Hack Attack (32 page)

If I had any doubt about whether John Yates was a reliable source of information for my editor, that vanished when he came to the subject of the former deputy prime minister, John Prescott. Our original story about Gordon Taylor had said that Prescott was a target for Mulcaire. I now knew, from John Prescott’s son, David, that in December 2009, after five months of pestering, Prescott had finally wrung out of Scotland Yard confirmation that he was indeed named as a target in the Mulcaire paperwork, on two different invoices, dated – exactly as we had said in our story – spring 2006. David Prescott had asked me not to publish this while his father’s lawyers decided how to handle it. Now, two months later, John Yates calmly told Alan Rusbridger that there was no evidence at all to suggest Prescott had been a target. His exact words were: ‘He doesn’t appear anywhere in Goodman’s material or in Mulcaire’s material. There is no reference to John Prescott at all.’

Rusbridger ignored everything that Yates told him.

There was one other important meeting that week in February 2010. Late one evening, Rusbridger phoned me and started by saying that he sometimes felt as though he were living in a Stieg Larsson novel, full of endless plots and dark machinations. At short notice, he had been summoned to see a senior member of the Labour government and had found himself confronted by a minister brandishing a copy of the
Guardian
, pointing feverishly to my story about the ninety-one PIN codes and the 120 victims identified by the phone companies, insisting (as if Rusbridger did not know it) that this was very important, that Murdoch was out to destroy the governments of Barack Obama in the USA and of Kevin Rudd in Australia and just possibly this story could stop him doing the same to Gordon Brown’s. This source had suggested to Rusbridger that the prime minister himself may have had his bank and phone records penetrated by Murdoch’s journalists. He had ended by telling him to watch out. All very Stieg Larsson.

The minister had offered to help. I suggested that Rusbridger ask him to appoint a middleman, some trusted official who would meet me and become a point of contact in the hope that I could give them information which might be of use and (far more important for a selfish reporter) that they could squeeze information for me out of the police or even out of the Security Service, MI5. This happened very fast.

Within forty-eight hours, I was sitting in the coffee lounge of the Thistle hotel next to Victoria station with the middleman, a very bright and likeable character whom Rusbridger and I took to calling the Emissary. Our meeting was highly discreet, secret even, not because we were doing anything wrong but because, if News International found out that the
Guardian
was linking up – even indirectly – with a government minister, they would make propaganda and claim that we were part of a political plot. We might as well paint bullseyes on our backsides and invite them to kick us. I gave the Emissary a two-hour tutorial on crime at News International during which his phone rang two or three times, as the senior minister with whom he worked called in to check on progress. ‘He’s very excited about me seeing you,’ he explained to me.

I gave him a short shopping list of questions to try to answer via his own contacts in government.

We were getting stronger.

*   *   *

While this was going on, I had decided to write a pamphlet, to be published in the run-up to the general election, which was widely predicted to happen in May 2010. It was to be called
Hack Attack
and it would summarise all of the evidence that Andy Coulson must have known that his journalists had been breaking the law and, therefore, that the man who looked set to be the next prime minister’s close aide must have lied to Parliament when he gave evidence to the media select committee in July.

With the help of a researcher, I now had material from more journalists who had worked for the
News of the World
, each of whom independently agreed that, while the hacking might have been a secret from the outside world, inside their office, plenty of people knew, including Andy Coulson.

I got to know a couple of these journalists quite well. There was a lot of mutual suspicion at first. I heard from the
Guardian
that a former
News of the World
journalist called Paul McMullan had written a book which might disclose evidence of illegal activity and which he might want to publicise in the paper. I called him, and he was a model of surly resentment. He suggested I was taping the call. Legally, I would be allowed to; in fact, I was not. He said the
Guardian
was wrong to chase after journalists. Journalists were heroes, he said. Privacy was for bad people, a way of hiding their badness. That was all. He hadn’t finished writing the book, he didn’t know what it would say, he ended the conversation. For all his sullen resistance, McMullan was interesting: if he really believed all that about privacy, he might well decide that there was no reason to hide what had been going on at the paper. So I stuck with him.

Over the weeks, I had several more phone calls with him, each a little longer than the last, each a little more relaxed. Then we met up and spent an afternoon in Brighton and – on the strict condition that this was all off the record – he opened up. McMullan had spent seven years on the paper, from 1994 when Piers Morgan was editor, through the next editor, Phil Hall, until he left in October 2001 when Rebekah Brooks was editor and Andy Coulson was her deputy. He was quite open about the fact that he had spent his time there swimming down a river of alcohol and cocaine and ended up in the Priory clinic, which had only reinforced his fundamentalist Fleet Street convictions: ‘What I was taught in the Priory, is that you should confess everything, no such thing as privacy. Adolf Hitler wants privacy, Jesus doesn’t.’

He was almost evangelical in his enthusiasm for the dark arts. He had risen from being a reporter to a deputy features editor under Brooks, and in that role, he had dealt routinely with Steve Whittamore and a couple of other PIs: ‘I must have authorised hundreds of technically illegal operations. I say it’s for the greater good.’ He gave me the example of an actress whose medical records he accessed in order to be able to expose the fact that she had had an abortion.

Coulson, he said, knew all about it. As deputy editor, one of Coulson’s tasks had been to set up a new investigations unit, built around McMullan and Mazher Mahmood, who specialised in dressing up as the ‘fake sheikh’ and tricking people into embarrassing revelations which he covertly recorded. ‘How can Coulson possibly say he didn’t know what was going on with PIs? He was the brains behind the investigations department, that was his first task. How can he say he had no idea about how it works?’

This was all very strong; but he refused to say anything on the record. I could quote it as the claims of an unnamed source, which would be interesting but it would have no impact. I needed evidence which nobody could deny. Which was why I spent a lot of time with a former
News of the World
reporter I traced, whom I will call York. She knew plenty about Glenn Mulcaire.

She explained that while Mulcaire was not much of a secret in the newsroom and even turned up to Christmas parties, there was only a limited number of people who could actually commission him. She named Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck, Jimmy Weatherup and Ian Edmondson. I knew enough now about the
News of the World
to see the pattern: all four of them had been news editors. If that was correct, it put Mulcaire right at the heart of the newspaper’s work: it was part of the news editor’s job to tell him what to do.

York also made sense of something which had been said by Mango, the anonymous source who had called the
Guardian
after the Gordon Taylor story. He had claimed that Greg Miskiw’s network of dark arts involved a private investigator called ‘Boyle’ who had been paying off police officers. Wrong spelling. It was ‘Boyall’. I knew John Boyall had been part of Steve Whittamore’s network and had ended up in the dock alongside him, but what York explained was that Boyall was yet another PI who had worked direct for the
News of the World
: in the late 1990s, she said, Boyall had been Greg Miskiw’s main man until he made the mistake of introducing Miskiw to his assistant, Glenn Mulcaire, who had then replaced him as the
News of the World
’s favourite gumshoe.

York seemed determined to help and agreed to talk to some of the key suspects – Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck, Ian Edmondson and others – and to tape the conversations in the hope that they would disclose evidence. It didn’t work. She fed back a few useful titbits, but she fell into a frustrating pattern, reporting that she had spoken to key people yet always apologising that they had failed to say anything of interest.

Around that time, I found a sports report in the
News of the World
, dated 18 August 2002, which harked back to Mulcaire’s early career as a footballer, describing the first game ever played by one of his teams, AFC Wimbledon: ‘Glenn Mulcaire – the man they call Trigger – had been seemingly ruled out of the club’s Combined Counties Premier Division debut with cracked ribs. But Trigger, part of our special investigations team, was steam-rollered into action just ten minutes before kick-off.’ So the humble sports reporter knew about Mulcaire’s work for the paper, even though the then deputy editor – Coulson – reckoned he had never heard of him.

Similarly, I came across an interesting paragraph in an unpublished book which had been written by a keen fan of AFC Wimbledon (locally known as ‘the Dons’). It took the form of a diary. This was the entry for 4 March 2003, shortly after Coulson had become editor of the paper, describing how Mulcaire turned up to watch a game with his family in tow: ‘He was getting back to a bit of Dons reality after being wined and dined at the Pont de la Tour by Murdoch executives the previous evening to plan some News International skulduggery. Not a good man to give your mobile number to isn’t our Trigger. One call and he’ll tell you everyone you’ve spoken to in the last couple of months.’ So this ordinary football fan knew what Mulcaire was up to with Murdoch’s team, yet still we were expected to believe that Coulson succeeded in knowing nothing.

It was steaming, screaming obvious that Coulson must have known, but the frustrating fact was that I had no smoking gun. The case against him was compelling yet not conclusive and, since UK libel law remains a relentless enemy of truth without proof, I decided that my planned pamphlet would simply provoke another blizzard of lies from Coulson and News International and achieve nothing, and so I abandoned the project. I would have to find proof which they could not deny.

*   *   *

I had known ‘Karl’ for nearly fifteen years. He was a seriously good detective, whom I had met when I was covering a murder trial. He was also a reporter’s dream – strong and confident and blessed with a dramatic shortage of respect for anybody who did not match up to his standards, which happened to include some of his bosses. If he thought the public needed to know something, he would tell a trusted reporter even if that did mean defying official policy (which is why I’m not using his real name). And, as Murdoch’s bad luck would have it, Karl happened to be in a position to help with the hacking scandal.

Meeting one day by arrangement, at a bus stop on the banks of the Thames, he told me that he knew a lot about Jonathan Rees of Southern Investigations. Now, simply because Karl did not think that a thug should be using bent officers to invade people’s privacy for a tabloid newspaper, he undertook to help me to find out more.

With his guidance, I was able to accumulate a mass of detailed evidence about the work which Rees and his business partner, Sid Fillery, had been doing for journalists, particularly for Alex Marunchak at the
News of the World
. More important, I got hold of something which had real political punch – copies of invoices from News International, which showed that, in spite of Rees being jailed for a seriously vile conspiracy to take a woman’s child away by planting cocaine on her, Andy Coulson’s
News of the World
had started hiring him again after he emerged from prison. I also found that Rees had been involved in hacking into a target’s email messages.

Clearly, this would put real pressure on Coulson’s story. I got ready to write. In the meantime, reinforcements arrived from the House of Commons.

*   *   *

On 24 February 2010, the media select committee released its much-delayed report, unanimously attacking key players. They criticised the Press Complaints Commission for accepting News International’s version of events at face value and described the conclusions of their report on the affair as ‘simplistic and surprising’. They criticised the Metropolitan Police for their failure even to attempt to question anybody about the email for Neville Thurlbeck. ‘It is our view that the decision was a wrong one. The email was a strong indication both of additional lawbreaking and of the possible involvement of others. These matters merited thorough police investigation, and the first steps to be taken seem to us to be obvious. The Metropolitan Police’s reasons for not doing so seem to us to be inadequate.’

The committee reserved its strongest words for News International. There was no doubt, they said, that a ‘significant number of people’ had been hacked. They recorded that they had no evidence to show that Andy Coulson was involved but said it was ‘inconceivable’ that Clive Goodman was the only person on the paper who knew about it. ‘A culture undoubtedly did exist in the newsroom of the
News of the World
and other newspapers at the time which, at best, turned a blind eye to illegal activities such as phone-hacking and blagging and, at worst, actively condoned it. We condemn this without reservation and believe that it has done substantial damage to the newspaper industry as a whole.’

The
News of the World
’s internal inquiry had been far from ‘full’ and ‘rigorous’ as its executives had claimed. It had kept secret its settlement with Gordon Taylor ‘to avoid further embarrassing publicity’ and had been wrong not to inform the PCC and the select committee of the settlement. The committee complained of the ‘collective amnesia’ of News International witnesses and continued: ‘Throughout, we have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall, and deliberate obfuscation. We strongly condemn this behaviour which reinforces the widely held impression that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred.’