The Crown Prosecution Service said on Tuesday that Mr. Coulson and Ms. Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, were among five people to be charged as part of a police inquiry called Operation Elveden. The investigation ran in parallel with other investigations related to a phone hacking scandal that led to the closing of The News of the World.

Among the five were Clive Goodman, a former royalty correspondent at The News of the World, who served a brief jail term in 2007 for hacking into voice mail accounts in the royal household. A sixth potential suspect, apparently a public official, is still being investigated.

Mr. Coulson was deputy editor of The News of the World from 2000 to 2003 and editor from 2003 to 2007, when he became Mr. Cameron’s spokesman. He resigned from that post in 2011 as the hacking scandal intensified. The charges against him relate to two periods between August 2002 and January 2003 and January and June of 2005, before he joined Mr. Cameron’s office, the prosecutors said.

When he hired Mr. Coulson, Mr. Cameron said he accepted his aide’s assurances that he was not involved in any criminal wrongdoing while editing The News of the World. But the Labour opposition has frequently accused Mr. Cameron of poor judgment for taking him on and defending him before he quit.

Ms. Brooks, who was editor of The Sun tabloid from 2003 to 2009, will face charges along with John Kay, the newspaper’s chief reporter from 1990 to 2011, and an employee of the Defense Ministry, Bettina Jordan-Barber.

Ms. Brooks is among a group of former Murdoch employees who are to face trial next year on charges related to the scandals.

Altogether, more than 50 former newspaper executives, lawyers, editors, reporters and investigators have been arrested and questioned in extensive police inquiries.

Before her fall, Ms. Brooks was a close confidante of Mr. Murdoch and one of the most powerful figures in the British news media. Over nearly 20 years with the company, she rose rapidly to become editor of The News of the World, a weekly, and later of The Sun, Britain’s most widely circulated daily paper, before being promoted to chief executive of News International in 2009.