The professional skills of a reporter were always the main factor in standing up a story. But in order to maximise our chances in addition we had almost unlimited support to fall back on. Tools and techniques such as surveillance photographers who routinely spent weeks outside of a target’s house in blacked-out vans, shitting in bin bags like the SAS. A video-bag man, who looked like John Thaw off The Sweeney, clad in a shiny ’70s bomber and polar neck. His steel flight case housed a box of tricks to rig up reporters and their hotel rooms with state-of-the-art pin-hole cameras. A rock-hard if slightly crazed ex-copper, known as a ‘follower’, who tailed cars around London on a motorbike. An NoW staff man with an orange tan and a long mac on, on permanent standby in the records’ office pulling births, deaths and marriages. And a harem of honey-trap girls – ‘glamour’ models, Penthouse pin-ups and ex-hookers – used to lure daft blokes into public humiliation.
Much of the time the NoW’s resources were better than the police and security services. The reason was simple – almost unlimited budgets. I knew this because I occasionally worked with the same sub-contractors that worked for M15 and Customs and Excise. They told me how they were forced to use obsolete, government-made equipment. If Gerry Brown, a former NoW hack turned video-bag renter, wanted the latest recording device, he simply jumped on a flight to Singapore to buy it. Gerry Brown had exposed Jeffery Archer’s hush money hooker scandal back in the day. The consensus was that M15 were fat grammar school kids, just playing at it.
Despite these resources I always liked to do my dirty work myself. I started blagging people direct, instead of paying private detectives to do it, to save the News of the World money. I cannot remember an executive ever sending a memo to warn me that using PIs on some searches was illegal. But every few months, he did send me a three-line circular in a reusable buff envelope complaining that my private detective bills were spiralling out of control. From now on, every inquiry had to be approved by him, personally.
As a loyal functionary, and in order to prevent further suffering to News International shareholders, I started to blag criminal records by myself. Necessity being the mother of invention, I stumbled upon a useful trick whilst doing a paedophile story one day about a sex offender who moonlighted as a security guard at a children’s attraction. Whilst sitting on my bed in a Wirral hotel room, I phoned HM Prison Service central records office. I didn’t pretended to be a prison officer but the civil servant on the other end of the line presumably thought I was. The man was very helpful and gave me a full CRO of the paedophile that I was looking into. Under the dim glow of the bedside lamp, as I scribbled down the type and date of offence, a mixture of pride and impatience overwhelmed me. So much so that I could barely wait till the call was ended. I was so eager to get off the phone and tell Ray how well I’d served him.
Irrational devotion was a common theme. For me, a childlike need to suck up to Ray and be stroked by him was always more important than the story itself. Praise from him was the only emotion that penetrated my exo-skeleton.
Another technique I used was called ‘swarming’. ‘Swarming’ is a method used by the CIA to undermine foreign governments. Secret agents whip up crowds to repeatedly ‘flashmob’ the authorities. The coordinated attacks have the effect of panicking those in charge, as has been the case in Serbia, Ukraine, Iran and Libya.
I regularly used a simplified version of swarming to panic people into giving me confessions. Some people are just too hard faced to admit to doing something wrong. Take building society boss Helen Watson. The petite brunette had pulled off one of the oldest cons in the book. She told everyone that she had cancer, and ripped off her mates. Her colleagues at the Bristol & West building society broke down in tears, had a whip round and bunged her a £10,000 fund-raiser to make her death more comfortable. Miraculously, Helen got better and used the money to start up a small business.
My tipster told me that the police had investigated her for fraud but I drew a blank when I tried to pull her criminal record – obviously she wasn’t convicted. That often happened when suspects were let off with a caution. Someone pulled her medical records. Encouragingly, they made no mention of her cancer but that didn’t prove that she was a con artist. The only way to stand up a story like this is to wheedle a confession out of her on tape. Easier said than done.
When I fronted her up, at first Watson wouldn’t let me into her plush Georgian flat in the upmarket district of Clifton, Bristol. A string of‘no comment’s followed. She knew how to play the game. The weakness with people like Watson, though, is that they are ruled by fear and greed. This was fortunate as I was also ruled by fear and greed and knew which buttons to press. Through her letterbox I shouted that we would pay her for her story (greed) and that she might as well talk to me as the story was going to break massively and soon there would be a pack of ruthless journos like me on her doorstep (fear). She lived in a nice area so I knew she wouldn’t want to attract heat from her neighbours.
Eventually I was let inside but Watson was still poker-faced and giving nothing away. Then I offered her more money and told her that she could turn the story around to her advantage, use it to say sorry before using the publicity to catapult her to fame. It’s amazing how many people believe this. I told her that she could have full control of the story and that we wouldn’t write anything bad about her. The point of this is to bombard the target with a kind of verbal shock therapy. The CIA call it ‘coercive interrogation’. It’s about provoking a hurricane in the mind. Then there comes an interval, a sort of suspended animation, which an experienced interrogator, like me, gets on to – the point at which targets are most likely to make concessions against their will.
It was at this crucial point that I broke off negotiations and pretended to make a call to my office to get £10,000 in cash sent down to her immediately. Instead I was secretly calling my mates outside. Earlier I’d arranged to pay four or five photographers and reporters to pretend to be a press pack who’d suddenly arrived from London to monster her. They started banging on the door and ‘hosing down’ the property with their flashguns. They began to swarm her house shouting that the story was going to be on all the front pages, that the Prime Minister had even jogged in and was jumping up and down, threatening to make a statement on the scandal in the house, and that the sky was about to fall in any minute.
I turned to Helen and said: ‘This is getting serious. Who do you want to talk to? Me or them? Compared to that scum I’m a nice feller.’ I pulled a big Tony Blair-style grin of reassurance across my face. ‘If you tell me the whole story then we’ll tell the pack that you’ve done an exclusive deal with us and they’ll back off.’ She folded instantly and gave me the full confession. Of course, and quite rightly so, we hung her out to dry that Sunday and she never got a penny.
9
Spoofing
I was sat in a noisy, steamy greasy spoon near Whitechapel tube in East London disguised as a street dealer. Five months into the job and it’s a freezing cold February. The Bengali waiter placed down two teas on the table. Sat opposite me was a blond-haired, blue-eyed race warrior called Mark Nodder who wholesaled Ecstasy tablets to fund his fascist Combat 18 offshoot. Nodder handed over a sample of his deadly wares. A Screws snapper had hidden himself in a street-market close by, waiting for Nodder to come out, to ‘snatch’ him covertly on a long-lens.
According to Nodder’s back-story, the Führer-worshipping white supremacist was obsessed with guns, loved attacking black people and chilled out listening to SS martial music. I wasn’t scared though, despite Nodder boasting of his knife fights and links to Irish UVF terrorists. For me it was all in a day’s work. I was an investigative reporter for Britain’s premier campaigning newspaper. Crusading for truth and justice was my duty. The small talk relaxed Nodder and we even shared a joke or two, strained though it was, before he launched into a racist tirade.
On the following Sunday, my courage was rewarded with a full-page exposé of Nodder’s abhorrent v
iews. The headline screamed: ‘What a Nazi Bit of Work. News of the World Exposes Thug Who Peddles Drugs to Fund Evil Race War.’
True to format, there was a grainy, covertly-taken photograph of Nodder, wearing shades and carrying a brief case, walking unawares out of the café into a bustling street. The caption said it all: ‘Twisted.’ The evidence was damning. An adjacent photograph showed a far-right magazine called Wannsee that Nodder admitted to publishing ‘to spread his message of hate’. The next picture was the money shot – a handful of ‘E’ tablets that Nodder had sold me, enough to get him nicked and jailed. In all, it was a perfect Screws story replete with the vital ingredients – drugs, Nazis, hidden worlds – that was sure to liven up a punter’s dreary Sunday.
I’d written the story strong. The intro roared: ‘Britain’s most evil racist thug has found a new way to discriminate against blacks – through the killer drugs he peddles to raise cash for his Nazi-style hate campaign.’ The gist was that Nodder was supplying an inferior, cheaper and even deadlier type of ‘E’ for sale to black people.
The sick bigot explained: ‘They’re cut to **** and if you have enough, they’ll kill you. But who gives a ****? One less n***er the better.’
The next paragraph proved that Nodder wasn’t simply a lone nutter, cranking up the fear factor. The extent of the threat was self-evident: ‘Twisted Nodder, in his 30s, commands a group of 200 white supremacists bent on stirring up racial violence right across Britain.’
As was customary, the payoff was a commitment by the paper, that had already put hundreds of villains behind bars, to bring Nodder to justice: ‘Our dossier on Nodder and his vile pals is being passed to Scotland Yard.’
There was only one problem – there was no ‘dossier’. Neither was there a Nodder. Nor any of his 200 vile pals. There was no Wannsee newspaper. There wasn’t even a taped conversation of the meeting and his allegedly offensive rant.
The reason was simple – the whole story was a complete fabrication from start to finish. Millions of readers had been totally duped. The page 30 exclusive was no more than a fairy tale, or rather a nightmare, depending on your viewpoint.
It’s what’s known in the trade as a ‘stunt-up’. Not one word or picture is true. I made it all up. Nodder wasn’t a neo-Nazi. In real life, he was my flat mate Gav, to whom I had promised £400 to play the role for a day. The quotes didn’t come from Nodder – they came from my imagination. The Wannsee magazine had a grand circulation of two – I paid Gav to knock it up on his Commodore 64 computer and print it out in our bedsit on a rainy February day. We both read it, proud of our ingenuity.
If you have ever believed that the news you read is true, be very careful. There is a long tradition of ‘spoofing’ on Fleet Street, which goes back hundreds of years and permeates both tabloids and posh papers. The disgraceful practice also extends to television. Fabrication is a complex issue. The example above is spoofing in its simplest form – a ‘rogue’ reporter like myself making up stories primarily to make himself look good, however obscene that sounds. But I wasn’t the only one – there was an ingrained culture of story fabrication at the News of the World. I knew several reporters who systematically spoofed stories, or at least parts of them, when the pressure was on and the goods had to be delivered up to the gods. The bottom line was this: the pressure and expectation to deliver world-class belters week-in, week-out was too much.
However, the wider context is also important too. In a general sense, made-up stories appear in the papers nearly every day. Common examples include staged showbiz paparazzi pics, orchestrated by editors, celebrities and their agents. Bullshit Hollywood interviews. Government propaganda by the armed forces, secret services, police and some other official departments. (For example the lie about weapons of mass destruction that paved the way for the Iraq War) The American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a ‘war of perception, conducted continuously using the news media.’ At the MOD’s psychological warfare facility in Chicksands, Bedfordshire, the warriors are trained in ‘information dominance’. Political spin. According to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in ‘blackpropaganda, known today as ‘news management’, modern wars invariably begin with a ‘master illusion’. Deliberate share-ramping in the City pages. Commercial misinformation. Smears planted by PR gunslingers to undermine enemies and competitors (a hugely profitable but secret industry).
Unlike the phony neo-Nazi, strategic media lies are more complicated so may not be identifiable as outright frauds straightaway. They are a more subtle form of lying that depends on what renowned media boffin Noam Chomsky calls the ‘manufacture of consent’ – an insidious form of collusion and self-editing between powerful interests that wish to trick the Great Unwashed en masse. It’s the reason why Britain’s concentrated media reports the same old issues in the same way time and again, strangling all dissent. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet journalists used to marvel that the same effect could be achieved in Russia only by sending journalists to the gulag.
In the Mark Nodder Nazi stunt-up, both Gavin and I had gone to great efforts to get all the details right. To make the pictures convincing enough to get past my boss Ray Levine and the rival News department. News would have relished the prospect of exposing a Features reporter for a fraud, if they could have spotted a clue to a story’s lack of credibility, so this was important.
Consequently, preparations began a few days before. Gav got his hair cut short and bleached to disguise himself, so that no one would recognise his real identity in the paper and make a connection to me. Dutifully, he sourced clothes from a charity shop that had no connection to him, and mirror shades. Shades always looked a bit silly, and sent suspicious signals to a streetwise news executive, especially when worn in winter. But it was a risk we had to take to keep Gav’s facial show-out to a minimum.
For the main prop, I always had a few Ecstasy tablets hanging around in my top draw at work – along with wraps of coke, chunky blocks of cannabis resin, speed and poppers. Not that I was a cheesy quaver. It’s just that, as reporters, we were legally allowed to buy small amounts of gear because of a loophole in the Misuse of Drugs Act. We were always doing drug investigations to demonise Ecstasy in the wake of teenager Leah Betts’ death, so the samples just built up. Under the law, I was supposed to send the drugs off to a Home Office-approved lab for analysis and safekeeping. But no one seemed too arsed about the law and several reporters had mini Black Museums of narcotics in their pencil trays, which they’d show off and I suspect occasionally dabble in.
For the fictitious far-right free sheet, Gavin had chosen a masthead name with a believable historical context. It had to have a sinister dimension, the ‘right feel’ if you will. The Wannsee Directive – named after a Berlin suburb where SS leaders met during the Second World War – was a secret set of instructions given to Nazi functionaries in 1942 to prepare and plan for the Final Solution. Gavin’s girlfriend was Jewish. He lived in a North London suburb and had a wide circle of Jewish pals. In addition, he was a life-long socialist whose father had been a commie before him. At school, he used to write essays about assassinating Margaret Thatcher, which drew great approval during the bitter recession of the early 1980s. We were both left-leaning, armchair anti-fascists, so we saw the anti-Nazi theme of our stunt-up as an all-round win-win. I got a story that kept me in a job for one more week. Gav got a 400-quid bung. And we both relished the opportunity to demonise the far right and take the piss out of them in a fantastical manner. We also buzzed off the fact that we were getting one over on my tyrannical bosses, especially Gav. He was a lifelong Liverpool fan and trade unionist who instinctively hated Rupert Murdoch, still more so after Hillsborough.
It never crossed my mind that I was trivialising the Holocaust. Or trading off that memory. Or insulting the victims – which I was. Or that I risked giving the far-right a propaganda victory, if they ever found out the story was a fantasy. Neo-Nazis are always claiming that the establishment �
��Jewish-run’ media is making up stories about them. In my corrupt mind, I never thought that I was falsely inflaming race divisions that didn’t really exist. What a fucking knob-head I was. But there you go.
Today, I read the cutting of this story with a deep sense of shame. I feel depressed, deceitful and dirty. Something inside feels broken and awkward, like a person in therapy might feel. But at that time I felt nothing – I’d become desensitised and selfish to a murderous degree. The philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius said that lying damages the soul – a portion of mine definitely shrivelled up into nothing that day.
However, like the Yorkshire Ripper, once I’d done my first one, it was easy to keep on going. Stunt-ups soon became another trick of the trade to deploy when I was having a dry patch. The next one wasn’t so much of a stunt-up – where identities and props are faked – but was what’s known as a ‘flyer’. A flyer is a story in which a small key fact is exaggerated to such an astronomical degree that the story no longer has a rational basis in truth.
One week I had nothing for conference when I spotted a story in one of the dailies about Oasis axe-man Noel Gallagher doing a charity single for War Child to raise funds for Bosnian orphans. I hot-footed it into conference waving the ripped-out Bizarre exclusive like a shield that would save me from the wrath of Ray.
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