Hack

by Graham Johnson

  The already complex cross-wires were further mangled by the method of communication. Most of the conversations took place on speakerphone. With all of these people talking at once over each other. So, Steve and I would have to follow different rules of engagement simultaneously. Hiding one thing from one person, while communicating something else to someone else at the same time. It was going to be a hair-trigger combination of double-meanings, mind-reading and timing. On top of that, there was a fourth dimension – a layer of independent observers and secret fifth columnists lurking about. Listening in to find out if there was any conspiracy. Reporting back to different factions, who they were loyal to.

  Let’s just say, it wasn’t exactly a culture of openness and transparency. Years later, I understood completely how phone hacking was allowed to get so out of hand. With everyone ratting on each other. It was simple – exactly the same type of conversations had been going on. I could imagine a Spaghetti Junction of cover-ups, calculated risks, half-truths and lies. All glossed over with a veneer of corporate respectability. No big deal – isn’t that’s how Big Fat Westerners get through the day? Isn’t that why we rule the world? I’d complain, but no one would listen. No fucking wonder they ended up shutting the whole thing down. Like a ruptured reactor. The toxic mess threatened to spill out, sliming up the whole world for all time. No single building in history had ever been the home to so much dissembling. Once a chain reaction like that starts, there’s no containing it so it’s a good job they did – by closing it down forever.

  During the first chat with Rebekah, Steve was more than happy to play ball with her – after all he was convinced that ultimately she was the Mr Big pulling the strings. To his mind, she was having to go through the motions of quizzing us simply to convince all the people at her end and cover her own back. That said, Steve’s blag was word perfect – Peter Cook-esque in its droll understatement. Like he was telling her that he had just shagged Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford in the bogs. But with the delivery of a gasman reading the meter. I loved him now. It’s true – these good North London boys, they really are the chosen ones. I assumed he had to prove to her that his blag was good. So that she was confident that the scam was airtight.

  Then gulp. At 9.45 am Ray called me. Turning on the breathlessness, I told him something like. ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Blah. Blah. Blah. And then it just walked out, in front of us. Cool as fuck.

  ‘Just as me and Steve were walking across the field. Then, the next moment like, it was gone just like that. Blah. Blah. Blah. Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks.’

  ‘Well done, Graham.’ But his voice was light with blag-bonhomie. Brittle with caution around the edges. Not knowing whether to shit or comb his hair. Of course, there could never be any explicit reference to ‘engineering’. Not in a million years – are you fucking stupid? Even though I believed he knew what was going on, or at least could work it out, the Chinese Walls were well and truly up by now. Suddenly slammed shut, like a secret chamber in Indiana Jones. Too late for polite conversation now. From then on, it was strictly gangster-speak on the blower. Fresh air for the Feds. Never talk over the phone, d’you get me? Where everyone knew the score. But everyone tap-danced around the graft like it never happened and it wasn’t there. In a merry dance of multi-level, shape-shifting conspiracy. Looming but silent like a car bomb that was about to go off. So that if it ever came on top, everyone can plausibly deny everything. And the shit can only ever flow one way. Gravity-wise, and straight on to heads of the minions below. Leaving the powerful to seal the airlock. To head straight for the bunkers in Deep Carpet Land. At News Int. force protection was a well-honed drill. Once a caper was underway, it went without saying that everyone would have to behave. Both in public and in private, that the Beast was all on the up-and-up.

  In a strange way, I was glad not to have to speak to Ray about stunting-up. I didn’t have the bottle. It felt squirmy and embarrassing. He was too sacred. Like having that talk about the birds and the bees with your mum and dad. Once a peasant, always a peasant – I actually felt it was my duty to shield him.

  But Steve had other ideas – he wanted to be able to talk freely about the stunt. It was frustrating for him. But no chance – by then it was already out of control. A labyrinthian riddle of smoke and mirrors where nothing was what it seemed.

  26

  The Calls

  After conference, Ray called again and spoke to both Steve and me. He said something like, ‘Listen, they’re great pics and Rebekah appreciates your efforts, being down there. But if they’re stunted, you can tell us now. We’ll all have a laugh and move on.’

  But deep down, I sensed that his heart wasn’t in it. Both Ray and I knew that if I’d have confessed now it would have been extremely serious because it was taking the piss out of Rebekah on her big week.

  ‘Mate,’ I said, ‘I’ve told you what happened. I saw a big cat. And we’re not just saying this because it’s raining down here and we’re desperate to come home.’ Steve said that he thought Ray was having to put on an act because other people were listening in. On that occasion, Assistant Editor Garry Thompson and a female Pic Exec were next to Ray. Ray was making himself look good.

  A few minutes later Steve was getting the same shit direct off his line manager Liz Cocks. Rebekah must have put them up to it. I later found out that Rebekah was saying that she needed reassurance before midday, because if it was kosher, she was going to ask Exec Chairman Les Hinton for more budget to fund an extra-long print run on that Sunday. Hooray! Big sales for her.

  Steve and I knew that Kuttner would be cautious. Sure enough, when informed, he thought that there was something about the pictures that made them almost too good to be true. Not only that, but if he or any of the execs would have looked just that bit closer, they would have seen a clue to their falsehood. At the bottom of the photograph, there were three symmetrical and parallel dark lines – the remnants of three photoshopped-out railings from the puma’s cage. Later Steve said that he had deliberately left them in their as an insurance policy against taking them seriously. But for now Kuttner failed to spot them. But he tempered his suspicion for the greater good. Adding that he would never have expected someone like Steve to stunt them. Or a relatively junior reporter like myself to take such a large risk with my career. So for him, on balance, it was a ‘yes’.

  Some time later Ray called again on speaker phone with Senior Associate Editor Harry Scott.

  ‘I want you to get hold of a professional hunter,’ he explained. Great, I thought, the heat’s off for a bit and Ray is playing along nicely. Makes us both look good in front of Harry. ‘I want you to lay a trap for the Beast at the spot where you saw it. When we catch it, we can put it in a cage and get proper pics. Then hand it over to a zoo or something.’ If he wasn’t so serious, I would have laughed. What a fucking palaver! That’s the thing with tabloid newspapers. They don’t know where to stop. At heart, they’re extremists. You give them a picture of the Beast. No it’s not good enough now. We want more. We actually want to own it now. We want it to be ours. That’s why, in the end, tabloid newspapers are doomed. They will always destroy themselves.

  ‘OK, Ray. That’s a good idea. I’ll get on it straightaway.’ I felt like saying don’t bother. Our Beast already lives in a zoo. But I didn’t. I liaised with Ricky Sutton who started ringing around to find a real-life Jungle Jim. ‘Look in Yellow Pages,’ I told him. ‘Under H for hunters.’

  Next up was the big set-piece with Rebekah that we were all dreading. On speakerphone. With Rebekah and Kuttner up front. And Ray and Liz lurking about in the background.

  Steve stiffened. He wasn’t happy at all that Kuttner was getting involved. So far he’d only had to lie to senior execs who he thought were involved in the scam – that was Rebekah and Ray. He was more than happy to merry dance with them all day long. But Kuttner was a different matter. Steve felt he was now ‘being put in an impossible position’. Where he was having to lie to Kuttner, who wasn’t
at all fair game, because he wasn’t in on it. Nor did Kuttner have a direct interest in it. Steve had to make a split-second decision on the spot – confess to Kuttner there and then. Drop Ray and Rebekah in it, with them listening in. Or blag on and hope for the best.

  ‘On the spur of the moment,’ he told me afterwards, ‘I decided that the best course of action would be to maintain the pictures were genuine.’

  First off, Rebekah came on quite strong. Trying to put us on the back foot. Or the back paw, as we laughed later. All for show in front of Kuttner, Steve concluded, and played along.

  ‘You simply can’t have a picture of the Beast,’ she crowed. ‘And if the story’s not true, you should say now.’ To rebut her, I did my pièce-de résistance, blagging Rebekah in the most important phone conversation of my life.

  But Steve went on the offensive. Volleying the shot right back over the net like Björn Borg. ‘D’you know,’ he said to her, backing her up in this charade, ‘I am so pissed off. You do a good job and you come up with a story and picture scoop like this and all you can do is kick us in the bollocks.’ In his own mind, Steve was lining himself up with Rebekah to convince Kuttner.

  Rebekah was taken aback. This was the turning point, she said later, when she was convinced the pics were genuine. No one could say that she wasn’t taking all reasonable steps. Like we had assumed, it was Steve’s stature that was going to carry the day. But the icing on the cake was a little sideswipe he took at Ray with everyone listening in.

  ‘We’re not going to do what Ray Levine wanted us to do,’ Steve told Rebekah and Kuttner. Pause. As everyone held their breath.

  What the fuck is he going to say, I thought? Blow the gaff now? Verbal Ray up, for asking us to engineer a pic? Bring it all crashing down at the first big hurdle?

  ‘What do you mean?’ someone asked. ‘What has Ray asked you to do?’

  ‘Set a trap for the Beast,’ Steve sighed. ‘Ray has just asked us to catch the Beast. And we’re not going to do it because it’s bloody dangerous.’ Steve’s little verbal gemstone had the simultaneous effect of making the Beast blag more credible and attacking Ray covertly at the same time. Steve was trying to say something to Ray, under the radar. ‘You’ve dragged me into this, you cunt, and now I’m going to make you look like a cunt. Even if I can’t tell you straight, in front of Kuttner.’

  Ray piped up in the background, somewhat chided. ‘That’s not the case,’ he intervened, ‘that I wanted Steve and Graham to trap the Beast. I simply told them to get an expert to do it for them.’ Rattled a bit by the shot across his bows. Steve had well and truly put him in his place. Letting him know, that if it came down to it, he wasn’t afraid of criticising his instructions in front of Rebekah and Kuttner. ‘Don’t fuck up in here,’ Steve was saying to him on the QT. But a nice little touch to create fear of the Beast, as though it was real. Rebekah liked it. Kuttner swallowed it.

  ‘It certainly sounds as if they’re telling the truth,’ Rebekah told her consiglieri.

  ‘I’ve got little option other than to believe them.’

  Kuttner agreed that it was a spectacular scoop on which we were both to be congratulated but that he had to be sure they were genuine.

  To close the deal Steve said solemnly: ‘I would never lie to my Editor and Managing Editor.’ Amen. Everyone congratulated us on our ‘memorable achievement’.

  Battle Stations. Rebekah cleared the first five pages of the paper for our world exclusive. The PR people started to fix up TV interviews for Steve and me. Plans were made to accommodate the hundreds of press people who’d flock to Cornwall to revel in it. This had to be done because there was no infrastructure in the countryside to cope with an expected press invasion. A big international news conference was pencilled in. All the while, Kuttner and Levine were ringing us to check the details. Steve and I held the line fast.

  But later that day, Steve was suddenly ordered back to London.

  ‘What the fuck’s that about?’ I asked, the colour draining.

  ‘No big deal,’ he said. ‘Obviously, they’re going to use the pictures big, and they want me in the office.’

  ‘Oh. OK,’ I said.

  ‘And I suppose they also want to hear the story again face to face this time,’ he conceded.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ I thought. But there wasn’t any time for a steward’s inquiry now. I had to put on a brave face in front of Steve, even though deep down I knew this was an ominous twist.

  ‘OK, mate. Stay cool,’ I said. ‘Don’t fold under questioning, whatever you do.

  ‘And, it goes without saying, watch out for all those rats. There’s more snakes up there than at that crank’s we went to the other day.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said. ‘I’m staunch.’ The man of air flexing his props.

  ‘Well, good luck,’ I said, as we shook hands like escaped POWs going our own way. ‘I’ll see you on the next one.’ Lord Lucan. Loch Ness. Life on Mars. Whatever it might be.

  27

  Bad Friday

  Imagine the worst day of your life. When something that you have invested in, falsely or not, fucks up so apocalyptically, that all you can do is lie down.

  1. You get the Os, Us and Fs in your A-Levels, when you should have got Bs and Cs.

  2. You’re made redundant after twenty years of getting up in the dark, and working through dinnertime, because you didn’t mind taking one up the arse for the company.

  3. Your kids get really ill.

  4. Your village is overrun by soldiers and massacred. Even though it’s been there for 10,000 years.

  As always of recent, mine began with a wank. Just like on the news, disaster days began same as it ever was. Room was top-off hot, because the dial on the cast-iron rad was rust-stuck on one louder. Over a luke-warm Full English/continental room service combo, on a too-busy tray off which lots of things fell off on to the floor, I watched the Big Breakfast. Then buzzed off a few peasants talking bollocks on Kilroy. Before turning the sound down, best way, when Richard and Judy came on. Switching back and forth between them, and keeping an eye on the racing on Channel Four.

  All the while I was writing up the story on a 1980s laptop – my notebook. Before singing it down the telegraph to the copy-takers. Who didn’t give a fuck that I was making history, just hating on my unprofessional stopping and starting. They had complained about me before now, the slags. Moaning that the new generation of reporters couldn’t speak fluent Sunese like the old guard, and were therefore wasters. This story’ll show ’em, I thought.

  So prawn sandwiches and tea on trays were coming through the door like tellies through windows on tour with The Who. Too busy even to get dressed and showered. Sat there in my boxies, hair stuck up on end, unshaven. Just the same as when I’d decided to become a reporter, watching Sky News on the couch, on the dole.

  Then Ricky turned up with Jungle Jim. A youngish but slightly balding big cat tracker, who got excited when I told him about my brush with the Beast.

  ‘I think there might be some footprints,’ I added, ‘so I’ll take you to the exact spot, as soon as Ray stops hassling me for adds.’ Deep down, though, I was worried in case overnight drizzle had washed away our corroborating evidence.

  But Jungle Jim didn’t seem that arsed, saying he’d look for droppings as well. Droppings! Fuck! Why hadn’t we thought of that? Maybe we should have robbed some from the zoo, when we did the pic, and scattered it about a bit at the scene of the crime. Irrefutable proof. Instead, all Jungle Jim’ll find is some of my old chewy packets and shoe prints from my Rockport boots.

  A big steel cage was being sent down. With a dead sheep as bait inside it. Another News of the World photographer called Steve Burton, whose nickname coincidentally was Beasty, said that he was trying to get a chopper up, to do an aerial. A broadcast-quality film camera with a crew was on order, he said, to get footage of the Beast for a TV advert. I was pleased – I’d scrutinised both Beasty and Ricky. To see whether they’d swallowed it all, or were sp
ying for the Desk. But Ricky seemed genuinely glad to be back on board for the big win.

  Then Steve Grayson called from the office in London. I took it in private, without trying to make it look like a big deal.

  ‘Everything’s cool,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that,’ I breathed out, glad to hear from him.

  ‘I got a fucking big grilling off Kuttner, mind you. But it’s all calmed down now.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ I asked, trying to size up the risk.

  ‘You know what he’s fucking like. He kept asking me over and over again, in his office, if it’s real. Of course I said it was real, because it is, isn’t it? It’s a real puma. After I’d said that, he seemed happy, and he then went off to see the Chairman, because they’d want the higher-ups to sign off on a big telly spend.’ Meaning they were going to buy costly advertising space on ITV and Sky. Bigging up the story, in the run-up to Sunday.

  ‘It’s going to be over the first six pages,’ Steve added. ‘And that’s not fucking happened since Princess Di died.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said. Not knowing whether to defecate in terror or have another wank.

  ‘But that wasn’t the only thing. That fucking dick-head Ray Levine collared me by the photocopying machine. Started talking all kinds of bollocks, about me going on the telly on Saturday night.’

  ‘Fronting the advert and that?’ I asked bitterly. I pictured what Ray wanted, in my mind’s eye. You know the model. Steve bouncing on to the telly, in between Midsomer and Stars in their Eyes, with mad bangy, bangy, newsy, newsy take-this-seriously music in the background, saying: “I’m the man who came face-to-face with the Beast of Bodmin Moor and lived to tell the tale. See my astonishing pictures of Britain’s only man-eating monster. Read my spine-chilling story. Only in the News of the World tomorrow.”’