Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (19 page)

While the
Mirror
titles were enthusiastic customers, the
News of the World
was paying Rees £150,000 a year. The bug recorded him saying: ‘No one pays like the
News of the World
do.’

Police would have carried on eavesdropping had they not stumbled on a crime they were duty-bound to disrupt. With Austin Warnes, a corrupt police officer in the Met’s south-east regional crime squad, Rees had hatched a plot to plant cocaine on a former model, Kim James, so that her businessman husband, Simon James, could gain custody of their child. Drugs were duly planted in Kim James’s car and Warnes provided false information about her drugs activities. In September, police raided Southern Investigations. In December 2000, Rees was sentenced to six years, increased to seven on appeal, for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Warnes was sentenced to four years. As they closed down the corruption ring, police arrested twelve suspects and raided twenty-three premises.

With Rees in jail for a long stretch, the police began a fourth inquiry into Daniel Morgan’s murder in early 2002 and arranged for an appeal to be made on BBC TV’s
Crimewatch
. The husband of one of the programme’s presenters, Jacqui Hames, herself a former Met police officer, was Detective Superintendent David Cook, head of the Met’s north London murder squad, and it was agreed that he would make the appeal. The day after it was broadcast on 26 June, Scotland Yard warned Cook that it had picked up intelligence that Rees’s partner, Sid Fillery, had been in touch with Rees’s handler at the
News of the World
, Alex Marunchak, now editing its Irish edition, who had agreed to ‘sort Cook out’. Surrey Police, where Cook had previously worked, also told him someone purporting to be an “Inland Revenue inspector” had tried to blag his home address from its finance department.

Unbeknown to Hames and Cook, Glenn Mulcaire had started tracking data about them. Under the heading 3 July, Mulcaire recorded the date Hames had joined the Met in 1977, her payroll and warrant numbers, the name, location and phone number of her place of work and her home phone number and address. Mulcaire recorded Cook’s name, phone number, rank and made a reference to his
Crimewatch
appeal.

Hames later said:

This information could only have come from one place: the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service]. I was horrified by the realization that someone within the MPS had supplied information from my personnel file to Mr Mulcaire, and probably for money.
⁴

On 10 July, Cook noticed a van parked opposite his and Hames’s home. The following day there were two vans. When he took Hames’s son to school, both vehicles started following them. When the vans followed them again soon after, Cook contacted the Met who asked a policeman to stop one of the vehicles on the pretext of it having a broken tail light. Both vans were leased to News International. Police mobilized a witness protection unit and counter-surveillance team to protect the couple and their children.

At a press social event at Scotland Yard in January 2003, David Cook and his superior officer, Commander Andrew Baker, decided to confront the
News of the World’
s editor, Rebekah Wade, about its surveillance. Accompanied by Dick Fedorcio, the Met’s director of public affairs, they ushered Wade into a side room and told her of the sinister activity and that there was evidence that the news executive who commissioned work from Southern Investigations, Marunchak, had a corrupt relationship with Jonathan Rees. A former colleague of Rees had claimed that some of his
News of the World’
s payments were channelled back to Marunchak, who had been able to pay off his credit card bill and his child’s private school fees. (Marunchak denies this allegation.) Wade lamely claimed the paper was trying to discover whether Hames and Cook were having an affair (they were married) and defended Marunchak on the grounds that he did his job well. Scotland Yard, ever eager to maintain a good relationship with Wapping, took no further action. Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner at the time, later said he had no knowledge of the meeting.
⁵

Hames told the Leveson Inquiry in February 2012:

The
News of the World
has never supplied a coherent reason for why we were placed under surveillance … I believe that the real reason for the
News of the World
placing us under surveillance was that suspects in the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry were using their association with a powerful and well-resourced newspaper to try to intimidate us and so attempt to subvert the investigation. These events left me distressed, anxious and needing counselling and contributed to the breakdown of my marriage to David in 2010.
⁶

After his release from jail in 2005, Rees was re-employed by Andy Coulson’s
News of the World
until the Met charged him with murder three years later. For in secrecy, in 2006, a fifth murder inquiry, Operation Abelard,
*
had begun away from Scotland Yard, led by David Cook and supervised by Assistant Commissioner John Yates – who had vowed to uncover the truth about what he described as ‘one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the Met’.
⁷
The squad consisted of thirty-five officers, all of whom were asked to declare that they were not Freemasons. Cook built a case which included testimony from career criminals who had turned ‘Queen’s evidence’, and whose sentences were reduced as a result of their cooperation. In April 2008, the police charged Rees, two brothers, Glenn and Gary Vian, and a builder, James Cook, with Morgan’s murder. Sid Fillery – who had been convicted of possessing indecent images of children in 2003 – was charged with perverting the course of justice. In October 2009, the murder trial began at the Old Bailey. The laws of contempt of court, which forbid mention of material that could prejudice a case, meant the
Guardian
could not report Jonathan Rees’s re-employment by Andy Coulson after his jail term – but, in February 2010, Ian Katz spoke about it in his phone call to David Cameron’s office. Cameron kept Coulson.

While Rees’s lawyers sought to throw out the murder charge at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, the hacking scandal was developing in the civil courts. Despite the unwillingness of Murdoch’s British news operation to acknowledge there was a case to answer, Max Clifford pursued his civil claim for breach of privacy. As Mark Lewis had done in the Gordon Taylor case, Charlotte Harris asked Scotland Yard to disclose Mulcaire’s notes on Max Clifford, and, just as in the Taylor case, a judge ordered disclosure. But this time, when the documents came through on 7 December 2009, the police had struck out whole sections. Harris recalled: ‘The police would only provide documents under court order and when you did get the documents they would be redacted in a random way. The police would have known that journalists at the
News of the World
were named in the top left-hand corner of many of the pages and yet they blacked them out.’
⁸
She returned to the High Court, where, on 3 March 2010, Justice Geoffrey Vos ordered the removal of the redactions. The expected result was that there would be clear evidence that journalists
*
at the
News of the World
had ordered the hacking of Max Clifford’s phone. Just as in the Gordon Taylor case, News International suddenly became desperate to settle.

Relishing his own negotiating skills – which had squeezed £300,000 out of the
News of the World
for Rebecca Loos’s lust-filled romps with David Beckham – Clifford lunched Rebekah Brooks at a restaurant in London, and agreed a deal: he would get £220,000 a year for three years plus his legal costs of £331,112 – a total of £991,112 – in return for his silence and for re-opening the flow of exclusives to Wapping. Clifford rang Harris and trilled: ‘Poppet, poppet, I’ve sorted it out with Rebekah. I’ve done the money! Now you sort the costs out between you.’ Harris was devastated that the end of the case might ruin any chance of exposing the phone hacking scandal, especially when they had come so close, but Clifford had other ideas. Harris and her barrister Jeremy Reed agreed to meet with the
News of the World’
s legal team – Tom Crone and Julian Pike from Farrer & Co – at Clifford’s house in the Home Counties to thrash out the small print. Clifford emerged from the swimming pool, dried off and went out – leaving the lawyers to haggle in the sitting room, underneath portraits of the coiffeured publicist with various stars. Harris said: ‘We were being distracted by his dogs the whole time. Tom Crone would be saying things like: “Well, it’s obvious you were going to win this case, so you shouldn’t be getting the ‘no win, no fee’ uplift” and these dogs were slavering all over my feet. When Jeremy and I wanted to talk on our own, we would leave the room and go into Max’s kitchen and conservatory.’
⁹
On a handshake, Clifford agreed to keep the deal secret, but abandoned that when, he said, ‘
News of the World
lawyers revealed the details of my settlement.’
¹⁰
(It is not known how or when the
NoW
’s lawyers did this.)

He spoke to the
Guardian,
and on 9 March Nick Davies and Rob Evans reported the settlement online (and in the next day’s newspaper): ‘Max Clifford drops
News of the World
phone hacking action in £1m deal’:

The
News of the World
was tonight accused of buying silence in the phone hacking scandal after it agreed to pay more than £1 million to persuade the celebrity PR agent Max Clifford to drop his legal action over the interception of his voicemail messages.

Clifford was quoted as saying: ‘I’m now looking forward to continuing the successful relationship that I experienced with the
News of the World
for twenty years before my recent problems with them.’

The
News of the World
had paid an extraordinarily large sum to keep a lid on the scandal, but it had again failed to do so. Harris said: ‘The difference between Gordon and Max was that while Max settled he didn’t shut up. He said to them: “Please give me this amount of money.” And then: “Thanks for the money, I’m telling everyone!”
¹¹

Despite disclosing the payment of yet more hush money, the
Guardian
’s story on Clifford was not followed up by any other national newspaper. Most Fleet Street titles had their own dubious dealings with Steve Whittamore: given that reporters often moved between tabloid titles, journalists did not believe that the
News of the World
was the only publication to have intercepted voicemails. Editors may also have thought that the Gordon Taylor story had not really led to anything except some tutting from MPs. Notwithstanding Clifford’s success, in March 2010 the small band who wanted to crack open the scandal were despondent. All the political parties were focusing on the general election in May. Almost every national paper had ignored or belittled a year-long Commons inquiry, and there was a sense that the trail was going cold. At the
Guardian
’s offices in King’s Cross, Alan Rusbridger decided upon another roll of the dice and called his friend Bill Keller, executive editor of the
New York Times,
and urged him to investigate hacking: after all, it was a strong story for a liberal American paper, a potent brew of Britain’s muckraking tabloids, the royal family, Scotland Yard and the Manhattanite Rupert Murdoch. The
Guardian
would offer every assistance. Sharing a story went against an editor’s instincts, but Rusbridger understood that the normal rules of newsgathering didn’t apply to phone hacking.

Keller dispatched a team of three senior reporters – Don van Natta Jr, Jo Becker and Graham Bowley – to the UK almost immediately. Straight off the plane, on 15 March, they met Rusbridger, Nick Davies and the
Guardian
lawyer Gill Phillips in a room on the first floor of Kings Place. Davies spoke for most of the three-hour meeting, taking the American team through the story, and repeating the process at the
New York Times
’s office in Westminster two days later. Over the following months, the Americans would criss-cross Britain investigating with the help of Davies, whom they dubbed ‘Nickypedia’ because of his detailed knowledge of dodgy practices among redtop journalists.

Davies himself carried on digging. He contacted celebrities whom former
Screws
employees indicated had been targeted and urged them to write to Scotland Yard. He also tracked down former
News of the World
reporters, private investigators and friends of Glenn Mulcaire. By this time, he was speaking regularly to Tom Watson, and both of them were talking to the Manchester lawyers Mark Lewis, now working for the law firm Stripes, and Charlotte Harris at JMW. All were on the edge of their respective fields, away from the centre of power: Watson was a backbencher; Lewis and Harris solicitors in provincial general practice rather than big London media firms; Davies was an outlier who rarely visited the
Guardian
’s offices. But together they continued to challenge the misinformation of News International and the Metropolitan Police.

On 4 April, Davies made a startling disclosure. Only eight phone hacking victims had been named in court – Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Helen Asprey, Paddy Harverson, Gordon Taylor, Max Clifford, Sky Andrew, Simon Hughes and Elle Macpherson – and ‘Yates of the Yard’ had told the Culture Committee that offences could be proved against only a small number of individuals. Yet in an answer to a Freedom of Information request by the
Guardian
, Scotland Yard admitted that Mulcaire’s notes had contained no fewer than 4,332 names or partial names of people, 2,978 numbers or partial numbers for mobile phones and thirty audio recordings of voicemail messages. It was now incontrovertible that the true number of victims might not just be eight, or even scores, but thousands – people from all walks of life, rich and poor, famous and anonymous, whose messages had been secretly tracked, hacked and retailed by the country’s largest news group. He also disclosed the existence of the secret agreement between the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police in July 2006 (see Chapter 4) that the case presented in court should be ‘deliberately limited’ to ‘less sensitive’ witnesses, thus excluding more high-profile, newsworthy victims, such as Princes William and Harry.