13 January 2003
The Daily Telegraph
Philip Johnston
Philip Johnston talks to the Ulster policeman who says he was forced to retire after leading the inquiry into last year's Castlereagh break-in.
Bill Lowry is an angry man. After 30 years as a police officer in Northern Ireland, he was forced to quit as head of Belfast's Special Branch shortly before Christmas in the murkiest of circumstances.
Although he walked away with a full pension and an exemplary discharge, Mr Lowry, 55, was given no option but to leave, just 10 weeks away from retirement. He believes, as do some of his colleagues, that pressure for him to be ousted was applied from London - possibly by MI5, which wants greater control over Special Branch's role in Northern Ireland.
The reason was to give Sinn Fein the scalp of a senior Special Branch officer as part of continuing efforts to revive the political process that collapsed amid allegations of a republican spy ring inside the Northern Ireland Office.
While Mr Lowry was doing what he saw as his job in trying to unmask agents at the heart of government, other powerful forces were unhappy that his investigations had helped to bring down the province's precariously-balanced institutions.
Sinn Fein has long despised the police Special Branch and has consistently called for its abolition or total reform. It has refused to sit on the Police Board of Northern Ireland partly because of a failure to disband the organisation.
So when Mr Lowry was blamed for leaking confidential information to the media and threatened with disciplinary action, a double purpose was served. He would become the sacrificial offering to Sinn Fein to atone for the police raid on its Stormont office; and his removal would be a sign to the republicans that the days of the Old Guard were numbered.
Mr Lowry should have retired last February. But, with Sir Ronnie Flanagan about to step down as chief constable of what used to be the Royal Ulster Constabulary, he agreed to stay on another 12 months as the head of Special Branch in the city of his birth to help to oversee the transition to the new regime under Hugh Orde.
Had he gone then he would now be enjoying a new and largely untroubled life in the private sector, bolstering his pension by offering his counter-terrorist expertise to anyone who wanted it.
But on March 17 last year - St Patrick's Day - three men broke into the Castlereagh headquarters of the Special Branch. Initially, Mr Lowry and his colleagues suspected that the break-in and theft of documents had been staged by disaffected members of military intelligence.
The burglars, who exploited lax security on a day when they knew there would be a dearth of staff, made off with documents containing the names of senior republicans. However, the information did not necessarily point to the identities of any used by the police, as was feared at first.
"They did not get the crown jewels," said one insider. "There was not enough information to put agents at risk. But if it could be tied up with other information it might have been more worrying."
Within a few days, intelligence sources suggested that the material taken from Castlereagh had found its way to IRA activists. Mr Lowry led a Special Branch operation to try to track it down. The investigations uncovered a far wider conspiracy. Documents that could have come only from inside the Northern Ireland Office had also fallen into republican hands. They included the transcript of a telephone conversation between Tony Blair and President Bush.
There was also a memo from the director of Central Intelligence in Northern Ireland - an MI5 officer - to the director of security at the Northern Ireland Office on how influence could best be exercised over Special Branch and its Army counterparts. Also among the papers was a document outlining the strategy for the organised crime task force being established by the Government. There were also transcripts of discussions between Mr Blair and Unionist leaders in addition to the personal details of hundreds of prison officers.
"This stuff was clearly coming from the Northern Ireland Office and the desks of ministers," said Mr Lowry. "At this stage we didn't know whether these were documents that had been given to the republicans - though it soon became clear that this was not the case."
A special operation - codenamed Torsion - was put into effect, though not without initial reluctance. Officials delayed asking John Reid, the then Northern Ireland Secretary, to sign the necessary warrants because of the likely political ramifications.
Mr Lowry said suspicion fell upon four or five people in the Northern Ireland Office who would have had access to the information that had fallen into IRA hands. By October, the police had enough information to begin making arrests, although one of the prized scalps they targeted was not found with anything incriminating.
Alan McQuillan, who was, at the time, the acting chief constable, said the operation had taken police "into the very heart of the Provisional IRA".
In raids on homes in Belfast, thousands of documents and computer files were seized. Denis Donaldson, the head of Sinn Fein's administration, had his Stormont office raided, to the fury of republicans. He has been charged on five counts of possessing documents that could be useful to terrorists.
Those who feared that Operation Torsion would have severe political repercussions were proven right. The Unionists were already threatening to walk out of the devolved power-sharing assembly unless the IRA showed greater willingness to disarm; the alleged spy scandal brought matters to a head. Within a fortnight of the raids, Stormont had been suspended and direct rule from Westminster re-established. The institutions remain dormant.
The Stormont raid caused such anger that Mr Orde, who had been in the his new post as chief constable for only a few weeks, felt obliged to apologise for the way it was handled.
In early November, Mr Lowry was contacted by a BBC journalist researching a story on the raids. He gave him a briefing in which he admits that he may have said more than he should but maintains that he was not the source for most of the broadcast. He told senior officers about the conversation and was admonished and thought that was the end of the matter.
"A few days later I was called back to headquarters and told that I was being transferred with immediate effect and that I was to be the subject of a disciplinary investigation," said Mr Lowry.
"I was stunned, shocked," said Mr Lowry. "I could not believe it."
After the involvement of Mr Lowry's lawyer, the police service agreed to drop the disciplinary proceedings if he retired. "I said, `I will go, but not with good grace'."
Mr Lowry subsequently heard from colleagues that the decision to force him out was taken after Mr Orde had spoken to people in London, something the chief constable denies.
"After that call, everything changed towards me," said Mr Lowry. "The chief constable directed or ordered that I be moved immediately. I am told the call came from MI5. They said Bill Lowry had to go because they wouldn't work with him any more. I think it was also meant to be a gift to the Provisionals.
"The security service and the politicians saw an opportunity to give them something by forcing me into a position that I had to retire to give them a scalp."
Mr Lowry has now lodged a formal complaint against Mr Orde and Mr McQuillan with the Policing Board. "I felt humiliated, degraded, embarrassed and betrayed," he said. "We had had one of our most successful years in Belfast and it ended like this."
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