I’ve had uncomfortable meetings with the Ulster Volunteer Force, the most active of the north’s loyalist terror groups, but the one described by security writer Brian Rowan in his new book, How the Peace was Won, takes some beating.

“As the meeting progressed, I became ‘that c*** Rowan’. I was told this was how volunteers in the UVF saw me,” he writes. Rowan’s offence had been to point out that a UVF statement in which it promised to “put arms out of reach” did not amount to decommissioning and would earn the organisation few political kudos. The UVF expected whatever gesture it made to be gratefully received, and was incensed because Rowan had devalued it.

The UVF’s plans leaked because many of its leaders were police informants, including some who met Rowan. Even John “Bunter” Graham, the movement’s splendidly titled brigadier general, was so accused under Dail privilege in 2006. In the same year an inquiry by Nuala O’Loan, the then policing ombudsman, discovered that most of the organisation’s brigade staff were informants.

In this case the police knew all about the UVF decomissioning plan from informants, but hadn’t enough control over their agents to get it rewritten in more realistic terms. Instead, a “security source” gave Rowan an interview in an effort to encourage a rethink.

The ploy failed. When Rowan published the story on April 20, the result was a summons to the Shankill Road to be insulted in person by Murder Incorporated.

Augustus “Gusty” Spence cannot be dismissed by the UVF leadership as an “awkward c***”. He was the UVF’s first prisoner and was convicted of the first two murders of the Troubles in 1966.

A dapper, pipe smoking ex-serviceman with a taste for tweeds and blazers, he became politicised in Long Kesh, preaching a mixture of loyalism and socialism to UVF inmates until his release in 1984.

He inspired a generation of young UVF men, including the late David Ervine, to look for a political way forward. “Why are you in here?” he asked them on admission, waving aside answers such as “robbery” or “murder”.

He invited them to analyse their aspirations and motivations and to consider whether they had been used as cannon fodder by political actors. Ultimately this assisted political engagement and the ending of the UVF campaign. Ervine was Spence’s most successful protégé and loyalism’s best political thinker. Rowan believes he was the nearest thing to a loyalist Gerry Adams. His death last year lobotomised the UVF. It may be rudderless but it still possesses weapons.

Spence, now 75, uses Rowan’s book to try to give some direction by publicly criticising the UVF statement which he read out in May 2007. “They said a thing in the statement — it galled me to read it out, but I read it out anyhow — that the arms had been bunkered, beyond reach, and the general \ had been contacted. I told them, ‘that means nothing’,” Spence said, recalling a fraught meeting with the UVF leadership.

Spence wanted verifiable decommissioning, to match the gesture made by the IRA which completed the process in September 2005. His words gave weight to earlier statements by Dawn Purvis, Ervine’s successor as leader of the Progressive Unionist party. It is possible that their efforts will bear fruit, but the police’s failure to influence the UVF statement suggests that the organisation’s leadership has shut its ears to outside influence.

During the Troubles, a paramilitary giving information to the security forces was known as an agent. Nowadays the term is covert human intelligence source, which is closer to the mark. It is becoming clear that some “police agents” did not simply follow orders — they used the relationship to consolidate their own positions.

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