The Accidental Spy by Sean O'Driscoll

Author:Sean O'Driscoll [O'Driscoll, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: memoir, True crime
ISBN: 9781912624287
Publisher: Mirror Books
Published: 2019-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Back in the US, Rupert was busy repairing the house and doing the garden. He drove a tractor mower up and down the garden all weekend, listening to an audiobook about American forces in World War II.

As Maureen and Dorie chatted at home, he drove to an Irish pub in Forest Park, Chicago for an IFC meeting and to appeal for weapons. It was Sunday, 19 March 2000.

He wanted to see Frank O’Neill before the others arrived and to brief him on the trip to Ireland.

Carl O’Connor [not his real name], an increasingly regular attendee was also there, talking to Frank.

O’Connor was a business journalist and by the far the most middle-class and educated of the Chicago group. He acquired his Irish republicanism from his good friend, the unfortunately named George Harrison, the Provisional IRA’s most prolific gun-runner.

The FBI estimated that Harrison moved 100,000 rounds of ammunition and 3,000 weapons, including rocket-launchers and heavy machine guns, to Ireland in the 1970s. The IRA had given him his own unit of men for transporting weapons by sea.

At his trial on weapons charges in 1982, the prosecutor told the jury that Harrison had been gun-running for six months. Harrison objected.

“Mr. Harrison is insulted,” Brian O’Dwyer, his lawyer said. “He wants the court to know that there has not been a weapon sent to Northern Ireland in the last 25 years without Mr Harrison.’’

He was acquitted after convincing the jury that his mission was approved by the CIA, which refused to come to court to deny what was obviously an invented story.

Harrison strongly opposed peace in Northern Ireland without a British withdrawal and sided with Republican Sinn Féin when the split came.

When I worked for an Irish American newspaper in New York, we would occasionally get letters from him, signed “George Harrison, Continuity IRA”.

O’Connor was far more discreet and even-tempered.

Rupert, with army council observer status and having been appointed US coordinator for the Real IRA, was keen to assert that he was now in charge.

To show his new status, he told Frank and Joe that he had been given a list of weapons that the Real IRA wanted. McKevitt immediately needed two .25 ladies’ pistols, he said.

Rupert had discussed weaponry with the IFC many times before, but nobody had ever volunteered to go out and buy them. It was always seen as something that Ireland sorted out directly.

Frank O’Neill was too old for gun-running anyway, so Rupert could discuss the subject knowing nothing would come of it.

O’Connor, the business journalist, said he would go to Fetlaws, a gun dealership in Indiana, and buy the guns.

Rupert was in real trouble if he did. The FBI had repeatedly warned him: do not buy any weapons for the Real IRA. The case against its US fundraisers could be thrown out if he did. It was bad enough that he had given the Real IRA personal organisers with long delay timers.

Rupert tried to dissuade O’Connor by telling him that it was a bad idea, that any guns would have to be off the street and untraceable.

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