Hack Attack (25 page)

Hayman’s personal closeness to the press was part of a wider set of links between the top of Scotland Yard and Fleet Street. Ian Blair’s predecessor as commissioner, John Stevens, had decided that the Met was taking an unfair battering in the press and set out to build closer links with them. He had frequent meetings with editors, columnists and reporters. When his term ended in January 2005, Stevens was hired as a columnist, for up to £7,000 a column, by the
News of the World
. His work was ghostwritten for him by the deputy editor, Neil Wallis.

To build these bridges to Fleet Street, Stevens had relied on the contacts of Dick Fedorcio, who was in constant contact with journalists, including those at News International. This was a natural and inevitable part of his job, but the Leveson Inquiry heard evidence which indicated that Fedorcio may have been particularly close to Rupert Murdoch’s titles. He had hired ten former News International journalists to work for him; in July 2005, when Ian Blair was looking for somewhere for his fifteen-year-old son to get a week’s work experience, Fedorcio set it up with the
Sun
; when Lucy Panton from the
News of the World
was at Scotland Yard one day, under pressure to file a story, he allowed her to use his personal computer and email; when Rebekah Brooks was looking for a horse, it was Fedorcio, with Ian Blair’s knowledge, who arranged for her to be loaned a retired police animal; during the Caryatid inquiry, in June 2006, Fedorcio and Ian Blair had a meeting with Rebekah Brooks; three months later, after Goodman and Mulcaire had been arrested, Fedorcio took the then deputy commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, to dinner with Neil Wallis. On 29 November 2006, the day that Goodman and Mulcaire entered their guilty pleas at the Old Bailey, Rebekah Brooks was at Scotland Yard with Fedorcio.

Sir Ian told the Leveson Inquiry: ‘I have nothing to suggest that any individual took a decision based on an overestimate of the importance of the influence of any organisation. The problem is that the levels of contact with people from that organisation were so frequent that the defence of “It didn’t matter” is very difficult to maintain.’

*   *   *

This close contact with News International fuelled speculation that Operation Caryatid must have been influenced in the company’s favour. But the evidence points in a different direction.

Nearly five years after Caryatid ended, when the hacking scandal finally exploded in July 2011, the man directly in charge of the inquiry, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, was called to explain himself to the House of Commons home affairs select committee. Later, he was called to the Leveson Inquiry. On both occasions, Clarke – a gruff, solid bear of a man with a reputation for total straightness – was a compelling witness who gave a clear and powerful account of his decision to stop the investigation. There were three key points.

First, and most important, Clarke said that his counter-terrorism branch had been overwhelmed with work aimed at preventing mass murder. This had been bad enough at the beginning of their inquiry into the hacking but, on the day after the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire in August 2006, it had got significantly worse when they launched the biggest counter-terrorism operation in British history, Operation Overt, to deal with a plot to blow up nine passenger planes over the Atlantic. Desperate for resources, Clarke said he had had to stall some of his other terrorist inquiries and borrow 300 detectives from forces around the UK. By comparison, the inquiry into voicemail-hacking was no threat to anybody’s life, and they had done enough to prosecute two offenders, to alert the public and government and to ensure that phone companies improved their security.

Second, he had considered and rejected the possibility of passing on the unfinished investigation to some other branch of Scotland Yard. It emerged that DCI Keith Surtees had been suggesting this since May but Clarke had decided that it would be unreasonable to pass so much work to another team which would be struggling with its own priorities, particularly as the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire meant that others involved would have had a chance to destroy evidence.

Third, they had misunderstood the law (what later became known to the
Guardian
as the RIPA bollocks). Caryatid officers told Leveson that their whole approach to the investigation had been defined by advice from the CPS that the hacking of voicemail was an offence only if the message was hacked before it had been heard by the intended recipient. It turned out that at one early point, the CPS had given this advice, albeit in very tentative form; but that later, after they had checked with the lead prosecutor, David Perry QC, they told police that they had changed their view.

However, internal Caryatid logs showed that the lead investigator, Detective Chief Superintendent Phil Williams, and his team simply failed to take this new view on board. They continued to refer to the narrow view of the RIPA law as though it were correct and even arranged for one of the royal household, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, not to access his voicemail while they monitored Goodman and Mulcaire calling into his phone, precisely so that they could prove that the investigator was listening to the messages before his target. This misunderstanding significantly restricted their work.

Having heard the evidence of Caryatid officers and examined their logs, Lord Justice Leveson criticised some of their decisions but he concluded that they had always acted in good faith: ‘I am entirely satisfied that each of the decisions taken was justified and based on reasoning that was clear, rational and entirely in keeping with the imperatives of the police at that time.’

He found that they had failed to pursue and interview suspects because they could not have done so without searching through all of the seized material and making hundreds of separate legal applications for call data, all of which was beyond their resources. They had failed to warn John Prescott and others because ‘they took their eye off the ball’. They had agreed that Mulcaire should lose only £12,300 of his income but they had originally pressed for more to be confiscated.

It was not all simple. There were some thorny questions about whether the police had failed to alert the prosecutors as well as the public that there was evidence which appeared to implicate other journalists at the
News of the World
. The senior prosecutor, David Perry, told Leveson that when he met Caryatid officers a fortnight after the arrest of Goodman and Mulcaire, he had asked them whether there was any evidence to suggest that the editor, Andy Coulson, had been involved, and he had been told there was none. ‘We also inquired whether there was any evidence connecting Mulcaire to other
NoW
journalists. Again, we were told there was not, and we never saw any such evidence.’ Police witnesses replied that they had misunderstood Perry’s question: they said they had thought he was asking whether there was evidence strong enough to justify a prosecution, not simply whether there was any evidence at all, and they had told Perry in general terms that others might be involved.

They were taxed too on their failure to hand prosecutors the email for Neville, which was to become central to the
Guardian
’s inquiries and which appeared to be important evidence of Mulcaire’s guilt in the hacking of Gordon Taylor’s phone. They explained that the email was dated June 2005 while the conspiracy charge covered a period from November 2005. Yet the police had handed prosecutors the contract which Greg Miskiw had signed with Mulcaire for the Gordon Taylor story, which was dated even earlier, February 2005.

There was a similar question in the handling of evidence for another of the non-royal victims, the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes. It emerged that Caryatid had handed prosecutors Mulcaire’s notes about the royal victims with the telltale corner name, Clive; and yet in Simon Hughes’s case, they had not handed over the notes, which carried corner names of three other
News of the World
journalists. Nor, contrary to common practice, had they shown this paperwork to Simon Hughes.

The police pointed out that they had given access to all of the unused material to the junior prosecution counsel, Louis Mably, but CPS witnesses told the Leveson Inquiry that Mably’s sole task had been to check for any evidence which tended to undermine the prosecution, as the law required. He had not looked for anything which might have assisted a wider prosecution. Leveson accepted that these police decisions were part of the wider legitimate decision to limit and close down Caryatid. ‘No evidence was concealed,’ he concluded.

Finally, Leveson considered the cosy links between News International and some senior officers. The links were real. In the case of Andy Hayman, they were positively controversial, but Leveson found that there was no evidence that this had made any difference to Caryatid’s activity. However, there were signs that that was not for want of the Murdoch company trying. A solicitor who worked briefly for News International, Lawrence Abramson, told Leveson he had read internal emails which suggested ‘quite an active involvement in Clive Goodman’s prosecution, trying to influence the way the prosecution was being conducted or the defence being conducted’. Quite what this involved was never disclosed.

Leveson uncovered one incident which appeared at first to be linked. He published the email dated 15 September 2006 in which Tom Crone reported to his editor the information which ‘the cops’ had given to Rebekah Brooks about the progress of their inquiry.

Leveson confronted the potential implication: ‘On the face of the email, it appeared that the police had given Mrs Brooks details of the prosecution strategy over and above that which any other victim of crime could expect to be given and it is suggested that, in doing so, the police were improperly alerting her to the state of the investigation by the Metropolitan Police, inviting her to take action internally.’ Caryatid officers, however, explained to Leveson that they had spoken to Brooks simply because their evidence of Mulcaire hacking her voicemail was so clear that they thought they might name her in court as one of the non-royal victims. As Phil Williams put it: ‘This is purely: “You are a potential victim. Would you like to join our prosecution?”’ Brooks had declined the offer. Leveson accepted this. A subsequent investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that DCI Surtees had committed no crime nor any disciplinary offence.

One other sign that News International’s power was having some impact on police thinking was reported much later by the
New York Times
, who said that within days of the arrest of Goodman and Mulcaire, several detectives had started to feel internal pressure. One described being approached by Dick Fedorcio’s then deputy, Chris Webb, ‘waving his arms up in the air, saying, “Wait a minute – let’s talk about this.”’ The detective had rejected the request. Webb said he did not recall the alleged incident.

The bottom line here is that there is no evidence to support the idea of a deliberate conspiracy by Caryatid to help Murdoch’s company. As Leveson said: ‘I have no doubt that neither Peter Clarke nor any of the other officers were or would have been affected by any relationships between some senior officers and News International personnel. There is no evidence that the relevant officers approached their task from the standing point of seeking to deal with wrongdoers other than properly and so as to bring the force of the law to bear.’

Bribes had indeed been paid by News International journalists to Scotland Yard officers, but there was no evidence, nor even any hint of an allegation, that any had been paid to any Caryatid officer. The decisions which had limited the investigation all had reasonable explanations. The Caryatid team, Leveson said, had been ‘robust, tenacious, well motivated and skilful’. He added: ‘I have no doubt that they approached their task with complete integrity.’

There is no reason to doubt Leveson’s conclusions. Questions remain whether the
News of the World
was able to use any of its contacts to find out what Caryatid was doing or even to influence its decisions. Beyond that, what the evidence revealed about Scotland Yard was something more basic and more widespread than conspiracy: the casual, routine assumption among those responsible for the Yard’s public face that even though this was a police force acting on behalf of the public, spending public money and enforcing laws agreed by those elected by the public, there was nothing controversial about keeping the public in the dark.

Power and secrecy walk hand in hand. Power enjoys secrecy, because it increases its scope. Power generates secrecy, simply because it can. The police – particularly the counter-terrorism branch – have good reasons for keeping some of their work highly secret; but the secrecy of Caryatid went well beyond operational necessity. And there is nothing unusual about that. Scotland Yard is no different to other powerful organisations. They find secrecy easy, natural and extremely helpful, regardless of whether or not it may cheat the public of the information to which they have a profound right. On this occasion, it also helped the conspiracy in News International, not only while Caryatid was working but over the following years as the truth threatened nevertheless to emerge.

*   *   *

On 2 March 2007, Clive Goodman dropped a bomb on News International.

He had been sorely provoked a month earlier when, having held his tongue and gone to prison on the promise from Andy Coulson that he would still be employed at the
News of the World
, he received a letter, informing him that the promise had been broken. Les Hinton wrote that there was ‘no choice but to terminate your employment’. Hinton offered him an apology and a year’s salary. It was not enough to placate him.

Goodman’s bomb took the form of a letter to the director of human resources at News International, Daniel Cloke, written a few days after his release complaining that the decision to sack him was perverse because he was acting with ‘the full knowledge and approval’ of senior executives, and also inconsistent because ‘other members of staff were carrying out similar illegal procedures’. Specifically, he said that Andy Coulson had supported his hacking of the royal household; the extra payments to Mulcaire had been approved by Stuart Kuttner; and similar hacking had been commissioned by the assistant editor (news), Ian Edmondson. ‘This practice was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference until explicit reference to it was banned by the editor … Tom Crone and the editor promised on many occasions that I could come back to a job at the newspaper if I did not implicate the paper or any of its staff in my mitigation plea. I did not, and I expect the paper to honour its promise to me.’