Hack
Page 1
HACK
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
A CBS Company
Copyright © 2012 by Graham Johnson
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Graham Johnson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London
WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-84983-877-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-879-5
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY
For
Emma, Sonny, Raya
Connie and Clara
Also by Graham Johnson:
Darkness Descending
Powder Wars
Druglord
Football and Gangsters
The Devil
Soljas
Gang War
The Cartel
Contents
Introduction
1 Star Wars on Earth
2 Street of Shame
3 Pressure
4 Stories
5 Dark Arts
6 Bully
7 Official Files
8 Blags
9 Spoofing
10 Stunt-Ups
11 Contagion
12 Close Shave
13 Kiss ’N’ Tell
14 Conman
15 Sex Kid
16 Samrai Warrior
17 Angry Men
18 No Excuse
19 Blown Out of Proportion
20 Summer of Discontent
21 Beast of Bodmin: The Build-Up
22 Upholding the Claw
23 Lost in the Field
24 Dartmoor
25 Black Thursday
26 The Calls
27 Bad Friday
28 A Night to Remember
29 The Dark Side
30 Look on the Bright Side
31 98/99
32 Slave
33 Millennium Bug
34 New Editor
35 Hacking
36 The Final Countdown
37 Freedom Next Time
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The phone rang. It was Rebekah Brooks.
Acting Editor of the News of the World. Cold-eyed corporate killer. Supreme Top Operator.
At the other end of the line was me. Tabloid extremist. Prolific story-getter. Fleet Street’s Next Big Thing.
I knew why she was calling – she wanted to find out for herself whether the photographs were real or fake. The conversation opened up something like this:
Rebekah: ‘Hi Graham. How’s it going down there?’
There were golf balls of stress in my shoulders. I was pacing around a chintzy, overheated hotel room on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. This was the most important conversation that I would ever have in my life.
If I could blag my way through it, there would be glory beyond my wildest dreams. Triumphant return home. Fortress Wapping at my feet. But if I fucked up, there would be untold doom. Disgrace. Unemployment. Exile. The stakes were stratospheric. Just the way they always were.
For a brief moment, I zoned out trippily, even though she was still on the other end. I had to be honest with myself. Mad though it was, deep down, at that moment, I didn’t really care about either outcome. I was oddly detached. Success was the preferred option, of course. But all that I really wanted to do, in my heart, was to please her. Make her think nice things about me, even if it was just for a short while. I was consumed with an unstoppable and irrational craving to give her good news. Like many corporate functionaries, I was in the grip of a modern phenomenon – an unnatural and slavish desire to satisfy my superiors, even if it was not in my interests to do so.
My other motivation to get through the conversation fast was fear, fear of nothingness. Of just existing. Of thinking. I just wanted to get to the next stage of the caper ASAP. I moved at 800 miles per hour, at all times: the mean velocity of a tabloid terrorist, whether I was coming through your door to destroy your life, filing copy or irritably phoning my mum once every six months. I had so much latent nervous energy coursing through my veins that I was often charged with static, even when I was crashed out in a heap. I got electric shocks every time I got into a car. I worried so much about stories, that within two years of becoming a journalist, I had a stomach ulcer. Like a German tank column, I only ever ate on the move, mostly out of 24-hour garages – Ginsters curry pasties, Lucozade to dissolve the exhaustion and a couple of Zantac popped for dessert. I had the thousand-yard stare of a soldier who couldn’t take much more. My mind was so disturbed with passion and vice, I took beta blockers in an attempt to make it still. I was in my twenties.
On top of all of that, I had the impatience of a rapist – and I don’t say that lightly. I myself had a conviction for Section 47 assault for pouring boiling water over a fellow degree student my girlfriend had accused of raping her. A fitting end to my graduation ceremony that signaled the start of my working life. The wounds were still smarting. Not for her, I was worried my bosses would find out that I had a criminal record and it would hold me back from my jet-powered journey up the greasy pole to the top of News International. These were the degenerate impulses that powered my warped ambition. Aristotle found impatience to be a vice. The World’s Biggest Selling Sunday Newspaper nurtured it as a virtue. So when Rebekah called, I just wanted to get through it and then for something else to happen, even if it meant the end. Experiencing nothingness is agony for a red-top reporter.
Rebekah carried on with her call, getting down to business: ‘I’ve seen the pictures of the Beast of Bodmin.’ She said they were amazing or something like that. The Beast of Bodmin Moor was a mythical big cat that roamed the ghostly hills of North Cornwall, according to folklore – and the local freelancers who made a few hundred quid every year selling stories about mysterious sightings. There were tales of the Beast spooking tourists with bloodcurdling roars from across the moon-washed, foggy fields. During the nineties, the Beast had etched itself into the national tabloid psyche, quickly becoming the equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster for Britain’s godless Generation X that also believed in crop circles. What’s more, no one had ever tracked the Beast down, and papped it close up. Nor got irrefutable evidence of its existence. Except of course for Yours Truly. Earlier that day. Wow!
‘They’re great pictures,’ Rebekah continued. She buttered me up a bit, by saying that when she had sent me down to Cornwall a fortnight or so earlier, she’d never expected me to nail the Beast, to stand the story up. High praise indeed, because at the end of the day, that’s what great News of the World reporters did week-in, week-out – they stood up stories that were impossible to stand up. They made their own luck. They beat the odds.
‘But we’ve all had a good laugh,’ she went on, turning subtly. My spider senses picked up the tremors. Rebekah had a unique talk-round trick, one that would take her right to the apex of the News Int. pyramid. She often spoke through a wry smile that laced you up with condescension. This had the effect of locking both parties of the conversation into a narrow relationship of superior – inferior. She was also nimble enough never to allow her prey to move away from the submissive role. However, here was the rub – Rebekah us
ed the sealed confines of this channel to love-bomb her target like a cult leader. She made them feel like they were the only person in the world.
Rebekah said something like: ‘I can take a joke like everyone else. But c’mon, the joke’s over now. We’ve all got a sense of humour here, in the office . . .’
These conversations were always very tricky because each party was trying to suss the other person out, decoding the nuances. Then she tried to outflank me.
‘By the way, I’ve got the phone on loudspeaker.’ She was bringing in the big guns to test my mettle.
‘Stuart Kuttner’s sitting in with me . . .’
Kuttner jogged in with a ‘Hello Graham’ in his clipped, whiney voice, an East End drawl that had been machined for full spectrum dominance by elocution lessons. Stuart Kuttner. Known amongst the reporters as Cuntner. Or simply The Cunt. By day, the Screw’s Managing Editor. By night powerful Fleet Street fixer.
At that point I realised for definite that Rebekah was trying to blag me. Kuttner – a sense of humour? He looked like someone who slept on a stainless steel mortuary slab. He may have been one of Murdoch’s Angels – the inner sanctum of British consigliere that had helped the proprietor build up his empire from the early days – but he had deathly, sunken eyes and a blank expression.
I also noticed Kuttner had used my name in his opening gambit; he was trying to be nice. But, at the same time, obviously taking the Beast of Bodmin issue very seriously. There’s no way he’d want to be sucking up to me with a first name unless he had good reason to.
Rebekah carried on with her patter: ‘If you say to me, “It was all a joke – we took the pictures for a prank,” then that’s fine. No harm done and we can move on and everyone can forget about it.’
She had sprung her first trap. Like all the best blags, it was half crude/half clever. She wasn’t confronting me directly, by asking outright if the pics were spoofed-up. That would be seen as a gratuitous frontal assault on my integrity. News of the World reporters were assumed to have impeccable credentials. In truth, executives rarely challenged the integrity of reporters directly because it was a no-go area. Simply because many of us had no integrity at all. We lied for a living, cheated members of the public and broke the law routinely. Direct questions threatened to penetrate the Chinese Walls that were supposed to protect executives from contamination. The same nuclear-strength, labyrinthian walls behind which executives stood for so long during the phone-hacking scandal that blew up 15 years later.
Rebekah was trying to coax me into an admission by using the sugar-coated joke-line as bait. That was the crude part. She was also giving me a pretend outro, by claiming that if I said it was a joke, then all would be forgiven. That was the carrot. But of course, she was lying on all counts. The situation was already out of control. If I said this was all a joke, it would have meant instant dismissal.
Back against the wall, I would have to try and blag her that it was all true. The problem was Brooks was a top blagger as well. She’d started out as doe-eyed secretary on Sunday, the News of the World’s glossy celeb supplement. Seven years later she was the Deputy Editor of the paper. And everyone knew she was being groomed for a top slot in the corporation.
It’s hard to blag a blagger. But I launched into it anyway. First of all, I deferentially confirmed to her that my sighting of the Beast of Bodmin wasn’t a joke. Humbly, I said that it was all true and the pics were genuine. I played a little hard done-by, as a result of her attempts to undermine me, but not too much because that would have been to show disrespect. To disagree with what your superior had said, even when she was trying to trap you, was political suicide.
Following my denial, I then started to tell her the story of how I’d managed to track down the Beast of Bodmin so that it could be photographed. It was a whopper of a tale that involved a six-foot-long puma jumping out of a bush and going for me. At the right points in the yarn, to heighten the drama, I let the blag breathe. But during the adventurous bits, I machine-gunned the words into the phone, reacting to and embracing what Rebekah was asking and saying, the two of us twisting and turning in an elaborate merry dance. I paced the floor animatedly like a big cat stalking its prey, throwing all my effort into convincing her. The excitement of the story contrasted with the depressing backdrop of the room – the bog floor selfishly littered with piles of dumped newspapers. A half-eaten Full English on a wood-effect tray. An unmade, wanked-in bed. The trademark hotel detritus of the Lone Wolf reporter on the road.
The story was very far-fetched but she went for it anyway and at the end of the conversation I was sure that I had persuaded her that the pics were real. I can’t claim all the credit for her swallowing it, though. The reason was simple – she wanted the Beast of Bodmin to be true. She was desperate for it to be true. This week she was in charge. The real News of World Editor Phil Hall was away on holiday and she was in the hot seat. She wanted a big story to kick off with. She wanted to have an impact. She wanted his fucking job. The whole Beast of Bodmin scenario had been her idea in the first place. It was on her direct orders that I’d been sent down here, dressed as Sherlock Holmes, for fuck’s sake. Now that it had worked out, she wanted to claim all the credit. Who was going to spoil the fairy tale? I certainly wasn’t. Silently, and without expressing it explicitly, it seemed we had agreed to believe in each other. In my mind, a manufacture of consent had been consummated.
1
Star Wars on Earth
Two years earlier, my job interview at the News of the World had been secretive and shadowy. I entered through a side-door, so that I wouldn’t be seen. Straight into a rat-run of roller-shuttered filing cabinets that gave me cover until I got to a blacked-out room in the corner of the office.
Many years later, in the fourth line of her resignation letter, Rebekah Brooks spoke of ‘her desire to remain on the bridge’ as she exited this room for the last time. The newsroom looked like the bridge on the Death Star – a grey, airless state-of-the-art office bathed in 100 per cent unnatural light. An ominous hum lurked in the background – hushed voices, subdued ringtones and the tapping of keyboards. The audible holocaust of lives being destroyed by remote all round Britain. Well-groomed functionaries glided purposefully between green screens on long Formica-topped workstations, arranged in parallel, like a war room. An all-pervasive terror emanated from the aloof, powerful executives bunkered up in the glass offices around the perimeter. Some of the reporters dared to look up at me as I hurried past. What were they thinking? Were they quietly praying for my soul as I entered their lair? No, I knew what they were thinking: ‘Who is this scruffy cunt – and is he after my job?’ This was the black heart of the Evil Empire – and I craved to be part of it.
Fortress Wapping was largely windowless and cashless. Security doors on permanent lockdown. Red signs in the corridor warned of threats and attacks because of‘the business we are in’. Like the Death Star, the atmosphere was drenched in fear and repression. Dread so powerful at times, so tangible, that it weighed down on the bodies of reporters like the atmospheric pressure under the ocean, often crushing them.
A good example was Sean Hoare, the former Screws whistle-blower who was found dead during the middle of the hacking scandal. I first met Sean around Christmas 1995, a few weeks after my job interview. He was a showbiz reporter at the Sun. He was a laddish, rough-and-tumble journo who often arrived to work falling out of the back of a builder’s van. He was ideally placed to ride the wave of the Loaded generation that had just broken into mainstream popular culture. Sean was dating a gorgeous, shiny-haired secretary in my department. Noel Gallagher’s mobile was keyed into his Nokia 2120 and he was high on life.
A few years later when I last saw him, Sean was rattling like a smack-head. He had the body of a doddering, Alzheimered-up pensioner. Speech slurring Ozzy Osbourne-style, and I could see slo-mo thoughts framed on his face, thoughts that he found frustratingly difficult to express. He had the kind of bag-head teeth – blackened and co
rroded by cocaine acids – that you only find on a working girl banging it out on the street.
As someone who had been in theatre with him, I recognised the symptoms of the Fleet Street equivalent of Gulf War Syndrome – the limp unfocused gaze, the soul shrivelled by years of lying for a living, darkened by the abuse of cruel, torturous bosses that had left this hulk of a man timid like a runt dog. Then the injustice of being disposed off when he had passed his use-by date. Cause: driven to drink and drugs by the constant pressure to deliver stories. Verdict: bullied to death by News International.
Back on the bridge, my ‘job interview’ was about to begin. Enter Darth Vader. Feature’s Editor Ray Levine. Today’s interrogator. I was guided to a black leather chair, rammed tight up to his paperless desk. A glaring table lamp shone in my eyes, so close I could feel the heat on my cheeks. Slivers of fluorescent rays, from the blinds that fronted his office, dramatically striped parts of the room by the door, giving it the appearance of a death row cell in an old black and white film. But these were quickly extinguished as the door shut tight, until Ray Levine was reduced to an amorphous umbra in the shady recesses of the room. Moving around me like a CIA inquisitor at Guantanamo Bay.
Foolishly, I had brought along a cuttings folder, photocopies of my previous stories to show off. I was very proud of them – Ray fucked them off immediately. Ray was a dark-skinned Iranian of Jewish heritage with an incongruously boyish grin. I’d known a few Israelis and like them, Ray was tough, cocky and loud.
‘What type of stories do you like doing?’ he asked, without looking at me and busy doing five other things. It was a Saturday afternoon. The next day’s paper was being put to bed and Ray was hunched over his laptop, answering last minute subs’ queries, legals and niggly demands from the Editor.
‘I like turning people over, stitch ups – drugs, vice that kind of thing,’ I replied deferentially. ‘I’ve also done a lot of brothel stories.’ Referring to a genre of journalism that I would later come to know as ‘investigations’.