Phone hacking scandal deepens

[David Guyatt]

"Broadsword to Danny Boy", "the chicken is in the pot" code phrases, DLB's (Dead Letter Boxes), and naming the "disappearing" of evidence from the police as "Operation Blackhawk".

Do these people really think like this? If it wasn't so f**cking pathetic it'd be funny.

Clearly they live and breathe in a different order of existence...

Phone-hacking trial told of Rebekah Brooks' attempt to 'hide evidence'

Jury hears a curious tale involving an underground car park, two pizzas and a famous movie line of Richard Burton's

• Nick Davies
  
• The Guardian, Monday 4 November 2013 21.17 GMT
  

Rebekah Brooks at the Old Bailey. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex Features

Rebekah Brooks and her husband hatched a complicated plot to hide evidence from the police only to be foiled by a conscientious cleaner, an Old Bailey jury has heard. It was a curious tale involving an underground car park, two pizzas and a famous movie line of Richard Burton's.
The story was told by the Crown as part of a wider allegation that, as the chief executive of News International, Brooks had tried to conceal evidence of wrongdoing at the News of the World by deleting email records and destroying her journalistic notebooks. She denies two counts of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
The jury at the phone-hacking trial also heard an opening speech on behalf of Andy Coulson that the Crown had mis-stated his role as editor of the News of the World and that "it is his case that he was never party to an agreement to hack phones whatever others might have been doing on his watch".
Completing his three-day opening argument for the Crown, Andrew Edis QC took the jury back to July 2011, to the aftermath of the Guardian's disclosure of the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone. "A media firestorm was about to engulf the News of the World," he said. "You can imagine the extremely anxious, if not panic-stricken approach to these developments that must have been going on at the News of the World."
With a Scotland Yard inquiry closing in, Edis said, News International announced it would close the News of the World, and Brooks, a former editor of the paper, realised she faced arrest when she kept an appointment with police on Sunday 17 July. It was in this context, Edis claimed, that she and her husband Charlie Brooks came up with a plan to stop police finding computers and records at their country home, Jubilee Barn in Oxfordshire, and their flat at Chelsea Harbour, central London.
That Sunday morning, a chauffeur drove the pair in their Audi from Oxfordshire to London. Back at Jubilee Barn, Edis alleged, the head of security at News International, Mark Hanna, collected items which were to be concealed and set off in a black Range Rover to the company's office in Wapping. Hanna, meanwhile, was in charge of protecting the Brookses from "newspaper people" and others in what had been named internally Operation Blackhawk.
By noon the chauffeur had dropped off Charlie Brooks and driven Rebekah Brooks to Lewisham police station, waiting while she was formally arrested and questioned. At 12.15pm, Edis said, Charlie Brooks was caught by CCTV cameras at Chelsea Harbour going down to the underground car park, carrying a jiffy bag and a laptop computer which he appeared to leave in or around a waste bin. Two hours later, the CCTV recorded Hanna apparently removing both items. According to cell site information from his mobile phone, Hanna then returned to head office at Thomas More Square.
That afternoon the police searched both of the Brookses' homes. Edis suggested to the jury that among the material concealed from there were two iPads and an iPhone which, according to electronic records, the couple had been using recently. "The coast is clear," he said. "The police have been and gone. But of course, it may not be entirely clear because there may be police or press keeping an eye on what was going on."
This became important, the jury heard, when it was decided to return some "safe" items to the Brookses that evening.
Hanna texted one of his men: "Have plan. Can you call please?" Edis suggested to the jury that this security man had been tasked to go to News International headquarters at Wapping, to collect a big bin bag containing some of the concealed items and to take them to Chelsea Harbour where there was some risk of being spotted by police or press. "There has got to be some sort of pretext," he said. Which is where the pizzas allegedly became involved.
According to Edis, the security man had picked up two pizzas, phoned Charlie Brooks, delivered the pizzas to an unnamed man who came down to the underground car park, left the bin bag behind a bin and then texted his immediate boss with a line famously used by Richard Burton when communicating with his commanding officer in Where Eagles Dare.
"Broadsword to Danny Boy" he texted, adding: "Pizzas delivered. The chicken is in the pot."
His boss texted back: "Amateurs! We should have done a DLB or a brush contact on the riverside. Log the hours as pizza delivery." Edis explained that a DLB is a dead letter box of the kind used by spies and that what the text as a whole meant was: "You have done the secret little job. We could have done that better. Log in the hours as pizza delivery because you can't log in the hours as perverting the course of justice."
"The whole exercise," said Edis, "was quite complicated and quite risky and liable to go wrong." On the following morning, the prosecutor told the jury, it had indeed gone wrong: when the chauffeur drove the Brookses to see their solicitor, leaving the bin bag still behind the waste bin.
In their absence, a cleaner, Mr Nascimento, had noticed the bag and its contents and taken it to his manager. When the Brookses returned, CCTV records showed, Charlie Brooks had searched the area around the waste bin and texted the security man who had left the bin bag there: "Need to get Rebekah some lunch. Pizza."
But by then, said Edis, Nascimento's manager had decided to call the police "which is how the police ended up with the bin bag".
Separately, the jury heard that in the previous week, on Friday 8 July, the day after the closure of the News of the World was announced, Rebekah Brooks and her personal assistant, Cheryl Carter, had arranged to remove from the company archive seven boxes allegedly containing all the notebooks Brooks had used from 1995 to 2007. Carter had falsely told the archivist that they were her own notebooks, Edis said, and then falsely told police that Brooks had not been in the office on this day. "It was quite dishonest," the prosecutor said. The notebooks had never been found.
Rebekah and Charlie Brooks, Cheryl Carter and Mark Hanna all deny conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
The trial continues.