Hack Attack

by Nick Davies

  So judgement was entered in Miller’s favour. She won – and News International were delighted. In principle, there was nothing to stop them doing the same with just about any case which any of the lawyers might bring. Murdoch’s company could start by opposing them and might well get some of them thrown out. But any case which appeared to have a real chance of coming to trial could be killed simply by surrendering. With dozens of cases queuing up in the background, this could cost a great deal of money, and the newspaper might suffer a large dent to its reputation, but its individual journalists and executives (and owners) need no longer fear exposure in the civil courts.

  There was a similar problem with Tamsin Allen’s application for a judicial review of the original police inquiry. It was going too well to succeed. In the High Court on 23 May, there was an extraordinary hearing, which I tried to describe in the Guardian:

  The Royal Courts of Justice have heard hundreds of professional criminals claim that the police are bent. Yesterday, however, it was a respectable group of public figures including three Cabinet ministers and a former police chief who claimed that Scotland Yard had twisted the truth and buried the evidence in their case. In a series of withering attacks, the Metropolitan Police were accused of misleading the High Court, Parliament and the public over the phone-hacking scandal; and of keeping hundreds, possibly thousands of victims in the dark in a way which shielded Rupert Murdoch’s News International from embarrassment and expensive legal settlements.

  The former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, and the former Media Secretary, Tessa Jowell, had joined the former Europe minister, Chris Bryant, and the former deputy assistant commissioner, Brian Paddick, in asking the court to agree that High Court judges should review the original police inquiry. The real sting for the police was that in the face of this unusually prestigious attack on their behaviour, they were forced to admit what their barrister gently described as ‘some operational shortcomings’.

  It emerged that when finally (and very quietly) John Yates’s crew had searched the material seized from Glenn Mulcaire in August 2006, they had overlooked numerous documents and scanned others on to their database in a form which was not searchable, with the result that Operation Weeting were having to start the job all over again. And not only had they sent completely misleading letters to those who suspected they were victims, according to Hugh Tomlinson, they had also submitted a formal response to this judicial review which contained ‘patent factual inaccuracies’. In a written submission to the court, Tamsin Allen wrote that the effect of Scotland Yard’s failure had been to protect News International from expense and embarrassment: ‘We share the disquiet of the public about the police’s motivation for playing down the scale of unlawful behaviour and the way in which News International has, as a result, been shielded.’

  For me, sitting at the back of the court and scribbling notes, certainly it was reassuring to hear the Guardian’s coverage being vindicated (and to hear John Yates’s threats and denials put firmly in their place). But it was also frustrating. The real value of the judicial review for me was that it would force the police to hand over exciting bundles of internal paperwork which might reveal what had gone on behind the scenes. Why had they behaved like this? Had they had any kind of secret contact with News International? Who exactly had been involved in all these lousy decisions? And now it looked like this paperwork would never come out in open court because, even though this particular hearing agreed that the judicial review should happen at some point, we all knew that it would not. The purpose of a judicial review is to seek a remedy for some failure in public administration. In this case, the remedy would be a new investigation – and we already had that, in Operation Weeting. At the next stage, the police would surely and easily be able to argue that there was no longer any justification for the courts to hold the review.

  Just as the victory in the civil actions meant that cases like Sienna Miller’s would never actually be heard in open court, our success in forcing Scotland Yard to run a real inquiry ironically also meant that they would not now have to disclose the inner history of their failure.

  Meanwhile, I knew, News Corp were waiting impatiently for Ofcom to decide whether the BSkyB deal could be completed.

  * * *

  We still had two big shots to get to the truth – Operation Weeting, and whatever else we could come up with at the Guardian.

  Weeting were going strong. On 14 April, they made their third arrest, of the former news editor, Whispering Jimmy Weatherup. This produced a couple of interesting sidelines.

  First, I discovered that a reporter in the Guardian newsroom, Amelia Hill, had a brilliant source who knew exactly what Weeting were up to. As a result, she was able to report that, while News International were claiming to want to co-operate with police, the reality was that, as soon as they heard that Weatherup had been arrested, several executives went to his desk in the office, shovelled everything they could find into bin bags and then handed them over to Burton Copeland, the same law firm which Andy Coulson had hired five years earlier after the arrest of Clive Goodman.

  Weeting officers had then turned up to search Weatherup’s desk and were furious at this blatant obstruction. There had been a showdown during which, according to Amelia Hill’s source, the police made it clear that they regarded this as a criminal offence and they would arrest those responsible and even search the offices of Burton Copeland if the contents of Weatherup’s desk were not returned. News International blinked and told the lawyers to hand back the bin bags.

  I had never met Amelia Hill, but clearly she was in touch with somebody very useful. I contacted her. She agreed to work with me. I didn’t ask her who the source was. I guessed it was either an officer on Operation Weeting, or somebody so senior at Scotland Yard that they knew what Weeting were up to. We’ll call him Jingle.

  Immediately, he proved his value on a second sideline. Speaking to another officer from Weeting, Mark Lewis had picked up a hint that there was something odd about the place where Weatherup had been arrested, something which we needed to be aware of. This was a mysterious tease, which might have led nowhere, but Lewis asked me if I could find out more. I asked Amelia Hill to ask Jingle, who explained that Weeting had gone to Weatherup’s marital home to arrest him and been told that he no longer lived there. They had gone to the flat which was his new base and found that this was not much more than a place where he stored some belongings. Finally, they had traced him to the home of a young woman, with whom he was having a relationship – and this young woman happened to work for Mishcon de Reya, the law firm where Charlotte Harris was now acting for several dozen hacking victims. I could see why a police officer would be worried and I warned Harris, who was able to establish that the young woman posed no threat to her work.

  Over the weeks, I stayed in touch with Amelia Hill, who is tall and dark with a husky voice from the school of Marlene Dietrich, and, through her, Jingle supplied a stream of invaluable intelligence. Its first effect was to encourage us to trust Operation Weeting. Jingle said that they had been told not to worry about causing damage to the reputation of Scotland Yard and that there were officers in Weeting who thought John Yates had behaved so badly that he should resign. He said they had no doubt that Andy Coulson had known all about the crime in his newsroom, that 50% of the hacking had been done from phones belonging to the News of the World. They had seized masses of new material during the arrests of Edmondson, Thurlbeck and Weatherup; they were consulting prosecutors about the possibility of busting somebody at News International or Burton Copeland for obstructing them in the search of Weatherup’s desk; they were thinking of prosecuting Glenn Mulcaire for a second time.

  At one meeting, in a café near the High Court, Hill told me that Weeting were having trouble dealing with Greg Miskiw who, according to their analysis of Mulcaire’s notes, had commissioned some 68% of the hacking. They wanted to arrest him, but Miskiw – who was often short of morals but never short of cunning –
had left the country. He had sent police a message that he would return in August, but they didn’t trust him. They put Miskiw’s name on a national database as a wanted man.

  Jingle also made it very clear that News International were not helping Weeting. What most worried them was that it looked like somebody in the Murdoch team had been systematically deleting their archive of emails. They had stumbled on this when a detective was talking to a technician working for News International, who mentioned an occasion when an executive had told him to delete a vast tranche of messages. According to Jingle, the technician had refused to do so, and the executive had then reached round to the keyboard of the technician’s computer and deleted the messages himself. Jingle said that they believed that one particularly enormous deletion had taken place in January, just as News International were handing over three of Ian Edmondson’s old emails and claiming to be helping the police, just as Operation Weeting were beginning their inquiry.

  But in March, Weeting had brought in IT wizards who reckoned they could retrieve them. Jingle said they now believed that the total number of emails which had survived the programme of deletion was less than the total number which should have been available for the account of just one senior journalist. He was talking about the destruction of tens of millions of messages, maybe hundreds of millions. That explained why later that month News International’s lawyers had had to grovel in court, admitting that contrary to all the company’s previous claims, they did store messages for more than six months.

  For my part, I kept throwing whatever I could find at Murdoch’s walls. We disclosed that Weeting wanted to question Rebekah Brooks and that her phone had been tapped back in 2003/4, when Operation Glade were investigating her claim to the media select committee that her journalists had paid police in the past. This coincided with an interesting contribution from the actor Hugh Grant.

  Grant’s car broke down in Kent and, by sheer fluke, he was spotted by Paul McMullan, formerly of the News of the World and now running a pub in Dover. McMullan grabbed some pictures and then offered Grant a lift, which he reluctantly accepted. As they drove, McMullan chattered on so much about his work as a tabloid journalist that Grant, whose private life had been ransacked by the tabloids over the years, decided to try a little stunt.

  Some weeks later, he turned up in McMullan’s pub with a concealed recorder and, using a tabloid method to catch a tabloid man, he got McMullan talking and secretly taped him insisting that Rebekah Brooks must have known about the hacking. It didn’t amount to serious evidence, but a transcript of the conversation was published by the New Statesman magazine in the same week that we ran our story about Scotland Yard planning to question her.

  This had no impact at all at News International, where Brooks remained in charge of their internal investigation.

  We disclosed that finally, twelve months after I had first asked under the Freedom of Information Act, Scotland Yard were admitting that during their original inquiry they had warned only twenty-eight of Mulcaire’s victims; and, since our Gordon Taylor story, they had warned only eight more. By contrast, Weeting were now contacting hundreds. My remaining small respect for Andy Hayman and John Yates disappeared down a drain. I don’t know whether it was a coincidence that at about this time, a friendly police contact told me of an email written by a senior Scotland Yard press officer, describing me as ‘a man without compassion or a soul’.

  Politically more important, we also disclosed the extraordinary case of Dennis Rice, a veteran Fleet Street reporter who had been shown evidence by Weeting that, when he was working for the Mail on Sunday, filing stories from the 2006 football World Cup in Germany, the News of the World were hacking his phone, apparently trying to steal his work. Evidently Mulcaire had also obtained the password which Rice used to access the Mail on Sunday’s internal computer system, potentially allowing the News of the World to monitor all of their email traffic and all of the stories they were preparing to publish.

  Our story noted that this was a particularly sensitive claim since it could start to break the alliance of silence which had seen most Fleet Street papers refuse to investigate the scandal. We recorded that former journalists from the News of the World were claiming that the paper had also tried to steal stories from the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People. In the same vein, I was hearing rumours that Rebekah Brooks had approached a private investigator and commissioned him to dig out evidence that other Fleet Street newspapers had been hacking voicemail in an apparent attempt to divert fire from News International.

  I had several other plots running. Pursuing them, I kept coming across the footprints of a BBC journalist called Glenn Campbell, who had worked on the Panorama programme which exposed Alex Marunchak and the hacking of Ian Hurst’s computer. We decided to pool resources. We started to collect information about News International’s targeting of Gordon Brown. I already had the tape of Barry Beardall, the fraudster who worked for the Sunday Times, blagging confidential details about Brown from a London law firm, which Rusbridger had used to stop the Sunday Times publishing their smear story back in July 2009. Through Tom Watson, who was in regular contact with Brown, we started to get more examples, and we began looking into the controversial occasion in November 2006 when the Sun had breached the medical confidentiality of Brown’s infant son, Fraser, by splashing across their front page the fact that he had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

  Campbell and I also worked together to bring out more of the activities of Jonathan Rees. It made no sense that Weeting were digging into Mulcaire’s work but ignoring Rees’s years of crime for Fleet Street – and the mass of paperwork, computer records and bugging transcripts which had been collected over the years by various inquiries into the murder of Daniel Morgan. Campbell had much better police contacts than I did. Between us, we started to assemble more and more detailed evidence of Rees’s activity. The two of us held several meetings with Tom Watson who sent a summary of Rees’s activity to the head of Operation Weeting, Sue Akers. On 17 May, she wrote back to him, to say that they were ‘assessing your allegations along with others we have received to consider a way forward’. She added that Rees might be outside Weeting’s official terms of reference. We translated that to mean that she was willing to investigate Rees if Scotland Yard would allow her to. We decided to give her bosses a couple of helpful nudges.

  First of all, Campbell and I prepared stories. Together we had identified a whole raft of new people who had been targeted by Rees – politicians, senior police and more members of the royal household. Perhaps the most eye-catching was Kate Middleton, who had been Prince William’s girlfriend when Rees targeted her but who was now married to him and in line to become queen. The oddest was John Yates, who had somehow wandered into Rees’s field of fire.

  And with all of this, the really crucial point was that Scotland Yard already knew it. More than that, just as they had sat on the Mulcaire evidence and failed to act, Campbell and I knew that they were sitting on several hundred thousand pages of evidence which had been seized from Rees by the various investigations into the murder of Daniel Morgan. Knowing all this, we made two other moves.

  First, we agreed that the day before Campbell and I put out our stories, Tom Watson would stand up during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons and pitch David Cameron a question about this. Second, we decided to share the story with a rival newspaper, the Independent. Although they had spent the first fifteen months of this saga attacking the Guardian, there had been a change of editor and a change of line, and now it looked as if they were willing to try to dig out the truth.

  On 7 June, Tom Watson arranged for me to meet Martin Hickman, one of the Independent’s senior reporters and an old university friend of his. Not for the first time in this affair, I found myself handing over information to a rival reporter. Hickman was good – attentive and sharp – and he agreed that he would hold back until Campbell and I were ready to fire.
/>
  On 8 June, in the House of Commons, Watson stood up and gave the prime minister a summary of what we had found, adding: ‘Yet the head of Operation Weeting has recently written to me to explain that this evidence may be outside the inquiry’s terms of reference. Prime Minister, I believe powerful forces are involved in a cover-up.’

  Cameron had little choice. He replied – in this most public of venues – that the police were free to go wherever the evidence might take them. ‘There are no terms of reference as far as I am concerned. The police are able to look at any evidence and all evidence they can find.’

  On 9 June, the Guardian, the BBC and the Independent all ran stories disclosing the detail behind Tom Watson’s question. ‘Pressure is building on the Metropolitan Police to expand their phone-hacking inquiry to include a notorious private investigator.’ Within days, we heard that Scotland Yard had set up a small team, to be known as Operation Tuleta, and they had been told to search through the vast reservoir of material they held on Jonathan Rees so that they could decide whether to launch a full inquiry into his activities.

  Ten days later, Scotland Yard was forced to set up a third operation. This one was called Elveden and its object was to investigate the alleged payment of bribes to police officers and other officials by journalists from the News of the World. According to News International’s version of events, this was all their achievement. They claimed that they had discovered emails which appeared to contain evidence of corruption and dutifully had passed them to Scotland Yard. So, News International were on the side of law and order. Jingle told a different tale.

  According to him (and to other friendly sources), it was the police who had forced these emails out of News International’s hands. Like me, Weeting detectives had read on the media select committee’s website the letter from the posh London law firm Harbottle & Lewis who had reviewed 2,500 internal News of the World emails and found they contained no evidence to support Clive Goodman’s allegations of crime in the newsroom. As Jingle told it, detectives had guessed that the lawyers’ copies might have survived the mass deletion of emails and had told News International to hand them over, which eventually they had done on the morning of 20 June. They appeared to show Andy Coulson authorising the payment of cash to police officers, and so Sue Akers had another inquiry to manage.