatsoever. It’s like with family events David doesn’t want to go to, suddenly the security issue is a problem.”

  Despite friction over kindergarten and family events, David and Maureen seem still very much in love, and continue to make each other laugh. Writing this book brought back many memories of Ireland, and Maureen, in particular, would like to return some day, if incognito.

  In 2013, Rupert was invited to FBI headquarters to receive an award for being one of their greatest civilian agents. He flew to Langley, Virginia, where he posed with Kathleen McChesney, Mark Lundgren and others while getting a certificate of appreciation. It was one of the happiest days of his life. He had what he craved all his life – official respectability and encouragement.

  “It was kind of the end of everything. I know my family were real proud too. Not in a million years could you recreate the circumstances of how this all happened. But there I was.
”

  On Easter Sunday 2016, while hundreds of thousands of people were marking the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising with official parades in Dublin, Mickey McKevitt was released from prison, to much comment in the newspapers. He had no regrets, he told the newspapers. “Armed struggle is the only language the Brits understand,” he said.

  I called at his house in Blackrock to see if he would talk to me about David Rupert and the Omagh civil case. From his bellicose statement upon release from prison, I wondered if he was genuinely committed to peace, or just holding it in until he got a reduction in sentence for good behaviour.

  His daughter answered the door. I could hear him talking in the back room.

  “Absolutely no way,” she said to an interview request, as he and Bernie were sitting down to dinner. Absolutely no way he would do it on another day, she said.

  There was an awkward silence between us, so I shrugged my shoulders. “Well,” I said. “I tried.”

  “Yeah, you tried,” she said. “And let me tell you something – you’re a brave man.”

  I thanked her and walked to the Blackrock mini market at the end of the street. A 19-year-old woman was serving behind the counter. I was hoping she could supply me with some information on the McKevitt family but she had never heard of them. She totted up my total for an orange juice and a newspaper. “Mickey McKevitt,” I said. “Lives just up there. Just got out of prison. “Oh yeah,” she said blankly. “I think my dad said something about that.”

  I felt disappointed and then an enormous sense of relief. Her generation knows nothing of political violence, nor should they. Rupert got his $10m and fame. McKevitt got what he deserves: anonymity.

  *****

  For me, this book was never about David Rupert. He is an anomaly, an alien, who by a strange set of circumstances fell through a portal into Ireland and who, more than anyone else, helped bring a final end to our centuries-long national nightmare.

  This book, really, is about Ireland. There were invasions from England for 600 years, centuries of oppression and a famine when a million died. A rebellion freed the south but the north teetered on the edge of violence until it exploded in the late 1960s. Co-ordinated political violence came to an end with the imprisonment of McKevitt and Rupert’s heavy infiltration of its army council and US fundraising wing.