Hack Attack (19 page)

The transcript also had interesting clues about the police. The prosecution version of events was that Goodman had persuaded Mulcaire to hack phones for him by smuggling cash to him. He had done this, they said, by inventing a non-existent super-secret source at Buckingham Palace, code-named ‘Alexander’, and claiming £500 a week in tip fees for him and then passing this on to Mulcaire. But the dates didn’t fit. The prosecution’s own case was that Mulcaire had been hacking royal phones since February 2005, possibly even earlier, but the first payment to Alexander was not until November 2005. So why would the police accept such a daft version of events?

Meanwhile, the DPP’s office called back with an answer to the question which I had put to them while I was standing under the rain-sodden tree outside John Ford’s house. Had the police in 2006 given prosecutors the email for Neville? And the answer was no. They had not shown the prosecutors clear documentary evidence which was directly relevant to one of the very few non-royal victims who had been named in court – documentary evidence which clearly implicated two other named journalists in handling illegally intercepted voicemail. So why would the police do that?

I banged out a story about the police failing to show prosecutors the email for Neville and carried on poking around in my imagination, looking for the rest of the picture.

*   *   *

I tracked down Brian Paddick, who had been a very senior officer in the Metropolitan Police back in 2006, an interesting man who had been reviled by the tabloid newspapers, partly because he took a liberal line on the policing of cannabis and partly because he committed the unforgiveable sin of being openly gay. He explained how things worked at the top of Scotland Yard. The key man, he said, was Dick Fedorcio – the director of communications, responsible for the Met’s links with Fleet Street. Fedorcio, he explained, had become a very powerful voice in the internal politics of Scotland Yard.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he said, the Met’s senior management team, the SMT, would meet to discuss policy. This was a small group which included Dick Fedorcio, who was allowed to have a direct impact on operational decisions: ‘The Met is desperate to get newspapers to run good news and not to run bad news. Dick Fedorcio is extremely close to editors. One big point of the commissioner’s SMT meetings is to discuss cases which are going well and to talk about how to get those out into the press, and to talk about the bad news and how to keep it out of the press. The meetings are dominated by that kind of conversation. Dick will persuade a paper to drop a bad story by giving them exclusive access to a big raid, that kind of thing.’

Paddick had had no direct involvement in the original phone-hacking inquiry in 2006, but he knew a fair bit about it. Simply because the original complaint had come from the royal household, the job had been passed to Specialist Operations, whose main focus is counter-terrorism and whose boss at the time was Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman. Based on his previous experience, Paddick reckoned the job would have been discussed from time to time at the SMT meetings. ‘Andy Hayman would give an update, and there would be a discussion around the table, including Dick: Hayman reports that they have concluded inquiries on the royal family but there is all this other material, and that’s when Dick would speak up, and they would decide not to pursue it, not to get into a fight with one of the biggest media organisations in the world.’ It was understandable, according to Paddick, that Specialist Ops had not wanted to get bogged down in a long inquiry that would divert them from their proper role. ‘It should have been passed to the Serious Crime Directorate. But it wasn’t.’

Why? Fear of News International? Favouritism for a powerful news organisation? Simply crap judgement?

It was Paddick who pointed out something which I should already have recognised, that the column in
The Times
in which Andy Hayman claimed there had been only a handful of victims was not a one-off. Hayman had left Scotland Yard in December 2007 and had then got himself a job as a regular columnist with
The Times
– he had gone to work for the organisation he had been investigating!

When I checked a database of media stories, I found Hayman had not only been writing regular columns for
The Times
, he had also sold them the serial rights for his memoirs. Since leaving the police, I reckoned he must have earned at least £100,000 from News International.

The same database disclosed that Hayman was not alone. The man who had been Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of the original inquiry, Ken Macdonald, had stepped down in October 2008 – and in February 2009, he too had started working as a columnist for
The Times
! The point here was not that Hayman or Macdonald was corrupt. This was about cosiness, the easy assumption that News International was a friendly and respectable organisation to be cultivated, rather than an organisation which might be routinely engaged in illegal activity and which needed to be brought to book.

Just as I was coming to terms with that,
Private Eye
magazine reported that on 16 July, seven days after he announced that no further investigation was required into News International’s involvement in phone-hacking, Assistant Commissioner John Yates had sat next to Rebekah Brooks at a police bravery awards ceremony at the Dorchester hotel, sponsored by the
Sun
. Also sitting there was the current commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, and one of his predecessors, Sir John Stevens, who had left Scotland Yard and became a columnist for the
News of the World
. Cosy indeed. And that was not all.

Hayman had left the Met under a cloud. In December 2007, eleven months after the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, he had had to resign after an anti-corruption inquiry accused him of using his corporate credit card to spend thousands of pounds on his own personal pleasure, including restaurants and hotel bills for a female officer with whom he was having an affair. I spoke to a couple of crime reporters who said that it had been well known among them that Hayman was having affairs, not only with the officer who had benefited from his corporate credit card but also with a civilian worker at the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

Simply by checking back through press cuttings, I then found an extraordinary picture. It was not just that the officer in charge of the original inquiry (Hayman) had been having a secret affair. In addition, the DPP at that time (Ken Macdonald), who was ultimately responsible for the prosecution, had been having a secret affair; and the Attorney General at that time, Lord Goldsmith, who was ultimately responsible for the DPP, had been having a secret affair. All three affairs had subsequently been exposed by tabloid journalists. And shortly after this, it was disclosed that the officer who was now responsible for the subject and who was refusing to reopen the inquiry, John Yates, was also having a secret affair.

Apart from the fact that it appeared that nobody in the senior ranks of the criminal justice system was capable of keeping his trousers on, this bizarre coincidence was worrying. To be clear: I had absolutely no evidence that the
News of the World
had tried to use this information to put pressure on any of these senior figures. Nor did I have any evidence that any of these senior figures had compromised their work for fear of what the
News of the World
might do to them. But what was alarmingly obvious was the sheer potential power of a newspaper which specialises in gathering painful and embarrassing secrets about the private lives of influential people. Whether or not that potential power had made any difference in this case was frustratingly invisible.

*   *   *

The more I poked around, the more I saw the truth. Two whistle-blowers helped.

One contacted the
Guardian
office and had a series of conversations with a bright young reporter called Paul Lewis. This source needs to remain unidentified, and I’ll call him ‘Mango’.

Mango claimed to know a lot about the activities of Greg Miskiw. He said Miskiw had targeted the call centres of the main mobile phone companies by paying cash bribes to some staff there and possibly also by inserting a journalist into one of them as an employee and spy. Mango reckoned that some call-centre workers were earning between £500 and £1,000 a week from the
News of the World
, doubling their legitimate salary by selling confidential information. If true, this would help to explain a mystery.

The trial transcript revealed that when Glenn Mulcaire called the mobile phone companies to blag them, he was able to pose as a member of staff because he could quote an internal password, even though it changed every twenty-four hours. If Miskiw was bribing people in the phone companies, that would explain how Mulcaire was able to do that.

Mango also claimed that Miskiw was involved in paying cash bribes to police officers to extract information from the police national computer and that it was possible that he had a ‘high-up contact’ in the Metropolitan Police. Miskiw was supposedly being helped by a former police officer named Boyle, who had become a private investigator. All of this evidently had been the subject of a police inquiry at some stage. Mango reckoned that the police had got close to Miskiw and that at one point they had arrested and interviewed him at Colindale police station in north London, but that Miskiw had refused to comment and there had been a lack of will at the top of the Met Police to pursue him.

The other whistle-blower had fallen out of the sky with the rain when I was sitting in the car with David Leigh outside John Ford’s house. A complete stranger who had seen our Gordon Taylor story had called me and offered me access to the treasure which had eluded me when I was researching
Flat Earth News
– the material which had been seized by the Information Commissioner’s Office when they raided the home of Steve Whittamore back in March 2003, dealing with all the newspapers who had hired him, not just the News International titles.

The source was most anxious to remain anonymous and over the next few weeks we worked together very cautiously. I lent him a pay-as-you-go mobile phone so that I could call him without leaving any trace of his identity on my billing records. When we met, I used cash to pay for drinks or food so that my credit card left no footprints. Much later, this source stepped forward publicly and identified himself, so it is OK now to say that this was Alec Owen, a grey-haired, gravel-voiced former police officer who had worked on counter-subversion in Merseyside Special Branch and had then moved to become an investigator with the ICO. He was now retired.

After some tentative negotiations, I went to his home in Cheshire where the two of us perched on the side of the bed in his spare room and stared at the screen of an ageing computer on the bedside table. Here at last was the database which the ICO had assembled from the Whittamore material – thousands and thousands of requests from more than 400 named journalists, targeting thousands of people, rifling through confidential data about them on the police national computer, the DVLA, phone records, bank records. And, according to the ICO’s analysis, the vast bulk of this activity was illegal.

I had already seen the contents of the blue book, in which Whittamore recorded requests from the News International titles, and I had summarised it in the Gordon Taylor story. Now, with an apparently eternal cigarette burning between his fingers, Owen showed me the contents of the red, green and yellow books in which Whittamore had recorded the requests from the
Daily Mail
, the
Daily Mirror
, the
Daily Express
and all of their respective Sunday titles as well as numerous magazines and (embarrassingly) the
Guardian
’s sister paper, the
Observer
. Owen wouldn’t let me copy the material or even read it at my own pace. He scrolled slowly through it, and, with my eyeballs leaping around the screen, I stopped him and took detailed notes whenever I spotted an interesting line.

On 31 August 2009, we published the result, naming scores of victims and describing ‘the casual regularity with which newsrooms have treated confidential databases as a library of convenience and the alarming ease with which the security around supposedly well-guarded databases has been repeatedly penetrated’. Some of the victims had real reason to be frightened: the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Imbert, who had a long history of investigating terrorist groups and whose private address had been handed out by British Telecom; the then head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove; well-known footballers whose homes had been burgled while they were at matches; and two leading journalists who had exposed the activities of gangsters. The summaries of stories on Whittamore’s invoices made it clear how little of this had anything to do with public interest: ‘Bonking headmaster … Dirty vicar … Miss World bonks sailor … Witchdoctor … TV love child … Junkie flunkie’, and so on and on.

The significance of this was not just the snapshot of promiscuous criminality in Fleet Street but the fact that they had got away with it. Just as the Metropolitan Police had failed to dig deep into the
News of the World
or warn Mulcaire’s victims, so the Information Commissioner had failed to prosecute the newspapers or alert Whittamore’s victims. Alec Owen had no doubt about the explanation: the ICO didn’t want to get into a fight with Fleet Street.

*   *   *

Seeing the truth was not enough. On the best of days, British libel law is so ferocious that newspapers frequently end up concealing the truth about rich or powerful people who can go to court and win hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages and legal costs if the journalists cannot produce hard evidence to defend themselves. In a case like this, where a powerful organisation had already proved itself willing to lie on a grand scale, my knowing the truth meant nothing unless I had documents or on-the-record human sources to prove it. This is where the lawyers came in.