Hack Attack (40 page)

As I sat down to write this into a story, something else came through. After four months of obstruction, delays and several clear breaches of the Freedom of Information Act, Scotland Yard finally answered my remaining questions about the contents of the material which they had seized from Glenn Mulcaire. Apart from the ninety-one PIN codes and one document with transcribed emails which they had already admitted, they now disclosed that this material also contained 4,332 names or partial names of targets; 2,978 mobile phone numbers; and thirty cassette tapes containing voicemail. Yet more evidence that the scale of Mulcaire’s crime – and of Scotland Yard’s failure – was way beyond the official version of events.

In the vague hope that the police had decided to obey the law, I put in another Freedom of Information request, asking for the number of hacking victims they had warned in 2006 and in 2009. Their response – again – was to breach their legal duty to reply within twenty days and then to start making excuses for not providing the information.

On 5 April, the day after Peter Oborne’s column had appeared in the
Observer
, I ran a story disclosing the contents of Lola’s file and also revealing these numbers. The following day, as Gordon Brown formally confirmed that there would be an election on 6 May, I wrote again, summarising all that we now knew about the police behaviour: ‘Something very worrying has been going on at Scotland Yard. We now know that in dealing with the phone-hacking affair at the
News of the World
, they cut short their original inquiry; suppressed evidence; misled the public and the press; concealed information and broke the law. Why?’

The Yard immediately demanded space to reply, and the
Guardian
published an article, under John Yates’s byline, denying that police had been concealing evidence. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ he wrote. The Yard’s handling of the affair, he said, ‘should be recognised for what it is – a success’. It irritated me that the
Guardian
had let Yates do this. Good newspapers believe in giving a balanced view of the world. Fine. Some people then exploit that belief and use it to balance truth with falsehood.

Lola’s file had revealed one more secret. It disclosed that the original inquiry had been deemed so sensitive that a series of Scotland Yard reports were sent to the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who reviewed them in his capacity as the government’s legal adviser. Surely those reports would still be sitting in a file in the Attorney General’s office. If we could get hold of them, they would tell us still more about what the police had known in 2006, and maybe I could stop Scotland Yard scattering falsehood around the place. It might also tell us more about Andy Coulson.

Like scrambling up a muddy hill, always slipping down.

I contacted the Emissary, who was immediately alert to the political potential of these reports. Normally, he said, he could have tried to arrange for a government minister to retrieve the file, but because Gordon Brown had formally called the election, members of the government were now banned from their own offices. The only alternative was to persuade a civil servant to hand them over. He agreed to try it. For forty-eight hours, I sat with my fingers crossed, hoping that the Emissary would be able to retrieve the police reports. But he couldn’t: the officials in the Attorney General’s office refused to co-operate, so the reports stayed hidden. This was so frustrating – if I had seen Lola’s file just a week earlier, I could probably have found a friendly Labour minister to dig out the treasure. As it was, all I could do was practise my swearing.

Separately, I contacted the Crown Prosecution Service and David Perry QC, who had been the prosecuting counsel at the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, and tried to get them to admit that they had been wrong to say that it was an offence to hack voicemail under the RIPA law only if the message had not been heard already by the intended recipient. The CPS stood by their story and told me they would not answer any more questions. David Perry never replied.

At the same time, I had been working my way down a very different grapevine, of people who knew Glenn Mulcaire, particularly those who shared his passion for AFC Wimbledon. It felt like a waste of time; but then, in late April, I called a friend of Mulcaire, whose job means he cannot be identified, so I will call him Ovid. I asked him some tired question, just going through the motions, and to my surprise, he replied: ‘You’ve just struck gold.’

He explained that Mulcaire used to run the reserve team at AFC Wimbledon and had had to write notes for the match programme, which he had found difficult, so Ovid had helped him. When Mulcaire came out of prison in May 2007, he had decided to write two books – the boring one which I had already heard about, advising people how to improve their personal security, and a second one about the whole history of his illegal activity at the
News of the World
. And for this second book, he had asked Ovid to be his ghostwriter. Mulcaire had spent several days pouring out his heart and memories to Ovid, who had written a synopsis for both books. And yes, if I would come to London to meet him, he would be happy to hand over the synopsis for the tell-all book as well as the notebooks in which he had recorded all the detail. I agreed. Quickly.

When I met him the next day outside Holloway Underground station, as arranged, his opening line was worrying. ‘Good news and bad news,’ he said. The good was that he had found the synopsis and he had a copy of it for me. The bad news was that he had a young daughter and she had needed a new bedroom and so a few months ago he had cleared out his study and he had thrown out a lot of old notebooks …

There are times when you just want to chew through your own arteries. The synopsis was interesting, but it had been written as a tease, to provoke a publisher into commissioning the whole book, and deliberately it held back on all the important detail. It said an editorial executive had ordered Mulcaire to hack the royal phones, but it didn’t name the executive. It said somebody had approached Mulcaire before he was put on trial and had persuaded him to ‘change his story’, but it didn’t name the persuader or explain what Mulcaire’s story would have been. It made it very clear that this was no ‘rogue’ operation. Indeed, the synopsis claimed that the
News of the World
had pressurised Mulcaire against his will to target the royal household: ‘I was told in no uncertain terms – “stop now and you will never work in the media again”. What choice did that give me? My loyalty cost me.’ But who had pressurised him? Coulson? Some other executive? The synopsis did not say, and Ovid could not remember.

Ovid said the notebooks would have answered all these questions and more, that Mulcaire had gone into great detail about what he had done and who he had done it for. He remembered a few of the targets – the TV presenter Chris Tarrant, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and Prince Charles. All very interesting, and certainly, where Tarrant and Abramovich were concerned, I could try to alert them.

Ovid also reckoned that Mulcaire had had seriously good contacts among the police and that he had been tipped off that he was being investigated before he was arrested in August 2006, and that this tip-off had included a warning that the Security Service, MI5, were looking at him; but Ovid wasn’t sure, and the notebooks were gone – all that lovely detail, all those powerful facts. And, of course, the book had never been written, because Mulcaire had done a deal with the
News of the World
. They might still be denying it but I had no doubt that they had paid Mulcaire money in exchange for a binding undertaking not to tell what he knew.

I wrote a story based on the synopsis which Ovid had given me and I extracted a quote from one of the most influential members of Gordon Brown’s government, Peter Mandelson, who was more willing than some of his colleagues to fire a shot at Rupert Murdoch: ‘The idea that as editor of the
News of the World
, Andy Coulson was not aware of this activity beggars belief. If the election in less than a week goes the Tories’ way, we would see this man taking on a major role in the British government. People should think long and hard before considering voting Conservative.’

It had no impact at all. People were too busy electing a government to start worrying about stuff like that.

*   *   *

There was a pause. David Cameron emerged as victor from the election and moved in to Downing Street, with Andy Coulson at his side. A few weeks later, on 15 June, James Murdoch announced that News Corp were bidding to take over BSkyB. I could see as clearly as anyone else that this would make them more powerful than ever but there was not much I could do about it. I had run my best stories before the election and, just as News Corp were announcing their bid, I veered off sideways when I read a story on the foreign pages of the
Guardian
, about an American soldier called Bradley Manning who had been arrested and accused of giving a massive tranche of secrets to an organisation called WikiLeaks.

I persuaded the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, to release the secrets to an alliance of news organisations led by the
Guardian
and spent several months working with him until August when I realised I had to return to the hacking: after some five months of research, the
New York Times
were getting ready to publish.

On the afternoon of Wednesday 1 September 2010, fourteen months after we published the Gordon Taylor story and began the battle, the US paper finally posted their hacking story on their website – and we breached the outer walls of Murdoch’s castle. Most of their long story simply confirmed what the
Guardian
had been saying – on one level it was simply a relief that they had not concluded that we really were wrong. This way, we had a lot of extra muscle to support the things we had said. But, on several critical points, they went further. Above all, they had managed to find a former
News of the World
journalist who was willing to come out on the record and put his name to serious claims about phone-hacking – and to put Andy Coulson in the middle of the action.

Sean Hoare, the paper’s former show-business correspondent, told the
New York Times
on the record that he personally had played recordings of hacked voicemail messages to Coulson when they worked together at the
Sun
and that later, when he worked for him at the
News of the World
, he had continued to tell him about stories which were based on hacked messages. Coulson ‘actively encouraged me to do it’, Hoare said. That was reinforced anonymously by a former executive from the
News of the World
who was quoted claiming that Coulson had talked freely about illegal news-gathering techniques, including phone-hacking, and that the subject had come up at ‘dozens, if not hundreds’ of meetings with Coulson. ‘The editor added that when Coulson would ask where a story came from, editors would reply “We’ve pulled the phone records” or “I’ve listened to the phone messages.”’

Beyond those two sources who specifically named Coulson, others had told the
New York Times
, as they had told me, that phone-hacking was ‘pervasive’ in Coulson’s newsroom. ‘Everyone knew,’ according to one unnamed senior reporter. ‘The office cat knew.’ Most of these former reporters were unnamed, but one, Sharon Marshall, was quoted as having witnessed hacking when she worked at the paper under Coulson between 2002 and 2004. ‘It was an industry-wide thing,’ she said. It was now simply unbelievable that Coulson had not known his reporters were breaking the law.

All this clearly crashed through News International’s defences, but the story was embarrassing too for the Metropolitan Police. It quoted several unnamed police sources who suggested that the original 2006 inquiry had been hampered by a desire to avoid upsetting Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper: ‘Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with the
News of the World
.’ And, in that context, they produced the beautiful nugget that Dick Fedorcio’s then deputy, Chris Webb, allegedly had approached one of the Caryatid detectives, waving his arms and urging him to stop and think about whether to pursue the inquiry.

Finally, they had managed to get hold of the mysterious tape I had heard about when I was researching the original Gordon Taylor story, on which Mulcaire could be heard explaining how to hack voicemail to a journalist whose name sounded like Ryan or Ryall. One of the
New York Times
reporters, Jo Becker, had performed a brilliant investigative trick, by feeding the dialling tones at the beginning of the tape into specialist software which converted them back into a phone number. She had then phoned that number and identified the mysterious ‘Ryan’ or ‘Ryall’, but he refused to speak and, to avoid the risk of error, the paper had held back his name.

News International and Scotland Yard denied everything, and various Conservative MPs said this was all old stuff and anyway Sean Hoare had had drink and drugs problems (which was true but not exactly relevant). None of that could prevent the eruption of a small but very loud chorus of protest. A few politicians rushed through the gap in Murdoch’s defences, looking for Coulson, worrying out loud about News Corp’s bid for BSkyB. The media select committee said it would take more evidence. Two other select committees – on home affairs, and on standards and privileges – announced their own inquiries. Tom Watson, who had become increasingly active since the election, called on Scotland Yard to reopen their failed investigation. He also called on the prime minister to set up an inquiry into the relationship between the police and the
News of the World
.

The
Guardian
followed up with a barrage of stories. We disclosed that the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, was one of those whose details had been found in Mulcaire’s paperwork, ‘raising questions about whether officers who were directly involved in the investigation had discovered that they, too, had been targets of the newspaper’.