Claude Rains* would agree

Don Van Natta and Ravi Somaiya have an article in The New York Times about yet-more phone hacking in Britain:

Shortly after Scotland Yard began its initial criminal inquiry of phone hacking by The News of the World in 2006, five senior police investigators discovered that their own cellphone messages had been targeted by the tabloid, and had most likely been listened to. The disclosure, based on interviews with current and former officials, raises the question of whether senior investigators feared that, if they aggressively investigated, The News of the World would punish them with splashy articles about their private lives. Some of their secrets, tabloid-ready, eventually emerged in other news outlets. Those damaging allegations, about two of the senior officers’ private lives, involved charges that one had padded his expense reports and was involved in extramarital affairs, and that the other used frequent flier miles accrued on the job for personal vacations.
“If it is true that police officers knew their phones had been hacked, it is a serious matter that requires immediate investigation,” said John Whittingdale, the chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, which investigated phone hacking. “It would be shocking.”
The lead police investigator on the phone-hacking case, Andy Hayman, left the Metropolitan Police in December OF 2007 after questions were raised in the news media about business expenses he had filed, and the nature of his relationship with a woman who worked for the Independent Police Complaints Commission. At the time, Channel 4 News reported details of four hundred text messages and phone calls that Hayman had sent to her.
John Yates, the assistant commissioner who has become a lightning rod for the police’s handling of the phone-hacking case, had reportedly used frequent flier miles earned in the line of duty to pay for flights for his relatives.
The outlets that reported these allegations have not been implicated in the hacking.
Members of Parliament will question Hayman, Yates, and several other senior police officials at a hearing of the Home Affairs Select Committee to try to determine why the Metropolitan Police decided to strictly limit the initial phone-hacking inquiry in 2006. One area of inquiry is whether the fact that the officials’ phones had been hacked had any impact on the scope of their initial investigation, according to two members of the committee. They are also concerned about whether the investigators had a conflict of interest because they themselves were victims of the people they were investigating.
Among the eleven thousand pages of documents seized from the home of The News of the World’s phone-hacking specialist, Glenn Mulcaire, in August of 2007, the investigators also found the names of Sir Ian Blair, then the Metropolitan Police commissioner, and at least two other senior police officials involved in the inquiry, according to several former senior Scotland Yard officials. The officials declined to reveal the names of the other investigators. Sir Ian declined to comment.
In the autumn of 2006, the police notified only a handful of victims that their cellphone messages had been hacked, even though there was evidence that News of the World journalists might have gained access to the messages of nearly four thousand people. The top police officials learned they had been hacked after an eight-to-ten-page list of potential victims was assembled that fall for Hayman, several former Scotland Yard officials said.
In January of 2007, Mulcaire and Clive Goodman, the paper’s royalty reporter, pleaded guilty to gaining access to the messages of aides to the royal family and were sentenced to prison. The inquiry was then concluded. For years after that, Scotland Yard officials, including Yates, insisted that there was no evidence of further hacking, a claim he repeated in 2009. A Scotland Yard spokesman declined to discuss whether any senior officials’ phones had been hacked. “We will not comment on media speculation or give a running commentary on our investigation,” the spokesman said.
In an interview published by The Telegraph, Yates apologized for the initial Scotland Yard inquiry, acknowledging that it was lax and ineffectual. “I have regrettably said the initial inquiry was a success,” Yates said. “Clearly that looks very different now.” In Parliament, two Labour Party lawmakers, Chris Bryant and Tom Watson, accused Yates of lying, and renewed calls for his resignation.
At the upcoming hearing, the Parliament panel is also scheduled to question Sue Akers, who is leading the Metropolitan Police’s new phone-hacking inquiry, known as Operation Weeting, which began last January. At the same time, Scotland Yard is also investigating allegations that News of the World reporters had passed more than £100,000 in bribes (about $160,000 at current exchange rates) to police officers in exchange for inside information. Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor, was arrested on Friday. Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, which published The News of the World, is expected to be interviewed by the police this week. More arrests are expected in the coming days, officials said.
Allegations of further improper connections between Scotland Yard and The News of the World are still emerging. Reports from the BBC and The Guardian suggested that officers in the Specialist Operations branch, which protects the royal family, and which Hayman commanded when he was conducting the initial inquiry into the hacking, had sold information about members of the royal family to Goodman, the News of the World royalty reporter.
But why the initial Scotland Yard inquiry was so limited is a main focus of the hearing. Mark Lewis, a lawyer who represents a number of high-profile hacking victims, said in an interview that he believed that Hayman was unwilling to investigate phone-hacking because he feared that the newspaper would reveal his relationship with a woman who worked at the Independent Police Complaints Commission. “He feared that, if News International had become displeased with the investigation, there would be very serious consequences for him,” Lewis said. In evidence given to the Home Affairs Committee, Lewis wrote: “It became public knowledge that throughout the period of the investigation into voice mail hacking, Hayman was involved in a controversial relationship with a woman who worked for the Independent Police Complaints Commission and was claiming expenses.” Hayman did not respond to several messages seeking comment. He said last year that he had done nothing wrong, but declined to comment further for an article in The New York Times Magazine. After leaving the police in December of 2007, Hayman was hired by News International as a columnist for The Times of London. He has written nearly a hundred columns for the newspaper, including one in 2009 that defended the original phone-hacking inquiry, saying that only top detectives had been assigned to it and that the inquiry had left “no stone unturned.” It is not known whether The News of the World has targeted the phones of two additional senior Scotland Yard officials who worked on the initial criminal inquiry in 2006, Peter Clarke and Philip Williams. Clarke is also scheduled to testify before the select committee in Parliament. The relationship between Scotland Yard and News International is another area of the committee’s inquiry. Former and current senior Scotland Yard officials told The New York Times Magazine last year that one reason the criminal inquiry was not aggressively pursued was that senior police officers enjoyed a close relationship with editors at The News of the World.
In September of 2006, Scotland Yard’s deputy commissioner at the time, Paul Stephenson, had dinner with Neil Wallis, who was then the deputy editor of The News of the World, The Mail on Sunday has reported. The meeting occurred just one month after the arrests of Mulcaire and Goodman.

*Rico says that Claude Rains is who said it in Casablanca, of course: