Hack Attack (47 page)

This was very important. For four and a half years, Scotland Yard had pretended that this paperwork was not worth investigating, and now here was a High Court judge kicking that claim into the long grass with a large boot mark on its backside – and thus inviting all those who were named in Mulcaire’s notes to think about suing.

The judge ruled that Mulcaire must answer a list of questions about those at the
News of the World
who had commissioned his hacking, echoing the earlier order that he must answer questions about who had told him to hack the phones of Nicola Phillips and Sky Andrew. This order went wider and instructed him to answer questions about his work generally for the paper, including the names of those who had told him to hack the royal household and the means by which he had obtained internal passwords from the mobile phone companies. He appealed against this – and, again, we suspected that it was News International who were paying him to do so.

On 25 March, there was another landmark hearing when News International admitted that, contrary to their earlier claims, they had access to a vast archive of their email traffic going back to 2005. Sienna Miller and Sky Andrew had been asking for disclosure of messages about them and had been told repeatedly that the company stored email for no more than six months. Now, their solicitor, Julian Pike of Farrer & Co., formally apologised for previously misleading the court and explained that he himself had been misled by News International.

Pike now told the court that he estimated the archive contained some 500 billion bytes of data. In the single case of Sienna Miller, there were at least 11,000 email messages. And the whole archive was to be searched for information on anybody who was suing. For the police who for years had failed even to ask for this trove, this was another damning revelation. For all of the executives, editors and journalists at News International, this was terrifying: who could remember what they had said in emails over the last six years; who could say where this would end?

Vos ordered disclosure of all News International’s relevant electronic records. Over in Westminster, Jeremy Hunt’s office had been inundated with so many hostile public comments on the BSkyB bid that he was forced to delay announcing his final decision.

*   *   *

Around the corner from the Royal Courts of Justice, in the criminal courts of the Old Bailey, Jonathan Rees got himself a break. After a gruelling series of pre-trial hearings, the judge threw out the case against him and others for conspiring to murder his former business partner, Daniel Morgan. He was free. And so at last, we were free to name him.

We did so in a long story which pulled together all we now knew about his crimes for the
News of the World
and the very public signs that he was committing them. The point was not simply that, as editor, Andy Coulson would have to have been suffering from profound brain failure to remain ignorant of the crime in his newsroom, but that David Cameron wanted us to believe that with all the political antennae of the Conservative Party at his disposal, and with all the investigative might of the police and the intelligence agencies on his side, he too knew nothing at all about Andy Coulson’s indifference to the law – a very convenient ignorance for a man who had reason for wanting to enjoy the benefits of having Murdoch’s former editor on his team.

The idea that Cameron knew nothing became even more acutely difficult to believe when Alan Rusbridger revealed publicly that, back in February 2010, when we had written about Rees as ‘Mr A’, the
Guardian
’s deputy editor, Ian Katz, had drawn the story to the attention of Cameron’s director of strategy, Steve Hilton, and later to Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. Rusbridger also disclosed that he personally had discussed the story with the Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, who had gone on to become Cameron’s deputy prime minister.

Now, the BBC’s
Panorama
programme revealed the first hard evidence that Coulson’s paper had commissioned the hacking of email as well as voicemail. The BBC had been working on this for months, after Rusbridger encouraged them to look at the story. At Rusbridger’s request, I had given them information and advice, but they had succeeded in breaking significant new ground. They got hold of the contents of a fax which had been sent to the
News of the World
in July 2006, containing information which appeared to have been obtained from the computer of Ian Hurst, who had worked with British Intelligence in Northern Ireland where he had had access to highly sensitive material.

Panorama
found a source who tipped them off that Hurst’s computer had been hacked by a specialist called Philip Campbell Smith who, by chance, had worked in British Intelligence in Northern Ireland alongside Hurst.
Panorama
approached Hurst, showed him the fax and persuaded him to meet Smith in a hotel and to confront him while the BBC secretly filmed them. It went beautifully. Smith casually admitted that he had hacked Hurst’s computer: ‘It weren’t that hard. I sent you an email that you opened, and that’s it … I sent it from a bogus address … Now it’s gone. It shouldn’t even remain on the hard drive … I think I programmed it to stay on for three months.’ When Hurst then asked who had commissioned him to do this, Smith said: ‘The faxes would go to Dublin … He was the editor of the
News of the World
for Ireland. A Slovak-type name. I can’t remember his fucking name. Alex, his name is. Marunchak.’

Marunchak thus became the sixth of Coulson’s journalists to be named in connection with the scandal, after Clive Goodman, Ross Hindley, Neville Thurlbeck, Ian Edmondson and Greg Miskiw. Marunchak was the most senior. He had risen to be senior executive editor at the paper. He was also in a sense the most important since, on the basis of all that I had heard from his former colleagues, I believed he was the grandfather of the dark arts at the
News of the World
.

*   *   *

The opposition were fighting for every yard of territory.

News International were still doing all they could to suppress the truth.
The Times
reacted to the
Panorama
programme about Philip Campbell Smith by smearing the BBC, accusing them (wrongly) of having hired Jonathan Rees in the past. Their lawyers were opposing all of the civil actions in court. More than that, I confirmed – courtesy of Max Mosley and his new employee, Glenn Mulcaire – that it was indeed News International who were paying Mulcaire’s legal fees to appeal against the orders that he answer questions about his work for them.

Some of the lawyers also strongly suspected that News International may have been spying on us. On one occasion, Mark Thomson had a conversation with friends in which he mentioned that there was a Sienna Miller hearing coming up and, within an hour, he had calls from reporters at Sky and
The Times
asking if this was true. His law firm’s technology specialists strongly suspected that somebody was monitoring the activity on his phone and those of other lawyers and of myself. Rusbridger and I both contacted our phone companies and asked them to check for any sign of anybody trying to access our voicemail.

There was also considerable suspicion that News International might destroy evidence. Having finally forced the Murdoch team to admit that they held an archive of emails, Mark Thomson feared they might now be deleted, and went to court for a preservation order.

The Press Complaints Commission continued to live in denial. In spite of losing the libel action brought by Mark Lewis for her thoughtless and one-sided remarks about him, Lady Buscombe turned up on the BBC
Today
programme and, instead of withdrawing the PCC’s report which had upheld the
News of the World
’s story about itself, she confronted the evidence that was now flowing into the public domain by claiming that ‘we just don’t know’ the facts.

Although Operation Weeting looked like a thorough inquiry, the leadership of Scotland Yard showed no signs of acknowledging the scale of their failure. It was at this moment that they were compelled by their own police authority to disclose details of their senior ranks’ intimate social contact with News International. It was clear what Scotland Yard would have to do. They would call in their Directorate of Professional Standards to run a parallel inquiry alongside Operation Weeting, urgently to establish a) why the original inquiry had failed, and b) why John Yates subsequently had also failed and been allowed to make a sequence of misleading statements to press, public and Parliament. Of course they would. No, they didn’t. Weeting would finally investigate the
News of the World
, but, as things stood, nobody would investigate Scotland Yard.

And John Yates was making threatening noises towards the
Guardian
. As Operation Weeting began to uncover the truth, I had quoted Mark Lewis in the paper, accusing Yates of misleading Parliament by telling select committees that there had been only ten or twelve victims. Yates wrote to Rusbridger demanding that we withdraw this, publish a correction and undertake not to repeat it. Then he hired London’s most notoriously aggressive law firm, Carter Ruck, to repeat his demands. The
Guardian
’s in-house lawyer, Gill Phillips, sent back the legal equivalent of a Scud missile, a fourteen-page summary of the very good reasons for saying that he had indeed misled Parliament – and Yates dropped every demand.

Yates then became embroiled in a most unusual public bitchfest, with the Director of Public Prosecutions. This was provoked by Yates continuing to try to justify police failures by relying on the RIPA bollocks. After months of troubling silence, the DPP, Keir Starmer, finally stepped forward and directly and loudly challenged Yates. In a letter to the home affairs select committee, Starmer rubbished the claim that the original inquiry in 2006 had been told to adopt this narrow interpretation of the law: ‘The prosecution did not in its charges or presentation of the facts attach any legal significance to the distinction between messages which had been listened to and messages which had not … The issue simply did not arise for determination.’ This was very welcome.

And yet Yates persisted. In letters to the
Guardian
and then in evidence to select committees, he recycled the same old claims about RIPA, which succeeded only in provoking Starmer to come back at him, passing a detailed record of contacts between Caryatid and prosecutors to the home affairs committee. Its chairman, Keith Vaz, said the DPP’s evidence was ‘astonishing’ and that Yates’s version of events ‘was clearly not what happened’.

I decided to check another of the claims which Yates had been making, that during the original Caryatid inquiry, they had ensured that the four mobile phone companies warned all of their customers who had been identified as victims of hacking. I already knew that they had done so only patchily. Now I discovered that the police had never told any of them that they were supposed to contact anybody. Worse, I found that two of the companies – Orange and Vodafone – had written to the police to explain that Yates’s story was wrong. And yet now, more than four months after that warning, the Yard had still not told the select committee that Yates had misled them. Indeed, none of this seemed to register at all with his bosses, who allowed him to remain in post and even promoted him to take over as acting deputy commissioner.

*   *   *

On the morning of 5 April 2011 – sixty-four months after Buckingham Palace first complained to the police that there was something wrong with their voicemail – the
News of the World
’s former assistant editor Ian Edmondson and the current chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck were arrested on suspicion of illegally intercepting messages. Officers from Operation Weeting went to Wimbledon in south-west London to search Edmondson’s home, and to Esher in Surrey to search Thurlbeck’s. They removed paperwork and computers, and they searched Thurlbeck’s desk at the
News of the World
. News International, wearing a straight face, put out a statement declaring that the company ‘has consistently reiterated that it will not tolerate wrongdoing’.

That evening, all of Fleet Street’s finest gathered in their dinner jackets and their ankle-length gowns for the annual press awards, under the chandeliers of the banqueting room at the Savoy hotel. There was enough tension to start a small war.

The organisers had arranged the room so that the
Guardian
table was at the maximum distance from the
News of the World
’s. I had been nominated twice for ‘Scoop of the Year’, for the WikiLeaks stories and for the hacking scandal. The awards are decided by the votes of Fleet Street executives. It went to the
News of the World
for their exposé of corruption in the Pakistani cricket team. Across the room, I could see the
News of the World
editor, Colin Myler, standing in front of his staff, leading their cheers, and it seemed to me that they had learned nothing.

*   *   *

On 8 April, News International came up with a cunning move. They admitted defeat. At least, they pretended to.

In a ‘mea culpa’ statement, which had been rumoured for weeks, the company announced that, following ‘an extensive internal investigation’, they would be offering an unreserved apology and an admission of liability to some of those who were suing and that they would set up a compensation scheme for any other justifiable claims. ‘Past behaviour at the
News of the World
in relation to voicemail interception is a matter of genuine regret. It is now apparent that our previous inquiries failed to uncover important evidence, and we acknowledge our actions then were not sufficiently robust.’

This was huge. After all the lies and all the obstruction, all the aggression and all the claims about the rogue reporter, they were admitting that they had been wrong. But also this was clever. They appeared to be putting up their hands, admitting their crime and promising to tell the truth. In fact, what they were doing was to find a new device for concealing the truth. By conceding the general point that there had been crime, they could settle the cases much more cheaply, paying standard-rate damages instead of million-pound hush money – and they would stop any case coming to full trial with all its threat of public disclosure. They had abandoned another outer wall, in order to defend the castle itself.