Hacked | Investigation
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Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. You have to first of all identify the human who is in a position to have access to information. Then most important, you've got to understand the thinking, the emotional state of that source so that when you approach them, you know what it is you need to say to find a motive that might persuade them to cooperate with you. This is True Spies. Episode 29. True Spies.

So I'm Nick Davis. I used to be special correspondent for The Guardian newspaper. Nick Davis is not a spy. And this week's episode of True Spies is not about spying in the sense that most people understand. But it is about how a newspaper reporter sometimes needs the skills of a spy to get the job done. In 2009, Nick Davis broke one of the most explosive stories in Britain in recent years.

the deliberate, sustained and illegal hacking of mobile phones by reporters on the country's largest Sunday newspaper. His investigation had far-reaching consequences. It led to resignations, it led to jail sentences, and it led to a very public bloody nose for Rupert Murdoch.

It took several years and relied heavily on people with inside knowledge. People whose names could not be revealed, but people without whom the story would never have been told. Cultivating people like that is the key piece of tradecraft that a reporter must master.

In some ways, what a reporter does is quite similar to what a spy working for an intelligence agency does. The intelligence agency may have access to all sorts of amazing technology which can intercept communications, but over and over again you'll hear spy chiefs say, "What we really need are human sources."

Now, a reporter who's not breaking the law doesn't have access to the technology to intercept communications. The human source is the most important part of our work. And whether you're a reporter or an agent handler, you have to be able to build a relationship with literally anybody. Could you do that? It can get awkward.

So once upon a time I was doing a lot of investigation about child sexual abuse. So I'm building a relationship with adults who were sexually abused as children.

I'm also building relationships with paedophiles who sexually abuse children. And I'm building a relationship with the detective who catches the paedophile. Now, it's as if you have to be a very different person in each of those three contexts, but you have to be able to build a relationship to sustain this connection with the person who's agreed to help you.

The crucial thing is that you make sure that the source is safe and that they know they're safe, that the source knows they are being protected. So it's very, very similar, the reporter and the agent handler, as to how we operate. Sometimes a source in a sensitive investigation will allow a reporter to use their real name, but mostly not.

This story came to light thanks to people like Jingle, Lola, Mango, Ovid, The Emissary and York. But it all began with Mr Apollo. He actually originally sent me an email

and left me his phone number, his cell phone, and he said, "Whatever you do, don't leave me a voicemail message," which was obviously quite a significant caution. A significant caution because voicemail was extremely vulnerable. It was easy for phone hackers to listen to messages. But Nick didn't know any of this until Mr Apollo told him how to do it. Mr Apollo had got in touch after hearing Nick being interviewed on BBC Radio one morning in 2008.

Nick had been invited onto the show because of a book he'd written about dysfunction in the British media. And unknown to me, they set things up so that in a neighbouring studio there was a senior editor from Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. Do you remember the News of the World? It was the archetypal tabloid newspaper. Loud and irreverent, it specialised in celebrities and sex, preferably in the same story.

It sold hundreds of thousands of copies a week, one of four newspapers in Britain published by News International, part of Rupert Murdoch's global empire. But the paper had recently blotted its copybook and made headlines itself.

Clive Goodman, the editor responsible for covering the royal family, had been sent to jail for hacking the phones of three people working at Buckingham Palace. And when I started referring to that, the senior editor from the News of the World interrupted, very angry, saying he didn't know what planet I was living on if I thought that criminal activity in his newspaper or any other newspaper was a problem. So he was pretty rude and aggressive.

And what he was saying wasn't true. And the effect was that it provoked somebody I'd never heard of into getting in touch with me. And that person started the whole ball rolling. Enter Mr. Apollo with his intriguing instruction not to leave a voice message. I would like to have a discussion with you, he wrote. I think you will like what I have.

So I arranged to meet him in a hotel room in London, and he gave me the outline of the story that Rupert Murdoch's News of the World was routinely engaged in committing criminal offences in order to get information, specifically and most frequently hacking into people's voicemail messages.

And furthermore, that the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard in central London knew about this and had evidence of this, but were not taking any more action about it. Now, that was very important to me, that second element about the police, because

The actual crime that's being committed here, hacking into voicemail, it matters. It is a crime. You can go to jail for it. But it's not big-time crime. But if the most powerful police force in the country isn't acting on it, it raises the most important aspect of the story, which is power. And in the UK, Rupert Murdoch has a great deal of power and people are frightened of him. Powerful people are frightened of him. Even Scotland Yard are frightened of him.

But journalists like Nick are supposed to challenge the powerful, not protect them. There was a further reason to go after this story. At the time Clive Goodman went to prison, the editor of the News of the World, the one who should have known everything that was going on at the paper, was a man called Andy Coulson. He'd resigned soon afterwards, saying the time had come for him to take ultimate responsibility. But Mr. Coulson now had a new job as Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

and the Conservatives looked likely to win the next election. So the former editor of the News of the World who'd overseen this criminality, Andy Coulson, would end up working in one of the most powerful positions in the country. And so you have to ask yourself, what would this guy do if he thought that, let's say, other members of the government were conspiring behind the Prime Minister's back? Would he organise private investigators to intercept their voicemail messages?

So if somebody with a history of criminality is about to become that powerful, it's a good thing for independent journalists to try and investigate them and see what's really gone on. At this stage, the extent of the phone hacking had yet to be revealed. The news of the world continued to plead the one bad Apple defence, but there were hints that the rest of the barrel might be rotten too. Clive Goodman had not been alone in the dock. There had been another man...

There's the royal correspondent and the private investigator, both accused of listening to royal voicemail messages.

But the private investigator was also accused of listening to voicemail messages of people from the world of sport and show business. And so you think, well, why is he doing that? If the only journalist involved is the one who's on trial alongside him, that's the royal correspondent. He's not interested in people from show business and sport. There's something missing here. Why indeed?

It wasn't long before Nick got corroboration of Mr. Apollo's story that phone hacking was rife at the news of the world. The intelligence came from an unexpected source. Nick found himself sitting next to a senior policeman at a social function. "How many phone hacking victims had there really been?" he asked. "Just the handful that were mentioned in court." "Oh no," said the policeman. "There were thousands. Thousands." Thousands of people had had their phones hacked.

A paper owned by the most powerful media organisation in Britain. A paper apparently protected at the highest levels of the police. A paper that seemed likely soon to have influence at the very heart of government. Is that a hornet's nest you really want to poke? Much easier to keep your head down, to look away. Is that what you'd do? Or would you keep digging? Not sure? Well, it does help to have proper backup.

I had an editor at The Guardian, a guy called Alan Rusbridger, who wasn't frightened. And so there are editors who would have said, "Whoa, we're not going to get into a fight with the most powerful media baron in the country and the most powerful political party and the most powerful police force. That's too much like trouble." But this editor said, "No, okay, let's go for it."

The stakes were huge for everyone involved. Nick Davis, Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian, and all those anonymous sources. You have to understand that in the context of British public life, a lot of people who have power are frightened of Rupert Murdoch.

And therefore, if as a reporter you're coming in from outside, as I was, over and over again you're talking to people who are very worried that if Murdoch and his people discover that they're helping to unmask what's going on, they're going to be in trouble. Under the tutelage of Mr Apollo, Nick now understood how to hack voicemail. You have to remember, we use voicemail a lot more then than we do now.

Back then, mobile phones weren't quite the extension of our bodies that they are today. So it wasn't so unusual to forget them when leaving the house. The idea is that if you leave your telephone at home and you're in your office, you can still check your voicemail messages by calling your own cell phone number, listening to the recorded voice. Hello, your call cannot be taken at the moment. And then pushing the right buttons and it will ask you to put in a four-digit security code.

That code would have been set by the service provider and it was usually something very simple. Double one, double one perhaps. And human nature being what it is, most people didn't bother to change it. I mean, ask yourself, have you changed yours? So once the users of the world understood that that was the case, they could call anybody's cell phone when they were not actually using it.

Wait for the recorded voice to offer them the option of listening to voicemail messages. Randomly choose the various factory setting for the PIN codes, discover which one would work, and bingo, they're through. You have one new message. It was an incredibly simple crime to commit. But what do you do if your target has been smart enough to change their PIN?

Well, then you need someone skilled in the art of blagging. This blagging, this tricking of organisations into disclosing confidential data, merges with the voicemail hacking because if somebody had had the good sense to change the security pin code, the four-digit code on their phone, to something unusual,

The News of the World's private investigator, Glenn Mulcair, would contact their service provider, posing as a member of the security staff, and get the four-digit code put back to the standard factory setting on the phony grounds that that then would allow the security guy to do his job. Of course, what it actually allowed was the News of the World to carry on listening to the voicemail messages on that phone. But suppose you ring a number in order to hack the voice messages and the target actually picks up.

Hello? Well, there was a strategy to deal with that too.

It was known as double whacking. So what it means is that the reporter's sitting there with two mobile phones. One phone calls the target. If the target picks up and says hello, at that moment the phone's engaged. So they use the second phone to call in on the same number, and that second phone will then go to the recorded messages and can get access to the voicemail. And on the first phone, the celebrity has said hello. As soon as the second phone has got through, they hang up on the first phone.

And then there was another trick Nick discovered called pinging. Say you've got your target's phone number but you want to know where the phone actually is. Because if the phone is there, the target probably is too. So you use a friendly contact in the police to tell you which base stations are relaying signals from a particular mobile phone. And then you triangulate the signals to pinpoint a location.

And this was important because if they had some kind of claim that such and such an actor is having an affair with somebody, then they could say, "Well, where is the actor this afternoon? Okay. He's at the Savoy Hotel in central London. We'll go and stake it out, see if we can see him, see if we can see a woman he's connected with." The problem that faced Nick and the Guardian as they set out to investigate this story was how to prove what they thought they knew.

It was all very well Mr Apollo saying that phone hacking was routine at the news of the world, or a senior policeman saying there were thousands of victims. A journalist has to show that this is true. Once again, Mr Apollo provided an opening. He revealed that one of the five non-royal victims named in the Goodman Mall Care case was now suing for damages.

was a guy called Gordon Taylor, who was the head of the Professional Footballers Association. So he was an attractive target for the News of the World because he was dealing with problems around famous footballers. For example, if a footballer got caught sniffing cocaine in a nightclub, Gordon Taylor would be involved in trying to sort out the mess. You'll remember that Mr Apollo had already told Nick that the police at Scotland Yard had evidence of widespread phone hacking at the News of the World, but hadn't acted on it.

Gordon Taylor's lawyer was trying to get the police to hand over that evidence, at least where it concerned his own client. If there was a way of getting sight of that evidence, the Guardian might have a story to print in the event the case never came to court. And then Nick found out that the news of the world had settled, which was in itself revealing. What I discovered was that

The Murdoch company in the UK had paid out just about a million pounds in damages and expenses

in exchange for Gordon Taylor and two people who were linked to him agreeing that nothing would be said in public about the fact that they had sued and sued successfully. Now, £1 million in total is an enormous settlement in the context of privacy settlements up to that point in the UK. The newspaper, remember, while acknowledging the guilt of its royal editor, had insisted that he had acted alone.

He was an aberration, a rogue operator. I could see the kind of scale

of anxiety that was beginning to rise in the Murdoch company. They knew very well that if the truth came out, they were going to be in lots and lots of trouble. Therefore, it was worth spending an unprecedented amount of money to silence this legal action that was brought by Gordon Taylor's lawyer. Crucially for the Guardian's investigation, Nick had managed to get hold of copies of two documents the police had handed to the judge. One was a contract that

hiring the private investigator, Glenn Mulcair, to work for the News of the World under a false name. They called him Paul Williams. If you're hiring somebody for legitimate work, you don't have them doing it in a false name. The second document was even more incriminating. It contained transcripts of a large number of voicemail messages from Gordon Taylor's mobile phone, which had been pasted into an email and sent by a junior reporter

to the paper's chief reporter, a man called Neville Thirlbeck. According to the official version of events being put out by the police and the Murdoch company, these people weren't involved. But here was this junior reporter and the chief reporter himself clearly involved in handling messages which had been illegally hacked from Gordon Taylor's phone. So the disclosure of these documents changed everything. It ripped apart

the News of the World's entirely dishonest claim that the only person who'd been involved in criminality at their newspaper was the so-called rogue reporter, the royal correspondent Clive Goodman. So it was now clear that at least two other people knew what had been going on, Neville Felbeck and the junior reporter. By this time, Nick had been working on the investigation for over a year.

Finally, he was confident that The Guardian had a story it could publish. We were able to conclude, or I was able to persuade the editor, that it was certainly true that there was widespread phone hacking and criminality going on in Murdoch's company, and that the police knew about it and had taken no action, and that they had paid out the best part of a million pounds to settle this legal action. The Guardian went to print.

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We did a big story on the front page of the paper, a big double page spread inside and ran it in a big way on the website. It was July the 9th, 2009. Revealed. Murdoch's £1 million bill for hiding dirty tricks ran the headline.

The thrust of the story was that Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group had paid the money to hide what the Guardian said was "evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories." There was a picture on the front page of Andy Coulson, the former Murdoch editor and now the Conservative Party's director of communications. He was holding, yes, a mobile phone to his ear. News International was not amused.

Time to fasten your seatbelt. This is going to be a bumpy ride. The Murdoch Company reacted by lying.

They surrounded themselves with falsehood, stuck to their original claim that there was only ever one reporter involved in criminality, and then accused us of deliberately misleading the British people. And then the murder organisation went on the offensive. They used their political connections to summon me and my editor

to give evidence before one of the select committees in parliament in London early in the following week. This was an intimidating prospect. Select committees are open to the public and this hearing would attract huge interest. A clear opportunity for members of parliament, either well disposed to the Murdoch organization or ill disposed towards the Guardian, to do some damage.

Because Nick was aware there was a chink in their armor, and that's where their opponents would focus their attack.

They could see, being journalists, that even if what we'd printed in The Guardian was true, we hadn't quoted a single on-the-record human source, we hadn't quoted from a single document. So even if what we were saying was true, it looked to them that we wouldn't be able to prove it. And therefore, if they could haul us up in front of this select committee, we would be torn to ribbons.

And that would be the end of the Guardian's credibility in the phone hacking story. And possibly the end of Nick's career too. Imagine how that might feel. Now imagine how it would feel if Scotland Yard rubbished your story too. The Guardian had quoted an anonymous police source as saying there was evidence that thousands of mobile phones had been hacked by private investigators at the behest of staff on Murdoch newspapers. But the police denied it.

When we published the first story, the number two officer from the Metropolitan Police, a man called John Yates, stepped out in front of the main building at Scotland Yard and told the press who were gathered there that the Guardian story was wrong. So you spend 15 months painstakingly putting your case together, and then the second most powerful man in the Metropolitan Police accuses you of making it up. Who do you think people are going to believe?

At the time that was quite frightening because you have a kind of built-in tendency to assume that if a senior police officer says that a newspaper story is incorrect, he's probably telling the truth. But he wasn't telling the truth. The truth was concealed behind the sealed doors of Scotland Yard and we had to prise those doors open to get at it. So the newspaper group is out to get you, the police say you're wrong and you're about to undergo very public scrutiny.

But you know that you're right, only that you might not be able to prove it. Who would you turn to? Well, as well as enemies in high places, Nick had friends there too. At the crucial moment, one of Nick's anonymous sources came up Trump's.

They agreed at the hearing Nick could use those two incriminating documents: the Gordon Taylor voicemail transcripts and the contract in a false name, which, while very welcome, presented a new problem.

I was now operating on what I call constructive paranoia. You have to imagine things going wrong and block them before they go wrong. And in this case, what could go wrong was that if Nick, as it were, waved Gordon Taylor's voicemail transcripts around in public, then he too might stand accused of breaching Taylor's privacy. He found an old-school solution.

The man investigating electronic surveillance went shopping and came home with paper, scissors and glue. And then I got my kids to sit around our dining room table and to cut out bits of black paper to mask the contents of the voicemail messages. And then I Xeroxed this lots and lots of times

Nick could then give the committee a version of the document, which proved that it had been sent by one News of the World journalist to another, without revealing any of the actual content. It was a turning point. As a result of the original Guardian story and the select committee hearing, people started to get in touch. People who'd worked at the News of the World. And a couple of lawyers as well. Lawyers suspicious that their celebrity clients had had their phones hacked.

By linking up with the lawyers whose famous clients were suing in court, there was the prospect that the judge in that case would order the police or the Murdoch company to disclose internal documents or other material, which would then give me the proof I needed to show that the police and the Murdoch company were being dishonest in their denials. By so openly challenging another newspaper, he had made himself a target.

It was inevitable that they would start looking for dirt on him. So he picked up a few tips on how to protect himself. I had a private investigator or several private investigators who were helping me to uncover this. And one of them said, "You need to be careful of roving bug." Roving bug was a technology originally developed by the FBI and then taken private.

An ingenious little tool. The idea was that somebody would send a text message to your cell phone that would contain malware, which would turn the phone effectively into a microphone, which would relay anything that was being said in the room or in the vicinity around the cell phone. And this would happen even if the phone was switched off because the battery, which keeps the little clock going in the cell phone, would still operate the microphone.

So you learn to take counter measures. So therefore, let's say I'm sitting down with a couple of lawyers who are acting for these celebrities who are suing. We would put our phones on the table in front of us and take the batteries out. So the phone was completely incapable of operating in any way. Nowadays you can't do that, but at the time you could. The hunter had become the hunted. Quite a frustrated hunter.

Because by the spring of 2010, nine months after The Guardian had published its first story about phone hacking, nothing much seemed to have changed. No heads had rolled, either within the Murdoch organization or the police. And everything went a bit flat. I think there was a feeling that nobody was interested in what The Guardian was saying. And so the paper decided to up the ante by doing something that, in the newspaper business, is very unusual.

it invited others in on the story. Isolated and vulnerable, under attack by both the Murdoch organization and the police, the paper decided to share what it knew with other news organizations. The big example of that was that my editor got in touch with the editor of the New York Times, who then sent three reporters to London,

I then spent 48 hours talking almost non-stop, giving them information, background information, leads, contacts. For example, I had one very particularly off-the-record police contact, and at a certain point that contact agreed that he would meet somebody from the New York Times. And so I took the New York Times reporter to meet that police contact in a very, very discreet location.

This was potentially a very risky move. You've been working on this story for a couple of years. Is there a possibility that you've developed tunnel vision? That what you think is the scoop of the century doesn't actually stand up? You hand over your research and your sources to someone else, and that someone else discovers that you've got it all wrong. You're going to look very foolish, and you'll probably lose your job. In the meantime, power had shifted in Britain.

The Labour Party had been voted out of power and replaced by a coalition led by the conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. His right-hand man? None other than Andy Coulson.

the man who had resigned in disgrace as the editor of the News of the World after his royal editor was sent to prison. I was told quite a telling small thing by somebody who worked in Downing Street, where the prime minister is based in London, that Andy Coulson was one of only two people who was allowed to walk into the prime minister's office without knocking.

So he's right there at the center of power in the UK, even though he has this history of organizing crime in order to get information for Rupert Murdoch. In September 2010, the New York Times printed its story about phone hacking. Sighs of relief all around. Well, certainly in the Guardian building. The story in the Times supported everything the Guardian had reported.

And the American paper had made one significant breakthrough. For the first time, they got somebody from the news of the world who knew all about the voicemail hacking to come on the record. A guy called Sean Hall, who'd been an entertainment correspondent, allowed them to quote him by name, saying...

Certainly this was going on, the Guardian have got it right, and the guy who was the editor at the time, Andy Coulson, who's now working for our prime minister, knew about it. So it was a big step forward. Remember what we said about cultivating sources? The key piece of tradecraft the reporter and the spy must master: understanding the thinking and emotional state of your source.

Working out what motivates them, Nick had his own source he thought he might persuade to go public. And I contacted him and he was very kind of surly and untrusting with me on the phone. Eventually he agreed to meet me. He warmed up a little bit, but he was still not at all sure that he wanted to trust me. Very slowly he began to help me out with information, but only on background basis, not to be quoted.

Once the New York Times had persuaded Sean Hoare to go on the record, this source agreed to do the same. His name was Paul McMullen. You would think that

A News of the World reporter who'd been breaking the law would be very shy about saying it. But once Paul crossed the line, he took a really extraordinary line and he was almost proud, really, of what he'd done. And he used to say, "Privacy is for paedophiles. We have a right to know what everybody's doing." Once he'd crossed that line, he was extraordinarily confident and outspoken.

I think some of his former colleagues were terrified by the way he was just so willing, effectively really to boast about the extent to which they had been engaged in crime. Off-the-record sources will get you the story, but the ones that will go on the record are the ones that have impact. The pressure was mounting on several senior journalists in the Murdoch organization. So through 2010, we are slowly getting more and more information into the public domain.

By December 2010, we've named at least six senior journalists at the paper as being directly involved. And by early January, it became clear that at least two news editors at the News of the World, going back several years, had been commissioning private investigators to hack phones.

both of whom had reported up to Andy Coulson. It was becoming simply impossible to believe that he didn't know about what was going on in his newspaper at the time. Andy Coulson's job in Downing Street was no longer tenable. He resigned in January 2011. When the spokesman needs a spokesman, he said, it's time to move on.

I think that from that moment on, the Murdoch company and also the police were on the defensive. They were falling back because we'd broken through. The police set up an inquiry. Not the first one, by the way, that they'd set up to investigate phone hacking. But this one finally had teeth.

They found a woman detective called Sue Akers, a very senior, experienced detective. And she set up an inquiry which from the outset said, "Enough of this dishonesty, enough of this fear of Rupert Murdoch. We're going to do the job properly." And to her great credit, she did. There's another twist to this story: the business ambitions of Rupert Murdoch.

For him, there could not have been a worse time for the phone hacking scandal to come to light. In the background, Rupert Murdoch has been moving to take over the majority ownership of Sky, the satellite broadcasting outfit. And he wants to do this because Sky has become enormously profitable. It's a cash cow.

And if he can get all of the ownership of Sky, if he can get his hands on all of that cash, he can then go out and buy Disney or Time Warner using that cash to fund an enormous loan. And at that point, he would be simply the biggest media mogul in the world, in the history of the world. But if he's to take over Sky, Mr Murdoch needs the approval of the British government.

In ordinary times, there would have been little question that the government would give the green light. And then suddenly, from the side of the stage, comes this phone hacking saga getting more and more and more powerful. Finally, in June 2011, Nick Davis took the phone call that would prove fatal to the news of the world. The call came from one of those anonymous sources Nick had been cultivating.

And the source told him that journalists from the news of the world had hacked the voicemail of a missing schoolgirl. This had been a huge and traumatic story at the time. Nationally famous, everybody terribly sorry about what happened to the girl and her family. The girl's name was Millie Dowler. She had been snatched off the street in March 2002. It had taken months to find her body.

There are those who will argue that the private lives of politicians and celebrities are fair game. Perhaps this is why the news of the world had been able to brush off the phone hacking allegations for so long. But the revelation that the paper had hacked the phone of a child who had been abducted and murdered changed everything.

The idea that boozy journalists from Murdoch's company would be hacking into her voicemail and listening to her friends and family leaving tearful messages pleading with her to get in touch, it was too disgusting. It changed everything because suddenly The Guardian was no longer on its own. Rival newspapers, which up to that point had chosen to ignore the phone hacking scandal, now began to weigh in.

The Milly Dowler story carried such emotional weight that it was just not possible for those newspapers to stay silent anymore. And they then piled in and followed up on the Milly Dowler story. It's probably hard to imagine anything more upsetting than the invasion of the privacy of a missing girl and her family. The Daily Telegraph came up with two other phone hacking enterprises that run it close. They disclosed...

First of all, that when terrorists bombed the London Underground train system in July 2005, the News of the World had hacked the voicemail messages of the bereaved families. It's disgusting. Secondly, they disclosed that when British soldiers serving in Afghanistan had been killed in action, the News of the World were hacking the bereaved families' phone messages again.

The news of the world and the empire that owned it were painted into a corner. There was no escape from these allegations. Advertisers began to withdraw their business. Rupert Murdoch's solution was a uniquely ruthless one. He closed the paper.

The last edition of the News of the World hit the newsstands on Sunday, the 10th of July 2011. Now, senior people at the newspaper were involved in criminal activity, maybe as many as a dozen people. There were 200 people working on that newspaper. But in order to try to save

their various plans and their reputation, the Murdochs threw 200 people out of work. It was also the end of what would have been one of the most lucrative media deals in history. Mr. Murdoch announced that his company was withdrawing its bid for BSkyB.

Murdoch was, I think, traumatised. I think what Murdoch did was to turn to his lawyers and his PR people and they said, "You haven't got a choice here. You've got to give in. You've got to grovel. You've got to be humble." Grovel he did, in a full-page advertisement across a range of national newspapers, a message signed personally by Mr Murdoch himself. "We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred," he wrote.

"We are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected. We regret not acting faster to sort things out." By this time, lots of heads were rolling. Andy Coulson, until recently the government's director of communications, was arrested. So was the woman who'd been chief executive of all four Murdoch papers in Britain.

There were other resignations, and not only within the Murdoch organisation. From the top of Scotland Yard, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was forced to resign. The Assistant Commissioner, John Yates, who had been leading the falsehood behind which the police had hidden, he was forced to resign. It was just this staggering sight as the entire house of cards around Murdoch collapsed. Which may not have been Nick's intention.

What the investigative reporter aims to do is to shine light on dark secrets. He needs the help of courageous insiders to do this: the Sean Hawes and the Paul McMullens, but also those anonymous contacts whose real names we will never know, people like Mr Apollo. And he also needs a bit of luck. In this case, it was provided by the target itself.

The Murdoch company and the police made a terrible mistake in attacking The Guardian and me. Because if they hadn't been so aggressive, if they hadn't told the world that we were liars, we would have followed up on our first story a couple of times and then moved on to the next exciting adventure. But because they insisted on telling the world that we were liars, which is the worst thing you can say about the professional performance of a newspaper, that they're knowingly misleading people.

There's a postscript.

On July 4th, 2014, more than six years after Nick Davis had made that appearance on an early morning radio show, Andy Coulson was sent to prison. The man who had swapped the editor's chair for the seat of government was given an 18-month sentence for conspiracy to intercept voicemails. Hard to believe that that would have happened if Mr. Apollo hadn't sent Nick that first intriguing email.

I'm Vanessa Kirby. Join us next week for another brush with true spies. We all have valuable spy skills and our experts are here to help you discover yours. Get an authentic assessment of your spy skills created by a former head of training at British Intelligence for free now at Spyscape.com.