Hack Attack (31 page)

Another lawyer joined the fight – Tamsin Allen from Bindmans, a law firm with strong historical links to the Labour Party and an interest in human rights. On the phone, Allen sounds like the Queen’s own lawyer, possibly even like the Queen herself, sharp as a diamond, intimidating and posh. In real life, she is deeply relaxed and inclined to turn up at rock festivals in muddy boots. She became involved because two of her clients strongly suspected that they had been hacked: Brian Paddick, the former deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, who had talked to me about Dick Fedorcio’s influence on policy; and Chris Bryant, the minister for Europe in Gordon Brown’s government. Both men had been tormented by the tabloids because they are gay.

Tamsin Allen wrote to Scotland Yard on behalf of Paddick and Bryant to see whether John Yates’s officers would admit to holding any evidence on them, so that they could sue the
News of the World
for breach of privacy. She also came up with a second line of legal attack. She would apply to the courts for a judicial review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the original inquiry in 2006. As with the privacy actions, this would force the police to disclose evidence. Unlike the privacy actions, however, this could not be closed down by the
News of the World
handing out big money to those bringing the case. If the courts agreed that Scotland Yard had failed in its public duty, the only way to settle the case would be for the police to offer a remedy, probably a new investigation.

For sure, this was how we would win – through the courts. The lawyers would enlist the power of the judges. Mark Lewis and Mark Thomson were preparing cases. Charlotte Harris was heading for the front line with Max Clifford. But it was slow! It was like waiting for heavy artillery to be dragged laboriously through the mud while we sat around outside Murdoch’s castle, watching him and his court feasting inside.

*   *   *

It was winter. I worked alone in my study, although sometimes cabin fever would get the better of me and I would take a friend’s horse out on the hills near my home town, riding alone, thinking about Murdoch’s castle, occasionally whipping out my mobile to call the answer machine back in my study to record some devious idea about how to break in.

I got into the habit of visiting the website of the media select committee, where occasionally they posted new written evidence. One day, I found an interesting memo which had been submitted by the police. Down in its detail, it disclosed for the first time a claim that Caryatid had warned victims in four ‘national security’ categories and then asked the phone companies to warn others. That was news to me; but it was frustratingly limited. It was not just that this was yet another hint that they knew of far more victims than they had admitted. It also raised more questions. Had Mulcaire actually jeopardised national security? Who were these people? Why on earth had the police not even hinted at this before? And anyway, were they telling the truth?

In pursuit of more detail, I decided to recruit a new ally – Scotland Yard. This looked like a good tactic. Surely they could see that if the truth came out, the Metropolitan Police were going to look bad if they carried on acting as though they were colluding with News International. Surely they had no need to defend the errors and weaknesses of the original inquiry – that had been Andy Hayman’s work, and Hayman had left in some disgrace, accused of fiddling with his female colleagues as well as with his expenses. Surely I could persuade the Yard to talk to me off the record, to give me some of the truth that they were sitting on, which would help me with my story and also help them to stop the whole affair dragging on and dragging them down.

On the horse on the hills one afternoon that November, I called Dick Fedorcio, who agreed that this was a good idea. After weeks of delay, it was arranged that I would talk to a senior officer without identifying him, referring simply to an anonymous police source. (Much later, that officer disclosed publicly that he had held this meeting with me, so I can say now that this was Assistant Commissioner John Yates.) My bright idea turned out to be a dud. As soon as I sat down in his office, Yates told me that he doubted whether he could help. I started by offering him the chance to give me a story that would surely make Scotland Yard look good, by confirming that in order to be able to inform all potential victims, they had set up a new database containing all of the evidence which they had gathered in 2006.

He shrugged hard, his eyebrows popping upwards in mock disbelief. ‘Have we?’

I told him I knew very well that they had, that I had a lot of detail from lawyers who had been in touch with the Yard. Reluctantly, he conceded the point. But it was a bad sign.

He went on to declare that the
Guardian
stories were ‘all old stuff’; that there was a perception that this was the
Guardian
running a vendetta against the
News of the World
while everybody else just wanted to move on; that we had claimed to have new evidence when in fact we had none; and that, when he had given evidence to the media select committee, he had decoded the eye movements of the MPs and concluded that I had briefed all but one of them. Weird.

We went round in several circles about the number of victims who had been warned. I wanted to know how many people had been approached as possible witnesses in 2006; how many had then been approached in the four ‘national security’ categories; how many more they had warned in the last few months. He said the
Guardian
could not be trusted to write a straight story, so he would not give me the numbers. I considered using foul language but opted to carry on negotiating. He shifted a little and said he would think about it but assured me that there were not thousands of victims. The total number of names in Mulcaire’s material was more like 600 – and those were just names. The total number of victims was much smaller.

The meeting ended badly. He said he was not allowed to tell me the things I was asking for. I told him I had been in and out of Scotland Yard for off-the-record briefings since before he joined the police and had often been given information that was far more sensitive than this. He told me he had never fallen out with a journalist. I told him that he had finally done so, and that I was sorry we had wasted each other’s time.

End of that meeting. End of that tactic. And if there was any doubt about Scotland Yard’s attitude, it cleared a couple of weeks later when the commissioner himself, Sir Paul Stephenson, went to see Alan Rusbridger with Dick Fedorcio by his side. Sir Paul explained that my coverage of the hacking story was exaggerated and incorrect. Evidently he expected the editor to tell me to stop digging. To his great credit, Rusbridger ignored him.

With nothing but obstruction from Scotland Yard, I decided to use the Freedom of Information Act to try to force them to disclose something of the evidence they were sitting on. I thought I would start with something simple and unthreatening, so I asked them to look at the database which they had now created from the material which they had seized in August 2006 and to give me five numbers. How many names, mobile numbers, PIN codes, voicemail recordings and voicemail transcripts were recorded in that database?

Their response was as unhelpful as ever. They received my request on 1 December 2009. The law allowed them twenty working days to reply. So, allowing for weekends and Christmas, I would receive an answer by 31 December. No chance. I received nothing by that date, not even a note to say that there was a delay. I made calls, sent emails, made more calls, pointed out that they were breaking the law, lodged a formal complaint and finally, four weeks later than the limit prescribed by law, on 28 January 2010, they sent me just two of the five numbers I had asked for.

There were ninety-one PIN codes in the seized material, they admitted. That was very significant. Since Mulcaire was a man who specialised in hacking voicemail, it suggested that he had had at least ninety-one victims. Why else would he have obtained their PIN codes? But, since we knew that the vast majority of people did not bother to change the factory settings on their phone, it implied that he had probably had a great many more victims. Certainly not ‘a handful’.

The police gave me one other answer – that the only example of transcribed voicemail messages in the seized material was already in the public domain, i.e. the email for Neville Thurlbeck. I wasn’t sure whether to believe that. But if it was true, it made it even more difficult to understand why they had failed to show this unique document to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2006.

I lodged an appeal in search of the remaining three numbers I had asked for. In the meantime, I had been trying to follow up on the police claim in their memo to the select committee, that they had asked the phone companies to trace other victims of Mulcaire and Goodman and to take appropriate action. I approached the four big mobile phone companies.

One of them – T-mobile – said the police had never been in touch with them at all. Which suggested that the police memo was not entirely reliable. The other three phone companies declined to help. So I sent the three of them a deliberately provocative email, suggesting that I would write a news story about their refusal to disclose how many of their customers had been victims and how many of them had been warned: ‘The fact that you have now chosen to suppress these numbers clearly raises the possibility that the company failed to contact and warn a significant proportion of those whose voicemail was targeted or accessed.’

That jogged one of them into action: O2 replied that they had identified ‘about forty’ victims and had warned them all. Armed with that, I went back to the other two companies and told them that O2 were co-operating, so if they carried on concealing, it would look more and more like they had something to hide. Vodafone then replied that they had found a ‘broadly similar’ number of victims to O2 and that they had warned them ‘as appropriate’ – whatever that meant. Orange finally replied that they had found forty-five victims but had warned none of them – because the police had never asked them to. A total of some 120 victims, most of whom evidently had never been warned in spite of what Scotland Yard had told the select committee.

The numbers were very significant, because the true scale was likely to be much greater: these were victims who had been hacked from phone numbers used by Mulcaire and Goodman, but they didn’t include those who had been hacked by other journalists. And the phone companies keep call data for only twelve months, but journalists who had worked at the
News of the World
were saying that Mulcaire and various reporters had been hacking phones for at least five years.

On 2 February 2010, the
Guardian
published a front-page story revealing the 120 extra victims found by the phone companies and the ninety-one PIN codes which had been obtained by Glenn Mulcaire and which had never previously been disclosed by Scotland Yard. I wrote that this directly contradicted the ‘handful of victims’ in the official version of events which was being promoted by the
News of the World
and the police. The story also pointed out that this was further evidence that Scotland Yard had breached their agreement with the Director of Public Prosecutions that they would warn ‘all potential victims’. They also appeared to have misled the select committee by submitting a memo which claimed that ‘for anybody else that may have been affected’, they had made an agreement with the phone companies to research their customers and to take appropriate action.

Scotland Yard did not like this. The story got Yates into trouble with the media select committee, whose chairman, John Whittingdale, wanted to know why on earth Yates had not told them about the ninety-one PIN codes when he had appeared before them in September. Yates explained that in September, they had not known about the PIN codes – thus accidentally confirming that it had taken Scotland Yard more than three years to get round to searching the material they had seized in August 2006.

The Yard’s head of communications, Dick Fedorcio, wrote to Alan Rusbridger to complain that my story ‘once again presents an inaccurate position from our perspective and continues to imply that this case has not been handled properly and that we are party to a conspiracy’. He followed up by visiting Rusbridger once more, on 19 February 2010, this time with John Yates at his side. I was able to get a very accurate account of what went on.

Yates told Rusbridger that he was ‘mystified’ that he could not get his message across. He then proceeded to recite the RIPA bollocks which I felt sure was a false version of the law. ‘I managed to fall out with Nick slightly,’ he said. ‘First time I’ve ever fallen out with a journalist. Nick thinks I’m being pedantic.’ That wasn’t the word I would have used. ‘It’s just the law,’ he chorused. ‘That’s RIPA.’ Later he added that on this basis, it was correct to say that there had been ‘only a handful’ of victims. But when Rusbridger pushed him to explain exactly what he was saying, Yates agreed that if you set aside the question of how RIPA should be interpreted, the simple reality was that there had been ‘a mass attempt at penetrating people’s voicemail systematically’ by Goodman and Mulcaire and ‘gross systematic breaches of privacy’ and ‘a systematic process of interception’. Yates added: ‘It was dirty business, it is unpleasant.’ At last! He was confirming the scale of the hacking – and yet he had never once attempted to say anything like this to the press, public or Parliament.

He went on to claim that most of the ninety-one people whose PIN codes had been found in the Mulcaire material had been contacted by the phone companies, i.e. they were among the 120 victims identified by those companies. This was very surprising since that same week, Scotland Yard’s legal department had been writing to Mark Lewis saying that the police did not even know how many people had been contacted by the phone companies, let alone their identities.

He conceded that it was not ideal that Andy Hayman had gone to work for News International. ‘Unfortunately, we have no control over what he does and doesn’t do. Is it distasteful? Some people say it probably is.’ But he tried to claim that the original inquiry had treated the investigation very seriously and had used ‘significant resources’ and ‘very experienced investigators’. Yet they had failed to analyse the evidence which they seized, failed to persuade the
News of the World
to hand over internal paperwork, failed to interview a single other suspect, and failed to inform the potential victims in spite of agreeing with prosecutors that they would do so.