Hack Attack (26 page)

On 20 March, Goodman was given an appeal hearing with the paper. It was held well away from the
News of the World
’s office, in the company’s magazine HQ, off the King’s Road in Chelsea. The company refused to hand over documents which Goodman had requested to prove his case, or to allow him further time to prepare his defence, or to bring his lawyer with him, or to record the hearing. Unusually, the appeals panel had no employee representative nor anybody from the company’s management. This would have been ‘inappropriate’ when dealing with such serious allegations, according to News International. Goodman put his case to the human-resources director, Daniel Cloke; the company’s legal director, Jon Chapman; and to the
News of the World
’s new editor, Colin Myler.

Goodman hit them hard. He repeated his allegations against those he had already named, adding specific detail about the involvement of Greg Miskiw, and he claimed that in the past two years there had not been a single story controlled by the news desk which had not involved hacking voicemail or accessing some other form of confidential information, and threw in the claim that, with Mulcaire’s help, Ian Edmondson had been hacking the voicemail of Andy Coulson on a daily basis.

It got worse. Goodman claimed that in addition to hacking, the paper routinely had been getting hold of targets’ call records and tracking their location by ‘triangulating’ their mobile phones. This was a particularly serious allegation. A mobile phone can be located in this way only by obtaining precise detail of the three phone towers nearest to the handset, mapping the standard radius of all three and then spotting any point where they intersect. Necessarily, that would involve having inside sources in the phone companies or one source in some special section of a law-enforcement agency. This was not simply illegal access to confidential information; it raised the clear possibility that a law-enforcement source had been paid a bribe, for which the courts would impose a heavy prison sentence. All this, Goodman said, was well known.

And he produced his insurance policy – the emails which he had downloaded when he was released from police custody in August 2006, implicating Coulson in the hacking. He told them too that he had taped conversations with Coulson, including their secret meeting at the Café Rouge. He produced the transcript of a voicemail which, he claimed, had been shown to Coulson; Mulcaire’s phone records which showed multiple conversations with Ian Edmondson; notes of his meetings with Tom Crone when they discussed his decision to stay silent and the promise that he would keep his job. He argued that the fact that the paper had continued to pay him even after he had pleaded guilty confirmed this promise.

And it got worse still. A lawyer acting for Glenn Mulcaire emailed Tom Crone to inform him that Mulcaire, too, was making similar allegations. Specifically, Mulcaire claimed that Ian Edmondson had instructed him to hack voicemails including those of Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and a member of the House of Lords; that he had email to prove it; and that, while he was driving Ian Edmondson in his car one day, the assistant editor had told him to hack the celebrity PR Max Clifford. Mulcaire also announced that he was planning to write a book about his work for the
News of the World
and, with help from his friend Greg Miskiw, to make a TV documentary.

Over the following ten days, Daniel Cloke and Colin Myler interviewed Stuart Kuttner, who agreed that Coulson and Goodman had been in touch after Goodman’s arrest; Ian Edmondson, who declined to say which executives knew Mulcaire was hacking for the paper; and Neil Wallis, who said Goodman was a paranoid troublemaker and that he had never heard of Glenn Mulcaire until he was arrested. The following week, on 29 March, Wallis and the crime reporter Lucy Panton had lunch with Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman.

Rebekah Brooks intervened, taking Goodman out for lunch at the RAC Club on 12 April. The official policy of News International was that any journalist who broke the law would be instantly dismissed. She had just repeated the point in a letter to the Press Complaints Commission, who were conducting their ‘investigation’ into the hacking at the
News of the World
. However, at lunch with Goodman, she offered the convicted journalist a job at the
Sun
. Goodman declined.

It was at this point that, with Les Hinton’s backing, Cloke and Myler decided to collect emails which Goodman had exchanged with Glenn Mulcaire and the five executives who, he claimed, were co-conspirators – Coulson, Wallis, Kuttner, Edmondson and the features editor, Jules Stenson – and to hand them to the upmarket law firm Harbottle & Lewis. This was later found to be riddled with controversy of two different kinds.

First, the evidence strongly suggests that the law firm were not shown all of the emails. They were collected into seven files, but only five of them were shown to Harbottle & Lewis; and among the messages they did see, several were missing key passages. It may be significant that, according to one source, when Andy Coulson was asked if he would consent to having his emails searched, he said he was not sure and would have to check with his lawyers.

Second, the emails contained evidence which appeared to suggest that Goodman was right, at least in some respects. When the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, later read a sample of them, he suggested it was ‘blindingly obvious’ that they included ‘evidence of serious criminal offences’. The messages included strong hints that Coulson and others were aware of Goodman’s hacking, both while he was working with Mulcaire and later when he had been arrested and was awaiting trial; and apparently overt references to payments to royal police officers, complete with several warnings from Goodman that these had to be handled carefully because they amounted to criminal offences – for example, in an email to Coulson: ‘These people will not be paid in anything other than cash because if they’re discovered selling stuff to us, they end up on criminal charges, as could we.’ They also reflected some of the contacts between Coulson and Tom Crone as they tried to limit the damage from Goodman’s arrest.

But News International’s brief for the law firm was very narrow – not to look generally for evidence of wrongdoing but simply to check for evidence to support Goodman’s specific claims. On 9 May 2007, Harbottle & Lewis were given remote access to the emails on News International’s system. Without waiting for a reply, News International went ahead with a second hearing with Goodman on 10 May, at an even more discreet location, the Antoinette hotel, ten miles from central London, in Kingston upon Thames. There, Cloke and Myler argued that Goodman’s allegations were irrelevant to his claim for wrongful dismissal, and that all they should consider was whether Goodman’s sacking had been reasonable and conducted by a proper process. They refused to give him copies of the Harbottle & Lewis emails. A furious Goodman told them that their minute of their earlier hearing was inaccurate, repeated his allegations and added that, in spite of Andy Coulson’s involvement in the hacking, Coulson had been rewarded with a pay-off of £400,000, a car and a nod that he would be allowed to return to News International in the future.

A fortnight later, on 24 May, a senior partner from Harbottle & Lewis, Lawrence Abramson, spoke by phone with News International’s legal director, Jon Chapman. According to evidence which Abramson later gave to the Leveson Inquiry, he drew some of the emails to Chapman’s attention because they ‘contained potentially confidential or sensitive matters that News International may not want to give disclosure of’. But none of this apparent wrongdoing was covered by the brief which News International had given to Harbottle & Lewis: Abramson said that he was told that these were not matters on which he was required to comment. After a brief negotiation with Chapman about precise wording, Abramson formally wrote the letter which News International were to disclose to the media select committee two years later as evidence of their innocence of crime, confirming that ‘we did not find anything in those emails which appeared to us to be reasonable evidence that Clive Goodman’s illegal actions were known about and supported by’ those whom Goodman had named. Abramson later told Leveson that some of the emails which News International claimed to have sent him ‘must have escaped my attention’.

News International then struck a peculiarly generous deal with their criminal former employee: in addition to the one year’s salary of £90,000 which Goodman had been offered by Les Hinton in February, he would be paid a further £140,000 plus £13,000 for his legal bill. This payment was on condition that he sign an agreement not to disclose the existence of the agreement or the circumstances surrounding it, and that he must make no public statement which might damage the good name of the
News of the World
. Separately, they agreed to pay Glenn Mulcaire a total of £80,050 with the same agreement of secrecy. Mulcaire abandoned his plans to produce a book and a TV documentary about the
News of the World
.

Both men stayed silent. Murdoch’s company – armed now with even more detailed allegations about the crime in one of their newsrooms – chose to say nothing and do nothing.

*   *   *

While News International were pacifying Goodman and Mulcaire in the spring of 2007, Mark Lewis was moving forward with his plan to sue the company on behalf of Gordon Taylor, opening the fight with a formal ‘letter before action’. Rapidly, Tom Crone took a train to Manchester where, according to public evidence later given by Mark Lewis, an outwardly calm Crone said that he had thought this had all gone away, to which Lewis had replied that Gordon Taylor was entitled to damages of £250,000. Crone later recalled that he thought ‘Wow. That’s a lot of money.’

Legal wheels turn slowly. Lewis submitted a claim. News International resisted stoutly. When Lewis then obtained devastating new evidence, including the email for Neville, the Murdoch company switched track, pointing out with little subtlety that, if Gordon Taylor pursued this case, the false story about his supposed affair would become public. That may have worried Taylor; it also made him angry. Lewis continued. At the beginning of May 2008, News International offered to pay £50,000 in damages – five times the amount which had just been paid in a privacy case brought by the actress Catherine Zeta Jones. Lewis rejected it. At the end of May, News International upped their offer to £150,000. Lewis rejected it.

News International went to a senior specialist in media law, Michael Silverleaf QC, showed him the bundle of evidence and asked him what he thought. In a powerful opinion – later released to a select committee – Silverleaf concluded on 3 June 2008 that ‘there is a powerful case that there is or was a culture of illegal information access used at News Group Newspapers, to produce stories for publication’. Silverleaf suggested that they might have to go as high as £250,000 to settle the case. News International upped their offer to £350,000, and Mark Lewis rejected it.

On Friday 6 June, one of News International’s external solicitors, Julian Pike of Farrer & Co., spoke to Lewis by phone, an uncomfortable conversation during which Lewis evidently told Pike that it was obvious that hacking was ‘rife’ at the
News of the World
, that either they went to court, which would expose the scandal, or they would have to settle out of court, in which case his client would agree to sign a confidentiality agreement but he would want £1 million in damages: ‘One way or another, this is going to hurt.’

Pike emailed Tom Crone his note of the conversation, repeating Mark Lewis’s claim that hacking was ‘rife’ at the paper and adding that, before submitting a formal defence, he would speak to Glenn Mulcaire ‘to avoid (as much as possible) hostages to fortune’. Crone sent it on to Colin Myler, explaining his thinking and warning that there was ‘a further nightmare scenario’ if Gordon Taylor’s in-house legal adviser, Jo Armstrong, also sued for messages which had been taken from her voicemail and transcribed in the email for Neville Thurlbeck.

Crone and Pike consulted James Murdoch – a move which was later to jeopardise the young Murdoch’s career – and duly settled the case, agreeing to pay £425,000 plus £210,000 legal costs to Gordon Taylor. The ‘nightmare scenario’ then unfolded as not only Jo Armstrong but also Taylor’s external solicitor, John Hewison, sued. Nevertheless, News International had the answer. It may have cost them £1 million, but they ensured that all three litigants signed confidentiality agreements and that the case papers were sealed for ever by the court.

Some of Murdoch’s UK executives had been pushed to the very edge of the precipice, to the brink of a fall that would destroy their careers and ruin the reputation of News International, but they had stood their ground, obstructing the police, suppressing the voices of Goodman and Mulcaire, paying off the threat from Gordon Taylor and his two fellow claimants. They had survived. They had kept it all hidden. Now, all would be well for them – for as long as they could continue with their secrets and lies.

Part Two

The Power Game

There is only one thing in this world, and this is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.

Napoleon Bonaparte

I work for a man who wants it all and doesn’t understand anybody telling him he can’t have it all.

Paul Carlucci, senior executive in News Corp

7. A wedding in the country

Based on interviews with wedding guests and with journalists and others who have worked with News Corp; biographies of Rupert Murdoch and of UK prime ministers; and evidence disclosed to the Leveson Inquiry.

On a bright shining Saturday afternoon in the middle of June 2009, in the rolling green downland of west Oxfordshire, there is a wedding party. Several hundred men and women are gathered by the side of a great lake, 350 metres long, crowned at the far end with an eighteenth-century boathouse disguised as a Doric temple. The sun pours down. The guests sparkle like the champagne in their gleaming flute glasses. The bride arrives to the sound of Handel’s ‘Rejoice!’, written for the arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Amongst the onlookers, two men lean their heads towards each other.