Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

Where are the cops?

Um. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

Phone hacking: Met police put on spot by ignored leads and discreet omissions

Papers on the News of the World phone hacking scandal seen by the Guardian show how detectives tried to limit inquiry and failed to notify potential victims
September 6, 2010

Somewhere in the offices of the Crown Prosecution Service, there is a file that will be of great interest to any independent inquiry that attempts to tell the truth about the behaviour of the Metropolitan police in the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World. The Guardian has read it.

The police were dragged into the centre of the scandal last week when the New York Times quoted unnamed detectives claiming that Scotland Yard's "close relationship" with the News of the World had hampered the inquiry. Essentially, the Met is charged on two counts: first, that it cut short its investigation; second, that it then failed to tell the truth to the press, public and parliament. The police insist that they are innocent on both counts.

The unpublished CPS file shows the inquiry started well. In December 2005, Buckingham Palace complained that someone seemed to be listening to royal household voicemails. Five months later, detectives had tracked the activity to the News of the World's royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and, beyond, to the paper's contracted private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. The detectives had analysed a mass of telephone data and, in a briefing paper dated 30 May 2006, they presented the results to prosecutors.

They wrote: "A vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority. These may be the subject of a wider investigation in due course. A number of the targets of this unauthorised access have been informed."

That day, there was a case conference between prosecutors and police, and a file note records an interesting suggestion: "The appropriate strategy is to ringfence the case to minimise the risk of extraneous matters being included." The file makes it clear that this was a reference to suppressing the names of particularly "sensitive" hacking victims, and that it was the police who were suggesting this unusual tactic.

We still do not know which victims were to be concealed. We do now know that Prince William and Prince Harry had their voicemail intercepted, and that this was never mentioned when the case came to court. We now know that members of the military, the government and the police also were victims.

None of those was mentioned in court. Scotland Yard has refused to name them, or even to say how many there were in each category.

None of the military victims has been identified. Among government victims, we now know that Tessa Jowell, the minister then responsible for news media, had her voicemail intercepted; and, unofficially, it is said that David Blunkett, at the time the home secretary and directly responsible for the police, also had his messages compromised, although this has not been confirmed.

Other ministers, including the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott and the former business secretary, Peter Mandelson, show up in Mulcaire's paperwork without any clear evidence on whether their messages were hacked.

Among the police targets whose names were suppressed, we now know that the then commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Ian Blair, and two other former senior officers, Brian Paddick and Mike Fuller, showed up as targets of the News of the World's private investigator, although it is not known whether their voicemail was accessed. And last week, one police source suggested that senior detectives who were involved in the hacking inquiry may have discovered that they themselves had been targeted. That has not been confirmed.

Six weeks later, on 14 July 2006, the file again records the police pushing prosecutors to suppress the results of their analysis of mobile phone records: "The police have requested initial advice about the data produced and whether the case as it stands could be ringfenced to ensure that extraneous matters will not be dragged into the prosecution arena."

By August, prosecutors had agreed not only to suppress the names of "sensitive" victims but also to focus the court case on a limited sample of victims, including two members of the royal staff, Jamie Lee Pinkerton and Helen Asprey, who were later identified in court with one other colleague, Paddy Harverson. A file note dated 8 August 2006 says: "It was recognised 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 director of public prosecutions has since said this was done to make the case manageable.

On that same day, police arrested Goodman and Mulcaire. They seized a mass of paperwork, computer records and other material from the homes and offices of both men. The Guardian eventually established that this included the mobile phone numbers of 2,978 people as well as 30 audiotapes of voicemail messages and 91 secret PINs for accessing voicemail for the minority of people who change their factory-set PIN.

It was at this point, according to the New York Times, that one senior investigator on the case was approached by a Scotland Yard press officer who was "waving his arms in the air, saying: 'Wait a minute, let's talk about this,'" and who went on to stress the value of the Met's long-term relationship with News International, which owns the News of the World. According to the New York Times, "the investigator recalled becoming furious at the suggestion, responding: 'There's illegality here, and we'll pursue it like we do any other case.'"

Any independent inquiry will want to understand the reasons for a series of decisions that were taken at Scotland Yard around this time and which have since been uncovered by the House of Commons's media select committee, the Guardian and the New York Times:

• When they raided the offices of the News of the World, police limited their search warrant to the desk of Goodman. A journalist who was in the building at the time has given the Guardian the names of two senior staff members who that day removed black bin bags full of paperwork from their office desks.

• When they wanted internal paperwork from the News of the World, police chose not to go to court to obtain a production order to require its disclosure, but instead simply wrote to the paper asking for a list of documents, all of which it refused to supply.

• The paperwork seized from Mulcaire included an email that had been sent from the News of the World's office to the paper's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, containing the transcript of 35 voicemail messages that had been left for the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, Gordon Taylor, and his legal adviser, Jo Armstrong. Police did not pass the email to the Crown Prosecution Service, even though Taylor was one of only five non-royal victims who were to be named in court.

• The paperwork also included a contract signed by an assistant news editor, Greg Miskiw, agreeing to pay the private investigator an extra £7,000 if he brought in a specified story about Gordon Taylor, in the course of which the investigator hacked Taylor's voicemail. Police did pass this to prosecutors but chose not to interview Miskiw about this contract. Nor did they interview Thurlbeck about the email that he had been sent, nor the junior reporter who had sent it to him. Nor did they interview any other reporter, editor or manager apart from Goodman.

• Although it is clear that police looked at the material they had seized from Goodman and Mulcaire, they have now conceded that they did not fully analyse it until two years later, after Guardian stories revived interest in the affair. It was only then, for example, that they found the 91 secret PINs.

• They chose not to warn the vast majority of those whose names and details had been collected by Goodman and Mulcaire, despite a formal agreement with the DPP that they would warn "all potential victims".

Scotland Yard last week denied all wrongdoing and said specifically: "The case was the subject of the most careful investigation," and "the CPS had full access to all the evidence gathered".

In January 2007 Goodman and Mulcaire pleaded guilty in court. The News of the World said both men had acted without their knowledge or authority. A total of eight victims were named in court. There was no mention by police or prosecutors of the "vast number" of victims recorded in the CPS file. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) said it could find no evidence of any further wrongdoing. The case ended.

Then, two and a half years later, it began to unravel. The Guardian disclosed that one of the victims named in court, Taylor, had sued the News of the World and obtained a court order which forced police to disclose paperwork that showed that, contrary to the official version, other journalists had been involved in handling intercepted voicemails. The Guardian disclosed that, having denied all knowledge of this hacking, the News of the World had paid more than £1m in costs and damages to persuade Taylor and two associates to settle the case and to seal the file. Sources at Scotland Yard told us there were "thousands" of victims.


News International accused the Guardian of "lying to the British people". The PCC held a second inquiry and again found no evidence of any wrongdoing. Within 24 hours, the Met's assistant commissioner, John Yates, said he had been asked by the commissioner to "establish the facts". Any independent inquiry will want to understand:

• Why Yates suggested that he had "established the facts around our inquiry" when, as he later conceded, Scotland Yard had not yet fully analysed the mass of material seized from Goodman and Mulcaire. Following his statement, Yates ordered officers to do so, and after several months of work they produced a spreadsheet listing more than 4,000 names or partial names, together with a summary of the material held on each one.

• Why he made no reference to the Met's internal report of "a vast number" of victims and said: "Potential targets may have run into hundreds of people but our inquiries showed that they only used the tactic against a far smaller number of individuals."

• Why he made no reference to Scotland Yard's strategy, accepted by prosecutors, to "ringfence" evidence to suppress the names of "sensitive" victims.

• Why he said: "This investigation has not uncovered any evidence to suggest that John Prescott's phone had been tapped," but did not disclose that invoices submitted by Mulcaire to the News of the World identified Prescott as a target.

• Why he said: "Where there was clear evidence that people had potentially been the subject of tapping, they were all contacted by the police," but did not say the Met had breached its agreement with the DPP to warn "all potential victims".

Yates has denied anything in his statement was misleading. He says he did not claim to have read every line of evidence. In particular, he has said it is wrong to suggest he was misleading in his comments on the low numbers of victims, as police succeeded in finding full legal proof of interception in only one case.

The former assistant commissioner who had headed the original inquiry, Andy Hayman, by now had left Scotland Yard and gone to work for the organisation that he had been investigating, News International.

As a regular columnist for the Times, he wrote about the Guardian's disclosures, claiming: "We put our best detectives on the case and left no stone unturned," and that, while there may have been hundreds of potential victims, "There was a small number – perhaps only a handful – where there was evidence they had actually been tampered with."

Since then, senior officers from Scotland Yard have used press briefings to repeat the claim that there were "only a handful of victims". Those briefings have also continued to include denials about the targeting of John Prescott. In February this year – two months after Scotland Yard finally wrote to Prescott, confirming that his name showed up on Mulcaire's invoices – a senior Met officer told journalists: "He doesn't appear anywhere in Goodman's material or in Mulcaire's material."

In private, Scotland Yard has begun to tell a different tale. In February, as the Met prepared for publication of the media select committee's report, which criticised its failure to investigate all leads, Yates's staff officer, Dean Haydon, wrote a briefing note for ministers in which he acknowledged that the material seized in police raids had not been properly examined – "Minimal work was done on the vast personal data where no criminal offences were apparent."

The briefing note, dated 18 February 2010, went on to repeat a new claim that Scotland Yard had started to use in press briefings. Attempting to explain the discrepancy between its claims about "a handful of victims" and the emerging evidence of "a vast number" of victims, it had started to claim that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 regarded someone as a victim only if it could be proved that he or she had not listened to their messages before they were hacked. Specialist lawyers say that this is a contentious interpretation, and that, in any event, the Computer Misuse Act 1990 states that it is an offence to intercept voicemail without authority, regardless of whether the intended recipient has listened to the message.

The truth remains unclear. Senior officers concede privately that they have evidence of "gross" and "systemic" interception of voicemail. They concede, too, that more could have been done to investigate at the time. However, they say their failure to follow all leads was simply caused by a shortage of resources at a time when their detectives were stretched to breaking point dealing with terrorism plots.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep...tan-police