Hack Attack (52 page)

It was days later, on 14 April, that Weeting detectives arrested Jimmy Weatherup and then threatened to arrest Ian Burton for attempting to hold the contents of Weatherup’s desk in his office. This finally snapped the patience of Sue Akers, who called a summit meeting at Scotland Yard on 21 April. Flanked by her senior officers, she carpeted Lewis and Greenberg like a headteacher with disobedient students. ‘She was quite threatening,’ according to one who was there. ‘Finger-wagging stuff, saying “if this is co-operation, you don’t know the meaning of the word”.’ She also made it painfully clear that she was not happy to see Ian Burton in the room. Chastened, Lewis and Greenberg went back to the office and are said to have told Brooks: ‘These are not nice people. Either you put us in charge, or we’re gone.’ Brooks agreed to put them in charge.

In New York, Lon Jacobs was pushing hard for an independent inquiry, hiring a law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, to run it. However, Joel Klein switched the job to a different firm, Williams & Connolly, based in Washington DC. Jacobs’ firm was left with a watching brief while Klein’s firm handed the job to one of their most senior attorneys, Brendan Sullivan, who had become famous in the late 1980s for representing Colonel Oliver North in the Iran–Contra scandal.

In early May, Jacobs flew to Washington for a summit meeting in Brendan Sullivan’s office. Rebekah Brooks and Will Lewis were coming in from London. They would all meet to hammer out a strategy. In the event, whether by accident or design, the London duo failed to arrive on time. After an empty afternoon, Jacobs was persuaded by Sullivan to go to his hotel for the evening. Later that night, Jacobs discovered that after he had left, Rebekah had arrived and that Sullivan had proceeded to discuss the case without him. He was so furious that he emailed Joel Klein and Rebekah Brooks to say he was sacking Sullivan with immediate effect.

But Sullivan was not sacked. Rebekah subsequently told friends in London that when she saw Jacobs’ email, she had called Joel Klein to ask him what he thought and that Klein had expressed himself very simply: ‘Fuck Lon.’

Sullivan duly declared that having spoken to Rebekah, he believed she was innocent. The real problem for Jacobs and some others in New York was that there was no sign of anybody conducting a serious investigation: not Rebekah or James in London; not Rupert and Joel Klein in New York. Those who feared there was far more dirt to be uncovered, including Jacobs and his chosen law firm, were sidelined.

Soon after the abortive meeting at Brendan Sullivan’s office, Rupert Murdoch announced that ten key players from the company must meet for dinner at his home in London on Thursday 19 May, to agree a strategy for the hacking. According to a detailed account which was later published by
Bloomberg Businessweek
, the players immediately split into two groups.

A group of six began the evening with cocktails in Murdoch’s house round the corner from Buckingham Palace: Rupert and James Murdoch, the deputy chairman Chase Carey, Joel Klein, Brendan Sullivan and Rebekah Brooks. Sullivan and Brooks went into a huddle. The other group, of four, were sent to a nearby hotel to buy a drink: Lon Jacobs and his deputy, Jeff Palker; Will Lewis and his sidekick Simon Greenberg. Lewis, according to one of those there, said he had been saying for months that they must close the
News of the World
, speaking of ‘greasy people producing rancid journalism – moral corruption dragging us into the mire’. When they merged for the meal, Rebekah Brooks took a seat directly opposite the chairman, according to the
Businessweek
report: ‘Brooks expressed mild embarrassment at being in the prime position, even though she had arranged the seating personally. She turned to Carey and coyly insisted that he switch seats with her. Carey demurred.’

And then, without discussion, according to
Businessweek
, Rupert Murdoch announced his decision: ‘This is going to be handled by Joel and Brendan. I will handle the board. Everyone else, stay out of it.’ Brendan Sullivan then repeated his view that Rebekah was innocent. The message was clear. There would be no investigation; nobody from New York would challenge Rebekah or James; Lon Jacobs was out of the picture and, a fortnight later, he resigned.

*   *   *

By mid-May, Fred Michel was sending urgent signals to Jeremy Hunt’s office pleading for a rapid decision: ‘Otherwise we won’t be done before mid-June, which will be catastrophic for many important reasons.’

And now the hacking scandal was banging on Hunt’s door. The ‘mea culpa’ from News Corp on 8 April had worried him and he had asked his lawyers for advice. On 18 April, they had told him that the hacking revelations raised a question about trust ‘to the extent that they suggested that you could not reasonably expect News Corp to abide by their undertakings, for example, if the wrongdoing was known of and endorsed or ordered at a senior level within News Corp’. Knowing nothing of Rupert Murdoch’s decision to refuse to allow a real investigation, Hunt concluded that this was not a problem. But still the bid was stalled. News Corp had still not hammered out an agreement with Ofcom, and nearly 40,000 people had now sent objections to Hunt’s department. Each of them had to be dealt with.

By 6 June, Michel was reporting that, in talking to Hunt’s office, he had ‘floated the threat that, if this were to go on for weeks, we could decide at any moment to withdraw’ – an echo of James Murdoch’s threat, in his speech in Barcelona seven months earlier, to pull BSkyB out of the UK altogether. It didn’t work.

By this time, Scotland Yard were scoping Operation Tuleta, to investigate Jonathan Rees’s involvement with the
News of the World
, and News International were running out of excuses for failing to give police the Harbottle & Lewis emails. During May, Brooks had agreed that a small sample of them should be shown to the former DPP, Lord Macdonald, who reported to the News Corp board, as he later recalled, that it was ‘blindingly obvious’ that they contained evidence of crime. Yet still Brooks had delayed.

There was more talk within the company of making the drastic tactical move of simply closing the
News of the World
. On 9 June, Simon Greenberg emailed Brooks: ‘If we are the subject of further enquiries into computer hacking and possibly payments, this is why we should consider the shutdown option. Is the brand too toxic for itself and the company? I believe it is. Unparalleled moments need unparalleled action. Showing we get it is important for us and for Rubicon. You could be person to save the Rubicon deal.’

Weeting detectives had met her on 13 June to show her evidence of the scale on which her own phone had been hacked but she had said nothing about the emails. Finally, on 20 June, nearly three months after receiving them from Harbottle & Lewis, she agreed that Lord Macdonald should pass them to police together with the surviving records of Clive Goodman’s allegations of crime, thus finally provoking the Operation Elveden inquiry into the bribing of police and other public officials.

However, Brooks was still fighting back. As the
New York Times
later reported, she was trying to create a diversion by asking former
News of the World
journalists to dig up evidence of hacking by other Fleet Street newspapers. On this account, Rupert Murdoch personally warned the editor of the
Daily Mail
, Paul Dacre, that ‘we are not going to be the only bad dog on the street’. Dacre is said to have told senior managers at the
Mail
that he had heard several reports that Will Lewis and Simon Greenberg had encouraged business leaders, footballers and PR agencies to see whether they had been hacked by the
Mail
. Rebekah’s efforts earned her nothing but friction, first from Dacre, who is said to have confronted her at breakfast in Brown’s hotel with the complaint that ‘you are trying to tear down the entire industry’, and then from Lady Rothermere, wife of the
Mail
’s owner, who told her that the
Mail
had not broken the law, to which Brooks is said to have responded by asking her who she thought she was, ‘Mother Teresa?’

On 22 June, Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading finally agreed terms with News Corp. An adapted version of Newco would spin off Sky News. The bid could go ahead. On Thursday 30 June, Jeremy Hunt went to Parliament to announce the news, adding that the phone-hacking allegations were ‘not material to my consideration’. He added just one final step – a brief final public consultation, with a deadline of noon on Friday 8 July. Victory was in sight.

On Sunday afternoon, 3 July, while Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch partied with senior politicians in Elisabeth Murdoch’s Oxfordshire garden, Fred Michel was at home, watching Rafael Nadal take on Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon tennis final. He spotted Jeremy Hunt in the crowd and texted him: ‘Come on Nadal!’

Nadal lost.

On the afternoon of Monday 4 July, the
Guardian
website posted a detailed story about the
News of the World
’s involvement in hacking the voicemail of Milly Dowler.

Part Three

Truth

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way.

Emile Zola in
Dreyfus: His Life and Letters

No tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other.

Aristotle

14. 28 June 2011 to 19 July 2011

I spent six days following up the tip about Milly Dowler. The thirteen-year-old schoolgirl had become a household name when she disappeared while walking home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, on 21 March 2002. Six months later, her body was found in woodland twenty-five miles away.

At first, the source was so nervous that he insisted I must make no inquiries for fear of exposing him. As a safe routine move, I checked into the
Guardian
’s database of Fleet Street output to find some background. Suddenly, I realised I was reading a most revealing story, which had been published by the
News of the World
on 14 April 2002. It was not a big story – only 300 words long and buried away on page 30. It claimed that a mentally ill woman had tricked one of Milly’s friends into giving her the missing girl’s mobile number and had contacted an employment agency, pretending to be Milly looking for work. And then this: ‘The agency used the number to contact Milly when a job vacancy arose and left a message on her voicemail … It was on 27 March, six days after Milly went missing, that the employment agency appears to have phoned her mobile.’

Two thoughts collided. First, that the
News of the World
had been either crazy or completely complacent to publish that without even attempting to pretend they had a lawful source for the information. Second, that this gave me a way forward. I contacted the nervous source and suggested that I could start asking questions without exposing him if I told people I was following up on the
News of the World
’s old story. He agreed.

I called Glenn Campbell from the BBC, who had worked on Milly’s disappearance in 2002. He offered to try to track down sources in Surrey police who had been involved in the original inquiry. I went off in search of other leads. Rapidly, I found a big one in my own office. Steve Whittamore’s records of his work for the
News of the World
clearly showed that the paper had commissioned him to blag British Telecom records for the home addresses and ex-directory phone numbers of three Surrey families called Dowler, including Milly’s parents, Bob and Sally. That was illegal.

Within hours, Glenn Campbell reported back that his source on the 2002 Surrey police inquiry had told him that there had been ‘a hell of a lot of dirty stuff going on’. The source had given him three precious nuggets. First: ‘We knew they were into Milly’s answerphone, but there was just so much going on that we didn’t, rather couldn’t tackle it.’ Second: ‘The press interest was just so intense that often we’d arrange landline calls between the SIO [Senior Investigating Officer] and the team and chief, as we didn’t trust our mobiles. Paranoid or what, but looking back, it was most probably sensible.’ Third, Operation Weeting were investigating the hacking of Milly’s phone and had been taking statements from officers on the original inquiry.

I spoke to current sources in Surrey police and confirmed all three points. They were particularly worried about emerging evidence that their own officers had had their phones hacked, including one who had been having an affair at the time. Glenn Campbell’s Surrey source then added that they had known about the hacking at the time because the
News of the World
quite shamelessly had quoted the voicemail to them when the paper was preparing its story. They had also suspected that the voicemail of Milly’s parents might have been targeted. I contacted Scotland Yard, who refused to help: ‘It’s a “not prepared to discuss”, I’m afraid.’

The original source had two other claims: that the
News of the World
had not only hacked Milly’s messages but had also deleted some of them, apparently because her voicemail box had filled up and they wanted to make room for new messages; and that some of those deletions had given Milly’s parents a false hope that their daughter must be alive and checking her voicemail.

I brought in Amelia Hill, who contacted Jingle and soon reported back that the
News of the World
had hacked Milly’s phone, and deleted messages because the voicemail box was full. Months later, new evidence surfaced and cast serious doubt on this last point but at the time, it was supported by the evidence which was available. Amelia added that Weeting had visited the parents a few months ago and were pursuing the case with the Crown Prosecution Service.

That weekend, I drafted a story and sent it to Glenn Campbell and Amelia Hill to check that it was accurate and did not jeopardise their sources. I was worried about Milly’s family being caught unawares by all this, so I sent Surrey police press office a summary of the story and asked them to warn the Dowlers and to try to put us in contact with somebody who could speak for them, possibly their solicitor. On Sunday evening, 3 July, I emailed the final version to Alan Rusbridger. With the mental image of ambitious tabloid reporters eavesdropping on Milly’s distressed family and friends imploring her to get in touch, I added a message: ‘I think this may be the most powerful hacking story so far.’