The Guardian
April 5 2010
Police who investigated the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World obtained previously undisclosed telephone records which showed that ‘a vast number’ of public figures had had their voicemail accessed – and then decided not to pursue the evidence, according to official papers seen by the Guardian.
The revelation – contained in paperwork from inside the Crown Prosecution Service – raises fundamental questions about the behaviour of Scotland Yard which has claimed repeatedly that it found evidence of ‘only a handful’ of people whose mobile phone messages had been intercepted by the News of the World’s private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire.
The paperwork also reveals that police and prosecutors adopted a deliberate strategy to ‘ring fence’ the evidence which they presented in court in order to suppress the names of particularly prominent victims, including members of the royal family. The existence of this strategy has been omitted from all public statements including evidence to the House of Commons’ media select committee.
In a further blow to the official version of events, the Guardian has
discovered that although police and prosecutors named only eight victims in court, material seized by police from Glenn Mulcaire and the paper’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, contained 4,332 names or partial names of people in whom the two men had some kind of interest; 2,978 numbers or partial numbers for mobile phones; and 30 audio tapes which appear to contain an unspecified number of recordings of voicemail messages.
The revelations increase the prospect that government will order a new inquiry into the affair. While Scotland Yard’s public position remains that they did all that their resources and the law permitted, some police sources admit privately that they failed to fully investigate the case, that decisions may have been distorted by a fear of upsetting Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, and that it was ‘unfortunate’ that the officer in charge of the inquiry, assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, subsequently left the police and went to work for News International as a columnist.
The emerging picture of the scale of Glenn Mulcaire’s criminal activities is also potentially embarrassing for the Conservative leader David Cameron’s media adviser, Andy Coulson, who edited the paper at the time of the offences and who says he does not remember any illegal act.
The search for the truth about the case now focuses on two caches of evidence. The first is telephone records, which police obtained in the Spring of 2006 and whose contents have not previously been disclosed. The detail is still not known, but it is clear that, contrary to numerous police briefings and statements, the telephone data allowed police to identify multiple victims of interception.
According to a CPS file note, dated May 30 2006, police wrote a briefing paper based on these records, informing the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions that: “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 wider investigation in due course.”
But that wider investigation never happened. In a memo dated August 8 2006, a senior CPS lawyer wrote: “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 focussed on a discrete area of offending relating to JLP and HA and the suspects Goodman and Mulcaire.”
The initials refer to Jamie Lee-Pinkerton and Helen Asprey, two of the three Palace employees who were named in court as victims. Five non-royal victims were also named. It is not unusual for police and prosecutors to deal with a complex case by selecting sample charges, but Scotland Yard will be under pressure to explain why their public statements have consistently failed to reflect their apparent knowledge of this scale of criminal activity by the News of the World’s investigator.
The CPS paperwork also reveals that police persuaded prosecutors “to ring-fence the case to minimise the risk of extraneous matters being included”. The papers make clear that this is a discreet reference to a strategy of suppressing any public reference to particularly sensitive victims including members of the royal family.
The police appear to have proposed the plan first in the briefing paper to the Attorney General and the DPP on May 30 and then to have pushed it with CPS lawyers. A file note dated July 14th records then that “the police have requested initial advice about the data produced and whether the case as it stands, could be ring-fenced to ensure that extraneous matters will not be dragged into the prosecution arena.” By July 25th, the paperwork shows, the CPS had agreed that the case should be “deliberately limited” to “less sensitive” witnesses.
Neither the CPS nor Scotland Yard has admitted the existence of this strategy. Public statements have disclosed that police found suspected victims of Mulcaire’s interceptions in the government, the police and the military as well as the royal family, but Scotland Yard continues to refuse to identify them or even to say how many suspected victims fell into each category.
The paperwork reveals that these strategy decisions had been agreed by police and prosecutors before Mulcaire and Goodman were arrested on August 8 2006. It was then that police obtained the second cache of evidence – a mass of computer records, paperwork and audio tapes which they seized from the homes and offices of both men. This evidence also was not fully investigated.
It was not until after the Guardian dislosed new details of the scandal in July last year that the police even went through all of the material and listed its contents on a database. A senior officer in a media briefing then tried to deny that the database existed, and, when the Guardian asked for numerical details, the Yard resisted for four months, during which time they had to apologise formally for breaching the terms of the Freedom of Information Act.
As part of the agreement with prosecutors to cut short the investigation, police agreed that they would approach and warn ‘all potential victims’. They then broke that agreement, failing to warn victims even though they had seized transcripts or tapes of their intercepted voicemail. Recently, the Yard has told government that it has informed victims where there was evidence ‘or mere suspicion’ that their voicemail had been intercepted. This appears to be contradicted by a failure to warn all the owners of 91 PIN codes, which they found recently in the seized material and which are used to access voicemail.
In recent briefings for government and media, Scotland Yard has attempted to justify the gap between their public statements and the reality of the evidence by claiming that their investigations were restricted by legal advice that it is an offence to intercept voicemail only if the message has not already been heard by its intended recipient, and that this was technically very difficult to prove. The DPP has backed this explanation.
However, police failed to mention this explanation in earlier statements when they were claiming that there were only a handful of victims. Furthermore specialist lawyers say this is a contentious view that has never been tested in court and would probably fail. The advice is said to have been given by David Perry QC, who prosecuted the case. However, the DPP has admitted that Perry never provided a written opinion to this effect; and the transcript of the court hearing shows that he never made any mention of it when presenting the case against Goodman and Mulcaire. Asked this week if his advice had been misrepresented, Perry declined to comment.
The News of the World continues to say that it had no knowledge of any illegal activity by Mulcaire or Goodman. The newspaper has paid out more than £2m to suppress evidence in court actions brought by two confirmed victims, Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers Association and Max Clifford the celebrity PR agent. It has also paid money to Goodman and Mulcaire in deals which are believed to require them not to speak.
ENDS
