Hack Attack Page 10

  I made several calls to Scotland Yard’s press bureau, trying to find out whether the original inquiry had interviewed anybody from the News of the World apart from Clive Goodman; and why they had slipped out this weird statement so late on a Friday evening; and how many other victims they were now approaching. They were unhelpful to the point of being obstructive.

  * * *

  Select committees are famous for being boring. They have no real power to get anything done, they hold meetings which nobody watches and nobody cares about, and most of their members are particularly well known for being useless at the interrogation of their witnesses. This one was a little bit different.

  The committee room was stuffed with people. The public seats were filled; there were spectators sitting on windowsills and standing round the doors, all watching the dozen MPs who sat behind a horseshoe-shaped desk. Rusbridger and I were suffering from some stage fright. At a nervy early morning meeting in a greasy café in Whitehall, I had told him about the documents which I was going to give to the committee, but we had no idea quite how things would play out, whether hostile MPs would nevertheless be able to make skewered pork of us. There was a real tension in the air: somebody was going to have a very bad day.

  First, there was a warm-up act, a solo performance by the director of the Press Complaints Commission, Tim Toulmin, a tall, thin dark-haired man in his mid-thirties. He lounged backwards in his seat, with one arm tossed over the back of the empty chair beside him, a model of confidence. I could only watch him and wonder whether he had any idea of how wrong he was.

  Toulmin explained that there was no problem with the phone-hacking report which the PCC had produced in 2007: ‘Of course, there is absolutely nothing in it for the PCC to cover anything up at all.’ None of the MPs asked him if there might be something in the fact that a large chunk of the PCC’s funding came from News International, or that their ethics committee had been chaired by a Fleet Street executive – Les Hinton – at the same time as he was chief executive of News International.

  Toulmin was asked how he could be sure that phone-hacking was not continuing. ‘We cannot be one hundred per cent sure without having some sort of God-given powers of seeing into journalists’ minds and private activity. The point is, if you have any suspicion, you can go to the police, you can complain to a lawyer, you can come to the PCC, you can go to a newspaper, you can tell Nick Davies about it and he will probably write a lengthy story about how frightful journalists are.’

  Was this man speaking as the supposedly independent arbiter of press complaints, or was he just a spokesman for Fleet Street? Two or three of the MPs showed signs of standing up to him. A Labour MP, Paul Farrelly, challenged him to follow up on an old report in Private Eye magazine that News International had paid Glenn Mulcaire £200,000 in exchange for his silence. Toulmin questioned how that could be relevant, and Farrelly spelled it out to him, that this looked like hush money, the purchase of silence about the very facts in which Toulmin claimed to be interested. Toulmin was not interested: ‘We are not going to chase up every rumour and bit of tittle-tattle that we read in Private Eye.’

  Farrelly fired back: ‘People will gain a very poor impression of the PCC if that is the line you continue to maintain.’

  Farrelly, I knew, had been a Fleet Street journalist before he became a Labour MP, and there were clear signs that he knew what he was talking about and, like a lot of other journalists, might well feel angry at the way that News Corp had dragged newspapers downhill in search of bigger profits. He was also naturally pugnacious: he ran the House of Commons rugby team, playing at scrum half.

  There was one other potential ally. Over the weekend, two of the Guardian’s political correspondents had emailed me to say that there was a new Labour MP on the committee, Tom Watson, who had told them he wanted to get to the bottom of the hacking scandal. They had explained that he was a former defence minister who had no love at all for the Murdoch papers, which had hounded him because he had been part of the ‘curry-house plot’ in 2006, which had tried to force Tony Blair to resign to make way for Gordon Brown at a time when Blair was the darling of the Murdoch titles.

  Toulmin slipped away, evidently content in the knowledge that Rusbridger and I were heading for disaster. Indeed, Rusbridger also had his doubts about me. He knows my mouth sometimes works much faster than my brain and, as we took our seats, he explained that if I started to get wild, he would squeeze my knee under the table. Rusbridger made an opening statement about the regulation of the media and then, with the vague distraction of my editor’s fingers drifting towards my inner thigh, I started talking.

  I explained about the gap that often develops between what a reporter knows and what the reporter can say publicly, because so many sources insist on keeping themselves and their evidence hidden. ‘On Friday evening, News International put out a statement which was deemed by one particularly important source to be “designed to deceive” and, as a result, I have now been authorised to show you things that previously were stuck in that gap, and I am talking about paperwork. So what I want to do is to show you, first of all, copies of an email.’

  I handed them copies of the email for Neville (as redacted by my children). ‘Now, perhaps I could just leave that with you and move on to a second document which I want to be able to show you—’

  John Whittingdale, the chairman, interrupted. ‘With respect, we have quite a lot of questions for you, rather than just—’

  I shrugged at him. ‘Do you want the evidence or not? It is up to you.’

  Several of the MPs said certainly they wanted it. I could see Paul Farrelly and Tom Watson nodding with particular energy.

  Whittingdale gave in. ‘Go on.’

  We were winning. Happy that somebody else’s plans were coming unstuck, I handed out the redacted copies of the contract signed by Greg Miskiw, offering £7,000 to Mulcaire if he would bring in the story about Gordon Taylor. I talked about the police, who had been sitting on these two documents since they had raided Mulcaire three years earlier and the curious fact that, if News International were to be believed, detectives had never arrested or interviewed Neville Thurlbeck who had been sent all these voicemail transcripts, or the junior reporter who had sent them to him (I held back Ross Hindley’s name), or Greg Miskiw, who had signed a contract with a private investigator using a false name.

  ‘If News International are correct in saying that these people have not been arrested or questioned,’ I told them, ‘the implications, I am sure you can see, are very, very worrying. I spent yesterday on the phone, asking Scotland Yard for an answer to this question. At the end of the day, they eventually confirmed that they had not arrested any other News of the World staff other than Clive Goodman, but they would not tell me whether they had questioned any. Clearly, that is terribly important.’

  And what about John Yates? ‘For reasons which I cannot explain, he made no reference to the fact that Scotland Yard has had in its possession for well over two years paperwork which implicates other News of the World journalists. I do not know why he did not tell us, but again it worries me.’

  Just what was the truth about whether the police had warned all the victims of the hacking? ‘Why were we told on Thursday that everybody had been approached and then quietly, in this almost invisible fashion – because I do not think any newspaper picked this up for Saturday morning – on Friday evening were we told “We are now contacting people”?’ Why had Yates said blandly that there was no evidence that John Prescott’s phone had been hacked? ‘So far as we know, there was no attempt by Scotland Yard to investigate what it was that Mulcaire had done in relation to Prescott – and, therefore, of course there is no evidence.’

  By now, the atmosphere in the room had changed. The MPs on the committee were flicking through the paperwork I had given them, frowning, shaking their heads, exchanging whispers. Rusbridger had relaxed and taken his hand off my knee.

  I handed the committee a third clutch of paperw
ork, a collection of rather elderly invoices which had been released years earlier, in redacted form, by the Information Commissioner as samples of the material which his officers had seized from Steve Whittamore in March 2003. ‘The reason I am showing this to you is not because it tracks down some specific criminal offence but because it shows the systematic and open character of what is going on. These payments have not been made with bags of cash under the counter, they are being made by the News International accounts department.’ The invoices explicitly recorded Whittamore being paid for extracting confidential data from phone companies and the DVLA, all potentially illegal.

  I explained that I had seen records of Whittamore’s dealings with the News of the World, identifying twenty-seven journalists who had commissioned him. I named the former assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, who was recorded making ninety requests, thirty-five of which would be illegal if they could not be justified in the public interest. ‘I want to say, because it is important to make it clear, that Andy Coulson’s name does not show up in that list.’ I decided not to name any others: ‘I would just feel uneasy if I started running around with a blue light on my head … The organisation will blame the lowly individuals rather than accepting whatever responsibility is due to themselves.’

  There was a brief puff of barbecue smoke from one of the Tory MPs who quoted Stephen Glover, the right-wing columnist from the Independent, with his odd theory that the story was ‘to do with the BBC and the Guardian ganging up on the Murdoch press’. It was all that was left of News International’s attack, and it was too little and too late. We were safe.

  I tried to end on a clear note: ‘I think it is very hard to resist the conclusion that News International have been involved in covering up their journalists’ involvement with private investigators who are breaking the law, and it is very worrying that Scotland Yard do not appear to have always said or done as much as they could have done to stop that cover-up.’

  Later that day, I phoned a friendly source at News International. ‘We’re depressed,’ she said.

  * * *

  Of course, we hadn’t really won much of a victory. All we had done was to avoid the barbecue.

  The fact was that we had started a fight and we couldn’t stop it. There was a small sign of that when Rebekah Brooks backed out of a Guardian project which the Sun had been planning to support, the 10/10 campaign to cut carbon emissions by 10% during the year 2010, which was due to be launched in September 2009. It was made clear that she was backing out because of our coverage of the hacking affair. James Murdoch evidently agreed with her, even though he makes much of his concern about the environment. ‘He’s passionately green,’ according to one source who knows him well, ‘but that’s second. First, he’s tribal.’

  There was an even clearer sign of News International’s mood a few days later when an MP contacted me to report a conversation with Rebekah Brooks. On the day after the select-committee hearing, she had been asked how she thought the hacking affair might end. ‘With Alan Rusbridger on his knees, begging for mercy,’ she had replied.

  Murdoch’s Times disposed of the Guardian’s evidence to the select committee in 115 words tucked away on page 20. The Sun did not mention it at all.

  It was as if now there were two versions of reality. There was the official version, aggressively promoted by News International and endorsed by the police and the PCC and the Conservative Party and most of the rest of Fleet Street. Then there was the version which was being shown to me by a small collection of nervous off-the-record sources – journalists, private investigators, the managers and lawyers of various celebrities – who told a very different story. They weren’t talking about a rogue reporter. What they were describing was a rogue newspaper.

  4. Crime in Fleet Street

  Based on interviews with private investigators who worked for newspapers; journalists who hired them; evidence collected by police officers and others who investigated the investigators; ‘Stick it Up Your Punter! by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie; as well as material obtained by the Leveson Inquiry.

  Rupert Murdoch has consistently denied ever having any knowledge of illegal activity in his newsrooms. Not everyone sees it that way.

  Some claim that, whatever he knew, he was responsible because he imposed on his editors such a ruthless drive for sales; and that, although he might not have known of specific offences, he always understood in general terms that his journalists might break the law to deliver results. This idea was given some traction in March 2013, when one of his own reporters secretly recorded him declaring that the bribing of police by journalists had been ‘going on a hundred years’. Furthermore, there is an interesting pattern which became clear as the truth finally emerged about the epidemic of crime in British newspapers. Whether the offence was blagging, or hacking phones or computers, or tapping live phone calls, or paying bribes to police, the new evidence suggests that, with every kind of crime, the trouble began in the Murdoch papers.

  * * *

  Ian Withers is possibly the best-known and longest-surviving private investigator in the UK. He is old style: been around since 1960, used to be a police officer, has had a few run-ins with the law. By sheer fluke, the dusty archives of the Guardian hold a memo, written on 26 April 1971, in which an experienced reporter summarised an interview with him.

  According to the memo, all those years ago Withers was saying that it was ‘easy and very common’ to make a phone call to extract sensitive personal information from the Inland Revenue, the Department of Social Services, police and other government agencies: ‘No trouble at all in the majority of cases,’ he said. ‘One can usually adopt a fairly effective cover story, pretending to be someone in another branch of the same department.’

  The memo described Withers’ work for foreign embassies, US and UK corporations and the Liberal Party, who allegedly asked him to check out the anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain (who years later became a Labour Cabinet minister). It presented Withers as a man who was not too worried about breaking the law, recording his bland admission that he was awaiting trial under the Wireless Telegraphy Act, which then banned bugging and phone-tapping: ‘The case has not yet come to court, but it will end in a fine when it does.’ In the same year, 1971, he and three others were prosecuted for blagging, using the antique common-law charge that they had conspired to effect public mischief. They were convicted although they won an appeal to the House of Lords, which said effectively that it was not a crime to tell a lie.

  From the mid-1980s, Ian Withers sold his services to the Sunday Times, which had been the property of Rupert Murdoch’s company since 1981. He worked in particular for the paper’s investigative specialist, Barrie Penrose. By this time, the 1984 Data Protection Act had passed into law, making it a crime to take information from a confidential database unless it was necessary in the public interest.

  Withers was the beginning. In the end, there were several dozen specialists following in his footsteps, digging out confidential information for newspapers by fair means or foul. Forty-two of them are named, many for the first time, in the appendix to this book. The link between them and Withers’ early work was forged by one man who became involved in the strangest development in Fleet Street crime.

  In the early 1980s, this man was a young stage manager, bored with his work in small London theatres. One day he was reading his local paper, the Richmond and Twickenham Times, when he saw an advertisement offering jobs in a private-investigation agency. It so happened that, for no clear reason, the respectable suburbs of Richmond and Twickenham had attracted a cluster of private investigators who had become involved in the fast-growing industry of ‘tracing’.

  Some private investigators – commonly known as ‘PIs’ – blame Margaret Thatcher. They say that there had always been a small number of specialists who traced people who had disappeared without paying their debts. These tracers were expert at mining public records for information, but they also blagged, calling up people and o
rganisations to trick them into disclosing information about the target’s current whereabouts. The 1980s saw Mrs Thatcher engineer a credit boom with millions borrowing for mortgages, bank loans, hire purchase. This, in turn, generated a debt boom as a mass of these new borrowers took the money and ran. The demand for tracers went through the roof. Dozens of new staff were hired by the existing specialists, including Ian Withers’ company, Nationwide. Other PIs joined in, creating new tracing agencies. It was one of these new agencies – based over a sandwich shop in Twickenham – whose advertisement caught the young stage manager’s eye.

  He was hired and, for professional purposes, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Al Green’. He was quite unlike most PIs, who tended to be ex-cops like Ian Withers. Al Green had never been in the police and generally despised them as thugs. He was highly strung, highly intelligent, instinctively left wing. And there was one other thing about Green which was most unusual in his new profession, and which was to have a decisive impact: he was addicted to heroin.

  Green quickly discovered that he was oddly adept at tracing. He used to tell friends that the job suited him because he had always felt inadequate and this was a rare chance for him to take on a challenge and win. He also recognised that when it came to blagging, a heroin addict develops a horribly effective skill at deceiving all those around him, including himself, and he would tell the joke about the difference between an alcoholic and a drug addict: ‘The alcoholic will steal your wallet. The heroin addict will steal your wallet and then help you to look for it.’

  Soon, he learned how to trick police into disclosing information from their confidential records (known as making a ‘club call’); and how to trick British Telecom into handing over the itemised bills which they started to produce in 1987 (known as rocs, ‘records of calls’). Other tracers were calling banks and blagging the new home address of an account holder; Green started to blag their bank statements as well. When Barclays Bank proved difficult to penetrate, he posed as a postgraduate student researching a thesis about computer systems and spent a day as a guest of one of the companies who supplied the bank’s software.