Hack Attack (6 page)

Finally, I also heard that there was a tape-recording of Glenn Mulcaire explaining to a reporter exactly how to get access to Gordon Taylor’s voicemail messages, a step-by-step guide in the art of phone-hacking. The reporter’s name, I was told, sounded like Ryan or Ryall.

All this was truly damaging for the
News of the World
. Even if they wanted to claim that they knew nothing about hacking when Clive Goodman was arrested, they had known about this paperwork for months, since it was disclosed in the Gordon Taylor legal action earlier in 2008. Yet they had made no attempt to correct the record in any way. And what about Scotland Yard? This material had been seized from Glenn Mulcaire when police arrested him in August 2006. It had been sitting in police hands ever since. Had they done anything at all to pursue it, to interview or arrest other
News of the World
people who were involved? And if not, why not? And why had they not even mentioned this in court at the original trial?

And surely this was only the beginning. As far as I could tell, the court had ordered the police to hand over material which they held specifically in relation to Gordon Taylor. If it was true that there really were thousands of victims, then it looked as if there would be thousands more documents in Scotland Yard’s vaults, about other victims and possibly about other perpetrators at the
News of the World
. Just how much were News International concealing? Just how much evidence had the police buried away?

But, of course, as far as News International and the police were concerned, the case had been settled. The money had been handed over to Gordon Taylor and the two others who had joined the action, Jo Armstrong and John Hewison. The paperwork had been sealed with the blessing of the High Court. Nobody was to know anything about any of this.

Well, that was their plan.

*   *   *

Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post
once said that ‘the best journalism is often done in defiance of management’. True. At best, news managers are desperate for copy, so they won’t give reporters the time they need to work on stories; at worst, they are little people with big titles who think they should prove themselves by interfering all day long.

But I’m freelance. I work from home where I can be almost invisible to the people who employ me. So I hide out in my study down in deepest Sussex with nothing to disturb me but outbreaks of very loud music and a distant view of a thirteenth-century church, happy in the hope that the
Guardian
will forget me and in the knowledge that I don’t need a school prefect to stand over me to tell me to work.

By late June 2009, finally armed with enough detail and my collection of explosive paperwork, I was more or less ready to run the hacking story and so I needed to go up to London to get the
Guardian
onside. It had been well over a year since I had encountered Stuart Kuttner on the BBC radio
Today
programme. I had been working on other projects as well, but this one had got bigger and bigger.

I had lunch with the
Guardian
editor, Alan Rusbridger, in the newspaper’s swanky new glass office in the area behind King’s Cross Station which was once lined with prostitutes and crack dealers but now trades in nothing more dangerous than chai latte and croissants.

Rusbridger is different from other news managers in at least two ways. First, he is a friend. He and I started as junior news reporters on the
Guardian
on the same day in July 1979. Now that he is the editor, we have a very simple deal: I bring him stories; he covers my back. He knows I won’t let him down; I know he won’t mess me about.

Second, he has a backbone. Fleet Street is well stocked with ambitious cowards, who have risen to the top by grinning obediently at anybody who is higher up the ladder than them. That kind of editor would take one look at a story which was bound to cause trouble with the largest news organisation in the country and the largest police force and the largest political party and, for good measure, the Press Complaints Commission, and they would have killed it or cut it back and tucked it away at the bottom of page five, hoping nobody would notice it. But Rusbridger liked it.

We agreed that we must run it soon, before Parliament rose for its summer recess, so that we could be sure it would have some impact. I had a little bit more work to do on it. I needed to approach some of the key players, including Coulson and News International, to see if they had anything to say. I also had a worry about it.

I was not sure about naming twenty-seven journalists from the
News of the World
and four others from the
Sun
who had been commissioning Steve Whittamore’s network; or the news reporter, Ross Hindley, who had sent the email for Neville Thurlbeck, containing the transcripts of voicemail messages. I did not want to create more Clive Goodmans – more reporters who could be dismissed as rogues by senior people who were, in fact, the ones who were really responsible. Blame tends to fall downwards. Also, perhaps wrongly, I had a queasy resistance to naming journalists, just because I am a journalist. We agreed to hold back the names of all but the most senior and the most culpable.

I explained, too, that although I had got hold of a lot of paperwork, I couldn’t admit that. Our evidence would have to stay hidden. We frightened each other a little with some speculation about which particular parts of our private life could be dragged out to punish us. And then we agreed to publish in the next week or so.

We’d probably be OK.

2. Inside the
News of the World

Based on interviews with former journalists from the
News of the World
as well as documents and detail which emerged in the Leveson Inquiry and in court hearings.

Andy Coulson had a good view from his office. Sitting at his desk, he could look out through his glass wall and see the beating heart of the
News of the World
. Right in front of him was the ‘back bench’ – the row of desks where he would often sit with his lieutenants, filtering all the material that was being pumped into the paper from news agencies and freelancers and from his own staff, making the decisions that shaped the paper.

Beyond the back bench, he could see the picture desk and then the news desk where several executives ran the news reporters who were cramped together in a group on the far side of the room and, next to them, the sub-editors who would check their stories and write their headlines. Around the edges of the newsroom were the feature writers, the sports writers, offices for a few other executives and a special cubicle for the royal editor, Clive Goodman. This was Coulson’s world, and he ruled it. But that wasn’t the best part of the view.

The best sight was over to his right, just to the side of the back bench, where he could always see it, where everybody could see it – the trophy cabinet. He had just ordered it brand new, in April 2005, because he was proud of what his staff had achieved. This was the biggest-selling paper in the country – 3.5 million copies every Sunday. It was probably the biggest-selling paper in the Western world. It had the biggest budgets, the biggest impact. Nobody beat the
News of the World
. Which was why the new cabinet now displayed the biggest prize in British journalism – the award for Newspaper of the Year for 2004/5.

In the last twelve months, they had brought in one big scoop after another. David Beckham might be a great footballer and he might have thought he was clever enough to have an affair without his wife or anybody else finding out, but they’d caught him and exposed him for sleeping with his personal assistant, Rebecca Loos, and spread the story over seven pages. A few months later, they’d done the same with the England football manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, when they caught him having an affair with Faria Alam, a secretary at the Football Association. To top that, a month later they had exposed the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, who had been having an affair with a married American publisher, Kimberly Quinn. As a bonus, they discovered that a
Guardian
journalist, Simon Hoggart, was also having an affair with Quinn, so a few weeks later they had tossed him into the mix as well. Week after week, they had pounded the opposition papers.

For Andy Coulson, aged thirty-seven, this was a peak. He had come a long way in a short time. He had left school at the age of eighteen, armed only with some A levels, a very good brain and one burning ambition: to become a showbiz reporter. It took him just two years of working on a local paper in Essex to hit his target. In 1988, aged only twenty, he was hired by the
Sun
to become part of the team that produced the gossip column, Bizarre. The column was brash and loud – just like its editor, Piers Morgan. It was obsessed with the private lives of rock stars, film stars, TV stars, anybody who could sprinkle glitter on the column’s gossip. Coulson was pitched into a world of A-list celebrities and Class A drugs.

There were some people working on Bizarre who disappeared headlong into a blur of non-stop partying. One of Coulson’s closest friends, Sean Hoare, who worked beside him on the column, used to start the day with what he called ‘a rock star’s breakfast’ – a Jack Daniel’s and a line of coke – and then he would carry on partying with whatever PR people or celebs would find him a story to justify his expenses.

‘My job,’ Hoare used to say, ‘is to take drugs with rock stars.’

There was a tradition, known as the Friday Feeling, when Hoare or one of the other journalists would go off to the
Sun
cashier and draw out £300 and buy some charlie (it was an old News International tradition that some of the back-up staff would always have a nice supply) and then they’d get coked out of their heads and start the weekend.

Those who liked Coulson used to say he was calm at the core; he would always stay straight enough to file his copy. In spite of his youth, he seemed to have landed fully formed, with his light blue shirt and his dark blue suit, all neat and grown up. Others said he was cold, that no matter what was going on, Andy would always survive; behind that mask of mild-mannered competence, he was ruthless.

Hoare was furious with him one time when Hoare had brought in a story about a famous actress only to find that Coulson, first, refused to publish it; second, took the famous actress on holiday; third, was clearly being rewarded in her bed; fourth, and worst of all, told the famous actress how Hoare had managed to get the story in the first place, with the result that the source was exposed and lost forever. When Hoare discovered all this, he told Coulson direct and to his face that he was a complete cunt. Coulson replied with a line which became a regular catchphrase as he worked his way upwards: ‘I’ll make it up to you, mate.’ As though it never mattered what you did, because you could always throw a favour in somebody’s direction and just move on. Within six years, he had replaced Piers Morgan as editor of the Bizarre column.

Four years later, in January 1998, Coulson climbed further up the tree and became associate editor of the
Sun
, working alongside the new deputy editor – a sharp, sassy, ambitious young woman called Rebekah. They already knew each other a bit. Now, the two of them bonded. People guessed they must be sleeping together, though nobody was sure. They made a team – they were both young and clever, they had both started with nothing and they both shared an intense ambition. And together they made it.

In May 2000, Rupert Murdoch moved Rebekah Brooks to the editor’s chair at the
News of the World
. She immediately recruited Coulson as her deputy. He worked hard for her, set up a new investigations department, handled the detail of stories for her and made sure the staff were happy. He had a good reputation in the newsroom. While Brooks was off in the clouds, making contacts among very important people, Coulson would turn up at the staff parties, and say hi to people in the newsroom. He rewarded himself with a Porsche Boxster with a top speed of 165 mph and a price tag of £35,000. But people began to notice that the more powerful he became, the more names he forgot. After a while, he was reduced to calling most of the men ‘mate’ and most of the women ‘sweetheart’.

Three years later, in January 2003, Rupert Murdoch gave Brooks the
Sun
to edit and made Coulson boss at the
News of the World
. His new position gave him power, and he was happy to use it against those who crossed him. For example, he didn’t like Roy Greenslade, the former editor of the
Daily Mirror
who had become a professor of journalism at City University, London. So he withdrew the funding for two student places which the
News of the World
had been sponsoring. The head of the City journalism department, Adrian Monck, had lunch with Coulson and sweet-talked him into restoring the funding. But, as he got up to leave, Coulson added: ‘One thing, mate. I want you to give me Roy’s head on a plate.’ Monck refused: City lost its funding.

It was not simply that he was himself capable of being cold. More important, he was required to be ruthless. From his proprietor and the board of News Corp 3,500 miles away in New York, through the chief executive of News International, Les Hinton, who sat in the same building in Wapping, east London, the unstated message to him and to Rebekah Brooks, editing the
Sun
in the same building, and to every other editor in every other part of the empire was constant and simple: ‘Get the story – no matter what.’

The previous month, March 2005, Coulson had been to the Hilton Hotel to pick up his big award, for Newspaper of the Year. Afterwards, when he was interviewed by the
Press Gazette
, he had shrugged off the sneering disdain of outsiders who seemed to think his kind of journalism was not really respectable.

‘I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,’ he said. ‘And this goes for everyone on the
News of the World
. The readers are the judges. That’s the most important thing. And I think we should be proud of what we do.’