by Nick Davies
The Independent again were particularly hostile. Their media columnist, Stephen Glover, went to work once more, firmly clasping Murdoch’s hand to his lips. In July, he had suggested that the Gordon Taylor story was not only old but also now irrelevant since these illegal practices had surely stopped. ‘The Guardian does not suggest they still go on,’ he had written. Now, four months later, obediently following the PCC’s fictional line, he casually rearranged the facts. ‘The Guardian’s reporter Nick Davies suggested such practices were still widespread,’ he wrote.
This was not simply a spat between the Guardian and the PCC. Beneath the surface, this was a test of the idea that newspapers could regulate their own business. When Alan Rusbridger told a BBC radio interviewer that the report was ‘worse than useless’, he meant it. He and one other Fleet Street editor privately discussed the possibility that both of them would simply withdraw entirely from the PCC in order to register their protest. As it was, Rusbridger settled for resigning from the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee and making his views very clear. Whether self-regulation could survive remained to be seen.
* * *
A few days later, in central London, I hailed a taxi. The driver wanted to talk, asked me what I did for a living, what kind of stories I wrote, so I told him I’d been doing this stuff about the phone-hacking.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I know the thing you mean. That all turned out to be wrong, didn’t it?’
6. Secrets and lies
Based on interviews with current and former police officers; sources who worked for companies owned by Rupert Murdoch; and evidence disclosed to select committees, court hearings and to the Leveson Inquiry.
Behind layers of official secrecy and public denial, the reality was that the police knew a very great deal about the crimes which were being committed by powerful newspapers. It was years later that the scale of their knowledge finally emerged. Looking back, it is clear that the Guardian and others were uncovering only tiny fragments of the truth. This is the story of what the police had hidden in their files, as finally revealed.
It begins in June 2002, when a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police, Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook, a clever Scot, then aged forty-three, was asked to appear on the BBC Crimewatch programme. His job was to appeal to the public for help in the long-running effort to catch the people responsible for slamming an axe into the head of the private investigator Daniel Morgan in a south London pub car park fifteen years earlier.
The broadcast had a hidden agenda. Secretly, the Met’s anti-corruption squad were starting a new investigation into the murder and into the links between bent police officers and their two prime suspects – Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery, who now ran the murdered man’s agency, Southern Investigations. They wanted to use Crimewatch to announce a £50,000 reward in the hope of provoking one or more of the suspects to discuss it – and to record them with covert listening devices. Cook had been chosen as a frontman, to conceal the role of the anti-corruption officers. He was a natural choice, a specialist homicide detective who also happened to have been married for several years to one of the presenters of Crimewatch, a serving detective sergeant named Jacqui Hames. On 25 June, the day before the broadcast, an odd thing happened.
Scotland Yard received sensitive intelligence (probably from a phone-tap, although that has not been proved) which indicated that Sid Fillery had discussed Cook’s forthcoming appearance with Alex Marunchak, the executive editor of the News of the World, and that Marunchak had agreed to ‘sort him out’. That sounded very much like a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and possibly a threat of violence. A few days later, Cook was warned by the Yard to watch his back. Several more odd things then happened.
A week later, on 3 July, as court documents later disclosed, somebody who was almost certainly Glenn Mulcaire called the finance department of Surrey police, where Cook had worked previously as head of CID, and, posing as an official from the Inland Revenue, tried to blag the detective’s home address. He failed but evidently succeeded elsewhere. The following week, Cook noticed two vans hanging around his home, following him and his wife when they went out. He checked their numbers and found that both were leased to News International. Scotland Yard tasked a covert surveillance unit to follow the vans and then, using the pretext that one of them had a broken tail light, arranged for uniformed officers to stop it and question the driver, who turned out to be a photographer working for the News of the World.
Cook complained. Scotland Yard’s director of communications, Dick Fedorcio, contacted the News of the World who claimed that they had been pursuing a straightforward story, that Cook was having an affair with Jacqui Hames – a claim much weakened by the fact that Cook and Hames were married with two children.
Later that year, Cook was appointed to formally take over the investigation of Daniel Morgan’s murder. He raised his concerns about the News of the World’s surveillance with his commander, André Baker. Baker arranged a meeting, on 9 January 2003, between himself and Cook, Dick Fedorcio and the paper’s then editor, Rebekah Brooks. Cook told her the story of the two vans, with the clear implication that her executive editor, directly or via others at the News of the World, had obtained his home address at the behest of a murder suspect and then organised the surveillance in order to discredit or harass him.
Cook went on to tell the meeting that there was further evidence that Marunchak was a rogue journalist. He said that a former secretary at Southern Investigations had made a sworn statement that the agency had paid thousands of pounds to Marunchak, who had used the money to pay off his credit card and, she believed, his son’s school fees. Clearly it was possible that Marunchak had been defrauding the News of the World by authorising unearned payments for Southern who had then passed him the surplus; or that he was taking bribes to send business in Southern’s direction. And then, to Cook’s alarm … nothing was done.
In sworn evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, Fedorcio described how he had led Rebekah Brooks from the meeting to a drinks party then taking place at Scotland Yard and left her talking to the then commissioner, Sir John Stevens. Scotland Yard conducted no investigation into what could have been interpreted as a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in a murder inquiry and an allegation of fraud. Marunchak remained in post as one of the most senior journalists at the News of the World.
Much later, Dave Cook’s team discovered that the Yard’s anti-corruption command were sitting on the hundreds of hours of conversation which had been secretly recorded in Southern’s office in 1999, revealing Marunchak’s deep involvement in buying information from Southern’s network of corrupt police contacts. The tapes included another suggestion that Southern were recycling News of the World money to him: Rees described how he had fallen out with Marunchak and warned him that ‘your fucking paper will get fucking tipped off about who gets fucking backhanders’. Cook’s team also received unconfirmed intelligence reports claiming that Marunchak had bribed an officer in Cambridge to get information on the murder of two young girls, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, in Soham in August 2002; and that he was close to the former Met detective John Ross, who was a conduit for press stories provided by corrupt officers in London.
Most serious, Cook’s officers found a statement which had been sworn by a close associate of Daniel Morgan who said that in the weeks before he was murdered, Morgan had contacted a Sunday newspaper to try to sell information about very powerful corrupt officers. There was no evidence that this involved Marunchak, let alone that he had tipped off Rees; but Cook’s team sent a detailed report to the Directorate of Professional Standards, suggesting that Marunchak be investigated. Nothing was done.
Later it emerged that back in 2000, the team which had placed the listening device in Southern’s office had been equally disturbed by what they heard. Their operational head, Detective Superintendent Bob Quick, had sent his own report to the Directorate of Professional Standards, urging them to investigate
the payment of police bribes by newspapers. Nothing was done.
* * *
March 2003 was a bad month for News International.
In London, Rebekah Brooks, now editing the Sun, gave evidence to the media select committee in the House of Commons and admitted that ‘we have paid the police for information in the past’. She appeared to have no idea that this was an admission of crime. Sitting beside her, Andy Coulson, who had just replaced her as editor of the News of the World, dived in to rescue her, explaining that they would do this only if it were in the public interest. He appeared to have no idea that this made no difference – bribing police was still a crime.
It was in that same month that investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office raided Steve Whittamore and seized his cache of paperwork detailing his dealings with Fleet Street. This proved to be a turning point in the development of three separate police investigations. All three exposed potentially illegal information-gathering on behalf of the Murdoch papers and other news organisations.
The first was Operation Reproof, which had been opened in January 2002, when a businessman in Devon complained that he was being blackmailed by people who had obtained details of his criminal record from a private investigator. Within months, police had identified seventeen police personnel who were suspected of leaking confidential data to a network of half a dozen PIs. At least one of the PIs – Glen Lawson of Abbey Investigations in Newcastle upon Tyne – was working for newspapers. He had commissioned searches of police records for information on three Labour MPs: the then chancellor, Gordon Brown; his close ally, Nick Brown; and the MP for Reading, Martin Salter. Lawson would not identify his client, but police noted that he had made the searches at a time when the News of the World were attacking Salter for daring to oppose Rebekah Brooks’s controversial campaign to introduce ‘Sarah’s Law’, requiring police to disclose the home addresses of convicted paedophiles.
Total number of journalists interviewed: zero.
Operation Motorman was a spin-off from this inquiry. Reproof raided a PI called Chris Dewse based in Horley, Surrey, and found a host of evidence that he had been obtaining data from two men who worked for the DVLA and that he was then selling some of it to Steve Whittamore. They passed this to the ICO, who organised the raid on Whittamore in March 2003 – and who then failed to interview any of the journalists who had commissioned his criminal activity. Internal ICO paperwork confirms that they simply chose not to confront the power of the newspapers, recording that a senior barrister told them that although there was evidence to support a prosecution of the press, the prospect of Fleet Street fighting them in a series of expensive pre-trial hearings persuaded them to accept the barrister’s advice that ‘the cost would be excessive both to investigate and prosecute’.
Total number of journalists interviewed: zero.
Operation Glade was a spin-off from Motorman. Searching through Whittamore’s paperwork, the ICO soon found evidence that the network had a source with access to Scotland Yard’s sensitive computer records. They handed their evidence to the Metropolitan Police, whose anti-corruption command in August 2003 set up Glade and raided Whittamore for a second time. Glade decided to dig deeper, which soon took them back to Rebekah Brooks’s bold admission to the select committee about making payments to serving officers. Police sources claim that they tapped her phone. Brooks has told friends that she believes this happened. Glade also dug into the web of ‘dark arts’ contacts set up by her assistant editor, Greg Miskiw (later to surface in calls to the Guardian from the source known as Mango). By 10 November 2003, an internal Glade log recorded: ‘Evidence exists which implicates a number of journalists in the offence of conspiracy to corrupt.’ Anticipating a hostile reaction from Fleet Street, they called in Dick Fedorcio and one of his press officers for advice about how to handle any media storm. In January 2004, they interviewed as suspects seven journalists from the Mirror Group, the Daily Mail and News International, including Greg Miskiw (just as Mango later alleged). All admitted hiring Whittamore, but denied knowing that he used illegal methods to obtain his information. In March 2004, Glade sent a file to the CPS, who decided there was insufficient evidence to justify a charge against any of them.
Total number of journalists interviewed: seven. Total journalists prosecuted: zero.
In December 2004, twenty-one months after publicly admitting that her journalists had paid police officers in the past, Rebekah Brooks dined at the exclusive Ivy restaurant in London with the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens.
In November 2005, there was a strange and notorious incident when Rebekah Brooks was arrested after her husband, the TV actor Ross Kemp, reported that she had assaulted him. She was held overnight in a cell. According to unconfirmed police sources, she was released in the morning without being interviewed, an apparent breach of normal procedure.
And then in early 2006 there was Operation Caryatid, Scotland Yard’s inquiry into the hacking at the News of the World – an inquiry, we now know, that uncovered very much more than was ever admitted when Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed.
While the court and the world were told of only eight victims, the reality was that, in a brief and superficial search of the 11,000 pages of paperwork seized from Mulcaire’s office, detectives had found the names of 418 people. A senior Caryatid officer, DCI Keith Surtees, had no doubt what this meant, recording in his daily log on 10 August 2006: ‘I take the view that the research work is and has been undertaken with the intention of eventually obtaining access to voicemail messages.’ If they had completed a thorough search of the seized material, they would have found that it contained references to 6,349 people who had been targeted by Mulcaire over the previous five years. They also said nothing public about the audio recordings of 745 hacked messages which they found in Mulcaire’s possession including some which had been left by David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary and ultimately responsible for Scotland Yard.
And while Goodman alone from the News of the World faced prosecution, Caryatid found clear clues that other journalists were involved. Having noticed that Mulcaire wrote ‘Clive’ in the top left-hand corner of his notes whenever he was working for Goodman, Caryatid went on to find twenty-eight other names written in the same position on his notes about non-royal targets, including the first names of Greg Miskiw, Ian Edmondson, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup. Studying Mulcaire’s phone records, they observed a regular pattern, that the investigator would call the paper, hack a target’s voicemail and then call the paper again. The implication was clear.
It was not just that detectives had reason to believe that others at the paper were receiving hacked material from their investigator; Caryatid had also discovered that journalists themselves were probably listening to voicemail. They had uncovered phone company records which showed that on hundreds of occasions, target phones had been accessed from two particular numbers which belonged to News International. They established that these were ‘hub’ numbers, a billing arrangement which allowed the company to collate numerous handsets and landline extensions into one bill with one collective number. A Caryatid detective sergeant, Mark Maberly, later told Leveson that he had identified three News of the World journalists he would like to have questioned.
Scotland Yard opted not only to stay silent about these findings, they also chose not to mention two significant facts about their inquiry. The first was that they had been obstructed repeatedly by News International. This started in brazen form on the day Clive Goodman was arrested in August 2006, when they sent a team of specialist officers to the News of the World to use their standard power to search the premises of anybody who has been arrested for an indictable offence. As four officers started to collect paperwork from Goodman’s desk, they were confronted by executives who argued that they had no right to search a journalist’s property, which has some special protections in law. The officers hesitated. Somebody called in a couple of photographers who started taking
pictures. The inspector in charge reported that he feared they would be attacked. Outside the building, more officers were barred from getting through the front door.
Three News International lawyers turned up, took the four officers into a conference room and persuaded them to stop searching Goodman’s desk and, in particular, not to seize his computer or the contents of his locked personal safe. The police argued that nevertheless they must be allowed to search the accounts department, which contained material that was not journalistic. They went to do so but, according to evidence at the Leveson Inquiry, the managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, joined the lawyers and physically blocked them. The raid was abandoned.
Later in the inquiry, Caryatid wrote to News International to ask them to hand over a list of material, including records of Mulcaire’s work; information from Clive Goodman’s computer and safe; and the detail of which extensions and handsets had made calls via the ‘hub’ numbers, as well as the owners of numbers which had been called by Mulcaire before and after he accessed a target’s voicemail. Through their lawyers, News International agreed to co-operate but then failed to hand over every item, with one exception. They disclosed details of the total of £12,300 which Clive Goodman had paid in cash to Mulcaire, which had been recorded internally as payments to the non-existent source called David Alexander. This proved to be the cornerstone of News International’s cover-up.
UK law allows police to go to court for a production order to compel journalists to hand over evidence if they fail to co-operate with an inquiry, and Caryatid had enclosed a draft order in their letter. The officer who dealt with this, Detective Sergeant Mark Maberly, later told Leveson that he suspected he was being ‘fobbed off’ by News International. Leveson himself concluded that the company were offering only the ‘veneer of co-operation’. But senior officers chose to take no further action. The draft production order was never used.