Hack Attack (3 page)

I arranged to meet my intriguing caller. I am never going to be able to say who he is. That’s a really common problem. Over and again, you find that the people who have the most interesting things to say are the people who are least able to say them, because they are under pressure of some kind – they are worried that they will be arrested or sacked or divorced or beaten up. Anonymity protects them. This man is going to crop up several times, so he needs a memorable name. I’ll call him Mr Apollo.

As soon as I met him I liked him, but I didn’t necessarily trust him. We sat in his room in a central London hotel, him faffing about with the coffee-making equipment while he started to talk, me wondering how he knew so much and what he wanted in return.

He told me that Kuttner was a liar, that the
News of the World
had been hacking phones all over the place and that this was how they got most of their stories: they picked up their leads by intercepting voicemail, and then they went out to get photographs and quotes to lay a false trail, so that they could pretend that they had found the story by normal, legitimate means. It wasn’t just Clive Goodman who had been doing it, he said – that was a complete joke, loads of reporters had been at it. It was such an easy trick, he said. You dial your target’s mobile phone number and when you get through to the recorded message, you hit ‘9’, then the recorded message asks you to enter a four-digit PIN code. Most people don’t bother to change the code from the factory setting, so you know what it is. Or, if they do change it, they use something really obvious like the year of their birth. You put in the code and that’s it, you can listen to their messages. Of course, Mr Apollo explained, you need to work this so that the target doesn’t answer their phone when you call in. So maybe you call during the night, or when you know the target is in a meeting.

Most of the time, he said, it was so easy to do this that you didn’t need a private investigator like Glenn Mulcaire to make it happen. Mulcaire’s main job, he said, had been to ‘blag’ the mobile phone companies – to call them up and pretend to be one of their staff – so that he could get numbers for people who were ex-directory, or, more important, to get a PIN code changed back to the factory setting if the target had bothered to alter it. Once the
News of the World
were inside one target’s voicemail, they would pick up messages with the numbers of their closest associates, then hack their voicemail, get more associates and create a whole network of eavesdropping around the target. The targets would not discover the codes had been changed for weeks. And if they did discover it, they would think it was some kind of techno foul-up.

This was interesting stuff, and it was tempting to get involved. It would be good to put Kuttner back into his box. It would be better still to do something about tabloid journalists behaving badly. It was not just that a small minority of cowboys with notebooks were making up stories and ruining people’s lives; they were also making it much more difficult for other journalists to do their jobs, because people generally now expected to be bribed, bullied and cheated by reporters, so they were far more difficult to deal with.

But it wasn’t that great a story. Nobody was going to be very surprised to be told that some tabloid reporters behaved badly and, even if I wanted to pursue it, the difficulty was that all this was just the word of Mr Apollo, who might be right or might be wrong but who had made it very clear that he could not be quoted or named to defend anything that I might write.

By now, he had got the better of the coffee-making, and he sat down and started to relax and to talk about the police. He claimed that Scotland Yard had found masses of mobile phone numbers which had been logged by Glenn Mulcaire but they had never followed up on them. They had made no attempt to prosecute Mulcaire for all these other possible victims, nor to find out who else might have been giving instructions to Mulcaire, nor even to tell all these people that they had been targeted. This was getting more interesting. Why would the police behave like that when dealing with a particularly powerful newspaper, which happened to belong to Rupert Murdoch, the biggest media mogul in the country?

We started talking about the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, about the fact that it never did make sense that Mulcaire admitted hacking five non-royal victims. That was when Mr Apollo finally opened the door so that I could see a way forward. He claimed that one of those five unexplained victims was suing and was trying to get the police to hand over some of the evidence which they had collected and never revealed. Apparently, it was causing some panic at Scotland Yard. Now here was a way to check Mr Apollo’s story. If a judge went ahead and ordered Scotland Yard to hand over evidence, the police would have to comply and then, with any luck, I could get access to the court files and see what was in there.

It was only later that evening, after I’d left Mr Apollo with thanks and a guarantee to stay in touch, that my brain finally clicked into gear and I understood the biggest reason for going after this story. It was not just about the most powerful news organisation in the country apparently cheating and breaking the law, and about the most powerful police force in the country failing – maybe deliberately refusing – to go anywhere near exposing the truth about it. I finally realised that what really mattered was that the man who was editing the
News of the World
at the time – Andy Coulson – was now working as media adviser for the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. And although it was the Labour Party who were in government, it looked very likely that the Conservatives would win the next election and Cameron would become prime minister. Andy Coulson was on his way into Downing Street.

I remembered Coulson resigning as editor of the
News of the World
after the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, explaining that he had known nothing about Goodman’s evil ways but saying that he felt he should go because it had happened on his watch. If Kuttner was lying about all this, then maybe Coulson was lying too. And yet he was aiming to take on the job of organising the communication between the government and the people of the country – really a very unsuitable place for a liar. More than that, if he really had presided over a regime of illegal eavesdropping at the
News of the World
, what would he do if he found himself in Downing Street and he wanted to find out who was talking dirty behind the prime minister’s back? Would he go back to the dark arts?

*   *   *

What is the difference between a reporter on the
Guardian
and a reporter on a paper like the
News of the World
? Don’t believe anybody who tells you that it has anything to do with moral fibre, or intelligence, or sensitivity. There are bastards and moral weaklings, good guys and idealists, in both worlds. All reporters are really very similar. They run on a flammable psychological mixture, like petrol and air, a volatile combination of imagination and anxiety.

You train your imagination, pushing it like you’d push a muscle until it’s stronger than other people’s, until it becomes almost freakishly powerful. And over and over again, you point it at your problem and you guess, with great energy and vivid mental pictures: what could the truth possibly be; where could I possibly find the evidence; who could know; why would they talk; what’s next; what’s missing; how do I finish this jigsaw puzzle in the dark? Then, when you go out to check what your imagination has delivered, you complete the mixture by pouring in equal measures of stomach-burning anxiety. What if this goes wrong; if they won’t talk to me; if they talk to somebody else with a notebook; if they lie to me; if they tape me; if they grass me to the opposition? What if I’m wrong? What if the stupid news desk won’t run the story?

There is one other thing, the equivalent of the spark that ignites the fuel and air. Most of the reporters who survive and thrive are driven by some kind of deep need. I know one who spent years pretending to himself and to the rest of the planet that he was not gay. He diverted his sexual energy and his waking hours, day and night, into fighting all the powers that be, and he did extraordinary work uncovering all kinds of secret scandals until finally he accepted himself and relaxed and never really produced another story worth reading. I know another who says he grew up with a secret in his family – there was this thing that nobody was allowed to say. Eventually, in his late teens, he discovered that his father was Jewish while his mother was not and that, when they married, their two families had protested so bitterly that the couple resolved never to mention This Thing again. So this reporter can’t stand secrets, and he has spent years earning a living and winning awards by hunting down concealment wherever he can find it and tearing it apart.

OK, so mine is this: I spent my childhood being hit by people – grown-ups – some of them genuinely vicious, some of them simply believing the noxious idea that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child. I had been working as a reporter for a couple of decades, thinking I was interested in criminal justice and social problems, before I looked back and saw how over and again I had been drawn to stories where I might have saved victims: particularly victims of unfairness (miscarriages of justice, police corruption); and, even more than that, victims who were children (working as prostitutes, losing out at school, being sexually abused, living in poverty, struggling in prison, being attacked by a mentally disordered nurse). Underlying all of this work, I could see, was some deep-seated urge to hit back at anybody at all who takes power and abuses it.

What’s the difference between a reporter on the
News of the World
and one on the
Guardian
? The difference is in the office, in the hierarchy – in the Bully Quotient. There is a lot of bullying in Fleet Street – a lot of puffed-up, pissed-up, overpaid, foul-mouthed, self-important editors-in-chief and people who run news desks and features desks, who can’t tell the difference between leadership and spite. I’ve come across it in quality newsrooms but there is no doubt that the worst of the bullying thrives in the downmarket tabloid newsrooms. Why? It begins with train timetables.

There are 50 or 60 million people crammed into England, Scotland and Wales and, ever since the Industrial Revolution, it’s been possible to print a paper in London or Glasgow and put it on a train at night, knowing that by dawn it can reach any household in the land. Compare that to the US: until the electronic revolution, a newspaper that set out at night on a journey from New York City, for example, would be halfway to nowhere by the next morning. So while the US developed city papers, usually no more than a couple in each city, the UK developed a national market for newspapers which was bursting with competition as a dozen or so daily titles fought each other for the attention of all these readers. And the competition has always been most intense among the mass-market tabloids. Their very survival depends on circulation, on selling lots of papers – on printing something that the competition has missed. By contrast, the upmarket papers don’t expect to sell millions: they aim for the wealthiest people in the market and make most of their money by carrying advertisements which are aimed at their readers’ well-padded wallets.

The commercial pressure in UK newsrooms is relentless, particularly for the mass-circulation titles. Tabloid editors will send out their reporters with an unmistakeable message pinned painfully to the back of their heads – ‘just get the story’. No excuses are accepted, no failure is allowed, you stand on that doorstep till she talks to you, you keep asking till you get the answer, open that miser’s paw, just get the damned story. And a lot of these editors will scream abuse and shout threats and tip verbal acid over the head of any fool reporter who dares to come back with an empty notebook.

If you succeed in a tabloid newsroom, you’ll be given big stories and great foreign trips, lots of bylines, a licence to fiddle your expenses, cosy lunches with the editor and private pay rises. If you fail, you’ll sit lonely in a corner, being given no stories or just crap stories that will never make it into print; you’ll be woken up at dawn and kept going till midnight; you’ll be sent away to Sunderland just as you were leaving the office to go to your own birthday party; if you happen to write something that gets into the paper, you’ll get no byline, no thanks, no respite; you will wish you were somebody else. (I know some of this at first hand: I spent my first few years as a reporter on tabloid papers and fled to escape one particularly remorseless bully.) So, of course, when those reporters are out there on the road with nothing much more than their imagination and their anxiety for company, some of them may well decide to invent quotes, fabricate facts, cheat sources, steal pictures, ignore rules, break laws – anything to be allowed to feel good.

Compared to that, the life of a reporter on the
Guardian
is as soft as a baby’s face. It’s not just that – like the other ‘quality’ papers – there is less pressure to sell copies. Beyond that, unlike the other quality titles, the
Guardian
belongs to a trust. Instead of having shareholders trying to claw profit out of the newsroom, the trust has subsidiary businesses whose profits are used to fund the newsroom. The paper is still run as a business and it has to survive in the marketplace, but the commercial pressure which distorts so much behaviour in so many newsrooms is reduced to the bare minimum.

What’s the difference between the
News of the World
and the
Guardian
? From a reporter’s angle? The Bully Quotient. Just that really. I’m allowed to fail.

*   *   *

Not everything that Mr Apollo told me was a total shock.

When I was researching
Flat Earth News
, over the previous two years, I had contacted reporters who had worked in Fleet Street newsrooms, looking for the stories behind their stories, to try to understand why it is that so often our work fails to tell the truth. A lot of reporters had helped and a few of them had gone further and started to tell me about their use of private investigators to gather information by illegal means – these ‘dark arts’. Coming from the soft world of the
Guardian
, I had known almost nothing of this.