Hack Attack (24 page)

Set aside for a moment the question of why the police acted as they did. The immediate point is that by opting to say nothing, the effect was to enable the success of a dishonest conspiracy that was taking place outside Scotland Yard, at the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s UK company.

*   *   *

To begin with, it all focused on Clive Goodman. On Thursday 10 August 2006, two days after his arrest, Goodman was visited at his home in Putney, west London, by the
News of the World
’s clean-up specialist, the managing editor, Stuart Kuttner. Goodman confronted him with a series of alarming claims. According to notes which Kuttner made at the time, the royal editor told him that Mulcaire had claimed to be getting help in hacking the Palace phones from a contact in the Security Service and that he had ‘told Andy this at the start’; the police thought that there were other targets of Mulcaire’s hacking, including the paedophile former rock star Gary Glitter and the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic; they had spotted how Mulcaire would speak to the
News of the World
before and after some hacks; and they were looking at the paper’s payment records as a way of possibly widening their inquiry. The only good news was that Goodman had refused to answer police questions. So far. That afternoon Kuttner reported back to Coulson.

Giving evidence years later, Goodman described how over the following few weeks, he felt an increasing pressure from News International to take all the blame for the paper’s hacking on his own shoulders. He said he was surprised that his own solicitor, Henri Brandman, who was being paid by News International, suggested he might say that he was acting ‘under stress – some kind of lone wolf’. He also claimed that Coulson phoned him, agreed to suspend him on full pay and then suggested that he had had some kind of contact with the police or the Home Office and that they did not want to send him to prison as long as he admitted his guilt and got the case out of the way.

Goodman and Coulson were friends: Coulson had been one of the few people from work who had been invited to his wedding two months earlier. But now the royal editor was so worried that he was being set up to take the blame for all of the
News of the World
’s hacking that he found himself an insurance policy: he accessed his office email account and downloaded messages which recorded him discussing hacked stories with his editors, including Coulson, and which reflected Coulson’s approval of the ‘David Alexander’ payments for the royal hacking. Apparently aware that a news organisation might be willing to hack into a computer, he took the precaution of doing this in an Internet café.

Coulson was evidently just as suspicious. He asked to meet Goodman but, according to one source close to him, he feared that his royal editor would secretly tape record him and so he refused to go to Goodman’s house and rehearsed his lines to make sure they were safe before finally meeting him in the Café Rouge restaurant in Wimbledon. He was right to be suspicious: Goodman secretly taped the conversation (although he made a mess of it). Recalling this meeting years later, Goodman claimed that Coulson once more had implied that he or somebody else at News International was in touch with the police attempting to use their influence to ensure that he would not go to prison. Goodman said his editor urged him again to plead guilty, assuring him that he would still have a job: ‘You can be one of the people who come back.’ He added that Coulson had encouraged him to say that he had ‘gone off the reservation’ adding: ‘All you’ve got to say is that you’re a lone wolf.’ Goodman said that he noted the echo of his own solicitor’s words and that this ‘put the fear of God into him’ that he was being set up, although a judge later ruled that this fear was unfounded.

There is no evidence to confirm Coulson’s claim that he or somebody close to him had a contact in the police. But internal paperwork from the Crown Prosecution Service does reveal that on 22 August – eight days after the meeting in the Café Rouge – a senior prosecutor sent an email indicating that it was unlikely that anyone other than Goodman and Mulcaire would be charged.

Certainly, News International did their best to find out what the police were doing. On 15 September, a Caryatid officer, DCI Keith Surtees, met Rebekah Brooks to tell her that her own phone had been hacked and to ask if she would act as a witness for the prosecution. She declined to do so but attempted to discover as much as she could and reported back to News International’s in-house lawyer, Tom Crone. Crone in turn sent a worrying email to Coulson: police had a list of more than a hundred victims; evidence that Mulcaire could have been paid as much as £1 million by the
News of the World
; and no evidence of his being paid by anybody else. Searching Mulcaire’s office and home, Crone reported, police had seized ‘numerous recordings’ as well as verbatim notes of voicemail messages. They had spotted a story in the
News of the World
which reproduced precisely a phrase from a voicemail between the actor Hugh Grant and his then partner, Jemima Khan.

But Crone also reported better news, that ‘the cops’ were thinking along the same reassuring lines as the prosecutors: ‘They suggested they are not widening the case to include other
NoW
people but would do so if they got direct evidence, say
NoW
journalists directly accessing the voicemails. (This is what did for Clive)… There are no recordings of
NoW
people speaking to GM [Mulcaire] or accessing voicemails. They do have GM’s phone records which show sequences of contacts before and after accesses. Obviously, they don’t have the content of the calls, so this is, at best, circumstantial.’

All looked well – as long as Clive Goodman kept his silence. Over the next two months, Crone made it his business to attend Goodman’s meetings with his lawyers, often in the teeth of Goodman’s objections, reporting back to Coulson. When the CPS in late October served Goodman with five lever-arch files of evidence, Crone succeeded in persuading Henri Brandman to give him a copy. Goodman later insisted that this was directly contrary to his instructions. The file, which was also seen by Coulson, revealed just how close the police had come to implicating others at the
News of the World
. It included contracts with Mulcaire which had been signed by Greg Miskiw and Neville Thurlbeck. In early November, Coulson spoke on the phone with Goodman, who made a better job this time of using his tape recorder, capturing their nervous references to the material in the prosecution file and their worry that Mulcaire was ‘hostile’ and might not ‘keep schtum’ as well as the editor’s seductive reassurance: ‘You need looking after, and that’s what we’ll do … We’re on the same side here … You have it from me that, you know, I absolutely see a future for you here.’

Goodman claims that, with a key court hearing due at the end of November, he felt a persistent pressure to admit his own guilt while concealing the guilt of others. He wrote a ‘proof of evidence’ which named senior executives, including Coulson, as conspirators in the hacking. By the time he submitted it to the court, that material had been deleted. He says Crone made it clear that he could keep his job only if he agreed not to implicate others at the paper. After Crone attended one of his legal meetings, Goodman emailed Henri Brandman to complain that Crone had delivered ‘a fairly crude carrot and stick from the
NoW
’. He added: ‘I felt more threatened by the message he was asked to deliver today than I had been by much of the prosecution case.’

With Goodman apparently accepting that he should hold his tongue, Tom Crone then warned the editor that Mulcaire, who understood that his work for the paper was finished, had hired an employment lawyer who was making ‘a thinly disguised blackmail threat’, and advised that they should offer the investigator at least a year’s money as a severance deal ‘despite the concerns and lack of enforceability re a confidentiality clause’.

It was clear that in Mulcaire’s mind, the most acute anxiety was financial. The police and prosecutors had to decide how much of his past income had been derived from crime, so that it could be confiscated by the courts. They had evidence to suggest that, as DCI Surtees told the Leveson Inquiry, ‘a substantial amount of his time was spent in illegal activity’. A confiscation on that scale would bring ruin on Mulcaire and his family.

As it was, police and prosecutors agreed to confiscate only the £12,300 cash which had been paid to him as ‘David Alexander’. This had the advantage of being uncontentious: there was no dispute from any quarter that this money had been earned through crime. It also had the effect of giving Mulcaire a motive to forget all thoughts of speaking out on the true scale of his crime for the paper.

On 29 November, Goodman and Mulcaire went to court and pleaded guilty. It was a nervous time for the
News of the World
. On the eve of the hearing, Coulson exchanged emails with Crone and others, debating whether to make a public apology to the victims who were to be named in court, anxiously reflecting that this might provoke Goodman and Mulcaire into ‘reacting badly’. They decided to say nothing. As Goodman and Mulcaire pleaded guilty, Coulson used email to discuss with Rebekah Brooks the merits of leaking the fact that Brooks herself had been a victim of the hacking, with Coulson arguing that it was a mistake. ‘It’s all going so well,’ he said – an odd remark from an editor seeing a senior employee pleading guilty to crime. Later, as Goodman prepared to be interviewed by the probation service in advance of his sentencing, Crone emailed Coulson, worrying that Goodman might not stick to ‘the preferred line’. Goodman and Mulcaire stuck to the script, both of them rewarded with continuing pay from the
News of the World
in spite of having now admitted criminal conduct.

In truth, Goodman did discreetly wander a little from the script. When his probation officer wrote his report for the court, he included one killer line which Goodman had given him about the hacking of the royal phones: ‘He contends that his senior editor knows about and gave tacit agreement to the conduct in question, willingly opening a revenue source with the paper’s financial department to pay for Mulcaire’s activity.’ At the sentencing hearing, in January 2007, the judge said he was particularly interested in that line, but he did not read it out, and nor did anybody else. Nothing more was said in public.

By the time the two men were jailed in January 2007, Stuart Kuttner, Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and Tom Crone all had good reason to conclude that Goodman was not the only one of their journalists who was involved and that Mulcaire’s hacking was widespread. Coulson resigned, accepting responsibility but denying all knowledge of the crime. The obvious conclusion was that he and some of the others had chosen to conceal what they knew – to cover up. And the objective fact – regardless of motive – is that Scotland Yard’s behaviour allowed them to succeed.

*   *   *

For an outsider, all this provided reasonable grounds to cry ‘foul’ – to speculate that Scotland Yard must have compromised its work because it feared falling out with the country’s most powerful news organisation; or even because someone somewhere was receiving bribes or wanted to conceal the history of bribes. That speculation found more fuel as detail emerged of the close and friendly relationship between the Metropolitan Police and Murdoch’s journalists. They were particularly close to Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, who was ultimately responsible for Operation Caryatid.

Andy Hayman is a controversial figure. Some of his former colleagues dismiss him as a ‘yob’ and a ‘wide boy’, who spent too much time and police money in bars and restaurants. On one occasion, he took eight fellow officers for lunch in a West End restaurant and spent £556 from the public purse, including £181 on alcohol. His decision, on resigning from Scotland Yard, to become a columnist for Murdoch’s
Times
proved to be only one part of an unusually friendly relationship with journalists. He told Leveson that, as part of an authorised effort to build bridges with the press, he had shared breakfasts, lunches, dinners and drinks with them. His commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, wrote in his memoirs that some of this had worried him: ‘I began to pick up that Andy seemed to be spending a great deal of time with the press. Quite early on, there were rumours that he was briefing in a careless and sometimes disloyal manner, although I never had any proof.’

Among these journalists was the
News of the World
’s crime correspondent, Lucy Panton, the wife of a Scotland Yard detective. Hayman had phone calls, private meetings and occasional dinners with her. He also knew Rebekah Brooks and other senior people from News International. He continued this contact even while his own officers were investigating the hacking.

On 26 April 2006, four months into Caryatid’s inquiry, Hayman went to the trendy Soho House club in central London. He was accompanied by Dick Fedorcio. The two of them had a private dinner with Andy Coulson and his deputy editor, Neil Wallis – the two men who ran the paper which was suspected of crime by one of Hayman’s own teams. Six months later, after Caryatid had decided to stop their investigation but before Goodman and Mulcaire had said whether they would plead guilty or not, Hayman spent two hours drinking with Neil Wallis.

Hayman insists that he did not discuss the hacking inquiry in any way on either occasion. There is no direct evidence to contradict him. But even on its best interpretation, these meetings seem to suggest a degree of friendship between a senior officer and the target of his detectives’ work, an easy assumption that there was no reason to treat News International as a suspect organisation in spite of its track record of obstructing his officers. At the Leveson Inquiry, Hayman acknowledged that his decision to go and work for
The Times
after resigning under a cloud of scandal could be seen as ‘ethically difficult’.

It may or may not be important that crime reporters suggest that while Hayman was still an assistant commissioner, they were aware of rumours that he was having affairs, one of which was with a woman who worked for the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Since the IPCC at the time were investigating the role of Hayman’s officers in the shooting of the Brazilian student Jean Charles de Menezes, who had been mistaken for an al-Qaeda terrorist, this appeared to create a genuine public interest in publishing a story. They published nothing, leaving Hayman with an implicit debt to them.