DO DIANA'S SECRET TAPES STILL EXIST IN A N.Y. VAULT?

DIANA’S SECRET TAPES FORCED CHARLES TO ADMIT HE IS AT CENTRE OF ROYAL SCANDAL by Gordon Thomas

Prince Charles’ aides panicked him into revealing he is at the centre of a serious allegation – after the aides learned intimate details still exist on one of seven video tapes Princess Diana made before her death six years ago.

The tapes were filmed at her request by a former BBC cameraman. Last week, he was interviewed by a senior MI6 officer at his home in California.

Afterwards, he broke six years of self-imposed silence to disclose all he knows about the tapes in an exclusive interview.

His revelations are guaranteed to escalate the crisis now engulfing the Royal Family. “I was told by the intelligence officer that the tapes involve important matters for not just Charles, but the entire Royal Family. I cannot therefore say where the tapes are today. But they have definitely not been destroyed,” he said.

Sir Michael Peat, the prince’s private secretary, learned last Thursday that the tapes still exist.

Charles was immediately informed when he arrived in Oman. Next day, he issued his unprecedented denial to try and end mounting speculation about the incident.

The cameraman said he was told the tapes were stored in a bank vault in the United States.

Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrel, has denied “they are anything to do with me”. This week, Royal legal advisers will explore how they can recover the videos that not only contain intimate details of Diana’s marriage to Charles – but also deal with his relationship with Michael Fawcett.

Last week, Fawcett failed to keep his own name secret after the High Court in London refused to continue his injunction for privacy.

Prior to the four day court battle, a senior courtier at Clarence House had leaked to a Sunday national newspaper last week that the videos had been destroyed. It was the opening shot in a desperate effort to avert the now burgeoning Royal scandal – culminating in the prince’s extraordinary denial that no British newspaper can legally reveal what the allegation is based on.

Lurid details of the allegation are now widely published on the Internet. European and American media are planning to publish their versions of an allegation that no British newspaper can yet report.

That was the final reason the former BBC cameraman agreed to talk. “I feel it important people in Britain know the facts. Then they can judge for themselves whether Sir Michael Peat’s statement can be the final word,” he said.

He requested his name and whereabouts in California should not be identified. His identity is known to this newspaper and his request will be respected.

“I have seen too many media feeding frenzies to be part of this one. I just wish to set the record straight on certain matters.

“There were seven tapes, not twenty as reported. They were shot on a camera Diana provided. My job was to set-up the technical side, framing and lighting.

“She retained the tapes. She told me she was placing them in a bank vault in America. I understand a close friend in New York arranged this.

“I believe the tapes still remain in the vault. I have made a statement about all this to the intelligence officer so that it can be given to the appropriate persons advising Charles.” The cameraman said he had “probably been offered the film job because I was known as a safe pair of hands. I had also worked on several Royal-related films for the Beeb and knew the form.”

From time to time, he consulted notes he had made at the time of filming to refresh his memory. He spoke in a soft, modulated accent. It was agreed he would not be recorded. “This is a one-off. I’m doing no more interviews,” he said at the outset.

This is what the cameraman said are on the Diana tapes. “She describes the incident that is now at the centre of what is happening. She spoke of her concern about Charles relationship with Fawcett. She believed it played an important part in the end of her marriage.

“She was very calm and factual. The only time I sensed her pain was when she spoke of Camilla Parker-Bowles. On one tape, she talks of catching Charles and Camilla de flagrante. She reveals that she had listened in to their phone sex talk. She said that Camilla was the raunchier of the two.

“On another tape she spoke of how she had pleaded with Charles to give up Camilla for the sake of the children.

“Diana said she had asked Princess Anne and Prince Andrew to help. She said they refused to lift a finger.

“But time and again, she came back to Fawcett. She described how she came across he and Charles whispering to each other in Palace corridors (Kensington Palace). Several times, she said she didn’t like the way he seemed to dominate Charles, not just in a physical way, but mentally also.

“On one video, she spoke at length about sexual goings on among the Royal Household staff. She claimed Charles tolerated it. I made a note after one video filming that she spoke of one staff party being like something out of Caligula.”

The cameraman described how he came to be asked to work on the film. “In February 1997, I was approached by a former colleague at the BBC. He explained that Diana was not happy with the BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir and wished to make her own film. I was asked if I was interested. A fee of £5,000 was mentioned. A few days later, I was in Kensington Palace, in the same room where Bashir had done his famous ‘three in a bed’ interview with Diana.

“Diana explained she would not need me to ask any questions to prompt her and she said she had been coached in how to face a camera.

“From the start, she was very professional. All I had to do was supervise the camera. She would talk into it. There would be no “cutaways’ or what are known in TV as ‘bridging shots’. She said that after each video I would check its quality and hand it to her. There would be no other copy made.

“The first filming took place in early March 1997. I arrived by taxi at Kensington Palace. She was waiting for me in the drawing room. I set up the camera and positioned the chair on which she sat. It was like doing a home movie, a video diary. I used the room lights. “The first video runs for an hour. The others, I recall, were a little shorter. The last one was about 40 minutes and dealt with her hopes for the children.

“At the end of the final session, she handed me an envelope. It contained my full fee in cash.”

The cameraman emphatically denied reports that the tapes were the ones which had been seized from Paul Burrel’s home in Cheshire two years ago.

“Whoever was involved in those tapes, it was not me. Burrel was not there when I worked with Diana. Also the report that Diana was emotional when filming is not true. She was very calm and knew exactly what she wanted to say. There were no hesitations or retakes. It was a very professional performance,” he said.

“I asked her what she planned to do with the tapes. She smiled and said ‘keep them in a safe place’, something like that. I later learned they had been couriered to a close friend in New York to place in a bank vault. I am told the tapes still exist.”

The decision to involve the secret intelligence service came after high-level discussions in Whitehall.

“While the tapes are unlikely to have any bearing on national security, their contents have a direct bearing on the Royal Family and it is the duty of the security service to protect the Crown,” said a source.

The world’s foremost private detective, Julius Kroll, will be asked to help Prince Charles recover the videos.

On returning to Britain, Charles was told by Royal lawyers that they could mount a successful case to reclaim the tapes as they form part of Diana’s copyright over which Princes William and Harry could now claim full rights.

Prince William and Camilla Parker-Bowles, key members of the crisis management team Charles set up before he flew home from Oman, will also urge him to have an urgent meeting with Britain’s two security chiefs to explore what one Royal insider has called “a plot to destabilise the entire Royal Family”.

Both Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of MI5, have already indicated in briefings to Downing Street that “the sustained campaign of smears” is already having a world wide effect on the Royal Family.

Kroll and his team of high-priced detectives – the firm charges Stg £1,000 an hour upwards – have been employed by governments all over the world to discover the hidden secrets of the powerful and notorious.

The US government used them to uncover the whereabouts of billions of dollars hidden by Philippine’s president Ferdinand Marco and his wife, Imelda. The Haitian government asked Kroll to trace even more billions laundered through world banks by the island’s former dictator, Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

Currently the agency is helping to locate Saddam Hussein’s secret fortune. The 62 year-old super detective has investigated the late newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell who stole his staffs’ pensions.

GLOBE-INTEL is a free subscription service provided by http://www.globe-intel.net

The spy v spy angle is interesting:

http://www.bushcountry.org/news/oct_news_pages/g_103003_thomas_nsa_princess_diana.htm

Secret NSA Tapes Could Provide Testimony To Support Princess Diana's Dramatic Letter

One thousand and fifty secret electronic transcripts made by America’s “spy in the sky”, the National Security Agency, NSA, are believed to contain even more shattering evidence to support Princess Diana’s handwritten letter uncannily forecasting she would die in a car crash.

The NSA tapes show she and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed, were under surveillance by NSA and other intelligence agents before their deaths in Paris.

As pressure mounts for an inquest, these tapes could be a crucial exhibit. The NSA tapes are stored in a climate-controlled vault at NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade outside Washington. They have been heard by only the agency’s most senior staff.

NSA controls a worldwide electronic eavesdropping system normally only used against America’s enemies. Dodi’s father, Mohammed al-Fayed, the millionaire owner of Harrods, has waged an unsuccessful battle in the US courts to obtain copies of the tapes. He believes they also contain evidence that his son and Diana planned to marry – and that she may even have been pregnant before her death.

But equally explosive could be the revelations about the intelligence web that electronically enshrouded the Princess in the last weeks of her life.

Israel’s Mossad has never denied it had recruited Henri Paul, the driver of the car in which Diana, Dodi al-Fayed and Paul died. He was deputy head of security at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. It is owned by Mohammed al-Fayed.

Former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson has claimed the British Secret Intelligence Service was “actively involved in tracking Diana”. He has said that MI6 were helped by NSA satellite surveillance to maintain watch on Diana and Dodi al-Fayed as they sailed around the Mediterranean on his father’s yacht, the Jonikal, in the weeks before Diana died.

Senior Buckingham Palace aides have been told Diana reveals on the NSA intercepts, explicit sexual details about Prince Charles. She claims his behaviour forced her to have an affair with James Hewitt.
Hewitt, who has so far unsuccessfully failed to sell what he calls “steamy love letters” from Diana, claims the NSA transcripts boost his claims about life in Royal circles.

The Royal Coroner will also have to decide what steps to take to trace secret video tapes Diana is now known to have made months before her death.

Hints of their contents appeared last year at the trial of Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrel, who was acquitted of stealing her possessions. Mention of the tapes was made. But the judge stopped the trial before their contents could surface. Since then, the tapes are believed to be in the custody of Scotland Yard. Last week, they refused to discuss the matter.

There are seven tapes. Each is the length of a Hollywood blockbuster. But if made public – say London intelligence sources – no movie could have their impact.

“Just call them explosive. That’s all I need say”, said a London intelligence source. While it is not clear what Diana intended to do with the tapes, any plans were ended with her death a few months later.

A Buckingham Palace courtier suggested Diana may have planned to use them as a bargaining tool to try and get a better financial settlement in her divorce. Or maybe to secure her place in history.
More certain, the tapes’ revelations, delivered in the same little-girl voice which was Diana’s carefully cultivated stock-in-trade to convey something sensational, go to the heart of what she saw as wrong in the House of Windsor.

The story behind those tapes is complex and revealing – and casts new light on Diana’s mindset in the months before she died in 1997.
The very existence of the tapes had been a closely-guarded secret until the collapse of the Paul Burrel trial. Then rumours began to emerge that the Queen’s intervention to stop the trial was because she had become aware of the contents of the tapes.

The tapes were shot in March, 1997, five months before her death. Diana sat before a VHS video camera in the main drawing room of her home, Kensington Palace,, and spoke in all for 12 hours over a period of ten days.

Only one other person knew she had made the tapes, Dodi al-Fayed. His father, Mohammed al-Fayed, confirmed he wants the Royal Coroner, Dr Michael Burgess, to listen to the tapes – and compare them with the 1,050 intercepts NSA made later that year.

In the past, the US Justice Department has said the intercepts contain matters of “national security”. Mohammed al-Fayed has fought a lengthy, but unsuccessful, court battle in Washington to obtain copies.

A former Buckingham Palace aide has hinted that the video tapes are Diana’s video diaries. “In a sense, they are an oral history of the Royal Family. She deals with each member in detail”, he said. He claimed last week that the videos reserve her most stringent criticism for Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles.

“She describes how she caught Charles and Camilla de flagrente. She reveals how she listened in on their phone sex talk. She says that Camilla was the raunchier of the two. She gives examples”, said the source.

He said that on one tape, Diana talks of the “sexual treachery” of her husband. Of how he would make late night calls to Camilla of “a sexual nature”.

“Diana paints a portrait of how she pleaded with him for the sake of the children to give up Camilla. She says that she turned to Anne (Princess Anne) and Andrew (Prince Andrew) for help. Both, she says, refused to lift a finger”, said the source.

“She describes how Charles and other members of the Royal Family – the Queen excepted – used to store expensive gifts in bin-liners.
“On one video Diana describes how there was a right old panic when a member of the Saudi Royal Family came visiting and his wedding gift had been binned. Staff spent hours going through the bags looking for a set of gold goblets.”

“She talks about how his welcome into the Family had turned to cold hostility once the marriage had broken up. “Undoubtedly, the most revealing part of her video diaries is how Diana saw her future”, the source said.

“She makes it clear that she would do everything possible to make sure Charles never became King. She wanted William to succeed to the Throne when the Queen died. Diana clearly saw her role to be the power behind the Throne.”

Royal Coroner, Dr Burgess, will have to decide how much, if any, of these allegations will be allowed to surface in any inquest on Diana. His only public comment so far was to confirm: “this is a high-profile case and everything has to be weighed very carefully. The questions go behind the ‘survivability’ argument over whether she (Diana) should have gone to hospital sooner. The speed of the car, seatbelts, where people were sitting: these are all relevant questions for an inquest to consider”.

He could hear evidence from NSA officers as well as testimony from MI6, CIA and possibly from Mossad. All the agencies were closely involved in monitoring Diana and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed, in the weeks they spent together before their fatal car crash six years ago this past week.

The potential revelations at the inquest could be even more sensational than the Hutton Inquiry.

Gordon Thomas’s own relationship with Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed began six months before their deaths. Dodi was to produce Gordon Thomas’s screenplay, Mambo. Diana was slated to be the executive producer. The film focused on her interest in banishing land-mines. It was to be shot in South Africa. Brad Pitt, Gene Hackman and Embeth Davitz were slated to star. The first pre-production meeting was scheduled on the very day Dodi and Diana died.

Gordon Thomas
10.30.03 09:31 AM

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