Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (9 page)

Despite the huge haul and clear circumstantial evidence that other
News of the World
journalists had commissioned Mulcaire, Scotland Yard made only a cursory attempt to identify wrongdoers other than Goodman and Mulcaire. Crown Prosecution Service records suggest that the police did not disclose to it the true scale of the evidence seized from Mulcaire. At a case conference on 21 August, the officer in overall charge of the operation, Detective Superintendent Philip Williams, told the CPS that there were potentially around 180 victims.
*
When the row over Operation Caryatid exploded later, the CPS said: ‘We enquired whether there was any evidence connecting Mulcaire to other
News of the World
journalists. Again we were told that there was not, and we never saw any such evidence.’
¹⁰

On 7 September, in an attempt to ascertain whether other journalists had commissioned the hacking, Scotland Yard wrote to News International explaining its intention to find ‘co-conspirators’ and asked for its notes and files on Mulcaire together with the records of phone calls made from its offices to him. Burton Copeland, a firm of lawyers contracted by News International to ‘assist’ the police, replied on 14 September that its client could find only one document (which has not been publicly disclosed) and refused to hand over the phone records, to protect ‘sources’. Under the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, officers could only obtain a search warrant for ‘journalistic premises’ if the company was not cooperating. The police decided that News International was not cooperating, but nevertheless did not request a search warrant.

Then they did something strange. Someone inside Scotland Yard – it is not known who – approached Rebekah Wade, the
Sun’
s editor, and apparently gave her details of the operation. The rationale for this seems to have been that Wade was herself in Mulcaire’s notes. She was thus, as
Sun
editor, potentially a victim of the
News of the World’
s newsgathering operation – which was also used to spy on other journalists, such as four at the
Mail on Sunday
. The police intended to approach her to ask whether she wished to pursue a case against her own employers, News International. The briefing she received was captured in an internal email sent by the
News of the World’
s lawyer to its editor, Andy Coulson:

From: Tom Crone

Sent: 15 September 2006 10.34

To: Andy Coulson

Subject: Strictly private and confidential

Andy,

Here’s [what] Rebekah told me about info relayed to her by cops:

1. They are confident they have Clive [Goodman, former royal editor] and GM [Mulcaire] bang to rights on the Palace intercepts;

2. [on Mulcaire’s] … accesses to voicemails. From these they have a list of 100–110 ‘victims’;

3. The only payment records they found were from News Int, ie the NoW retainer and other invoices; they said that over the period they looked at (going way back) there seemed to be over £1m of payments.

4. The recordings and notes demonstrate a pattern of ‘victims’… replaced by the next one who becomes flavour of the week/month;

5. They are visiting the bigger victims, ie where there are lots of intercepts;

6. Their purpose is to insure that when GM comes up in court the full case against him is there for the court to see (rather than just the present palace charges);

7. All they are asking victims is ‘did you give anyone permission to access your voicemail?’ and if not ‘do you wish to make a formal complaint?’

8. They are confident that … they can then charge Glenn Mulcaire in relation to those victims … they are keen that the charges should demonstrate the scale of GM’s activities … so they would feature victims from different areas of public life, politics, showbiz, etc

In terms of
NoW
:

(a) They suggested [this part of the email is unclear]
News of the World
journalists directly accessing the voicemails (this is what did for Clive).

(b) But they have got hold of
NoW
back numbers to 2004 and are trying to marry CG accesses to specific stories,

(c) In one case they seem to have a phrase from an NoW story which is identical to the tape or note of GM’s access,

(d) They have no recordings of NoW people speaking to GM or accessing voicemails,

(e) They do have GM’s phone records which show sequences of contacts with
News of the World
before and after accesses … obviously they don’t have the content of the calls … so this is at best circumstantial.

10. They are going to contact RW today to see if she wishes to take it further.
¹¹

Unsurprisingly, Wade did not wish to submit a formal complaint against her employers. Scotland Yard showed a similar lack of enthusiasm for widening Operation Caryatid. At the time, the Met was engaged in seventy live operations, some of which were not being fully staffed for lack of resources. At the end of September, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, Andy Hayman’s deputy, made the decision to limit the investigation to Goodman and Mulcaire. Speaking six years later at the Leveson Inquiry, he stood by his decision:

Invasions of privacy are odious, obviously. They can be extraordinarily distressing and at times they can be illegal, but, to put it bluntly, they don’t kill you. Terrorists do.
¹²

He expressed disappointment, however, at the execution of the police’s strategy to inform victims. Officers told thirty-six individuals in the government, military, police and royal household who they deemed needed to know their phones had been compromised for reasons of national security. Strangely, these did not include John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, who was known to have been distrustful of Rupert Murdoch’s political meddling.

Police later said that they understood that the mobile phone companies would alert affected customers. O2 warned forty straight away; the others waited for a staggering five years. Citing a concern that doing so would prejudice police inquiries, Orange and T-Mobile only notified their forty-five and seventy-one subscribers respectively in July 2011, while Vodafone waited until January 2012 to contact its forty affected customers. This meant that until then all those individuals were unaware they could change their PIN codes or sue News International. The overwhelming majority of Mulcaire’s victims did not find out for years that they had been targeted.

Police had found a thoroughly detailed haul of incriminating evidence indicating that Mulcaire had hacked hundreds of newsworthy targets. But they had misled prosecutors about the number of victims and the involvement of other
NoW
journalists, failed to inform directly the vast majority of people who were likely to have been eavesdropped on, and rejected the options of selecting a wider sample of wrongdoing, pursuing a limited number of heavy users of Mulcaire at the
News of the World
or farming out the investigation to a less stretched unit
.
So the prosecution would be very narrow indeed.

This was a relief to the obstructive authorities at Wapping. Journalists there had been expecting the police to be knocking on their doors early in the morning, but the knocks never came. Faced with the ongoing threat to their reputations from the continuing, albeit limited, fallout from Goodman and Mulcaire’s arrests, Rupert Murdoch’s executives considered how best to respond to the steadily escalating crisis. They then did what they thought was proper in the circumstances: for the next five years they mounted a sustained and deliberate cover-up, threatened, followed and attacked their critics, and lied to the public, media and Parliament.

The first pressing problem was how to minimize the impending prosecution of Clive Goodman. According to Lawrence Abramson, a senior lawyer at Harbottle & Co, which later worked for News International, internal emails at Wapping in 2006 ‘revealed quite an active involvement’ in Clive Goodman’s prosecution: ‘They showed [the company] trying to influence the way the prosecution was being conducted or the defence was being conducted.’
¹³

Naturally News International did not want its royal editor to suggest that phone hacking was rife at the
News of the World,
nor that he had only been doing what was expected of him. To demonstrate to Goodman that he was still valued, despite the shame he had brought, Tom Crone relayed to him Andy Coulson’s repeated assurance that he could come back to the
News of the World
once he had served his sentence. News International continued to pay Goodman’s full salary while he stayed at home, and even called him occasionally for help on royal stories. It also continued to pay Glenn Mulcaire his full salary.

While the Crown Prosecution Service put together the limited case against Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, News International had become concerned about an attack from another direction – the campaign by the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, to introduce a prison term for breaches of the Data Protection Act. On 24 July 2006, the Department for Constitutional Affairs issued a consultation paper agreeing with his proposal. In an attempt to lobby support for it, on 27 October Thomas met the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission’s powerful Code Committee, which set its code of conduct and who happened to be Les Hinton, News International’s executive chairman and one of Rupert Murdoch’s closest allies. Since joining the
News
in Adelaide as a copy boy in 1960, Hinton had worked his way up to head Murdoch’s British newspapers, where he had stewarded the promotions of Rebekah Wade and Andy Coulson. Although NI was implacably opposed to jail terms, Thomas said the meeting was ‘civilized and reasonably constructive’ and that Hinton ‘talked a lot about the efforts which would be made to tackle misconduct’.
¹⁴
Thomas was extremely surprised a few days later to see a ‘personalized and hostile leading editorial’ on him and the ICO in
The Sunday Times
on 29 October 2011:

Where someone lives, who they are, who their friends and family may be is hardly confidential information. It is common currency that is easily discovered by talking to neighbours, looking at the electoral register or searching the Land Registry, as anyone is entitled to do. To propose imprisonment for reporters – and insurers, solicitors and private investigators – who obtain such deals would be laughable, if it were not so sinister.

A further hostile leader appeared in
The Times
three days later, on 1 November:

It [the proposal] could all too easily prevent investigative journalists looking at personal data in pursuit of a public-interest story; deter whistleblowers from revealing malpractice; and blow wide open the confidentiality that protects the journalist and his source.

Thomas told the Leveson Inquiry: ‘At that time, nothing else was appearing in the mainstream press about ‘What Price Privacy? ’ to prompt these attacks. The episode raised questions in my mind about proprietorial influence on editorial independence and freedom.’
*

At a pleas hearing at the Old Bailey in London in November 2006, the limited nature of the prosecution of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire became apparent. Under the Criminal Law Act 1977, the men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to intercept the communications of the royal aides Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Helen Asprey and Paddy Harverson. In the eight months leading up to their arrests, they had made 609 calls to the direct dial inboxes of the trio (Goodman making the most, 487). Under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, Mulcaire also pleaded guilty to hacking the phones of five other individuals whose voicemail inboxes he had called a total of sixty-six times. He had ransacked the messages of Max Clifford, who had negotiated Rebecca Loos’s £300,000 kiss and tell on David Beckham, but who had refused to deal with Andy Coulson again after the
Screws
turned over Kerry Katona. Two of the other figures came from the football world, which Mulcaire knew well: Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, and Sky Andrew, a sports agent whose most famous client was the Arsenal footballer Sol Campbell. The other two were the supermodel Elle Macpherson and the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, who had recently admitted he was bisexual after being confronted by the
Sun
with evidence that he had called gay chatlines. All five would have been of interest to the
News of the
World
, but probably not to its royal editor – which indicated the involvement of others at Wapping.