The following month, Diana flew to Cairo for a series of solo public engagements in Egypt. Her Queen’s Flight aircraft—to her deep annoyance—made a detour to Ankara to drop off Charles who had arranged a further holiday in Turkey with Camilla. She was still seething with rage when she told her host, the British Ambassador, and his guests that she expected to be just Lady Di again by the time her husband was eventually crowned. This was seven months before the end of her marriage was officially announced, and proved a total conversation-stopper.
Yet despite her emotionally charged state, Diana turned Egypt into another spectacular media triumph with a series of stunning photographs using the pyramids, the Sphinx and the great palace at Luxor as backdrops. The only downside for the princess was that, this time, the press had failed to spot Camilla alongside Charles during their Turkish holiday. It was hardly a very satisfying revenge, but on her way home she refused to collect him in Ankara, even though the pilot told her they would fly almost directly over the Turkish capital. Charles had to order that her aircraft do a fast turnaround when it reached England, and return to pick him up.
The princess’s comments—usually fueled by anger or provoked by her husband’s boorishness, especially those like her bombshell in Cairo—continued to make headlines and constantly seemed to catch Charles and his aides by surprise. It is certain that none of their friends or the palace staff had the slightest inkling that she had secretly planned to unleash a bombshell of such mega proportions that it would deal a devastating blow to the monarchy and be the means by which she would break free of her disastrous marriage.
Andrew Morton’s biography
Diana: Her True Story
had an even greater impact on the royals than the princess had dreamed possible. Her in-laws were not just rocked to the foundations, but were in danger of falling down entirely. The royal family en masse pointed the finger of blame at Diana but she, slightly fearful now of what she had put in motion eighteen months earlier, vehemently denied cooperating with the author, or encouraging her friends to help in any way. She stuck to this story throughout, even though it was untrue and she had supplied Andrew Morton with many hours of tape recordings in which she clearly spelled out her problems and placed the blame for her failed marriage squarely at Camilla’s door.
It was a thrust of such wounding proportions that it might well have proved fatal to the House of Windsor—and it was delivered deliberately, albeit under intense provocation, by a woman who was an absolute royalist, and whose children’s future depended to a great extent on the monarchy’s survival. To Prince Philip it was a devastating blow. He saw all his hard work in reshaping and consolidating the family since 1947 being wiped out by Diana’s ill-judged revelations. It stirred feelings of real hatred for the first time, I was told.
While understandable as an act of revenge against Charles and Camilla, it was at the same time a vain, childish and extremely stupid act, and was one which Diana was to regret deeply, for it did all the royals and their loyal courtiers and staff lasting and fundamental damage. But there could be no denying that, on a different level, her plan was superbly successful. The ability of the palace or the Establishment to control her, or her marriage, had been removed.
But what of the cost? Diana had helped to expose the corrupt side of royalty and to take away the family’s credibility. Walter Bagehot once cautioned royal writers, “We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Diana had not just pulled back the curtains and let the harsh light of reality flood in, she had ripped them away and exposed how the trick was done.
Of one thing there was no doubt. After the Morton book the problems between Diana and Charles became insoluble. In the winter of 1990–91, Charles and Diana had grown so full of hatred for each other that the Highgrove staff feared for the safety of both. They both found each other’s company so offensive that barely a civil word passed between them, explained Wendy Berry. On one occasion, Diana was sitting on the stairs sobbing when Charles shouted, “For God’s sake, Diana, come here and talk to me.”
“I hate you, Charles,” she shrieked. “I fucking hate you.”
It was a typical exchange.
Diana herself, at this time, remained immensely popular, though public opinion of Charles had swung to an all-time low. He had zero support. Wearily the Queen summoned the couple to a private meeting, at which a formal separation was suggested by both. Her answer was that they go, with the princes, on one final family holiday and at least try to patch up their differences. Neither believed such a holiday would achieve anything—except perhaps add a few more scars to their marriage. But neither was prepared to refuse the Queen’s request, and so a further Greek cruise on John Latsis’s luxury yacht was agreed. Its main attraction was that it was so large Charles and Diana did not actually have to meet while aboard.
After initially spending hours hiding in a lifeboat and sobbing, and then threatening to fly home at the first port of call—tantrums that Diana’s long-suffering private detective Ken Wharfe was left to sort out—the princess enjoyed long days of water sports with her children, while Charles spent many hours of each day talking to Camilla on the telephone in his cabin.
Camilla, discovering at firsthand the pressures from the fourth estate that Diana had endured for ten years, was in temporary exile abroad, having dodged the British press’s formidable attempts to interview her, and announced she would only return after the fuss died down. A consolation came at Christmas when Charles bought his mistress a beautiful diamond necklace as a present. It was a further slap in the face for Diana who, knowing what he had bought Camilla, found his gift to her was a cheap set of paste gems!
The Establishment prayed for a miracle to take the heat off Mrs. Parker Bowles and the prince, and tumble Diana from her elevated public pedestal. The scandal which would provide that miracle was, in fact, already in place—put together by officers of the Secret Intelligence Service—and would prove almost as sensational as
Diana: Her True Story.
Their allegedly unwitting pawn was an unlikely candidate for scandal-mongering. Cyril Reeman, a retired bank manager, whose bizarre late-night hobby was listening to other people’s telephone conversations, recorded an incredible chat between Princess Diana and her car-dealer friend James Gilby.
It was originally obtained by the Secret Intelligence Service from a phone tap on Diana’s telephone inside Kensington Palace. Bugging at such a high level would usually require the sanction of the prime minister, who at this time was John Major. The SIS claimed their concern was protection of the princess.
Publication of the tape in the
Sun
could not have come at a better time for Charles and Camilla. It was, in short, a godsend.
The
Sun
’s quirky editor had chosen to dub it the Squidgy Tape.
FIVE
Publication of the Squidgy Tape in 1992 resulted in Diana, Princess of Wales, being blamed for the problems in her marriage for the first time.
The royals had been aware from the mid-eighties that for security reasons it had become necessary for the security services to monitor and record all telephone conversations as a routine precaution, although it was understood that nothing of a personal nature would be kept on record. Initiating this policy meant recording all telephone and some face-to-face conversations both inside and outside the royal residences.
It was certainly not explained that copies of some royal conversations, if deemed relevant, would be forwarded, on a regular basis, to the security services of the United States. Nor was it explained, or even leaked until many years later, that the Americans were also eavesdropping on royal conversations through the NSA using its ultra-secret, Star Wars-style system known as the ECHELON project.
The National Security Agency, which was secretly created in 1952 by President Truman, admitted to the
Washington Post
that they possessed files on Princess Diana partly composed of interrupted telephone conversations. It is known that the NSA’s mandate was expanded by President Reagan to include information systems and operations security, and to achieve its goals, an automated global interruption-relay system, code-named ECHELON, was developed by the NSA and is now operated by the intelligence organizations in five nations: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The existence of the ECHELON project is still not acknowledged by the United States government, although European Union and Australian government committees have officially admitted its existence. ECHELON monitors upward of three billion communications each day, including telephone calls, e-mails, Internet downloads and satellite transmissions. There are separate search lists for each country. They siphon out what is valuable using artificial intelligence programs.
Because James Gilby, then a salesman for Lotus cars, used his pet name for Diana—“Squidgy”—during their twenty-three-minute conversation, this was the name label used to identify the tape. The phone call—to Gilby in his car—was purported to have been picked up by an amateur radio buff, Cyril Reeman, randomly roving through the airwaves. The chances of this happening are extremely small; an amateur managing to tape all twenty-three minutes of the conversation with no gaps, when mobile-phone networks continually shift frequency during operation, is technically impossible.
That the phone call itself took place on New Year’s Eve 1989, and the amateur radio enthusiast recorded it on January 4, 1990, is clearly also impossible. Telephone signals do not hang about in the ether for ninety-six hours. Cellnet, which operated the network then used by Gilby, categorically denied that the call could have been recorded in the manner claimed.
The only explanation is that the call was recorded from a bug or other listening device in Kensington Palace, and then broadcast on a fixed wavelength four days later so it could easily be picked up by an amateur radio buff. In the intervening days, the tape had been electronically cleaned. The sound of other traffic and reflected noise on the road where Gilby took the call had been removed to make the voices of him and Diana more easily understood. The tape was examined by a leading technical expert in national security matters. In his opinion the tape had been “cleaned” using a special machine with which he was familiar. The machine used was not particularly expensive: it cost about £30,000. But it has an interesting rarity factor. He revealed there are only two such machines in Britain: one belongs to MI5 and the other to MI6.
Further, also in his opinion, no non-government department or organization would be allowed to buy the machine from its manufacturer.
The two branches of the British secret service— MI5 which concentrates on problems in Britain, and MI6 which deals with overseas situations—are also the only ones with the equipment to have bugged Kensington Palace and rebroadcast the tape at a later date.
Princess Diana’s personal protection officer at that time, Ken Wharfe, revealed a decade later that the intelligence services routinely taped her telephone conversations. He revealed that at least two sets of Diana tapes are in existence, “recordings of the same conversation made on different days by different radio buffs.” Wharfe believes that they were transmitted on a number of occasions in order to make sure they were picked up.
In the rather tawdry conversation, fully featured in the
Sun
in August 1992, Diana mentions her fear of becoming pregnant with Gilby’s child, demonstrating the sexual nature of their relationship. It was not a statement the royal family could dismiss as being an exaggeration or a misinterpretation, as they had with Andrew Morton’s book. This was straight from the horse’s mouth—and no one who heard it had any doubt that from this point on an official separation of the prince and princess must follow, sooner rather than later.
Diana had also unequivocally revealed her feelings about the royal family in repeating to Gilby one of her frequently mouthed comments: “Bloody hell. After all I’ve done for that fucking family.” It was a phrase heard dozens of times over the years by staff, friends and her personal detectives.
Prince Charles had the good sense to keep quiet, and almost certainly thanked God that the Squidgy Tape had taken the pressure off him and Camilla. Diana meanwhile, though highly embarrassed by the publication of her very private conversation with a lover, had long since dropped Gilby and transferred her attention to another man, art dealer Oliver Hoare. Her affair with James Hewitt had also foundered after a brief renaissance during the Gulf War when she sent him luxury food hampers, pornographic magazines and steamy, handwritten love letters. For a time it had satisfied Diana’s romantic need to have a sweetheart bravely facing the dangers of war. But when Major Hewitt returned to London, Diana found the old buzz was no longer there, and she suggested they “cool it” for a while. After that she did not reply to his phone messages.
Oliver Hoare was married to Diane, an extremely wealthy woman in her own right, and the couple had met Charles and Diana at a function at Windsor Castle. The prince had struck up an immediate friendship with Hoare and the four of them dined together occasionally at one or other of their homes. Oliver Hoare also knew the Parker Bowleses, and initially Diana was attracted to him because she believed he might explain the mysterious attraction Camilla exercised over her husband—something which the princess never did understand.
Hoare was clearly flattered by her attentions, and willingly agreed to a series of assignations, though he neither expected nor wanted it to lead to anything serious. Diana, on the other hand, became temporarily besotted with the thirty-nine-year-old—as she did with all the men to whom she was attracted. This led to her taking risks, for Diana needed the constant reassurance that she was the most memorable woman in her lover’s life. On one occasion, to give Hoare a taste of the “unforgettable” aspect of an affair with the Princess of Wales, she arrived on his doorstep wearing a full-length fur coat, which she flung open, revealing that underneath she was stark naked—except, that is, for a diamond necklace.
Despite stunts like this, and though they spent nights together at Kensington Palace, or in the homes of mutual and discreet friends, she agonized, correctly, that he did not reciprocate her love. These doubts made her irritable and unapproachable, even to her favorites. She was definitely in no mood to give more than short shrift to the palace aide who brought outline plans for a proposed “romantic” visit to the East with her husband. She told the man not to be stupid and to go away.
Incredibly, despite the parlous state of the Waleses’ marriage, certain palace aides really believed they could still organize a fence-mending operation on their nonexistent relationship, and had proposed a “kiss and make up” tour of South Korea. Diana was not even speaking to Charles at this stage, and announced that in the name of all honesty she saw no reason to go. The Foreign Office, her senior staff and finally Ken Wharfe were recruited to try and persuade her to change her mind, but with no success. In the end it took a tough talking-to by the Queen to get Diana to capitulate, though then only very reluctantly.
With hindsight it was agreed that it would have been far more sensible to have canceled the visit, or to have sent Prince Charles alone. The whole, pointless exercise was a disaster for the royals and a deep embarrassment to the couple’s hosts—the people of South Korea. With no consideration for anyone’s feelings but their own, the Waleses indulged themselves in a massive shouting match on board the royal flight as it descended into Seoul airport, and when they finally emerged flushed, angry and scowling, it set the tone for the next five days: sullen, uncooperative and bleak.
It was, even the media agreed, a sad and sorry ending to the fairy-tale marriage which it had been hoped would see the royals triumphantly and joyfully into the twenty-first century. It survived only eleven mostly miserable years; Diana herself claimed it was lucky to have survived the first.
Whether the break came in time to prevent lasting damage to the two boys, William and Harry, is still unknown, but tragically, by then, the boys were fully aware of their parents’ problems and had been party to some of their most awful rows. What everyone—family, friends, courtiers and staff—agreed was that if there was not a radical change in their circumstances then the children would inevitably become emotionally scarred by the situation. It might already be too late. Wendy Berry had heard William, almost in tears, shouting at Charles, “I hate you, Papa. I hate you so much. Why do you make Mummy cry all the time?”
The official death-knell on the marriage was sounded by prime minister John Major on December 9, 1992. “It is announced from Buckingham Palace that, with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate.”
Hardly had the shockwaves from this announcement subsided and the New Year been welcomed in that a new blockbuster royal scandal exploded in the press. This time it was Diana’s turn to grin and Charles and Camilla’s turn to squirm. It would make the Squidgy Tape revelations seem almost innocent by comparison.