Hack Attack Read online

  If you succeed in a tabloid newsroom, you’ll be given big stories and great foreign trips, lots of bylines, a licence to fiddle your expenses, cosy lunches with the editor and private pay rises. If you fail, you’ll sit lonely in a corner, being given no stories or just crap stories that will never make it into print; you’ll be woken up at dawn and kept going till midnight; you’ll be sent away to Sunderland just as you were leaving the office to go to your own birthday party; if you happen to write something that gets into the paper, you’ll get no byline, no thanks, no respite; you will wish you were somebody else. (I know some of this at first hand: I spent my first few years as a reporter on tabloid papers and fled to escape one particularly remorseless bully.) So, of course, when those reporters are out there on the road with nothing much more than their imagination and their anxiety for company, some of them may well decide to invent quotes, fabricate facts, cheat sources, steal pictures, ignore rules, break laws – anything to be allowed to feel good.

  Compared to that, the life of a reporter on the Guardian is as soft as a baby’s face. It’s not just that – like the other ‘quality’ papers – there is less pressure to sell copies. Beyond that, unlike the other quality titles, the Guardian belongs to a trust. Instead of having shareholders trying to claw profit out of the newsroom, the trust has subsidiary businesses whose profits are used to fund the newsroom. The paper is still run as a business and it has to survive in the marketplace, but the commercial pressure which distorts so much behaviour in so many newsrooms is reduced to the bare minimum.

  What’s the difference between the News of the World and the Guardian? From a reporter’s angle? The Bully Quotient. Just that really. I’m allowed to fail.

  * * *

  Not everything that Mr Apollo told me was a total shock.

  When I was researching Flat Earth News, over the previous two years, I had contacted reporters who had worked in Fleet Street newsrooms, looking for the stories behind their stories, to try to understand why it is that so often our work fails to tell the truth. A lot of reporters had helped and a few of them had gone further and started to tell me about their use of private investigators to gather information by illegal means – these ‘dark arts’. Coming from the soft world of the Guardian, I had known almost nothing of this.

  My enlightenment began one evening in a shady bar in Soho, where a very experienced news reporter spent several hours talking me through his own paper’s involvement. He started with ‘Benji the Binman’, a deeply eccentric loner who had spent his nights buzzing around London in a little van, scavenging in the rubbish bins of law firms and record producers and anybody else who might be in touch with celebrities, and then selling the news he found among the filth. Eventually, he was caught and convicted of theft, which hadn’t stopped newspapers using private investigators, or sometimes their own staff, to carry on rummaging through garbage in search of scoops. This reporter said his own paper certainly had done so. They had even displayed as a trophy on the newsroom wall a pair of knickers discarded by the daughter of a leading politician and retrieved from her dustbin by somebody who was pleased to call himself a journalist.

  Crouched over a candle on a rickety table in the corner of the bar, we talked on, and he told me in some detail how newspapers had started using ‘Trojan Horse’ emails to steal data from their targets’ computers, which was seriously illegal; and how one newspaper – Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times – had ended up doing so much illegal stuff that, in July 2003, they had appointed a specialist reporter, David Connett, to act as a kind of fallback fall guy. They had taken Connett on as a staff reporter but put him on a freelance contract, made sure he didn’t have an office phone number or email address, and then given him the job of commissioning the dark arts. That way, if he got caught, the paper could stand back, disown him and pretend that he was just some crazy freelancer who was nothing to do with them. Connett had become the butt of jokes in the office, with colleagues pretending they couldn’t hear him ‘because you’re not here, mate, are you?’

  That little scheme had turned bad. The paper had cut back its staff and made Connett redundant. He asked for the pay-off he would have received as a staff member. They told him he was freelance and so he wasn’t entitled to it. Now, he was taking them to an employment tribunal. Weeks later, I sat in on the hearing and listened to the evidence, including the denials of the Sunday Times. The tribunal accepted that this master of the dark arts was clearly more than a casual employee and awarded him compensation for unfair dismissal.

  Others who had worked for the Sunday Times went on to confirm all this. One of their senior journalists later met me in the coffee lounge of a sedate hotel and, in amongst the old ladies with their tea and digestive biscuits, he not only described that paper’s long history of illegally ‘blagging’ confidential data from phone companies and banks and government departments but also gave me the name and contact details of the specialist who had been doing it for them for years – a former actor from Somerset called John Ford. Another described how they had used a con man, Barry Beardall, to try to entrap Labour politicians.

  Since the research for Flat Earth News was an attempt to investigate truth-telling on quality newspapers, my education about the dark arts tended to come from them. I found scraps of evidence that other quality papers were also hiring blagging specialists to trick organisations into disclosing confidential data – a criminal offence unless it was justified by a clear public interest. The Conservative peer, Lord Ashcroft, named an investigator who had tricked the Royal Bank of Scotland into disclosing details of the party’s bank account, on behalf of The Times. A reporter from the Sunday Telegraph gave me a copy of a fax about Dr David Kelly, the weapons specialist who had committed suicide after being caught up in the furore over false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It had been sent to them by a private investigator on 18 July 2003, the day that Dr Kelly’s body was found, and it recorded every phone number Kelly had dialled in a previous eight-week period.

  Similarly, the reporter who first told me about bribing police officers was not from a red-top tabloid. He had spent years with the Daily Mail, probably the most hardline law-and-order newspaper in the country, always ready to call for more police and tougher punishment – unless it is itself the offender. The Mail reporter told detailed stories of using a former detective as a go-between, to hand over envelopes of cash for serving officers, to persuade them to disclose material from police computers or from current investigations. I found more journalists, from the Mail and other titles, who had also used the same man to bribe police; and yet others who had been paying their bribes through a particularly nasty bunch of private investigators who ran a London agency called Southern Investigations.

  It turned out that all this crime had built up slowly among numerous Fleet Street papers, quality and tabloid. It had reached the point in the early 2000s where several news desks had banned their reporters from commissioning investigators, not because so much of their work was illegal but simply because they were costing such a lot. Those papers began to insist that only executives could commission the dark arts.

  Of course, little of this had ever reached the public domain. It’s not as if papers were about to start reporting it. The one big glimpse for the public was the material which had been published in two reports in 2006 by the Information Commissioner, whose job is to police databases containing confidential information. These two reports described a network which for years had been run by a private investigator called Steve Whittamore, who specialised in blagging confidential information out of key organisations. Whittamore had two men inside the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA); a civilian worker in the Metropolitan Police; a former Hell’s Angel who specialised in tricking British Telecom; and a private investigator who targeted mobile phone companies and banks. Since the mid-1990s, Whittamore had been sitting in his quiet detached house in a small town in Hampshire, taking calls from journalists and using his network to blag t
he confidential information they wanted. Almost everything he did was illegal.

  In March 2003, the Information Commission set up Operation Motorman and raided Whittamore. In April 2005, he and three of his network went on trial for their extraction of confidential information from police computers, but the whole case ended in confusion. Whittamore and his co-defendants were given the minimum possible sentence – a result so weak that a second trial involving Whittamore and five others was scrapped.

  In the background, the newspapers who had commissioned all this activity from Whittamore escaped without a graze. A senior figure from the Information Commissioner’s Office told me that their lawyers predicted that, if they were charged, the newspapers would hire senior barristers who would fight every inch of the way and run up huge legal bills and simply bust their budget. Fleet Street was just too big and powerful to fight. As a safer alternative, the commissioner had published two reports outlining Whittamore’s activity, identifying eight national daily papers and ten national Sundays which, over a three-year period, had made a total of 13,343 requests for confidential data, almost all of which were ‘certainly or very probably’ obtained through Whittamore by illegal means. Yet with a hypocrisy which turned out to be typical, Fleet Street chose to report almost nothing of this to the outside world.

  Working on Flat Earth News, I pestered the Information Commissioner’s Office from hell to breakfast, trying to get hold of the material which they had seized from Whittamore during Operation Motorman – his record of the 13,000-plus requests, complete with the names of some 400 journalists, the names of the targets, the nature of the confidential data required, the method used to obtain it and the price paid. Previously, the ICO had released some sample invoices, hoping to generate publicity. The invoices had been edited to conceal the names of Whittamore’s targets, but what they clearly showed was that there was no secret about what was happening. Whittamore was explicitly recording illegal searches on his invoices, and Fleet Street newspapers were paying them. In spite of all my wheedling, I could not persuade the ICO to give me more. At one point, one of their senior officials let me into a room and showed me the piles of paperwork which they had seized from Whittamore. All he had to do was walk away and leave me with it. He wouldn’t. The whole bundle of evidence remained hidden.

  I knew I was a long way from knowing the whole truth. It was enough to irritate Stuart Kuttner on the radio, which was an achievement of a kind, but I also knew that, in spite of the pressure which the Information Commissioner had created by publishing his two reports, nothing had really changed.

  In the summer of 2006, I had doorstepped one of the most active members of Whittamore’s network. He was a confident, friendly man and, having escaped without effective punishment, he was happy to talk. He explained that they had decided not to steal any more information from police computers, because it was particularly dangerous, but, apart from that, the network was still trading with a smile on its face, as if the law had never tried to stop them. He sat in front of me in his office, illegally trafficking data, and showed me his current list of clients, which included nearly every newspaper in Fleet Street.

  * * *

  Imagination, anxiety – there’s also room for some luck. A few weeks after meeting Mr Apollo, early in 2008, I found myself at a media function, where I spoke about Flat Earth News. Afterwards, we sat down to eat and I discovered that the man on my right was a very senior figure from Scotland Yard. So I asked him, ‘That case with the phone-hacking, where the News of the World guy went to prison. How many victims were there? Was it really only eight?’

  ‘No,’ he said, casually. ‘There were thousands.’

  Oh, really?

  It also helps if you have somebody like Mr Apollo to guide you. He stayed in touch and started to provide an invaluable stream of information. Crucially, he was able to give me the name of the non-royal victim who was now suing the News of the World – Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, a prime target for a Sunday tabloid in search of stories about the private lives of star players, who would turn to Taylor for help if they found themselves in trouble.

  And, just as Mr Apollo had suggested during our first meeting, there was indeed some panic about this legal action at Scotland Yard. This was largely because Gordon Taylor was being represented by a lawyer who, for those who oppose him, is like a nightmare in a dark suit – Mark Lewis, very bright, very ambitious and absolutely devoted to the smell of trouble. I found that there were some people who had a crude theory about Lewis and his weirdly unflinching way of walking into enemy fire with a boyish grin on his face. They reckoned it is because he suffers from multiple sclerosis – ‘he’s dying, so he has no fear’. That missed the point entirely. It is true that he has MS, which gives him a pronounced limp, but that isn’t what drives the man. By chance, I came across somebody who had been at primary school with him, who said that he hasn’t really changed since the age of nine. Even then, he was the same – clever, cocky and disobedient. Mark Lewis just loves being a nuisance.

  Clearly, it was Lewis who was the brains behind Gordon Taylor’s legal action, who had spotted the weakness in News International’s story and who was now confronting them with one simple allegation – that if it wasn’t Clive Goodman who had told Glenn Mulcaire to hack Gordon Taylor’s phone, then surely it was somebody else at the News of the World. According to Apollo, Lewis had now hired a barrister and gone to court and persuaded a judge to order the police to hand over any evidence which they possessed relating to the hacking of Taylor’s phone. Apollo didn’t know what the evidence was, but a few people at the Yard who knew about it were worried.

  I soon tracked down Mark Lewis at the office of a Manchester law firm, and did my best to recruit him as an ally. The problem was that he was hemmed in by confidentiality and so he was not allowed to help. Also, as I later discovered, he takes some pride in being maddening and very rarely does anything that he does not want to do.

  If ever I was going to be able to write this story, I needed far more detail. In gaps between working on other stories to keep the Guardian happy, I went off, following my imagination wherever it led, in search of police officers and Crown prosecutors, lawyers and probation officers, anybody at all who had been involved in the original trial of Goodman and Mulcaire and who might know something about the evidence which had not been disclosed in court. I made some progress. I tried to find anybody who had anything to do with Gordon Taylor – friends, colleagues, enemies. I made less progress.

  Over time, I looked for anybody who had ever had any kind of job at the News of the World, anybody who had ever had any kind of connection to the top of Scotland Yard. I found a second source who had had some access to the material gathered by police in the original inquiry. He echoed the estimate of the number of victims which I had been given by the senior Yard figure at the media function: ‘Two or three thousand,’ he suggested.

  I went back and looked more closely at the official version of events. In March 2007, two months after Goodman and Mulcaire were sent to prison, the case was examined by the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport. The committee called as a witness Les Hinton, the chief executive of the News of the World’s UK owner, News International, and asked him if he had conducted ‘a full, rigorous internal inquiry’ and was ‘absolutely convinced’ that Goodman had been the only person on the paper who knew about the hacking of phones. ‘Yes, we have,’ Hinton replied, ‘and I believe he was the only person.’ Hinton added that the new editor, Colin Myler, who had replaced Andy Coulson, was still investigating. Which was a little odd because twelve days before Hinton gave this evidence, Myler had already told the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) that he had concluded that Goodman’s hacking was ‘aberrational’, ‘a rogue exception’ and ‘an exceptional and unhappy event in the 163-year history of the News of the World, involving one journalist’.

  The case was also examined by the PCC, whi
ch 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.