Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1204-1219)
MR ALAN
RUSBRIDGER, MR
PAUL JOHNSON
AND MR
NICK DAVIES
14 JULY 2009
Q1204 Chairman: For the second part of
this morning's session, can I welcome Alan Rusbridger, the Editor
of the Guardian, Paul Johnson, the Deputy Editor, and Nick
Davies, the author of the stories over the last few days. The
main story which you reported was the payment by News International
to two individuals of something over £1 million in settlement,
but the events which you describe in the story and the subsequent
follow-up, they all relate to a period considerably earlier, they
relate to the Mulcaire/Goodman period and the Operation Motorman.
Is that correct?
Mr Rusbridger: That is correct.
First of all, I have delayed my holiday to come here today, so
I hope you will not mind if I am out of here by about five to
one, otherwise I am going to miss my holiday, but I wondered if
it would help if we structured this so that I spoke and then Nick
spoke; I think it would put some of this in context, if that is
agreeable to you.
Q1205 Chairman: Yes, that is fine.
Mr Rusbridger: With your permission,
I would just like to make some general comments about the Guardian
story, again with a constructive suggestion for a way through,
and Nick will then speak about his story and the basis for it.
As a few general points about the story that we ran, it was not
a campaign to oust anybody, it was not a campaign to reopen a
police inquiry or for more prosecutions or to force anybody to
resign and we have not called for any of those, and I would like
to emphasise that, as a paper, we do believe in effective self-regulation
and we do not want a privacy law which stated that. When you come
to effective self-regulation, it seems to me that effective self-regulation
can only work if the paper groups are truthful and open with the
regulator. I can think of one or two groups, for example Associated,
who have conceded past patterns of behaviour and put a stop to
them, and the question is whether News International have been
similarly frank. Therefore, for me, the three key questions are
whether self-regulation was effective in this case, whether the
PCC had the full and accurate picture at the time they decided
against rigorously investigating the Goodman/Mulcaire case themselves,
and whether, given the reassurances at the time and as further
facts came out, they and perhaps you should have been kept informed
of those new facts. The company has engaged in an aggressive attempt
to discredit the Guardian story. A press release last Friday
was notably evasive about the central disclosure about the £1
million settlement in three hacking cases, hiding behind their
own confidentiality, and it has included a series of cleverly
drafted denials of allegations that were not actually made by
the Guardian. We reject the assertion by the Chief Executive-elect
of News International in a letter to you that we misled the public
far less deliberately, and I think News International have, with
some success, tried to position it as a spat between two newspapers.
Why was the secret settlement significant? Because it undermined
the assurances given both to you and the PCC about the sole reporter
and the sole detective, the so-called `rotten apple' defence.
Les Hinton said: "After a full and rigorous inquiry, Clive
Goodman was the only person at News of the World who knew
what was going on"; Colin Myler told the PCC: "Goodman's
hacking was aberrational, a rogue exception, an exceptionally
unhappy event in the 163-year history of News of the World
involving one journalist"; Stuart Kuttner, the Managing Director
of News of the World on Radio 4: "It happened once
at the News of the World". That is why this case is
significant, because the evidence in the Gordon Taylor case, though
concealed from the public and from you and from the PCC, showed
evidence that this was not a practice restricted to, or known
about by, one reporter and one private detective, and in a minute
Nick Davies will help you more on that. News International have
known about the involvement of other journalists, including at
senior level, for at least a year. It is believed the case was
settled last September, the initial case involving Gordon Taylor,
so that begs the question why they did not tell the PCC, the regulator,
or the Committee of the new facts that have come to light. Now,
the press release they issued on Friday from a major public company
said, "It is untrue that the News of the World executives
knowingly sanctioned payments for illegal intercepts". That
is why, I think, this is a significant story and I hope and believe
that any newspaper or broadcaster would have published that if
presented with that evidence. If not, it does not say much for
press plurality in this country. A secondary element was the claim
by two sources familiar with the case that the files showed that
thousands of individuals may have been targeted and/or hacked
and/or `blagged', and Nick Davies will address that because they
are his sources. We do know that there was a sophisticated machine
at work 70 hours a week earning one private investigator £100,000
a year plus bonuses and, if it had not been intercepted by the
police, it might still be going, so, if the numbers are smaller,
it was not due to any virtue on News International's behalf. Before
I hand over to Nick, I want to suggest a way forward. It is common
ground that journalists on many newspapers and for many years
have been making widespread use of dubious methods. I think it
is common ground that, in some circumstances, where there is a
high public interest those methods may be justified. I think what
is less clear are the rules or ethical framework by which editors
might reach these difficult decisions, and they should be difficult
decisions and not easy decisions, as they seem to have been in
some cases, and this comes back to the question of public interest
which you have just been discussing with the Director of the PCC.
As a profession, we currently operate by a reasonable definition
of the `public interest', but it is notoriously difficult to pin
down. The press are not the only people in this world who are
considering how you codify or guide behaviour, and I have recently
been struck by the thinking of Sir David Omand, the Government's
former Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator, in a recent IPPR
pamphlet because there he says that the intelligence services
wrestle with this problem about the fact that finding out other
people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules.
That is what they acknowledge in the intelligence services and
I think that maybe some elements of the press have forgotten that.
Omand's suggestions for the five guidelines are: one, there must
be sufficient sustainable calls, it needs to be justified by the
scale of the potential harm; two, there must be integrity of motive,
ie, it must be justified in terms of public good; three, the methods
used must be in proportion to the seriousness of the business
in hand using minimum intrusion; four, there must be proper authority,
it must be authorised at a sufficiently senior level with appropriate
oversight; and, five, there must be a reasonable prospect of success,
ie, no phishing expeditions. I think that is a good tick-list
for editors. I think that what we are talking about is so serious
that it should be the last, not the first, resort, it should be
highly in the public interest, it needs to take into account the
potential harm this intrusion can do, the intrusion should be
proportionate, there should be no phishing expeditions and it
ought to be overseen. I will pass those guidelines round in a
second. I think the public would be greatly reassured if it felt—
Q1206 Chairman: This is a very long
opening statement.
Mr Rusbridger: I am within one
sentence of finishing and then I am going to hand over. If editors
worked to this code, I hope, as a Committee, that you might find
some merit in the suggestion and I will put it before the PCC.
Now, there have been calls for us to produce more evidence and
at this point I shall hand over to Nick Davies.
Q1207 Chairman: Can you make it relatively
brief because we have quite a lot of questions.
Mr Davies: I have quite a lot
to tell you, but I will do my best. So, you have to understand
I am a reporter and, any time a reporter works on a story about
a powerful individual or a powerful organisation, human sources
get nervous and a gap emerges because these sources will say,
"This is what's happening, but you mustn't quote me"
or, "Here is a document. You can read it, but you mustn't
say you've seen it". That gap is very common between what
the reporter knows at first hand and what he or she can disclose
in public, and some of this story has been in this gap. Now, something
has changed. On Friday evening, News International put out a statement
which was deemed by one particularly important source to be "designed
to deceive" and, as a result, I have now been authorised
to show you things that previously were stuck in that gap, and
I am talking about paperwork, so what I want to do is to show
you, first of all, copies of an email.
Q1208 Chairman: If you wish to admit
evidence, you have to read it into the record.
Mr Davies: Read every single word?
I will start and you can guide me. Before we distribute it, I
want to explain it before it goes round. There are two important
things about this because, first of all, in general terms what
I am about to give you are copies of an email written by a News
of the World reporter on 29 June 2005 to Glenn Mulcaire, referring
to another News of the World journalist. Now, there are
two points about this, two hurdles I have to overcome ethically.
The first is that what this email contains is a typed-up transcript
of 35 messages which Glenn Mulcaire has hacked from the telephones
of Gordon Taylor, the Chief Executive of the Professional Footballers'
Association, and Ms Jo Armstrong, his legal adviser, so transcripts
of more than 30 messages from two different targets, two different
telephones. The whole thrust, the whole reason for the Guardian
doing this is a concern about privacy. If I give you the document
with all of the verbatim messages in it, I think I am probably
recreating the breach of privacy which we are worried about, so
I have masked the wording, all the words of the messages themselves,
so you can see who is talking to whom, you can see how many there
are and, crucially, you can see the role of the News of the
World journalists. The second point, which we are going to
have to deal with as we go along, is that I have a worry that,
if I start spraying round the names of ordinary working reporters
on the News of the World, that opens the door to the organisation
saying, "Ah, more Clive Goodmans, more rogue reporters we
didn't know about", and the organisation will blame the lowly
individuals rather than accepting whatever responsibility is due
to themselves. In this, which I am about to send round, you will
see the name of the junior reporter who is sending the email and
I would ask you to keep that confidential and, insofar as we may
use this document outside this House, we will not, ie the Guardian,
disclose that junior reporter's name. I will pass this round now.
This email, to summarise so that you understand, from a reporter
on the News of the World, using a News of the World
email address, is sent to Glenn Mulcaire at what, we know, is
his email address, shadowmenuk, and at the top you will see that
the reporter says, "Hello, this is the transcript for Neville",
and Neville is Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter of the News
of the World. I am happy to name senior people in some contexts.
Q1209 Mr Sanders: It is just about
MPs' expenses, is it not!
Mr Davies: If you come to page
1, "Hello, this is the transcript for Neville", and
Neville is Neville Thurlbeck, so the transcript has been typed
up and it is going to the chief reporter of the News of the
World. I do not think we should say publicly the name of the
reporter, which you can see, who is doing the emailing. At the
top, you see `shadowmenuk@yahoo.co.uk', and that is Glenn Mulcaire's
email address. In the detail, where it says "JA to GT"
on the first one, that is Jo Armstrong to Gordon Taylor and, if
you turn to page 2 and look at number five, "GT to JA",
that is the other way, so they have hacked Armstrong's phone as
well as Taylor's. Now, perhaps I could just leave that with you
and move on to a second document which I want to be able to show
you.
Q1210 Chairman: With respect, we
have quite a lot of questions for you rather than just—
Mr Davies: Do you want the evidence
or not? It is up to you.
Q1211 Chairman: Go on.
Mr Davies: I will give it to you
as quickly as I can. The second document which I want to give
you is a contract that was signed a couple of months before that
document, that email, was produced. This is a contract signed
by the then Assistant Editor in charge of news with the News
of the World, a guy called Greg Miskiw, and this contract
is dated 4 February 2005, so it is about four months before that
email. This is a contract between the News of the World
and Glenn Mulcaire, offering Mulcaire a bonus of £7,000 if
he will deliver the story thereafter about Gordon Taylor. Again,
with a view to privacy, I have blacked out the nature of the story
which they are after because of Gordon Taylor's privacy, but what
you will notice is that this is a fascinating contract because
it is made out to Glenn Mulcaire in a false name. Now, there is
no dispute that Glenn Mulcaire used the name Paul Williams, and
you may want to ask why the Assistant Editor of the News of
the World, in relation to this story where we have just seen
that email, was making a contract with a man in a false name.
That is a sample of some of the paperwork in this case. Now, I
need to reconstruct the chronology here and then you will see
why it is important. December 2005: a complaint from the Palace
to Scotland Yard that there are signs of people's mobile phones
being interfered with in the Royal Household and the police were
given the inquiry. August 6 2006: Scotland Yard officers arrest
Clive Goodman, our man from the News of the World, and
Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator, and seize masses of
paperwork, tape recorders and computer records from the homes
and/or offices of both men. Now, this timing is terribly important
because the two documents which I have just given you are, to
the best of my knowledge, material that was in the possession
of Glenn Mulcaire that was seized by the police in August 2006.
Now, come back to the statement which News International put out
on Friday night and I need to read you just one sentence from
it which I will find very quickly. The wording of it is: "The
police have not considered it necessary to arrest or question
any other member of the News of the World staff",
ie, other than Clive Goodman. Now, there are two possibilities
here, and the police, bear in mind, have had this documentation
and whatever else they found since August 2006. Possibility number
one: the police have arrested and/or questioned the journalists
who are implicated by virtue of this documentation, in which case
we need to ask why on earth News International made that statement
on Friday night, or News International are right in what they
said and Scotland Yard have not arrested or questioned the journalists
who are implicated by this paperwork. If News International are
correct in saying that these people have not been arrested or
questioned, the implications, I am sure you can see, are very,
very worrying. I spent yesterday on the phone, asking Scotland
Yard for an answer to this question. At the end of the day, they
eventually confirmed that they had not arrested any other News
of the World staff other than Clive Goodman, but they would
not tell me whether they had questioned any. They say it is a
matter of routine that they never tell you whether or not they
have questioned somebody who has not been arrested, but clearly
that is terribly important. Now, I also think it is fair to point
out, and ask questions about, a statement that was made by Scotland
Yard on Thursday afternoon last week, later in the day that our
story was published, where the Assistant Commissioner John Yates
told the press, Parliament and the public that he had been asked
to establish the facts about all this, and he made a statement
which referred to Clive Goodman and to Glenn Mulcaire, but, for
reasons which I cannot explain, made no reference to the fact
that Scotland Yard has had in its possession for well over two
years paperwork which implicates other News of the World
journalists. I do not know why he did not tell us, but again it
worries me. Then, if we look at this from the point of view not
of the police but of News International, we know, as a matter
of fact, that this paperwork was disclosed by Scotland Yard to
Gordon Taylor's legal team in April 2008, more than a year ago,
and we know for sure that, as part of the sealing of the deal,
there was the payment of more than £1 million to make sure
everybody went away, they did not come back to press, Parliament,
the public or the PCC to say, "This is what we now have in
our possession". If you go further back to the period between
the police raid and their giving evidence to the PCC and the Select
Committee, I cannot tell you whether News International executives
were aware of the existence of this paperwork. All I think we
could ask about is how likely it is that a newspaper that specialises
in investigation was not able to discover that its Assistant Editor
of News, its chief reporter and another reporter were openly involved
in paying for, and circulating transcripts of, work provided in
this way by this private investigator; the question hangs there.
If we move on in terms of the Scotland Yard evidence, that was
from a sample of what they found in Glenn Mulcaire's place that
they have not told us about, but, in respect of the material taken
from Clive Goodman, all I would point out is that there is a very
interesting evidential gap. Goodman was charged with successfully
hacking into three phones of Palace staff. If you look carefully
at what the Assistant Commissioner said on Thursday, he said,
first of all, directing his remarks only to what had gone on between
Clive Goodman, as an individual, and Glenn Mulcaire, that Goodman
had had hundreds of potential targets for phone-hacking, that
he was trying to hack, as I understand that, hundreds of phones
and he succeeded only in a handful of cases. What he does not
say, and I leave it to you to interpret this, is that Goodman
succeeded only in three cases, which is what you would think he
would say. This throws up the question: did Goodman succeed in
hacking into messages of phones of other people who belong to,
or are associated with, the Royal Family? We do not know the answer.
That is about Goodman. If I can come to the evidence that the
Information Commission has, let us just get the sequence of events
right. In March 2003, officers from the Information Commission
raid the home of a completely different private investigator,
not Glenn Mulcaire, a man called Steve Whittamore who lives down
in Hampshire, and they seize wheelbarrow-loads of paperwork and
start analysing it. We know, from the report that was subsequently
published, that this showed more than 300 Fleet Street journalists,
well, in fact journalists from various newspapers and magazines,
not just Fleet Street, more than 300 of them, asking Whittamore
to provide access on more than 13,000 occasions to databases which
appeared to be confidential. We know, and the Information Commission
published a statistical summary of, how many news organisations
had asked for how many of these requests. What is new is that
I now have the names of all 31 journalists from News Group who
made those requests. News Group is the company which owns the
News of the World and The Sun only. There
are 27 names that I have from the News of the World.
Q1212 Chairman: You do not have the
names of the 305 journalists concerned?
Mr Davies: No, I know about the
News Group, so I know the 27 from the News of the World,
I know the names of the four from The Sun, I also
know the names of every single person who was targeted by those
journalists, as reflected in the paperwork seized, and I know
every single request that they made, and some of them, I think
it is fair to them to point out, are legal where they were asking
the guy to get access to the electoral register because ordinary
individuals cannot do that on a computer base. Some of them were
searches for company directors, but several hundred are clearly
requests for information from databases where it would be a breach
of the Data Protection Act to get that evidence, unless you had
a clear public interest on your side. Now, people keep asking
me to name these names and I have not. I do not want to name those
names partly because of this concern that I have already expressed,
that I do not want the responsibility to fall downwards on the
heads of the little people, but also because I am a reporter,
not a police officer, but I think it will help us to understand
what is going on if I say this much: that there are a number of
senior editorial executives whose names clearly show up on that
list, making requests which would be illegal if they did not have
public interest on their side. I think it is all right to say
it, since his name has already come out, that one of the executives
that is there is Greg Miskiw who rose to the position of Assistant
Editor of News and he is recorded as making 90 requests, and 35
of those are directed at confidential databases where it would
be illegal if there were no clear public interest. There are other
executives more junior and more senior than him. I want to say,
because it is important to make it clear, that Andy Coulson's
name does not show up in that list. His colleagues at an executive
level do, but Andy Coulson, it is only fair to him to say, is
not there, so I would like to give you, if you will indulge me
once more, a few more bits of paperwork. These are copies of invoices
from News International, making payments to Steve Whittamore,
this private investigator who specialists not in phone-hacking,
but in what they call `blagging', getting access to confidential
databases. First of all, I need to explain where this comes from.
This has not come from some secret source in a dark corner. This
material was released under the Freedom of Information Act by
the Information Commissioner months ago and it may startle you
to discover that the newspapers did not bother reporting it. Now,
he has done the blacking out on this occasion. He has blacked
out the private investigator's home address to protect his privacy
and he has blacked out the details of the targets, and the reason
I am showing this to you is not because it tracks down some specific
criminal offence, but because it shows the systematic and open
character of what is going on. These payments have not been made
with bags of cash under the counter; they are being made by the
News International Accounts Department. You might think that,
if this were all a secret that nobody knew, they would have some
clever euphemism, like "This is a payment for services rendered",
but, as you will see when I hand them round, it is perfectly explicit
and it says, "to get an address from a telephone number to
get the vehicle registration number converted", so it is
just that, to the extent that in the attack on the Guardian
story it is being alleged that this was something that nobody
at News International knew about, I think these documents may
help you. Mr Chairman, may I speak for maybe one minute more and
then pause?
Q1213 Chairman: Yes.
Mr Davies: I think there is something
quite worrying here for all of us. I think that what begins to
be very worrying about all of this is that we are not being told
the truth. I am worried, for example, by the fact that on Thursday
afternoon the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,
whom I take to be an honest man, stood up and made a statement
in which he said, "Where there was clear evidence that people
had been the subject of tapping, they were all contacted by the
police. These people were made aware of the potential compromise
to their phones and offered preventative advice". That is
Thursday afternoon that he makes that statement, at about half
past five, widely reported. At 7.37 the following evening, Friday,
two hours later after most reporters have gone home, in the midst
of the confusion caused by the fact that News International had
just released its statement at seven o'clock, Scotland Yard quietly
put out another statement, which says, "Assistant Commissioner
Yates said yesterday that he wanted to ensure that the Met has
been diligent and sensible in taking all proper steps to ensure
that, where we have evidence that people have been the subject
of any form of phone-tapping by Goodman or Mulcaire, they have
been informed. The process of contacting people is under way and
we expect this to take some time to complete". Why were we
told on Thursday that everybody had been approached and then quietly,
in this almost invisible fashion because I do not think any newspaper
picked this up for Saturday morning, on Friday evening were we
told, "We are now contacting people"? I cannot explain
that. Why, in the same way, were we not told on Thursday afternoon
that the police have had evidence for more than two years of other
News of the World staff being involved? I do not know what
the answer is and I cannot attempt to explain it to you. Where
News International are concerned, I think the worry is, in a way,
even greater. If you look back at the statements that have been
made by News International or its representatives since August
2006, I cannot find a single statement about the scale of phone-hacking
or News International's knowledge of involvement in the phone-hacking
which has not proved to be misleading, and that includes, I am
sad to say, that statement that was put out on Friday evening
which is profoundly misleading and, amongst other things, fails
to acknowledge what they know about these other journalists from
the paperwork I have given to you. If you put that together with
the payment for £1 million to suppress three witnesses who
had evidence along with whatever settlements have been made with
Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, which I do not claim to know
about, I think it is very, very hard to resist the conclusion
that News International have been involved in covering up their
journalists' involvement with private investigators who are breaking
the law, and it is very worrying that Scotland Yard do not appear
to have always said or done as much as they could have done to
stop that cover-up.
Q1214 Chairman: Thank you. That raises
a lot more questions and we may need to study some of this and
perhaps come back to you in due course, but perhaps I can start
off. Part of the confusion here is that there are two separate
areas of activity.
Mr Davies: Correct.
Q1215 Chairman: They are Glenn Mulcaire,
Clive Goodman and potentially other employees of News International,
and then there is Operation Motorman, which relates to News Group
but almost every other newspaper group, with the exception, I
believe, of the Guardian, although I think The Observer
had one or two.
Mr Davies: Correct.
Q1216 Chairman: Can I, first of all,
just look at the transcript you have provided. Can you just tell
me again, this email, who is it going to?
Mr Davies: To the email address
which is right at the top, `shadowmenuk', which is certainly Glenn
Mulcaire's.
Q1217 Chairman: But Glenn Mulcaire
will have supplied it, so why is he sending it back to Glenn Mulcaire
when the information came from Glenn Mulcaire?
Mr Davies: Because what Mulcaire
gets hold of is a tape, an audiotape, in which you can actually
hear Gordon Taylor's voice and Jo Armstrong's voice, and somebody
has got to transcribe that. You can see that the transcription
is primarily for Neville, Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter,
who is going to be working on the story, but it is also being
sent to Glenn Mulcaire for his records or in case it assists him
with further enquiries, and I cannot tell you quite why it is
being sent to him, but the tape goes in to the News of the
World, it is transcribed for Neville Thurlbeck, the chief
reporter, and the results are sent back.
Q1218 Chairman: It seems very odd
that the News of the World are sending it back to Glenn
Mulcaire.
Mr Davies: Well, either he cannot
type or he has not got a typist. They need a transcript, you see.
If you are working on a story, you cannot keep listening to tapes;
it would be maddening.
Q1219 Chairman: So this transcript,
you believe, was supplied to Neville Thurlbeck?
Mr Davies: Well, I can tell you
that it was certainly directed at him. If I were a Scotland Yard
detective, I would certainly have gone to Neville to say, "What
do you say about this?"
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