Operation Motorman: The Full Story Revealed

An old story I will grant you, so why am I running it?

The answer to that lies in the reading and I suppose, the 'file under' tag.

That being of course, 'Stuff you couldn't make up.'

Operation Motorman: the full story revealed

As the information commissioner prepares to address Commons investigation into privacy and press standards, one private investigator's work for news organisations emerges
Nick Davies
31 August 2009

Joanna Lumley, Ian Hislop and Caprice Bourret: among those of interest to investigators.

From his cramped office at the back of his family home on a quiet street on the Hampshire coast, Steve Whittamore was for years the link between news organisations and a network of sources who could penetrate the security of confidential databases.

Eastwards, on the Sussex coast, he paid a long-haired Hells Angel who had perfected a spiel that allowed him to phone up British Telecom to extract home addresses and ex-directory numbers. To his north, in Salisbury, he used a fellow private investigator who worked on mobile phone companies as well. To the west, in Devon, a civil servant in the Department for Work and Pensions had access to the giant database of the social security system. Inside a regional office of the DVLA, he had two men who sold him the private details of any registered car owner. At Wandsworth police station in south London, a civilian worker sold criminal records and other personal information from the Police National Computer.

Whittamore is only one of a dozen or more private investigators who have been involved in breaking the law for Fleet Street. There is the former actor who uses his skills as a mimic to "blag" the same databases; the former detective who was bounced out of the police for corruption and who has spent years carrying cash bribes from newspapers to serving officers; the London investigator who paid police to moonlight for his agency and to provide live intelligence that he sold on to newspapers. Some have supplied the technology that allows journalists to use "trojan horse" emails to steal information from computers, tap live phone calls and hack into voicemail messages, the technique that led to prison two years ago for a journalist and a private investigator working for the News of the World.

Whittamore's network has become notorious simply because it was busted. Operation Motorman led to the information commissioner's staff descending on his office in New Milton in March 2003, emerging with a vast cache of handwritten records of requests from journalists, many of which appear to lack any sign of the kind of public interest that would make them legal. The sheer scale of the activity indicates the collapse of the security walls around organisations that are trusted by millions to protect their privacy and the rapacious will of the news media to rush through the gaps. And yet, when the information commissioner obtained the material, it was so short of resources that it approached and warned only a handful of those whose privacy had been compromised even where potential targets for terrorism or other crime were involved.

Lord Imbert, a former commissioner of the Metropolitan police and also a former special branch detective with a long history of investigating terrorist groups, had his home address and ex-directory phone number scammed out of BT. In spite of Imbert's position as a potential target for terrorists, the information commissioner's office never informed him of this.

Even though high-profile footballers have been the victims of burglary while playing matches, BT was tricked into handing out the home addresses and ex-directory numbers of eight members of the England football squad who played in the World Cup in Japan in 2002. They also disclosed the carefully protected home addresses of journalists, such as the former editor of the News of the World, Phil Hall, and the investigative reporter Martin Short, both of whom had specialised in exposing gangsters and violent criminals. "I incurred the long-term wrath of many violent folk," Short says. A woman who had been tracked down and raped at her secret address by her violent ex-husband then had that address released to journalists.

Gross violations

In other cases, where the physical safety of victims was not obviously in jeopardy, the victims simply suffered gross violations of their privacy. The actor Joanna Lumley was targeted repeatedly by news groups who were trying to uncover the identity of the father of her child. In one 18-month period, News International paid a total of £1,726 in five different invoices, apparently for printouts of phone numbers she had been dialling.

In another gross invasion of privacy the editor of Private Eye, Ian Hislop, is named in the paperwork as a victim of the notorious celebrity newspaper photographer Jason Fraser, who hired the network to obtain his phone records. Hislop says this followed the publication of a series of stories in his magazine that criticised Fraser for invading the privacy of his subjects. Fraser reacted by invading Hislop's privacy. "It was fantastically vindictive," Hislop says. "He had my list of Friends and Family. He even had my bank manager's number. He rang me up and just said: 'I've got your number', which was ex-directory. That was when we lived in London and then we moved out, and he rang me up at our new house, too. He just wanted to gather information about me. It was rather spooky that somebody could pay a little money and have all this information."

Some of the targets whose home details were obtained from BT are particularly sensitive because of crimes that have been committed against them or their families. They include Valerie Storie, who nearly died when she was attacked in the notorious 1961 crime for which James Hanratty was hanged; Lady Pamela Hicks and separately Lord Brabourne, respectively the daughter and grandson of Lord Mountbatten, who was killed by the IRA in 1979; Frances Lawrence, whose husband, Philip, was stabbed to death at the school where he was headmaster in 1995; and Elisa Ferraina, who died in the twin towers attack in September 2001.

Sometimes, the number appears to be sought simply so that a reporter can phone up for a quote, for example from the former director general of the National Trust, Sir Angus Stirling. On other occasions, it is part of a campaign of bitter harassment. When Brian Paddick was being pursued as a south London police commander, newspapers fished in the BT database in search of his former home addresses, apparently hoping to locate his ex-wife. When the Southampton football manager Dave Jones was wrongly accused of sex abuse during his earlier career as a care worker, a Fleet Street reporter paid Whittamore, who paid his Hells Angel, who rapidly acquired Jones's home address and ex-directory number. Among thousands of requests for confidential data, only one shows any sign of being defeated by BT's security system. When the Mirror Group tried to obtain the ex-directory numbers of George Harrison's home near Henley-on-Thames, the record of the request is marked 'No go – security tags'.

The security of other organisations proved to be just as porous as that of BT. The two bent employees at the DVLA routinely handed over personal data. Through Whittamore, journalists passed them car registration numbers in search of home addresses for the model Caprice Bourret; the former England football manager Glenn Hoddle; a football supporter caught up in a riot; a man who happened to park his car at a game of cricket in which the actor Hugh Grant was playing; and Robert Kilroy-Silk's son because they were interested in the state of his marriage. On one occasion, the DVLA sources handed over the details of a Jaguar that appears to have been used as an undercover vehicle for a government department.

The civilian police worker casually rifled the Police National Computer, covering his tracks by recording phoney reports from the public to justify each log-on and searching for dozens of criminal records, for example: for a young man who had died of a drugs overdose, who was of interest because his father is a well-known actor; of an actor who had appeared in a TV soap; the father of a Big Brother contestant; three Millwall football fans; the partner of a famous singer; and a woman suing her health authority.

The security around mobile phone companies was also penetrated, leaking home details, for example, for the snooker player Steve Davis and the former England footballer Tony Adams. One of the tabloids bought a photograph of a woman kissing a man who had once been married to a well-known comedian – and the woman's mobile phone company was conned into handing over her details. Frantic efforts by several different papers to uncover the romantic life of the former head of Ofsted, Chris Woodhead, included tricking a mobile phone company into providing his home address. In their efforts to prove that a Labour MP, Clive Betts, was having a relationship with a male Brazilian student, journalists hired the network to trick City of London College into handing over the student's mobile phone number and then to trick the mobile phone company into disclosing his home address.

The seized paperwork includes numerous requests for the home addresses of targets, some of which may have been found through perfectly legal searches of the electoral register. Others, however, appear to have involved accessing the social security database to find targets whose jobs exempted them from the electoral register, including a forensic psychologist working with criminals, and the then head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove.

The 1998 Data Protection Act would allow access to some confidential databases if the journalist were acting in the public interest. However, the public interest is not obvious in the work summaries that Whittamore listed on his weekly pay claims: "Bonking headmaster, Lonely heart, Dirty vicar, Street stars split, Miss World bonks sailor, Dodgy landlord, Judge affair, Royal maid, Witchdoctor, Footballer, TV love child, Junkie flunkie, Orgy boss, BBC gardening blunder, Hurley and Grant, EastEnders star … "

Text messages

In some cases, there is a strong scent of hypocrisy, for example in a Sunday paper's exclusive story about the relationship between the singer Ms Dynamite and her boyfriend's former partner, Sanshica Carew. The newspaper accuses Ms Dynamite of sending hostile text messages to Carew who, it reports, changed her phone number and was "horrified" when Ms Dynamite managed to get hold of it. On this very story, that newspaper also commissioned three illegal searches of the Police National Computer at £500 a time, looking for any sign of a criminal record for Ms Dynamite, her boyfriend or her manager.

There is the same scent around the newspapers covering the imprisonment of Michael Ahearne, formerly a star of the television programme Gladiators, who acted as a go-between for criminals who were bribing a police officer to supply information: those same newspapers were using Whittamore as a go-between for their own bribes to be paid to the civilian police worker to supply information.

Beyond the potentially illegal extraction of information from databases, Whittamore's network also conned information out of organisations including banks and prisons. Crédit Lyonnais, for example, was tricked into handing over the home phone number of one of its clerks, who had written an email describing a recent sexual adventure. Whittamore's network then got the clerk's home address out of the BT database.

Goldman Sachs and Hang Seng Bank also show up as targets as well as a Los Angeles hotel where a BBC executive was suspected of entertaining his lover; a theatre where Britt Ekland was performing; various locations that might have been used for Prince Edward's stag party; the post office that handed over the details of PO boxes owned by the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the jockey Kieren Fallon; and two prisons, Glen Parva and Stocken, apparently in search of information about Winston Silcott, who had been wrongly jailed for the murder of a police officer during the 1985 Tottenham riot.

This is by no means limited to the rich and powerful. The bulk of the victims appear to be ordinary people who happen to have strayed across the media's radar. Sometimes it is because they are linked to a celebrity: the people who moved into Lady Thatcher's former home in Dulwich; Wayne Rooney's mother; Carol Vorderman's brother; the former wife of the poet laureate Andrew Motion; the murderer Harold Shipman's daughter; and a man whose name happens to sound like Andrew Lloyd Webber's. Others are simply news fodder for the week: the man who was accused of driving his van into his former girlfriend's car, or the family whose teenage daughter ran off with her teacher.

And, with the exception of a handful of victims who were asked to make witness statements for the Information Commissioner's Office, none of them has ever been told.

Syrita Collins-Plante complained to the Press Complaints Commission that the Sunday People had invaded her privacy and harassed her in search of a story about the boxer Lennox Lewis, phoning her repeatedly until a police officer asked the newspaper to stop. The PCC ruled that her privacy had not been breached – without knowing that her private address and phone number had been blagged out of BT by Whittamore's network.

The newspapers who commissioned this activity were never prosecuted and attempts to prosecute Whittamore's network ended in fiasco with Whittamore and three others receiving conditional discharges, and a trial of other members collapsing before it even started. Gruniad

h/t Steel Magnolia

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