Keeping his back to the wall

In 30 years of Northern policing, RUC veteran Johnston Brown's worst enemies were on his own side, he tells Susan McKay.

Johnston Brown bounds up the steps of the hotel, a smiling man in a cream suit, extends his hand, index finger pointed like a gun, then shakes mine. Several times in the course of the interview, he points the same gun, and he makes a few times as though to punch me in the face. He is entirely friendly, just an expansive storyteller with a lot of stories about violence. Thirty years in the RUC have made sure of that. He retired four years ago, but believes he still lives under threat of death.

He likes to sit with his back to the wall. His wife, Rebecca, is with him, though, so he can relax. She has sharper eyes and a better instinct for danger than him, it seems. A couple of months ago, they were in a bar in Belfast when a man smashed a bottle over Brown's head.

"I'd been watching this guy," says Rebecca. "He was acting like he was drunk or stoned, but I knew he wasn't. I said it to Johnston a couple of times, but he said the guy was just drunk."

The attacker ran off into the night, and was not caught. As to who he was, or what his grievance against the former detective might have been, Brown shrugs. It was a mixed bar.

"Could have been a loyalist, could have been a republican, could have been just some young criminal," he says.

He has a lot of enemies, not all of them on the wrong side of the law.

His new book, Into the Dark: 30 Years in the RUC, is about what used to happen when RUC detectives, carrying out their investigations "according to procedures", suddenly found that they were "inadvertently stepping on Special Branch toes". What happened "in the dark" was extremely sinister.

"There was a culture of protecting murderers," he says. "Have I seen evidence that it has stopped? No. Hugh Orde [Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland] says he goes where the evidence takes him. Isn't he lucky? I couldn't do that."

Brown is known as the detective who got UDA leader Johnny Adair to brag his way into a life sentence for directing terrorism. He calls Adair "the little fellow", without affection.

Brown was half-expecting not to make it to the launch of his book in a Belfast restaurant last week.

"I thought they might have arrested me that morning," he says. "Within hours of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) hearing that the book was due, I got a hand-delivered letter putting me on notice of my obligations under the Official Secrets Act."

They haven't come for him yet, but he is prepared for that particular knock on his door. "I don't fear them," he says. He wears an RUC badge on his lapel and says, proudly, that the book launch was "well- attended by officers of quality".

The book is a devastating exposé of the RUC's role in the North's "dirty war", but he insists that the "vast majority of officers policed impartially" and that the element he indicts is a small minority. The power of that "hard core" within the Special Branch and the CID (Criminal Investigations Department) was, however, formidable.

"I've seen officers who had bravely fought the IRA crumble before Special Branch," he says. "I've seen Special Branch use uniformed police like tethered goats."

His first experiences of the RUC led him to respect and admire them. His father violently abused Brown, his mother and his siblings. The police were frequently called to their house, where Brown found them kind. "My father was the first bully I encountered," he says. He spent his later childhood in care.

His first foray "into the dark" came in 1973, soon after he joined the constabulary. The Northern conflict was raging, the death toll escalating. Brown had just succeeded in seizing guns from a loyalist paramilitary unit. His colleagues and the chief constable had praised him. But one day, as he walked through Newtownabbey Barracks, he was grabbed by a man dressed as though for golf. A detective, he guessed.

"Take your f**kin' boot out of the Prods," his assailant instructed him. "Those guns you recovered have started a whole f**kin' storm . . . A real 'Proddy-basher', aren't you, son? Well, you better pull your reins in!"

Brown was soon to learn that this was not, as he at first assumed, about the sectarianism of an individual. It turned out that the guns he'd seized, at considerable risk to himself, were from an RUC armoury. They had not been reported missing. "No one supports a whistleblower, Johnston. Trust me," an older colleague warned him.

He was threatened, beaten up. Whispering campaigns were started against him. His address was given to loyalists who were told Brown was out to get them, which inevitably led to them trying to get him first.

Things got really nasty after he asked UDA gunman turned informer Ken Barrett who killed Pat Finucane in 1989. Barrett replied: "Hypothetically, me." Brown soon found out that not only did Special Branch know this was the case, but that it was also going to do all in its considerable power to stop him from acting on the information to prosecute.

"Barrett was the epitome of everything evil," says Brown. "But he was theirs. They adopted him like a son."

When Brown went to give evidence to Sir John Stevens in 2000 for the third Stevens Inquiry into the killing of Pat Finucane, he found that Special Branch had set him up. Stevens went on to praise him, but others saw him as a traitor.

"After Stevens, I was a pariah," says Brown. "I'd been highly respected and a damn good detective, but one senior officer told me one day that I could forget about any medals. He said: 'As long as you refuse to bend the knee, you won't get as much as a CDM.' That's a Cadbury's Dairy Milk. I said: 'I'd rather eat shit than bow the knee to you.'

"They can't take constructive criticism. They wouldn't listen to John Stalker and they wouldn't listen to John Stevens."

Brown tells plenty of stories about how Special Branch work saved lives, including his own. "At one time I had intelligence that a particular IRA man was preparing to kill me, and at the same time I had intelligence that loyalists were setting out to kill him," he says. "We saved his life."

However, he also accuses Special Branch of collusion and of soliciting murder. He says of one notorious UVF leader that by the time Special Branch had finished with him, "he was taking life after life". When detectives tried to deal with him, they were told to "back off" and were accused of "embarrassing their valuable source".

In 2001, Brown's home was bombed. It was a potentially lethal attack and it was the last straw. "Rebecca nearly had a nervous breakdown. We had to move from our home of 13 years," he says.

He blames the UDA, but it is clear he feels they weren't acting alone. A crucial security device in the house wasn't working that night, though it had recently been tested. "Special Branch didn't kill Pat Finucane. They wouldn't kill me," he says. "They call it 'harnessing negative energy'. They see me as a rat, and they'd use a rat to kill a rat."

He won't give evidence to the British police ombudsman against former CID and Special Branch colleagues, and he won't make any further statements to Stevens.

"For 30 years I fought the good fight against these people," says Brown. "I brought my family to hell and back, many times. If I was still in the constabulary, yes. It would be my duty. But lead the charge from retirement? No. I don't think so. What do you think, Rebecca?"

"I think they'd come after you," says Rebecca, and she reaches for her cigarette packet again.

Into the Dark: 30 Years in the RUC is published by Gill & Macmillan, £16.99