Hack Attack

by Nick Davies

  However, Leigh immediately saw something important buried in the second page of the statement. The DPP described how, in August 2006, police had searched Glenn Mulcaire’s office and seized material which indicated that some non-royal targets had been hacked. Prosecutors had agreed that they should select only a sample of these cases to take to court: ‘Any other approach would have made the case unmanageable.’ That suggested a scale of activity by Mulcaire which went well beyond what had been described by Assistant Commissioner John Yates with his ‘small number’ of cases where hacking had been successful, or by the former assistant commissioner, Andy Hayman, in his article in The Times with his ‘handful’ of victims.

  In the front seat of the car, with the rain pouring down the windows, we started drafting a story, but then my eye was caught by something else in the DPP’s statement. Towards the end, he said: ‘Having examined the material that was supplied to the CPS by the police in this case, I can confirm that no victims or suspects other than those referred to above were identified to the CPS at the time. I am not in a position to say whether the police had any information on any other victims or suspects that was not passed to the CPS.’ No other suspects? But what about the email for Neville? Surely that was evidence of other suspects – a named junior reporter sending thirty-five hacked messages to the chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

  I stepped out of the car so that Leigh could concentrate on drafting the story and, under the dripping branches of a rain-sodden tree, I called the DPP’s office and asked whether the email for Neville had been amongst the evidence which the police had passed to prosecutors in 2006. Clearly, they should have handed it over. It dealt with one of the very few cases which had been brought to court, that of Gordon Taylor. It was direct and damning evidence of the offence that had been committed. But the DPP’s statement seemed to be hinting that the police had not passed it to prosecutors, in which case Scotland Yard had yet more serious questions to answer. The only alternative was that the police had handed it over, and the DPP was simply lying when he said he had seen no information on other suspects. The DPP’s office said they would come back to me.

  We filed our story and carried on lurking suspiciously, waiting for John Ford to show up. He never did and we concluded that he was probably clasped safely in Leppard’s arms somewhere, precisely to make sure that we didn’t get a chance to talk to him. We stayed overnight in a small hotel and, when there was still no sign of Ford the next day, we headed back to London.

  Without Ford to explain what had happened, Leigh returned to the office and contacted Ciex, the company which had been hired by Rusbridger. It turned out that Leppard had been in touch with one of their security consultants, a former head of MI6’s counter-terrorism division called Hamilton Macmillan, trying to persuade him to confirm the story. Macmillan now talked to Leigh and gave him a valuable on-the-record quote: ‘The Sunday Times allegations are false. The information they supplied to me to support this allegation was also patently invented.’

  Back home in Sussex, I decided to turn the fire back on the Sunday Times and phoned their managing editor’s office to ask them to tell me on the record a) how many times they had made payments to John Ford to blag into confidential databases, and b) the period of time over which these payments had been made. Within minutes, I had an email from David Leigh in the Guardian office: ‘Sunday Times going ballistic. Give me a ring.’ Clearly, they didn’t want the truth about John Ford being told. The result was that, for a second time, Witherow agreed to drop the smear against Rusbridger.

  But the dirty play continued. Rebekah Brooks met a friend of Rusbridger and explained that she was very disappointed that he would publish these terrible stories about the News of the World, particularly as ‘we were so good to him over his love child’. Since Rusbridger had never fathered an illegitimate child, this was interesting. Since Brooks was editing the Sun, which specialised in publishing damaging stories – true or false – about the private lives of public figures, this was also slightly worrying. Rusbridger and I had a paranoid conversation about whether we were going to find some twisted tabloid version of our sex lives in the Sun and we decided that the best way to stop it happening was to carry on publishing stories about the hacking. That way, it would be disgustingly obvious that any story like that was nothing more than vengeance.

  In the meantime, as if to confirm our anxiety, the smear about Rusbridger using John Ford found its way into the column of the Independent’s right-wing media commentator, Stephen Glover, who produced a lip-smacking account in which he announced once more that our Gordon Taylor story had been ‘aided and abetted by the BBC’ and that Rusbridger had a ‘holier-than-thou aura’ while in truth he was ‘like the grubbiest reporter on the News of the World’.

  We couldn’t let it drop.

  * * *

  The truth really wasn’t hard to find. It was sitting there winking and waving and defying us to come and get it.

  Paul Farrelly, the Labour MP who was leading the way on the media select committee, got hold of a transcript of the hearing at which Goodman and Mulcaire had pleaded guilty and been sentenced in January 2007. It turned out to be littered with clues that Mulcaire was not just working for Goodman on some dodgy, rogue project but was clearly breaking the law for the News of the World as a whole.

  For example, here was the prosecution counsel talking about Mulcaire’s hacking of the five non-royal victims who were named in court: ‘His purpose in doing this was to obtain information concerning the private lives of the individuals concerned, as well as other celebrities, and pass it on to the News of the World.’ Couldn’t be clearer! Clive Goodman’s counsel had repeated the point and explained that the non-royal hacking was the responsibility of ‘whoever else may be involved at the News of the World’ – and the judge had agreed. These comments were really significant, because the barristers and the judge had had access to the evidence which the police had supplied for the trial – and yet not one newspaper had reported them.

  There was more in the trial transcript. It listed the exact dates when the five non-royal victims had been hacked – which happened to coincide precisely with times when the News of the World was working on stories about them. Mulcaire had targeted Gordon Taylor in 2005 when they were pursuing the story about his private life, and again between February and March 2006, when they were chasing allegations about Premiership footballers taking part in gay sex orgies; Max Clifford when he was representing two different women who were alleged to have had affairs with government ministers (John Prescott and David Blunkett); a football agent, Sky Andrew, when one of his clients, the Premiership player Sol Campbell, had mysteriously walked out of an Arsenal game; the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes when Fleet Street was hounding him for being gay; and the fashion model Elle Macpherson when they were pursuing her relationship with a new partner.

  In theory, Mulcaire might have been doing this for another newspaper but the transcript disclosed that his contract with the News of the World explicitly forbade him from working for any other paper. And since the court was told he had been working at least seventy hours a week for them, it was not clear how he could have been hacking for anybody else even if he had been allowed to.

  And this was obviously not some big secret. The court heard a claim from Mulcaire that hacking was so widespread that he had not even realised it was illegal. Phone records quoted in court showed that Goodman was not hiding in a dark hole in a distant field to listen to royal messages: he was often doing it from his desk in the News of the World newsroom. The records showed that over a period of 143 working days, he had done this on at least 348 occasions – an average rate of two or three times a day. Goodman apologised in court for deceiving the royal household but he made no such apology to the News of the World.

  The transcript also had interesting clues about the police. The prosecution version of events was that Goodman had persuaded Mulcaire to hack phones for him by smuggling cash to him. He had done this,
they said, by inventing a non-existent super-secret source at Buckingham Palace, code-named ‘Alexander’, and claiming £500 a week in tip fees for him and then passing this on to Mulcaire. But the dates didn’t fit. The prosecution’s own case was that Mulcaire had been hacking royal phones since February 2005, possibly even earlier, but the first payment to Alexander was not until November 2005. So why would the police accept such a daft version of events?

  Meanwhile, the DPP’s office called back with an answer to the question which I had put to them while I was standing under the rain-sodden tree outside John Ford’s house. Had the police in 2006 given prosecutors the email for Neville? And the answer was no. They had not shown the prosecutors clear documentary evidence which was directly relevant to one of the very few non-royal victims who had been named in court – documentary evidence which clearly implicated two other named journalists in handling illegally intercepted voicemail. So why would the police do that?

  I banged out a story about the police failing to show prosecutors the email for Neville and carried on poking around in my imagination, looking for the rest of the picture.

  * * *

  I tracked down Brian Paddick, who had been a very senior officer in the Metropolitan Police back in 2006, an interesting man who had been reviled by the tabloid newspapers, partly because he took a liberal line on the policing of cannabis and partly because he committed the unforgiveable sin of being openly gay. He explained how things worked at the top of Scotland Yard. The key man, he said, was Dick Fedorcio – the director of communications, responsible for the Met’s links with Fleet Street. Fedorcio, he explained, had become a very powerful voice in the internal politics of Scotland Yard.

  Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he said, the Met’s senior management team, the SMT, would meet to discuss policy. This was a small group which included Dick Fedorcio, who was allowed to have a direct impact on operational decisions: ‘The Met is desperate to get newspapers to run good news and not to run bad news. Dick Fedorcio is extremely close to editors. One big point of the commissioner’s SMT meetings is to discuss cases which are going well and to talk about how to get those out into the press, and to talk about the bad news and how to keep it out of the press. The meetings are dominated by that kind of conversation. Dick will persuade a paper to drop a bad story by giving them exclusive access to a big raid, that kind of thing.’

  Paddick had had no direct involvement in the original phone-hacking inquiry in 2006, but he knew a fair bit about it. Simply because the original complaint had come from the royal household, the job had been passed to Specialist Operations, whose main focus is counter-terrorism and whose boss at the time was Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman. Based on his previous experience, Paddick reckoned the job would have been discussed from time to time at the SMT meetings. ‘Andy Hayman would give an update, and there would be a discussion around the table, including Dick: Hayman reports that they have concluded inquiries on the royal family but there is all this other material, and that’s when Dick would speak up, and they would decide not to pursue it, not to get into a fight with one of the biggest media organisations in the world.’ It was understandable, according to Paddick, that Specialist Ops had not wanted to get bogged down in a long inquiry that would divert them from their proper role. ‘It should have been passed to the Serious Crime Directorate. But it wasn’t.’

  Why? Fear of News International? Favouritism for a powerful news organisation? Simply crap judgement?

  It was Paddick who pointed out something which I should already have recognised, that the column in The Times in which Andy Hayman claimed there had been only a handful of victims was not a one-off. Hayman had left Scotland Yard in December 2007 and had then got himself a job as a regular columnist with The Times – he had gone to work for the organisation he had been investigating!

  When I checked a database of media stories, I found Hayman had not only been writing regular columns for The Times, he had also sold them the serial rights for his memoirs. Since leaving the police, I reckoned he must have earned at least £100,000 from News International.

  The same database disclosed that Hayman was not alone. The man who had been Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of the original inquiry, Ken Macdonald, had stepped down in October 2008 – and in February 2009, he too had started working as a columnist for The Times! The point here was not that Hayman or Macdonald was corrupt. This was about cosiness, the easy assumption that News International was a friendly and respectable organisation to be cultivated, rather than an organisation which might be routinely engaged in illegal activity and which needed to be brought to book.

  Just as I was coming to terms with that, Private Eye magazine reported that on 16 July, seven days after he announced that no further investigation was required into News International’s involvement in phone-hacking, Assistant Commissioner John Yates had sat next to Rebekah Brooks at a police bravery awards ceremony at the Dorchester hotel, sponsored by the Sun. Also sitting there was the current commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, and one of his predecessors, Sir John Stevens, who had left Scotland Yard and became a columnist for the News of the World. Cosy indeed. And that was not all.

  Hayman had left the Met under a cloud. In December 2007, eleven months after the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, he had had to resign after an anti-corruption inquiry accused him of using his corporate credit card to spend thousands of pounds on his own personal pleasure, including restaurants and hotel bills for a female officer with whom he was having an affair. I spoke to a couple of crime reporters who said that it had been well known among them that Hayman was having affairs, not only with the officer who had benefited from his corporate credit card but also with a civilian worker at the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

  Simply by checking back through press cuttings, I then found an extraordinary picture. It was not just that the officer in charge of the original inquiry (Hayman) had been having a secret affair. In addition, the DPP at that time (Ken Macdonald), who was ultimately responsible for the prosecution, had been having a secret affair; and the Attorney General at that time, Lord Goldsmith, who was ultimately responsible for the DPP, had been having a secret affair. All three affairs had subsequently been exposed by tabloid journalists. And shortly after this, it was disclosed that the officer who was now responsible for the subject and who was refusing to reopen the inquiry, John Yates, was also having a secret affair.

  Apart from the fact that it appeared that nobody in the senior ranks of the criminal justice system was capable of keeping his trousers on, this bizarre coincidence was worrying. To be clear: I had absolutely no evidence that the News of the World had tried to use this information to put pressure on any of these senior figures. Nor did I have any evidence that any of these senior figures had compromised their work for fear of what the News of the World might do to them. But what was alarmingly obvious was the sheer potential power of a newspaper which specialises in gathering painful and embarrassing secrets about the private lives of influential people. Whether or not that potential power had made any difference in this case was frustratingly invisible.

  * * *

  The more I poked around, the more I saw the truth. Two whistle-blowers helped.

  One contacted the Guardian office and had a series of conversations with a bright young reporter called Paul Lewis. This source needs to remain unidentified, and I’ll call him ‘Mango’.

  Mango claimed to know a lot about the activities of Greg Miskiw. He said Miskiw had targeted the call centres of the main mobile phone companies by paying cash bribes to some staff there and possibly also by inserting a journalist into one of them as an employee and spy. Mango reckoned that some call-centre workers were earning between £500 and £1,000 a week from the News of the World, doubling their legitimate salary by selling confidential information. If true, this would help to explain a mystery.

  The trial transcript revealed that when Glenn Mulcaire called the mobile phone companies to blag them,
he was able to pose as a member of staff because he could quote an internal password, even though it changed every twenty-four hours. If Miskiw was bribing people in the phone companies, that would explain how Mulcaire was able to do that.

  Mango also claimed that Miskiw was involved in paying cash bribes to police officers to extract information from the police national computer and that it was possible that he had a ‘high-up contact’ in the Metropolitan Police. Miskiw was supposedly being helped by a former police officer named Boyle, who had become a private investigator. All of this evidently had been the subject of a police inquiry at some stage. Mango reckoned that the police had got close to Miskiw and that at one point they had arrested and interviewed him at Colindale police station in north London, but that Miskiw had refused to comment and there had been a lack of will at the top of the Met Police to pursue him.

  The other whistle-blower had fallen out of the sky with the rain when I was sitting in the car with David Leigh outside John Ford’s house. A complete stranger who had seen our Gordon Taylor story had called me and offered me access to the treasure which had eluded me when I was researching Flat Earth News – the material which had been seized by the Information Commissioner’s Office when they raided the home of Steve Whittamore back in March 2003, dealing with all the newspapers who had hired him, not just the News International titles.

  The source was most anxious to remain anonymous and over the next few weeks we worked together very cautiously. I lent him a pay-as-you-go mobile phone so that I could call him without leaving any trace of his identity on my billing records. When we met, I used cash to pay for drinks or food so that my credit card left no footprints. Much later, this source stepped forward publicly and identified himself, so it is OK now to say that this was Alec Owen, a grey-haired, gravel-voiced former police officer who had worked on counter-subversion in Merseyside Special Branch and had then moved to become an investigator with the ICO. He was now retired.