Hack Attack Read online

  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 h
alf 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?

  Finally, I also heard that there was a tape-recording of Glenn Mulcaire explaining to a reporter exactly how to get access to Gordon Taylor’s voicemail messages, a step-by-step guide in the art of phone-hacking. The reporter’s name, I was told, sounded like Ryan or Ryall.

  All this was truly damaging for the News of the World. Even if they wanted to claim that they knew nothing about hacking when Clive Goodman was arrested, they had known about this paperwork for months, since it was disclosed in the Gordon Taylor legal action earlier in 2008. Yet they had made no attempt to correct the record in any way. And what about Scotland Yard? This material had been seized from Glenn Mulcaire when police arrested him in August 2006. It had been sitting in police hands ever since. Had they done anything at all to pursue it, to interview or arrest other News of the World people who were involved? And if not, why not? And why had they not even mentioned this in court at the original trial?

  And surely this was only the beginning. As far as I could tell, the court had ordered the police to hand over material which they held specifically in relation to Gordon Taylor. If it was true that there really were thousands of victims, then it looked as if there would be thousands more documents in Scotland Yard’s vaults, about other victims and possibly about other perpetrators at the News of the World. Just how much were News International concealing? Just how much evidence had the police buried away?

  But, of course, as far as News International and the police were concerned, the case had been settled. The money had been handed over to Gordon Taylor and the two others who had joined the action, Jo Armstrong and John Hewison. The paperwork had been sealed with the blessing of the High Court. Nobody was to know anything about any of this.

  Well, that was their plan.

  * * *

  Bob Woodward of the Washington Post once said that ‘the best journalism is often done in defiance of management’. True. At best, news managers are desperate for copy, so they won’t give reporters the time they need to work on stories; at worst, they are little people with big titles who think they should prove themselves by interfering all day long.

  But I’m freelance. I work from home where I can be almost invisible to the people who employ me. So I hide out in my study down in deepest Sussex with nothing to disturb me but outbreaks of very loud music and a distant view of a thirteenth-century church, happy in the hope that the Guardian will forget me and in the knowledge that I don’t need a school prefect to stand over me to tell me to work.

  By late June 2009, finally armed with enough detail and my collection of explosive paperwork, I was more or less ready to run the hacking story and so I needed to go up to London to get the Guardian onside. It had been well over a year since I had encountered Stuart Kuttner on the BBC radio Today programme. I had been working on other projects as well, but this one had got bigger and bigger.

  I had lunch with the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, in the newspaper’s swanky new glass office in the area behind King’s Cross Station which was once lined with prostitutes and crack dealers but now trades in nothing more dangerous than chai latte and croissants.

  Rusbridger is different from other news managers in at least two ways. First, he is a friend. He and I started as junior news reporters on the Guardian on the same day in July 1979. Now that he is the editor, we have a very simple deal: I bring him stories; he covers my back. He knows I won’t let him down; I know he won’t mess me about.

  Second, he has a backbone. Fleet Street is well stocked with ambitious cowards, who have risen to the top by grinning obediently at anybody who is higher up the ladder than them. That kind of editor would take one look at a story which was bound to cause trouble with the largest news organisation in the country and the largest police force and the largest political party and, for good measure, the Press Complaints Commission, and they would have killed it or cut it back and tucked it away at the bottom of page five, hoping nobody would notice it. But Rusbridger liked it.

  We agreed that we must run it soon, before Parliament rose for its summer recess, so that we could be sure it would have some impact. I had a little bit more work to do on it. I needed to approach some of the key players, including Coulson and News International, to see if they had anything to say. I also had a worry about it.

  I was not sure about naming twenty-seven journalists from the News of the World and four others from the Sun who had been commissioning Steve Whittamore’s network; or the news reporter, Ross Hindley, who had sent the email for Neville Thurlbeck, containing the transcripts of voicemail messages. I did not want to create more Clive Goodmans – more reporters who could be dismissed as rogues by senior people who were, in fact, the ones who were really responsible. Blame tends to fall downwards. Also, perhaps wrongly, I had a queasy resistance to naming journalists, just because I am a journalist. We agreed to hold back the names of all but the most senior and the most culpable.

  I explained, too, that although I had got hold of a lot of paperwork, I couldn’t admit that. Our evidence would have to stay hidden. We frightened each other a little with some speculation about which particular parts of our private life could be
dragged out to punish us. And then we agreed to publish in the next week or so.

  We’d probably be OK.

  2. Inside the News of the World

  Based on interviews with former journalists from the News of the World as well as documents and detail which emerged in the Leveson Inquiry and in court hearings.

  Andy Coulson had a good view from his office. Sitting at his desk, he could look out through his glass wall and see the beating heart of the News of the World. Right in front of him was the ‘back bench’ – the row of desks where he would often sit with his lieutenants, filtering all the material that was being pumped into the paper from news agencies and freelancers and from his own staff, making the decisions that shaped the paper.

  Beyond the back bench, he could see the picture desk and then the news desk where several executives ran the news reporters who were cramped together in a group on the far side of the room and, next to them, the sub-editors who would check their stories and write their headlines. Around the edges of the newsroom were the feature writers, the sports writers, offices for a few other executives and a special cubicle for the royal editor, Clive Goodman. This was Coulson’s world, and he ruled it. But that wasn’t the best part of the view.