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Hack Attack

The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch

Faber and Faber, Inc.

February 2008 to July 2009

I was sitting in a BBC radio studio, getting ready to vomit.

They wanted me to talk about a book I had just written, Flat Earth News, about the scale and origins of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the media. In theory, I was happy to talk to them: I'd spent two years breaking my brain to produce the book, which was finally being published now, in February 2008, and this was a chance to persuade people to read the result. But the thought of this interview flooded me with anxiety.

This was live national radio. Worse than that, this was the Today programme. The Queen listens to the Today programme; the prime minister, foreign ambassadors, the whole damned UK power elite chews its breakfast with one ear on the Today programme. And worst of all, a few minutes earlier, while I was pacing up and down outside the studio, just before I sat down for my ordeal, they had revealed that they had brought in Stuart Kuttner to oppose me. Kuttner!

I had never met him, but I'd heard plenty. Kuttner was this figure from the shadows – the managing editor of Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, lurking just behind the editor's throne, the guy who kept the secrets, who got rid of the problems, who dealt with the really dirty stuff. You wouldn't spend long trying to describe Stuart Kuttner without using words like 'tough' and 'ruthless' and 'basically very unpleasant'.

The interview started, I mastered my nerves and started to talk. Kuttner stepped in a couple of times, to inform the nation that I must be from a different planet because he certainly didn't recognise the newspaper industry I was describing. Then I got on to the 'dark arts', outlining the few scraps of information I had found about private investigators who for years had been working for most British newspapers, breaking the law to help them get scoops. Kuttner moved in quickly. 'If it happens, it shouldn't happen. It happened once at the News of the World. The reporter was fired; he went to prison. The editor resigned.'

Certainly it crossed my mind that he was not telling the truth. He was right on the simple fact that only one reporter from the News of the World had been sent to prison – the royal editor, Clive Goodman – but the idea of the 'one rogue reporter' had never quite made sense to me. Goodman had been jailed a year earlier, in January 2007, for intercepting the voicemail of three people who worked at Buckingham Palace. The private investigator who had helped him to do that, Glenn Mulcaire, had been jailed not only for hacking the voicemail of those three royal targets but also for eavesdropping on the messages of five other people who had nothing to do with the royal family. Why had Mulcaire done that? Nobody had suggested for a moment that it had been the royal editor who had told him to hack non-royal victims. So who had asked him to? Other reporters? Editors? Mysterious voices in his head?

Kuttner swept over the top of me, on a rhetorical roll. British journalism, he declared, was 'a very honourable profession'. A newspaper like the News of the World was really a kind of moral watchdog, keeping an eye out for misbehaviour among the powerful. 'We live in an age of corrosion of politics and of public life – degradation,' he warned.

On that high note, the interview finished, and that might have been the end of it. I didn't believe all this stuff about the News of the World being a defence against the degradation of public life, but I wasn't interested in the News of the World. I didn't read it and I didn't want to write about it. I was only relieved to be out of the studio and happy to go off spreading my ideas about Flat Earth News, which is mostly about quality newspapers and the deep flaws in the way they now operate. But, unknown to me, Stuart Kuttner had just made a mistake, a very bad mistake. 'It only happened once,' he had said. Somewhere out across the airwaves, a man I had never met nor heard of had listened to what Kuttner said and had felt so angry about it that he decided to contact me. Which is what happened a few days later.

'I would like to have a discussion with you,' he said. 'I think you will like what I have.'

He left me his mobile phone number, but told me never to leave a message on it.

* * *

It's fair to say that reporting is a great deal easier than most reporters like to pretend. People tell you things; you do your best to check them out; and then you tell a lot of other people what you've found. There are some hidden subtleties in there and a few simple skills, but generally speaking, there is nothing very clever about it.

I arranged to meet my intriguing caller. I am never going to be able to say who he is. That's a really common problem. Over and again, you find that the people who have the most interesting things to say are the people who are least able to say them, because they are under pressure of some kind – they are worried that they will be arrested or sacked or divorced or beaten up. Anonymity protects them. This man is going to crop up several times, so he needs a memorable name. I'll call him Mr Apollo.

As soon as I met him I liked him, but I didn't necessarily trust him. We sat in his room in a central London hotel, him faffing about with the coffee-making equipment while he started to talk, me wondering how he knew so much and what he wanted in return.

He told me that Kuttner was a liar, that the News of the World had been hacking phones all over the place and that this was how they got most of their stories: they picked up their leads by intercepting voicemail, and then they went out to get photographs and quotes to lay a false trail, so that they could pretend that they had found the story by normal, legitimate means. It wasn't just Clive Goodman who had been doing it, he said – that was a complete joke, loads of reporters had been at it. It was such an easy trick, he said. You dial your target's mobile phone number and when you get through to the recorded message, you hit '9', then the recorded message asks you to enter a four-digit PIN code. Most people don't bother to change the code from the factory setting, so you know what it is. Or, if they do change it, they use something really obvious like the year of their birth. You put in the code and that's it, you can listen to their messages. Of course, Mr Apollo explained, you need to work this so that the target doesn't answer their phone when you call in. So maybe you call during the night, or when you know the target is in a meeting.

Most of the time, he said, it was so easy to do this that you didn't need a private investigator like Glenn Mulcaire to make it happen. Mulcaire's main job, he said, had been to 'blag' the mobile phone companies – to call them up and pretend to be one of their staff – so that he could get numbers for people who were ex- directory, or, more important, to get a PIN code changed back to the factory setting if the target had bothered to alter it. Once the News of the World were inside one target's voicemail, they would pick up messages with the numbers of their closest associates, then hack their voicemail, get more associates and create a whole network of eavesdropping around the target. The targets would not discover the codes had been changed for weeks. And if they did discover it, they would think it was some kind of techno foul-up.

This was interesting stuff, and it was tempting to get involved. It would be good to put Kuttner back into his box. It would be better still to do something about tabloid journalists behaving badly. It was not just that a small minority of cowboys with notebooks were making up stories and ruining people's lives; they were also making it much more difficult for other journalists to do their jobs, because people generally now expected to be bribed, bullied and cheated by reporters, so they were far more difficult to deal with.

But it wasn't that great a story. Nobody was going to be very surprised to be told that some tabloid reporters behaved badly and, even if I wanted to pursue it, the difficulty was that all this was just the word of Mr Apollo, who might be right or might be wrong but who had made it very clear that he could not be quoted or named to defend anything that I might write.

By now, he had got the better of the coffee-making, and he sat down and started to relax and to talk about the police. He claimed that Scotland Yard had found masses of mobile phone numbers which had been logged by Glenn Mulcaire but they had never followed up on them. They had made no attempt to prosecute Mulcaire for all these other possible victims, nor to find out who else might have been giving instructions to Mulcaire, nor even to tell all these people that they had been targeted. This was getting more interesting. Why would the police behave like that when dealing with a particularly powerful newspaper, which happened to belong to Rupert Murdoch, the biggest media mogul in the country?

We started talking about the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, about the fact that it never did make sense that Mulcaire admitted hacking five non-royal victims. That was when Mr Apollo finally opened the door so that I could see a way forward. He claimed that one of those five unexplained victims was suing and was trying to get the police to hand over some of the evidence which they had collected and never revealed. Apparently, it was causing some panic at Scotland Yard. Now here was a way to check Mr Apollo's story. If a judge went ahead and ordered Scotland Yard to hand over evidence, the police would have to comply and then, with any luck, I could get access to the court files and see what was in there.

It was only later that evening, after I'd left Mr Apollo with thanks and a guarantee to stay in touch, that my brain finally clicked into gear and I understood the biggest reason for going after this story. It was not just about the most powerful news organisation in the country apparently cheating and breaking the law, and about the most powerful police force in the country failing – maybe deliberately refusing – to go anywhere near exposing the truth about it. I finally realised that what really mattered was that the man who was editing the News of the World at the time – Andy Coulson – was now working as media adviser for the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. And although it was the Labour Party who were in government, it looked very likely that the Conservatives would win the next election and Cameron would become prime minister. Andy Coulson was on his way into Downing Street.

I remembered Coulson resigning as editor of the News of the World after the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, explaining that he had known nothing about Goodman's evil ways but saying that he felt he should go because it had happened on his watch. If Kuttner was lying about all this, then maybe Coulson was lying too. And yet he was aiming to take on the job of organising the communication between the government and the people of the country – really a very unsuitable place for a liar. More than that, if he really had presided over a regime of illegal eavesdropping at the News of the World, what would he do if he found himself in Downing Street and he wanted to find out who was talking dirty behind the prime minister's back? Would he go back to the dark arts?

* * *

What is the difference between a reporter on the Guardian and a reporter on a paper like the News of the World? Don't believe anybody who tells you that it has anything to do with moral fibre, or intelligence, or sensitivity. There are bastards and moral weaklings, good guys and idealists, in both worlds. All reporters are really very similar. They run on a flammable psychological mixture, like petrol and air, a volatile combination of imagination and anxiety.

You train your imagination, pushing it like you'd push a muscle until it's stronger than other people's, until it becomes almost freakishly powerful. And over and over again, you point it at your problem and you guess, with great energy and vivid mental pictures: what could the truth possibly be; where could I possibly find the evidence; who could know; why would they talk; what's next; what's missing; how do I finish this jigsaw puzzle in the dark? Then, when you go out to check what your imagination has delivered, you complete the mixture by pouring in equal measures of stomach-burning anxiety. What if this goes wrong; if they won't talk to me; if they talk to somebody else with a notebook; if they lie to me; if they tape me; if they grass me to the opposition? What if I'm wrong? What if the stupid news desk won't run the story?

There is one other thing, the equivalent of the spark that ignites the fuel and air. Most of the reporters who survive and thrive are driven by some kind of deep need. I know one who spent years pretending to himself and to the rest of the planet that he was not gay. He diverted his sexual energy and his waking hours, day and night, into fighting all the powers that be, and he did extraordinary work uncovering all kinds of secret scandals until finally he accepted himself and relaxed and never really produced another story worth reading. I know another who says he grew up with a secret in his family – there was this thing that nobody was allowed to say. Eventually, in his late teens, he discovered that his father was Jewish while his mother was not and that, when they married, their two families had protested so bitterly that the couple resolved never to mention This Thing again. So this reporter can't stand secrets, and he has spent years earning a living and winning awards by hunting down concealment wherever he can find it and tearing it apart.

OK, so mine is this: I spent my childhood being hit by people – grown-ups – some of them genuinely vicious, some of them simply believing the noxious idea that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child. I had been working as a reporter for a couple of decades, thinking I was interested in criminal justice and social problems, before I looked back and saw how over and again I had been drawn to stories where I might have saved victims: particularly victims of unfairness (miscarriages of justice, police corruption); and, even more than that, victims who were children (working as prostitutes, losing out at school, being sexually abused, living in poverty, struggling in prison, being attacked by a mentally disordered nurse). Underlying all of this work, I could see, was some deep-seated urge to hit back at anybody at all who takes power and abuses it.

What's the difference between a reporter on the News of the World and one on the Guardian? The difference is in the office, in the hierarchy – in the Bully Quotient. There is a lot of bullying in Fleet Street – a lot of puffed-up, pissed-up, overpaid, foul-mouthed, self-important editors-in-chief and people who run news desks and features desks, who can't tell the difference between leadership and spite. I've come across it in quality newsrooms but there is no doubt that the worst of the bullying thrives in the downmarket tabloid newsrooms. Why? It begins with train timetables.

There are 50 or 60 million people crammed into England, Scotland and Wales and, ever since the Industrial Revolution, it's been possible to print a paper in London or Glasgow and put it on a train at night, knowing that by dawn it can reach any household in the land. Compare that to the US: until the electronic revolution, a newspaper that set out at night on a journey from New York City, for example, would be halfway to nowhere by the next morning. So while the US developed city papers, usually no more than a couple in each city, the UK developed a national market for newspapers which was bursting with competition as a dozen or so daily titles fought each other for the attention of all these readers. And the competition has always been most intense among the mass-market tabloids. Their very survival depends on circulation, on selling lots of papers – on printing something that the competition has missed. By contrast, the upmarket papers don't expect to sell millions: they aim for the wealthiest people in the market and make most of their money by carrying advertisements which are aimed at their readers' well-padded wallets.

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Excerpted from Hack Attack by Nick Davies. Copyright © 2014 Nick Davies. Excerpted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc..
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