it's really difficult for me to sit here and talk about this because the whole point of fighting these newspapers is because i was so keen to have my privacy. i feel a sense of duty to expose them, as they've exposed us. prince harry and sir eltonjohn have launched legal action against the publishers of the daily mail. action is being taken- against the sun newspaper. legal action against the mirror group over allegations of phone hacking. who did you hack? it would be quicker to say- who i didn't hack, wouldn't it? it'd be easier. celebrities, politicians... i was living in this sort of super highway of illicit information. it was exciting. you felt like a spy.

i don't know to this day how many people have heard my deepest secrets, my desires. ..that phone hacking was not i practised by the mail on sunday or the daily mail. you have just about anybody who's ever appeared in a tabloid newspaper saying, "give me large wadges of cash, please." i think it's actually a legal scandal. it's not the money i'm after. it's to expose their guilt. it's justice. there was undoubtedly phone hacking. all of it from.

we would pay handsomely. about 30 something years ago, i got out of prison and i read an ad in the paper, and it said, wanted, private investigator, no experience necessary, and it turned out i had a knack for investigations, because i knew exactly how criminals think. i started working for all the british tabloids, around 1986. i'm the guy that tracked down jeffrey epstein's girl that was with the prince, that famous photograph. tracked her down to australia. i was asked to search for a lot

of british celebrities who had either lived in the united states or come here to do some work. david beckham, when he moved here, they wanted me to know about all of his neighbours, how he was being received in the neighbourhood, that sort of thing. john cleese, of course, was one of them. it was explained to me that danno in the la had been for a very long time been getting information. i met danno, i liked him enormously, he was very sympathetic, little bit of a rogue but i like people like that. what i was puzzled was, some of the stuff that he was having was things like social

security numbers and national health numbers. i said, "well, that's hardly fatal to my career!" he said, "no, you don't understand, once they have "that, it's very easy to persuade people that you're "allowed to have certain confidential information." it's what i referred to as the keys to the kingdom. what's going to happen is if somebody calls up the phone company, the first thing they're going to ask them, what's your social security number? what's your date of birth? you know, what's your favourite pet's name? if you have the information from the database, now they will just give you everything. if there was a scandal and the person had any kind of footing in the united states, the tabloidsjust knew that i could find somebody in a few minutes. and they were willing to pay. i was making $20,000-$30,000

a month from them. even though i am probably brilliant on databases, and i say that myself, i know what i can do, i'm really naive when it comes to trusting human beings. they wouldn't tell me anything about what the story was about. they would simply say, we want to find this person and we want to know everything about them. and so i didn't know what the results were from what i did. with litigation against mirror group continuing, attention turned to the country's biggest red—top tabloid.

so the news of the world and the sun were sister newspapers based on the same building. obviously, everybody knew phone hacking was going on at the news of the world, it was always denied it was going on at the sun. it has been difficult to find out information. but we say we have got evidence. sex scandal and soap have made the sun the biggest selling - newspaper in the - english—speaking world. the sun newsroom felt like a war room. it was 90 mph, it was frantic, real commercial pressure, we had to sell better than our rivals. we had to do better than our rivals. we were told on days where the mirror had got a great front page that heads will roll and somebody is going to have to be sacked for this because we should have had that, not the mirror. always, it was about exclusives, because it was the exclusive stories

that sold the paper. four years after they were married, sir paul mccartney and heather mills are splitting up. of course it was never going to be a quiet life, marrying a former beatle, but in a statement today the couple said the level of intrusion into their private lives had been so great, it made a normal relationship almost impossible. paul mccartney was untouchable because he was paul mccartney! national treasure, and nobody wants to pick up a paper that is slagging him off, simple. so heather mills kind of went through this, quite literally, honeymoon period. but when their relationship hit the rocks and it went wrong, the gloves came off. the press had it in for me, they took the side in my divorce and decided they would try and absolutely annihilate me and make me out to have a bad character and i wasjust vilified and abused. they generally started making

up loads of rubbish. but then, elements of truth started to come in and i was, like, how could they have known that? that was a phone conversation we had. we collected hours and hours and hours of this filming, i was like, "0k, they are still hacking, this "is still going on." we started writing incessantly, again, to the press complaints commission, who said they would deal with it, and they still never did. he's coming round with his camera! from then on, i always had two phones. at one point, i ended up with six. in the end, it felt like they started to find out all my numbers and work out where i was going. it made me afraid, you know, where are they? are they following me? what are they doing? and frightened to talk on the phone because you knew you were being listened to

but nobody would believe you. the most notorious private investigator in the phone hacking story is a man named glenn mulcaire. he was hired by news of the world to hack phones and he hacked the phone of milly dowler, the schoolgirl who was murdered and when that emerged in 2011, it shocked the country and the news of the world had to close. he was, for a while, the most hated man in britain. today, a rare sighting of glenn mulcaire, the private investigator in the eye of the storm, the man who phone hacked for the news of the world. i made a statement yesterday, and due to legal constraints, unfortunately at this stage i can make no more comment at the moment. with no apparent irony, he'd asked the media to respect the privacy of his family. we believe that glenn mulcaire worked for other newspapers on fleet street, including the sun. i listened to heather mills' voicemails for the sun. i hacked not only the target, heather mills, but friends and families and associates so they could get access to material from voice

messages left by heather. so glenn's skill was he was able to blag the phone company and he did that by posing as an employee of the phone company in one department, and calling somebody else in another department, pretending to be a colleague, and getting access to the internal database. so you've got somebody�*s telephone accounts, you can find out their itemised phone bills, the numbers they were calling, dates and times. more importantly, he could change the pin number in order to access people's voicemails. the pin number protected the voicemails, if he reset it to the default, he could hack into their phone. once you're on the inside of any phone companies,

or banks, or any institution, you're on the dance floor, you control all the information and it got results very, very fast. glenn mulcaire was not the only private investigator used by fleet street. there were a number of other private investigators who were hired by other newspapers, for example, milly dowler, we all know that glenn hacked milly dowler's phone and was punished for it, and the news of the world closed. but there is evidence that has been aired in court that he was not the only private investigator or the only newspaper that targeted the dowler family. i was accused of deleting milly dowler's messages. that was incorrect. i wasn't the only investigator, i wasn't the onlyjournalist

at that time investigating milly dowler. do you feel sorry that you hacked the phones of murdered victims? absolutely. my brother was killed, i've lost both parents. of course. absolutely heartfelt. it wasn't crossing a line? it wasn't instructed that way. he or she wasn't a murdered victim at the time, he said this needs to be hacked or this information needs to be laid back to them. there wasn't time to have a conversation of saying, this is regarding that and can you do that? it was actually, can you turn the number around, can you get the information back, and nothing else matters. it was totally, totally carnage. are you comfortable with the fact that some of your whistle—blowers are criminals and liars? you do have to be careful, for obvious reasons, particularly with private investigators, these were people who were paid

to blag, to lie for a living by the newspapers. so, as far as possible, you've always got to make sure that what they say and what they're telling you is backed up by evidence, by documents. heather mills, she brought a claim against the news of the world and the sun in 2017. part of heather mills' claim was an e—mail exchange between greg miskiw, glenn mulcaire�*s main handler and he went on to be convicted of phone hacking. that e—mail exchange is between greg and the sun. this is what the e—mail says, it's dated the 29th of may 2006. "monitored over the weekend, and there is nothing new. "she may not be using it at the moment. "we'll keep on,

but not hopeful. "have a couple of other irons in the fire." what we see there is the crucial part of that e—mail is the sentence, "she may not be using it at the moment." we say that is a direct reference to her phone. "she is not using it at the moment," in other words, "i can't access her messages and find out where she is." there is then a reply from the sun. "ok, thanks, greg. keep looking, mate." news group newspapers denied that the e—mail telling greg miskiw to keep looking was an instruction to access heather mills' voicemail. they say the e—mails were about monitoring an address connected with heather mills in order to ask for comment or get a picture. in 2019, news group newspapers paid heather mills a significant sum of money to settle their claim before it came to trial. they admitted to hacking

for the news of the world, but made no such admissions for the sun. news group newspapers, through the destruction of my public reputation, have also indirectly destroyed thousands and thousands of other innocent lives, through the profoundly negative impact that this has had on my landmine and animal and children charities and our ability to raise funds. but for the claimants, this was a landmark case that paved the way for further action. the e—mail gave the claimants' lawyers the confidence that ammunition for future cases might rest with internal newspaper documents. when someone sues a newspaper. each side have to give documents to each other. in the case of the sun, they will have to give any invoices, payments records or e—mails with a claimants name on it and it's a case

of piecing that together to build a picture of what happened at the sun and the unlawful information gathering we believe happened there. they are especially important because there are no whistle—blowing journalists like dan evans who have come forward to say hacking was going on at the sun and i saw it happen and so on so new and that kind of thing. all we have is the paper trail. by analysing the documents handed over by the sun, the team were able to gain what they considered crucial clues into stories that happened years earlier. members of the liberal democrat party to decide who will be their next leader. four liberal democrat leadership candidates have had their first chance to try to persuade activists that they are the right man to lead the party. the goal is to lead his party into power.

we cannot afford to spend the next century on the sidelines of british politics. towards the end of 2005, the leader of the liberal democrats — charles kennedy's drinking was becoming a problem. he stepped down and i suddenly found myself as being one of the favourites to become leader of the lib dems. my heart wasn't in it. it was a stupid idea, i was captured by the ego of it all and people saying you should do it. i am announcing this afternoon that i'm formally withdrawing for the candidate to be a leader of the liberal democrat party. i withdrew from the leadership contest and thought, "phew, that is a big relief!" i'm going to spend the weekend with my family, have some fun, go to the pictures, do some gardening, spend time with the children! the next morning, i woke up and opened the curtains and saw a couple of black cars in the village hall opposite our house and i thought, that's odd.

so, i went out to speak to the journalists and it was then that they dropped the bombshell that they had found out that in 2004, i had seen a male escort and they wanted to know what my comments were. i think i can honestly say there is hardly a day goes by where i don't still think about that moment. after 2006 and the scandal — which is the way i try and describe it now — i moved on and tried to get my life back on track. and then, out of the blue, the met police call me. they called me in for a meeting, "your phone "was hacked," and they revealed all of the details of what had happened when i was running for leader. i was in tears, i wasjust completely blown away by what they showed me.

there were tapes. tapes of voice messages that i'd never, ever got. i'd never, ever heard. these were messages from people such as the itv correspondent, tom bradby, they were messages that if i had got them, i might have done things differently. the reason i hadn't got them was because the news of the world had got them. mark oaten had been exposed on the sunday in the news of the world for a sex scandal. we believe that the sun said, can we have a piece of this? let's have a look at some of the other leadership contenders. simon hughes was one of them. it looks like you have been lying in the sun for a month! where have you been? costa del sol. we are in the middle of the campaign, the polling

appeared to suggest i was in the lead. we were all in good shape and good nick. mark oaten had been exposed on the sunday. 0n the tuesday, an e—mail is sent from the sun news editor. and that e—mail, remarkably, contained a summary of an itemised phone bill from simon hughes's home phone which cannot be obtained legally. there was a payment to a known private investigator. that was used to obtain phone bill data, itemised phone bills and phone numbers. this itemised phone bill showed calls to a gay chat line from simon hughes's home phone. there was a persistent call

from the sun saying they wanted to talk to me personally about a personal matter and not willing to talk to any of my team. at the time i didn't have any idea what the issue would be. the meeting with the sun journalist happened on the parliamentary state and the assertion he put to me was that they had evidence that i'd been making phone calls to a gay or man—to—man chattine~ _ they wanted to know what response i'd make to that. the word blackmail wasn't used in the conversation but fairly quickly i said, "yes, i accept that has happened." i've had relationships with women and men, i don't think it's a matter of public interest. it seemed to me it was better to be honest and upfront about that and hope that, in a way, that would be the end of it.

i was angry and embarrassed. i had never gone public about my sexuality, i'm a member of the christian church and it's an issue in the church. i had family members for whom this would have been difficult. my mum who was living on her own, widowed, it was difficult. effectively detonated my campaign. is lib dems policy now to lie until you're found out? mr hughes's disclosure to the sun comes just a week after an interview with the independent newspaper where he denied past homosexual experience. today, he apologised for misleading people. i went from being the favourite to being the outsider in the campaign within 24 hours. something is clearly wrong here where people can obtain private information of this sort which has no public interest in terms of how

the person does theirjob, whatjob they do, it is not illegal. this clearly is wrong. in 2019, simon hughes launched the first claim directly against the sun. the sun obtained illegally the itemised home phone bill of my associate and friend simon hughes and outed him against his will as bisexual in an article that was frankly intrusive and homophobic. dr evan harris, a former lib dems mp, discovered that his phone number was one of those listed in simon hughes' itemised phone bill. he also launched a claim against the sun and the news of the world. as with heather mills, news group paid to settle both cases before they went to trial. as a former director of hacked off, aren't you just a campaigner and aren't using the legal system now to have a go at the tabloid?

when i ran the hacked off campaign, i encountered victims of press abuse, whistle—blowers who wanted to say what had really gone on. that is a combination of knowledge and experience that is clearly helpful to claimants. the job we do as paralegals now is to assist the claimants. so, yeah, i'm a frustrated campaigner because thejob i am currently doing is focused on the legal side of things, but this appears to be the only

way for the truth to come out.

hello, there. some beautiful rainbows spotted again on thursday, particularly across parts of scotland, such as here in aberdeenshire. and there will be more rainbows on friday with sunshine and showers still very much the theme of the day but lots more dry weather to come in the forecast as we head through the weekend and into the start of next week now with high pressure starting to edge in from the west, killing off some of those showers by the time we get to the end of the afternoon. it's a cloudy, mild start to the day across england and wales. it's a little brighter further north across scotland and northern ireland. the focus of the showers gradually shifting further southwards as we head through the afternoon across the midlands, down through central southern england. now, there will be quite a brisk and a chilly northerly to northwesterly wind blowing, lightening again by the time we get to the end of the day.

and quite a range of temperatures, too — just eight celsius in aberdeenshire with that northerly wind but 15 celsius across the south—west of england. now, as we head through friday night, the skies will clear and away from north sea—facing coasts, which stay rather cloudy and breezy, then we could again see a touch of frost with temperatures dropping back to low single figures, so another chilly start to the weekend. now, the weekend — a lot of dry weather. in fact, it is looking mostly dry. we'll see some rain across scotland and there will be quite a bit of cloud around at times, especially towards the east, and a bit of east—west split in terms of temperature. with that high pressure over us, we're drawing in quite a chilly north—easterly wind, so those north sea—facing coasts. so here, it is always going to feel cooler and there will be quite a lot of cloud around as well — the north sea really quite cold at this time of year. so, west is best in terms of sunshine amounts and temperature, certainly. now, as we head through saturday, there's a warm front gradually easing its way across

the far north of scotland. this will bring some cloud, some outbreaks of rain. further south, it is largely dry but cloudy, drizzly perhaps towards these north sea—facing coasts. best of the sunshine out towards the west — it will get to 11! or 15 celsius perhaps here. some of the cloud could break up a little further eastwards, too, and that's also true on sunday, but temperatures towards these eastern coastal areas will really struggle to get much past eight or nine degrees. compare that to further west where, in parts of northern ireland, we could get to 17 degrees perhaps. feeling warmer here.

i want to welcome in our view is on pbs and we want to bring you some breaking news, this is a developing story. two us official tells cbs news, our us partner, that an israeli missile has hit iran. reports from iran say that explosions have been heard in the centre of the country. there are a few more details coming in, and iran news agency has reported a blast in the city of esfahan close has reported a blast in the city of esfa han close to has reported a blast in the city of esfahan close to the

airport. —— isfahan. iran reports that flights to tehran, isfahan and shiraz and airports in the west, northwest and southwest have been suspended. an iranian source tells reuters that its air defence system has been activated in the region. it was activated against, quote, "an object suspected to be a drone". in newsagency telling officials there had been three explosions heard near an army base in the city's north—west so we are getting more details coming in and we will continue to update the story as we get it. joining me live is mark kimmitt, former us assistant secretary of state for political—military affairs. it's great to have you on tonight with us as we get these details about a potential what we believe to be an israeli missile strike on iran. as you are hearing these reports coming in, what details stand

out to you?—