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“You don’t get to be editor of the Mirror without being a fairly despicable human being.”
Piers Morgan to Kate Winslett: The Insider (2005)
When he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2009, Piers Morgan was challenged about phone hacking. Presenter Kirsty Young asked him about dealing with people who listened to phone messages. “People who tap people’s phones … how did you feel about that?”
Morgan didn’t deny the allegation: “I’m quite happy … to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to … I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do.”
But after the revelation in July 2011 that Rupert Murdoch’s journalists had hacked murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s mobile phone, he changed his tune. When the American Daily Beast website resurrected his Desert Island Discs comments in 2011, Morgan insisted: “For the record … I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone.”
But, in fact, the Daily Mirror had printed an article based on phone hacking more than a decade earlier. It was just as mobile phones were taking off — and Piers Morgan had been Daily Mirror editor for more than two years.
Early in 1998 one of the paper’s journalists in Dublin realised it was possible to access messages left on the mobile phones of senior Irish politicians. Reporter Karl Brophy — based at the Irish Parliament — proceeded to listen to messages left on the phone of the Irish leader, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. He also successfully listened to messages left on the phones of other Cabinet ministers.
Brophy’s article — published as an “Exclusive” on Saturday, 18 April 1998 — went into great detail about how phone messages could be hacked: “The phone tap can be operated by anyone who knows the number of the mobile phone they wish to listen in to.” The article explained that mobile phones were sold with a standard password for stored messages that most people never changed. “That means that anyone can listen in to another person’s messages by simply phoning into their electronic mailbox and dialling the digits 0000. Once they have done this the hacker has unlimited access to all the messages.”
The article was accompanied by an editorial. This stated: “If Richard Nixon had lived in Dublin he would have had no need for Watergate. Instead of teams of bungling burglars all he would have needed was a mobile phone to tap into the thoughts of his political rivals.”
The piece continued: “The Irish Mirror discovered this amazing security breach and chose not to keep it under wraps. It is to be hoped the gap has been plugged before some unscrupulous eavesdropper has used it for sinister [purposes].”
There was to be no phone hacking scandal in Ireland.
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The Open Backdoor
Not a word of the story appeared in the mainland editions of the Daily Mirror. This was despite the fact that several million people of Irish descent live in Britain — thousands of them Daily Mirror readers. And the implications of the story for the British political establishment were obvious.
If British mobile phones were anything like their Irish counterparts, there was a potential security problem.
There were also strong connections between the Irish edition and the paper’s headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf. The man in charge of the Irish Mirror was Craig Mackenzie, brother of Kelvin Mackenzie, Mirror Group deputy chief executive. Kelvin Mackenzie was editor of the Sun when Piers Morgan started on the paper in the late 1980s. Both Mackenzie brothers were friends of Morgan’s.
Press Gang spoke to Karl Brophy last week. He said he wrote the story at a time when mobile phones were taking off. “When you got your phone in those days it clearly … told you to change your PIN immediately,” he said. “The thing was that most older people didn’t bother.”
“So, one day, I just started phoning mobiles of politicians and seeing if they had changed their PINs. A lot hadn’t so I changed all the PINs of the ones who hadn’t to a single four digit number so nobody else could listen in.”
“I thought the fact that voice messages … of government ministers and advisers could be so easily accessed was rather serious – especially considering where we were in 1998 with the Peace Process …”
In fact, the historic Good Friday agreement had been signed a week earlier. All the ministers Brophy hacked immediately changed their PIN numbers after he told the government what he’d done.
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Tipped Off
Fifteen months later the Daily Mirror in London were told about security problems with mobile phones.
Welsh sales manager Steven Nott rang the paper in August 1999 about a flaw in Vodaphone’s system. He talked to Mirror special projects editor Oonagh Blackman. He told her that if people did not change the standard Vodaphone 3333 PIN number, anyone could dial in and listen to messages.
Nott claims that, initially, Blackman was enthusiastic but after 12 days told him the paper wasn’t interested. The paper later sent him a £100 cheque with a statement saying it was in relation to “mobile phone scandal.”
Nott later told the Leveson Inquiry: “I accused the Daily Mirror of keeping the phone hacking method for their own purposes.”
But, in addition to the Irish Mirror story, there’s evidence the paper’s journalists were already deeply involved in the “dark arts” of illegal news-gathering, including phone hacking.