“It was done for a straightforward commercial reason: he wanted to make sure he buys BSkyB. He already controls it,” said former Times of London editor Simon Jenkins. “It was high politics at an almost total moment of national hysteria. He lanced a boil but not enough. None of the executives were sacked.”
The company had survived worse. Twenty-one years earlier, as Sky Television was losing about $2 billion a year, News Corp was swimming in debt incurred by the $3 billion TV Guide acquisition. Murdoch kept rolling over various loans to keep the company afloat, relying on 146 lenders in all. In October 1990 he called bankers to London and said he wouldn’t be able to pay off a $500 million loan, had another $2 billion coming due, and needed to borrow another $600 million. All of them would have to wait to be paid back. One held out: tiny Pittsburgh National Bank, owed only $10 million. A drop in the bucket, in the big picture, that could have kept the company under water for good. It took a personal call from Murdoch himself to the loan officer to persuade the bank from calling in the note. The $10 million—and the empire—was preserved.
With hacking, the company’s executives had to shift strategies as they kept losing ground to their critics.
At first, the aim was to protect News of the World at all cost by wooing allies and intimidating critics in Parliament and the press, and either holding off, scaring off, or paying off the victims. They did the same to the people who hacked phones on the paper’s behalf. But they couldn’t save News of the World. The next goal was protecting the broadcasting deal to take over BSkyB and past that, Brooks’s standing.
But the scandal kept advancing.
15
“THIS ONE”: REBEKAH BROOKS
UNDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, REBEKAH BROOKS might well have been considered a victim of hacking. Her first marriage to the soap opera star Ross Kemp imploded in 2005, when she was editor of the Sun. Brooks (then Rebekah Wade) was arrested at 4:00 AM on suspicion of having assaulted Kemp but was not charged; she told reporters it was “a silly row that got out of hand.” Their spats inspired staffers for her old paper, the News of the World, to start hacking repeatedly into messages on their former boss’s mobile phone, police later concluded.
Brooks and Kemp had favored Tony Blair’s New Labour, and she had befriended Blair, his wife, Cherie, and Gordon and Sarah Brown. The pair split after Kemp’s confession of marital infidelity, and Rebekah soon took up with Charlie Brooks, the young Tory leader David Cameron’s Eton classmate. Rebekah and her new boyfriend rented homes on the grounds of Blenheim, the Churchill family’s historic estate, and later moved to Chipping Norton, where they dined and fraternized with the future prime minister and other leading Tory and media figures, including James and Elisabeth Murdoch and their respective spouses.
In August 2008 then opposition leader Cameron flew on the private plane of Elisabeth’s husband, Matthew Freud, the London public relations executive, to the Greek isle of Santorini; Cameron met with the media patriarch and much of his inner circle on his yacht. It was just as important to the young Conservative politician’s prospects as Tony Blair’s jaunt across the globe to Hayman Island off the coast of Australia had been thirteen years earlier.
Charlie Brooks raised horses, and soon Rebekah was on the fields riding too. Their friends joined in on the fun. In one text to Rebekah Brooks, written in 2009, Cameron wrote, “The horse CB [Charlie Brooks] put me on—fast unpredictable and hard to control—but fun.”
In the wake of a key address by Cameron to the Conservative Party, Brooks cheered him on: “brilliant speech. I cried twice. Will love working together.” Later, Brooks tutored the next prime minister in the protocol of their modern communiqués: “Occasionally, he would sign them off, LOL—‘Lots of love,’” she said, “until I told him it meant ‘laugh out loud.’ And then he didn’t sign them like that anymore.” Cameron attended her June 2009 wedding. So did then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A month later, the Murdochs elevated her to become CEO of News International.
In retrospect, the Guardian story in 2009 should have blown away all vestiges of that “line in the sand” walling off the rest of News of the World from the specific scandal over the princes. Three days after the Guardian’s scoop appeared, Colin Myler called in Neville Thurlbeck and promised him a generous severance package if he agreed to resign. The email “for Neville” detailing transcripts of hacked voice mail messages was too hot for the paper, though Thurlbeck denied wrongdoing.
James Murdoch had told his colleagues in New York there was no cause for concern. Executives at News Corp’s headquarters heard the assistant police commissioner John Yates dismiss the Guardian story out of hand. That was good enough for them. The board did not formally take up the issue.
More than a year later, in late 2010, I stood next to Brooks outside the glass-paneled meeting rooms of the Times of London as she watched Cameron on a TV monitor, waiting for the verdict on which country would get to play host to the World Cup games in 2018 and 2022. She cut a striking figure—initially, it must be said, by her appearance, her pale skin offset by a flowing mane of fiery red hair. Then I was struck by the force of her personality. The UK was a finalist, but thought unlikely to prevail. The set was tuned to Sky News as Cameron and Prince William made impassioned last-minute pitches.
“Just imagine how many papers we could sell if London got the Cup,” Brooks said, watching intently. She rolled her eyes as the Swiss president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, finally announced the games would go to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, a setback for Cameron and his minister of culture and sport, Jeremy Hunt.
Some executives in Manhattan considered the New York Times story in September 2010 to be a wake-up call, raising questions about criminal implications and Brooks’s behavior, but James Murdoch insisted hacking could be handled locally. It was a relatively trifling issue, he said, and any involvement from headquarters would be wrongly taken by the company’s rivals to mean there was substance to larger accusations.
Rupert Murdoch had one overriding concern: protect Brooks above all. The company’s general counsel, Lawrence Jacobs, insisted that the board needed to take charge and to set up an internal investigation. The corporation had to act to satisfy both US and UK authorities that it was rooting out any practices of corruption in its British properties. This could no longer be handled by London. Brooks could not be the focus of defense efforts. Corporate officials in New York had been deceived in 2009 by relying on the assurances of police officials in London who had been compromised by close ties to News Corp’s British executives and newsrooms.
But James held New York at bay. His hopes for succession at long last were starting to materialize. He had carried a quiet anger that he had not been designated the future CEO—or even simply promoted to the job—several years earlier. In March 2011, he had been elevated to deputy chief operating officer and chief executive of News Corp’s international holdings. The new position formalized his status as the heir apparent. He would move to New York and run the non-American elements of the conglomerate.
And Rupert Murdoch turned elsewhere for legal help. When the New York Post had to acknowledge its lead gossip columnist had taken payments from sources and another gossip writer had attempted extortion, the Post did not engage in the self-reflection and self-flagellation exhibited by the New York Times after the Jayson Blair fabrication and plagiarism scandal. Nor would News Corp do so here.
At his multimillion-pound townhouse on the periphery of Green Park, near Buckingham Palace, in May 2011, a group of senior News Corp officials and lawyers dined at a long table in a session convened by Brooks, then still CEO of News International. Among the guests were Jacobs, Klein, and Brendan Sullivan, a Washington defense attorney who had famously represented Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings and who had been a law partner of Klein’s wife.
At the dinner, the chairman revealed his own plans. This is going to be handled by Joel and Brendan, Murdoch declared. I will handle the board. Everyone else stay
out of it. Privately, Murdoch had told Klein and Sullivan that they had one mission: to preserve Rebekah Brooks’s standing. Klein told others later that that order would be a tall one. To save the Murdochs and to protect the corporate board, she would probably have to go. But he did not press the chairman. Not yet.
At the dinner, Brendan Sullivan declared his faith in Brooks’s innocence; indeed, she would soon be entrusted with running the UK company’s internal investigation. Attention would be kept away from New York, away from James and especially from Rupert. Sullivan’s declaration flew in the face of reality. But Murdoch leaned on Klein more than ever. His chief spokeswoman at the city schools system had just been named Murdoch’s chief of staff. Sullivan was a senior partner at his wife’s firm.
Klein teamed with News International executive Will Lewis to run News Corp’s management and standards committee. For the time being, they would please their client, Murdoch. But they knew a reckoning would confront the company down the line.
Jacobs resigned less than a month after witnessing the rejection of his advice.
EVEN AS James Murdoch shut down News of the World in July, he sustained his support for Brooks. “I am satisfied that Rebekah, her leadership of this business and her standard of ethics and her standard of conduct throughout her career are very good,” James said, praising her for working “transparently” with police to get to the heart of the matter.
Then James announced he had chosen Brooks herself to lead the company’s internal investigation. By the end of the first week of July 2011, Brooks’s standing was in considerable doubt. Brooks met with the shell-shocked staff on July 7 to explain the decision to shut down News of the World. If she felt personally chastened, it did not show, citing the “onslaught of attacks” the paper had faced since 2006. “You have led the news agenda [the headlines] because of past mistakes, but you have also set the agenda. . . . We don’t get that message across.”
“This is not exactly the best time in my life, but I’m determined to get vindication for the paper and for people like you,” she told them, promising to shield their reputations from what she called a “Guardian-BBC witch hunt.”
Security guards stood sentinel by the doors; technicians had severed the staff’s access to the Internet on their work computers. The newsroom by this point had become a crime scene, lacking only the yellow tape favored by police to declare areas off-bounds.
“By your calling our newspaper toxic, we’ve all been contaminated by this toxicity,” one reporter responded. “There’s an arrogance there that you’d think we’d want to work for you there again.”
Brooks was apologetic and emphasized her own lack of knowledge of any wrongdoing. “One of the problems, now, is how we dealt with it at the time,” Brooks said. In 2006, she said, everyone wrongly defined hacking as an isolated case. The police said so, she noted. News International had believed them. “There’s a feeling of a cover-up, our rivals think. Eventually, it will come out why things went wrong and who was responsible. And that will be another very difficult moment in this company’s history.”
Perhaps mindful of the police, lawyers, and prosecutors poring over emails, documents, and phone records inside the newspaper and in people’s homes, no one at the staff meeting articulated the main source of their resentment: like Goodman earlier in his letter of protest at being dismissed for hacking into the princes’ phones, reporters and editors believed that their bosses had tolerated, endorsed, and even effectively required these activities. Brooks undercut Murdoch’s virtuous declaration that he would dedicate the advertising revenue to charity by telling her staff that the number of companies willing to take out ads had plummeted.
PRIME MINISTER Cameron began edging away from his patrons at News International. On Friday, July 8, 2011, he announced concurrent investigations by police and MPs, and a broad-ranging inquiry into the practices and ethics of the press. (It would be led by Lord Justice Brian Leveson.)
Contrition proved the order of the day. “Because party leaders were so keen to win the support of newspapers, we turned a blind eye to the need to sort [out] this issue, get on top of the bad practices, to change the way our newspapers are regulated,” Cameron said. “The people in power knew things weren’t right. But they didn’t do enough quickly enough—until the full mess of the situation was revealed.” Cameron said had he been in Murdoch’s position, he would have accepted Brooks’s resignation.
News International press aides denied she had made any such offer. Yet behind the scenes, guided by executives in New York, News International eased Brooks from the role she had ostensibly been assigned to oversee the internal inquiries. Stories in the Guardian and elsewhere brought a fresh rash of concerns: a report that a senior News International executive, as yet unnamed, had intervened twice to destroy millions of emails dating back to 2005—when the phone hacking of the royals occurred.
Rupert Murdoch flew to London, arriving on the morning of Sunday, July 10. He emerged from a chauffeured sedan carrying the final edition of News of the World; “Thank You and Goodbye” read the last headline. It carried the banner: “The World’s Greatest Newspaper, 1843–2011.”
Murdoch headed to his house in Mayfair and later emerged with Rebekah Brooks, crossing to a meeting at a luxury hotel across the road. Asked by a reporter amid a throng of photographers and cameramen about his priorities now that he was in town, Murdoch answered, “This one,” gesturing with his thumb to Brooks, giving public voice to his private instinct.
EACH WEDNESDAY, political junkies in the UK settle around their televisions and computer screens to watch Prime Minister’s Questions, the weekly sessions in which the parties joust over questions devised to test the head of the queen’s government.
As the second Wednesday of July approached, Cameron’s rhetoric was shifting daily, as though an inexorable tide were pulling him to the ground held by his foes. All three parties prepared to join as one to denounce News Corp and force it to abandon the acquisition of BSkyB.
On Monday, July 11, News Corp did something unexpected. It pulled its promise to spin off Sky News so it would not be under direct leadership of News Corp. That concession, made to ease Cabinet approval of the takeover, no longer held. The decision set off a chain of bureaucratic consequences. The British regulatory agency OFT, the Office of Fair Trading, judged that the proposed merger raised questions of media concentration; Jeremy Hunt referred the decision to the Competition Commission. This referral would tie up the decision for months, an outcome that News Corp had been laboring to avoid. Hunt also noted that OfCom, the separate communications regulator, was suddenly reviewing whether News Corp was a “fit and proper” owner of BSkyB at all.
Yet Hunt’s seemingly unwelcome referral for review would have the ameliorative effect of delaying consideration to a time when emotions might not run so high and so hot. This process might give politicians a chance to rant against the Murdochs, get it out of their system, and yet allow the deal to be resurrected, Lazarus-like, the following year.
This time the Murdochs blinked. The company’s ranking non-Murdoch chief operating officer, Chase Carey, acknowledged reality: the deal for outright ownership of BSkyB had collapsed. He announced News Corp was withdrawing its bid for the company entirely.
Still the public anger did not subside, as fresh developments arrived almost hourly. Police told Prince Charles that he had been targeted for hacking. So had his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. “There needs to be root-and-branch change at this entire organization,” Prime Minister Cameron told the House of Commons. “What has happened at this company is disgraceful. It’s got to be addressed at every level. And they should stop thinking about mergers when they’ve got to sort out the mess they’ve created.”
Former prime minister Gordon Brown declared his belief that the Sunday Times had misrepresented itself to obtain his private financial records. There were suggestions that turned out to be unproven that the Sun paid off hospital workers to secure medical
documents confirming that his infant son had a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, he said. The Sun and Rebekah Brooks rejected claims about the story on Brown’s child. A parent of a child with a similar condition had, in fact, alerted the paper, Brooks made clear. The parent had said he hoped the Browns would talk about the diagnosis and give some comfort to families in like situations. Brooks had been sensitive to the pain the story would cause, reached out to the Browns, and even received a letter from Sarah Brown thanking her for the care she took in doing so. Several years later, Brooks attended a pajama party to mark Sarah Brown’s fortieth birthday with a select group of women friends.
By the summer of 2011, however, the Browns’ mood had changed. Standing in the back benches of the House of Commons, consigned there in part, he felt, by the decision of the Murdoch papers to abandon him two years earlier, Brown said he had been punished for challenging the company’s plans for consolidation. The scandal, Brown said, was “not the misconduct of a few rogues or a few freelancers but, I have to say, lawbreaking often on an industrial scale, at its worst dependent on links with the British criminal underworld.”
Others trained their fire on Brooks as well. Murdoch’s chief outside investor, the Saudi prince Al Waleed bin Talal, told the BBC, “For sure, she has to go. You bet she has to go.”
Evidence suggested the most fearsome of consequences: seepage to the States. On July 11 the Mirror reported that a former New York City police officer, unnamed, had been approached by reporters for News of the World. They offered to pay the ex-cop, now a private investigator, to hack into electronic phone records for people who had been killed in the 9/11 attacks. “The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look.” The Mirror, it appeared, had not spoken to the unidentified police officer directly, and the third party it quoted was equally anonymous. Yet US lawmakers took the story seriously. Several senators, all Democrats, urged an investigation into whether the Murdoch tabloids had engaged in similar acts in the US.
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