Hack Attack Read online

  This was strong stuff. At the same time, they released a letter from Rebekah Brooks to the chairman of the House of Commons media select committee, John Whittingdale. ‘The Guardian coverage, we believe, has substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public,’ she wrote, and the allegation that thousands of people were the objects of illegal phone-hacking had been ‘roundly contradicted’ by John Yates. Very strong.

  All this ran like water down a mountain through the columns of the Murdoch newspapers and the bulletins of his Sky News channel. It was frightening to watch and, since the statement had been released just as Fleet Street was hitting the deadline for its first editions, it was also very difficult to counter.

  I was at home, alone in my study, when this torrent of aggression was released. As I saw it break out on to my computer screen, a feeling of dread swamped me. For a moment or two, my brain just stalled and then, like a malignant cell, a horrible thought silently formed itself – I had screwed up. I’d got the story wrong – a big story, that had gone round the world, that had had politicians and public figures standing up on their back legs shouting for action. And it was wrong, or maybe it was wrong, or I couldn’t be sure, but if it was wrong – on that kind of scale – Rusbridger and I really were in a deep pit of foul-smelling trouble.

  And then it got worse. I took a call from the Independent on Sunday, who lobbed a highly destructive verbal bombshell in my direction. They told me they wanted to run a story accusing me of paying bribes to police officers, specifically of paying bribes in order to obtain the phone-hacking stories which we had just published. I started gabbling down the phone – I’d never paid a bribe in my life, why were they saying this, who had said this to them, which officer was I supposed to have paid, when, where, why, didn’t they understand they were accusing me of crime, didn’t they understand they couldn’t just publish crap like that? The reporter said they had a good source. It was as if he could not hear me telling him that this just wasn’t true.

  I called Rusbridger in his office in London, who told me that he had just taken a call from David Leppard at Murdoch’s Sunday Times. Leppard! Of all the reporters in all the newsrooms in all the world, Leppard was the person you least wanted to have on the end of your phone. He was no friend of the Guardian and nor was his editor, John Witherow, who had once flared up at a story about his paper in the Guardian and told Rusbridger that ‘I will always retaliate and I have many more readers than you do, so I can cause you much more pain.’ I had written harsh things about Leppard in Flat Earth News, and he had publicly declared he was suing me, although he never did. Now, he told Rusbridger he planned to run a story that Sunday, accusing him of hiring a private investigator who had illegally hacked into voicemail.

  Leppard claimed this had happened some ten years earlier in the late 1990s, that Rusbridger had hired a high-powered security consultant to check out allegations that a senior civil servant was being paid backhanders by the multinational biotech company Monsanto. Leppard was saying that the consultant had subcontracted work to an investigator who had hacked the target’s voicemail. Rusbridger’s deputy, Paul Johnson, was in the room when Leppard made this call. He said he had never seen Rusbridger look so shocked, that he had put down the phone, sat in his chair looking pale and dazed, and said: ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’

  Trying to work out a reply to News International’s statement, trying to find a way to stop the Independent on Sunday and the Sunday Times smearing us as criminals and hypocrites, we then heard that the first edition of the next day’s Times – also owned by Rupert Murdoch – was carrying a column written by Scotland Yard’s former assistant commissioner, Andy Hayman, who had supervised the original hacking inquiry in 2006. ‘We put our best detectives on the case and left no stone unturned,’ he wrote. And when he turned to the scale of the hacking which they had uncovered, this assistant commissioner who had personally supervised the whole inquiry directly contradicted my off-the-record sources: ‘There was a small number – perhaps a handful – where there was evidence that the phones had actually been tampered with.’

  This was not good.

  * * *

  We couldn’t stop, so we had to fight back.

  As far as most of the world was concerned, the Guardian had been wrong about every significant statement in our stories – John Yates and Andy Hayman had implied as much, News International had shouted it loud, the rest of Fleet Street had reported it. Furthermore, two other newspapers were now out to expose Rusbridger and me as criminals. And the two of us were waiting to be barbecued by the select committee on Tuesday.

  I hardly slept. Even so, by Saturday morning, I had cleared my head and felt sure once more that our story was right. News International were surely blowing up a blizzard of lies to conceal the truth and, for some reason, the police and the DPP seemed to be going along with them. I spoke again to the Independent on Sunday, who finally accepted that I had not bribed any police officers. They withdrew the story.

  The smear against Alan Rusbridger, however, came direct from News International. But it turned out that it was partly my fault. On the Friday morning, I had written a feature for the Guardian’s media section, which was due to be published on Monday. It pulled together everything I knew about Fleet Street and the dark arts, including the Sunday Times’s long history of involvement. Unknown to me, the media section had called the Sunday Times for a comment, and John Witherow had lived up to his promise that he would always retaliate and cause Rusbridger pain, by releasing David Leppard like a dirty bomb in Rusbridger’s office.

  Also on that Saturday morning, Rusbridger had the Guardian archives searched and found that the beginning of Leppard’s story was true. In 2000, the Guardian had been investigating Monsanto and hired a high-calibre security consultancy, Ciex, to produce a ‘due diligence’ report on the company. Leppard was claiming that Ciex had subcontracted some of the work to a man who had gathered information by illegally hacking voicemail, a former actor called John Ford. Rusbridger knew nothing about it. But I knew something. In Flat Earth News, I had identified Ford as a specialist blagger – who worked for years for the Sunday Times and David Leppard!

  The difficulty for Rusbridger was that it was not going to matter very much that the story was not true or that it was an exercise in hypocrisy. There were hostile newspapers and Conservative MPs lining up to feast on his flesh, and they would use this as a carving knife. He spoke to Witherow who insisted he would run the story.

  Rusbridger and I talked tactics. Ford was not the only skeleton in the Sunday Times’s cupboard. Researching Flat Earth News, I had got hold of tapes of a con man, Barry Beardall, who worked regularly for David Leppard, attempting to entrap various politicians. They included a phone call in which Beardall had conned the posh London law firm Allen & Overy into handing over confidential material about Gordon Brown. That was sleazy and, in the case of Allen & Overy, potentially illegal. How would Witherow like it if the Guardian posted those tapes on its website?

  By late morning, the two editors had agreed to pull their tanks off each other’s lawns. Witherow withdrew the story which Leppard had been working on. Rusbridger withdrew the story about Fleet Street’s use of the dark arts which I had written for Monday’s Media Guardian and agreed not to use the Barry Beardall tape. Rusbridger and I were both happy enough to be fighting on only one front.

  Then my phone rang and, for the second time in this saga, I benefited from News International’s dishonesty. Just as Mr Apollo had first contacted me because he wanted to answer Stuart Kuttner’s outburst on BBC radio, so now a well-meaning supporter reacted to the long and aggressive statement which News International had put out the previous evening. It was designed to deceive, according to this source. Probably, I said, but we had no way of proving it since I was not allowed to reveal the evidence I had collected from various sources. However, my caller persuaded me that to defend the Guardian at Tuesday’s select-committee meeting I could safely use t
wo of the documents which I had got my hands on – the email for Neville Thurlbeck containing transcripts of thirty-five of Gordon Taylor’s voicemail messages, and the contract signed by the assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, offering a £7,000 bonus to ‘Paul Williams’ if he delivered a story about Gordon Taylor’s private life. Both had been passed through enough people’s hands that nobody could be sure where I had obtained them. They also happened to be the two most powerful documents in my possession.

  Now maybe we had a chance, but I didn’t tell anybody, not even Rusbridger. I didn’t want any risk of some hostile MP on the select committee hearing about this and changing direction in search of their barbecue.

  That Sunday, I went up to the office to be interviewed by foreign TV crews and to meet Gordon Taylor’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, who was a far more relaxed man now that the story had been published. He was still bound by some confidentiality but he was willing to work with me, to find new clients and new ways of breaking down News International’s door. He brought with him his former assistant, Charlotte Harris. The two of them wanted to set up a new legal partnership and they had just acquired their first potential client, the celebrity publicist Max Clifford.

  Like Gordon Taylor, Clifford had been approached by police back in 2006 and been told that they had evidence that his phone had been hacked. Like Taylor, he had been named in court as a victim of Glenn Mulcaire with the same mysterious idea that Mulcaire had hacked him without anybody ever having asked him to do so. Now Clifford, too, was going to sue the News of the World. Unlike Taylor, however, Clifford was saying that he would not settle. He was suing so that the truth would come out and he was not going to sell his silence for any of Murdoch’s millions.

  * * *

  The pressure on the Guardian was beginning to show. One executive sent Rusbridger a long email that Sunday morning, arguing that some parts of our original story must have been wrong. He quoted the statements made by Yates and Hayman, said that in his experience Yates was crafty but not a liar, and added: ‘They have made it clear that the Goodman inquiry didn’t find evidence of other reporters being directly involved … I think we are vulnerable, and the Tories on the committee will hammer us.’ The paper, he suggested, needed to acknowledge that some parts of the story were inaccurate. I felt a strong desire to strangle the author of the email. Rusbridger was unmoved.

  News International were busy in the background. Friendly journalists from other papers called to tell me that, speaking off the record, News International were pushing hard against the Guardian. Nobody was interested in this story, they said, and the Guardian were being ‘obsessive’ in pursuing it. The whole story was untrue and the subject was old. It was just being reheated by people who had a liberal agenda, who wanted to attack Rupert Murdoch: the BBC and the Guardian had concocted the whole thing.

  Oddly, however, in spite of insisting that the whole story was fiction, News International were using a second line of defence with journalists who contacted them – it was all Andy Coulson’s fault. He had lost control of the paper. One of the journalists who had been fed this line explained: ‘They’re happy to throw Coulson to the wolves. All they care about is protecting James Murdoch and Rebekah.’

  News International were busy, too, in print. On Sunday, the News of the World ran a leader comment denouncing our story as ‘inaccurate, selective and purposely misleading’ and republished Andy Hayman’s column from The Times. That same day, the Sunday Times performed an interesting manoeuvre. They ran a long feature about the phone-hacking. In the top half of the story, they included a series of sceptical lines, describing the claims in the Guardian story as ‘extravagant’ and recycling the denials of News International, John Yates and Andy Hayman. However, buried towards the end of the story, the paper disclosed that, according to ‘a senior source with good knowledge of the case’, the potential victims of hacking identified by the original inquiry included the then commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair.

  This was very strange journalism. If they believed that the police commissioner may have had his messages intercepted, that was a big story – straight to the front page – not just because of the security implications when the commissioner was responsible for secret inquiries but also because it raised more loudly than ever the underlying question about whether Scotland Yard had concealed far more than they had revealed. Why would the police not have said openly that their own boss had been a target? The Sunday Times, however, had buried the claim. It looked very much as though somebody was trying to run a ‘spoiler’.

  Sadly, it looked as though other journalists were picking up on News International’s briefings. On Monday, the Independent published a column by its right-wing media commentator, Stephen Glover, which simply recycled the gospel according to News International as though it were true: ‘The BBC has conspired with the Guardian to heat up an old story and attack Murdoch.’ It didn’t seem to matter that the BBC had had nothing to do with the story and had been reluctant even to follow it up. The whole affair was hysteria, wrote Glover. Nick Davies was ‘the sort of journalist who can find a scandal in a jar of tadpoles’. The story was old, he said, the Guardian didn’t claim the hacking was still going on. ‘If there is new evidence, let it be brought forward.’

  And that was exactly what News International wanted him to say. On the following day, Tuesday 14 July, I had to give evidence to the select committee. Rusbridger had postponed a holiday to come with me. And, as far as News International knew, we would walk naked into that committee room, completely unable to produce any evidence to back up our story. If they had their way, there was a good chance that Rusbridger and I would be humiliated and, if they kept pushing, we could lose our jobs.

  But I had some protection. Although I believed that it was safe to use my documents, I was worried that if I simply handed them over to the select committee, I would lay myself open to the charge that I was breaching Gordon Taylor’s privacy just as badly as the News of the World had. Since then, newspapers have published the fact that this was about the false story about his supposed affair with Jo Armstrong, but at the time, this was clearly private. So, I decided to organise some home-made redaction.

  That Monday morning, I sat my teenaged children round our dining-room table with a pot of glue, a pair of scissors, some black paper and a photocopy of the documents and asked them to stick slices of black paper over all the passages that could breach Gordon Taylor’s privacy. While they redacted the paperwork, I sat in my study to think.

  It was Scotland Yard who were the real threat. They were giving News International credibility. But the more I looked at Yates’s statement, the more I worried about what he was up to. I reckoned I could see clear signs that he knew much more than he was saying.

  For example, how many people had been warned? Yates said that the original inquiry in 2006 had warned all the potential victims. Really? A sharp-witted editor on the Guardian news desk had noticed that, after News International circulated their damning statement on Friday evening, Scotland Yard’s press bureau also had put out a short press release, which had been overlooked in the turmoil (and which always was likely to be overlooked, being put out at 7.37 on a Friday evening when most reporters have gone home). It repeated the closing words from Yates’s statement from the previous evening, about how he wanted to make sure that police had been diligent and sensible and taken all proper steps to make sure victims had been informed – and then it revealed that they had begun contacting people to tell them their phones may have been hacked ‘and we expect this to take some time to complete’.

  Why on earth had John Yates not said that plainly on the Thursday – ‘We’re terribly sorry, we’ve discovered we didn’t do the job properly in 2006, the Guardian are quite right that we failed to inform all the potential victims, so we’re going to have to do that now’? Why on earth had he chosen instead to say ‘Where there was clear evidence that people had potentially been the subject of tapping, they were all contacted by t
he police’?

  And just how many victims were there? The official version was that there were eight, who had been named at the original trial. But Yates had kept it very vague, saying only that it was ‘a far smaller number’ than hundreds. If it was eight, why not say so? And if it was not eight, then why not say that the official version failed to disclose the whole story?

  And why had he said nothing about the involvement of other journalists? He said he had been asked to ‘establish the facts’. So why not mention the fact that since August 2006 when they seized material from Mulcaire, the police had been in possession of an email which clearly suggested that Clive Goodman was not the only News of the World journalist involved in all this? What other evidence might they be failing to disclose?

  I also noticed a few odd points in the statement which News International had put out on Friday evening. The original police investigation, they said, had included ‘live monitoring’ of Goodman and Mulcaire. How could they know that? The statement went on to cite the evidence which the police found. Again, how could they know what the police did or did not find? Maybe they were lying. If they were telling the truth, the police must have given them this information. How many organisations which are the object of police inquiries are given a briefing about the result of those inquiries?