Hack Attack (9 page)

Early in 2000, Miskiw fell out with John Boyall and poached Mulcaire from Boyall’s agency to work for him direct. By 2001, with Miskiw’s support, Mulcaire had joined the British Association of Journalists and been given a full-time contract worth £94,000 a year – a big deal, more than the news editor was being paid. Soon, he had an office in Sutton, south London, where he blagged and hacked on such a scale that he had to recruit an assistant to help him.

Now, early in February 2005, Mulcaire went to work on Gordon Taylor. By 22 February, he had recorded eleven messages that had been left on Taylor’s phone. Mulcaire passed the tape to Miskiw who gave it to a secretary in the Manchester office, who typed out the messages. This was a well-oiled system.

Miskiw was in contact with Glenn Mulcaire almost every day, sometimes tasking him on his own stories, very often passing on requests from other people on the paper. A few other senior journalists were allowed to deal direct with Mulcaire, but Miskiw made sure he was the main minder. This was partly because it gave him power and prestige within the paper; but also because Miskiw didn’t trust other people not to cock it up. Miskiw always ensured that Mulcaire’s work was hidden, inventing false sources, omitting key details, always laying false trails. Often, this involved using a former police officer, Derek Webb, who had become an expert in covert surveillance, calling himself Silver Shadow. Mulcaire would locate a target using criminal methods, Webb would follow them for days without breaking the law, then the paper would close in.

If the story was seriously libellous, the
News of the World
would cut a deal with the target. Knowing that they could not defend a libel action without admitting that they had obtained the story by criminal means, they would call the target, pretend that they were ready to publish and then offer to run a less damaging version if the source would give them confirmation. So the actress would confirm she had had a miscarriage if the paper agreed not to say that it was an abortion; the footballer would confirm that he had smoked cannabis, if they agreed not to say he was snorting cocaine. Andy Coulson had often made calls like this and liked to declare with a grin: ‘That’s tabloid journalism! You turn them over in the morning. And in the afternoon, they thank you for it.’

None of Gordon Taylor’s messages revealed any kind of affair between him and Jo Armstrong. On the following Sunday, Liverpool were due to play Chelsea in the Carling Cup final at the new Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. Glenn Mulcaire found out which hotel Taylor was staying in before the game. As a result, Taylor was disturbed early on the Sunday morning by a
News of the World
reporter finding some pretext to call his room to see whether a woman answered. The same reporter lurked outside the hotel, in case a picture would tell the story. It didn’t.

But Mulcaire persisted. That was not easy: he was overloaded with work. Coulson’s former reporters say he was helping them on just about every story they covered, though not all of them knew he was hacking. Even on a Saturday, when the paper had to cover small news stories, they would ask Miskiw to get Mulcaire to blag phone companies to find close friends of a family who had died in a house fire, or to blag the DVLA for the name and home address of somebody who died in a car crash. They used him to check on kiss-and-tell stories. A train company manager wanted to sell them the tale of his brief affair with the model Kate Moss. He described how he had been staying at a hotel in central London when he had started talking to her at the bar. They had spent the night together, he said, and, when he woke up the next morning, he had found a note from her, asking him to get in touch if he was in town again and leaving her mobile number. Mulcaire blagged the phone company and found that this had indeed been Kate Moss’s number, but it was no longer in use. Eventually, the man confessed he had made up the whole tale, and so, to punish him, they got Mulcaire to find his home address and landline number and then called his wife to ask her to comment on her husband’s relationship with Kate Moss.

All the stories which had won Coulson the award of Newspaper of the Year were based on Mulcaire hacking voicemail. He had hacked Sven-Göran Eriksson to expose the England manager’s affair with a secretary, Faria Alam. He had hacked David Beckham to expose the footballer’s affair with his personal assistant, Rebecca Loos. No matter how many times Beckham changed his number, no matter how many extra SIM cards he shuffled through his phone, Mulcaire kept listening to his messages. At one point, Mulcaire claimed, Beckham had hired an expensive security agency to make sure that his phones were safe, and, according to Mulcaire, he had broken through their protection within an hour.

He had hacked messages left by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett, provoking Greg Miskiw, who was usually highly secretive, into boasting to colleagues that if they could listen to the voicemail of the minister who was directly responsible for the Security Service, they could surely listen to anybody’s. Having got away with it the previous year when the paper had exposed Blunkett’s relationship with Kimberly Quinn, Mulcaire was now hacking him all over again, seeking out the details of the politician’s supposed relationship with a former estate agent named Sally Anderson, which, in truth, had nothing sexual about it. He was hacking Sally Anderson. And her father. And her brother, as well as her partner, ex-boyfriend, grandmother, aunt, mother, cousin, a close friend, her osteopath and two of Blunkett’s special advisers.

By May 2005 Ian Edmondson was getting impatient for the Gordon Taylor story which Miskiw had been promising to deliver for several months. Internal messages show that during April Edmondson had tried to nail it by sending a reporter, Laura Holland, to spy on Taylor at the PFA’s annual awards ceremony in Park Lane, in case he showed up holding hands with Jo Armstrong. She got nothing. (She and a male photographer were told also to swab the toilets in case they could find cocaine traces.) Mulcaire had tried blagging into Taylor’s bank account in case that yielded anything. It didn’t. So, Edmondson brought in Neville Thurlbeck, chief reporter, winner of awards, tabloid-scoop hero, rather unusual person.

Thurlbeck, then aged forty-three, grew up in down-to-earth, gritty Sunderland in the north-east of England, but he emerged in the fantasy role of a very old-fashioned high Tory. He was obsessed with the 1930s. He liked to wear braces and tweed jackets with a handkerchief neatly placed in the breast pocket. He told colleagues with pride that he had never worn a pair of jeans. He spoke about his wife in equally conservative tones, boasting that he had never ironed a shirt in his life. He was a fan of George Formby and claimed to play the ukulele. He drove a Mercedes and deplored these southerners who thought it was sensible to spend millions to live in Victorian semis, which he regarded as slums, and insisted on finding his own detached house in Surrey, built, of course, in the 1930s. And yet beneath this stuffy, fluffy image, he was a ruthless tabloid man.

He had made his name – and won four different awards for the scoop of the year – in 2000 by exposing the Conservative peer and novelist, Jeffrey Archer. Notoriously, he had once also exposed himself in the course of attempting to prove that a naturist couple in Dorset, Bob and Sue Firth, were offering sexual services to the customers of their bed and breakfast business. Not realising that his attempts to persuade the couple to have sex in front of him had made them so suspicious that they were secretly videoing him, he stripped off to pose as a fellow naturist and then surreptitiously engaged in an act which earned him the nickname Onan the Barbarian. In spite of regularly indulging himself by spending company money on the most expensive restaurants and hotels, Thurlbeck had risen through the ranks, serving as news editor under Greg Miskiw, from 2001 to 2003, and was now chief reporter, the man who did the big stories.

On 9 May 2005, Thurlbeck was sent a transcript of the messages from Gordon Taylor’s voicemail which had been typed up by the secretary in Manchester three months earlier. It took a while for him to get moving. He had just revealed that the TV football presenter Andy Gray had broken up with his girlfriend. Gray, too, was being hacked by Mulcaire and by several
News of the World
journalists. He was an easy target: whenever he was commentating on a live football match, they knew he could not answer his phone, so they dialled in and listened to his voicemail. Then, before he could start work on Gordon Taylor, Thurlbeck was sent to Australia to cover the supposedly private medical care of Kylie Minogue, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Thurlbeck filed a long piece from Melbourne, quoting her younger brother, Brendan, ‘speaking to a family friend’. Brendan Minogue and his sister, Dannii, were being hacked by Mulcaire.

In June, just as Thurlbeck started work in earnest on the Taylor story, something very significant changed at the
News of the World
: Greg Miskiw left the paper. Control of Mulcaire, who had been managed with such cunning by Miskiw, now passed to Ian Edmondson, who was happy to embrace the investigator but who was an altogether less subtle operator. He started using Mulcaire on very sensitive targets, including the specialist PR man Max Clifford, who brokered the tales of people at the centre of tabloid scandals; journalists and editors on rival papers, including even Rebekah Brooks at the
Sun
; George Osborne, the closest political ally of David Cameron who became Conservative leader in October 2005; and the family of the Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. Mulcaire even ended up hacking
News of the World
journalists, including Andy Coulson, and a football reporter, James Fletcher, in case he was picking up titbits about the private lives of famous players.

There was a big leaving party for Miskiw in London. Glenn Mulcaire was a guest, rubbing shoulders with reporters and executives and with Andy Coulson, who was later to deny ever having met the investigator.

Edmondson wanted the Gordon Taylor story badly. On Monday 27 June, he called in Derek Webb, who booked into a hotel in Manchester and started to shadow Taylor, watching him meeting Jo Armstrong, observing no sign of anything sexual and reporting back that it looked as though the story was not true. Edmondson refused to drop it. On Wednesday 29 June, Glenn Mulcaire supplied a new recording of some messages left on the phones of Taylor and Armstrong. These were transcribed and, that afternoon, a London reporter, Ross Hindley, emailed the transcript of thirty-five messages to Mulcaire so that he could pass them on to Neville Thurlbeck. ‘Hello,’ wrote Hindley in a message which was to become a central exhibit in the exposure of the
News of the World
. ‘This is the transcript for Neville.’

Two days later, on Friday 1 July, Edmondson sent a photographer up to Manchester to try to snatch a picture of Taylor with Armstrong. Derek Webb was in a swanky fifth-floor restaurant, watching his two targets having lunch, when the photographer called him to say he had arrived in the city. Webb told him where he was and a few minutes later, to his horror, the photographer walked into the restaurant and sat down beside him. Taylor and Armstrong did not notice. Nor, by sheer luck, did they notice when the photographer walked to the back of the restaurant, turned and openly banged off several shots of them. However, another diner did notice exactly what was happening and, as the photographer headed for the exit and found he had to wait for the lift, the observant diner went to warn Gordon Taylor and pointed out the photographer and also Derek Webb, who was clearly linked to him.

Taylor was furious and went after the photographer, narrowly failing to catch him as a lift arrived to take him downstairs. Taylor followed him. Webb followed the two of them, pausing in the lift to change his coat and put on a hat, before arriving in the street to see Taylor now confronting the photographer – and a passing police officer being drawn into the incident.

That afternoon, Edmondson tasked three photographers and two more reporters to join Thurlbeck in trying to nail the story for that Sunday’s paper. Thurlbeck, in his customary style, booked into a very pleasant country hotel outside Manchester. On Saturday morning, the team split up and went off to stage simultaneous confrontations with Jo Armstrong, Gordon Taylor’s son and Taylor himself. It was a disaster. Jo Armstrong said the story wasn’t true; Taylor’s son told the reporter to piss off; and Thurlbeck, having idled over a satisfying breakfast, turned up on Taylor’s doorstep too late, found he had gone into town and ended up chasing him through a shopping mall, at the end of which Taylor told him to piss off.

The story was false. It died. At least, that’s what the
News of the World
thought at the time. Unknown to them, Gordon Taylor decided to alert his lawyer, Mark Lewis. Lewis wrote to the
News of the World
’s long-serving in-house lawyer, a man with a laid-back and charming style called Tom Crone, who had qualified as a barrister before going to work for News International where he attempted to prevent libels and contempts of court and dealt with the aftermath if he failed. Crone wrote back to Lewis, saying there would be no story and that this was all just legitimate journalistic inquiry.

*   *   *

In the newsroom without boundaries, there was one thing which was not tolerated: failure. This was a problem for Clive Goodman, who had worked for the
News of the World
since 1986. He was portly, pompous, well past his prime, and his career had ploughed into the sand.

After years as a specialist in celebrity gossip and the life of the royal family, he had run out of contacts and started to run out of steam. By 2005, he had the grandiose title of royal editor, a fob watch, his own office and not much hope. Colleagues in the pub once joked that he was like the eternal flame because he never went out.

Goodman did his best to make good. He emailed Coulson from time to time saying he needed cash to pay police officers who worked at the royal palaces, occasionally adding a line to point out that this was a criminal offence. Coulson routinely agreed, the payment was logged in internal paperwork with false names for Goodman’s contacts, and the money was served up in cash through the network of offices run by the Thomas Cook travel agency.