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Suspicions About Former Editor in Battle Over Story Complicate Hacking Scandal

LONDON — On Dec. 21 last year, The Daily Telegraph was preparing to publish a blockbuster exclusive: Vince Cable, the government’s business secretary, had been caught on tape boasting that he had “declared war” on Rupert Murdoch and would find a convenient legal excuse to block the News Corporation’s bid for British Sky Broadcasting, Britain’s most lucrative satellite television network.

But the day before The Telegraph was to run the article, the paper was scooped by Robert Peston, the business editor of the BBC. Mr. Peston reported that “a whistle-blower” had provided him with a secretly recorded conversation between The Telegraph’s undercover reporters and Mr. Cable.

Senior editors at The Telegraph, furious that Mr. Peston had somehow beat them on their own story, suspected they were the victims of corporate espionage.

As the editors saw it, the person who stole the audiotape of Mr. Cable was either an enemy of the newspaper or someone with a motive to see Mr. Cable replaced by an official more willing to push forward the Murdochs’ bid for BSkyB, as the network is known.

Or, perhaps, the perpetrator was someone who fit both bills. The editors said they instantly suspected the hidden hand of William Lewis, the newspaper’s former editor in chief, who was dismissed from the Telegraph Media Group in May 2010 after a dispute with company executives. Mr. Lewis was now working at News International, the British subsidiary of the News Corporation.

The editors’ suspicions grew when a computer technician at The Telegraph, Jim Robinson, left in January to work for Mr. Lewis at News International. The two celebrated the appointment over pints at a pub.

The episode is significant because in recent weeks Mr. Lewis, 42, has emerged as a leader of the News Corporation’s campaign to clean up the phone-hacking and police bribery scandal that has engulfed the company and raised questions about the judgment of its top executives. He is a member of the News Corporation’s Management and Standards Committee.

The tale of the tape is yet another twist in a scandal that has ricocheted between the people making the news and those reporting it. Those in the anything-goes British press corps had already been suspicious of one another’s methods and motives. Now, every “splash” — a tabloid’s Page 1 story — is assumed to have been “nicked,” or stolen, by a hacked phone or other illicit means.

Within days of Mr. Peston’s scoop last December, The Telegraph hired Kroll, the security firm, to try to determine whether the newspaper was the victim of computer hacking or outright theft of the audio recording, and to identify who might have been responsible.

“It is a matter of record that Kroll was commissioned to investigate the unauthorized removal in December 2010 of an audio recording from Telegraph Media Group,” a Telegraph spokesman said Friday. “They concluded that the removal of the recording was, in all probability, an act of theft orchestrated by an external organization.”

Kroll found circumstantial evidence that Mr. Lewis and Mr. Robinson were behind the episode, according to a summary of its work, though it stressed in its report that investigators had not found direct proof of the link.

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William Lewis, left, and Rupert Murdoch. Mr. Lewis is a leader of the News Corporation's effort to deal with the current scandal.Credit...Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Mr. Lewis declined to answer questions about the episode but released a statement through a spokesman. “This is a clear attempt to undermine the strong working relationship between News Corp.’s Management and Standards Committee and the Metropolitan Police Service,” Mr. Lewis said. “Nothing will prevent us from continuing to cooperate fully with Operation Weeting,” the police investigation into illegal phone hacking at The News of the World, a Murdoch newspaper, now defunct, at the heart of the scandal.

A News International spokesman said Mr. Robinson had declined to comment.

Neither Mr. Peston nor the BBC would answer questions on how he had obtained the interview.

Kroll also declined to be interviewed for this article, saying it does not remark on matters concerning clients.

The Telegraph spokesman declined to comment further or to identify remedies it might have put in place to prevent such an episode from recurring.

The New York Times has pieced together a detailed account of Kroll’s internal inquiry through interviews with executives at The Telegraph and a review of Kroll’s executive summary of its work, which was completed last March.

Kroll found that a tight circle of former employees had “strong motivations to damage The Telegraph,” and that they included Mr. Lewis. Kroll investigators concluded that as The Telegraph was preparing its article in December, Mr. Lewis learned about it from a former colleague at the newspaper.

Kroll wrote in its report that it suspected that Mr. Lewis was “involved in orchestrating the leak of the information.”

Kroll concluded that the leak was “a result of unauthorized access to” the newspaper’s computer systems, “most probably from within the organization and by someone with access to it.”

Investigators then tried to determine who on the newspaper’s technology staff had access to the audio file of the Cable interview. They found about 15 people, but quickly focused on Mr. Robinson, the head of the technical support desk. Shortly after the leak, Mr. Robinson resigned to join News International “on unusually favorable terms,” the Kroll report said.

Kroll found that before departing The Telegraph, Mr. Robinson reformatted his iPad, erasing all the data, and cut up the SIM card to his iPhone. “As such it has been impossible to conclude whether there had been incriminating evidence on the devices,” Kroll said.

A senior executive at The Telegraph said that although the paper could not prove that Mr. Lewis and Mr. Robinson were involved, “they had all the motive to do this.”

“You can see how this would impress Will Lewis’s new masters,” said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The scoop was taken from us and given to Peston for maximum impact. And it was portrayed as if we had sat on a scoop. This would give Will Lewis big credibility in the eyes of his new bosses. And he had another motive — revenge against us. He wanted to make this organization look silly.”

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Vince Cable, the British government's business secretary.Credit...Matthew Lloyd/Bloomberg News

The consequences of the BBC report were enormous. Mr. Cable, a Liberal Democrat, handed over the BSkyB review portfolio to Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative culture secretary, who proceeded to greenlight Mr. Murdoch’s acquisition. (The deal ultimately did not survive the hacking scandal.) The transfer was seen as a major coup by executives inside News International.

At the same time, editors at The Telegraph were questioned by others in the press about why they had not yet published the comments Mr. Cable had made against Mr. Murdoch.

The episode also sheds light on the close relationship between Mr. Lewis and Mr. Peston, the BBC business editor. Both men hail from north London, and have known each other for two decades.

Mr. Lewis was hired in 1994 by Mr. Peston to join an investigations team at The Financial Times, where they worked together closely. Mr. Lewis went on to the New York bureau of the paper and eventually became the main news editor there. He joined The Telegraph in 2005.

In recent weeks, Mr. Peston has landed several scoops about sensitive information that was passed by News International to the Metropolitan Police Service. The reports concerned police officers who were alleged to have accepted bribes from reporters at The News of the World.

Many of those leaks appeared to be intended to shift the focus from News International’s current leadership to Scotland Yard and Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy in phone hacking and of bribing police officers.

According to several executives at the News Corporation, the leaks most likely came from within the company.

They prompted the Metropolitan Police to release an extraordinary statement saying it was “extremely concerned” about the release of selected information that was known only “by a small number of people.” The police said the leaks “could have a significant impact on the corruption investigation.”

On the BBC Thursday night, Mr. Peston reported that the standards committee run by Mr. Lewis had fired an editor at The Sun for “previous work” he had done at The News of the World.

Shortly after, Tom Watson, a Labour member of Parliament, accused Mr. Peston on Twitter of “distracting” readers from questions that were raised earlier in the day about the veracity of James Murdoch’s testimony at a Parliamentary committee hearing.

Mr. Watson, who had questioned the Murdochs at the session on Tuesday, told Mr. Peston that “you are being spoon-fed stories” and accused him of being “a patsy” for News International.

Mr. Peston dismissed Mr. Watson’s accusations, saying on Twitter that they did not dignify a reply.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Suspicions About Former Editor in Battle Over Story Complicate Hacking Scandal. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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