Phone-hacking jury given peek into Glenn Mulcaire’s working routine
Trial of Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson shown whiteboards and handwritten notes collected from hacker’s office and shed
The working life of a phone hacker was exposed in the Old Bailey on Thursday, including a note to be wary of a particularly tricky Vodafone employee and a suggestion that the News of the World’s deputy editor had been a target of his own paper’s eavesdropping.
The jury in the phone-hacking trial was shown eight of Glenn Mulcaire’s whiteboards – covered in handwritten notes and diagrams about his work – found by police in an office and a garden shed belonging to the News of the World’s specialist hacker.
One board carried a list headed “Networking”, which included the names of Rebekah Wade (as Rebekah Brooks was then) and Greg Miskiw, the former assistant editor of the News of the World who has pleaded guilty to plotting to intercept voicemail.
The same board also showed a list titled “Project Targets” followed by references to “Bulger inquiry”, “Royal assessments” and the names of high-profile footballers of the era, such as David Ginola and Tony Adams. Another carried the words “Swiss Cottage”, which, the jury were told, was the password of the week for the Vodafone network, used internally by employees of the phone company. Other boards carried similar words – “Venus Williams” and “Monty’s Pass” listed against O2; “Barcelona” against the word “Voda”.
The court was not told how Mulcaire might have succeeded in obtaining internal passwords, but one board suggested he might sometimes have failed in his contact with phone companies: “Voda – avoid Damian, Team Three,” a note read.
Separately, a detective from the operation Weeting inquiry, Richard Fitzgerald, gave the jury a short lesson in the techniques of intercepting voicemail with the aid of a hacking methodology diagram. He explained that Mulcaire was able to use three different routes to intercept voicemail. He could dial his target’s mobile phone and, provided they did not answer, he could press a key to interrupt the recorded greeting, enter a Pin and access messages. Or he could dial into a unique voicemail number (UVN), supplied to help customers listen to voicemail when abroad, and follow the same routine.
Or he could use two phones simultaneously: one to call his target’s mobile to ensure it was engaged; the second to access its messages. The jury was told that security around phone messages had now been significantly improved.
The court heard that police had studied billing data for a “private wire line” belonging to News International, which routed calls from the company’s landline extensions through a single Vodafone number. In one period of just over nine months beginning in October 2005, detectives had extracted all calls that been made from this number to UVNs. “The inference is that they are trying to reach voicemail,” Mark Bryant-Heron, prosecuting, told the jury.
