Diana’s highly successful campaign to outlaw the use of land mines and eventually force a cutback of all arms sales had, inevitably, brought her into direct conflict with the same very rich—and equally ruthless—manufacturers and salesmen of military hardware. They and the Pentagon launched a massive lobbying campaign to force the White House to maintain a land mines option.
The princess was clearly considered a powerful opponent by these international arms dealers and the military supremos at the Pentagon who supported them. This was effectively, and publicly, demonstrated when—to her opponents’ joint dismay—she persuaded President Clinton to support a land mines treaty which would be signed by all the world’s major powers. Already considered a loose cannon in some quarters, Diana was now confirmed as a real menace to certain major American industrialists who saw Clinton’s commitment to the princess as a direct threat to their future arms profiteering. Enormous political pressure was put on the president to renege on his promise to the princess. At the same time, admit some within the intelligence community, ways of silencing Diana, or hijacking her campaign, also became subjects for discussion.
Diana was killed just three weeks before the Oslo conference of September 19, 1997, at which Britain and most of the western world signed the land mines treaty. The only western power which refused to sign was the United States. Bill Clinton had been convinced of the “advisability” of breaking his promise to the late princess. His reversal of policy may well not have happened had she lived. It was a risk these protagonists of war were not prepared to take.
The United States government archives in Washington contain top-secret files on the activities of Princess Diana, totaling a staggering 1,190 pages. These files were assembled by the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) which, among other undertakings, monitors sensitive telephone calls on a worldwide basis.
According to an intelligence source in Washington, the surveillance activity surrounding Princess Diana increased dramatically after she became involved in the land mines appeal, and intensified even more after President Clinton agreed to back her. “At the same time, Pentagon and arms-industry lobbying against a U.S. involvement in the treaty became intensive. You don’t get that much focus from these guys unless they are planning to do something specific,” he said.
The files may well have a bearing on the death of Princess Diana, but the United States government has flatly refused to release any of the details they contain. When, after her death, American newspaper editors called for the release of the security agencies’ files on Diana, the State Department decreed that all 1,190 pages of documents must remain locked away indefinitely. The State Department spokesman, in justification, told the
New York Daily News
, and others
,
that revealing their contents would “seriously jeopardize the national security of the United States of America”!
American lawyers who want to know what the files contain are perplexed by the government’s dramatic response. They understand the intelligence agencies could well feel embarrassed if it were to become known that they had spied on a member of the royal household of a friendly nation. What they do not understand is how files on the princess could endanger their country’s security.
A former U.S. agent confirmed that orders came “from the very top” to spy on the princess and bug all the places she stayed during her frequent trips to America, and to keep her under constant, twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance. He told me this was carried out with the full knowledge of British prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair, after they had been convinced that it was necessary to ensure the security of the royals. Monitoring of Diana’s movements and telephone calls continued right up to the time of her death through the top-secret American surveillance center in Britain. The results were, under an agreement between the two countries’ intelligence services, routinely passed on to MI5, MI6 and Special Branch. Likewise, pertinent British intelligence on the princess was given to their opposite numbers in Washington. The Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) and the NSA have been cooperating as partners ever since the Thatcher–Reagan
entente
of the eighties.
Diana did not know the names or nationalities of the agencies which spied on her, but she knew they were there and used to have a former “spook” regularly sweep her home for electronic bugs. She dubbed the people responsible for organizing the surveillance “the men in gray suits.” These are the same men and women who see themselves as Charles’s protectors, and who move against anyone who threatens his reputation or weakens his position as king-in-waiting; the people the royals are referring to when they talk of the “dark forces.”
Almost from the time of her marriage, which had already been exposed to her as a sham, the princess had felt enmeshed in a web of deception and palace intrigue which she found all-pervading; but she knew that few, other than herself, were even aware of it. She was convinced that a deep malaise existed within the highest echelons of the royal family, but when she attempted to expose the dysfunctional nature of the family, her revelations were dismissed as paranoid rubbish. Since her death, the full accuracy of these allegations has been recognized.
The face of this beautiful, uniquely popular woman dominated the front pages of every newspaper and magazine in the world for two decades and she was, had they possessed the common sense to recognize it, the jewel in the crown of the British royal family. But they chose to see only the flaws. Those close to her knew that the gem that was Diana was always in danger of shattering. It was in the crucible of her childhood that the flaws were first forged in the girl who was to marry the heir to the throne.
She loved her parents, yet her lasting memory of childhood was the clatter of her mother’s high-heeled shoes on the marble staircase of their house in London’s Belgravia, the sound of the front door slamming as her mother walked out on her father—without saying goodbye to her children. Diana was ten years old when her mother bolted from her own loveless marriage to Earl “Johnny” Spencer. It was a memory that haunted her for the rest of her life. Even though her mother came back for them, Diana told friends that she had spent the rest of the night weeping and trying to console her little brother who was too young to understand how the constant bickering of their parents had finally boiled over and scalded their happiness.
With the right husband—a man offering love, tenderness and affection—Diana might have overcome the trauma of her parents’ breakup and her own insecurity, but Charles was unwilling, or simply unable—perhaps due to the effects of his own miserably unhappy childhood—to express genuine affection for this tragic young woman who was cuckolded even before she approached the altar. Charles and Camilla Shand had enjoyed a passionate and intense affair in the summer of 1972. It might have progressed had she not been judged by the royal family to be “secondhand goods”: too many people knew of her relationship with Andrew Parker Bowles, and that she was not a virgin. That alone was enough to rule her out as a future Princess of Wales. It is significant that Charles should argue today that it does not rule her out as a future Queen.
Andrew, a friend of the young prince, had been Camilla’s steady boyfriend since 1966, and there was an understanding between them that one day they would marry. But in 1969 Andrew didn’t hesitate to cast her aside when the nineteen-year-old Princess Anne fell in love with the dashing cavalry officer and surrendered her virginity to him. Despite being the Queen Mother’s godson—his father had been her closest male friend after the death of George VI—and a popular figure at court, Andrew was fully aware that there was no future in the relationship. The affair was passionate and intensely physical but Andrew knew that as he was a Roman Catholic it could never lead to marriage. He severed the relationship in 1972 and Anne was upset, but not heartbroken, by the end of the affair. She had already started seeing Captain Mark Phillips in 1971, and with classic Windsor morality was no more faithful to Andrew than he to her.
At the same time, Charles’s torrid affair with Camilla was, regrettably for him, coming to an end. For Charles it had been a dizzying and overwhelming revelation—he had experienced satisfying, exciting and successful sex for the first time in his life—but they both knew that the mores prevailing at the time would rule out a permanent union. In addition, although she was extremely flattered to have her future king besotted by her—as Edward VII had been by her great-grandmother Alice Keppel, who was his mistress for twelve years until his death in 1910—Camilla was still in love with Andrew, and had already waited six years for her guards’ wedding.
The following spring, Andrew proposed and Camilla accepted without hesitation. They married in July in the Guards Chapel in Birdcage Walk. Princess Anne was there, perhaps regretting what might have been. Charles, not present though perhaps also sharing her regrets, was serving aboard HMS
Minerva
, then stationed in the Caribbean.
Andrew and Camilla’s son, Tom, was born in December 1974. Charles was his godfather.
To Camilla, never a woman to let a question of morals spoil her fun, there now appeared no good reason why her affair with Charles could not be rekindled—and he enthusiastically agreed. From that moment on, Charles’s physical dependence on Camilla was absolute. It had him hanging about her skirt tails at Bolehyde Manor, the Parker Bowles country home, and Andrew soon grew used to finding the prince there when he returned from army duties in the evenings.
Potential fiancées came and went, but Charles really wanted nothing to do with them. He had already found the woman who satisfied all his needs. Approximately half the prince’s relationships with girls remained unconsummated because he was so well taken care of in that area by Camilla. She had also become his greatest confidante, and he shared with her the most intimate details of his merry-go-round hunt for a bride—however unenthusiastically pursued. In 1977 he offered his hand to Anna Wallace, the beautiful twenty-five-year-old daughter of a Scottish landowner. After watching Charles dance all evening with Camilla at the Polo Ball, thrown by Lord Vestey at his Stewell Park stately home in Gloucestershire, she told him, “Not even you can treat me like this, and you’ll never get another chance.” Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles might have to put up with the public humiliation, but Anna let it be known—very vocally—that she would not.
In 1980, when Andrew was serving in Rhodesia,
Private Eye
’s correspondent “Grovel” noted, “Andrew, 39, is married to a former (?) Prince Charles fancy, Camilla Shand, and if I should find the royal Aston Martin Volento outside the Parker Bowles mansion while the gallant colonel is on duty overseas, my duty will be clear.”
By now the couple didn’t care what people thought about the relationship, and Andrew’s return to England certainly didn’t stop Charles overruling the advice from both the palace and Foreign Office that he not take Camilla with him as his escort to the Zimbabwe independence celebration. Their affair was already out of control, and for the first time members of Charles’s entourage heard the phrase “Mrs. Parker Bowles is a nonnegotiable item.” If Charles wanted his Pompadour involved in the royal pomp, then that was the way it would have to be!
In Camilla’s eyes, unlike those of most of the other women in his life, Charles was never found wanting. With the others he was never particularly noted for his bedroom skills and was voted disappointingly inadequate as a lover by those of his girlfriends who were willing to talk. “He is the least tactile man I have ever known,” said one. Another could not remember him ever having caressed her—in or out of bed. “He made love to satisfy himself,” she recalled with a grimace. “What you might call Australianesque!”
Few of his girlfriends had wanted to prolong a relationship even with the matchless reward of becoming Queen of England. Some girls did not even have the consolation of social contact with Charles. They were delivered, by aides, to his bedroom in the homes of his many chums, made love to with little tenderness or satisfaction on their part, and spirited away. “He had the equipment but didn’t know how to use it,” was the verdict of one disappointed bed companion.
That the prince was nevertheless very generously endowed by nature in this area was recorded during his teens by a
Daily Express
photographer. Charles, being schooled in sailing technique by Uffa Fox, was stretched far out over the side of a yacht when the kilt he was wearing was blown up around his head. Measurements made later in the
Daily Express
darkroom revealed Charles to have appropriately regal proportions beneath his kilt.
The genius of Mrs. Parker Bowles, some in their circle claim with admiration, is that having recognized the prince’s sparse qualifications as a lover, she convinced him he was the greatest Lothario in the kingdom and she was grateful to pander to his every whim. It is a technique and piece of harmless cajolery that has been practiced by clever paramours with men of meager bedroom talent throughout the ages. She asks for nothing, gives everything and lets him know she feels fortunate to be blessed with his attention.
That attention, which she enjoys today, is perhaps more visible but certainly no greater than it was in 1980, and the influence she wields over the prince also remains unchanged from those pre-Diana days. It was Camilla who persuaded him of the need to marry—if for no other reason than to produce an heir. And when he stumbled across Diana Spencer, by accident, it seemed to the pair of them to be almost too good to be true.