Hack Attack (42 page)

I knew from my sessions in Mulcaire’s home that talking to him was like grabbing handfuls of mist. There was nothing threatening or unpleasant about the man, but he would never give a straight answer if a bent one came to mind. For example, Mosley reported, Mulcaire was claiming that 70% of his commissions had come from Ian Edmondson. That might have been true for the last twelve months of Mulcaire’s work for the
News of the World
, but for the four or five years before that, all the former
News of the World
sources agreed that Mulcaire had done most of his work for Greg Miskiw. Mulcaire, however, was claiming that Miskiw had given him only 5% of his commissions. Since Miskiw was his close friend and since Edmondson seemed to be nobody’s close friend, that looked very much like a neatly bent line. So, when he went on to say that Ian Edmondson had made some kind of threatening phone call to his home after he came out of prison in the spring of 2007, it was hard to take it at face value. Similarly, when he claimed that he had only ever hacked a grand total of a hundred public figures, I remembered all that I had been told by former
News of the World
journalists and reckoned that Mosley and I were being served up with more mist.

At one of the meetings in the posh café, Mosley explained that, apart from earning very good money running Formula One racing, he had also inherited a fortune. He wasn’t specific about its size but he explained that there was a very large amount of money which had been held in a family trust in Liechtenstein, and he had made a big decision. He was considering asking the trustees to move all of it onshore, paying whatever huge taxes needed to be paid, so that he had access to it as a fighting fund. He was happy for me to mention that to others who might need help in their legal actions.

By that autumn, following his support for Mark Lewis’s libel action against Lady Buscombe, he was helping several hacking victims, agreeing that he would pay the potentially very large legal bills if they lost a case and had the costs awarded against them. My researcher, Jenny Evans, had told me she happened to know a young woman who had been the key witness in the aborted trial of a TV presenter, John Leslie, who had been charged with rape and then cleared. This alleged victim had seen signs of her phone being hacked at the time of the trial, back in July 2003 – a particularly disgusting intrusion, if true. Through Jenny, I passed her on to Charlotte Harris, who took on her case, shielding her identity by calling her Miss X. Again, Mosley agreed to cover the costs if they lost.

I heard of another lawyer who had clients who appeared to have been victims. Gerald Shamash was representing John Prescott and also the former England footballer Paul Gascoigne who had seen so much of his private information turning up in the
News of the World
that it had begun to make him mentally ill, breeding a paranoia that the press were spying on him, but he was worried about suing in case he lost and could not pay the bill. Mosley stepped forward to help.

One way and another, word was spreading among the
News of the World
’s victims that the police were sitting on evidence which might include their names. Charlotte Harris was doing a brilliant job of procuring informants among former and current
News of the World
executives and was coming up with more names of possible victims. I was working with more former
News of the World
journalists and I had also opened a line to the private detective Derek Webb, who had specialised in physical surveillance for the paper and who now saw that almost certainly it was phone-hacking which had allowed the news desk to be able to tell him where to find his targets.

Whenever I found a new victim – actors from TV soap operas, a couple of film stars, a TV presenter – I tried to connect them with the lawyers who were suing. For months I had been in touch with David Law, a friend of the family of Paul McCartney’s former wife, Heather Mills. Law had eventually wrung out of Scotland Yard an admission that Heather Mills’s name and three of her mobile phone numbers were in Mulcaire’s notes. I steered her towards Mark Thomson, who was not fooled by the line at the end of the police letter which added that there was no evidence that any messages on these phone numbers had been unlawfully intercepted. Then I introduced Thomson to Max Mosley, who agreed yet again to act as a safety net, this time for Heather Mills’s costs.

In addition to the victims I sent them, the lawyers were finding more of their own. Other lawyers were joining in. By the end of October 2010, 194 people had asked Scotland Yard if their details showed up in Mulcaire’s material. That same month, after more than a year of behaving like a sulky toddler, replying to potential hacking victims with the legal equivalent of a grunt, the police came out with a new ruse. In addition to waiting for victims to guess that they might be victims, and providing only the minimum of information, and couching it in language which suggested that the information was not evidence of crime, they started replying to lawyers that they would provide information only ‘if your client has grounds for a reasonable suspicion that his mobile telephone voicemails were unlawfully intercepted’.

The lawyers were furious. As Mark Lewis put it in a story which I ran in the
Guardian
: ‘It’s a bit like the police discovering that your house has been burgled, but you don’t know that it’s happened – and they won’t tell you anything about it unless you can come up with your own evidence to show you’ve been a victim of the crime. It’s a transparent attempt to stifle legal claims by concealing evidence. The police are obstructing justice.’

Only six victims had broken through to the point where they had formally issued proceedings but, with Mosley in the background and the group of lawyers pushing hard, they were beginning to look powerful. Three of them – Andy Gray, Steve Coogan and George Galloway – were still at an early stage, and News International had simply served defences in which they denied everything. The other three were becoming more of a threat, and News International were being a little more imaginative in their efforts to get rid of them.

Sky Andrew, having already ignored an offer of £25,000 a year to drop his case, was working his way through the courts. Guided by Charlotte Harris, he was starting to ask for an order to force News International to disclose internal email, which could prove powerful. If Andrew ended up with evidence which identified the person who had told Mulcaire to hack him, the
News of the World
would be in trouble: Mulcaire had admitted this hacking at the original trial, so they would have no room to deny it.

News International reacted by dangling more money in front of him. How about £200,000 to go away, they said. No. Well how about £200,000 plus another £1.2 million in free advertising for a charity of his choice and how about accepting this money directly from them, without going through Charlotte Harris, so that he wouldn’t have to pay her costs? The answer was still no. Sky Andrew was not for sale. Good man. It was at about this time that Vodafone told him that right now – not way back in 2006, but right now, while he was suing the
News of the World
– somebody had been trying to access his voicemail. We never established who was responsible.

One of Mark Thomson’s anonymous clients – identified only as AZP – had been to court in June and had won an order for the police to hand over all relevant evidence in their possession. By September, the reporting restriction was lifted to reveal that AZP was, in fact, the actress Sienna Miller. Thomson was hinting that the case was going to be important but, discreet as ever, was refusing to explain what he meant. Clearly, her case was worrying News International. If a garbled rumour from New York was to be believed, Rupert Murdoch had heard about the threat and tried to neutralise it.

According to this version of events, Murdoch had approached the editor of
Vogue
magazine, Anna Wintour, and had gently suggested that Miller was making a mistake and that it might be helpful if Wintour had a word with her, and perhaps arranged for her and Rupert to have tea together, ‘to tell her to be sensible’. Nothing threatening, of course, but it was a fact that Miller was an actress and, among Murdoch’s many properties, he did happen to own one of the biggest film studios in the world, Twentieth Century Fox. That rumour certainly reached London and certainly made Sienna Miller pause and worry and wonder about whether to go on. Like several others in this story, she had more courage than the opposition and decided to stick with it.

Nicola Phillips, aided by Mark Lewis, was also suing, threatening to force police to expose the same paperwork which had been concealed in the case of her former boss, Max Clifford – paperwork which, we believed, would expose the role of Ian Edmondson. Phillips reported a series of calls from Edmondson himself who said he just wanted to talk to her ‘as a mate’ and then pressured her to drop her case. Since she was now an independent publicist, she found this alarming, particularly when she received a call from another
News of the World
executive who suggested that they could dig out and publish a damaging allegation about her. Bravely, she stood up to this. Then she made an even more threatening move.

On 27 October 2010, she went back to court to ask the judge to order Glenn Mulcaire to name all those at the
News of the World
who had instructed him to hack her phone. The judge wanted three weeks to come to a decision. It was clear from the argument in court that, even if the judge agreed to grant the order, Mulcaire would want to appeal, in which case News International could fire their biggest weapon – money. They could pay Mulcaire’s legal fees, knowing that Phillips would not be able to afford to pay hers, so they would win. Except that we had our secret weapon: on 3 November, Mark Lewis contacted Max Mosley who readily agreed to underwrite her costs. Murdoch was not the only one who had cash on his side.

Then there were signs of News International using another familiar tactic. On 10 November, somebody contacted Nicola Phillips on her mobile and, using a false name – Lee Jennings – attempted to tie her up on the line in a way which would have allowed a second person to dial her number and get access to her voicemail. Certainly, that was how the police later interpreted this. But Phillips was instantly suspicious as ‘Lee Jennings’ babbled about having seen her at a club, and she quickly got off the line.

On 17 November, Mr Justice Mann ordered Mulcaire to tell all about the hacking of Nicola Phillips’s phone. As we had predicted, Mulcaire immediately appealed. I reported that on the front page of the
Guardian
and included a line which identified Ian Edmondson as a person about whom Mulcaire would be questioned. Nine days later, on 26 November, Nicola Phillips was in tears after receiving what she took to be a direct threat to her new career as a publicist. It had come in a phone call from a third party, who was in touch with News Corp, and the thrust of it was: ‘We didn’t like that about your case on the front page of the
Guardian
– you have to decide whether to pursue the case or your career.’ Once again, with real backbone, she stuck with it.

On 19 November, Andy Gray went to court to ask for a similar order for Mulcaire to name the person who had instructed him to hack his voicemail. Our best sources on this suggested that that would expose the name of Greg Miskiw, one of Edmondson’s predecessors as head of news. Andy Gray went further than Nicola Phillips, asking for an order for Mulcaire to disclose a range of other information about those he had worked for. On 6 December, Steve Coogan applied for a similar order.

In the meantime, on 23 November, Mark Lewis won his libel action against the PCC chair, Lady Buscombe, forcing the PCC to pay damages and Lady Buscombe to apologise for her misleading comments about him – an embarrassing move for the leader of an organisation which was supposed to uphold standards of accuracy and fairness.

The pressure on News International’s inner walls was becoming severe, but they showed extraordinary resilience, dealing out denials in court paperwork as though the truth could always be repelled. Then the pressure increased – Andy Coulson was ordered to appear in court.

*   *   *

This move came from the side of the picture, from the radical Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan. He had been the victim of a
News of the World
exposé in October 2004, when the paper had accused him of enjoying orgies. Sheridan had sued for libel and, in August 2006, won £200,000 damages. However, the newspaper claimed that he had lied on oath in order to win the damages. The Scottish police had investigated and now, in December 2010, Sheridan was on trial for perjury at Glasgow High Court. He had sacked his barrister and was putting his own case to the jury and he had called Coulson as a witness.

I had been passing information to Sheridan’s solicitor, Aamer Anwar, who had followed up by getting a court order to force Scotland Yard to hand over the notes which Mulcaire had scribbled while he was hacking Tommy Sheridan. These were then displayed in open court – the first time that we had succeeded in flushing the hidden paperwork out into the public domain – and there, in the top left-hand corner, just as we had suspected, was a single word identifying the person who had commissioned the hacking – ‘Greg’, the former assistant editor, Greg Miskiw.

Coulson had consistently refused to answer any of the questions which I had sent him and so, on the eve of his appearance, I gave Aamer Anwar a nine-page memo identifying questions which Sheridan might put to him.

It was an interesting day in court. I had a brief encounter with Coulson at the doorway, during which he informed me quietly that I was a traitor. Sheridan did his best to confront him with allegations of his knowledge of crime, but Coulson was sharp and confident and conceded nothing. Faced with the paperwork which suggested that his assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, had ordered the hacking of Sheridan’s phone, he said: ‘I’m saying that I had absolutely no knowledge of it.’ He agreed that he had been on ‘not unfriendly terms’ with the former assistant commissioner Andy Hayman but he denied that the
News of the World
had been holding information about Hayman’s sex life which might have prevented him running a thorough investigation. He denied asking Clive Goodman to take the blame for the sake of the paper. He repeated his claim that he had never heard of either Mulcaire or Steve Whittamore while they were working for him. Asked about Sean Hoare’s allegations in the
New York Times
, he said he had spoken voluntarily to the recent Scotland Yard inquiry.