Hack Attack (22 page)

And, of course, nobody – not the assistant commissioner, John Yates, nor anybody else from Scotland Yard – had said a single word about this to press, public or Parliament. Indeed, Yates had insisted that there was no need to reopen the investigation without ever explaining that neither he nor anybody else at Scotland Yard knew what evidence was lying unexplored in their possession. Even now, in the late autumn of 2009, as a group of officers finished scanning it all on to their database and indexing the contents, Scotland Yard still chose to say nothing. There was no press release; no letter to potential victims to inform them. There was only silence and a self-serving decision that if any potential victim wanted to know about the crimes committed against them, they would have to work it out for themselves and then hire a lawyer to force the evidence out of them.

*   *   *

You win some ground. You lose some ground.

On the evening of Friday 6 November 2009, I flew into Copenhagen, to speak at a journalism conference. An hour or so later, my phone rang, and Alan Rusbridger told me that the Press Complaints Commission had produced a report about our Gordon Taylor story and seemed to have leaked it to
The Times
(prop: R. Murdoch). He had not yet seen the whole thing but he had heard enough, he said, to fear that the report was hostile to us. I met up with friends for a meal and tried to eat while my stomach went tight and refused to co-operate. A little later, Rusbridger got hold of a copy of the report and forwarded it to me. In the subject heading of the email, he wrote ‘Snow job’.

The PCC had asked themselves only two questions. First, had the
News of the World
misled them during their original phone-hacking inquiry in 2007 by claiming that Clive Goodman was the only one of their journalists who had been involved? In answering, they managed to ignore the comments of the prosecution, the defence and the judge at the original trial and even to dismiss the email for Neville as ‘speculation’. They were happy to declare: ‘The PCC has seen no new evidence to suggest that the practice of phone-message tapping was undertaken by others beyond Goodman and Mulcaire.’

Second, they asked whether their earlier actions had failed to prevent renewed hacking. They concluded happily that they had done a good job but, in doing so, they cut the
Guardian
’s legs off. They reported that our story about Gordon Taylor had claimed to have evidence that the hacking had continued after the jailing of Goodman and Mulcaire in January 2007. This happened to be untrue: there was nothing in the
Guardian
story about anything that had occurred after January 2007. The PCC then explained that they had asked me and Alan Rusbridger whether we had any evidence of hacking after January 2007. Since this was not something we had looked at, we had said we had none. The PCC now announced that we had confessed that we had no evidence to support our story. ‘The
Guardian
’s stories did not quite live up to the dramatic billing they were initially given,’ they concluded.

Four months earlier, when I read News International’s attack on our first story, I had felt swamped by dread, that we had just got it wrong. Now, I knew better. This time, I just felt angry. I thought of the PCC’s director, Tim Toulmin, in July, lounging back in his seat in front of the select committee smugly declaring that the PCC had no reason to cover up anything at all. How dare they claim to be a regulator? They regulated the journalism industry the way a poodle regulates its master.

Now, I was stuck in Copenhagen without a computer, and Rusbridger was in Nairobi, about to board an eight-hour flight back to London. Somehow, we had to catch up and get the truth across.

Rusbridger took charge and, by email, orchestrated the paper’s response – reporters in London ‘to make sure we have a point-by-point destruction of their feebleness, their straw men and diversions’; the
Guardian
press office to put out a snappy response; me to write 800 words for Monday morning’s paper; the website to run something sooner; somebody to contact Paul Farrelly and other MPs; somebody to draft a letter to John Whittingdale, chair of the media select committee. I persuaded a kindly Danish editor to let me use his office and started writing.

By Monday morning, we were fighting back. ‘MPs express anger at PCC phone-hacking “whitewash”’, said the headline on the front-page story, which quoted Farrelly and Adam Price laying into the report and Charlotte Harris saying its findings were ‘contradictory and self-serving’. Inside the paper, I tried to describe what was wrong with the report and to list a few of the things which they did not say.

I compared the PCC to a boxer who threw punches at shadows on the wall and then, having failed to land a blow on any real target, assumed the role of referee and declared himself the winner. I listed some of the things which they had failed to say and explained how lawyers for public figures were pressing to see the evidence which Scotland Yard was holding on them. ‘The PCC may yet discover that the only real victim of their attack is their own credibility.’

Other newspapers did not see it that way, recycling the PCC report as though it were telling the truth. ‘“Phone hacking” journos cleared’, said Murdoch’s
Sun
. ‘Watchdog rejects paper’s phone-tapping allegations’, said Murdoch’s
Times
. Both repeated prominently the PCC’s line that the
Guardian
stories did not ‘live up to their dramatic billing’.

The
Independent
again were particularly hostile. Their media columnist, Stephen Glover, went to work once more, firmly clasping Murdoch’s hand to his lips. In July, he had suggested that the Gordon Taylor story was not only old but also now irrelevant since these illegal practices had surely stopped. ‘The
Guardian
does not suggest they still go on,’ he had written. Now, four months later, obediently following the PCC’s fictional line, he casually rearranged the facts. ‘The
Guardian
’s reporter Nick Davies suggested such practices were still widespread,’ he wrote.

This was not simply a spat between the
Guardian
and the PCC. Beneath the surface, this was a test of the idea that newspapers could regulate their own business. When Alan Rusbridger told a BBC radio interviewer that the report was ‘worse than useless’, he meant it. He and one other Fleet Street editor privately discussed the possibility that both of them would simply withdraw entirely from the PCC in order to register their protest. As it was, Rusbridger settled for resigning from the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee and making his views very clear. Whether self-regulation could survive remained to be seen.

*   *   *

A few days later, in central London, I hailed a taxi. The driver wanted to talk, asked me what I did for a living, what kind of stories I wrote, so I told him I’d been doing this stuff about the phone-hacking.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I know the thing you mean. That all turned out to be wrong, didn’t it?’

6. Secrets and lies

Based on interviews with current and former police officers; sources who worked for companies owned by Rupert Murdoch; and evidence disclosed to select committees, court hearings and to the Leveson Inquiry.

Behind layers of official secrecy and public denial, the reality was that the police knew a very great deal about the crimes which were being committed by powerful newspapers. It was years later that the scale of their knowledge finally emerged. Looking back, it is clear that the
Guardian
and others were uncovering only tiny fragments of the truth. This is the story of what the police had hidden in their files, as finally revealed.

It begins in June 2002, when a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police, Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook, a clever Scot, then aged forty-three, was asked to appear on the BBC
Crimewatch
programme. His job was to appeal to the public for help in the long-running effort to catch the people responsible for slamming an axe into the head of the private investigator Daniel Morgan in a south London pub car park fifteen years earlier.

The broadcast had a hidden agenda. Secretly, the Met’s anti-corruption squad were starting a new investigation into the murder and into the links between bent police officers and their two prime suspects – Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery, who now ran the murdered man’s agency, Southern Investigations. They wanted to use
Crimewatch
to announce a £50,000 reward in the hope of provoking one or more of the suspects to discuss it – and to record them with covert listening devices. Cook had been chosen as a frontman, to conceal the role of the anti-corruption officers. He was a natural choice, a specialist homicide detective who also happened to have been married for several years to one of the presenters of
Crimewatch
, a serving detective sergeant named Jacqui Hames. On 25 June, the day before the broadcast, an odd thing happened.

Scotland Yard received sensitive intelligence (probably from a phone-tap, although that has not been proved) which indicated that Sid Fillery had discussed Cook’s forthcoming appearance with Alex Marunchak, the executive editor of the
News of the World
, and that Marunchak had agreed to ‘sort him out’. That sounded very much like a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and possibly a threat of violence. A few days later, Cook was warned by the Yard to watch his back. Several more odd things then happened.

A week later, on 3 July, as court documents later disclosed, somebody who was almost certainly Glenn Mulcaire called the finance department of Surrey police, where Cook had worked previously as head of CID, and, posing as an official from the Inland Revenue, tried to blag the detective’s home address. He failed but evidently succeeded elsewhere. The following week, Cook noticed two vans hanging around his home, following him and his wife when they went out. He checked their numbers and found that both were leased to News International. Scotland Yard tasked a covert surveillance unit to follow the vans and then, using the pretext that one of them had a broken tail light, arranged for uniformed officers to stop it and question the driver, who turned out to be a photographer working for the
News of the World
.

Cook complained. Scotland Yard’s director of communications, Dick Fedorcio, contacted the
News of the World
who claimed that they had been pursuing a straightforward story, that Cook was having an affair with Jacqui Hames – a claim much weakened by the fact that Cook and Hames were married with two children.

Later that year, Cook was appointed to formally take over the investigation of Daniel Morgan’s murder. He raised his concerns about the
News of the World
’s surveillance with his commander, André Baker. Baker arranged a meeting, on 9 January 2003, between himself and Cook, Dick Fedorcio and the paper’s then editor, Rebekah Brooks. Cook told her the story of the two vans, with the clear implication that her executive editor, directly or via others at the
News of the World
, had obtained his home address at the behest of a murder suspect and then organised the surveillance in order to discredit or harass him.

Cook went on to tell the meeting that there was further evidence that Marunchak was a rogue journalist. He said that a former secretary at Southern Investigations had made a sworn statement that the agency had paid thousands of pounds to Marunchak, who had used the money to pay off his credit card and, she believed, his son’s school fees. Clearly it was possible that Marunchak had been defrauding the
News of the World
by authorising unearned payments for Southern who had then passed him the surplus; or that he was taking bribes to send business in Southern’s direction. And then, to Cook’s alarm … nothing was done.

In sworn evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, Fedorcio described how he had led Rebekah Brooks from the meeting to a drinks party then taking place at Scotland Yard and left her talking to the then commissioner, Sir John Stevens. Scotland Yard conducted no investigation into what could have been interpreted as a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in a murder inquiry and an allegation of fraud. Marunchak remained in post as one of the most senior journalists at the
News of the World
.

Much later, Dave Cook’s team discovered that the Yard’s anti-corruption command were sitting on the hundreds of hours of conversation which had been secretly recorded in Southern’s office in 1999, revealing Marunchak’s deep involvement in buying information from Southern’s network of corrupt police contacts. The tapes included another suggestion that Southern were recycling
News of the World
money to him: Rees described how he had fallen out with Marunchak and warned him that ‘your fucking paper will get fucking tipped off about who gets fucking backhanders’. Cook’s team also received unconfirmed intelligence reports claiming that Marunchak had bribed an officer in Cambridge to get information on the murder of two young girls, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, in Soham in August 2002; and that he was close to the former Met detective John Ross, who was a conduit for press stories provided by corrupt officers in London.

Most serious, Cook’s officers found a statement which had been sworn by a close associate of Daniel Morgan who said that in the weeks before he was murdered, Morgan had contacted a Sunday newspaper to try to sell information about very powerful corrupt officers. There was no evidence that this involved Marunchak, let alone that he had tipped off Rees; but Cook’s team sent a detailed report to the Directorate of Professional Standards, suggesting that Marunchak be investigated. Nothing was done.

Later it emerged that back in 2000, the team which had placed the listening device in Southern’s office had been equally disturbed by what they heard. Their operational head, Detective Superintendent Bob Quick, had sent his own report to the Directorate of Professional Standards, urging them to investigate the payment of police bribes by newspapers. Nothing was done.