Hack Attack Read online

  Andy Coulson kept his hands close to the steering wheel. He chaired the daily conference when the heads of all the editorial departments – news, features, sport, showbiz, royal, politics – would pitch their ideas. He liked to show that he was on top of stories. During the spring of 2005, for example, he personally oversaw a project to snatch an interview with the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he was serving his time for the murder of thirteen women. This was kept very secret. The reporter on the job was instructed not to tell colleagues. For maximum discretion, Edmondson could have managed the job himself, but Coulson liked to think he knew how to run an investigation and he duly authorised the payment of a hefty fee to Sutcliffe’s brother, Carl, and also the purchase of a camera and recorder which were specially designed to trick the metal detectors at Broadmoor. Carl Sutcliffe concealed them inside a plaster cast and visited his unsuspecting brother who then found himself splashed across the News of the World, primarily on the grounds that he had become fat – ‘a balding 17-stone slob’, as the paper put it.

  Still, there was a limit to how much Coulson could intervene. He would sit in his office, banging out emails with terse instructions to those around him, but he relied on two right-hand men to enforce his will. Each of them had offices which flanked his own at the top end of the newsroom. To Coulson’s left, looking out, was Stuart Kuttner, who had been the managing editor at the News of the World for nearly fifteen years.

  There was something dark about Kuttner with his skeletal face, his slow, calculating manner and his original London accent only slightly disguised as posh. Since 1987, he had served half a dozen editors in a role like that of the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction – he cleaned up mess. If any kind of threat came out of any kind of dark corner – scandals in the newsroom, rebellious reporters, angry victims – Kuttner would deal with it, get rid of the body, clear up the blood. He told one colleague that his favourite book was Machiavelli’s The Prince with its admiration for manipulation and deceit as the necessary tools of power. Kuttner enjoyed power. Former colleagues say he liked to use the messengers as his private staff, sending them out to buy him fresh fruit in the morning or to take his briefcase down to his car at the end of the day. He was notorious for the violence of his bollockings. But primarily his power was financial. He was responsible for the editorial budget, and all those who worked for him agree that he treated the newspaper’s money as though it were his own: he wanted every penny accounted for.

  Coulson’s second enforcer, in the office to his right, was his deputy editor, Neil Wallis. He was nearly twenty years older than Coulson; he had been in Fleet Street for years, moving from one tabloid to another, earning along the way a reputation for what one colleague described as ‘a psychopathic ability to divorce his emotions from his actions’. This colleague recalls Wallis at a leaving party strolling up to an executive whom he had shafted in his earlier career with a cheery smile and an extended hand, only to be told: ‘I’m not going to shake your hand until you’ve washed it.’ He collected libel writs like kids used to collect coins – ‘the Wallis Collection’ as it was known, with a nod to the Wallace Collection of fine art in central London.

  Wallis made it his business to go drinking with top cops. In January 2005 he persuaded the retiring Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, to write a weekly column for the News of the World. It turned out that Wallis had been offering Stevens free PR advice for years and credited himself with helping Stevens into the commissioner’s chair. That, plus up to £7,000 a column, plus the promise to call him The Chief, even though Stevens was no longer a chief officer, landed the man.

  In some newsrooms, Wallis was known as ‘the wolfman’, possibly because of a story he had written to the effect that the Yorkshire Ripper was a Jekyll and Hyde character who killed only on full moons. At the News of the World, he was known as ‘the rasping fuckwit’, which was partly a reflection of his breathy voice but also a straightforward sign of disrespect. The truth was a bit more complicated than that. A lot of reporters didn’t like him as a person, they didn’t trust him and they knew he was the kind of cynic who gives cynics a bad name, but they also knew that he was a highly effective hack. He was quick-witted and tough. He had good contacts, he could spin a story. He understood the business of tabloid journalism.

  So News Corp’s demand for success at all costs was passed down from Andy Coulson’s office through Kuttner and Wallis to the news desk and the features department and then onwards to the journalists beneath them, and with it came a certain style of management, simply and repeatedly described by those who experienced it as ‘bullying’. This was a tough place to work.

  * * *

  Hanging on the wall above the news desk, there was a digital clock which counted down the minutes to the next edition of the paper. In the human-resources department, they logged the bylines of all the reporters, who were often reminded that those who slipped down the league table could expect to be hauled in for a bollocking or even to find themselves on the receiving end in the next round of redundancies.

  Reporters who worked there speak of a deeply unpleasant ‘ideas’ meeting on Tuesday mornings when they would all sit in a corner office while Edmondson or Weatherup or one of their deputies told them that their ideas for stories were all useless, a judgement which was often reinforced by an email later in the morning telling them that those were the worst story proposals the news desk had ever heard and demanding three more ideas from each of them. Edmondson, the reporters say, was particularly aggressive. They tell, for example, of him trying to put an electronic tracker on one reporter’s phone to check on his movements; of a senior reporter being reduced to tears at his desk because his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and Edmondson refused to let him have any time off work to look after her; of another who was sacked because he became a single parent and would not accept Edmondson’s ruling that ‘you belong to the News of the World’. When they were out on the road, they say, he liked to keep up the pressure by sending them texts – ‘tick tock’ or simply ‘??’.

  Since Rupert Murdoch broke the print unions and threw out the National Union of Journalists in 1986, the reporters had had no kind of protection. Some cracked. One is said to have tried to kill herself at a Christmas party. Mostly, however, they passed the bullying along to the people they dealt with. Several of them have described how they were encouraged to rip off the sources who sold them stories.

  Some sources were naive. They would tell their story before getting a signed contract and would simply never be paid. One reporter was sent to interview a prostitute who had had sex with a public figure, with instructions not to pay more than £250,000 for her story. The woman opened up by saying she wouldn’t talk for a penny under £10,000. Another agreed to talk on the promise that the News of the World would pay for her to have a good holiday. When she tried to claim her reward, Ian Edmondson declared that she was from up north, so she could stay in a caravan, for £150. Some got contracts and fell for an easy trick. The contract promised them big money if the story went on the front page. The reporter knew very well it would go inside the paper but kept that quiet. When the story came out and the source begged for something, anything, the reporter would offer them a tiny fee and, as one put it, ‘you wear them down and, in the end, they’ll take buttons’. A few – including a woman who had been raped by a footballer – fell foul of a clause which said that to the best of the source’s knowledge, the story must be true: the News of the World printed the story, claimed the source had been knowingly wrong about some part of it and refused to pay up. The subjects of stories also were shown no pity. They were dragged out and exposed in front of millions of readers, for being gay, for liking sex, for having a new partner, for accidentally showing their knickers when they stepped out of a car, for having broken the law when they were an adolescent. If the truth was not good enough to make a story, they could twist it.

  Some reporters say they h
ad pangs of conscience, not least because of the eye-watering hypocrisy which was involved. While castigating anybody else who showed any special interest in sex, the News of the World’s own newsroom was bubbling with affairs and outbreaks of sexual harassment, including a marked tendency during Andy Coulson’s time to recruit pretty young women who were encouraged to come into work wearing as little as possible. The paper had always been keen to expose orgies, but former News of the World journalists describe some of their own office parties as a model of drug-fuelled sexual adventure. They recall one mighty booze-up ending with an assistant editor outside the Chocolate Bar in Mayfair, central London, scarcely able to walk and talking to a woman reporter while he held his cock in his hand.

  The paper ruined a long list of more or less famous men by exposing the fact that they had visited prostitutes. And yet, in search of more of these stories, one News of the World reporter was told to make contacts among high-class sex workers with the specific instruction that he should have sex with them, do cocaine with them and claim it all on expenses. So he did. On another occasion, according to one source, Ian Edmondson wanted to expose a Premiership footballer for using prostitutes – and paid one to have sex with him. In the same way, they were ruthless in exposing any target who used illegal drugs, but there was no shortage of journalists using the same drugs. Former reporters tell stories of a Christmas disco where the dance floor was almost empty while various guests resorted to the toilets to snort cocaine; and of a ripple of panic when the Sun let their anti-drug hound, Charlie the Sniffer Dog, loose in the newsroom. Some of the journalists, including executives, were running on alcohol. A few ended up in expensive rehab clinics (noticing the opportunity to find stories about fellow patients).

  This was not just about hypocrisy. It was also the key to a crucial editorial distortion: regardless of the reality of the world they lived in, the News of the World was pretending in print that the nation lived by an antique moral code which rendered anything other than clean living and straight sex between a married couple improper and, therefore, they wanted to claim, a legitimate subject for exposure. It was fiction. It was also the cornerstone of their justification for their most destructive work.

  There was no room for doubt or conscience. Human feelings did not come into it. The News of the World was exposing bad people – all in the public interest. Privacy did not come into it. Privacy was for paedophiles, as the former feature writer, Paul McMullan, used to say. There was no escape. If a public figure admitted to using cocaine or enjoying sex, they had sacrificed their right to privacy. If a public figure refused to admit to using cocaine and enjoying sex, they were misleading the public, so they had no right to privacy in the first place. The News of the World might keep its own behaviour private. But that was different. The important thing was to get the story.

  * * *

  Gordon Taylor was a perfect target for the News of the World. It was not just that his job as the boss of the Professional Footballers’ Association gave him daily access to the private lives of famous players, his own private life also caught their eye.

  It started back at the beginning of 2005, when a well-known retired footballer contacted the paper and arranged to meet a reporter from the Manchester office in a pub on Merseyside. There the retired player passed on some scandalous gossip. He claimed – falsely, as it turned out – that Taylor was having an affair with Jo Armstrong, who was not just his in-house legal adviser: she was also his son’s former girlfriend. The reporter hurried back to the office and relayed the tale to Greg Miskiw.

  Miskiw was a News of the World legend, a man who had sacrificed his reputation, his peace of mind and his health to the single glorious goal of living the life of a lad. A lad drinks: Miskiw drank whisky in what he liked to call ‘gentleman’s measures’, so big that he didn’t have to ask for a refill while other people were nursing their pints. A lad has madcap adventures: Miskiw’s best was in 1982 when he tried to smuggle himself into communist Poland by hiding inside a mailbag and posting himself to Warsaw, only to be arrested and locked up until Mrs Thatcher’s government prised him free. A lad shags: Miskiw was deeply committed to the cause.

  By 2005, age was catching up with him. He was fifty-six and looked much older. He was getting very fat. Years of smoking had ruined his lungs. A few months earlier, he had left the Manchester office one day and crashed down on the pavement with a heart attack. Worse than that, he had been pushed aside. For years, from the mid-1990s, Miskiw had been cock of the walk in London, where he had been an assistant editor, overseeing the news desk. He had been devious, aggressive, secretive to the point of paranoia – and highly successful, although he spent most of the day every day raving with nervous energy, sometimes physically battering his head against the wall, until he got drunk enough to calm down in the evening. He had also been ruthless, once famously telling a young reporter, Charles Begley, who was depressed about having to dress up as Harry Potter as part of a publicity stunt, that he should toughen up and focus on what the News of the World did for a living: ‘We go out and destroy other people’s lives.’

  But Andy Coulson didn’t like Miskiw; and Miskiw didn’t like Coulson. So, in 2003, as Coulson established himself as editor, Miskiw was moved up to Manchester as northern editor.

  When he heard the story about Gordon Taylor, early in 2005, Miskiw did something which would have struck any outsider as very strange. He pretended he had been given the tip by somebody completely different. He even drew up a contract, dated 4 February 2005, which was eventually to fall into the hands of the Guardian. It undertook that if the story about Taylor was eventually published, the News of the World would pay £7,000 to this supposed source, who was named in the contract as Paul Williams. This was fiction upon fiction. It was not simply that Paul Williams did not exist. Like ‘Glenn Williams’ and ‘John Jenkins’, the name was simply a cover for one of Miskiw’s few close friends – Glenn Mulcaire, who was in a spot of trouble. After working for years as a prolific source of information for the paper, the investigator was now facing a disastrous suggestion that Stuart Kuttner, on orders from Andy Coulson, might cut his contract in half. It suited Miskiw very well to defy his bosses in London by finding another way to make sure that his mate got his money. Since the former footballer who really was the source of the story about Gordon Taylor would rather have eaten his own leg than admit he had told the tale, Miskiw could safely pretend that the source was his friend and agree a fat payment.

  It was Greg Miskiw who had originally discovered Mulcaire and his special skills. Miskiw had first come across him as a blagger, in the late 1990s, working for an investigator called John Boyall, who was one of the three men who later ended up in the dock with Fleet Street’s most notorious blagger, Steve Whittamore. Mulcaire was a natural. Other blaggers may have been better trained, they may have done more research on their targets or come up with better scripts to fool those they dealt with, but for ordinary, natural-born, quick-thinking, silver-tongued, seat-of-the-pants, top-of-the-head spontaneous genius, Mulcaire was the man. He was born to bullshit. And then he taught Miskiw about phone-hacking.

  By 1999, according to former News of the World reporters, Miskiw was dropping heavy hints to reporters that he was ‘a hundred per cent sure’ that some tip was accurate. Very soon, others in the newsroom learned his trick and started doing it themselves, swapping good numbers and useful messages like schoolboys swap conkers, openly discussing hacked messages, then writing stories which were sprinkled with imaginary quotes from an imaginary source, often an anonymous ‘pal’.

  It was no good if the target answered the phone, so they would help each other out – one calling the target and posing as the man from the gas board to keep the line busy, while the other called in and listened to the voicemail. They called this ‘double whacking’. Sometimes, reporters did both jobs at once – sitting crouched over their desk with a phone at each ear, one to engage the target, the other to hack. This was known as ‘muppeting’, bec
ause it looked so stupid. Ironically, one of the few who declined to do it in the early days was Clive Goodman: he thought mobile phones would never catch on, so he refused to have anything to do with them.

  Early in 2000, Miskiw fell out with John Boyall and poached Mulcaire from Boyall’s agency to work for him direct. By 2001, with Miskiw’s support, Mulcaire had joined the British Association of Journalists and been given a full-time contract worth £94,000 a year – a big deal, more than the news editor was being paid. Soon, he had an office in Sutton, south London, where he blagged and hacked on such a scale that he had to recruit an assistant to help him.

  Now, early in February 2005, Mulcaire went to work on Gordon Taylor. By 22 February, he had recorded eleven messages that had been left on Taylor’s phone. Mulcaire passed the tape to Miskiw who gave it to a secretary in the Manchester office, who typed out the messages. This was a well-oiled system.

  Miskiw was in contact with Glenn Mulcaire almost every day, sometimes tasking him on his own stories, very often passing on requests from other people on the paper. A few other senior journalists were allowed to deal direct with Mulcaire, but Miskiw made sure he was the main minder. This was partly because it gave him power and prestige within the paper; but also because Miskiw didn’t trust other people not to cock it up. Miskiw always ensured that Mulcaire’s work was hidden, inventing false sources, omitting key details, always laying false trails. Often, this involved using a former police officer, Derek Webb, who had become an expert in covert surveillance, calling himself Silver Shadow. Mulcaire would locate a target using criminal methods, Webb would follow them for days without breaking the law, then the paper would close in.

  If the story was seriously libellous, the News of the World would cut a deal with the target. Knowing that they could not defend a libel action without admitting that they had obtained the story by criminal means, they would call the target, pretend that they were ready to publish and then offer to run a less damaging version if the source would give them confirmation. So the actress would confirm she had had a miscarriage if the paper agreed not to say that it was an abortion; the footballer would confirm that he had smoked cannabis, if they agreed not to say he was snorting cocaine. Andy Coulson had often made calls like this and liked to declare with a grin: ‘That’s tabloid journalism! You turn them over in the morning. And in the afternoon, they thank you for it.’