Phone-hacking scandal: Jonathan Rees obtained information using dark arts
Freemason set up network of corrupt police,
customs officials, taxmen and bank staff to gain valuable information
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/08/phone-hacking-scandal-jonathan-rees?intcmp=239
Nick Davies - guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 June 2011 20.56 BST
Years ago, Jonathan Rees became a freemason.
According to journalists and investigators who
worked with him, he then exploited his link with
the lodges to meet masonic police officers who
illegally sold him information which he peddled to Fleet Street.
As one of Britain's most prolific merchants of
secrets, Rees expanded his network of sources by
recruiting as his business partner Sid Fillery, a
detective sergeant from the Metropolitan Police.
Fillery added more officers to their network.
Rees also boasted of recruiting corrupt Customs
officers, a corrupt VAT inspector and two corrupt bank employees.
Other police contacts are said to have been
blackmailed into providing confidential
information. One of Rees's former associates
claims that Rees had compromising photographs of
serving officers, including one who was caught in
a drunken state with a couple of prostitutes and
with a toilet seat around his neck.
It is this network of corruption which lies at
the heart of yesterday's claim in the House of
Commons by Labour MP Tom Watson that Rees was
targeting politicians, members of the royal
family and even terrorist informers on behalf of
Rupert Murdoch's News International. The
Guardian's own inquiries suggest that Watson knows what he is talking about.
Much of what the police sources were able to sell
to Rees was directly related to crime. But Rees
also bought and sold confidential data on anybody
who was of interest to his Fleet Street clients,
to which the police often had special access. The
Guardian has confirmed that Rees reinforced his
official contacts with two specialist 'blaggers'
who would telephone the Inland Revenue, the DVLA,
banks and phone companies and trick them into handing over private data.
One of the blaggers who regularly worked for him,
John Gunning, was responsible for obtaining
details of bank accounts belonging to Prince
Edward and the Countess of Wessex, which were
then sold to the Sunday Mirror. Gunning was later
convicted of illegally obtaining confidential
data from British Telecom. Rees also obtained
details of accounts at Coutts Bank belonging to
the Duke and Duchess of Kent. The bank accounts
of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, are also thought to have been compromised.
Confidential data
The Guardian has been told that Rees spoke openly
about obtaining confidential data belonging to
senior politicians and recorded their names in
his paperwork. One source close to Rees claims
that apart from Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Peter
Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, he also targeted
Gaynor Regan, who became the second wife of the
former foreign secretary Robin Cook; the former
shadow home secretary Sir Gerald Kaufman; and the
former Tory cabinet minister David Mellor.
It is not yet known precisely what Rees was doing
to obtain information on these political targets,
although in the case of Mandelson it appears that
Rees acquired confidential details of two bank
accounts he held at Coutts, and his building
society account at Britannia. Rees is also said
to have targeted the bank accounts of members of Mandelson's family.
An investigator who worked for Rees claims he was
also occasionally commissioning burglaries of
public figures to steal material for newspapers.
Southern Investigations has previously been
implicated in handling paperwork that was stolen
by a professional burglar from the safe of Paddy
Ashdown's lawyer, when Ashdown was leader of the
Liberal Democrats. The paperwork, which was
eventually obtained by the News of the World,
recorded Ashdown discussing his fears that
newspapers might expose an affair with his secretary.
Computer hacking
The successful hacking of a computer belonging to
the former British intelligence officer Ian Hurst
was achieved in July 2006 by sending Hurst an
email containing a Trojan programme which copied
Hurst's emails and relayed them back to the
hacker. This included messages he had exchanged
with at least two agents who informed on the
Provisional IRA — Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed
Stakeknife; and a second informant known as Kevin
Fulton. Both men were regarded as high-risk
targets for assassination. Hurst was one of the
very few people who knew their whereabouts. The
hacker cannot be named for legal reasons.
There would be further security concern if
evidence finally confirms strong claims by those
close to Rees that he claimed to have targeted
the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir
John [now Lord] Stevens, who would have had
regular access to highly sensitive intelligence.
Sir John's successor, Sir Ian Blair, is believed
to have been targeted by the News of the World's
full-time investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. Assistant
commissioner John Yates was targeted by Rees when
Yates was running inquiries into police
corruption in the late 1990s. It appears that
Yates did not realise that he himself had been a
target when he was responsible for the policing
of the phone-hacking affair between July 2009 and January 2011.
Targeting the Bank of England, Rees is believed
to have earned thousands of pounds by penetrating
the past or present mortgage accounts of the then
governor, Eddie George; his deputy, Mervyn King,
who is now governor; and half-a-dozen other
members of the Monetary Policy Committee.
Rees carried out his trade for years. His career
as a pedlar of privacy stretches back into the
1990s, when he worked assiduously for the Daily
Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the News of the World.
Rees and Fillery had three key media contacts,
some of whose conversations with them were
recorded by a police bug in their south London
office: Doug Kempster from the Sunday Mirror, who
was recorded suggesting that "Asians look better
dead"; Gary Jones from the Daily Mirror, who was
recorded as Rees told him that some of what he
was doing for the Mirror was illegal; and Alex
Marunchak, the executive editor of the News of the World.
This lucrative career was crudely interrupted in
September 1999 when Rees was arrested and then
jailed for plotting to plant cocaine on a woman
so that her ex-husband would get custody of her
children. Sid Fillery similarly ran into trouble
with the long of the arm of the law which he was
so keen to twist. He was arrested, convicted for
possession of indecent images of children and
retreated to Norfolk to run a pub. Rees, however,
emerged from prison in May 2004 and proceeded to
carry on trading, this time exclusively for the
News of the World, then being edited by Andy
Coulson, who went on to become David Cameron's media adviser.
The scale and seriousness of Rees's activities
have worrying implications for Operation Weeting,
the Scotland Yard inquiry which finally — unlike
its two predecessors — is making a robust attempt
to get to the truth of the scandal. Weeting has
been told to focus on one private investigator,
Glenn Mulcaire; on one illegal technique,
phone-hacking; which he deployed for the one
newspaper which paid him on a full-time contract,
the News of the World. That alone is consuming
the full-time efforts of 45 officers.
The truth is that Mulcaire was only one of a
dozen different investigators, many of whom used
other illegal techniques. And the News of the
World, as journalists all over Fleet Street know,
was not the only enthusiastic employer of these
dark arts. Mulcaire and his phone-hacking became
the single focus through the simple fluke that he
was clumsy enough to get caught interfering with
the voicemail of the royal household — the one
target which would finally move the police into
taking on a Fleet Street paper. The police
famously failed to look beyond him, and it is
only now that the rest of the truth is beginning to emerge.
With the new disclosures of Rees's operation
there will be pressure on Weeting to expand its
inquiry, which would involve recruiting still
more officers. And, in the background, there is a
small queue of other investigators waiting to
have their names — along with their Fleet Street
clients — added to Weeting's list of suspects.
High among them will be a former Metropolitan
police detective who was accused of corruption in
the early 1980s and forced out of his job after a disciplinary hearing.
Senior Yard sources say this detective then came
up with a novel form of revenge. He acquired a
press card and proceeded to act as a link between
Fleet Street crime correspondents and the network
of corrupt detectives he knew so well.
Former crime reporters from several national
newspapers have told the Guardian that they used
this detective to carry cash bribes — thousands
of pounds in brown envelopes — to serving
officers. Scotland Yard for years has been aware
of his activity and has attempted but failed to catch him and stop him.
The crime reporters say that one reason for the
Yard's failure is that, when the Yard tried to
stop the corruption, serving officers tipped them
off so they could evade detection.
And there is more. The Guardian has identified a
total of eleven specialist 'blaggers' who were
paid by wealthy clients, including Fleet Street
newspapers, to steal medical records, bank
statements, itemised phone bills, tax files and
anything else that was both confidential and newsworthy.
• This article was amended on 9 June 2011. The
original referred to the then Metropolitan Police
Commissioner, Sir John Stephens. This has been corrected.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/08/phone-hacking-scandal-jonathan-rees?intcmp=239
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"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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