Operation Weather

had misunderstood something Prime Suspect had said to them. Maybe Prime Suspect's lawyers had messed up. Whatever. There was definitely a mistake.

At Galbally's office, Mendax had refused to believe Prime Suspect had really turned. Not until he saw a signed statement. That night he told a friend, 'Well, we'll see. Maybe Chettle is just playing it up.'

Chettle, however, was not just playing it up.

There it was – a witness statement – in front of him. Signed by Prime Suspect.

Mendax stood outside the courtroom at Melbourne Magis- trates Court trying to reconcile two realities. In the first, there was one of Mendax's four or five closest friends. A friend with whom he had shared his deepest hacking secrets. A friend he had been hanging out with only last week.

In the other reality, a six-page statement signed by Prime Suspect and Ken Day at AFP Headquarters at 1.20 p.m. the day before. To compound matters, Mendax began wondering if Prime Suspect may have been speaking to the AFP for as long as six months.

The two realities were spinning through his head, dancing around each other.

When Galbally arrived at the court, Mendax took him to one side to go over the statement. From a damage-control per- spective, it wasn't a complete disaster. Prime Suspect certainly hadn't gone in hard. He could have raised a number of matters, but didn't. Mendax had already admitted to most of the acts which formed the basis of his 31 charges in his police inter- view. And he had already told the police a good deal about his adventures in Telecom's telephone exchanges.

However, Prime Suspect had elaborated on the Telecom break-ins in his statement. Telecom was owned by the govern- ment, meaning the court would view phreaking from their exchanges not as defrauding a company but as defrauding the Commonwealth. Had the DPP decided to lay those new charges – the Telecom charges – in February 1995 because