The Billionaire Who Wasn't (46 page)

Meanwhile, more serious allegations about Connolly surfaced. Lord Laird of Artigarvin, a Northern Ireland unionist and fierce opponent of Sinn Fein, alleged in the British House of Lords on June 9 and 14 that Frank Connolly had gone to Colombia with a known IRA man to collect some $3 million “as part payment to the IRA by FARC terrorists for providing training and expertise on bomb making.” The claims by Laird, who had acted as a public relations consultant for Anthony O'Reilly, chief executive of Independent News & Media PLC, were reported prominently in the group's Irish flagship, the
Sunday Independent
.

John Healy in New York was thoroughly alarmed to learn that the Irish minister for justice wanted to speak with Feeney so urgently. On a visit to Dublin in July, he called on the secretary general of the Department of Justice, Sean Aylward, to ask what was going on. Aylward told him only that it concerned Connolly and his alleged association with “subversives.” He declined Healy's request to arrange a confidential police briefing to establish what evidence there was against Connolly. On Wednesday, July 27, Healy went to see Dermot Benn, a former Irish army intelligence officer and managing director of the private security firm Risk Management International, and asked him to use his police contacts to find out urgently what the police had on Connolly. Benn called Healy the next day and told him the police were not currently concerned with Connolly and that they believed the Centre for Public Inquiry was an “august body.”

Feeney arrived back in Dublin in late August and the meeting the prime minister wanted was finally arranged. He and Colin McCrea went to see Bertie Ahern in Government Buildings on Wednesday, August 31. The prime minister told him that he was afraid that under Connolly, the CPI would indulge in a “witch hunt,” but that he should see Michael McDowell, who would tell him more. They met the justice minister at his office on St. Stephen's Green two days later. McDowell, an outspoken critic of Sinn Fein, began by stressing his own nationalist credentials to Feeney, pointing to the fact that his grandfather Eoin MacNeill had played a role in the Irish struggle for independence, and telling Feeney that a large Irish flag with a black sash across it displayed on his office wall was the funeral flag of his uncle Brian MacNeill, shot in the civil war on the Republican side. McDowell then read from a briefing note listing events in Connolly's background. As a student, Connolly had been associated with an extreme organization, Revolutionary Struggle at Trinity College Dublin, that had
shot and wounded a visiting Englishman, following which Connolly was arrested “but maintained silence during a lengthy interrogation.” Connolly had been convicted of riotous behavior on September 28, 1982, and given a two-year suspended sentence by the Special Criminal Court. On April 10, 2001, Connolly went to Colombia and visited the FARC zone controlled by Communist narco-terrorists, using a false passport in the name of John Francis Johnston of Andersonstown, Belfast, in the company of a top member of the Provisional IRA, Padraig Wilson and his brother Niall Connolly, both also using false passports.

Frank Connolly was part of a plot to exchange IRA technology for cash, concluded McDowell. Funding him was a serious matter, he said, adding, “He'll close you, not you him.” McDowell gave Feeney a copy of a photograph on the alleged false passport used by Frank Connolly, which he said had been supplied to him by the Colombian authorities.

Feeney listened carefully and said little. “He was measuring me up to see if I was just blackening Connolly or did I have the goodies,” concluded McDowell.

Feeney was in a dilemma. He had encouraged Connolly to set up the Centre for Public Inquiry. He strongly believed it was worth funding. He was loyal to friends, and he liked Connolly. McDowell had no hard conclusive evidence against him. Back in the Tara office, he and McCrea studied the photocopy: It looked like Connolly's profile, but the features were not distinguishable. They tossed around possible agendas people might have to blacken Connolly's name. Was the government worried about Connolly as a subversive, or as someone who could damage them, or both? Were Irish politicians genuinely fearful he would use the center to undermine the established political parties and enhance the electoral prospects of Sinn Fein, a peripheral force in Irish politics? Was Anthony O'Reilly concerned about Connolly and his team making allegations about his business affairs? Was the
Sunday Independent
, a strong critic of Sinn Fein, pursuing Connolly on ideological grounds?

The problem was now one of credibility, however. The CPI had to uphold the same standards of accountability that it sought to promote. Frank Connolly had never said where he was during the week he was alleged to be in Colombia on a false passport, and he continued to insist he would only address that question if he were charged with an offense. Colin McCrea compiled a list of questions for the journalist about the Colombia allegations
to try to clear the air. He and Chuck Feeney met him the following Wednesday evening. But with his dislike of confrontation, and his preference for mulling things over, Feeney didn't put the questions. He just told Connolly to “get on with the job.”

“Chuck was quite calm in a lot of this and to me privately he was saying, ‘Listen, we have got to try and deal with this problem but let's move on, I think the work you do is very important, we knew there was going to be a storm,'” said Connolly. Later Connolly gave them, in writing, a statement that he was not involved in what he was alleged to have done, while still declining to answer specific questions about his travels.

The affair took a heavy toll on Feeney. He slept badly, worrying if he was doing the right thing. He feared that the reputation of Atlantic Philanthropies, which liked to work quietly, was being publicly undermined. The controversy was taking up a huge amount of his time. It was difficult for him to focus on other priorities.

Feeney soon afterward left Ireland to attend a board meeting of Atlantic Philanthropies in Cape Town, South Africa. The board asked Colin McCrea and Tom Mitchell to suggest to Connolly that he stand down so that the center could survive. Connolly was upset at the suggestion that his position had become untenable but undertook to put the matter to his board. They refused to ask him to quit. “As I anticipated, the reaction of the board members was pretty general—if you step down we are all going, in other words, the whole project will collapse,” recalled Connolly.

The Atlantic directors then concluded that the CPI board was failing in its duty. It had to be a model of openness and high standards. “It's the primary responsibility of any board to protect the institution it has been entrusted with,” said Tom Mitchell. “This board failed to do that.”

McDowell was dismissive of the directors' role in his recall of the affair. “All of these people were stage furniture for ‘your man' [Connolly],” he said.

Feeney returned to Ireland in November for what turned out to be a “fractious” meeting between Atlantic and the CPI, at which nothing was resolved. When Connolly's board members argued that a person was innocent until found guilty, Mitchell told them that they were “not in a court of law here, you are in the court of public opinion.” The former Trinity president felt, however, that despite everything, Connolly behaved with decorum throughout.

Around this time, Connolly gave Feeney an advance copy of an eighty-three-page report by the Centre for Public Inquiry on a controversial plan by Shell to lay a pipeline carrying unprocessed gas from the ocean bed close to houses in the rural west of Ireland. Feeney read the report and phoned Connolly an hour later to congratulate him. Connolly said he called it “absolutely brilliant,” and that this was the reason the CPI had been set up, and he wanted to see it continue.

The Shell pipeline was a subject of much agitation in County Mayo. Five men from the village of Rossport had refused to allow engineers access to their land and had been jailed earlier in 2006 under an injunction obtained by the oil and gas company. Feeney felt great empathy with the protesters and had told Ahern that jailing them was a disgrace. In early September, Connolly had taken him to Clover Hill prison in west Dublin to visit one of the Rossport Five, a retired schoolteacher named Micheál O'Seighin. Feeney told O'Seighin, “I have a few favors to call in from the government, I'll do my best.” The men were released after ninety-four days in prison, when Shell dropped the injunction.

The CPI report contained evidence that the gas pipeline could not be made safe. It noted that Bertie Ahern was “closely associated” with the project to bring gas ashore at Rossport and that the senior executives of the Corrib consortium—Shell, Statoil, and Marathon—had been given “unusual access” to the national planning board. It claimed that the corrupt minister Ray Burke had been responsible for initial revision of offshore licensing terms favorable to the energy companies. It also noted that Anthony O'Reilly had financial interests in the Atlantic fields, and that the Flood Tribunal, sitting under a different judge and now known as the Mahon Tribunal, was scheduled to investigate a payment in 1989 of GB£30,000 (US$45,000) to Burke as a political donation by a director of a company owned by the Fitzwilton Group that was controlled by O'Reilly.

Coincidentally, around this time Feeney and O'Reilly were both involved in funding a new £45-million ($90-million) state-of-the-art library at Queen's University, Belfast. Of the £37-million total given by Atlantic Philanthropies to the university since 2001, Feeney directed £10 million toward the library, without public recognition. When completed in 2009, the building will be known as the Sir Anthony O'Reilly Library on the basis of a £4-million contribution from O'Reilly for the naming rights, half of which was provided by him and half by his Independent
News & Media Group and the Ireland Funds he cofounded to support worthy causes.

In November, Connolly learned through his solicitor that the director of public prosecutions did not plan to lay any charges against him regarding Colombia, due to lack of evidence. But McDowell did not let the matter rest. At Sam Smyth's request, McDowell provided him with information on Connolly from the police file. On Saturday, November 26, Smyth published in the
Irish Independent
a copy of Connolly's alleged application for a passport in a false name with the forged signature of a Belfast priest. In a subsequent edition, the newspaper also reproduced the alleged passport photograph alongside a recent photograph of Connolly to show a similar outline in profiles. Amid an outcry about a government minister leaking police documents, McDowell was forced to admit on Irish radio that he personally had leaked the material to Smyth.

Feeney and his directors gathered in New York on Tuesday, December 6, for a board meeting at which the controversy dominated the agenda. Just before getting down to business, they received a fax from Dublin with a written statement McDowell had made in the Irish parliament. In it he claimed—for the first time on the public record—that the Colombian authorities had established that Connolly had traveled to Colombia under an assumed identity with a known senior IRA member and that on the basis of “intelligence reports,” it appeared the visits concerned a deal whereby the IRA provided know-how in the use of explosives in return for “a large amount of money” from FARC. McDowell claimed that Connolly posed a threat to the security of the state and accused the CPI board of not making an “adequate and sustained attempt” to address these genuine issues of public concern.

With the Irish justice minister now on record in parliament saying the head of CPI was involved with a terrorist organization, and with Connolly still refusing to say where he was during the time he was alleged to be in Colombia, the Atlantic directors had little choice but to pull the 800,000-euro-a-year grant for the CPI, after just one year. They did it “because the board of the center seemed totally unresponsive to the concerns the foundation had,” said Atlantic Philanthropies chairman Frank Rhodes. “The feeling was that they have not given the sort of leadership the [Atlantic] board had hoped for.”

Connolly complained bitterly about “the fairly savage campaign against the Centre for Public Inquiry in the
Sunday Independent
, and against me in
particular, but also against all of our board members.” The decision was a blow to Judge Flood, who was close to tears when contacted by reporters. He accused McDowell of “a private and public blackening of Connolly's character.” The affair briefly caused uproar in the Irish media, with some law experts criticizing McDowell's leaking of police documents as in itself subversion of the state. Author Nuala O'Faolain wrote in the
Sunday Tribune
that McDowell had “behaved disgracefully” and that “the way he got rid of an extrapolitical power centre by shafting Frank Connolly shows the need for an extrapolitical power centre.”

Atlantic directors were angered by the tenor of some public comments that questioned Feeney's motives in setting up the center.
Irish Times
columnist John Waters wrote, “The idea of a foreign ‘philanthropist' sticking his nose and his dollars into the affairs of a sovereign nation, as Chuck Feeney has done in funding the centre, is to my mind deeply unhealthy.” Mary Harney, then deputy prime minister and head of McDowell's party, made no friends in the foundation when she said that “the idea of some group of citizens setting themselves up with absolutely no justification to the wider public is absolutely sinister and inappropriate.” “I found Mary Harney's remarks incredibly objectionable,” said one Atlantic executive. “I find it hard to believe she said it.”

Looking back, McDowell said that he did
not
in fact regard as “sinister” the idea of an investigative body like the CPI being set up in Ireland, even if funded by someone from outside Ireland. “The big thing was it was Connolly,” he said. “There was no trouble with the concept at all. I don't believe Chuck Feeney thought for one minute he was helping a Provo [Provisional IRA] front. If he were, he could have just told me to get lost, and he would fund whoever he wanted and good night Michael. What could I have done? It was my intention to warn him off before the whole thing got going and to do it privately, just to say, ‘You are dealing with someone who is not what he appears to be.' I deeply regret that he was upset because I am sure he is a private man and I am sure he doesn't like being dragged into a controversy when all he is trying to do is be philanthropic. It's a bum deal from his point of view, but the Irish government doesn't think worse of him for it. He has emerged as entirely honorable as far as we are concerned. He was faced with denials by Connolly, and Connolly is a plausible person. He wondered genuinely whether we were just trying to foot-trip Frank Connolly for political reasons, and that was a hard judgment call for him to make.”