In 2005, Andy Coulson was the award-winning editor of the News of the World, presiding over a culture of ruthless exploitation. In the second extract from his new book Hack Attack, Nick Davies examines a world where there was only one rule – get the story at any cost • The pervasive power of Rupert Murdoch: the first extract from Hack Attack

Andy Coulson had a good view from his office. Sitting at his desk, he could look out through his glass wall and see the beating heart of the News of the World. Right in front of him was the “back bench” – the row of desks where he would often sit with his lieutenants, filtering all the material that was being pumped into the paper from news agencies and freelancers and from his own staff, making the decisions that shaped the paper.

Beyond the back bench, he could see the picture desk and then the news desk where several executives ran the news reporters who were cramped together in a group on the far side of the room and, next to them, the sub-editors who would check their stories and write their headlines. Around the edges of the newsroom were the feature writers, the sports writers, offices for a few other executives and a special cubicle for the royal editor, Clive Goodman. This was Coulson’s world, and he ruled it. But that wasn’t the best part of the view.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Coulson receiving the Newspaper of the Year award for the News of the World, 2004/5.

The best sight was over to his right, just to the side of the back bench, where he could always see it, where everybody could see it – the trophy cabinet. He had just ordered it – brand new – in April 2005, because he was proud of what his staff had achieved. This was the biggest-selling paper in the country – 3.5m copies every Sunday. It was probably the biggest-selling paper in the western world. It had the biggest budgets, the biggest impact. Nobody beat the News of the World. Which was why the new cabinet now displayed the biggest prize in British journalism – the award for Newspaper of the Year, 2004/5.

In the past 12 months, with the help of Glenn Mulcaire and his special skills in phone hacking, they had brought in one big scoop after another. David Beckham might be a great footballer, but they had accused him of sleeping with his personal assistant, Rebecca Loos, and spread the story over seven pages. A few months later, they had done the same with the England football manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, when they caught him having an affair with Faria Alam, a secretary at the Football Association. To top that, a month later they had exposed the home secretary, David Blunkett, who had been having an affair with a married American publisher, Kimberly Quinn. As a bonus, they discovered that a Guardian journalist, Simon Hoggart, was also having an affair with Quinn, so a few weeks later they had tossed him into the mix as well. Week after week, they had pounded the opposition papers.

The rise to the top

For Coulson, aged 37, this was a peak. He had come a long way in a short time. He had left school at the age of 18, armed only with some A-levels, a very good brain and one burning ambition: to become a showbiz reporter. It took him just two years of working on a local paper in Essex to hit his target. In 1988, aged 20, he was hired by the Sun to become part of the team that produced the gossip column, Bizarre. The column was brash and loud – just like its editor, Piers Morgan. It was obsessed with the private lives of rock stars, film stars, TV stars. Coulson was pitched into a world of A-list celebrities.

One of Coulson’s closest friends, Sean Hoare, who worked beside him on the column, used to start the day with what he called “a rock star’s breakfast” – a Jack Daniel’s and a line of coke – and then carry on partying with whichever PR people or celebs would find him a story to justify his expenses.

“My job,” Hoare used to say, “is to take drugs with rock stars.”

Those who liked Coulson used to say he was calm at the core. In spite of his youth, he seemed to have landed fully formed, with his light blue shirt and dark blue suit, all neat and grown up. Others said he was cold, that no matter what was going on, he would always survive; behind that mask of mild-mannered competence, he was ruthless.

Hoare was furious with him one time when Hoare brought in a story about a famous actress only to find that Coulson, first, refused to publish it; second, took the famous actress on holiday; third, was clearly being rewarded in her bed; fourth, and worst of all, told the famous actress how Hoare had managed to get the story in the first place, with the result that the source was exposed and lost forever.

When Hoare discovered all this, he told Coulson direct and to his face that he was a “complete cunt”. Coulson replied with a line which became a regular catchphrase as he worked his way upwards: “I’ll make it up to you, mate.” As though it didn’t matter what you did, because you could always throw a favour in somebody’s direction and just move on. Within six years, he had replaced Morgan as editor of the Bizarre column.

Four years later, in January 1998, Coulson climbed further up the tree and became associate editor of the Sun, working alongside the new deputy editor – a sharp, sassy, ambitious young woman called Rebekah. They already knew each other a bit. Now, the two of them bonded. People guessed they must be sleeping together, though nobody was sure. They made a team – they were both young and clever, they had both started with nothing, and they both shared an intense ambition. And together they made it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Happier days: Piers Morgan, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, 2004. Photograph: Dave M. Benett/Getty Images

In May 2000, Rupert Murdoch moved Rebekah Brooks to the editor’s chair at the News of the World. She immediately recruited Coulson as her deputy. He worked hard for her, set up a new investigations department, handled the detail of stories for her and made sure the staff were happy. He had a good reputation in the newsroom. While Brooks was off in the clouds, making contacts among very important people, Coulson would turn up at the staff parties and say hi to people in the newsroom. He rewarded himself with a Porsche Boxster with a top speed of 165 mph and a price tag of £35,000. But people began to notice that the more powerful he became, the more names he forgot. After a while, he was reduced to calling most of the men “mate” and most of the women “sweetheart”. Three years later, in January 2003, Rupert Murdoch gave Brooks the Sun to edit and made Coulson boss at the News of the World.

His new position gave him power, and he was happy to use it against those who crossed him. For example, he didn’t like Roy Greenslade, the former editor of the Daily Mirror who had become a professor of journalism at City University, London. So he withdrew the funding for two student places that the News of the World had been sponsoring.

The head of the City journalism department, Adrian Monck, had lunch with Coulson and sweet-talked him into restoring the funding. But, as he got up to leave, Coulson added: “One thing, mate. I want you to give me Roy’s head on a plate.” Monck refused: City lost its funding.

It was not simply that he was himself capable of being cold. More important, he was required to be ruthless. From Murdoch and the board of News Corp 3,500 miles away in New York, through the chief executive of News International, Les Hinton, who sat in the same building in Wapping, east London, the unstated message to him and to Brooks, and to every other editor in every other part of the empire was constant and simple: “Get the story – no matter what.”

Everything is for sale

It is an odd thing about newspapers, that they live by exposure, yet they keep their own worlds concealed. A little of the truth about Coulson’s newspaper begins to emerge in evidence provided by one of his former staff – hundreds of notes and emails and memos that his executives wrote for each other in 2005 as they strove to repeat the triumphs of the previous 12 months.

It begins with the readers. The friends of tabloid newspapers often point out that their journalism exists only because millions of people pay money to read it. The internal messages go one step further, disclosing the fervour with which readers stepped forward to provide the News of the World with the information it craved. Take one week early in 2005. A male prostitute reports “romping” in a sauna with a male TV presenter – “He wants to do kiss-and-tell and says his mate can corroborate the tale.” And a woman who went out with a Hollywood actor when he was 14 wants to sell the story of how he cheated on her. And a caller “claims to have pics of a prominent Crystal Palace player in a gay clinch with pals on holiday”. And another says: “I’ve got some information regarding [England footballer] and his ex-wife.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest News of the World cover about David Blunkett’s affair with Kimberly Quinn, August 2004.

As the weeks go by, the messages disclose an apparently endless line of men and women who have collected some fragment of human interest and are now offering it for sale (almost always for sale). As the messages flow on, the commercial side of this auction takes second place to something else more striking, something more human and more secret – a casual treachery. At the very least, these informants are betraying those they have come across through their work: a hotel porter who says he has got his hands on paperwork to prove that two TV presenters have just secretly spent the night together; a prison worker who reckons he can prove that an old heroin addict in one of his cells is the secret father of a singer in a girl band.

At worst, they are volunteering to sell the secrets of those who most trust them – their friends, lovers, family members. Some of them try to make sure of their sale by offering evidence to prove their story. A man has got in touch to say that he has just spent the night with a young actress from a TV soap, and that’s a story worth selling and, even better, he says that he managed to sneak a photograph of her giving him oral sex. Another message records a woman’s story about an England footballer: “Paula claims that she had a four-week fling with XX in Dec last year. She says they had sex in the back of his car in XX’s pal’s pub. Paula also says she has a jumper with XX’s semen on it.”

Everything is for sale. Nobody is exempt. What begins to emerge is the internal machinery of an industry that treats human life itself – the soft tissue of the most private, sensitive moments – as a vast quarry full of raw material to be scooped up and sifted and exploited for entertainment.

Back in the 1980s, the News of the World had specialised in digging into the privacy of criminals. In the 1990s, enriched by the excavation of Princess Diana’s volatile life, they had widened their work to mine the activities of any celebrity, any public figure. Now, they had gone even further. The whole of human life – of anybody, anywhere, who had news value – had become one mass of crude bulk for Coulson’s newsroom to extract and refine in a ruthless search for the most intimate, embarrassing, often painful details that could then be converted into precious nuggets for sale in a massive marketplace.

Divide and rule

Working in Coulson’s newsroom was not easy. It was dirty and difficult and, in some ways, it was dangerous. But they had to get the story. To run this place required a special kind of team.

There is a story that Coulson’s assistant editor Ian Edmondson often liked to tell, about the time when he was still only a junior reporter on the News of the World and he had a girlfriend who was a reporter on another newspaper. He liked to call her “Boobs”. It so happened, he would explain, that Boobs made friends with Tracy Shaw, a particularly eye-catching young actor from Coronation Street who was of great interest to the tabloids. As Edmondson told it, there was one night when the two women had gone out on the town together and afterwards, Boobs had confided in him that Shaw had done some coke. This was obviously a secret, he would say, and one which could cause trouble for Shaw and potentially for his girlfriend – but also it was obviously a good story for the News of the World. So, he recalled with some relish, he had persuaded the trusting Boobs to tell him the whole tale again, secretly recorded her every word and gave it to the paper.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Not well-liked: Ian Edmondson, who was assistant editor of the News of the World. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

A lot of people genuinely didn’t like Edmondson. He was relentlessly competitive, with everybody around him. He had to have the biggest car, the biggest salary. He was very fit. He cycled to work and ran during the lunch hour, but other people ran too, so he made a big show of carrying a rucksack full of bricks when he went out. But Coulson was apparently quite happy to take advantage of Edmondson’s burning urge to compete. In November 2004, when he hired him as associate news editor, he already had somebody doing the same job, Jimmy Weatherup. Coulson left both of them in place to fight for his approval. They loathed each other. The results were often chaotic. Weatherup would send out a reporter to cover a story. Edmondson would call the reporter and send him somewhere else. A reporter would come up with a story idea and tell it to Edmondson, who would take him aside and tell him to keep the idea quiet for a week – “Jimmy’s off next week, and I’d like to have something good for myself.”

Weatherup was older and more experienced than Edmondson. But Weatherup was no kind of street fighter. He appeared to be stuck in a 1970s time warp, playing the John Travolta part in Saturday Night Fever. He wore expensive suits and special gloves for driving and he had a well-known tendency, at the first sight of a sunny day, to turn up in the office in tight-fitting white tennis shorts.

All this created a regime in which the naturally intense rivalry between a mass-market newspaper and its competitors was made all the more furious by the back-stabbing tension between the two news editors. Coulson managed to increase the friction still higher by aggravating the long-standing competition between the news desk and the features department.

Coulson kept his hands close to the steering wheel. He chaired the daily conference when the heads of all the editorial departments – news, features, sport, showbiz, royal, politics – would pitch their ideas. He liked to show that he was on top of stories.

During the spring of 2005, for example, he personally oversaw a project to snatch an interview with the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he was serving his time for the murder of 13 women. This was kept very secret.

The reporter on the job was instructed not to tell colleagues. For maximum discretion, any senior editor could have managed the job, but Coulson liked to think he knew how to run an investigation and he duly authorised the payment of a hefty fee to Sutcliffe’s brother, Carl, and also the purchase of a camera and recorder that were specially designed to trick the metal detectors at Broadmoor. Carl Sutcliffe concealed them inside a plaster cast and visited his unsuspecting brother who then found himself splashed across the News of the World, primarily on the grounds that he had become fat – “a balding 17-stone slob”, as the paper put it.

The bully boys

Still, there was a limit to how much Coulson could intervene. He would sit in his office, banging out emails with terse instructions to those around him, but he relied on two lieutenants to enforce his will.

Each of them had offices that flanked his own at the top end of the newsroom. To Coulson’s left, looking out, was Stuart Kuttner, who had been the managing editor at the News of the World for nearly 15 years. Since 1987, he had served half a dozen editors in a role like that of the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction. If any kind of threat came out of any kind of dark corner – scandals in the newsroom, rebellious reporters, angry victims – Kuttner would deal with it, get rid of the body, clear up the blood. He was notorious for the vehemence of his bollockings. But primarily his power was financial. He was responsible for the editorial budget, and all those who worked for him agree that he treated the newspaper’s money as though it were his own: he wanted every penny accounted for.

Coulson’s second enforcer, in the office to his right, was his deputy editor, Neil Wallis. He was nearly 20 years older than Coulson; he had been in Fleet Street for years, moving from one tabloid to another, earning along the way a reputation for what one colleague described as “a psychopathic ability to divorce his emotions from his actions”. This colleague recalls Wallis at a leaving party strolling up to an executive whom he had shafted in his earlier career with a cheery smile and an extended hand, only to be told: “I’m not going to shake your hand until you’ve washed it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neil Wallis, who was Coulson’s deputy editor and known as the ‘wolfman’. Photograph: Jason Buckner

In some newsrooms, Wallis was known as “the wolfman”, possibly because of a story he had written to the effect that the Yorkshire Ripper was a Jekyll and Hyde character who killed only on full moons. At the News of the World, he was known as “the rasping fuckwit”, which was partly a reflection of his breathy voice but also a straightforward sign of disrespect.

News Corp’s demand for success at all costs was passed down from Coulson’s office to the news desk and the features department and then onwards to the journalists beneath them, and with it came a certain style of management, simply and repeatedly described by those who experienced it as “bullying”.

Hanging on the wall above the news desk, there was a digital clock that counted down the minutes to the next edition of the paper. In the human resources department, they logged the bylines of all the reporters, who were often reminded that those who slipped down the league table could expect to be hauled in for a bollocking or even to find themselves on the receiving end in the next round of redundancies.

Reporters who worked there speak of a deeply unpleasant “ideas” meeting on Tuesday mornings when they would all sit in a corner office while senior editors or their deputies told them that their ideas for stories were all useless, a judgment that was often reinforced by an email later in the morning telling them that those were the worst story proposals the news desk had ever heard and demanding three more ideas from each of them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest News of the World from April 2004 with the story about David Beckham’s alleged affair with Rebecca Loos.

Reporters tell, for example, of one senior editor trying to put an electronic tracker on one reporter’s phone to check on his movements; of a senior reporter being reduced to tears at his desk because his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and an editor refusing to let him have any time off work to look after her; of another who was sacked because he became a single parent and would not accept an editor’s ruling that “you belong to the News of the World”. When they were out on the road, they say, he liked to keep up the pressure by sending them texts – “tick tock” or simply “??”.

Since Rupert Murdoch broke the print unions and threw out the National Union of Journalists in 1986, the reporters had had no kind of protection. Some cracked. One is said to have tried to kill herself at a Christmas party. Mostly, however, they passed the bullying along to the people they dealt with. Several of them have described how they were encouraged to rip off the sources who sold them stories.

Some sources were naive. They would tell their story before getting a signed contract and would simply never be paid. One woman agreed to talk on the promise that the News of the World would pay for her to have a good holiday. When she tried to claim her reward, an editor declared that she was from up north, so she could stay in a caravan, for £150. Some got contracts and fell for an easy trick. The contract promised them big money if the story went on the front page. The reporter knew very well it would go inside the paper but kept that quiet. When the story came out and the source begged for something, anything, the reporter would offer them a tiny fee and, as one put it: “You wear them down and, in the end, they’ll take buttons.” A few – including a woman who had been raped by a footballer – fell foul of a clause which said that to the best of the source’s knowledge, the story must be true: the News of the World printed the story, claimed the source had been knowingly wrong about some part of it and refused to pay up.

Culture of hypocrisy

Some reporters say they had pangs of conscience, not least because of the eye-watering hypocrisy involved. The News of the World’s own newsroom was bubbling with affairs and outbreaks of sexual harassment, including a marked tendency during Coulson’s time to recruit young women who were encouraged to come into work wearing as little as possible. The paper had always been keen to expose orgies, but former News of the World journalists describe some of their own office parties as a model of drug-fuelled sexual adventure. They recall one mighty booze-up ending with an assistant editor outside the Chocolate Bar in Mayfair, scarcely able to walk and talking to a woman reporter while he held his penis in his hand.

The paper ruined a long list of more or less famous men by exposing the fact that they had visited prostitutes. And yet, in search of more of these stories, one News of the World reporter was told to make contacts among high-class sex workers with the specific instruction that he should have sex with them, do cocaine with them and claim it all on expenses. So he did.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest After the fall: the deserted News of the World newsroom, 2012. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images

On another occasion, according to one source, an editor wanted to expose a Premiership footballer for using prostitutes – and paid one to have sex with him. In the same way, they were ruthless in exposing any target who used illegal drugs, but there was no shortage of journalists using the same drugs. Former reporters tell stories of a Christmas disco where the dancefloor was almost empty while various guests resorted to the toilets to snort cocaine; and of a ripple of panic when the Sun let their anti-drug hound, Charlie the Sniffer Dog, loose in the newsroom.

Some of the journalists, including executives, were running on alcohol. A few ended up in expensive rehab clinics (exploiting the opportunity to find stories about fellow patients).

This was not just about hypocrisy. It was also the key to a crucial editorial distortion: regardless of the reality of the world they lived in, the News of the World was pretending in print that the nation lived by an antique moral code. It was fiction. It was also the cornerstone of their justification for their most destructive work.

There was no room for doubt or conscience. Human feelings did not come into it. The News of the World was exposing bad people – all in the public interest. Privacy did not come into it. Privacy was for paedophiles, as the former feature writer, Paul McMullan, used to say.

There was no escape. If a public figure admitted to using cocaine or enjoying sex, they had sacrificed their right to privacy. If a public figure refused to admit to using cocaine and enjoying sex, they were misleading the public, so they had no right to privacy in the first place. The News of the World might keep its own behaviour private. But that was different. The important thing was to get the story.

• This extract was edited on 12 August 2014 to remove references to James Weatherup which were incorrect and for which we apologise to Mr Weatherup.

• The pervasive power of Rupert Murdoch: the first extract from Hack Attack

Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch is published by Chatto & Windus on 31 July, priced £20. To order a copy for £16, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. It is published on 12 August in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux