Hack Attack (10 page)

And Goodman also resorted to the skills of Glenn Mulcaire. He had been hacking in a small way on his own since January 2005, using a couple of phone numbers and PIN codes for royal staff which Greg Miskiw had given him. But in August, Coulson took him out to lunch and told him he had to find new ways to get stories about Prince William and Prince Harry – and Goodman knew how to do it. Years later, he was to claim it was Mulcaire’s idea, that the hacker was worried that his contract was going to be cut so he was looking for an extra deal on the side. Mulcaire says he never wanted to do it, because it was dangerous and that he was pressurised. Whatever the origin, the result was that Goodman agreed to find money to set up a special operation – they called it ‘Project Bumblebee’ – to trawl systematically through the voicemail of the royal family and their staff. Goodman would revive his career. Mulcaire would earn some extra cash. Over the following couple of months, the investigator started gathering royal phone numbers and PIN codes, dropping heavy hints to Goodman that he was being helped by some secret source in the Security Service.

The only problem with Goodman’s plan was Ian Edmondson, who had now pushed Jimmy Weatherup aside to take sole control of the news desk. With Miskiw gone, Edmondson was using the secret weapon to capture masses of stories (and making the rival features department look so weak that one of their writers, Dan Evans, was now routinely hacking phones on the same scale as Mulcaire in an attempt to catch up). Goodman had little chance of getting direct access to Mulcaire for himself. He had the answer. He would simply go over Edmondson’s head. On 25 October, Goodman went to see the editor. Coulson was cautious. He had no problem with breaking the law or invading the privacy of the royal household, but he was under relentless pressure from Murdoch’s managers to cut back on editorial spending. Nevertheless, if this worked, it could boost the paper’s circulation and pay for itself. Coulson agreed that, for a trial period of just four weeks, Mulcaire would be paid an extra £500 a week to target the royal household’s voicemail.

They all knew this was legally very risky. They agreed to keep it especially secret. They arranged that the payments to Mulcaire would be sent to him under yet another false name, David Alexander, with a pick-up address which could not be linked to him, in Chelsea, central London.

On 26 October, Mulcaire emailed Goodman – subject ‘Bumblebee’ – with details of fourteen royal numbers which he could access, adding ‘Please file secure folder!!!!’ From that afternoon, the two of them were regularly intercepting Palace voicemails; Stuart Kuttner was signing off payments to ‘David Alexander’; and, following the established pattern, Goodman was tasking Derek Webb to follow up on hacked intelligence by secretly following royal targets. Webb recognised this was not easy, but he found a solution: he lurked outside palaces and royal houses, noting the descriptions and numbers of police escort vehicles and then, as the escorts followed their royal charges, Webb followed the escorts.

It worked but, for the most part, it produced only small stories, which Goodman chose to run in his diary column, published under the pseudonym Blackadder. On 6 November 2005, he revealed that Prince William had pulled a tendon in his knee playing football and had gone to Prince Charles’s personal doctor for treatment. What Goodman did not realise was that the prince’s knee had recovered and he had never seen the doctor: all he had done was to leave a voicemail message with one of his staff, saying that he would like to see the doctor. A week later, Blackadder ran another small story about the political editor of ITN, Tom Bradby, lending a portable editing suite to Prince William. Goodman laid a false trail in the story, hinting heavily that he had picked this up from a source in ITN. What he didn’t know was that Bradby had told nobody at ITN apart from his secretary, whom he trusted. All he had done was to leave a voicemail message on one of the royal phones.

What Goodman and Mulcaire also did not know was that these signs of their activity had been so loud and so clear that the Palace had complained to the head of the police team at Buckingham Palace, who had passed on the complaint to the Specialist Operations team at the Metropolitan Police, who had decided to start an investigation.

The four-week trial period ended, and Goodman begged a further month’s money from Coulson, but by February 2006 the editor’s budget worries had become so intense that he instructed Stuart Kuttner to end Glenn Mulcaire’s royal retainer and to start paying him only when he delivered results. Goodman did his best to claim fat fees for any stories that the investigator found, but, in search of success, the two of them became more and more reckless. By now, the police were on to them.

On 9 April 2006, Goodman ran a story with Neville Thurlbeck about a row between Prince Harry and his then girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, after Harry had visited a lap-dancing bar. Under the heading ‘Chelsy tears Harry off a strip’, it not only reported the argument but quoted a deliberately slighty inaccurate version of a message which had been left on Harry’s voicemail by his brother, Prince William, mimicking the voice of Chelsy Davy. A week later, on 18 April, Goodman had the front-page splash with a story about Prince William getting drunk after his brother’s passing-out parade at Sandhurst military academy. Goodman was happy. Mulcaire was happy – he got £3,000 for his work. But the story crashed through trip wires in the army and the Palace, by accurately reflecting a complaint which had been made by the head of Sandhurst, General Andrew Ritchie, to Prince Harry’s private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton. The complaint had been made in a voicemail message.

Very few people knew about Project Bumblebee. But plenty of people knew about Glenn Mulcaire and understood that he was a master of the dark arts. Some knew precisely what he had to offer as a special skill and either practised it themselves or saw other people doing it. They talked about it in conference with the editor. They laughed about it in the pub. Some knew it was illegal. Some didn’t. It didn’t matter – as long as they could carry on concealing it from the rest of the world. Mulcaire continued with his work, busy as ever.

Early on the morning of 8 August 2006, Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested on suspicion of intercepting voicemail messages from the royal household. A few weeks later, the police contacted Gordon Taylor to tell him his voicemail had been hacked. Taylor told Mark Lewis and it was then, like a boy picking up a stone and starting an avalanche, that Lewis decided to sue.

3. 8 July 2009 to 14 July 2009

At half past four in the afternoon on Wednesday 8 July 2009, we posted my news story on the
Guardian
website, headed ‘Murdoch papers paid £1 million to gag phone-hacking victims’. It said:

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1 million to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures as well as gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the
Guardian
reveals details of the suppressed evidence, which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the
News of the World
and the
Sun
, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them. The evidence also poses difficult questions for:

• Conservative leader David Cameron’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the
News of the World
when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts;

• Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public;

• The Metropolitan Police, which did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel;

• The Press Complaints Commission, which claimed to have conducted an investigation but failed to uncover any evidence of illegal activity.

The story traced the course of the legal action by Gordon Taylor and his two associates and went on to quote the unnamed police sources who had suggested to me that there were thousands of victims of phone-hacking, adding that these sources ‘suggest that MPs from all three parties and Cabinet ministers, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott and former Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell were among the targets’.

As the story was posted on the website, the
Guardian
news desk asked a reporter, Caroline Davies, to call John Prescott, to get a reaction quote. Ten minutes later, she came back, flushed with success after tracking down the famously blunt and plain-speaking politician. She started to reel off a jumble of comments, capturing Prescott’s tendency to produce multiple half-formed sentences without finishing any of them. The deputy editor, Paul Johnson, asked her to slow down, go back to the beginning of her notes and just to tell him exactly what Prescott had told her. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I told him the gist of the story, and he said “FOOKIN HELL!”’

A few hours later, we published a second story on the website, headed ‘Trail of hacking and deceit under nose of Tory PR chief’, which delivered more detail without referring to the paperwork on which it was based. It explained that in a short period of Mulcaire activity during the spring of 2006, those who had been targeted included not only John Prescott and Tessa Jowell but also the rock star George Michael; the actor Gwyneth Paltrow; the former Conservative MP who had become mayor of London, Boris Johnson; and the radical Scottish politician, Tommy Sheridan. The story went on to publish more of the detail of Steve Whittamore’s blagging for the
News of the World
, naming public figures whose information he had stolen and the organisations whose security had been penetrated by his network.

The story had been damped down a little by the
Guardian
’s legal department. For fear of UK libel law, which makes it dangerous to criticise people who can afford aggressive lawyers, I had had to steer clear of any direct suggestion that Andy Coulson knew about the illegal activity. A few days before we published, I had submitted a detailed question to him about the Gordon Taylor settlement, and his secretary at Conservative HQ had replied to say that ‘it didn’t ring any bells with him’. For the same reason, I had had to suggest that Murdoch’s executives might have been acting ‘in good faith’ when they misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public. Personally, I believed that they had been deliberately lying. If they really had been acting in good faith, surely they would have gone back to the select committee and everybody else a year before, when they were passed the new evidence in the Gordon Taylor case, and they would have announced that, although the details of the legal action were confidential, they now realised that their whole ‘rogue reporter’ story was untrue. But they hadn’t done that.

What was more, News International had put out a lie before we published the story. When I had called them a few days earlier, I had been wary of telling them too much. I was worried that they might try to pre-empt me by putting out some twisted version of the story – a ‘spoiler’ calculated to make mine look old and unpublishable, without disclosing too much of the truth. So, I had asked – with calculated naivety – if they knew anything about any of their titles paying damages for hacking the mobile phones of possibly three people in the footballing world. That night, a friendly source had called me to say I had caused some kind of collective anxiety attack at News International’s headquarters: ‘They are all chasing around blaming each other for having given you the story.’

The following morning, the News International press officer called back to say that she had spoken to the managing editors and the lawyers for all four titles: ‘No one has any knowledge about this … This particular case means nothing to anyone here, and I’ve talked to all of the people who would be involved.’ That certainly was a lie, although the press officer did not know it, calculated on the assumption that we didn’t know enough to run a story.

By contrast, Clive Goodman, on whose head News International had shovelled so much blame, chose to be strangely silent. When I called him, he said: ‘I’m not even going to say “No comment” as a comment.’

*   *   *

The story went off like dynamite, though there was obviously something wrong with the detonator. Certainly, there was an explosion. John Prescott worked his way through broadcast studios, roaring his indignation like a bull in pain. Several other Labour MPs started chasing Andy Coulson’s tail like dogs on a fox, pointing out that it raised questions about David Cameron’s judgement in hiring him. And a handful of public figures surfaced to explain how vile it was to have their privacy invaded. But the explosion went off at half strength. It soon became clear that there was a shortage of people who were interested in getting into a fight with Rupert Murdoch.

The rest of Fleet Street did their best to ignore the story. That was no surprise. They had multiple motives for concealing the truth from their readers – because they themselves had a history of playing the same illegal games as the
News of the World
and/or they supported the Conservatives and didn’t want to give oxygen to the Andy Coulson angle and/or they were owned by Rupert Murdoch. I heard later from an executive at
The Times
that the editor, James Harding, had been ‘puce with rage’ at the idea that he had to follow up on this
Guardian
rubbish. The political correspondent of Murdoch’s Sky News channel solemnly warned his viewers that ‘this is very much being ramped up politically’.