Hack Attack (49 page)

At one meeting, in a café near the High Court, Hill told me that Weeting were having trouble dealing with Greg Miskiw who, according to their analysis of Mulcaire’s notes, had commissioned some 68% of the hacking. They wanted to arrest him, but Miskiw – who was often short of morals but never short of cunning – had left the country. He had sent police a message that he would return in August, but they didn’t trust him. They put Miskiw’s name on a national database as a wanted man.

Jingle also made it very clear that News International were not helping Weeting. What most worried them was that it looked like somebody in the Murdoch team had been systematically deleting their archive of emails. They had stumbled on this when a detective was talking to a technician working for News International, who mentioned an occasion when an executive had told him to delete a vast tranche of messages. According to Jingle, the technician had refused to do so, and the executive had then reached round to the keyboard of the technician’s computer and deleted the messages himself. Jingle said that they believed that one particularly enormous deletion had taken place in January, just as News International were handing over three of Ian Edmondson’s old emails and claiming to be helping the police, just as Operation Weeting were beginning their inquiry.

But in March, Weeting had brought in IT wizards who reckoned they could retrieve them. Jingle said they now believed that the total number of emails which had survived the programme of deletion was less than the total number which should have been available for the account of just one senior journalist. He was talking about the destruction of tens of millions of messages, maybe hundreds of millions. That explained why later that month News International’s lawyers had had to grovel in court, admitting that contrary to all the company’s previous claims, they did store messages for more than six months.

For my part, I kept throwing whatever I could find at Murdoch’s walls. We disclosed that Weeting wanted to question Rebekah Brooks and that her phone had been tapped back in 2003/4, when Operation Glade were investigating her claim to the media select committee that her journalists had paid police in the past. This coincided with an interesting contribution from the actor Hugh Grant.

Grant’s car broke down in Kent and, by sheer fluke, he was spotted by Paul McMullan, formerly of the
News of the World
and now running a pub in Dover. McMullan grabbed some pictures and then offered Grant a lift, which he reluctantly accepted. As they drove, McMullan chattered on so much about his work as a tabloid journalist that Grant, whose private life had been ransacked by the tabloids over the years, decided to try a little stunt.

Some weeks later, he turned up in McMullan’s pub with a concealed recorder and, using a tabloid method to catch a tabloid man, he got McMullan talking and secretly taped him insisting that Rebekah Brooks must have known about the hacking. It didn’t amount to serious evidence, but a transcript of the conversation was published by the
New Statesman
magazine in the same week that we ran our story about Scotland Yard planning to question her.

This had no impact at all at News International, where Brooks remained in charge of their internal investigation.

We disclosed that finally, twelve months after I had first asked under the Freedom of Information Act, Scotland Yard were admitting that during their original inquiry they had warned only twenty-eight of Mulcaire’s victims; and, since our Gordon Taylor story, they had warned only eight more. By contrast, Weeting were now contacting hundreds. My remaining small respect for Andy Hayman and John Yates disappeared down a drain. I don’t know whether it was a coincidence that at about this time, a friendly police contact told me of an email written by a senior Scotland Yard press officer, describing me as ‘a man without compassion or a soul’.

Politically more important, we also disclosed the extraordinary case of Dennis Rice, a veteran Fleet Street reporter who had been shown evidence by Weeting that, when he was working for the
Mail on Sunday
, filing stories from the 2006 football World Cup in Germany, the
News of the World
were hacking his phone, apparently trying to steal his work. Evidently Mulcaire had also obtained the password which Rice used to access the
Mail on Sunday
’s internal computer system, potentially allowing the
News of the World
to monitor all of their email traffic and all of the stories they were preparing to publish.

Our story noted that this was a particularly sensitive claim since it could start to break the alliance of silence which had seen most Fleet Street papers refuse to investigate the scandal. We recorded that former journalists from the
News of the World
were claiming that the paper had also tried to steal stories from the
Sun
, the
Daily Mail
, the
Daily Mirror
, the
Sunday Mirror
and the
Sunday People
. In the same vein, I was hearing rumours that Rebekah Brooks had approached a private investigator and commissioned him to dig out evidence that other Fleet Street newspapers had been hacking voicemail in an apparent attempt to divert fire from News International.

I had several other plots running. Pursuing them, I kept coming across the footprints of a BBC journalist called Glenn Campbell, who had worked on the
Panorama
programme which exposed Alex Marunchak and the hacking of Ian Hurst’s computer. We decided to pool resources. We started to collect information about News International’s targeting of Gordon Brown. I already had the tape of Barry Beardall, the fraudster who worked for the
Sunday Times
, blagging confidential details about Brown from a London law firm, which Rusbridger had used to stop the
Sunday Times
publishing their smear story back in July 2009. Through Tom Watson, who was in regular contact with Brown, we started to get more examples, and we began looking into the controversial occasion in November 2006 when the
Sun
had breached the medical confidentiality of Brown’s infant son, Fraser, by splashing across their front page the fact that he had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

Campbell and I also worked together to bring out more of the activities of Jonathan Rees. It made no sense that Weeting were digging into Mulcaire’s work but ignoring Rees’s years of crime for Fleet Street – and the mass of paperwork, computer records and bugging transcripts which had been collected over the years by various inquiries into the murder of Daniel Morgan. Campbell had much better police contacts than I did. Between us, we started to assemble more and more detailed evidence of Rees’s activity. The two of us held several meetings with Tom Watson who sent a summary of Rees’s activity to the head of Operation Weeting, Sue Akers. On 17 May, she wrote back to him, to say that they were ‘assessing your allegations along with others we have received to consider a way forward’. She added that Rees might be outside Weeting’s official terms of reference. We translated that to mean that she was willing to investigate Rees if Scotland Yard would allow her to. We decided to give her bosses a couple of helpful nudges.

First of all, Campbell and I prepared stories. Together we had identified a whole raft of new people who had been targeted by Rees – politicians, senior police and more members of the royal household. Perhaps the most eye-catching was Kate Middleton, who had been Prince William’s girlfriend when Rees targeted her but who was now married to him and in line to become queen. The oddest was John Yates, who had somehow wandered into Rees’s field of fire.

And with all of this, the really crucial point was that Scotland Yard already knew it. More than that, just as they had sat on the Mulcaire evidence and failed to act, Campbell and I knew that they were sitting on several hundred thousand pages of evidence which had been seized from Rees by the various investigations into the murder of Daniel Morgan. Knowing all this, we made two other moves.

First, we agreed that the day before Campbell and I put out our stories, Tom Watson would stand up during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons and pitch David Cameron a question about this. Second, we decided to share the story with a rival newspaper, the
Independent
. Although they had spent the first fifteen months of this saga attacking the
Guardian
, there had been a change of editor and a change of line, and now it looked as if they were willing to try to dig out the truth.

On 7 June, Tom Watson arranged for me to meet Martin Hickman, one of the
Independent
’s senior reporters and an old university friend of his. Not for the first time in this affair, I found myself handing over information to a rival reporter. Hickman was good – attentive and sharp – and he agreed that he would hold back until Campbell and I were ready to fire.

On 8 June, in the House of Commons, Watson stood up and gave the prime minister a summary of what we had found, adding: ‘Yet the head of Operation Weeting has recently written to me to explain that this evidence may be outside the inquiry’s terms of reference. Prime Minister, I believe powerful forces are involved in a cover-up.’

Cameron had little choice. He replied – in this most public of venues – that the police were free to go wherever the evidence might take them. ‘There are no terms of reference as far as I am concerned. The police are able to look at any evidence and all evidence they can find.’

On 9 June, the
Guardian
, the BBC and the
Independent
all ran stories disclosing the detail behind Tom Watson’s question. ‘Pressure is building on the Metropolitan Police to expand their phone-hacking inquiry to include a notorious private investigator.’ Within days, we heard that Scotland Yard had set up a small team, to be known as Operation Tuleta, and they had been told to search through the vast reservoir of material they held on Jonathan Rees so that they could decide whether to launch a full inquiry into his activities.

Ten days later, Scotland Yard was forced to set up a third operation. This one was called Elveden and its object was to investigate the alleged payment of bribes to police officers and other officials by journalists from the
News of the World
. According to News International’s version of events, this was all their achievement. They claimed that they had discovered emails which appeared to contain evidence of corruption and dutifully had passed them to Scotland Yard. So, News International were on the side of law and order. Jingle told a different tale.

According to him (and to other friendly sources), it was the police who had forced these emails out of News International’s hands. Like me, Weeting detectives had read on the media select committee’s website the letter from the posh London law firm Harbottle & Lewis who had reviewed 2,500 internal
News of the World
emails and found they contained no evidence to support Clive Goodman’s allegations of crime in the newsroom. As Jingle told it, detectives had guessed that the lawyers’ copies might have survived the mass deletion of emails and had told News International to hand them over, which eventually they had done on the morning of 20 June. They appeared to show Andy Coulson authorising the payment of cash to police officers, and so Sue Akers had another inquiry to manage.

*   *   *

The pressure on News International was intense. They replied by pretending that nothing had changed. And in a way, they were right. A few weeks earlier, the US pressure group Media Matters had caught Rupert Murdoch in the street and asked him to comment on the hacking scandal. He had refused to say anything, explaining, ‘I don’t have to.’ He was right. Who could force him?

On 16 June, News International held its annual summer party in a marquee in Holland Park, central London – and politicians of every colour and others from the power elite queued for an audience with the mogul, who was guided through the event by Rebekah Brooks. The traditional aggression was there too. Murdoch’s former friend and business ally, Lord Sugar, had said earlier that day that journalists who had hacked phones should be jailed. When he then turned up at the party, he was confronted by an angry James Murdoch, who made it very clear that his invitation had been withdrawn – he was not welcome among them. When a News Corp executive ran into a Labour Party figure, he asked for a message to be sent to Tom Watson, that he would meet Watson and help him send Andy Coulson to prison, but Watson must leave Rebekah out of it. Still the same old power game.

As the end of June approached, there were reports that Ofcom had finally given their blessing to News Corp’s bid for BSkyB. The Murdochs were about to become bigger players than ever, potentially the biggest media players on the planet. Who could possibly stop them?

On 28 June 2011, as I walked through central London in the sun, my phone buzzed in my pocket, and, when I answered, a familiar voice told me that the
News of the World
had hacked the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl called Milly Dowler.

13. The last ditch

Based on interviews with government ministers, officials and advisers; with sources in News Corp and other news organisations; research by Sarah Ellison for
Vanity Fair
magazine; and sworn evidence and internal documents, emails and texts from the Leveson Inquiry.

Tuesday 25 January 2011 – a big day.

The previous evening, Rupert Murdoch had flown into London with one overriding objective: to clear the path for Operation Rubicon, the bid for BSkyB. This thrust him into a world he loved, of political manoeuvre; but the politics were getting complicated.

The Cameron government’s loyalty was clearly divided, firstly by its coalition with the Lib Dems, who had no affection for Murdoch; and secondly by the uncomfortable fact that while Murdoch’s newspapers all wanted the bid to go through, two other powerful right-wing newspaper groups, the
Telegraph
and the
Mail
, were opposing it, causing splits in the Conservative ranks.