Hack Attack

by Nick Davies

  End of that meeting. End of that tactic. And if there was any doubt about Scotland Yard’s attitude, it cleared a couple of weeks later when the commissioner himself, Sir Paul Stephenson, went to see Alan Rusbridger with Dick Fedorcio by his side. Sir Paul explained that my coverage of the hacking story was exaggerated and incorrect. Evidently he expected the editor to tell me to stop digging. To his great credit, Rusbridger ignored him.

  With nothing but obstruction from Scotland Yard, I decided to use the Freedom of Information Act to try to force them to disclose something of the evidence they were sitting on. I thought I would start with something simple and unthreatening, so I asked them to look at the database which they had now created from the material which they had seized in August 2006 and to give me five numbers. How many names, mobile numbers, PIN codes, voicemail recordings and voicemail transcripts were recorded in that database?

  Their response was as unhelpful as ever. They received my request on 1 December 2009. The law allowed them twenty working days to reply. So, allowing for weekends and Christmas, I would receive an answer by 31 December. No chance. I received nothing by that date, not even a note to say that there was a delay. I made calls, sent emails, made more calls, pointed out that they were breaking the law, lodged a formal complaint and finally, four weeks later than the limit prescribed by law, on 28 January 2010, they sent me just two of the five numbers I had asked for.

  There were ninety-one PIN codes in the seized material, they admitted. That was very significant. Since Mulcaire was a man who specialised in hacking voicemail, it suggested that he had had at least ninety-one victims. Why else would he have obtained their PIN codes? But, since we knew that the vast majority of people did not bother to change the factory settings on their phone, it implied that he had probably had a great many more victims. Certainly not ‘a handful’.

  The police gave me one other answer – that the only example of transcribed voicemail messages in the seized material was already in the public domain, i.e. the email for Neville Thurlbeck. I wasn’t sure whether to believe that. But if it was true, it made it even more difficult to understand why they had failed to show this unique document to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2006.

  I lodged an appeal in search of the remaining three numbers I had asked for. In the meantime, I had been trying to follow up on the police claim in their memo to the select committee, that they had asked the phone companies to trace other victims of Mulcaire and Goodman and to take appropriate action. I approached the four big mobile phone companies.

  One of them – T-mobile – said the police had never been in touch with them at all. Which suggested that the police memo was not entirely reliable. The other three phone companies declined to help. So I sent the three of them a deliberately provocative email, suggesting that I would write a news story about their refusal to disclose how many of their customers had been victims and how many of them had been warned: ‘The fact that you have now chosen to suppress these numbers clearly raises the possibility that the company failed to contact and warn a significant proportion of those whose voicemail was targeted or accessed.’

  That jogged one of them into action: O2 replied that they had identified ‘about forty’ victims and had warned them all. Armed with that, I went back to the other two companies and told them that O2 were co-operating, so if they carried on concealing, it would look more and more like they had something to hide. Vodafone then replied that they had found a ‘broadly similar’ number of victims to O2 and that they had warned them ‘as appropriate’ – whatever that meant. Orange finally replied that they had found forty-five victims but had warned none of them – because the police had never asked them to. A total of some 120 victims, most of whom evidently had never been warned in spite of what Scotland Yard had told the select committee.

  The numbers were very significant, because the true scale was likely to be much greater: these were victims who had been hacked from phone numbers used by Mulcaire and Goodman, but they didn’t include those who had been hacked by other journalists. And the phone companies keep call data for only twelve months, but journalists who had worked at the News of the World were saying that Mulcaire and various reporters had been hacking phones for at least five years.

  On 2 February 2010, the Guardian published a front-page story revealing the 120 extra victims found by the phone companies and the ninety-one PIN codes which had been obtained by Glenn Mulcaire and which had never previously been disclosed by Scotland Yard. I wrote that this directly contradicted the ‘handful of victims’ in the official version of events which was being promoted by the News of the World and the police. The story also pointed out that this was further evidence that Scotland Yard had breached their agreement with the Director of Public Prosecutions that they would warn ‘all potential victims’. They also appeared to have misled the select committee by submitting a memo which claimed that ‘for anybody else that may have been affected’, they had made an agreement with the phone companies to research their customers and to take appropriate action.

  Scotland Yard did not like this. The story got Yates into trouble with the media select committee, whose chairman, John Whittingdale, wanted to know why on earth Yates had not told them about the ninety-one PIN codes when he had appeared before them in September. Yates explained that in September, they had not known about the PIN codes – thus accidentally confirming that it had taken Scotland Yard more than three years to get round to searching the material they had seized in August 2006.

  The Yard’s head of communications, Dick Fedorcio, wrote to Alan Rusbridger to complain that my story ‘once again presents an inaccurate position from our perspective and continues to imply that this case has not been handled properly and that we are party to a conspiracy’. He followed up by visiting Rusbridger once more, on 19 February 2010, this time with John Yates at his side. I was able to get a very accurate account of what went on.

  Yates told Rusbridger that he was ‘mystified’ that he could not get his message across. He then proceeded to recite the RIPA bollocks which I felt sure was a false version of the law. ‘I managed to fall out with Nick slightly,’ he said. ‘First time I’ve ever fallen out with a journalist. Nick thinks I’m being pedantic.’ That wasn’t the word I would have used. ‘It’s just the law,’ he chorused. ‘That’s RIPA.’ Later he added that on this basis, it was correct to say that there had been ‘only a handful’ of victims. But when Rusbridger pushed him to explain exactly what he was saying, Yates agreed that if you set aside the question of how RIPA should be interpreted, the simple reality was that there had been ‘a mass attempt at penetrating people’s voicemail systematically’ by Goodman and Mulcaire and ‘gross systematic breaches of privacy’ and ‘a systematic process of interception’. Yates added: ‘It was dirty business, it is unpleasant.’ At last! He was confirming the scale of the hacking – and yet he had never once attempted to say anything like this to the press, public or Parliament.

  He went on to claim that most of the ninety-one people whose PIN codes had been found in the Mulcaire material had been contacted by the phone companies, i.e. they were among the 120 victims identified by those companies. This was very surprising since that same week, Scotland Yard’s legal department had been writing to Mark Lewis saying that the police did not even know how many people had been contacted by the phone companies, let alone their identities.

  He conceded that it was not ideal that Andy Hayman had gone to work for News International. ‘Unfortunately, we have no control over what he does and doesn’t do. Is it distasteful? Some people say it probably is.’ But he tried to claim that the original inquiry had treated the investigation very seriously and had used ‘significant resources’ and ‘very experienced investigators’. Yet they had failed to analyse the evidence which they seized, failed to persuade the News of the World to hand over internal paperwork, failed to interview a single other suspect, and failed to inform the potential victims in spite of agreeing with prosecutors that they
would do so.

  If I had any doubt about whether John Yates was a reliable source of information for my editor, that vanished when he came to the subject of the former deputy prime minister, John Prescott. Our original story about Gordon Taylor had said that Prescott was a target for Mulcaire. I now knew, from John Prescott’s son, David, that in December 2009, after five months of pestering, Prescott had finally wrung out of Scotland Yard confirmation that he was indeed named as a target in the Mulcaire paperwork, on two different invoices, dated – exactly as we had said in our story – spring 2006. David Prescott had asked me not to publish this while his father’s lawyers decided how to handle it. Now, two months later, John Yates calmly told Alan Rusbridger that there was no evidence at all to suggest Prescott had been a target. His exact words were: ‘He doesn’t appear anywhere in Goodman’s material or in Mulcaire’s material. There is no reference to John Prescott at all.’

  Rusbridger ignored everything that Yates told him.

  There was one other important meeting that week in February 2010. Late one evening, Rusbridger phoned me and started by saying that he sometimes felt as though he were living in a Stieg Larsson novel, full of endless plots and dark machinations. At short notice, he had been summoned to see a senior member of the Labour government and had found himself confronted by a minister brandishing a copy of the Guardian, pointing feverishly to my story about the ninety-one PIN codes and the 120 victims identified by the phone companies, insisting (as if Rusbridger did not know it) that this was very important, that Murdoch was out to destroy the governments of Barack Obama in the USA and of Kevin Rudd in Australia and just possibly this story could stop him doing the same to Gordon Brown’s. This source had suggested to Rusbridger that the prime minister himself may have had his bank and phone records penetrated by Murdoch’s journalists. He had ended by telling him to watch out. All very Stieg Larsson.

  The minister had offered to help. I suggested that Rusbridger ask him to appoint a middleman, some trusted official who would meet me and become a point of contact in the hope that I could give them information which might be of use and (far more important for a selfish reporter) that they could squeeze information for me out of the police or even out of the Security Service, MI5. This happened very fast.

  Within forty-eight hours, I was sitting in the coffee lounge of the Thistle hotel next to Victoria station with the middleman, a very bright and likeable character whom Rusbridger and I took to calling the Emissary. Our meeting was highly discreet, secret even, not because we were doing anything wrong but because, if News International found out that the Guardian was linking up – even indirectly – with a government minister, they would make propaganda and claim that we were part of a political plot. We might as well paint bullseyes on our backsides and invite them to kick us. I gave the Emissary a two-hour tutorial on crime at News International during which his phone rang two or three times, as the senior minister with whom he worked called in to check on progress. ‘He’s very excited about me seeing you,’ he explained to me.

  I gave him a short shopping list of questions to try to answer via his own contacts in government.

  We were getting stronger.

  * * *

  While this was going on, I had decided to write a pamphlet, to be published in the run-up to the general election, which was widely predicted to happen in May 2010. It was to be called Hack Attack and it would summarise all of the evidence that Andy Coulson must have known that his journalists had been breaking the law and, therefore, that the man who looked set to be the next prime minister’s close aide must have lied to Parliament when he gave evidence to the media select committee in July.

  With the help of a researcher, I now had material from more journalists who had worked for the News of the World, each of whom independently agreed that, while the hacking might have been a secret from the outside world, inside their office, plenty of people knew, including Andy Coulson.

  I got to know a couple of these journalists quite well. There was a lot of mutual suspicion at first. I heard from the Guardian that a former News of the World journalist called Paul McMullan had written a book which might disclose evidence of illegal activity and which he might want to publicise in the paper. I called him, and he was a model of surly resentment. He suggested I was taping the call. Legally, I would be allowed to; in fact, I was not. He said the Guardian was wrong to chase after journalists. Journalists were heroes, he said. Privacy was for bad people, a way of hiding their badness. That was all. He hadn’t finished writing the book, he didn’t know what it would say, he ended the conversation. For all his sullen resistance, McMullan was interesting: if he really believed all that about privacy, he might well decide that there was no reason to hide what had been going on at the paper. So I stuck with him.

  Over the weeks, I had several more phone calls with him, each a little longer than the last, each a little more relaxed. Then we met up and spent an afternoon in Brighton and – on the strict condition that this was all off the record – he opened up. McMullan had spent seven years on the paper, from 1994 when Piers Morgan was editor, through the next editor, Phil Hall, until he left in October 2001 when Rebekah Brooks was editor and Andy Coulson was her deputy. He was quite open about the fact that he had spent his time there swimming down a river of alcohol and cocaine and ended up in the Priory clinic, which had only reinforced his fundamentalist Fleet Street convictions: ‘What I was taught in the Priory, is that you should confess everything, no such thing as privacy. Adolf Hitler wants privacy, Jesus doesn’t.’

  He was almost evangelical in his enthusiasm for the dark arts. He had risen from being a reporter to a deputy features editor under Brooks, and in that role, he had dealt routinely with Steve Whittamore and a couple of other PIs: ‘I must have authorised hundreds of technically illegal operations. I say it’s for the greater good.’ He gave me the example of an actress whose medical records he accessed in order to be able to expose the fact that she had had an abortion.

  Coulson, he said, knew all about it. As deputy editor, one of Coulson’s tasks had been to set up a new investigations unit, built around McMullan and Mazher Mahmood, who specialised in dressing up as the ‘fake sheikh’ and tricking people into embarrassing revelations which he covertly recorded. ‘How can Coulson possibly say he didn’t know what was going on with PIs? He was the brains behind the investigations department, that was his first task. How can he say he had no idea about how it works?’

  This was all very strong; but he refused to say anything on the record. I could quote it as the claims of an unnamed source, which would be interesting but it would have no impact. I needed evidence which nobody could deny. Which was why I spent a lot of time with a former News of the World reporter I traced, whom I will call York. She knew plenty about Glenn Mulcaire.

  She explained that while Mulcaire was not much of a secret in the newsroom and even turned up to Christmas parties, there was only a limited number of people who could actually commission him. She named Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck, Jimmy Weatherup and Ian Edmondson. I knew enough now about the News of the World to see the pattern: all four of them had been news editors. If that was correct, it put Mulcaire right at the heart of the newspaper’s work: it was part of the news editor’s job to tell him what to do.

  York also made sense of something which had been said by Mango, the anonymous source who had called the Guardian after the Gordon Taylor story. He had claimed that Greg Miskiw’s network of dark arts involved a private investigator called ‘Boyle’ who had been paying off police officers. Wrong spelling. It was ‘Boyall’. I knew John Boyall had been part of Steve Whittamore’s network and had ended up in the dock alongside him, but what York explained was that Boyall was yet another PI who had worked direct for the News of the World: in the late 1990s, she said, Boyall had been Greg Miskiw’s main man until he made the mistake of introducing Miskiw to his assistant, Glenn Mulcaire, who had then replaced him as the News of the World’s favourite gumshoe.
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  York seemed determined to help and agreed to talk to some of the key suspects – Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck, Ian Edmondson and others – and to tape the conversations in the hope that they would disclose evidence. It didn’t work. She fed back a few useful titbits, but she fell into a frustrating pattern, reporting that she had spoken to key people yet always apologising that they had failed to say anything of interest.

  Around that time, I found a sports report in the News of the World, dated 18 August 2002, which harked back to Mulcaire’s early career as a footballer, describing the first game ever played by one of his teams, AFC Wimbledon: ‘Glenn Mulcaire – the man they call Trigger – had been seemingly ruled out of the club’s Combined Counties Premier Division debut with cracked ribs. But Trigger, part of our special investigations team, was steam-rollered into action just ten minutes before kick-off.’ So the humble sports reporter knew about Mulcaire’s work for the paper, even though the then deputy editor – Coulson – reckoned he had never heard of him.

  Similarly, I came across an interesting paragraph in an unpublished book which had been written by a keen fan of AFC Wimbledon (locally known as ‘the Dons’). It took the form of a diary. This was the entry for 4 March 2003, shortly after Coulson had become editor of the paper, describing how Mulcaire turned up to watch a game with his family in tow: ‘He was getting back to a bit of Dons reality after being wined and dined at the Pont de la Tour by Murdoch executives the previous evening to plan some News International skulduggery. Not a good man to give your mobile number to isn’t our Trigger. One call and he’ll tell you everyone you’ve spoken to in the last couple of months.’ So this ordinary football fan knew what Mulcaire was up to with Murdoch’s team, yet still we were expected to believe that Coulson succeeded in knowing nothing.

  It was steaming, screaming obvious that Coulson must have known, but the frustrating fact was that I had no smoking gun. The case against him was compelling yet not conclusive and, since UK libel law remains a relentless enemy of truth without proof, I decided that my planned pamphlet would simply provoke another blizzard of lies from Coulson and News International and achieve nothing, and so I abandoned the project. I would have to find proof which they could not deny.