Hack Attack Read online

  None of Gordon Taylor’s messages revealed any kind of affair between him and Jo Armstrong. On the following Sunday, Liverpool were due to play Chelsea in the Carling Cup final at the new Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. Glenn Mulcaire found out which hotel Taylor was staying in before the game. As a result, Taylor was disturbed early on the Sunday morning by a News of the World reporter finding some pretext to call his room to see whether a woman answered. The same reporter lurked outside the hotel, in case a picture would tell the story. It didn’t.

  But Mulcaire persisted. That was not easy: he was overloaded with work. Coulson’s former reporters say he was helping them on just about every story they covered, though not all of them knew he was hacking. Even on a Saturday, when the paper had to cover small news stories, they would ask Miskiw to get Mulcaire to blag phone companies to find close friends of a family who had died in a house fire, or to blag the DVLA for the name and home address of somebody who died in a car crash. They used him to check on kiss-and-tell stories. A train company manager wanted to sell them the tale of his brief affair with the model Kate Moss. He described how he had been staying at a hotel in central London when he had started talking to her at the bar. They had spent the night together, he said, and, when he woke up the next morning, he had found a note from her, asking him to get in touch if he was in town again and leaving her mobile number. Mulcaire blagged the phone company and found that this had indeed been Kate Moss’s number, but it was no longer in use. Eventually, the man confessed he had made up the whole tale, and so, to punish him, they got Mulcaire to find his home address and landline number and then called his wife to ask her to comment on her husband’s relationship with Kate Moss.

  All the stories which had won Coulson the award of Newspaper of the Year were based on Mulcaire hacking voicemail. He had hacked Sven-Göran Eriksson to expose the England manager’s affair with a secretary, Faria Alam. He had hacked David Beckham to expose the footballer’s affair with his personal assistant, Rebecca Loos. No matter how many times Beckham changed his number, no matter how many extra SIM cards he shuffled through his phone, Mulcaire kept listening to his messages. At one point, Mulcaire claimed, Beckham had hired an expensive security agency to make sure that his phones were safe, and, according to Mulcaire, he had broken through their protection within an hour.

  He had hacked messages left by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett, provoking Greg Miskiw, who was usually highly secretive, into boasting to colleagues that if they could listen to the voicemail of the minister who was directly responsible for the Security Service, they could surely listen to anybody’s. Having got away with it the previous year when the paper had exposed Blunkett’s relationship with Kimberly Quinn, Mulcaire was now hacking him all over again, seeking out the details of the politician’s supposed relationship with a former estate agent named Sally Anderson, which, in truth, had nothing sexual about it. He was hacking Sally Anderson. And her father. And her brother, as well as her partner, ex-boyfriend, grandmother, aunt, mother, cousin, a close friend, her osteopath and two of Blunkett’s special advisers.

  By May 2005 Ian Edmondson was getting impatient for the Gordon Taylor story which Miskiw had been promising to deliver for several months. Internal messages show that during April Edmondson had tried to nail it by sending a reporter, Laura Holland, to spy on Taylor at the PFA’s annual awards ceremony in Park Lane, in case he showed up holding hands with Jo Armstrong. She got nothing. (She and a male photographer were told also to swab the toilets in case they could find cocaine traces.) Mulcaire had tried blagging into Taylor’s bank account in case that yielded anything. It didn’t. So, Edmondson brought in Neville Thurlbeck, chief reporter, winner of awards, tabloid-scoop hero, rather unusual person.

  Thurlbeck, then aged forty-three, grew up in down-to-earth, gritty Sunderland in the north-east of England, but he emerged in the fantasy role of a very old-fashioned high Tory. He was obsessed with the 1930s. He liked to wear braces and tweed jackets with a handkerchief neatly placed in the breast pocket. He told colleagues with pride that he had never worn a pair of jeans. He spoke about his wife in equally conservative tones, boasting that he had never ironed a shirt in his life. He was a fan of George Formby and claimed to play the ukulele. He drove a Mercedes and deplored these southerners who thought it was sensible to spend millions to live in Victorian semis, which he regarded as slums, and insisted on finding his own detached house in Surrey, built, of course, in the 1930s. And yet beneath this stuffy, fluffy image, he was a ruthless tabloid man.

  He had made his name – and won four different awards for the scoop of the year – in 2000 by exposing the Conservative peer and novelist, Jeffrey Archer. Notoriously, he had once also exposed himself in the course of attempting to prove that a naturist couple in Dorset, Bob and Sue Firth, were offering sexual services to the customers of their bed and breakfast business. Not realising that his attempts to persuade the couple to have sex in front of him had made them so suspicious that they were secretly videoing him, he stripped off to pose as a fellow naturist and then surreptitiously engaged in an act which earned him the nickname Onan the Barbarian. In spite of regularly indulging himself by spending company money on the most expensive restaurants and hotels, Thurlbeck had risen through the ranks, serving as news editor under Greg Miskiw, from 2001 to 2003, and was now chief reporter, the man who did the big stories.

  On 9 May 2005, Thurlbeck was sent a transcript of the messages from Gordon Taylor’s voicemail which had been typed up by the secretary in Manchester three months earlier. It took a while for him to get moving. He had just revealed that the TV football presenter Andy Gray had broken up with his girlfriend. Gray, too, was being hacked by Mulcaire and by several News of the World journalists. He was an easy target: whenever he was commentating on a live football match, they knew he could not answer his phone, so they dialled in and listened to his voicemail. Then, before he could start work on Gordon Taylor, Thurlbeck was sent to Australia to cover the supposedly private medical care of Kylie Minogue, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Thurlbeck filed a long piece from Melbourne, quoting her younger brother, Brendan, ‘speaking to a family friend’. Brendan Minogue and his sister, Dannii, were being hacked by Mulcaire.

  In June, just as Thurlbeck started work in earnest on the Taylor story, something very significant changed at the News of the World: Greg Miskiw left the paper. Control of Mulcaire, who had been managed with such cunning by Miskiw, now passed to Ian Edmondson, who was happy to embrace the investigator but who was an altogether less subtle operator. He started using Mulcaire on very sensitive targets, including the specialist PR man Max Clifford, who brokered the tales of people at the centre of tabloid scandals; journalists and editors on rival papers, including even Rebekah Brooks at the Sun; George Osborne, the closest political ally of David Cameron who became Conservative leader in October 2005; and the family of the Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. Mulcaire even ended up hacking News of the World journalists, including Andy Coulson, and a football reporter, James Fletcher, in case he was picking up titbits about the private lives of famous players.

  There was a big leaving party for Miskiw in London. Glenn Mulcaire was a guest, rubbing shoulders with reporters and executives and with Andy Coulson, who was later to deny ever having met the investigator.

  Edmondson wanted the Gordon Taylor story badly. On Monday 27 June, he called in Derek Webb, who booked into a hotel in Manchester and started to shadow Taylor, watching him meeting Jo Armstrong, observing no sign of anything sexual and reporting back that it looked as though the story was not true. Edmondson refused to drop it. On Wednesday 29 June, Glenn Mulcaire supplied a new recording of some messages left on the phones of Taylor and Armstrong. These were transcribed and, that afternoon, a London reporter, Ross Hindley, emailed the transcript of thirty-five messages to Mulcaire so that he could pass them on to Neville Thurlbeck. ‘Hello,’ wrote Hindley in a message which was to become a central exhibit in the exposure of the News o
f the World. ‘This is the transcript for Neville.’

  Two days later, on Friday 1 July, Edmondson sent a photographer up to Manchester to try to snatch a picture of Taylor with Armstrong. Derek Webb was in a swanky fifth-floor restaurant, watching his two targets having lunch, when the photographer called him to say he had arrived in the city. Webb told him where he was and a few minutes later, to his horror, the photographer walked into the restaurant and sat down beside him. Taylor and Armstrong did not notice. Nor, by sheer luck, did they notice when the photographer walked to the back of the restaurant, turned and openly banged off several shots of them. However, another diner did notice exactly what was happening and, as the photographer headed for the exit and found he had to wait for the lift, the observant diner went to warn Gordon Taylor and pointed out the photographer and also Derek Webb, who was clearly linked to him.

  Taylor was furious and went after the photographer, narrowly failing to catch him as a lift arrived to take him downstairs. Taylor followed him. Webb followed the two of them, pausing in the lift to change his coat and put on a hat, before arriving in the street to see Taylor now confronting the photographer – and a passing police officer being drawn into the incident.

  That afternoon, Edmondson tasked three photographers and two more reporters to join Thurlbeck in trying to nail the story for that Sunday’s paper. Thurlbeck, in his customary style, booked into a very pleasant country hotel outside Manchester. On Saturday morning, the team split up and went off to stage simultaneous confrontations with Jo Armstrong, Gordon Taylor’s son and Taylor himself. It was a disaster. Jo Armstrong said the story wasn’t true; Taylor’s son told the reporter to piss off; and Thurlbeck, having idled over a satisfying breakfast, turned up on Taylor’s doorstep too late, found he had gone into town and ended up chasing him through a shopping mall, at the end of which Taylor told him to piss off.

  The story was false. It died. At least, that’s what the News of the World thought at the time. Unknown to them, Gordon Taylor decided to alert his lawyer, Mark Lewis. Lewis wrote to the News of the World’s long-serving in-house lawyer, a man with a laid-back and charming style called Tom Crone, who had qualified as a barrister before going to work for News International where he attempted to prevent libels and contempts of court and dealt with the aftermath if he failed. Crone wrote back to Lewis, saying there would be no story and that this was all just legitimate journalistic inquiry.

  * * *

  In the newsroom without boundaries, there was one thing which was not tolerated: failure. This was a problem for Clive Goodman, who had worked for the News of the World since 1986. He was portly, pompous, well past his prime, and his career had ploughed into the sand.

  After years as a specialist in celebrity gossip and the life of the royal family, he had run out of contacts and started to run out of steam. By 2005, he had the grandiose title of royal editor, a fob watch, his own office and not much hope. Colleagues in the pub once joked that he was like the eternal flame because he never went out.

  Goodman did his best to make good. He emailed Coulson from time to time saying he needed cash to pay police officers who worked at the royal palaces, occasionally adding a line to point out that this was a criminal offence. Coulson routinely agreed, the payment was logged in internal paperwork with false names for Goodman’s contacts, and the money was served up in cash through the network of offices run by the Thomas Cook travel agency.

  And Goodman also resorted to the skills of Glenn Mulcaire. He had been hacking in a small way on his own since January 2005, using a couple of phone numbers and PIN codes for royal staff which Greg Miskiw had given him. But in August, Coulson took him out to lunch and told him he had to find new ways to get stories about Prince William and Prince Harry – and Goodman knew how to do it. Years later, he was to claim it was Mulcaire’s idea, that the hacker was worried that his contract was going to be cut so he was looking for an extra deal on the side. Mulcaire says he never wanted to do it, because it was dangerous and that he was pressurised. Whatever the origin, the result was that Goodman agreed to find money to set up a special operation – they called it ‘Project Bumblebee’ – to trawl systematically through the voicemail of the royal family and their staff. Goodman would revive his career. Mulcaire would earn some extra cash. Over the following couple of months, the investigator started gathering royal phone numbers and PIN codes, dropping heavy hints to Goodman that he was being helped by some secret source in the Security Service.

  The only problem with Goodman’s plan was Ian Edmondson, who had now pushed Jimmy Weatherup aside to take sole control of the news desk. With Miskiw gone, Edmondson was using the secret weapon to capture masses of stories (and making the rival features department look so weak that one of their writers, Dan Evans, was now routinely hacking phones on the same scale as Mulcaire in an attempt to catch up). Goodman had little chance of getting direct access to Mulcaire for himself. He had the answer. He would simply go over Edmondson’s head. On 25 October, Goodman went to see the editor. Coulson was cautious. He had no problem with breaking the law or invading the privacy of the royal household, but he was under relentless pressure from Murdoch’s managers to cut back on editorial spending. Nevertheless, if this worked, it could boost the paper’s circulation and pay for itself. Coulson agreed that, for a trial period of just four weeks, Mulcaire would be paid an extra £500 a week to target the royal household’s voicemail.

  They all knew this was legally very risky. They agreed to keep it especially secret. They arranged that the payments to Mulcaire would be sent to him under yet another false name, David Alexander, with a pick-up address which could not be linked to him, in Chelsea, central London.

  On 26 October, Mulcaire emailed Goodman – subject ‘Bumblebee’ – with details of fourteen royal numbers which he could access, adding ‘Please file secure folder!!!!’ From that afternoon, the two of them were regularly intercepting Palace voicemails; Stuart Kuttner was signing off payments to ‘David Alexander’; and, following the established pattern, Goodman was tasking Derek Webb to follow up on hacked intelligence by secretly following royal targets. Webb recognised this was not easy, but he found a solution: he lurked outside palaces and royal houses, noting the descriptions and numbers of police escort vehicles and then, as the escorts followed their royal charges, Webb followed the escorts.

  It worked but, for the most part, it produced only small stories, which Goodman chose to run in his diary column, published under the pseudonym Blackadder. On 6 November 2005, he revealed that Prince William had pulled a tendon in his knee playing football and had gone to Prince Charles’s personal doctor for treatment. What Goodman did not realise was that the prince’s knee had recovered and he had never seen the doctor: all he had done was to leave a voicemail message with one of his staff, saying that he would like to see the doctor. A week later, Blackadder ran another small story about the political editor of ITN, Tom Bradby, lending a portable editing suite to Prince William. Goodman laid a false trail in the story, hinting heavily that he had picked this up from a source in ITN. What he didn’t know was that Bradby had told nobody at ITN apart from his secretary, whom he trusted. All he had done was to leave a voicemail message on one of the royal phones.

  What Goodman and Mulcaire also did not know was that these signs of their activity had been so loud and so clear that the Palace had complained to the head of the police team at Buckingham Palace, who had passed on the complaint to the Specialist Operations team at the Metropolitan Police, who had decided to start an investigation.

  The four-week trial period ended, and Goodman begged a further month’s money from Coulson, but by February 2006 the editor’s budget worries had become so intense that he instructed Stuart Kuttner to end Glenn Mulcaire’s royal retainer and to start paying him only when he delivered results. Goodman did his best to claim fat fees for any stories that the investigator found, but, in search of success, the two of them became more and more reckless. By now, the police were on to them
.

  On 9 April 2006, Goodman ran a story with Neville Thurlbeck about a row between Prince Harry and his then girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, after Harry had visited a lap-dancing bar. Under the heading ‘Chelsy tears Harry off a strip’, it not only reported the argument but quoted a deliberately slighty inaccurate version of a message which had been left on Harry’s voicemail by his brother, Prince William, mimicking the voice of Chelsy Davy. A week later, on 18 April, Goodman had the front-page splash with a story about Prince William getting drunk after his brother’s passing-out parade at Sandhurst military academy. Goodman was happy. Mulcaire was happy – he got £3,000 for his work. But the story crashed through trip wires in the army and the Palace, by accurately reflecting a complaint which had been made by the head of Sandhurst, General Andrew Ritchie, to Prince Harry’s private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton. The complaint had been made in a voicemail message.

  Very few people knew about Project Bumblebee. But plenty of people knew about Glenn Mulcaire and understood that he was a master of the dark arts. Some knew precisely what he had to offer as a special skill and either practised it themselves or saw other people doing it. They talked about it in conference with the editor. They laughed about it in the pub. Some knew it was illegal. Some didn’t. It didn’t matter – as long as they could carry on concealing it from the rest of the world. Mulcaire continued with his work, busy as ever.