As Princess Diana’s marriage disintegrated, she became convinced there were spy cameras and bugs in her home and staff working as double agents.
Lana Marks, a close friend, told a British inquiry into her tragic death that by 1997 she and Diana were speaking in code about the princess’ life and relationships: “I appreciate that she would not have been able to say it openly over the phone because of her fears of being bugged but she would have found a way to tell me cryptically.”
Another friend, Roberto Devorik, recalled Diana saying she’d once left Kensington Palace without a security team or informing anyone but believed someone followed her car. “She didn’t think they were very professional and she was sure it wasn’t the police. She telephoned me very upset. She said, ‘Somebody wants to hurt me.’”
Princess Diana: The hunted
Diana had good reason to be paranoid - she was being spied on, whether by hackers, ham radio operators, journalists, or spies of a more professional variety.
Telephone transcripts of calls between Diana and a close friend, James Gilbey, were published by the National Enquirer in the early ‘90s and British tabloid The Sun in an article titled Squidgygate. Diana's former personal protection officer, Inspector Ken Wharfe, said an investigation had "identified all those involved, but for legal reasons I cannot expand further, and nor is it necessary to do so". The government of British PM John Major cleared MI5 and MI6 of involvement.
Between the royal bodyguards charged with keeping a close eye on the princess, snooping journalists, and spy agencies at home and abroad, it appears Diana was rarely alone with her thoughts in the months and days before her tragic death in Paris in 1997.
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As Princess Diana’s marriage disintegrated, she became convinced there were spy cameras and bugs in her home and staff working as double agents.
Lana Marks, a close friend, told a British inquiry into her tragic death that by 1997 she and Diana were speaking in code about the princess’ life and relationships: “I appreciate that she would not have been able to say it openly over the phone because of her fears of being bugged but she would have found a way to tell me cryptically.”
Another friend, Roberto Devorik, recalled Diana saying she’d once left Kensington Palace without a security team or informing anyone but believed someone followed her car. “She didn’t think they were very professional and she was sure it wasn’t the police. She telephoned me very upset. She said, ‘Somebody wants to hurt me.’”
Princess Diana: The hunted
Diana had good reason to be paranoid - she was being spied on, whether by hackers, ham radio operators, journalists, or spies of a more professional variety.
Telephone transcripts of calls between Diana and a close friend, James Gilbey, were published by the National Enquirer in the early ‘90s and British tabloid The Sun in an article titled Squidgygate. Diana's former personal protection officer, Inspector Ken Wharfe, said an investigation had "identified all those involved, but for legal reasons I cannot expand further, and nor is it necessary to do so". The government of British PM John Major cleared MI5 and MI6 of involvement.
Between the royal bodyguards charged with keeping a close eye on the princess, snooping journalists, and spy agencies at home and abroad, it appears Diana was rarely alone with her thoughts in the months and days before her tragic death in Paris in 1997.
Princess Diana in Washington, D.C. with actor John Travolta in 1985
The FBI’s Princess Diana file
Britain wasn’t alone in following the world’s most famous woman - and the most hunted, as her brother Charles Spencer called her.
Declassified FBI File 185-HQ2171 shows that the Bureau was closely watching Diana’s 1989 visit to New York and the Brooklyn Academy of Music where a demonstration was planned by the Irish Northern Aid Committee (Noraid), a group convicted of violating the US Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1981 for failing to list the IRA as its principal foreign agent.
Separately, the FBI Diana files show that the Bureau stepped in after a woman from Maryland overheard a man saying he’d mailed a bomb to the Prince and the Princess of Wales as a 1981 ‘wedding present’. The man claimed to have made the alleged threat "sarcastically".
The NSA & Princess Diana
In the late 1990s, the US National Security Agency said intelligence files on Princess Diana ran to 1,056 pages, inspiring a flurry of tabloid speculation. But what, exactly, was in the archive?
The speculation revolved around a two-page NSA denial of a Freedom of Information Act request from 1998. The NSA letter doesn’t note what intelligence was obtained or why. What it does reveal is that the NSA’s Fort Meade HQ produced 39 Top Secret "NSA-originated and NSA-controlled documents" running to 124 pages. The NSA said it wouldn’t release the intel "because their disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security".
Gerald Posner, an American investigative journalist interviewed by British investigators after Diana’s death, said he listened to a telephone recording electronically intercepted by the NSA which originated from the Brazilian Embassy in Washington. “I could only decipher a British woman and a woman with a slight Hispanic accent talking about hairstyles,” Posner told Britain’s Operation Paget.
Posner did not share his source or how he came to hear the NSA recording. Louis Giles, NSA assistant director for policy and records, stated in his official response to Britain’s Operation Paget investigation in 2006: “I can categorically confirm that NSA did not target Princess Diana nor collect any of her communication.”
The CIA & Princess Diana
Dodi Fayed’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA, which he believed was withholding information related to the deaths of Princess Diana and his son. The US Court of Appeals ruled against Fayed in 2001.
Writer John Greenwald requested all CIA records relating to the death of Princess Diana in 1998 under a Freedom of Information request, which he received some 20 years later and posted online. Many of the CIA files released are from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and news articles. Greenwald said the CIA refused to acknowledge if additional documents exist beyond what the Agency felt was already a publicly acknowledged link between the Agency and the death of Princess Diana.
In a letter to the British Embassy, the CIA said searches did not locate or identify “… any cables containing information about an alleged involvement of the British Royal family, government or intelligence services in the deaths of Princess Diana or Dodi Fayed” or “that CIA in any way might have been supportive in such a conspiracy”.
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