Hack Attack Page 13
Sand in turn left the Sun and moved to the Mirror Group. Former colleagues claim he continued to hack voicemail, that he did so openly and that he showed his trick to reporters on the group’s national titles – the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People. There are unconfirmed allegations that some editors at all three titles were either aware of criminal hacking in their newsrooms or actively took part in it.
At the Leveson Inquiry, Piers Morgan – by then the renowned presenter of CNN’s Tonight with Piers Morgan – found himself accused of supervising hacking during his time as editor of the Daily Mirror. One of Morgan’s finance reporters, James Hipwell, told Leveson of the ‘unfettered activities’ of the paper’s show-business team, whose desk was close to his own: ‘The openness and frequency of their hacking activities gave me the impression that hacking was considered a bog-standard journalistic tool … I would go so far as to say it happened every day, and that it became apparent that a great many of the Mirror’s show-business stories would come from that source.’ Hipwell said he had no proof that Morgan knew about the hacking but he added: ‘I would say that it is very unlikely that he didn’t know that it was going on … The newspaper was built around the cult of Piers. He was the newspaper. Nothing happened at the newspaper without him knowing.’
Morgan replied by saying that ‘I have no reason or knowledge to believe it was going on.’ He drew attention to the fact that Hipwell had later been jailed for insider trading, buying the same shares which he was tipping in his column. Hipwell was ‘a convicted criminal’, Morgan said, who had changed his story on a number of occasions when his share-dealing was investigated. ‘I believe any testimony he gives to be inherently unbelievable.’
Morgan specifically denied an allegation that he had listened to voicemail messages exchanged by Britain’s two most famous Swedish residents at the time – the TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson and the England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson – who were having an affair. He said he did not remember a lunch at which, according to the BBC anchorman Jeremy Paxman, Morgan had been seated opposite Ulrika Jonsson and had teased her about the messages which she had left for Eriksson, mimicking her Swedish accent. Paxman told the Leveson Inquiry that Morgan had then turned to him and explained how messages could be hacked.
Piers Morgan was also taxed over a column that he had written in October 2006, describing the tense relationship between Paul McCartney and his then wife Heather Mills. He had written: ‘At one stage, I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for her on her mobile phone.’ Heather Mills told Leveson that in January 2001 she had had an argument with McCartney, after which he had left a sequence of apologetic messages, including one in which he sang ‘Please forgive me’, and that later that day, a reporter who had worked for the Mirror had called her to say that he knew the couple had argued and that ‘I’ve just heard a message of him singing on the phone to ask you for forgiveness.’ Morgan agreed that he had heard a voicemail message, but he said: ‘I have no reason to believe that the tape was obtained in an unlawful manner.’ He said he would not identify the source of the tape but implied that it could have been leaked by Heather Mills. She denied sharing any voicemail with him.
Three men who had edited the People also found themselves facing unconfirmed allegations that they had hacked phones during their careers. Neil Wallis, who edited the paper before becoming Andy Coulson’s deputy at the News of the World, was eventually arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications. He was not charged. When Wallis later said that the police had no evidence of his involvement in hacking, the Crown Prosecution Service corrected him, saying that they did have evidence but that it was insufficient to take to court. Two of Wallis’s successors at the People, Mark Thomas and James Scott, were also arrested by police on suspicion of the same offence. At the same time, the former editor of the Sunday Mirror, Tina Weaver, and her head of news, Nick Buckley, were also arrested. At the time of this book’s publication, prosecutors had not decided whether or not they should be charged.
Kelvin MacKenzie himself was never implicated in the hacking. On the contrary, as his culture of recklessness spread across Fleet Street, his own voicemail was targeted – by Glenn Mulcaire from the News of the World.
* * *
One of the most striking features of all this crime is that the police failed to tackle it. This was true not only in relation to the hacking of voicemail but also with the more serious offence of tapping live phone calls – even when it was used against the most sensitive of victims, the royal family.
In August 1992, MacKenzie’s Sun published extracts from a phone call between Princess Diana and her childhood friend James Gilbey, during which he famously and repeatedly called her ‘Squidgy’. The princess described the sadness of her marriage to Prince Charles and the tension in her relationship with the royal family. That call had been intercepted. Oddly, the call had taken place in December 1989, nearly three years before it was published. Even odder, it had first surfaced in the United States, in National Enquirer magazine, which frequently employed former British tabloid journalists. The possibility was raised but never confirmed that this had been done to cast the Sun in the lawful role of merely reproducing material that had already been published abroad. Whatever the detail of the way it was done, there was no doubt that this was a serious offence, punishable with up to two years in prison under the 1985 Interception of Communications Act. Police took no action against the Sun.
Then the Sun did it again. In December 1993, they published highly embarrassing extracts from a long call made by Prince Charles to his then lover, Camilla Parker Bowles, explaining that he envied the role of her tampon. Alex Mitchell, an Australian journalist who was based in London at the time, later reported that the Queen’s private secretary, Lord Fellowes, had found that there was evidence of interference with the landline at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, the country seat of the Duke of Westminster, where Prince Charles is believed to have been staying when he made the call. Strangely, the call had been made in December 1989, the same month as the ‘Squidgy’ call and four years before it was published. Equally strange, it appeared first in an obscure women’s magazine in Australia, New Idea, which happened to belong to Rupert Murdoch. When it was suggested that the story had been effectively laundered through New Idea to avoid punishment by the British authorities, Murdoch issued a formal statement that ‘any suggestion of collusion or conspiracy between companies is totally without foundation’. The police took no action.
The royal family were not the only ones to find their phone calls being tapped and then published in the Sun. In 2002, the paper was pursuing the story of a convicted fraudster, Peter Foster, who had helped the then prime minister’s wife, Cherie Blair, to buy two flats in Bristol. On 13 December, the paper published ‘sensational details … gleaned from a series of taped phone calls to which the Sun has listened’. They reported that Foster was thinking of capitalising on the scandal around him by selling his story for up to £100,000. The Sun did not deny that, within hours of the calls being made, it had obtained tapes of ‘money-grabbing Foster’, his mother and his brother, without Foster’s consent. The Press Complaints Commission merely ‘censured’ the Sun for the tapping. The police took no action.
Who was tapping calls for Fleet Street? While the police failed to expose the truth, some journalists and private investigators were well aware of the answer, published here for the first time. It involved a former police officer, two serving officers and one deeply eccentric character with an obsession with cats. And News International titles.
On 24 September 1995, the News of the World ran a picture of the former England rugby captain, Will Carling, poking his head out of the door of a health club in west London. The point of the story was that Carling had just had a secret meeting in the club with Princess Diana, who was alleged to be having an affair with him. One of those who was directly involved with taking this picture says that it was obtained by intercepting the princess’s pho
ne calls. The job was commissioned, he says, by Alex Marunchak of the News of the World, and it was carried out by a former Metropolitan Police officer, Steve Clarke, who had set up an investigation agency called Metshield.
This source has described how he saw Steve Clarke use a device ‘about the size of a car radio’ to access Princess Diana’s number and to tune into the calls which she was making. This sounds like a radio scanner of the kind which could be used to intercept calls in 1995 when phone systems were still using analogue, not digital systems.
The source says that, having discovered the princess was due to meet Carling at the health club, Clarke tasked a former Met detective, Sid Creasey, who also worked for Southern Investigations, to go to the club with a photographer. The source says that Creasey saw Diana leave the club and then waited until, some minutes later, Carling started poking his head out of the door to check that the coast was clear, failed to spot the threat and was caught on camera.
Alex Marunchak went on to find two serving detective constables from the Metropolitan Police, Jimmy Young and Scott Gelsthorpe, who offered the same service. With funding from a senior London criminal, David Carroll, they set up Active Investigation Services (AIS) with an office in Cloth Fair in the East End of London. They used a network of former and serving officers to gather intelligence, and they also intercepted telephone calls, with devices made by hand in the shed of a suburban garden.
The bugs originally were designed and constructed in the mid-1990s by an elderly man, Arthur Strong. He suffered from cerebral palsy which made his hands shake and so, in the late 1990s, he recruited a near neighbour, Stuart Dowling, as his assistant and apprentice. Dowling learned quickly and then devised a more sophisticated version of the bug, using a microchip. He called it the Digital Analogue Crossover, or DAX for short. Placed on a landline, the DAX would relay conversations in real time to a mobile phone. He started making the bugs in his bedroom, but the resin which he used to make them waterproof smelled bad, and his wife, Jodie, complained. So he started using the shed at the bottom of his garden in Langley Road, Sittingbourne, as a workshop for bugging.
Unknown to his wife, Dowling used the bugs to monitor her movements. He was also hired by AIS. Mickey Hall, a former telecoms engineer from Battersea, south London, installed them up telephone poles or inside the green British Telecom junction boxes which stand on pavements around the country, using a fluorescent jacket as well as official barriers and signs to pass himself off as a BT worker.
AIS and the bugging team worked primarily for commercial clients and were eventually caught and convicted. What was not revealed in court is that this network was also working for Marunchak and allegedly for other news organisations. Old AIS invoices specifically record Marunchak hiring them. This seems to have started in 2004 – after the raid on Steve Whittamore – and continued even after the police raided AIS. The key players were released on bail, and AIS simply resurfaced with a new name, Alpha. Sources who worked for the company describe meetings with other unidentified journalists, including a conference organised by an upmarket security company run by a former MI5 officer. They say that Stuart Dowling demonstrated his DAX bug by hooking it up to a nearby shop to listen to its calls, and that journalists were present, not to report the event but as potential customers.
They claim that among the jobs which they took on for Fleet Street was the tapping of the Sussex home of the model and tabloid obsession Katie Price, in January 2011; and the phone calls of the journalist Andrew Morton, who has written biographies of Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky and Tom Cruise. One source says that the team were asked to bug Morton’s phone ‘near Regent’s Park’. Andrew Morton has confirmed that he had an office in Drummond Street, two minutes’ walk from the park.
And then there is Phil Winton, for years the proud owner of the No Hiding Place investigation agency, a short, tubby character, like Danny DeVito with a full head of dyed black hair and a thoroughly strange life. Winton is obsessed with cats. In 1996, he changed his surname to Catt; he drove a battered old Jaguar car with CAT 343X as the number plate; he kept up to a dozen rare cats in his office, above a café in Finchley, north London; he persuaded his local council to change the name of the alley behind the office to Siamese Mews; and enraged neighbours of his home by building a vast cattery in the back garden. Visitors to his office report that he also appeared to be a stranger to hygiene.
Winton bugged phones. On 20 January 1995, aged thirty-three, he was jailed for twelve months after being convicted of intercepting communications. A jury at Chelmsford Crown Court found that he had arranged for a shortwave transmitter to be placed on a target’s phone line in a BT manhole in the village of Witham, Essex. Two other men were jailed with him: David Coghlan, aged fifty-three, a former army intelligence officer; and David Edwards, aged thirty-five, a former BT engineer.
David Coghlan bugged for Ian Withers, who worked for the Sunday Times. He is also believed to have bugged commercial enemies of the former owner of the Observer, Tiny Rowland. David Edwards has told friends he worked for Gary Lowe and for the network of recovering addicts. Winton, too, was a regular contact of Lowe and the NA network. He had been at school with two of the NA recruits and was often seen visiting Blue. Gary Lowe, as ever, linked them to Fleet Street, although he disliked Winton and humiliated him when he was released from prison by hiring two actors to dress up as policemen and arrest him as he came through the gate.
Winton once boasted in an interview about his media clients, claiming to be getting regular and lucrative work from two contacts on the news desk of ‘a popular tabloid’: ‘One of them will say “Here’s the deadline, this is what I want, how much will it cost?” The other just calls up and says “Get the info, I don’t care how much it costs.”’
* * *
Breaking into stolen mobile phones … Hiding tracking devices on targets’ cars … ‘Bin spinning’ to find stories in rubbish … Using police officers and/or employees of phone companies to monitor the precise location of their targets’ mobile phones (known as ‘pinging’). The criminal ingenuity was almost endless. Ian Edmondson from the News of the World devised a scheme to send public figures free mobile phones containing spyware which would relay back to him the call data, contact numbers and pictures in the phone’s memory.
There was email hacking. In the summer of 2006, Derek Haslam, who was still spying on Jonathan Rees for Scotland Yard, was alarmed to discover that Rees had found a specialist who had succeeded in hacking into his computer and retrieving the secret reports which he had filed. Through Rees, the same specialist worked for the News of the World. Sienna Miller the actress, and Chris Shipman – the son of the murderous Dr Harold Shipman – had their emails hacked at a time when the paper was researching them.
There were burglaries – PIs and journalists working together to break into the homes of public figures. Whether or not they were connected to this, the actor Hugh Grant, the Labour MP Chris Bryant, and the chief executive of the Football Association, David Davies, all reported being burgled at a time when they were the objects of tabloid attention and in circumstances which suggested the burglar was looking for information, not valuables. Two separate sources who were close to Southern Investigations say that Rees and Fillery were breaking into houses, to remove material or plant listening devices. Other evidence shows them attempting to hire a former police officer to commit a burglary, apparently at the home of an unidentified MP. When police searched Fillery’s computer, they found a record of Southern reporting to Alex Marunchak the results of a burglary which they appeared to have carried out at the home of an unidentified woman.
Crimes which had been nurtured by three Murdoch papers had spread through almost all of the other national titles. What was being concealed after the arrest of Goodman and Mulcaire was not simply one rogue reporter, nor even one rogue newspaper. This was an industry which had gone rogue, driven by profit, regardless of rules, privileged by its power. Crime paid. Concealment was easy.
We could have let it drop. The truth is that, if we’d been left to decide for ourselves, we might well have let the whole phone-hacking saga go after Rusbridger and I had stopped the barbecue at the media select committee. We’d published a big story and kicked some powerful people in the shins; we’d proved we weren’t lying; there was a long queue of other stories waiting to be covered: why hang around in the cage with the tiger? The answer is that the tiger wouldn’t let us go.
It was a Tuesday morning, 14 July 2009, when we appeared before the select committee. That evening, we picked up reports that News International were sending their political correspondents into the House of Commons to spread the word among MPs about David Leppard’s story, that Rusbridger had hired the specialist blagger John Ford to hack voicemail. It didn’t seem to matter whether this was true or not (or that they had agreed not to publish it). By Wednesday morning, it was travelling fast around Parliament. We were going to have to go and find Ford.
I drove up to the M4 west of London, met the Guardian’s investigations editor, David Leigh, in a service station, dumped my car and together we headed off to Ford’s last known address, in Somerset. Leigh had been doing this kind of work for even longer than me: when I started out as a messenger boy at the Guardian, in 1976, he was already working for the pre-Murdoch Times. For both of us, the Leppard smear story was personal. Rusbridger was not just our editor, he was also our friend, and his wife is the sister of Leigh’s wife.
By Thursday morning, with the help of one or two journalists who had worked for the Sunday Times, we had tracked Ford down to his new home, a terraced house in Bradford on Avon. There was no sign of him, and so there we sat, in the front seat of Leigh’s car like two cops in a B-movie, drinking disgusting coffee from polystyrene cups, bitching about office politics and waiting for Ford to turn up. It rained steadily. In mid-afternoon, our phones suddenly started buzzing to tell us that the Director of Public Prosecutions had released a statement. In a nearby shop, we got hold of it by fax and learned that the DPP had reviewed all the evidence which the police had handed over in 2006 and concluded that it would not be appropriate to reopen the case or to revisit the decisions taken. A door slammed.