Hack Attack

by Nick Davies

  The picture was blurred. There was evidence that Neville Thurlbeck had told Surrey police at the time that he had personally got hold of Milly’s PIN number and that somebody may have listened to one of her messages long before Mulcaire was instructed. Other evidence revealed that Surrey police had switched off the automatic deletion system on the fourth day after her disappearance and yet some voicemail appeared to have been manually deleted after that, during the period when the News of the World certainly were eavesdropping. Surrey police at the time suspected that the paper were deleting messages. Indeed, three weeks after we published our story, Surrey officers had visited the Dowlers to tell them that, although they had no direct evidence on the point, they thought Mrs Dowler’s belief that the paper had caused her moment of false hope was ‘completely reasonable and absolutely possible’. But the bottom line was simple: the new evidence cast serious doubt on part of our story. The fact that the evidence had not been found until months after our story was published made no difference.

  On 12 December 2011, counsel for the Metropolitan Police at the Leveson Inquiry made a short statement concluding that it was unlikely that the News of the World had been responsible for Mrs Dowler’s moment of false hope.

  There duly followed several days of high-energy monstering, which was described by the Dowlers’ counsel, David Sherborne, as ‘a storm of misreporting’. The serious doubt was converted into a certainty that we had got it wrong and even that we had done so deliberately. Richard Caseby told a House of Lords committee that Alan Rusbridger had ‘effectively sexed up his investigation into phone-hacking’. A Sunday Times columnist said baldly that the Guardian had ‘made it up’. The problem with one part of the story became, in the mouth of Kelvin MacKenzie, the claim that the whole Dowler story had been wrong. The impact of that one angle was held to have been responsible for the creation of the Leveson Inquiry; and for the closure of the News of the World, with Caseby declaring that ‘the Guardian’s false allegation directly resulted in 200 people being thrown out of work’.

  By contrast, Weeting sent a detailed report to the Leveson Inquiry advising that ‘reaching a definitive conclusion is not, and may never be possible’ and, months later, Lord Justice Leveson wrote: ‘The fact remains that the News of the World hacked the phone of a dead schoolgirl. The revelation of that story rightly shocked the public conscience in a way that other stories of phone-hacking may not have, but it also gave momentum to growing calls for light to be shed on an unethical and unlawful practice of which there were literally thousands of victims. In that context, whether or not News of the World journalists had caused the “false hope” moment is almost irrelevant.’

  But at the time, it was frustrating and frightening to be at the centre of such a storm of aggression, particularly as they had a point. Beneath the exaggeration and hostility, the fact was that I had stated as a fact something which now appeared likely to be wrong. That was bad enough. Worse, I had exposed the Guardian to precisely the kind of attack which until then we had generally avoided with such success.

  Walking through my home town at the end of that week, I noticed an elderly woman in a long brown coat beckoning me from the other side of the street. I’d never seen her before but I crossed over and said hallo. To my surprise, she gently reached her hands up on to my shoulders and said something very warm about my work on the hacking. I thanked her and said we’d made a few nasty enemies, who were queuing up to give us a serious kicking right now, and, with her hands still resting on my shoulders, she looked up into my eyes, smiled and said quietly: ‘Well, fuck ’em.’ Which seemed like good advice.

  The full story of the News of the World’s activity in the Dowler case emerged later. It turned out that they had not only used Mulcaire and Whittamore to gather information illegally but that twice they had interfered in the police investigation.

  The first occasion came after they picked up the message from a recruitment agency, apparently offering Milly a job interview. In fact, the agency was trying to contact a Ghanaian woman called Nana, whose phone number differed from Milly’s by only one digit. Instead of alerting police to what they believed was very important evidence, the paper decided to find the missing girl themselves. Neville Thurlbeck led a squad of seven reporters and photographers who staked out the factory where they thought she would go for her interview. When she failed to show up, a woman reporter called the agency, posing as Milly’s mother, to get more information; another journalist called them, claiming to be working with the police; and Stuart Kuttner threatened to destroy the agency if they did not co-operate. It was only when all their efforts to land the story on their own had failed that they chose to tell Surrey police that they believed they knew where the missing girl was. A reporter contacted Surrey police and played the intercepted voicemail down the phone to them, insisting that they confirm the story. Kuttner followed up with a similar email, quoting voicemail messages and insisting that he was ‘110% certain’ that Milly had applied for the job.

  Second, both the News of the World and the Sun told Surrey police they wanted to offer a substantial reward for information about Milly. The police told them this was a bad idea, since they would need to divert manpower to deal with the calls and they feared some of them would come from hoaxers. After weeks of stalemate, senior officers were told that the News of the World planned to go ahead ‘with or without our blessing’. Both papers then offered the reward, generating some 600 calls to Surrey police, none of which led to any significant new line of inquiry.

  Richard Caseby continued his campaign. As the row over the Dowler deletions subsided, Operation Elveden arrested a detective on suspicion of passing information to a newspaper. This turned out to be Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, who was subsequently jailed for trying to sell the News of the World inside information about Scotland Yard’s work on the phone-hacking, but Caseby wrongly assumed that this was somebody who had been helping the Guardian. He sent an email to Rusbridger: ‘Hi Alan. I hear Amelia Hill’s source in Operation Weeting just got busted today. She must be terribly upset – they were ever so close. Some people at the Guardian say much too close.’ He was wrong about that, too.

  In the background, Scotland Yard were dealing with the Management and Standards Committee (MSC) which had been set up by Rupert Murdoch in July 2011 to ‘co-operate fully with all authorities’ in investigating his papers. It was not always easy.

  Voluntarily, early in 2012, the MSC started to review the Sun, and handed over material which led to two group arrests involving ten people who held or had held very senior positions at the paper. There was a backlash led by Trevor Kavanagh who used his Sun column to declare this a witch-hunt against legitimate journalism, adding that ‘there is nothing disreputable and, as far as we know at this point, nothing illegal’. He was wrong. But the subsequent Fleet Street attack on the police was strong enough to persuade Scotland Yard to abandon plans to run another group arrest of Sun journalists and instead to arrest them more discreetly one at a time.

  At the same time, the MSC handed over evidence which led to the arrest of police officers, prison officers and other public officials who were accused of taking bribes from the Sun. Curiously this included Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook. He had been a source for the newspaper but he had never been paid for his help. However, he had become a thorn in News International’s side, complaining about the News of the World surveillance on him when he first became involved in the inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan; suing them for hacking his phone; and offering to testify to the Leveson Inquiry about their links to Jonathan Rees’s network of corruption. Cook was arrested by the Independent Police Complaints Commission after the MSC handed over emails which showed he had supplied information to a reporter from the Sun. At the time of this book’s publication – more than two years after his arrest – prosecutors still had not decided whether he should be charged with any offence.

  Meanwhile, for months, according to minutes of meeting
s between the two sides, News International executives had been asking police nervously whether the company itself might end up in court. In May 2012, after receiving legal advice from prosecutors, the Weeting detectives formally told the MSC that they were investigating the company – and the full co-operation with authorities stopped dead. Police concluded that the Murdoch camp had been handing over material on junior reporters in the hope that this would persuade them not to prosecute the company.

  For several weeks, the MSC refused to provide any more material while a tense series of meetings took place. Minutes suggest that News Corp’s new in-house counsel, Gershon Zweifach, turned on the political pressure to resist a corporate charge, citing the 46,000 people employed by the Murdochs and warning that ‘the downstream effects of a prosecution would be “devastating and apocalyptic”. The US authorities’ reaction would put the whole business at risk.’

  Police began to see some of their requests for information refused or delayed. Material which was handed over now was sometimes heavily redacted, leaving detectives to guess whether it was important. When they asked to see the final report of the MSC review of the Sun, they were told that it did not exist. Some senior officers found this hard to believe and concluded that, if this were true, it might be because News Corp had realised that such a report would be so damning that it would be better not to write it. Scotland Yard also believed that News Corp had changed the MSC’s terms of reference so that their work no longer required them to follow clues into the higher reaches of the company. They were suspicious too that no material was ever handed over about suspect activity at the Sunday Times – the paper which had been so involved in the dark arts that they had hired a specialist, David Connett, to handle them and put him on a freelance contract so that they could disown him if he got caught. Senior police speculated that the MSC had been given a particularly narrow brief for the title. One News Corp source says that, having checked Sun records for the previous ten years, they searched Sunday Times records for only three years, i.e. back to 2008, thus neatly avoiding the Connett phase, which was from July 2003 to July 2005.

  A year later, in May 2013, the tension was continuing, with one very senior officer, Detective Chief Superintendent Gordon Briggs, telling the MSC ‘the higher up the organisation our investigation goes, the more you appear to withdraw co-operation’, while the chair of the MSC, Lord Grabiner, threatened to go to the Cameron government’s Attorney General to protest that any charge brought against the company would be an abuse of legal process.

  * * *

  It was not only the Murdochs and their companies which were exposed. Leveson and the select committees also took the lid off Scotland Yard’s reaction to the Guardian’s stories, revealing the internal machinations of their prolonged failure to tell the truth to press, public and Parliament.

  When John Yates stepped out in front of Scotland Yard on Thursday 9 July 2009, he made a point of saying that he came to the case with an independent mind. He did not say that, like so many of his colleagues, he had a history of dining and drinking with key people from News International including Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson; nor that he was a particularly close friend of Neil Wallis, that they had known each other for ten years, went to football matches together and, just the previous month, had enjoyed one of their regular dinners, at Scalini’s in Chelsea. This mattered, because the Guardian story had suggested explicitly that the police might now have to investigate ‘reporters and the senior executives responsible for them’.

  Yates’s statement that day was riddled with significant omission and falsehood. He said that ‘this case has been the subject of the most careful investigation’ without saying that it had been cut short for want of resources and had failed to pursue the mass of evidence it had collected. He did not mention that the original inquiry had found numerous indicators of the involvement of others at the News of the World; that they had failed to give this to prosecutors; or that a cursory study of the material seized from Mulcaire had identified 418 potential victims.

  When finally he was called to account, Yates’s defence was that he had not known the facts. But to a significant degree, this was his own fault. Before he made his statement, Yates had agreed that Phil Williams, who led the original inquiry, should prepare a detailed memo about the operation. That took Williams three days to prepare. Yet, without waiting to have sight of it, Yates stepped out and suggested that he had ‘established the facts’. Would he have done that if the suspect organisation had been a crime family or a paedophile network, not a media company with a close relationship with the police?

  Beyond that, evidence uncovered by the Leveson Inquiry suggests that Yates knew more than he said. At 11.00 in the morning that day, we now know, he had chaired a meeting of a Gold Group (police jargon for an operational command meeting) to discuss the Guardian story. Under the heading ‘Potential Vulnerabilities’, the minutes of that meeting recorded: ‘Could be criticism that MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] has not looked after wider private individuals.’ This reflected the fact that the original inquiry had contacted only twenty-eight of the 418 potential victims they had found. That day, Yates had instructed officers to check back and identify those who now needed to be warned. And yet he told the press that afternoon: ‘Where there was clear evidence that people had potentially been the subject of tapping, they were all contacted by police.’

  The following morning, Friday 10 July, Yates chaired another Gold meeting about the Guardian story. The minutes record that he was told that the original inquiry had not analysed the call data which might have identified other perpetrators at the News of the World; and that the paper had reacted to the attempt to search Clive Goodman’s desk with ‘resistance and threats to use force’, followed by ‘a general lack of co-operation’. Yates duly agreed to hold a second press conference that afternoon and to ask the Guardian to hand over any evidence it might hold. However, his officers then reported back on their search for unwarned victims with the news that they included Andy Coulson, who was now sitting at the right hand of the man who looked set to become the next prime minister. Yates now made a series of striking decisions.

  He cancelled the plan for a second press conference; decided not to ask the Guardian for evidence; and agreed that they would warn Coulson but also that they would speak to senior officials in the Home Office and the London mayor’s office – the two organisations who were responsible for Scotland Yard – and ask them not to mention this to the Home Secretary or the mayor because of ‘political sensitivities’.

  That evening, News International released its statement accusing the Guardian of misleading the British people, repeatedly citing Scotland Yard’s actions in support of the claim; and the first edition of The Times carried the column by Andy Hayman claiming that the original investigation ‘left no stone unturned’ and had found only a handful of victims. The Metropolitan Police said not one word to challenge any of this.

  More light is possibly thrown on the state of Yates’s knowledge by a statement submitted to Leveson by Keith Surtees, Phil Williams’s deputy on the original inquiry. Surtees said: ‘On more than one occasion in meetings I attended in 2009 with Assistant Commissioner Yates, I voiced my concern that the original investigation could and should be reopened or re-examined and suggested either Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary or another force undertake such a task.’ Surtees said his immediate boss, Phil Williams, could confirm this and added crucially that he had also ‘set out my view that the criminality extended beyond Mulcaire and Goodman. It was a view held jointly by DCS Williams and myself that the phone interception and other criminal conduct of Mulcaire and Goodman was not limited to them and that the criminality extended further.’

  Surtees went on to say that he had recorded his view of the need for a second investigation in the logbook which he had kept in 2006 – and that Yates had had access to that log in 2009: ‘In short, whatever information I obtained and documented in 2006 was relayed and/or a
vailable to AC Yates in 2009.’

  Yates not only dismissed the need for a new investigation in his first press statement but continued to do so for the following two years, without ever hinting to Parliament or public that Surtees had expressed his concern or given him this information. Yates’s claim to ignorance was further undermined by his own evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, that his ‘establishing the facts’ on 9 July was not the end of his research: ‘It was a continuing exercise of reviewing, considering, reflecting about whether we were on the right track and whether we needed to do something different.’

  The week after Yates’s statement in July 2009, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, got involved, and there was a new round of bad judgement. As with Scotland Yard – as typically with the power elite – events were screened by the easy assumptions of official secrecy.

  Keir Starmer said publicly that his officials had studied all the material they had been given by the original police inquiry. In fact, they had studied none of it: all they had done was to look at their correspondence with Scotland Yard. Nevertheless, Starmer declared that his office had been given no evidence of other victims or perpetrators. However, the Guardian then challenged him to explain the email for Neville. Starmer was worried, as he later admitted to Leveson: ‘It seemed to me to suggest that both the author and the recipient were possible suspects.’

  Starmer decided to consult lead counsel from the original inquiry, David Perry QC, who worried him even more by telling him, first, that the police in 2006 had said clearly that they had no evidence of the involvement of other journalists, and, second, that he did not think the police had shown him the email. Clearly alarmed, Starmer sent a message to Yates to ‘invite him to consider’ opening a new investigation. He even drafted a press release to announce this. But Yates then spoke to him on the phone twice in an hour, persuaded him to stall, then had a meeting with him and argued that the email for Neville ‘will go nowhere’. Phil Williams followed up with a long memo to Starmer urging that the email had no evidential value. Starmer sent it to David Perry who – without access to any of the original case papers – agreed with Williams. So Starmer backed down. There would be no new investigation. Nothing of this was revealed at the time. It was on that evening, Thursday 16 July, that Yates and other senior officers dined with Rebekah Brooks at the Sun’s Police Bravery Awards.