Hack Attack (5 page)

The case was also examined by the PCC, which had been established by the newspaper industry in 1991 in an attempt to prove that it was capable of regulating itself. In this case, I found, the PCC’s chairman, Sir Christopher Meyer, a former British ambassador to the USA, had promised to investigate ‘the entire newspaper and magazine industry of the UK to establish what is their practice’. In May 2007, the PCC had announced the results of its ‘wide-ranging inquiry’, claiming that it had ‘conducted an investigation into the use of subterfuge by the British newspaper and magazine industry’. This ‘investigation’ turned out to have involved writing to editors to ask about the internal controls which would prevent their journalists abusing their position, without even attempting to find out if they had been breaking the law; opting not to ask any questions of the outgoing editor of the
News of the World
, Andy Coulson, on the grounds that he had left the profession; opting not to ask any questions of any other executive, editor or reporter who had worked there when Glenn Mulcaire was hacking phones; and choosing instead to ask questions only of the incoming editor, Colin Myler, who necessarily had no direct knowledge of what had been going on before his arrival since he had been editing Murdoch’s
New York Post
at the time. The PCC report found no evidence of any illegal activity by any media organisation beyond that which had been revealed at the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire. At the time of the report, the chairman of the PCC’s powerful Code of Practice Committee was Les Hinton, the chief executive of News International.

‘Move along now, there’s nothing to see here.’

This was getting more and more interesting. If the information I was collecting was right, then for some reason the police, the House of Commons and the Press Complaints Commission had all failed to get to the truth. It all reeked of power – well, the abuse of power. What did Coulson know? What did Les Hinton or even Murdoch know?

*   *   *

The key to the door was Gordon Taylor’s legal action. By the summer of 2008, Apollo was telling me that it was not just the police who had been ordered to hand over material. Mark Lewis and his barrister, Jeremy Reed, had also persuaded the judge that the Information Commissioner’s Office must part with some treasure. So, while the police had been told to disclose any relevant material they had seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the ICO had been instructed to disclose the entire record of every job which Steve Whittamore and his network had performed for the
News of the World
– a big chunk of the material which I had glimpsed but conspicuously failed to obtain when I was researching
Flat Earth News
. These two caches of evidence would surely nail the story. Apollo reckoned that the court already had them. But how to get hold of them? A British court can be a secretive place.

Apollo discovered that there had already been preliminary hearings at the High Court at which each side had produced formal statements, of claim and defence. Reading them, I began to see the outline of what was happening. When Mark Lewis had first submitted a claim for breach of privacy on behalf of Gordon Taylor, back in 2007, the
News of the World
had hired an expensive law firm, Farrer & Co. – who oddly also sometimes acted for the royal household whose phones had been hacked. In long-winded legal terms, Farrer & Co. had submitted a defence which not only told Gordon Taylor to get lost, it also applied to the court to have his case struck out. But now that the police and the ICO had handed over their evidence, things had changed.

The case had not been struck out. Far from it, the
News of the World
had been forced to change their position completely. The court documents were short on detail but, as far as I could make out, the new evidence which had been disclosed by the police and the ICO showed that some of their reporters had been routinely breaking the law with Steve Whittamore and, furthermore, crucially, that other reporters apart from Clive Goodman had been involved in hacking phones.

Apollo heard that there were some very tense negotiations going on, with News International offering big money – seriously big money – to Gordon Taylor if he would allow the case to be sealed and kept secret. For reasons which became clear later, Taylor was apparently tempted to settle.

Then, that autumn, I heard that the case had expanded. It had emerged (presumably from the evidence which police had handed over) that the
News of the World
had also been listening to the voicemail of two of Gordon Taylor’s closest associates – his in-house legal adviser, Jo Armstrong, and an outside solicitor who specialised in sport, John Hewison. Now they, too, were suing through Mark Lewis. With three litigants, the paper was having to offer even more money to keep the whole thing quiet.

In the background, at the end of July 2008, the
News of the World
had lost a High Court case brought by Max Mosley, president of the body which runs Formula One motor racing. Mosley had sued them for breach of privacy. In March of that year, they had secretly videoed him playing sadomasochistic sex games with five prostitutes and then displayed parts of the video on their website, exposing Mosley’s naked body for all the world to see. The High Court saw this as an exceptionally brazen breach of privacy and awarded him higher damages than had ever been given by a British court dealing with a privacy action – £60,000.

In the case of Gordon Taylor, I discovered, News International finally agreed to pay more than £400,000 in damages, an enormous sum. The breach of Taylor’s privacy was nothing like as severe as that in Max Mosley’s case. Surely this was hush money. The paper also agreed to pay up to £300,000 to cover his legal bills. The deal had been struck during the summer of 2008, but News International had then become embroiled in another six months of wrangling to settle the cases brought by Jo Armstrong and John Hewison. That cost them a further £140,000 in damages plus legal bills. The whole package amounted to just over £1 million. And an essential element of every part of the settlement was that all of those involved would keep all of it secret, for ever. One very good informant claimed that the deal had been approved by Rupert Murdoch’s son, James, who had recently taken over from Les Hinton as head of News International and who was, in addition, the boss of the whole Murdoch business in Europe and Asia. If that was right, then Murdoch’s son could have his fingerprints on a £1 million cover-up.

By the time the settlement was reached, it was the spring of 2009 and I was surfacing from a horribly complicated investigation of offshore tax havens for the
Guardian
. In the meantime, I had found several sources who were willing to help on the hacking story, as long as I did not disclose their role. From one of them, I had managed to get some electrifying material – extracts from the two caches of evidence, from the ICO and the police, which had forced News International to settle the cases brought by Gordon Taylor and his two lawyer colleagues. I had been given this on the strict condition that, although I could summarise it, I could not say I had any of it in my possession. Good enough. It was powerful material, in two different ways.

First, it revealed the huge scale on which the
News of the World
had been routinely and casually invading the privacy of their targets. It turned out that Steve Whittamore had recorded his work in four exercise books, with a different colour for different newspaper groups. A blue book contained everything he had done for News International. Now, at last, I had my hands on the spreadsheet which had been prepared by the Information Commissioner, listing details from the blue book – every request made by News International journalists in the three years before Whittamore was raided in March 2003. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. The reporters had used Whittamore’s network of blaggers and insiders routinely to extract information from the confidential records of the police national computer, British Telecom, banks, hotels, the vast database of social security, the DVLA and the mobile phone companies. Some of the targets were famous names – actors like Jude Law and Sadie Frost. Some were linked to the famous – the grandson of Lord Mountbatten, and witnesses to the murder of the TV presenter Jill Dando. Others were simply ordinary people who had caught a reporter’s eye – the owners of every car which was parked near a village green where the actor Hugh Grant was playing cricket.

I thought back to the 1970s and 80s, when the secret state routinely invaded the privacy of its targets, and a network of lawyers and politicians and journalists had worked hard to try to make the police and security agencies accountable. Finally, those agencies had been forced to accept strict guidelines for the use of surveillance on citizens. Yet now, tabloid journalists had pulled on the secret policeman’s boots and started to engage in wanton surveillance, without any kind of accountability or due process: simply, they spied where they wanted. Unless this kind of blagging was justified by strong public interest, it was illegal. Certainly, it was wrong. And the paperwork from the police, dealing with Glenn Mulcaire, revealed even more of this invasion.

Like the Whittamore paperwork, it showed that Mulcaire had targeted all kinds of public figures as well as ordinary people who had strayed unwittingly into the path of the
News of the World
. I could not be sure exactly what Mulcaire had done to all of them – whether he had blagged their confidential data or hacked their voicemail, whether he had succeeded or failed – but it was clear he was involved in a very big operation. If he had succeeded in hacking their voicemail, that was illegal in all cases – there was no public-interest defence to justify it.

Some of the targets were particularly sensitive. For example, the paperwork I saw included invoices which made it clear that Glenn Mulcaire had been paid by the
News of the World
to target several senior government ministers, including Tessa Jowell, who had been the Secretary of State responsible for the media, and John Prescott, the deputy prime minister throughout Tony Blair’s ten years in Downing Street, from May 1997 to June 2007. In Prescott’s case, the paperwork suggested that the
News of the World
’s primary interest had been the disclosure in the spring of 2006 that he had been having an affair. The sensitivity, however, was that Prescott at that time had still been in post, handling all kinds of secrets – economic, diplomatic, military. And yet, on the face of it, the police had done nothing about it; they had not even warned the second most senior member of the government that he had been targeted by a man who specialised in intercepting communications.

But there was a second reason why all this paperwork was explosive – because of what it revealed about the perpetrators. The Whittamore material listed the names of twenty-seven different
News of the World
journalists and four others from the Murdoch daily, the
Sun
, who had hired the blagging network. Checking through a database of Fleet Street stories, I found that all of them had been working either for the news desk or for the features department. Neither of those departments was very big. Together, as far as I could tell, they employed no more than thirty or forty reporters and executives. It looked like well over half of them had been commissioning Whittamore. Between them they had made more than 1,000 requests for information over a three-year period, more than one for every working day – requests which, I already knew, had been analysed by the Information Commissioner who had found that almost all of them were ‘certainly or very probably’ illegal. And some of those who had commissioned Whittamore were very senior journalists: Rebekah Brooks, who had been editor of the
News of the World
at the time of the requests (and who had now become editor of the
Sun
); Greg Miskiw, the assistant editor for news; Doug Wight, the Scottish editor; Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter and former news editor; Jules Stenson, the features editor.

More than half the journalists in news and features? And their bosses? Collectively commissioning hundreds of searches which appeared to be potentially illegal. Surely, this was systematic. How could Coulson – the deputy editor at the time – not have known?

The Mulcaire material was even more significant. Quite simply, it kicked a large, gaping hole in the story that News International had told to the police, the public and Parliament; and it raised some very serious questions about the failure of the police and prosecutors to expose the truth. There were two particularly important documents.

One was a printout of an email, from [email protected]. A search in the database of Fleet Street stories quickly established that Ross Hindley was a news reporter at the
News of the World
. It had been sent to [email protected]. That proved to be the email address of Glenn Mulcaire. It was headed ‘
TRANSCRIPT FOR NEVILLE: WEDNESDAY JUNE 29 2005
’. Checking the database of Fleet Street stories, I found that there was only one Neville on the
News of the World
– Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter, who had also shown up as a customer of Steve Whittamore. There then followed the transcripts of thirty-five voicemail messages which had been left on the mobile phones of Gordon Taylor and his legal adviser, Jo Armstrong. This was straightforward evidence which suggested that at least two other reporters from the
News of the World
had been involved in handling illegally intercepted voicemail. It gave the lie to the official version – the claim by the
News of the World
and by Rupert Murdoch’s executives and by Scotland Yard and by the Press Complaints Commission – that the ‘rogue reporter’ Clive Goodman had been the only person on the paper who knew about it.

A second document was also highly suspicious – a contract signed by the assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, in February 2005, i.e. four months before Hindley’s email was sent, offering Glenn Mulcaire a payment of £7,000 if he brought in a particularly hostile story about Gordon Taylor, which was outlined in the contract. What was most suspicious about the document was that it had been drawn up using one of Mulcaire’s false names, Paul Williams. Why would an assistant editor sign a contract with somebody who was using a false name? Because he was commissioning illegal activity, perhaps?