Diana: In Pursuit of Love (27 page)

The path that led to this vortex of fear and paranoia began among the peaceful rolling acres of Diana’s childhood home of Althorp in Northamptonshire. It is here in the summer of 1995 that Bashir first met her brother, Earl Spencer, whom he and his colleagues had correctly identified as his sister’s gatekeeper. Gain his confidence and there was a good chance of reaching Diana. At the time the Princess was not the only member of the Spencer family living with the constant fear of phone taps, undercover surveillance and intrusion, either by the media or by other more sinister agencies. Crucially, Charles Spencer was as convinced as his sister that dark forces were at work in the country, and had already felt the
need to take robust action to defend himself and his family. A year earlier, in April 1994, in an off-camera conversation with a television producer, Jackie Donaldson, he said that he knew that he was being bugged and who was behind it. His comments came at a time when he was defending both his reputation and his privacy. After a two-year fight he successfully sued the
Daily Express
in 1996 for a series of articles which suggested he was suspected of having been used to launder the proceeds of a multimillion-pound fraud by his friend and best man, Darius Guppy. Earl Spencer won £50,000 damages and an apology. At the same time, and more significantly in the light of subsequent developments, he took out a High Court injunction against his former head of security, Alan James Waller, forbidding him from disclosing information about his private life and that of members of the royal family. His writ followed the publication, in March 1994, in the now defunct
Today
newspaper, of a letter he had written to Diana in December 1993 warning her that her public appearances were damaging her popularity, which Waller was suspected of having sold to the paper.

So when the young earl agreed to meet Bashir to discuss his suspicions about the involvement of the security forces, he had his own fears and theories. At the time Bashir was telling colleagues that he had a contact within MI5, the British security service, who was giving him information. By the end of August Bashir had met Charles Spencer at Althorp and told him that it was his understanding that the security services were indeed targeting the Princess. It is unclear what evidence he gave the Earl to underpin this assertion, but Spencer, a former correspondent with NBC television in America and therefore likely to be sceptical, found it persuasive.

In the meantime Bashir’s editor, Steve Hewlett – no doubt having seen other similar
Panorama
investigations peter out – was concerned by the slow progress and urged Bashir to aim for the stars, or rather the star, and press for an interview with the Princess. At one of several further meetings with the Earl, it seems that Bashir persuaded Charles Spencer to speak to his sister and arrange for Diana to meet Bashir secretly. Presumably he wanted to outline his knowledge about the hidden forces ranged against her face to face.

By now the plausible Mr Bashir had won the endorsement of her brother, which familial vote of confidence would have gone a long way to allay any doubts Diana may have had about Bashir’s motives. An unforeseen by-product of the involvement of Charles in the early stages of this venture was that it helped to reconcile brother and sister after a couple of years of coolness. ‘She was longing to reignite her relationship with her brother,’ asserted members of Diana’s circle, with whom she had discussed in detail what was happening. ‘It meant a lot to her.’

While memories differ regarding the fateful first meeting between the Princess and the TV reporter – one account says it was midsummer, another late September – all their encounters were characterized by secrecy and a theatrical atmosphere of intrigue that served to heighten the tension, and perhaps to bring the Princess and Bashir closer together, the conspiratorial feeling increasing her trust in the young reporter. It was a technique that became Bashir’s trademark. By September 1995 Bashir had built up a considerable rapport with Diana. ‘He’s not had an easy life; I enjoyed talking to him,’ the Princess told her butler after one of their hush-hush meetings. The first furtive encounter took place at a friend’s London apartment, another, like a scene from the movie,
All the President’s Men
, apparently occurred in an underground car park. Most, however, were at Kensington Palace. Paul Burrell would pick Bashir up from BBC Television Centre in west London and drive him, usually hidden under a green tartan blanket, to Diana’s apartment. ‘This passenger seemed to enjoy the cloak-and-dagger operation more than most,’ he wrote in
A Royal Duty
.

In the autumn of 1995, soon after she began to see Bashir regularly, the Princess became far more fearful for her safety, her customary suspicions and warnings now suffused by a genuine sense of dread, verging on the paranoid. ‘She was off on her own bat, having had her various insecurities fed by Bashir very cleverly,’ noted her American biographer Sally Bedell Smith. Bashir apparently convinced her that her apartment was bugged, something she had long suspected – she had in fact had it swept for
listening devices before, but now she seemed even more anxious than usual, summoning her private secretary to join her in a search of her apartment. He had already noted with concern her heightened state of paranoia, and here was another example of it.

According to Diana’s confidant, who spoke to her during this period, the Princess had been given the information about Tiggy Legge-Bourke and her hospital visits by more than one significant source. That Tiggy had been to hospital several times was shown to be true, but whether Diana jumped or was led to the hurtful conclusion, later proved to be wide of the mark, that the nanny had had an abortion is uncertain. The source of these stories must have been very credible to Diana to lead her to make the extreme and uncharacteristic accusations against Tiggy.

When, that autumn, Diana heard from the lips of Prince Charles’s orderly George Smith the tale of an alleged male rape by a member of the Prince’s staff, she feared that her knowledge of Smith’s claims might be dangerous. All was clearly far from well in the royal households – and then along came Martin Bashir, a credible witness, an outsider but also representative of the media establishment, amplifying and anchoring all the lurid stories she had heard about the shadowy security services. ‘Fear of the security services was one of the emotions driving Diana’s secret cooperation with the film,’ noted a
Sunday Times
article on the eve of the broadcast. The piece, ‘Diana’s Prime Time Revenge’ by Nicholas Hellen and Tim Rayment, continued, ‘When she learnt that Martin Bashir, the
Panorama
reporter fronting the project, was investigating the role of MI5 in her long nightmare of tapped telephone calls and tabloid tip-offs, she wanted to know more.’ Bashir’s initial claim that he had a contact inside MI5 who was supplying information that showed she was under surveillance was one thing – now he apparently told her that he had documentary evidence to back his contention in the form of bank statements. Not only did these statements show payments to Earl Spencer’s former head of security, but they also showed payments made by a shadowy offshore company. Could it be that he told the Princess that this company, Penfolds Consultants, was in reality a ‘front’ for a secret-service operation? While exactly what was said is
unlikely ever to be revealed, it is known that Diana was sufficiently alarmed to discuss the possibility of her leaving the country for a place of safety. As a former
Panorama
colleague of Bashir’s commented: ‘He is a good operator. If he wanted to give the impression that he was so close to MI5 that he was getting bank statements from them,
I
would take him seriously.’ Additionally, when the Princess talked about this, she expressed her belief that Prince Charles and the Duchy of Cornwall, his hereditary estate, were in some way involved. Where did she get that idea? In speaking to her circle, the Princess was not specific with details of the role of her husband or those around him. Plainly though, she was extremely concerned, especially in view of the lurid accounts she was now hearing about the goings-on inside the court of Prince Charles. ‘That,’ Diana’s friends said to me, ‘is why the whole thing is so sinister.’

Whatever the tale Bashir told the Princess, it is the firm and forceful contention of Diana’s circle that he did show her bank statements – denied by both Bashir and the BBC – which verified his assertion that he had a source who could obtain such confidential material. What the Princess did not know at the time was that they were forgeries.

In keeping with the undercover nature of the operation, the forging of these bank statements was as clandestine and covert as the filming of the programme. When Matt Wiessler, a graphic designer, was contacted by Bashir in early October 1995 about a ‘rush job’, the impression he got was that Bashir was at the heart of some dark mystery. Wiessler, who was struck by the way Bashir was ‘playing the super detective’, later recalled that, ‘He was very excited and told me that if he got this wrapped up it would make his career.’

What Bashir wanted Wiessler to do was to use his computer wizardry to fake two bank statements. Using information Bashir supplied, Wiessler worked through the night creating the statements, dated March 1994 and June 1994, for a National Westminster Bank account apparently held in Brighton. They showed a £4,000 payment purportedly made to a joint account ostensibly held by Earl Spencer’s former head of security, Alan
Waller, and a former business partner of his, Robert Harper, by News International, owners of
Today
newspaper – which had printed the purloined letter from Charles Spencer to Diana in 1994. The other statement showed £6,500 supposedly paid to Waller and Harper by a Jersey-based company, Penfolds Consultants. (Strangely, the company name Penfolds made an appearance in Bashir’s inquiry into Terry Venables, the name even appearing on screen during the report.)

It is not clear what role was assigned to the offshore company in the narrative Bashir relayed to the Princess, but could he have passed the company off as a front for a secret-service operation to monitor the Princess? It might even, given Diana’s conversation about the Prince of Wales and the Duchy of Cornwall, have been given some sinister royal connection. During the two hours or so that he spent with the graphic artist, Bashir, who had a very clear idea of what he wanted created, talked about the background surrounding the bank statements. ‘He said that it had to do with surveillance about her [Diana], that someone was being paid to keep an eye on her, check her movements, report on what she was doing,’ Wiessler recollected. ‘I was under the impression that these bank statements suggested that somebody was getting money to watch Diana. I can’t remember if it was MI5 or MI6.’

At the time, Wiessler did not think that he was doing anything underhand or illegal, as in the past they had faked material based on real documents in order to create leverage that would encourage people to talk on camera. It was only after the interview was broadcast that he worried about the morality and legality of their actions. ‘All I know is that Bashir said that if he showed these to this person [whom he did not name] it might lead to something that is going to have a real effect,’ Wiessler recalled. ‘He said he was going off to South Africa and that this might lead to a programme – she [Diana] might agree to something.’

After their conversation, Bashir left Wiessler working furiously to meet the deadline. At 7 a.m., tired but proud of his work, Wiessler handed over the completed documents, for which he was paid £250, to a BBC driver in an envelope addressed to Martin Bashir. The driver was told to meet the reporter in front of the
Sock Shop store at Heathrow’s Terminal 2. It is not clear who saw these forged bank statements at this point, although many journalists believe Bashir showed them to Charles Spencer. An article in the
Independent on Sunday
on 9 February 2003, for one, suggests that he could have used them to gain the Earl’s confidence:

Controversy may still swirl around the exact details of the lead-up to the Diana interview . . . (There remain unanswered questions, for instance, as to why Bashir falsified bank statements relating to Diana’s brother’s head of security. Did he do this to worm his way into the bosom of the Spencer family?) But what is certain is that Diana talked to Bashir . . . It was a mutually beneficial relationship and he had made himself her friend, her confidant. ‘Bashir worked on Diana for years, also getting close to her brother, Earl Spencer,’ says one former BBC colleague.

Unfortunately, like Bashir himself, the Earl has remained tightlipped about this vexed affair and has refused to be interviewed either for this book or elsewhere. As a former
Panorama
colleague of Bashir’s, who has seen the original documents, told me, ‘These are first-class documents. If you saw them you would think you were looking at genuine bank statements. So why work up these documents to broadcast quality? He was meeting someone at the airport that was crucial. My guess is he met Charlie Althorp [Earl Spencer] and says to Charlie: “Your man has been on the payroll, I have more of this stuff, Diana’s under surveillance, I can reveal it all to her. Here’s the proof.”’

It was only six months later, in April 1996, that the existence of the forgeries become public, following a Sunday newspaper investigation into the methods Bashir used to obtain his TV scoop. In the story, in the
Mail on Sunday
, the supposed joint bank-account holders, Waller and Harper, and the account holder for Penfolds Consultants, all confirmed that the bank statements were false. Waller and Harper stated that they had had a bank account in Brighton but it had been closed in March 1994, three months before the alleged June payment from Penfolds Consultants. Inside the BBC there was the growing feeling that the interview had been obtained by underhand means and that the
bank statements had been used in some way to persuade the Princess to agree to speak out. In the two internal BBC investigations into the affair, Bashir contended that the bank statements had never been used to obtain the interview and that he had had the documents made for an earlier story he was working on about members of the royal family.