Hack Attack (18 page)

David Coghlan bugged for Ian Withers, who worked for the
Sunday Times
. He is also believed to have bugged commercial enemies of the former owner of the
Observer
, Tiny Rowland. David Edwards has told friends he worked for Gary Lowe and for the network of recovering addicts. Winton, too, was a regular contact of Lowe and the NA network. He had been at school with two of the NA recruits and was often seen visiting Blue. Gary Lowe, as ever, linked them to Fleet Street, although he disliked Winton and humiliated him when he was released from prison by hiring two actors to dress up as policemen and arrest him as he came through the gate.

Winton once boasted in an interview about his media clients, claiming to be getting regular and lucrative work from two contacts on the news desk of ‘a popular tabloid’: ‘One of them will say “Here’s the deadline, this is what I want, how much will it cost?” The other just calls up and says “Get the info, I don’t care how much it costs.”’

*   *   *

Breaking into stolen mobile phones … Hiding tracking devices on targets’ cars … ‘Bin spinning’ to find stories in rubbish … Using police officers and/or employees of phone companies to monitor the precise location of their targets’ mobile phones (known as ‘pinging’). The criminal ingenuity was almost endless. Ian Edmondson from the
News of the World
devised a scheme to send public figures free mobile phones containing spyware which would relay back to him the call data, contact numbers and pictures in the phone’s memory.

There was email hacking. In the summer of 2006, Derek Haslam, who was still spying on Jonathan Rees for Scotland Yard, was alarmed to discover that Rees had found a specialist who had succeeded in hacking into his computer and retrieving the secret reports which he had filed. Through Rees, the same specialist worked for the
News of the World
. Sienna Miller the actress, and Chris Shipman – the son of the murderous Dr Harold Shipman – had their emails hacked at a time when the paper was researching them.

There were burglaries – PIs and journalists working together to break into the homes of public figures. Whether or not they were connected to this, the actor Hugh Grant, the Labour MP Chris Bryant, and the chief executive of the Football Association, David Davies, all reported being burgled at a time when they were the objects of tabloid attention and in circumstances which suggested the burglar was looking for information, not valuables. Two separate sources who were close to Southern Investigations say that Rees and Fillery were breaking into houses, to remove material or plant listening devices. Other evidence shows them attempting to hire a former police officer to commit a burglary, apparently at the home of an unidentified MP. When police searched Fillery’s computer, they found a record of Southern reporting to Alex Marunchak the results of a burglary which they appeared to have carried out at the home of an unidentified woman.

Crimes which had been nurtured by three Murdoch papers had spread through almost all of the other national titles. What was being concealed after the arrest of Goodman and Mulcaire was not simply one rogue reporter, nor even one rogue newspaper. This was an industry which had gone rogue, driven by profit, regardless of rules, privileged by its power. Crime paid. Concealment was easy.

5. 14 July 2009 to November 2009

We could have let it drop. The truth is that, if we’d been left to decide for ourselves, we might well have let the whole phone-hacking saga go after Rusbridger and I had stopped the barbecue at the media select committee. We’d published a big story and kicked some powerful people in the shins; we’d proved we weren’t lying; there was a long queue of other stories waiting to be covered: why hang around in the cage with the tiger? The answer is that the tiger wouldn’t let us go.

It was a Tuesday morning, 14 July 2009, when we appeared before the select committee. That evening, we picked up reports that News International were sending their political correspondents into the House of Commons to spread the word among MPs about David Leppard’s story, that Rusbridger had hired the specialist blagger John Ford to hack voicemail. It didn’t seem to matter whether this was true or not (or that they had agreed not to publish it). By Wednesday morning, it was travelling fast around Parliament. We were going to have to go and find Ford.

I drove up to the M4 west of London, met the
Guardian
’s investigations editor, David Leigh, in a service station, dumped my car and together we headed off to Ford’s last known address, in Somerset. Leigh had been doing this kind of work for even longer than me: when I started out as a messenger boy at the
Guardian
, in 1976, he was already working for the pre-Murdoch
Times
. For both of us, the Leppard smear story was personal. Rusbridger was not just our editor, he was also our friend, and his wife is the sister of Leigh’s wife.

By Thursday morning, with the help of one or two journalists who had worked for the
Sunday Times
, we had tracked Ford down to his new home, a terraced house in Bradford on Avon. There was no sign of him, and so there we sat, in the front seat of Leigh’s car like two cops in a B-movie, drinking disgusting coffee from polystyrene cups, bitching about office politics and waiting for Ford to turn up. It rained steadily. In mid-afternoon, our phones suddenly started buzzing to tell us that the Director of Public Prosecutions had released a statement. In a nearby shop, we got hold of it by fax and learned that the DPP had reviewed all the evidence which the police had handed over in 2006 and concluded that it would not be appropriate to reopen the case or to revisit the decisions taken. A door slammed.

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
.