Before her death six years ago, was Princess Diana under surveillance by “watchers” from MI5, the British Security Service? Yes. Did MI5 have a file on her? Yes. Were her telephone calls bugged? Yes. Were there, in the Queen’s words, “powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge”? Yes. Did MI5 or these mysterious powers murder Diana? Emphatically, no.
These are the simple answers to the questions raised in a book by Diana’s butler Paul Burrell, serialised this week. The book has given new life to conspiracy theorists who are convinced that MI5, or the secret intelligence service MI6, or both, or other unnamed powers murdered Diana and her friend Dodi Fayed, by “arranging” for the Mercedes in which they were passengers to slam into the wall of the Alma tunnel in Paris in August 1997.
Burrell considers it highly significant that Diana gave him a letter ten months before she died. In it she predicted that “[name deleted for legal reason] is planning ‘an accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry.”
There are several points to make about this. It was not Diana’s car and no one could have been be certain that she would be in it that night. The cause of the accident was not brake failure. “Any competent intelligence officer can fake a murder to look like an accident,” a KGB officer once told me. “But it takes a genius to make murder by car look like an accident.”
The French authorities blamed the Ritz hotel driver of the Mercedes, Henri Paul, concluding that he had taken a cocktail of drink and drugs before losing control of the car because he was speeding. Ah, say the conspiracy buffs, but isn’t it suspicious that he was an informer for the French security service. Not at all. Most leading hotels in Paris have someone on the staff who tells the authorities who’s in town and what’s going on.
Consider the number of people who would have to have been involved in such an operation and the problems of keeping them quiet all these years. And who would they have been? Burrell’s book has some suggestions. He says that the Queen warned him that there were “powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge”. He writes that Diana felt that she was being watched and followed and was convinced that her apartments at Kensington Palace were being bugged.
The Queen often uses the royal “we” to mean “I”. All she was saying is that she herself knew nothing about the work of the secret services, which is true. Perhaps she was also hinting that these services had powers the extent of which neither she nor Burrell realised. This is also true.
MI5’s job can be defined as defending the Realm. This gives it a very broad remit. It considers it to be part of its duty to gather intelligence that might reveal a plot against the Royal family and pass that intelligence to the Special Branch or those Scotland Yard officers who guard the Royals.
But MI5’s job could also be stretched to include doing its best to protect the Royal family from scandal that might bring it and Britain into disrepute. So right back at that moment when Prince Charles first became interested in Diana, MI5 opened a file on her. It would have initially been straight forward stuff: Who is she? What’s her background? Any known political affiliations? But it would have grown to include her associates and friends. Soon they, too, had files.
In the last years of her life, keeping tabs on Diana and her friends and lovers would have occupied a lot of MI5’s time. Who’s this Dodi Fayed? Is he the son of Mohammed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods, a troublesome foreigner? Cross index the file. Who does Diana meet on all these trips abroad? Why does she want her protection squad withdrawn? We’d better discreetly watch her ourselves.
And so the surveillance of Diana, for what MI5 would have regarded as the best of motives, grew. MI5 basically has a policeman’s mentality--many of its officers have come originally from Scotland Yard. They see themselves as upholders of law, order, and Victorian values. In the old days one applicant for a job with MI5 told me he had been advised to say his hobby was “gardening” -- anything else was regarded as slightly suspect.
So Diana was right in thinking that she was being watched. MI5 would have considered that it was for her own good. And those in her circle? Yes, MI5 kept files on them, and probably still does. But why would MI5 bug Diana? MI5 is an intelligence-gathering organisation. It is less interested in what has happened in the past than in what is going to happen. And experience has shown that the best way of finding this out is to listen to what people say in private.
But Diana’s paranoia was exaggerated. Burrell said that a friend of Diana’s, an “ex-intelligence services” officer had convinced her that so high-tech were intelligence facilities that a conversation could be listened to from a surveillance van parked outside Kensington Palace, transmitting a signal into the building and using mirrors to bounce it back. Burrell writes: “As a result she took down the round convex mirror that hung above the fireplace opposite the window in the sitting room.”
There is no such technology. There is a device which, given a clear line of sight, can pick up sound vibrations from the glass panes of the windows of a room in which a conversation is taking place--the Australians used one to try to eavesdrop on the Soviet Embassy in Canberra--but it is not very efficient.
Nor would there have been any listening devices under the floorboards in Diana’s sitting room because an electronic sweep would have revealed them and the ensuing questions would have been embarrassing for MI5--if Diana would not have known who had planted them, the intelligence community would.
MI5 would have simply lifted Diana’s conversations on her mobile phone out of the ether, or have asked the professional eavesdroppers, GCHQ, to have done it. It monitors thousands of conversations a day. Her landline telephone tap would have been at some nearby exchange.
That leaves only a group of rogue officers acting unofficially. This would be equally ludicrous had not such a group been involved back in the 1970s in trying to bring down the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. This group felt that Wilson had communist links and set out to expose him. Both Wilson and his Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, the highest legal officer in Britain, believed that they were under surveillance. Lord Gardiner said later, “I thought it more than likely that MI5 was bugging the telephones in my office.”
In August 1975 Wilson summoned the director of the Secret Intelligence Service, then Maurice Oldfield, and the head of MI5, then Michael Hanley, and asked them point blank if they were trying to bring down his government. Both replied that they were not. They admitted that there were officers who were strongly anti-Labour but both directors assured him that the services would remain under ministerial control.
Wilson did not believe them. He gave his publisher, Lord Weidenfeld, a letter to carry to Washington and hand to Senator Hubert Humphrey, a friend of Wilson’s. The letter named a number of MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service officers Wilson believed might be plotting against the Labour government.
He wanted Humphrey to ask George Bush, then director of the CIA and future President of the United States, whether the CIA knew anything about these officers. Was it possible, for instance, that these British officers might be working secretly for the CIA. Bush took Wilson’s letter so seriously that he himself flew to London to assure Wilson that if he had indeed been under surveillance, then it was not the CIA which had been responsible.
So the conspiracy theorists argue that if rogue MI5 and MI6 officers could have conspired against the Prime Minister, why not against Diana? The circumstances were very different. Misled though they were, the security officers genuinely felt that they were defending the Realm and their aim was to remove the Prime Minister from office, not murder him.
Everything strange about the death of Diana can be explained by that trio of factors present in all conspiracy stories--cock-up, cover-up and coincidence. And although MI5’s behaviour may have appeared suspicious, it was only doing the job we pay it to do.
The conspiracy speculation will nevertheless go on--look at the assassination of President Kennedy. There is only one way to put an end to it. There should be a full inquest in Britain into Diana’s death. The Royal coroner should announce a date for it now.
Phillip Knightley is the author of The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century (Pimlico)
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