Hack Attack (23 page)

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March 2003 was a bad month for News International.

In London, Rebekah Brooks, now editing the
Sun
, gave evidence to the media select committee in the House of Commons and admitted that ‘we have paid the police for information in the past’. She appeared to have no idea that this was an admission of crime. Sitting beside her, Andy Coulson, who had just replaced her as editor of the
News of the World
, dived in to rescue her, explaining that they would do this only if it were in the public interest. He appeared to have no idea that this made no difference – bribing police was still a crime.

It was in that same month that investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office raided Steve Whittamore and seized his cache of paperwork detailing his dealings with Fleet Street. This proved to be a turning point in the development of three separate police investigations. All three exposed potentially illegal information-gathering on behalf of the Murdoch papers and other news organisations.

The first was
Operation Reproof
, which had been opened in January 2002, when a businessman in Devon complained that he was being blackmailed by people who had obtained details of his criminal record from a private investigator. Within months, police had identified seventeen police personnel who were suspected of leaking confidential data to a network of half a dozen PIs. At least one of the PIs – Glen Lawson of Abbey Investigations in Newcastle upon Tyne – was working for newspapers. He had commissioned searches of police records for information on three Labour MPs: the then chancellor, Gordon Brown; his close ally, Nick Brown; and the MP for Reading, Martin Salter. Lawson would not identify his client, but police noted that he had made the searches at a time when the
News of the World
were attacking Salter for daring to oppose Rebekah Brooks’s controversial campaign to introduce ‘Sarah’s Law’, requiring police to disclose the home addresses of convicted paedophiles.

Total number of journalists interviewed: zero.

Operation Motorman
was a spin-off from this inquiry. Reproof raided a PI called Chris Dewse based in Horley, Surrey, and found a host of evidence that he had been obtaining data from two men who worked for the DVLA and that he was then selling some of it to Steve Whittamore. They passed this to the ICO, who organised the raid on Whittamore in March 2003 – and who then failed to interview any of the journalists who had commissioned his criminal activity. Internal ICO paperwork confirms that they simply chose not to confront the power of the newspapers, recording that a senior barrister told them that although there was evidence to support a prosecution of the press, the prospect of Fleet Street fighting them in a series of expensive pre-trial hearings persuaded them to accept the barrister’s advice that ‘the cost would be excessive both to investigate and prosecute’.

Total number of journalists interviewed: zero.

Operation Glade
was a spin-off from Motorman. Searching through Whittamore’s paperwork, the ICO soon found evidence that the network had a source with access to Scotland Yard’s sensitive computer records. They handed their evidence to the Metropolitan Police, whose anti-corruption command in August 2003 set up Glade and raided Whittamore for a second time. Glade decided to dig deeper, which soon took them back to Rebekah Brooks’s bold admission to the select committee about making payments to serving officers. Police sources claim that they tapped her phone. Brooks has told friends that she believes this happened. Glade also dug into the web of ‘dark arts’ contacts set up by her assistant editor, Greg Miskiw (later to surface in calls to the
Guardian
from the source known as Mango). By 10 November 2003, an internal Glade log recorded: ‘Evidence exists which implicates a number of journalists in the offence of conspiracy to corrupt.’ Anticipating a hostile reaction from Fleet Street, they called in Dick Fedorcio and one of his press officers for advice about how to handle any media storm. In January 2004, they interviewed as suspects seven journalists from the Mirror Group, the
Daily Mail
and News International, including Greg Miskiw (just as Mango later alleged). All admitted hiring Whittamore, but denied knowing that he used illegal methods to obtain his information. In March 2004, Glade sent a file to the CPS, who decided there was insufficient evidence to justify a charge against any of them.

Total number of journalists interviewed: seven. Total journalists prosecuted: zero.

In December 2004, twenty-one months after publicly admitting that her journalists had paid police officers in the past, Rebekah Brooks dined at the exclusive Ivy restaurant in London with the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens.

In November 2005, there was a strange and notorious incident when Rebekah Brooks was arrested after her husband, the TV actor Ross Kemp, reported that she had assaulted him. She was held overnight in a cell. According to unconfirmed police sources, she was released in the morning without being interviewed, an apparent breach of normal procedure.

And then in early 2006 there was
Operation Caryatid
, Scotland Yard’s inquiry into the hacking at the
News of the World
– an inquiry, we now know, that uncovered very much more than was ever admitted when Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed.

While the court and the world were told of only eight victims, the reality was that, in a brief and superficial search of the 11,000 pages of paperwork seized from Mulcaire’s office, detectives had found the names of 418 people. A senior Caryatid officer, DCI Keith Surtees, had no doubt what this meant, recording in his daily log on 10 August 2006: ‘I take the view that the research work is and has been undertaken with the intention of eventually obtaining access to voicemail messages.’ If they had completed a thorough search of the seized material, they would have found that it contained references to 6,349 people who had been targeted by Mulcaire over the previous five years. They also said nothing public about the audio recordings of 745 hacked messages which they found in Mulcaire’s possession including some which had been left by David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary and ultimately responsible for Scotland Yard.

And while Goodman alone from the
News of the World
faced prosecution, Caryatid found clear clues that other journalists were involved. Having noticed that Mulcaire wrote ‘Clive’ in the top left-hand corner of his notes whenever he was working for Goodman, Caryatid went on to find twenty-eight other names written in the same position on his notes about non-royal targets, including the first names of Greg Miskiw, Ian Edmondson, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup. Studying Mulcaire’s phone records, they observed a regular pattern, that the investigator would call the paper, hack a target’s voicemail and then call the paper again. The implication was clear.

It was not just that detectives had reason to believe that others at the paper were receiving hacked material from their investigator; Caryatid had also discovered that journalists themselves were probably listening to voicemail. They had uncovered phone company records which showed that on hundreds of occasions, target phones had been accessed from two particular numbers which belonged to News International. They established that these were ‘hub’ numbers, a billing arrangement which allowed the company to collate numerous handsets and landline extensions into one bill with one collective number. A Caryatid detective sergeant, Mark Maberly, later told Leveson that he had identified three
News of the World
journalists he would like to have questioned.

Scotland Yard opted not only to stay silent about these findings, they also chose not to mention two significant facts about their inquiry. The first was that they had been obstructed repeatedly by News International. This started in brazen form on the day Clive Goodman was arrested in August 2006, when they sent a team of specialist officers to the
News of the World
to use their standard power to search the premises of anybody who has been arrested for an indictable offence. As four officers started to collect paperwork from Goodman’s desk, they were confronted by executives who argued that they had no right to search a journalist’s property, which has some special protections in law. The officers hesitated. Somebody called in a couple of photographers who started taking pictures. The inspector in charge reported that he feared they would be attacked. Outside the building, more officers were barred from getting through the front door.

Three News International lawyers turned up, took the four officers into a conference room and persuaded them to stop searching Goodman’s desk and, in particular, not to seize his computer or the contents of his locked personal safe. The police argued that nevertheless they must be allowed to search the accounts department, which contained material that was not journalistic. They went to do so but, according to evidence at the Leveson Inquiry, the managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, joined the lawyers and physically blocked them. The raid was abandoned.

Later in the inquiry, Caryatid wrote to News International to ask them to hand over a list of material, including records of Mulcaire’s work; information from Clive Goodman’s computer and safe; and the detail of which extensions and handsets had made calls via the ‘hub’ numbers, as well as the owners of numbers which had been called by Mulcaire before and after he accessed a target’s voicemail. Through their lawyers, News International agreed to co-operate but then failed to hand over every item, with one exception. They disclosed details of the total of £12,300 which Clive Goodman had paid in cash to Mulcaire, which had been recorded internally as payments to the non-existent source called David Alexander. This proved to be the cornerstone of News International’s cover-up.

UK law allows police to go to court for a production order to compel journalists to hand over evidence if they fail to co-operate with an inquiry, and Caryatid had enclosed a draft order in their letter. The officer who dealt with this, Detective Sergeant Mark Maberly, later told Leveson that he suspected he was being ‘fobbed off’ by News International. Leveson himself concluded that the company were offering only the ‘veneer of co-operation’. But senior officers chose to take no further action. The draft production order was never used.

The second point on which Scotland Yard chose to stay silent was the key fact that in the early autumn of 2006, a month or two after arresting Goodman and Mulcaire, they had closed down Operation Caryatid without completing the investigation. The precise date when they did this is not known: they made no record of the decision nor of their justification for doing so.

It was as part of this decision, it eventually emerged, that they agreed with prosecutors to contact all potential victims. The police themselves would warn all those in four ‘national security’ categories – royal, military, police, political – while the phone companies would be told to warn others who they would identify from their own call data.

If they had mentioned this plan in public, they might well have been told, as Lord Justice Leveson eventually concluded, that this was ‘poorly thought out’ and ‘lacked coherence’ since it left out any potential victims whose names had not been found in the initial search of Mulcaire’s paperwork; and, in relying on the phone companies to find the evidence, it also excluded the bulk of Mulcaire’s targets over his years of hacking since the companies are allowed to keep call data for only twelve months.

In the event, they simply failed to execute the plan. They succeeded in warning all of the royal targets – nineteen of them (as distinct from the three who were mentioned in court). They then failed to warn the two military targets they had identified; failed even to warn all senior police including their own commissioner, Sir Ian Blair; and failed to warn most of the seventeen politicians. That included leaving in the dark three Home Secretaries – David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and the incumbent at the time, John Reid – in spite of the fact that they were responsible for police and the Security Service, and John Prescott and two of his staff, who were handling even more sensitive material. Of the 418 people they had identified as targets, they actually only warned twenty-eight, including Rebekah Brooks.

Beyond that, they also failed to tell the phone companies to contact the apparent victims among their customers. O2 took the initiative and informed some forty customers, but the other companies stuck to the standard police requirement that all information connected to their inquiries must be kept secret.

Having decided in the early autumn to close down Caryatid, they stood by that decision on 23 November when they received a delayed report from their forensic specialists about the contents of Mulcaire’s computers. This revealed that he had selected 320 victims as ‘special projects’, hacking not only their own voicemail but also those of their friends and family. These included their former deputy assistant commissioner, Brian Paddick, but they did not tell him that. Even more significant, the report contained one line which was bristling with threat to Scotland Yard: ‘It is also believed attempts may have been made to corrupt serving officers and misuse the Police National Computer.’

The allegation of corruption of their own officers was clearly very serious. Worse, the signs of corruption included evidence that in some way Mulcaire and/or the
News of the World
had penetrated the ring of security around the Witness Protection Programme, to uncover the new identities of witnesses and, in some cases, offenders who were deemed to be at serious physical risk. This is believed to have included Robert Thomson and Jon Venables, tabloid hate figures who had been convicted in 1993, as ten-year-old boys, of the abduction and murder in Liverpool of the two-year-old James Bulger. Caryatid sent a warning to the Witness Protection Programme and conducted no further inquiries themselves.

This was not the only material in Caryatid’s hands which hinted that the
News of the World
had been paying bribes. In Glenn Mulcaire’s home, they found whiteboards on his walls which included the daily security passwords for mobile phone companies, supposedly known only to trusted employees. Caryatid made no attempt to find out how Mulcaire had obtained them. In Clive Goodman’s home, they found fifteen internal phone directories from the royal household, all of them confidential, some of them containing sensitive details of the private phone lines of the royal family as well as security plans for the protection of Kensington Palace. Caryatid made no attempt to find out how Goodman had obtained them and did not even inform the Palace that he had done so.