An FBI informant
FBI mole spied for free trips, court told
Tue Jun 24 22:51:06 2003
208.152.73.64

FBI mole spied for free trips, court told

25.06.2003
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3509208&thesection=news&thesubsection=world

DUBLIN - An FBI informant infiltrated a renegade terrorist group behind the deadliest bomb attack in Northern Ireland's history in return for all-expenses paid trips to a country he had grown to love, a court heard yesterday.

Former trucking company boss David Rupert, 51, was paid US$1.5 million ($2.6 million) by the FBI and Britain's internal security service, MI5, over six years to spy on the Real IRA while posing as the splinter group's chief fundraiser in the United States.

Rupert was testifying against Michael McKevitt, 53, the alleged head of Real IRA, which detonated a massive bomb in the town of Omagh in 1998, killing 29 people.

Opposed to the peace process, the Real IRA split from the main Irish Republican Army in 1997.

McKevitt, whose wife is the sister of Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who died in 1981, denies both directing the Real IRA and being a member of it.

In one of the biggest security operations in Ireland in recent years, Rupert was flown in secretly from the US, where he is a member of the FBI's witness protection programme.

The former businessman said he first came into contact with republicans while holidaying in Ireland with an ex-girlfriend who had been a lobbyist for the US-Irish republican fundraising organisation Noraid. He said he was approached by an FBI agent in 1994 and shown pictures of him posing with known republicans.

"He asked me if I would be interested in working with the FBI in supplying information on those particular individuals and the relationship they had with the US."

Rupert said he hesitated at first, but then agreed to become an informant.

"From my moral teachings I found it morally acceptable to do.

"Secondly, I like to come here and he was offering to [pay] for my trips.

Until then, Rupert's frequent trips to Ireland had been for purely social reasons.

"I liked to come here to unwind from the stress of the job I was doing," Rupert told Dublin's heavily guarded Special Criminals Court.

After winning the confidence of the dissident republican group, he posed as the Real IRA's chief fundraiser in the US.

Only one person has so far been convicted in connection with the Omagh bombing.

Builder Colm Murphy, who lent a cellphone to the alleged bombers, is serving a 14-year prison sentence for conspiring to cause the explosion.

McKevitt's trial is expected to last about six weeks.

- REUTERS
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