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  For Jean Davies, who died in 1986. She would have loved this story.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Who’s Who

  Author’s Note

  Part One: Crime and Concealment

  1. February 2008 to July 2009

  2. Inside the News of the World

  3. 8 July 2009 to 14 July 2009

  4. Crime in Fleet Street

  5. 14 July 2009 to November 2009

  6. Secrets and lies

  Part Two: The Power Game

  7. A wedding in the country

  8. November 2009 to March 2010

  9. The mogul and his governments

  10. March 2010 to 15 December 2010

  11. The biggest deal in the world

  12. 15 December 2010 to 28 June 2011

  13. The last ditch

  Part Three: Truth

  14. 28 June 2011 to 19 July 2011

  15. Exposed!

  16. Final reckoning

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  List of Illustrations

  Index

  Photographs

  Also by Nick Davies

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Who’s Who

  Sue Akers

  Deputy assistant commissioner, Metropolitan Police

  Tamsin Allen

  Lawyer for hacking victims

  Matthew Anderson

  Right-hand man to James Murdoch

  Sky Andrew

  Sports agent, hacking victim

  Mr Apollo

  Code name for original source for story

  Joanne Armstrong

  Legal adviser to Professional Footballers’ Association, hacking victim

  Sir Ian Blair

  Commisioner, Metropolitan Police, 2005–09, hacking target

  David Blunkett

  Home Secretary, hacking victim

  Charlie Brooks

  Racehorse trainer, husband of Rebekah Brooks

  Rebekah Brooks

  Editor, News of the World and the Sun, chief executive of News International from September 2009

  Chris Bryant

  Labour MP, hacking victim

  Ian Burton

  External lawyer, News International

  Lady Buscombe

  Chair, Press Complaints Commission, 2009–11

  Vince Cable

  Liberal Democrat Secretary of State for business

  Glenn Campbell

  BBC journalist

  Richard Caseby

  Managing editor, the Sun

  Jon Chapman

  Legal director, News International

  Peter Clarke

  Deputy assistant commissioner, in command of Op Caryatid

  Max Clifford

  PR agent, hacking victim

  Daniel Cloke

  Director of human resources, News International

  Dave Cook

  Detective chief superintendent, Metropolitan Police

  Andy Coulson

  Editor News of the World, media adviser to the prime minister

  Tom Crone

  In-house lawyer, News of the World and the Sun

  Ian Edmondson

  Assistant editor (news), News of the World

  Emissary

  Code name for government source

  Kieren Fallon

  Jockey, hacking victim

  Paul Farrelly

  Labour MP on media select committee

  Dick Fedorcio

  Director of communications, Metropolitan Police

  George Galloway

  Respect MP, hacking victim

  Clive Goodman

  Royal editor, News of the World

  Andy Gray

  TV presenter, hacking victim

  Simon Greenberg

  Director, corporate affairs, News International

  Mark Hanna

  Director of security, News International

  Charlotte Harris

  Lawyer for hacking victims

  Dean Haydon

  John Yates’s staff officer

  Andy Hayman

  Assistant commissioner, responsible for Op Caryatid

  Amelia Hill

  Guardian reporter

  Ross Hindley

  News of the World reporter

  Les Hinton

  Chief executive News International until December 2007

  Sean Hoare

  Show-business reporter, the Sun and News of the World

  Jeremy Hunt

  Secretary of State for culture, media and sport

  Lawrence ‘Lon’ Jacobs

  In-house counsel, News Corp

  Jingle

  Code name for police source

  Tessa Jowell

  Secretary of State for culture, media and sport

  Karl

  Code name for police source

  Ian Katz

  Deputy editor, the Guardian

  Trevor Kavanagh

  Political editor, the Sun

  John Kelly

  Lawyer for hacking victims

  Joel Klein

  Executive vice president, News Corp

  Stuart Kuttner

  Managing editor, News of the World

  David Leigh

  Investigations editor, the Guardian

  Mark Lewis

  Lawyer for hacking victims

  Will Lewis

  General manager, News International

  Lola

  Code name for source in criminal justice system

  Mark Maberly

  Detective, attached to Op Caryatid

  Alice Macandrew

  Media adviser to James Murdoch

  Ken Macdonald QC

  Director of Public Prosecutions, 2003–08

  Paul McMullan

  Journalist, News of the World

  Mango

  Code name for whistle-blower source

  Alex Marunchak

  Executive editor, News of the World

  Sir Christopher Meyer

  Chair, Press Complaints Commission, 2003–09

  Fred Michel

  Lobbyist for James Murdoch

  Sienna Miller

  Actress, hacking victim

  Greg Miskiw

  Assistant editor (news), News of the World

  Dominic Mohan

  Editor, the Sun

  Daniel Morgan

  Private investigator, murdered 1987

  Piers Morgan

  Editor, Daily Mirror and News of the World

  Max Mosley

  Victim of News of the World story, funded hacking victims

  Glenn Mulcaire

  Phone-hacking specialist, News of the World

  James Murdoch

  Executive chairman of News International, 2007–11

  Rupert Murdoch

  Chairman and chief executive of News Corp

  Colin Myler

  Editor, News of the World

  Ovid

  Code name for Mulcaire’s ghostwriter

  Alec Owen

  Senior investigator, Information Commissioner’s Office

  Brian Paddick

  Deputy assistant commissioner, Metropolitan Police, hacking victim

  Lucy Panton

  Crime reporter, News of the World

  David Perry QC

  Senior prosecutor

  Rober
t Peston

  BBC business editor

  Nicola Phillips

  PA to Max Clifford, hacking victim

  Julian Pike

  External lawyer, News International

  John Prescott

  Deputy prime minister, hacking victim

  Adam Price

  Plaid Cymru MP on media select committee

  Jeremy Reed

  Barrister for hacking victims

  Ed Richards

  Chief executive, Ofcom

  Alan Rusbridger

  Editor, the Guardian from 1995

  Gerald Shamash

  Lawyer for hacking victims

  Michael Silverleaf QC

  Barrister for News International

  Adam Smith

  Special adviser to Jeremy Hunt

  Keir Starmer QC

  Director of Public Prosecutions, 2008–13

  Jules Stenson

  Features editor, News of the World

  Sir Paul Stephenson

  Commissioner, Metropolitan Police, 2009–11

  Sir John Stevens

  Commissioner, Metropolitan Police, 2000–05

  Keith Surtees

  Detective, deputy lead investigator on Op Caryatid

  Gordon Taylor

  Chief executive, Professional Footballers’ Association, hacking victim

  Mark Thomson

  Lawyer for hacking victims

  Neville Thurlbeck

  Chief reporter, News of the World

  Hugh Tomlinson QC

  Barrister for hacking victims

  Tim Toulmin

  Director, Press Complaints Commission

  Mr Justice Vos

  Judge in hacking cases

  Neil Wallis

  Deputy editor, News of the World

  Tom Watson

  Labour MP on media select committee

  James Weatherup

  News editor, News of the World

  Derek Webb

  Covert surveillance specialist, News of the World

  John Whittingdale

  Conservative chair of media select committee

  Phil Williams

  Detective, lead investigator on Op Caryatid

  John Yates

  Assistant commissioner, Metropolitan Police

  Author’s Note

  This is the strangest story I’ve ever written.

  In the beginning, it was next to nothing. Two men were arrested – a private investigator and a journalist from the News of the World. Both of them ended up in prison, but it was no big deal. The crime they had committed was minor. Their jail sentences were short. The only eye-catching thing about it at the time was that their crime was quite quirky: they had discovered that they could access other people’s voicemail messages and had spent months eavesdropping on three staff at Buckingham Palace. Even so, it was a small story, dead and gone from the public eye within a few days.

  And yet, I ended up spending more than six years of my working life trying to unravel the bundle of corruption which lay hidden in the background. Soon there was a small group of us working together, discovering that we had stumbled into a fight with the press and the police and the government, all of them linked to an organisation which had been created by one man.

  Rupert Murdoch is one of the most powerful people in the world. You could argue that he is, in fact, the most powerful. News Corp is amongst the biggest companies on the planet. Like all his commercial rivals, Murdoch has the financial power to hire or fire multiple thousands of people and the political power to worry governments by threatening to withdraw his capital and transfer it to a more co-operative nation. But, unlike his rivals in business, his power has another dimension. Because he owns newspapers and news channels, he has the ability to worry governments even more, to make them fear that without his favour they will find themselves attacked and destabilised and discredited. Certainly, a man who is both global business baron and multinational kingmaker has a special kind of power.

  So the simple crime story turned out to be a story about the secret world of the power elite and their discreet alliances. This is not about conspiracy (not generally) but about the spontaneous recognition of power by power, the everyday occurrence of a natural exchange of assistance between those who occupy positions in society from which they can look down upon and mightily affect the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women. In this case, as often, that mutual favouritism took place amidst the persistent reek of falsehood – not the fevered plotting of Watergate lies, but the casual arrogance of a group of people who take it for granted that they have every right to run the country and, in doing so, to manipulate information, to conceal embarrassing truth, to try to fool all of the people all of the time.

  A lot of writers say that they can’t do their job – they can’t produce the book or the film or the newspaper article – unless they can reach a point of such clarity about their project that they can reduce it to a single sentence. Waiting for a bus one day while I was drafting this book, I finally got there. This is a story about power and truth.

  To be more precise, it is about the abuse of power and about the secrets and lies that protect it. In a tyranny, the ruling elite can abuse its power all day long, and anybody who complains about it will get a visit from the secret police. In an established democracy, abuse of power cannot afford to be visible. It needs concealment like a vampire needs the dark. As soon as a corporation or a trade union or a government or any arm of the state is seen to be breaking the rules, it can be attacked, potentially embarrassed, conceivably stopped. The secrets and lies are not an optional extra, they are central to the strategy.

  In this case, the concealment had an extra layer, because news organisations which might otherwise have exposed the truth were themselves part of the abuse, and so they kept silent, indulging in a comic parody of misreporting, hiding the emerging scandal from their readers like a Victorian nanny covering the children’s eyes from an accident in the street – ‘you don’t want to see this’. Some did this because they were linked to the crime by common ownership or by their own guilty secrets about the lawbreaking in their own newsrooms; some turned away for fear of upsetting their political allies. Too many journalists had simply ceased to function as independent truth-tellers, separate from and critical of the people they were writing about. The crime reporter made common cause with the police and also with criminals. The political correspondent developed a loyalty to one party or faction. The media reporter became a tool for his or her owner. The news executive turned into a preening power-monger, puffed with wealth and self-importance, happy to join the elite and not to expose it – all rather like the final moment of Animal Farm, when the pigs who have led the revolt against the humans have come to adopt the behaviour of the rulers they were supposed to challenge: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’

  The story of the phone-hacking scandal happens to have unfolded in the United Kingdom, but it could have happened anywhere in the world. News Corp itself has spent years playing the power game in Australia and the United States and China, and anywhere else where its commerce has led it. Those other countries have suffered comparable abuse by News Corp and by other similar forces. The structures of power and the weakness of democracy are more or less the same everywhere. A freakish sequence of events allowed us to see the truth in the UK, but it delivers a lesson for anybody anywhere who thinks they have the right to have power over their own lives.

  In the end, the struggle by the small group of people who tried to uncover the hacking scandal was taken over by others who exposed even more. In writing this book, I’ve been able to draw on the mass of evidence which emerged eventually in civil lawsuits, criminal trials, select-committee hearings in the House of Commons and, above all, through the public inquiry which was chaired by Lord Justice Leveson in London from the autumn of 2011.

  In the background,
however, we relied consistently on the help of tabloid journalists, police officers, private investigators, government officials, former Murdoch allies and others who refused to accept the corruption around them. Some were able to speak openly, but most of them stepped forward on condition of anonymity, which I’ve maintained. In a few cases, sources who originally were unattributable have decided that they can now be named, and so they are identified here. All of them played their part, and I want to acknowledge the importance of their help and of their willingness to take risks so that the story could be told.

  In three particular areas, my own work was backed up by specialist researchers: Jenny Evans, who built bridges to journalists who had worked on the News of the World; Adrian Gatton, who went into the netherworld of private investigation; and David Hencke, who made good use of his long-standing links to politicians and their advisers. Tom Mills analysed press cuttings for me. Scarlett MccGwire introduced me to contacts from the political world.

  I also drew on several dozen published books and in-depth articles, which are listed in a bibliography on a website which is a companion to this book, www.hack-attack.co.uk. Occasionally, I have identified them as sources in the text. I acknowledge all of them as valuable raw material.