Hack Attack (2 page)

Author’s Note

This is the strangest story I’ve ever written.

In the beginning, it was next to nothing. Two men were arrested – a private investigator and a journalist from the
News of the World
. Both of them ended up in prison, but it was no big deal. The crime they had committed was minor. Their jail sentences were short. The only eye-catching thing about it at the time was that their crime was quite quirky: they had discovered that they could access other people’s voicemail messages and had spent months eavesdropping on three staff at Buckingham Palace. Even so, it was a small story, dead and gone from the public eye within a few days.

And yet, I ended up spending more than six years of my working life trying to unravel the bundle of corruption which lay hidden in the background. Soon there was a small group of us working together, discovering that we had stumbled into a fight with the press and the police and the government, all of them linked to an organisation which had been created by one man.

Rupert Murdoch is one of the most powerful people in the world. You could argue that he is, in fact, the most powerful. News Corp is amongst the biggest companies on the planet. Like all his commercial rivals, Murdoch has the financial power to hire or fire multiple thousands of people and the political power to worry governments by threatening to withdraw his capital and transfer it to a more co-operative nation. But, unlike his rivals in business, his power has another dimension. Because he owns newspapers and news channels, he has the ability to worry governments even more, to make them fear that without his favour they will find themselves attacked and destabilised and discredited. Certainly, a man who is both global business baron and multinational kingmaker has a special kind of power.

So the simple crime story turned out to be a story about the secret world of the power elite and their discreet alliances. This is not about conspiracy (not generally) but about the spontaneous recognition of power by power, the everyday occurrence of a natural exchange of assistance between those who occupy positions in society from which they can look down upon and mightily affect the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women. In this case, as often, that mutual favouritism took place amidst the persistent reek of falsehood – not the fevered plotting of Watergate lies, but the casual arrogance of a group of people who take it for granted that they have every right to run the country and, in doing so, to manipulate information, to conceal embarrassing truth, to try to fool all of the people all of the time.

A lot of writers say that they can’t do their job – they can’t produce the book or the film or the newspaper article – unless they can reach a point of such clarity about their project that they can reduce it to a single sentence. Waiting for a bus one day while I was drafting this book, I finally got there. This is a story about power and truth.

To be more precise, it is about the abuse of power and about the secrets and lies that protect it. In a tyranny, the ruling elite can abuse its power all day long, and anybody who complains about it will get a visit from the secret police. In an established democracy, abuse of power cannot afford to be visible. It needs concealment like a vampire needs the dark. As soon as a corporation or a trade union or a government or any arm of the state is seen to be breaking the rules, it can be attacked, potentially embarrassed, conceivably stopped. The secrets and lies are not an optional extra, they are central to the strategy.

In this case, the concealment had an extra layer, because news organisations which might otherwise have exposed the truth were themselves part of the abuse, and so they kept silent, indulging in a comic parody of misreporting, hiding the emerging scandal from their readers like a Victorian nanny covering the children’s eyes from an accident in the street – ‘you don’t want to see this’. Some did this because they were linked to the crime by common ownership or by their own guilty secrets about the lawbreaking in their own newsrooms; some turned away for fear of upsetting their political allies. Too many journalists had simply ceased to function as independent truth-tellers, separate from and critical of the people they were writing about. The crime reporter made common cause with the police and also with criminals. The political correspondent developed a loyalty to one party or faction. The media reporter became a tool for his or her owner. The news executive turned into a preening power-monger, puffed with wealth and self-importance, happy to join the elite and not to expose it – all rather like the final moment of
Animal Farm
, when the pigs who have led the revolt against the humans have come to adopt the behaviour of the rulers they were supposed to challenge: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’

The story of the phone-hacking scandal happens to have unfolded in the United Kingdom, but it could have happened anywhere in the world. News Corp itself has spent years playing the power game in Australia and the United States and China, and anywhere else where its commerce has led it. Those other countries have suffered comparable abuse by News Corp and by other similar forces. The structures of power and the weakness of democracy are more or less the same everywhere. A freakish sequence of events allowed us to see the truth in the UK, but it delivers a lesson for anybody anywhere who thinks they have the right to have power over their own lives.

In the end, the struggle by the small group of people who tried to uncover the hacking scandal was taken over by others who exposed even more. In writing this book, I’ve been able to draw on the mass of evidence which emerged eventually in civil lawsuits, criminal trials, select-committee hearings in the House of Commons and, above all, through the public inquiry which was chaired by Lord Justice Leveson in London from the autumn of 2011.

In the background, however, we relied consistently on the help of tabloid journalists, police officers, private investigators, government officials, former Murdoch allies and others who refused to accept the corruption around them. Some were able to speak openly, but most of them stepped forward on condition of anonymity, which I’ve maintained. In a few cases, sources who originally were unattributable have decided that they can now be named, and so they are identified here. All of them played their part, and I want to acknowledge the importance of their help and of their willingness to take risks so that the story could be told.

In three particular areas, my own work was backed up by specialist researchers: Jenny Evans, who built bridges to journalists who had worked on the
News of the World
; Adrian Gatton, who went into the netherworld of private investigation; and David Hencke, who made good use of his long-standing links to politicians and their advisers. Tom Mills analysed press cuttings for me. Scarlett MccGwire introduced me to contacts from the political world.

I also drew on several dozen published books and in-depth articles, which are listed in a bibliography on a website which is a companion to this book,
www.hack-attack.co.uk
. Occasionally, I have identified them as sources in the text. I acknowledge all of them as valuable raw material.

The emergence of this wealth of new information ended up changing the structure of the book, which now has two different kinds of chapters. Some of them form a historical account of the process by which I and others uncovered the scandal, containing only the information that was available to us at the time. Others are attempts to recreate what was happening behind the scenes – the crime and the cover-ups and the political machinations – and these chapters draw on everything that finally emerged, to try to show the truth that was being so busily concealed. The website has further background on events as well as related documents, audio and video.

A couple of notes about names. First, Rupert Murdoch runs a confusing muddle of companies, which have been restructured since the events described here. For the sake of simplicity, the book generally refers to only two of them: the then global parent company, News Corp; and its main UK subsidiary, known at the time as News International. The UK company has its own subsidiaries, but I have used the generic ‘News International’ to cover all of them. Second, one central character, Rebekah Brooks, was known by her maiden name, Rebekah Wade, until June 2009, when she married. To avoid confusion, I have used her current, married name throughout.

Finally, I should acknowledge the endless support of my colleagues at the
Guardian
– other reporters who worked tirelessly on the story, the in-house lawyers who wrestled with the threats of libel actions, the desk editors who tolerated my tensions, and, above all, the editor, Alan Rusbridger, who backed this story and never flinched in the face of aggression. Those colleagues and all who helped to tell this strange story believe we have the right to know the truth about power.

Part One

Crime and Concealment

All members of the press have a duty to maintain the highest professional standards.

Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice

You don’t get to be the editor of the
Mirror
without being a fairly despicable human being.

Piers Morgan

1. February 2008 to July 2009

I was sitting in a BBC radio studio, getting ready to vomit.

They wanted me to talk about a book I had just written,
Flat Earth News
, about the scale and origins of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the media. In theory, I was happy to talk to them: I’d spent two years breaking my brain to produce the book, which was finally being published now, in February 2008, and this was a chance to persuade people to read the result. But the thought of this interview flooded me with anxiety.

This was live national radio. Worse than that, this was the
Today
programme. The Queen listens to the
Today
programme; the prime minister, foreign ambassadors, the whole damned UK power elite chews its breakfast with one ear on the
Today
programme. And worst of all, a few minutes earlier, while I was pacing up and down outside the studio, just before I sat down for my ordeal, they had revealed that they had brought in Stuart Kuttner to oppose me. Kuttner!

I had never met him, but I’d heard plenty. Kuttner was this figure from the shadows – the managing editor of Rupert Murdoch’s
News of the World
, lurking just behind the editor’s throne, the guy who kept the secrets, who got rid of the problems, who dealt with the really dirty stuff. You wouldn’t spend long trying to describe Stuart Kuttner without using words like ‘tough’ and ‘ruthless’ and ‘basically very unpleasant’.

The interview started, I mastered my nerves and started to talk. Kuttner stepped in a couple of times, to inform the nation that I must be from a different planet because he certainly didn’t recognise the newspaper industry I was describing. Then I got on to the ‘dark arts’, outlining the few scraps of information I had found about private investigators who for years had been working for most British newspapers, breaking the law to help them get scoops. Kuttner moved in quickly. ‘If it happens, it shouldn’t happen. It happened once at the
News of the World
. The reporter was fired; he went to prison. The editor resigned.’

Certainly it crossed my mind that he was not telling the truth. He was right on the simple fact that only one reporter from the
News of the World
had been sent to prison – the royal editor, Clive Goodman – but the idea of the ‘one rogue reporter’ had never quite made sense to me. Goodman had been jailed a year earlier, in January 2007, for intercepting the voicemail of three people who worked at Buckingham Palace. The private investigator who had helped him to do that, Glenn Mulcaire, had been jailed not only for hacking the voicemail of those three royal targets but also for eavesdropping on the messages of five other people who had nothing to do with the royal family. Why had Mulcaire done that? Nobody had suggested for a moment that it had been the royal editor who had told him to hack non-royal victims. So who had asked him to? Other reporters? Editors? Mysterious voices in his head?

Kuttner swept over the top of me, on a rhetorical roll. British journalism, he declared, was ‘a very honourable profession’. A newspaper like the
News of the World
was really a kind of moral watchdog, keeping an eye out for misbehaviour among the powerful. ‘We live in an age of corrosion of politics and of public life – degradation,’ he warned.

On that high note, the interview finished, and that might have been the end of it. I didn’t believe all this stuff about the
News of the World
being a defence against the degradation of public life, but I wasn’t interested in the
News of the World
. I didn’t read it and I didn’t want to write about it. I was only relieved to be out of the studio and happy to go off spreading my ideas about
Flat Earth News
, which is mostly about quality newspapers and the deep flaws in the way they now operate. But, unknown to me, Stuart Kuttner had just made a mistake, a very bad mistake. ‘It only happened once,’ he had said. Somewhere out across the airwaves, a man I had never met nor heard of had listened to what Kuttner said and had felt so angry about it that he decided to contact me. Which is what happened a few days later.

‘I would like to have a discussion with you,’ he said. ‘I think you will like what I have.’

He left me his mobile phone number, but told me never to leave a message on it.

*   *   *

It’s fair to say that reporting is a great deal easier than most reporters like to pretend. People tell you things; you do your best to check them out; and then you tell a lot of other people what you’ve found. There are some hidden subtleties in there and a few simple skills, but generally speaking, there is nothing very clever about it.