Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (8 page)

By early May, officers on Operation Caryatid had made another discovery. The phone company O2 alerted Scotland Yard of some ‘suspicious activity’: a man posing as a member of staff, ‘John Jenkin from credit control’, was calling its operatives and asking them to change the PIN codes of Helen Asprey and a second royal aide, Paddy Harverson, Prince Charles’s communications secretary, to the default number. O2’s recordings of the calls showed that he had the current password which allowed him to change the PINs, even though it was itself changed regularly – suggesting he was, somehow, receiving inside information from O2. The police tracked back through the phone system to discover the real identity of ‘John Jenkin’. Their inquiries led them to the Kimpton industrial estate in Sutton, south London, where the calls had originated from phone lines registered to a ‘Paul Williams’. The police soon discovered that ‘Paul Williams’ was an alias used by a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, a former part-time footballer with AFC Wimbledon. In 1998 Mulcaire had been taken on by News International as a ‘researcher’. By 2006, his company, Nine Consultancy UK Ltd, was being paid £104,988 a year by NI, ostensibly for performing electoral roll and other legal checks. He was also receiving £500 cash a week from Clive Goodman, who listed him on his expenses as a confidential royal source, ‘Alexander’. The detectives soon realized that Mulcaire was not a legitimate researcher or a legitimate royal source, but an industrial-scale hacker of voicemails. His specialist skill was blagging phone companies into switching PINs back to the manufacturer’s default number.

By monitoring Mulcaire’s phone lines, officers discovered he was also accessing the voicemails of the publicist Max Clifford, who had fallen out with the
News of the World
the previous year over Andy Coulson’s treatment of one of his clients, the singer Kerry Katona. Part of Clifford’s pitch was that he could keep stories out of the papers as well as place them; Coulson had ignored Clifford’s pleas not to run a story in 2005 about Katona’s cocaine habit. Detectives discovered that the voicemails of another person, known as HJK, the friend of an MP, were also being accessed: the intrusion clearly extended well beyond the royals. They started to match calls to the voicemails of more than a dozen potential victims with stories in the
News of the World
, and began to realize that they would soon have to take dramatic action.

While the police secretly tracked Goodman and Mulcaire’s calls, the Information Commissioner’s Office gave the first public hint of the illegal data trade underpinning many newspaper stories. On 13 May 2006, it published a report to Parliament, ‘What Price Privacy? The Unlawful Trade in Confidential Personal Information’, which complained that confidential data was being bought by finance companies, local authorities and criminals intent on witness or juror intimidation, and also mentioned a ‘major case’ where a private detective had supplied private information to ‘305 named journalists working for a range of newspapers’. Though it did not name Steve Whittamore, the report outlined the type of records found in his house three years earlier, published his tariff of charges and pointedly mentioned Rebekah Wade’s comments to Parliament about paying police for information, explaining that the disappointing outcome of the case at Blackfriars Crown Court had frustrated its own attempts to seek justice. It did not mention that it had ample evidence to prosecute journalists in March 2003, three years previously, and had chosen not to do so, instead lobbying the Press Complaints Commission. Nor did it state the number of requests (17,489), nor name any of the newspapers or newspaper groups which had made the requests. But in the absence of any prosecutions of journalists by his own office and any action by the PCC, the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, used the report to launch a campaign for a two-year custodial sentence for breaches of Section 55 of the Data Protection Act. In November 2011, Alec Owens, the ICO’s frustrated senior investigator, complained:

The publication in May 2006 of ‘What Price Privacy?’ was no more than an attempt to lock the stable door after the horse had bolted in an effort to cover up the fact that the ICO had failed in its duty to conduct a full and proper investigation into the conduct of journalists at the time when they could and should have. Throughout the whole of the time Motorman investigation was going on there was never any mention or suggestion of any report being commissioned for Parliament. I felt it was no coincidence that this report was not published until May 2006, only a few weeks before the Mulcaire scandal broke. It is my belief that when ICO became aware that the Metropolitan Police were conducting yet another investigation involving more wrongdoing by the press, they decided to pre-empt and deflect any criticism which was bound to be directed towards them in relation to their lack of action against the press in Operation Motorman. All the evidence published in this report had been gathered and had been available since March 2003 … why did it take over three years to prepare it, and [then] not publish it until thirteen months after the prosecution against Whittamore had concluded?
³

News International was not greatly concerned by the ICO’s report. On 16 May 2006, three days after it was published, Andy Coulson walked on to the stage at Claridge’s hotel in London to accept the Sunday Newspaper of the Year Award for the third year running. The judges at the London Press Club described the
News of the World
as the paper they would least like to be without, ‘an incredible sledgehammer of a production’.

On Sunday 21 May, the
Screws
headlined its triumph: ‘We’re Crowned Triple Champs’, stressing: ‘No other paper has ever achieved this hat-trick.’ That day its front page was: ‘Hugh and Jemima on Rocks: Hugh Grant and Jemima Khan’s love is on the rocks, the
News of the World
can reveal. The glamour couple, who have been together nearly two years, are close to splitting after a string of furious rows.’ On page 7, the first line read: ‘Distraught Jemima Khan phoned Hugh Grant and sobbed: “I can’t go on like this.” ’ Both Grant and Khan were later informed by Scotland Yard that the paper had intercepted their voicemails.

Applauded by his peers and his bosses at Wapping, Coulson set about victimizing the sportswriter Matt Driscoll. After a complaint from Charlton Football Club in March 2006 about a small story (which turned out to be true), Driscoll faced a trumped-up disciplinary hearing. In July 2006, Coulson emailed his deputy, Neil Wallis, saying he wanted Driscoll ‘out as quickly and cheaply as possible’.
⁴
That month, Driscoll went on sick leave, suffering from severe depression. Despite being informed of his GP’s advice that he should distance himself from work, the paper bombarded him with daily phone calls and sent multiple recorded letters to his home, then stopped his pay.

On 4 August 2006, Andy Coulson suffered a rare setback. After a five-week trial in Glasgow, a court ruled that the
News of the World
’s swinger story had defamed the Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan and awarded him £200,000 damages. On the steps of the court, Sheridan likened his win to the equivalent of football minnows Gretna beating Real Madrid on penalties, adding: ‘They are liars and they have proved they are liars.’
⁵

By now Scotland Yard, still conducting its operation in secrecy, became aware that the
News of the World
was hacking not just the phones of the princes and their aides but a growing number of high-profile figures. Mindful of the seriousness of the terrorist threat – and perhaps also of its close relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers – the force decided to limit the scope of the investigation. A Crown Prosecution Service file note dated 14 July 2006 stated ‘the police have requested initial advice about the data produced and whether the case as it stands could be ring-fenced to ensure that extraneous matters will not be dragged into the prosecution area’. By 25 July, the CPS had agreed privately with the police that the case should be ‘deliberately limited’ to ‘less sensitive’ witnesses. A senior Crown Prosecution Service lawyer wrote: ‘It was recognized early in this case that the investigation was likely to reveal a vast array of offending behaviour. However the CPS and the police concluded that aspects of the investigation could be focused on a discrete area of offending relating to JLP and HA [the royal aides] and the suspects Goodman and Mulcaire.’
⁶
For a long time neither the Crown Prosecution Service nor Scotland Yard admitted the existence of this strategy in their subsequent testimony to Parliament, nor in their public announcements.

With their horizons sufficiently narrowed and with sufficient call data and corresponding newspaper stories based on intercepted messages, the police finally struck. Clive Goodman’s career as one of Britain’s most senior journalists came to a noisy end at 6 a.m. on 8 August 2006 when officers burst into the house he shared with his wife and eighteen-month-old daughter in Putney, arrested him and took him to a police station while they searched his home – where they found an important internal memo in a chest of drawers in his bedroom.

Later that morning, officers executed a search warrant at the
News of the World
in Wapping with the intention of seizing material from Goodman’s desk and financial records. In the absence of the
NoW
’s holidaying lawyer Tom Crone, the company called Julian Pike, a partner at News International’s solicitors, Farrer & Co (ironically, also the Queen’s lawyers), and asked him ‘to assist’ in the search. The four officers who gained access to the
News of the World
received a hostile reception – as Detective Chief Inspector Keith Surtees later explained:

We got to the desk of Goodman, we seized some material from the desk of Goodman. There was a safe on his desk, which was unopened. My officers were confronted with photographers, who were summoned from other parts of News International, and they were taking photographs of the officers. A number of night or news editors challenged the officers around the illegality of their entry into News International. They were asked to go to a conference room until lawyers could arrive to challenge the illegality of the section 8 (1) and 18 (5) and section 8 PACE authorities, and it was described to me as a tense stand-off by the officer leading that search. The officer tried to get our forensic management team, our search officers into the building. They were refused entry, they were left outside. Our officers were effectively surrounded and photographed and not assisted in any way, shape or form. That search was curtailed. Some items were taken. The search did not go to the extent I wanted it to.
⁷

At the time the officer leading the search, Detective Inspector Pearce, feared that the
News of the World’
s staff ‘may offer some form of violence against the small police team in the building’, though none occurred because the police soon left. They did not return because, as Detective Chief Inspector Surtees explained, the ‘moment had been lost with regard to the information we sought. It, I think, had gone, quite frankly.’
⁸
Details of News International’s obstruction and intimidation of the police were made public only six years later.

At the same time as they raided Goodman, detectives raided the home and offices of Glenn Mulcaire, from which they took away an extensive array of paperwork, CD-roms, audio cassettes and whiteboards on which were written PIN numbers, security codes and bank details of his targets. Mulcaire and Goodman stayed silent in their interviews with detectives and, after a night in the cells, were released on police bail. That day, 9 August, the Counter-Terrorism Branch arrested twenty-five people for a conspiracy to blow up nine transatlantic airliners – which quickly became its biggest investigation.

Police resources were again under strain. Detective Chief Inspector Surtees ordered a team of Special Branch officers to work day and night to draw up a list of potential victims from Mulcaire’s notes. What they found astonished them: Mulcaire had scrawled down thousands of names, phone numbers and PIN codes onto sheaf after sheaf of loose A4 notes. In all, there were 11,000 pages. Crucially, in the top left-hand corners of each page – where Mulcaire noted down which journalist commissioned him – there were twenty-eight different first names, such as ‘Clive’.

Just as the Information Commissioner’s Office had at the home of Fleet Street’s data thief Steve Whittamore two years before, the police had stumbled onto an industrial-scale intrusion into the private lives of newsworthy individuals. In all, the Special Branch officers inputted the names of 418 ‘potential victims’ into a computer spreadsheet. Here was evidence that Mulcaire, at least, had targeted not just the princes and their aides and a few others but hundreds upon hundreds of high-profile figures. Among them were two serving cabinet ministers, the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott – the voicemail PIN of whose Chief of Staff, Joan Hammell, Mulcaire had noted – and the Culture Minister, Tessa Jowell, who had responsibility for media policy and her husband, David Mills (who worked for the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi). Also listed were a former cabinet minister, the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose affair with the publisher Kimberly Fortier had been one of the
News of the World
’s award-winning splashes two years earlier, the Conservative frontbencher Boris Johnson, the Respect Party leader, George Galloway, and at least three senior Metropolitan Police officers, including Sir Ian Blair, the current Commissioner, Assistant Commissioner John Yates and his fellow Assistant Commissioner (who was overseeing the investigation) Andy Hayman. There was also evidence that Mulcaire had somehow obtained details of members of the public who had been given new identities by the Met under its witness protection scheme.