he’s a 20-stone illinois trucker who owes a fortune to the taxman. but david rupert is also the man believed to have infiltrated the terrorist group behind the omagh bomb. now the secrets he uncovered could bring the real ira to its knees and help pave th

Rupert’s testimony could bring down the main Republican opponents to the peace process in Northern Ireland. By the time his cover was blown, the FBI said their mole had secretly recorded meetings and sent them more than 2,000 e-mails containing devastating information about the dissident group’s plans. It was hinted that he’d thwarted more Omagh-style attacks and that he’d helped stem the flow of money and arms to the movement. His chief victory, however, was in delivering up Michael McKevitt. Rupert’s tapes, films and e-mails had resulted in McKevitt and his wife, Bernadette Sands-McKevitt (the sister of hunger-striker Bobby Sands), being arrested at their home in Blackrock, near the border, in late March. While his wife was released without charge, 51-year-old McKevitt appeared before the three-judge Special Criminal Court in Dublin and was charged with directing paramilitary activity and belonging to an illegal organisation, the Real IRA.

It was an astonishing development. An unknown American had succeeded in pulling off the biggest intelligence coup in the province’s bleak history. The quality of the evidence Rupert had obtained was equally impressive, though most of it won’t be revealed until he faces McKevitt in court. Both Republican and Loyalist terrorists are adept at avoiding even the most technologically advanced surveillance equipment; their meetings, for example, are held in deliberately low-tech surroundings like the back of an old van in the middle of a muddy field at four in the morning. Only when they feel totally confident about the company they are in will they speak freely. Yet it looks as if McKevitt and others dropped their guard in the presence of the infiltrator.

David Rupert is understandably paranoid about appearing in court. He knows there’s a Real IRA bullet out there with his name on it. He and his wife Maureen are watched over 24 hours a day by armed FBI agents at a safe house thought to be somewhere in rural Indiana. When they go to Dublin over the next few months, they’ll be protected by the Garda and the Irish Army. Rupert will wear a bulletproof vest. If everything goes to plan, he’ll be the first person to vanish into thin air after a paramilitary trial when he falls under the government’s Witness Security programme.

Michael McKevitt leads a very different existence. The miserable Portlaoise prison in the Irish Republic is the place he now calls home. It’s a far cry from the back-slapping welcome that awaits supporters of the "cause" in the Irish-American bars of Boston, New York and Chicago. It’s in these bars that the fundraising get-togethers are organised, and they were David Rupert’s hunting ground. He made contact with McKevitt in just such a place.

Little is known about Rupert. He was born on 27 July 1951, in or near the town of Madrid in upstate New York. The only known photograph of him comes from his high-school yearbook. In black and white, it shows a tall, running-to-fat young man with thick, light-coloured hair swept neatly to one side. His background was a mixture of German and Native American and his family lived near the St Regis Mohawk Indian reservation close to the St Lawrence Seaway. I tracked down a man there who is believed to be David Rupert’s father, but he refused either to confirm or deny that he was related to the elusive FBI informer. The only information he would impart was the address of Rupert’s attorney in Indiana. My calls and messages to the lawyer went unanswered, and the FBI would not admit Rupert was one of their agents.

Unlike many infiltrators, David Rupert had no Irish family connections. He wasn’t a Roman Catholic either, though American sympathisers frequently point out that the earliest founders of the Republican cause were Anglo-Irish protestants.

On leaving school in the late ’60s Rupert was assigned a standard social security number, but he left little evidence of what he did for the next 20 years. What is known is that he surfaced in Ireland in 1992 in the company of an American girlfriend who had Republican sympathies. Three years later, he was back in Ireland, though this time he may have been trying to escape the US tax man rather than simply enjoying a holiday. In February 1994, according to records in Cook County, Chicago, a former trucking business owner named David Rupert owed the Internal Revenue Service $325,000. A lien - an enforceable US Treasury IOU - against his house had been issued by the IRS to the tune of $94,200 because he’d not paid any income tax or social security on behalf of his employees. After penalties and interest, that debt eventually climbed to about $700,000.

During his escape to Ireland in 1995, Rupert travelled to Bundoran, a holiday town on County Donegal’s west coast. He got on well with locals who actively supported the radical Republican Sinn Fein party - a dissident offshoot of the more mainstream Sinn Fein and implacable opponents of the peace process. Rupert decided to take up

the lease of a bar called the Drowse Inn, in neighbouring County Leitram. It is believed that he lent both his flat in Bundoran and his new bar to Republicans - both political and paramilitary - for secret meetings. The IRS was still chasing him and, in June 1995, it issued a second lien, this time for $230,000 in more unpaid taxes and social security payments, as well as $39,000 in unpaid personal income tax. None of this money has ever been paid.

It’s been suggested that the service Rupert provided to the FBI may have been part of a deal: they’d clear his debts and erase any outstanding warrants for his arrest if he’d go undercover, using the goodwill he’d built up in Ireland, to spy on and betray the Real IRA.

In 1996 Rupert returned to the Chicago area, probably already working for the FBI. Records suggest he was using a false name and attending meetings of a group called the National Irish Freedom Committee. The NIFC claims it raises money for the families of political prisoners in Northern Ireland and the Republic, but security sources strongly believe this is a front for generating funds for paramilitary organisations. The NIFC’s leadership is mainly based in New York but a strong group is also found in Chicago. It was here that David Rupert drifted during 1996 and ’97.

He made contact with Frank O’Neill, an old Republican veteran who’d been active in Irish circles for four decades. "David Rupert seemed very plausible, an ordinary Joe," O’Neill told me. "But he turned out to be one of the biggest crooks God ever put on this earth."

O’Neill’s bitterness is fuelled by the fact that Rupert seems to have convinced members of the Chicago branch of the NIFC to split from the national leadership over the organisation’s support of the Continuity IRA and Sinn Fein. He was in favour of a more dangerous and radical strategy of supporting the Real IRA and its alleged political wing, the 32 County Sovereignty Committee. The latter is said to have been run by Michael McKevitt, who’d split from the IRA in disgust at the peace process. He would have brought to the breakaway organisation specialised knowledge of the Provos’ arms dumps and a significant body of dissident support. Thus, the Real IRA is said to have been born. But it lacked the Provos’ solid financial base. David Rupert stepped into the breach, placing himself at the forefront of a plan to assist the Real IRA financially and to set up a reliable supply of arms. In some e-mails written at the time, he refers to uniting the two factions into a brand new force based in the USA. In one message he states: "Chicago is going to withdraw from the national organisation and operate on our own as the Irish Freedom Committee, Chicago."

Some IFC members were suspicious. Rupert was able, without any discernable means of income, to fly from Chicago to New York for regular meetings. According to a Sunday Times report, one commented: "As soon as I met him I thought this was a set-up if ever I saw one. I thought, ‘Where are the cameras?’ I wasn’t at all surprised when I found out he was an agent. I’d have been surprised if I’d found out he wasn’t an agent."

Others noted that, in the heady, often drunken, atmosphere of Irish-American get-togethers, Rupert never drank; he always kept his guard up. He liked taking snapshots of his Republican pals at such gatherings - for keepsakes, he claimed. Yet, according to one friend, "When we tried to take a picture of him, he refused and bolted to another room." He also refused to pass on a home telephone number to comrades, saying instead that he was contactable only by mobile phone. He liked helping fellow members of the IFC with their computers, even taking some away to be repaired and donating a couple of PCs to the movement. His former friends now suspect these were doctored to allow the FBI access to the information they contained.

But most, like Frank O’Neill and well-known Bronx lawyer Martin Galvin - a long-time activist and current Republican Sinn Fein supporter, who also confirmed to me he’d met Rupert in US-Irish circles - suspected nothing. "He seemed to know a little bit about the [Irish] issue," O’Neill explained. "He’d gone out with an Irish-American girl too." Yet O’Neill noted that Rupert was apt to pull what he termed "disappearing acts" every now and then. "He was one of those guys you wouldn’t see for a while. I thought he was a trucking business owner who moved around a lot. He was a nice guy. But he was always the first guy into a function and the first guy out. He was not an accessible man."

Some time in 1998 - with the Sinn Fein/IRA leadership signed up to the Mitchell Principles of non-violence, and apparently willing partners of the peace process - Rupert made contact with the RIRA and the 32 County Sovereignty Committee. The dissidents needed an Irish-American group’s backing fast. Naturally they gravitated towards the USA, traditionally the largest donator to the Republican cause. David Rupert’s position in the IFC meant he looked like a contender for providing funding.

One report places Rupert in Ireland in August 1998 when the Omagh bombing occurred. Although it’s thought he was entirely unconnected with the incident, he did return to the USA the day after it happened. It’s unclear whether he was working for the FBI at the time and might have known about the attack. An e-mail allegedly from Rupert reflected: "It was a bad choice to bomb Omagh. It went wrong, as our intelligence shows, with the help of the security forces." But in a later, more paranoid, passage discussing the bombing, he says he’s concerned he might be outed in the media as a supporter of the bombers: "My immediate concern was to wake up and see a CNN van in front of my house. That might not fly the best in a rural Indiana neighbourhood."

The infiltrator was becoming twitchy.

But by early 1999 Rupert was back in Ireland. A report places him at a top-level meeting between the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA. The same report states that Rupert was shown weapons stored in a nearby barn, a supply which was later seized by the Garda.

Later, in November 1999, Rupert was spotted at a meeting of the Irish Republican Welfare Association - thought to be a RIRA front - in Dundalk town hall. The border town, frequently labelled "El Paso" at the height of the Troubles in the mid-’70s because fleeing Provos bolted south over the border to its many safe-houses, remains a hotbed of Republican support. One source told me that Rupert may at this point have produced a cheque for $10,000 for his comrades. If this report is true, the money bought him time and trust.

Back home, however, David Rupert was utterly broke. Although he talked big, he never donated a cent to the IFC himself. "I never saw him giving us any money. We couldn’t find any money he ever gave us. We couldn’t find his name [on donation receipts] anywhere," claimed Frank O’Neill. "He was living high-on-the-hog and conning everybody." This included the alleged head of the Real IRA, Michael McKevitt, who was taken in, like many others, by Rupert’s apparent largesse and long-term fundraising potential. But back in the US, some of Rupert’s fellow IFC members were already running checks on him. FBI alarm bells started ringing. They knew he’d only be accepted in Ireland as long as his credibility held firm in Irish-American circles. But that credibility was fading fast. His Chicago branch of the Irish Freedom Committee had already been kicked out of the national organisation by the main body in New York, some of its members suspicious of Rupert’s motives.

Yet he carried on, sending an astonishing 2,140 e-mails to his handlers during his run. He attended meetings and took calls with his Republican contacts, then dashed back to his laptop where he relayed all the details using an encrypted FBI programme.

Eventually the FBI decided the game was up and pulled their man out of the field. By this time he was known to MI5 and Irish intelligence too. He’d run further than any agent before inside Northern Ireland’s deadly terrorist war. It’s alleged that Rupert not only managed to penetrate the leadership of the Real IRA but also attended one of its army council meetings. His evidence later led to McKevitt’s arrest on charges of directing and belonging to an illegal organisation.

In the time Rupert was undercover, many members of the Real IRA were arrested. Several RIRA arms dumps and firing ranges were also closed down by the Garda. Last summer, MI5 successfully foiled a RIRA initiative to funnel arms from the Balkans. Three alleged RIRA men were arrested while trying to buy arms and explosives in the Slovak town of Piestany; MI5 agents had posed as Iraqis willing to trade arms during the operation. For an organisation already operating on a shoestring, these were heavy blows.

Security sources in Dublin are keen to underline the RIRA’s diminished capability. I was even told that the entire Dublin Brigade of the RIRA has been "stood down" because of fears that it had been compromised by informers in the ranks. But conflicting reports also suggest the group has rapidly reorganised itself. Two new leaders are already in place, one in South Armagh and the other in Dundalk. The recent attacks in London and Birmingham show that the audacity of the RIRA has not vanished. But David Rupert has inflicted a brutal body-blow on the organisation.

Dundalk-based lawyer James McGuill refused to be drawn when I asked him what strategy he’d use to defend Michael McKevitt in the face of Rupert’s evidence. It’s been suggested that McKevitt will simply deny all knowledge of the American. Or perhaps Rupert’s financial dirty laundry will be aired to show he was far from a normal FBI recruit. What is certain is that, long after verdicts have been handed down, witness protection schemes approved and the dust has finally settled in Dublin’s Special Criminal Court, David Rupert will have to reinvent himself one last time.

Whatever his new persona, inside Irish-American communities his old name will not be cited as an example of a brave man who prevented many Omaghs. As an official IFC statement said: "It is he who will have to look at himself in the mirror daily, come to terms with his actions and live with their consequences. Mr Rupert is guilty of a heavy sin - that of the informer."

"Somebody telephoned me and told me about him being an FBI man," recalls Rupert’s old pal Frank O’Neill, in his rasping, still-discernable Carrickfergus accent. "I couldn’t believe it... I thought, ‘well, there you go, Ireland has always had the best and worst of people’."

Meanwhile David Rupert sits watching, waiting and wondering in his safe house somewhere in the USA. It’s said he turned down the chance to spend the time until his Irish court appearance in a bolthole in the warmer climes of the Caribbean. Perhaps, as the trial approaches, he feels that he’s facing enough heat already. n

photographs: kevin bolyes photography

inside the real ira

The Real IRA was founded in October 1997 after a meeting in Gweedore, Co. Donegal, between the Provisional IRA leadership and its political wing, Sinn Fein, ended with dissidents opposed to the Peace Process leaving the Provos.

It has had significant success in recruiting

so-called "lilywhites" or "cleanskins": new recruits with no criminal records. They’re easier to use in cells on the British mainland and harder to find, because they’re not on current police databases.

The alleged political wing of the Real IRA is the 32 County Sovereignty Committee. It already has branches in London, Liverpool and Glasgow.

The actual numbers supporting the RIRA run to about 150. It’s reckoned there are around

40 hardcore "volunteers" ready for active operations. About 30 experienced Provisional IRA men joined its ranks in its early days, including, according to one source, "The Engineer".

He allegedly designed the bombs used in

the attacks on London’s financial district

and Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, and

is thought to have developed the Real IRA "Super-mortar" used in the Hammersmith Bridge attack.

RIRA attacks

15 August 1998: Omagh: 29 people

killed, 370 injured

6 February 2000: Mahon Hotel,

Co. Fermanagh, bombed

25 February 2000: Bomb found near Ebrington Barracks, Co. Londonderry

29 February 2000: Device found close to military base in Dungannon, Co. Tyrone

1 June 2000: London’s Hammersmith Bridge bombed; the first UK mainland operation by the Real IRA

20 June 2000: Explosives found in the grounds of the Northern Ireland Secretary’s residence at Hillsborough, Co. Down

9 July 2000: Car bomb blast on RUC station at Stewartstown

19 July 2000: London’s Ealing Broadway railway station attacked (above)

12 September 2000: Bomb at a military site in Magilligan, Londonderry, fails to detonate

20 September 2000: Rocket attack on MI6 HQ

3 March 2001: Taxi packed with explosives detonates outside the BBC HQ in Shepherd’s Bush, London

14 April 2001: Post office in Hendon, London, is bombed

3 August 2001: Car bomb explodes in Ealing, injuring 11 people

3 November 2001: Bomb detonates inside a car in Birmingham city centre