MI6 & The Lying Game: Rosa Monckton and the Oxbridge spooks...
I/Ops news-alliance.com
In December 2003, Daily Mail journalist Sue Reid, with whom we have worked in the past investigating the alleged ‘suicide’ of Dr David Kelly, quoted a source, who insisted on remaining anonymous, saying that Diana went to a leading London hospital to undergo a pregnancy scan, days before she joined Dodi on holiday. The result is unknown and the test was conducted in the utmost secrecy.
But then Diana’s self-confessed ‘best friend’ Rosa Monckton, claims that Diana menstruated only a week before the crash, while they were on holiday in Greece. It is clear that Monckton believes she cannot be challenged on this issue but former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson alleges that Rosa’s husband, Dominic Lawson, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper and Spectator magazine, provided journalistic cover for MI6 officers while he was editor of The Spectator.
Rosa’s brother, the Honourable Anthony Leopold Colyer Monckton, a diplomat, was also an MI6 spy according to Tomlinson. It should be noted that Dominic Lawson has never sued any publication or person for alleging he was an MI6 stringer. Dominic Lawson, is of course, the son of former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson and brother of famous TV ‘kitchen goddess’ Nigella Lawson. The very same Nigel Lawson who detested Mohamed Al Fayed for besmirching his beloved Tories.
Tomlinson alleges that Dominic Lawson provided cover for an agent named ironically ‘Spencer’, who was put on the case of a young Russian diplomat, Pluton Obukhov, in Tallin, capital city of Estonia. In an excerpt from Tomlinson’s ‘banned’ book (The Big Breach) published in Pravda, it was revealed that Spencer, returning from a visit to Information Operations (I/Ops), which plants stories or propaganda in the British press, remarked, “Flippin’ outrageous. They’ve got the editor of the Spectator magazine on the books. He’s called ‘smallbrow’. He’s agreed to le me go to Tallin undercover as a freelancer for his magazine. The only condition is that I have to write an article which he’ll publish if he likes it’, the cheeky bastard wants a story courtesy of the taxpayer.”
The allegations that Dominic Lawson was a paid asset of MI6 have also been made in parliament but he has always denied ever having been an agent. How likely is it that he would admit it? Again, we reiterate that Lawson has brought no libel action against any publication alleging he was an MI6 asset, or a ‘stringer’ planted on newspapers by the spooks to further their covert propagandist agenda.
Other disturbing aspects of the unlikely ‘friendship’ between Diana and Rosa were raised by Paris-based journalist Jane Tawbase in a EuroBusiness investigation into Monckton and Lawson. She wrote: ‘Rosa Monckton, a generation older, made an odd friend for the often unhappy princess. A svelte sophisticate and a wealthy working woman, her first relationships and loyalties lay, almost from when she was born, with the Queen. She was a regular visitor to the royal household all her life and was, for that reason, more given to loyalty to the crown than to an unhappy and disruptive outsider, one who was seriously damaging the public image of the royal family.’
On closer inspection, the relationship between Monckton and the ‘disruptive’ Diana, is somewhat inexplicable, perhaps just very odd. Diana was a fashion goddess and fitness fanatic who delighted in shopping and modern music. Monckton, by contrast, is a highly cerebral woman of the world, married to a man with links to MI6 that no journalist or newspaper editor should ever have.
Jane Tawbase also raises two further questions on this murky subject and throws more light on the matter than most before or after her. She wrote: ‘Whether Rosa Monckton introduced her brother to the princess and whether he was part of the MI6 operation. It was almost unthinkable that he was not.’ In her second point she wrote: ‘Did MI6 ask Rosa Monckton to do the key job of moving into the princess’s inner circle and become her confidante? It would certainly have made the job easier.’
Dissident MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, who has been harassed for years by the French and British authorities, is certain that Monckton’s brother is a spy. It should be noted that Anthony and Rosa’s grandfather worked for Edward VIII and kept a close watch on him for the security services throughout the abdication and beyond. Like Diana, the British Establishment were determined to rid themselves of Edward VIII. The Queen Mother, however, said that Diana was a greater threat to the House of Windsor than Wallis-Simpson and Edward VIII put together. Tawbase concludes that, ‘It would indeed be ironic if history had repeated itself and Rosa Monckton performed the same role for MI6 with regard to Princess Diana.’
In these circumstances, it is perhaps understandable that Rosa Monckton declared that Diana was not pregnant. It must also be noted that no one else can give witness to Monckton’s suggestion that Diana menstruated while they holidayed in Greece, nor should her statement be regarded as fact, it is opinion. Monckton simply expects everyone to believe her version of events because she was Diana’s ‘friend’. And again, it must be stated that Diana abhorred everything to do with the State and was convinced that hired assassins were trying to kill her. It is puzzling why Diana formed a friendship with Monckton.
We must turn to the testimony of Richard Tomlinson, who has been deliberately ignored by the French authorities. His affidavit to judge Herve Stephan was dismissed. Stephan showed no interest in Tomlinson’s affidavit but the British certainly did and MI6 led a campaign of arrests and harassment against its dissident officer across the world to disrupt his life and attempt to silence him….
Tomlinson also revealed that during his time with MI6, he discovered that there was an informal but direct link between certain MI6 officers of senior rank and royal courtiers. St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace are easy access points for the spooks through the back-channel process. Many of these ‘men’ share an Oxbridge background with royal courtiers and the relationship continues for life. They would all have known of the CIA eavesdropping operation against Diana and certainly shared the intel ‘product’.
In the Paget Report, Sir John Stevens alleges that MI6 and MI5 were not aware of the CIA operation. Indeed, he salaciously goes as far to say that the CIA were only interested in Diana’s ‘contacts’ and prime among which were Mohamed Al Fayed and his murdered son Dodi Fayed. By definition, if the CIA were watching Diana’s contacts, then Diana was also being watched. Obviously, Sir John Stevens, the faithful Establishment plod, knows this but at the same time, he must presume the general public to be completely stupid. His tale is defeated with elementary logic.
British Intelligence certainly would have been told of the surveillance operation on Diana and her contacts and highly likely also, they would have been given access to the product of the eavesdropping. It is also perfectly clear to anyone with experience of modern surveillance that Diana would have been tracked through the signal from her mobile phone. Such signals allow the target to be pinpointed to within a metre of their location. The same is also true of Dodi Fayed, Wingfield, Rees-Jones and Henri Paul etc.
As a ‘reward’ for his indiscretions, Tomlinson was arrested at gunpoint by the French DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) at his home. He suffered a broken rib in the operation against him despite the fact that he has no record of violence. The DST agents were ordered to go in hard to teach him a lesson. The whole arrest was designed to shake him to the core and think better of opening his mouth in future. And this is an interesting point which requires further analysis.
By their very nature, ‘fantasists’ or people who make things up, are ignored, not arrested at gunpoint and violently assaulted. Again, if Tomlinson was at least mistaken, or indeed lying about the matters he revealed, there would have been no need to arrest him and he could simply have been dismissed as a former employee with a furtive imagination. The fact he was arrested in such brutal fashion, proves conclusively that Tomlinson has revealed too many truths that powerful people would prefer to remain buried. It is also noteworthy that Tomlinson has not been accused of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by his detractors.
In the event, Tomlinson was questioned for over eighteen hours at the Paris HQ of the DST to discourage him from giving evidence to the Stephan inquiry. But he did appear before Stephan and told him, “As long as they [MI6] can get away with doing something then that’s their only limit about what they will do. This includes assassination.”
Diana’s decision to embrace Islam and highly likely produce a mixed-race brother or sister to the heirs to the throne of England, and her anti-landmines campaign were enough to warrant her elimination. But there is more still in the shape of the ‘secrets’ she held in her little box of treasures at Kensington Palace.
Paul Burrell, often referred to as ‘Diana’s rock’ was aware of the box and most, if not all of its contents. Following his arrest on the grounds that he unlawfully took over 300 items from Kensington Palace, after the princess’s funeral, he was interrogated again and again by Scotland Yard detectives, who shook him up quite badly but failed to break him.
In his book A Royal Duty, he relates his experience of the arrest and what the political police were looking for: ‘Then DS Milburn asked me two bizarre questions: “Do you have a manuscript of the memoirs you are writing?” If there was one moment when I knew the officers were stabbing in the dark, that was it. No such manuscript existed.’
Burrell then explains the events of the following morning: ‘The next morning, DS Roger Milburn returned. On instructions from Andrew Shaw, I said nothing to his volley of questions. Again, his curiosity seemed to focus more on the contents of a box, sensitive paperwork and a manuscript.’
Burrell’s trial was a landmine for the monarchy and the Queen could not risk her former butler, revealing some of what he saw. In open court, just before the trial collapsed, a truly revealing encounter took place that gave the world some insight of what was in Diana’s box of treasures.
Burrell wrote: ‘The full picture emerged with the judge’s approval. Scotland Yard was looking for a signet ring given to the princess by Major James Hewitt; a resignation letter from her private secretary Patrick Jephson; letters from Prince Philip to the princess; and a tape, which became known after the trial as the Rape Tape.
It was a recording made by the princess in 1996 when she informally interviewed former KP orderly and ex-Welsh Guardsman George Smith. He had alleged that after a night of heavy drinking he had been raped in 1989 by a male member of staff who worked for Prince Charles. It all came to a head because George who had worked at Highgrove, St James’s Palace and KP, had been suffering nightmares, was drinking heavily, and his marriage was falling apart. He blamed it all on an incident that he said he was bottling up.’
‘The princess knew the member of staff in question. From that moment on she loathed him. “I know what that evil bugger did. I know what he did to George, and I will never forgive him for that,” she seethed, after her futile attempts to bring about justice. He [George Smith] never returned to work, and accepted a settlement [Fiona Shackleton] at the end of his employment of around £40,000.’
‘The princess ensured that the tape never saw the light of day. But the mystery of its whereabouts, and the threat its contents posed, emerged during the police investigation of my case. Lady Sarah McCorquodale had asked that Scotland Yard ‘ascertain’ the contents of the box. In court, DS Milburn said: “I was looking for the contents of that box. All of a sudden, the undertones behind the raid on my home became clear.’
As the trial wore on it was obvious Burrell would have to take the stand. The prospect of ‘Diana’s rock’ hurling highly explosive stones at the British Establishment was enough to prompt the Queen to recall a conversation she had with Burrell in December 1997 at Buckingham Palace in which Burrell told her that he was taking a number of the princess’s items into safekeeping.
The exchange was a chilling encounter for Burrell. He wrote of it: ‘As the meeting neared its end, the Queen said one more thing to me. Looking over her half-rimmed spectacles, she said: “Be careful, Paul. No one has been as close to a member of my family as you have. There are ‘powers’ at work in this country about which we have no knowledge,’ and she fixed me with a stare where her eyes made clear the ‘do you understand?’.
‘She [Queen] might have been referring to the domestic intelligence service MI5 because, have no doubt, the Queen does not know of its secret work and ‘darker practices’ but she is aware of the power it is capable of wielding. Like the royal household, the intelligence services are given carte blanche to act in whatever way is considered to be in the best interests of state and monarchy.’
‘At my December 1997 meeting with the Queen and as my statement had made clear: ‘I feared at the time of the princess’s death that there was a conspiracy to change the course of history, and erase certain parts of her life from it. Mrs Frances Shand Kydd spent two weeks shredding personal correspondence and documents.’
Piers Morgan in his own memoir, The Insider, explains that he tried to help Burrell and have the quasi-case against him dropped, he wrote: -
17 January 2001 – I rang Mark Bolland at the Palace.
‘You guys are mad, Mark. Burrell could say anything in the stand.’
‘I know, I know,’ he replied despondently.
‘It’s a mess.’
‘Well, end it now, before it’s too late.’
‘We can’t, the police are running the case now.’
A cornered Burrell could be a very dangerous beast. This will go on for weeks, and can only be damaging to the Royal Family. They must be mad allowing Burrell to potentially take the stand. Cornered and desperate, he might say anything, and he knows the lot because he was there. There’s also no way he stole Diana’s stuff, anyone who knows him knows that. He could make more money from what’s in his mind than he ever could from a few of her trinkets.
The Establishment were again courting disaster by trying to silence Burrell. In reality, the tactic worked in reverse, virtually ensuring that Burrell, facing five years in prison if convicted, would open up before the glaring eyes of the world to save his own skin.
By 16 September 1997, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones had opened his eyes. The worry for the British Establishment was the strong possibility that he would remember what happened in the moments before the Mercedes crashed. Rees-Jones can certainly remember fastening his seatbelt just seconds before the car crashed but claims that he cannot remember anything after that. But again, damning further clarification comes in the shape of Piers Morgan and his memoir The Insider.
Morgan wrote: ‘Tuesday, 16 September 1997 – I had a brief chat with Fayed today and he said that Rees-Jones is awake, and having flashbacks of the crash. ‘Can we have the first interview?’ Fayed was anxious. ‘He needs to tell us what happened first, that is the most important thing. Then perhaps he can talk to you. But we must be careful Piers, he is in a very bad way.’ To this day, Al Fayed has not told the world what Rees-Jones said to him!
Naturally, Rees-Jones, who suffered terrible injuries, claims that he can remember nothing. Can he remember coming round in the hospital in the presence of Al Fayed and having ‘flashbacks of the crash’? We do not wish to be offensive to Rees-Jones, particularly given the injuries he suffered, but we do not think his story holds up in the slightest under examination. He can remember some things but not others, selective memory loss not amnesia.
For instance, Rees-Jones can remember leaving the Ritz Hotel on the rue Cambon and that a white Fiat Uno was tailing them. He then recounts that he saw a white Fiat Uno again on the approach to the Alma Tunnel. He also recalls that he fastened his seatbelt and encouraged the others to do the same moments before impact. At the very moment he fastened his seatbelt, the white Fiat Uno was careering into the path of the Mercedes but Rees-Jones does not remember that....
His memory falls apart when it comes to events in the Alma Tunnel. He can remember belting up, not verbally at that time, but cannot remember seeing the white Fiat Uno in the tunnel nor a blinding white flash. If he can remember fastening his seatbelt, he can remember what happened in the very next seconds involving the white Fiat Uno and the blinding flash of light and the escaping motorbike.
It is little wonder that the majority of people do not believe Rees-Jones. We will go further and state that he is lying about not being able to remember the juicy bits, the crucial events immediately before the Mercedes crashed. Either that, or he has made it all up about seeing a white Fiat Uno and fastening his seatbelt and encouraging the others to do the same. But then, why would he do that? This man wants his cake and to eat it but the majority of people do not swallow his 'sweetened' version of events.
Rumours are rife in the media world that Rees-Jones has been threatened by British intelligence. If he opens his mouth and suddenly remembers what happened in the crucial seconds to impact, he might not be so lucky a second time. Rees-Jones is also still subject to the Official Secrets Act and government lawyers can make that mean whatever they want it to mean. Theoretically, the OSA should apply only to the period one was in service but the strictures of the Act apply for the rest of one’s life and Rees-Jones knows this only too well.
There is also the fact that in Northern Ireland, Rees-Jones, a former paratrooper with experience of putting enemy targets under surveillance, worked closely at times with British Army Intelligence and he will know only too well what the Force Research Unit, MI6 and The Increment are capable of. On his testimony that he cannot remember the vital seconds before I impact, Rees-Jones should not be believed. The claim is that he suffers from amnesia, only in part mind you, and that we should have sympathy for him.
We genuinely sympathise with the fact that he suffered terrible injuries in the crash but one must remain logical and rational and not succumb to emotional impulses. In his book, The Bodyguard’s Story, he repeats the same old tale, over and over again: he cannot remember the ‘juicy bits’ but has no problem dishing out all the old crumbs of information he wants us to know. And we know people in the media world, who are certain that Rees-Jones has been silenced by British Intelligence.
An important note to end this article on comes in the form of a quote from former MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson: “There is an arrogant faction in MI6, part of the Oxbridge clique, which doesn’t try to hide dedication to the royal family and their self-appointment as defenders of the realm.” And spooks excel at the lying game, as par for the course of their ‘training’ and ethics by prerequisite, are irrelevant.…
I/Ops news-alliance.com
In December 2003, Daily Mail journalist Sue Reid, with whom we have worked in the past investigating the alleged ‘suicide’ of Dr David Kelly, quoted a source, who insisted on remaining anonymous, saying that Diana went to a leading London hospital to undergo a pregnancy scan, days before she joined Dodi on holiday. The result is unknown and the test was conducted in the utmost secrecy.
But then Diana’s self-confessed ‘best friend’ Rosa Monckton, claims that Diana menstruated only a week before the crash, while they were on holiday in Greece. It is clear that Monckton believes she cannot be challenged on this issue but former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson alleges that Rosa’s husband, Dominic Lawson, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper and Spectator magazine, provided journalistic cover for MI6 officers while he was editor of The Spectator.
Rosa’s brother, the Honourable Anthony Leopold Colyer Monckton, a diplomat, was also an MI6 spy according to Tomlinson. It should be noted that Dominic Lawson has never sued any publication or person for alleging he was an MI6 stringer. Dominic Lawson, is of course, the son of former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson and brother of famous TV ‘kitchen goddess’ Nigella Lawson. The very same Nigel Lawson who detested Mohamed Al Fayed for besmirching his beloved Tories.
Tomlinson alleges that Dominic Lawson provided cover for an agent named ironically ‘Spencer’, who was put on the case of a young Russian diplomat, Pluton Obukhov, in Tallin, capital city of Estonia. In an excerpt from Tomlinson’s ‘banned’ book (The Big Breach) published in Pravda, it was revealed that Spencer, returning from a visit to Information Operations (I/Ops), which plants stories or propaganda in the British press, remarked, “Flippin’ outrageous. They’ve got the editor of the Spectator magazine on the books. He’s called ‘smallbrow’. He’s agreed to le me go to Tallin undercover as a freelancer for his magazine. The only condition is that I have to write an article which he’ll publish if he likes it’, the cheeky bastard wants a story courtesy of the taxpayer.”
The allegations that Dominic Lawson was a paid asset of MI6 have also been made in parliament but he has always denied ever having been an agent. How likely is it that he would admit it? Again, we reiterate that Lawson has brought no libel action against any publication alleging he was an MI6 asset, or a ‘stringer’ planted on newspapers by the spooks to further their covert propagandist agenda.
Other disturbing aspects of the unlikely ‘friendship’ between Diana and Rosa were raised by Paris-based journalist Jane Tawbase in a EuroBusiness investigation into Monckton and Lawson. She wrote: ‘Rosa Monckton, a generation older, made an odd friend for the often unhappy princess. A svelte sophisticate and a wealthy working woman, her first relationships and loyalties lay, almost from when she was born, with the Queen. She was a regular visitor to the royal household all her life and was, for that reason, more given to loyalty to the crown than to an unhappy and disruptive outsider, one who was seriously damaging the public image of the royal family.’
On closer inspection, the relationship between Monckton and the ‘disruptive’ Diana, is somewhat inexplicable, perhaps just very odd. Diana was a fashion goddess and fitness fanatic who delighted in shopping and modern music. Monckton, by contrast, is a highly cerebral woman of the world, married to a man with links to MI6 that no journalist or newspaper editor should ever have.
Jane Tawbase also raises two further questions on this murky subject and throws more light on the matter than most before or after her. She wrote: ‘Whether Rosa Monckton introduced her brother to the princess and whether he was part of the MI6 operation. It was almost unthinkable that he was not.’ In her second point she wrote: ‘Did MI6 ask Rosa Monckton to do the key job of moving into the princess’s inner circle and become her confidante? It would certainly have made the job easier.’
Dissident MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, who has been harassed for years by the French and British authorities, is certain that Monckton’s brother is a spy. It should be noted that Anthony and Rosa’s grandfather worked for Edward VIII and kept a close watch on him for the security services throughout the abdication and beyond. Like Diana, the British Establishment were determined to rid themselves of Edward VIII. The Queen Mother, however, said that Diana was a greater threat to the House of Windsor than Wallis-Simpson and Edward VIII put together. Tawbase concludes that, ‘It would indeed be ironic if history had repeated itself and Rosa Monckton performed the same role for MI6 with regard to Princess Diana.’
In these circumstances, it is perhaps understandable that Rosa Monckton declared that Diana was not pregnant. It must also be noted that no one else can give witness to Monckton’s suggestion that Diana menstruated while they holidayed in Greece, nor should her statement be regarded as fact, it is opinion. Monckton simply expects everyone to believe her version of events because she was Diana’s ‘friend’. And again, it must be stated that Diana abhorred everything to do with the State and was convinced that hired assassins were trying to kill her. It is puzzling why Diana formed a friendship with Monckton.
We must turn to the testimony of Richard Tomlinson, who has been deliberately ignored by the French authorities. His affidavit to judge Herve Stephan was dismissed. Stephan showed no interest in Tomlinson’s affidavit but the British certainly did and MI6 led a campaign of arrests and harassment against its dissident officer across the world to disrupt his life and attempt to silence him….
Tomlinson also revealed that during his time with MI6, he discovered that there was an informal but direct link between certain MI6 officers of senior rank and royal courtiers. St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace are easy access points for the spooks through the back-channel process. Many of these ‘men’ share an Oxbridge background with royal courtiers and the relationship continues for life. They would all have known of the CIA eavesdropping operation against Diana and certainly shared the intel ‘product’.
In the Paget Report, Sir John Stevens alleges that MI6 and MI5 were not aware of the CIA operation. Indeed, he salaciously goes as far to say that the CIA were only interested in Diana’s ‘contacts’ and prime among which were Mohamed Al Fayed and his murdered son Dodi Fayed. By definition, if the CIA were watching Diana’s contacts, then Diana was also being watched. Obviously, Sir John Stevens, the faithful Establishment plod, knows this but at the same time, he must presume the general public to be completely stupid. His tale is defeated with elementary logic.
British Intelligence certainly would have been told of the surveillance operation on Diana and her contacts and highly likely also, they would have been given access to the product of the eavesdropping. It is also perfectly clear to anyone with experience of modern surveillance that Diana would have been tracked through the signal from her mobile phone. Such signals allow the target to be pinpointed to within a metre of their location. The same is also true of Dodi Fayed, Wingfield, Rees-Jones and Henri Paul etc.
As a ‘reward’ for his indiscretions, Tomlinson was arrested at gunpoint by the French DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) at his home. He suffered a broken rib in the operation against him despite the fact that he has no record of violence. The DST agents were ordered to go in hard to teach him a lesson. The whole arrest was designed to shake him to the core and think better of opening his mouth in future. And this is an interesting point which requires further analysis.
By their very nature, ‘fantasists’ or people who make things up, are ignored, not arrested at gunpoint and violently assaulted. Again, if Tomlinson was at least mistaken, or indeed lying about the matters he revealed, there would have been no need to arrest him and he could simply have been dismissed as a former employee with a furtive imagination. The fact he was arrested in such brutal fashion, proves conclusively that Tomlinson has revealed too many truths that powerful people would prefer to remain buried. It is also noteworthy that Tomlinson has not been accused of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by his detractors.
In the event, Tomlinson was questioned for over eighteen hours at the Paris HQ of the DST to discourage him from giving evidence to the Stephan inquiry. But he did appear before Stephan and told him, “As long as they [MI6] can get away with doing something then that’s their only limit about what they will do. This includes assassination.”
Diana’s decision to embrace Islam and highly likely produce a mixed-race brother or sister to the heirs to the throne of England, and her anti-landmines campaign were enough to warrant her elimination. But there is more still in the shape of the ‘secrets’ she held in her little box of treasures at Kensington Palace.
Paul Burrell, often referred to as ‘Diana’s rock’ was aware of the box and most, if not all of its contents. Following his arrest on the grounds that he unlawfully took over 300 items from Kensington Palace, after the princess’s funeral, he was interrogated again and again by Scotland Yard detectives, who shook him up quite badly but failed to break him.
In his book A Royal Duty, he relates his experience of the arrest and what the political police were looking for: ‘Then DS Milburn asked me two bizarre questions: “Do you have a manuscript of the memoirs you are writing?” If there was one moment when I knew the officers were stabbing in the dark, that was it. No such manuscript existed.’
Burrell then explains the events of the following morning: ‘The next morning, DS Roger Milburn returned. On instructions from Andrew Shaw, I said nothing to his volley of questions. Again, his curiosity seemed to focus more on the contents of a box, sensitive paperwork and a manuscript.’
Burrell’s trial was a landmine for the monarchy and the Queen could not risk her former butler, revealing some of what he saw. In open court, just before the trial collapsed, a truly revealing encounter took place that gave the world some insight of what was in Diana’s box of treasures.
Burrell wrote: ‘The full picture emerged with the judge’s approval. Scotland Yard was looking for a signet ring given to the princess by Major James Hewitt; a resignation letter from her private secretary Patrick Jephson; letters from Prince Philip to the princess; and a tape, which became known after the trial as the Rape Tape.
It was a recording made by the princess in 1996 when she informally interviewed former KP orderly and ex-Welsh Guardsman George Smith. He had alleged that after a night of heavy drinking he had been raped in 1989 by a male member of staff who worked for Prince Charles. It all came to a head because George who had worked at Highgrove, St James’s Palace and KP, had been suffering nightmares, was drinking heavily, and his marriage was falling apart. He blamed it all on an incident that he said he was bottling up.’
‘The princess knew the member of staff in question. From that moment on she loathed him. “I know what that evil bugger did. I know what he did to George, and I will never forgive him for that,” she seethed, after her futile attempts to bring about justice. He [George Smith] never returned to work, and accepted a settlement [Fiona Shackleton] at the end of his employment of around £40,000.’
‘The princess ensured that the tape never saw the light of day. But the mystery of its whereabouts, and the threat its contents posed, emerged during the police investigation of my case. Lady Sarah McCorquodale had asked that Scotland Yard ‘ascertain’ the contents of the box. In court, DS Milburn said: “I was looking for the contents of that box. All of a sudden, the undertones behind the raid on my home became clear.’
As the trial wore on it was obvious Burrell would have to take the stand. The prospect of ‘Diana’s rock’ hurling highly explosive stones at the British Establishment was enough to prompt the Queen to recall a conversation she had with Burrell in December 1997 at Buckingham Palace in which Burrell told her that he was taking a number of the princess’s items into safekeeping.
The exchange was a chilling encounter for Burrell. He wrote of it: ‘As the meeting neared its end, the Queen said one more thing to me. Looking over her half-rimmed spectacles, she said: “Be careful, Paul. No one has been as close to a member of my family as you have. There are ‘powers’ at work in this country about which we have no knowledge,’ and she fixed me with a stare where her eyes made clear the ‘do you understand?’.
‘She [Queen] might have been referring to the domestic intelligence service MI5 because, have no doubt, the Queen does not know of its secret work and ‘darker practices’ but she is aware of the power it is capable of wielding. Like the royal household, the intelligence services are given carte blanche to act in whatever way is considered to be in the best interests of state and monarchy.’
‘At my December 1997 meeting with the Queen and as my statement had made clear: ‘I feared at the time of the princess’s death that there was a conspiracy to change the course of history, and erase certain parts of her life from it. Mrs Frances Shand Kydd spent two weeks shredding personal correspondence and documents.’
Piers Morgan in his own memoir, The Insider, explains that he tried to help Burrell and have the quasi-case against him dropped, he wrote: -
17 January 2001 – I rang Mark Bolland at the Palace.
‘You guys are mad, Mark. Burrell could say anything in the stand.’
‘I know, I know,’ he replied despondently.
‘It’s a mess.’
‘Well, end it now, before it’s too late.’
‘We can’t, the police are running the case now.’
A cornered Burrell could be a very dangerous beast. This will go on for weeks, and can only be damaging to the Royal Family. They must be mad allowing Burrell to potentially take the stand. Cornered and desperate, he might say anything, and he knows the lot because he was there. There’s also no way he stole Diana’s stuff, anyone who knows him knows that. He could make more money from what’s in his mind than he ever could from a few of her trinkets.
The Establishment were again courting disaster by trying to silence Burrell. In reality, the tactic worked in reverse, virtually ensuring that Burrell, facing five years in prison if convicted, would open up before the glaring eyes of the world to save his own skin.
By 16 September 1997, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones had opened his eyes. The worry for the British Establishment was the strong possibility that he would remember what happened in the moments before the Mercedes crashed. Rees-Jones can certainly remember fastening his seatbelt just seconds before the car crashed but claims that he cannot remember anything after that. But again, damning further clarification comes in the shape of Piers Morgan and his memoir The Insider.
Morgan wrote: ‘Tuesday, 16 September 1997 – I had a brief chat with Fayed today and he said that Rees-Jones is awake, and having flashbacks of the crash. ‘Can we have the first interview?’ Fayed was anxious. ‘He needs to tell us what happened first, that is the most important thing. Then perhaps he can talk to you. But we must be careful Piers, he is in a very bad way.’ To this day, Al Fayed has not told the world what Rees-Jones said to him!
Naturally, Rees-Jones, who suffered terrible injuries, claims that he can remember nothing. Can he remember coming round in the hospital in the presence of Al Fayed and having ‘flashbacks of the crash’? We do not wish to be offensive to Rees-Jones, particularly given the injuries he suffered, but we do not think his story holds up in the slightest under examination. He can remember some things but not others, selective memory loss not amnesia.
For instance, Rees-Jones can remember leaving the Ritz Hotel on the rue Cambon and that a white Fiat Uno was tailing them. He then recounts that he saw a white Fiat Uno again on the approach to the Alma Tunnel. He also recalls that he fastened his seatbelt and encouraged the others to do the same moments before impact. At the very moment he fastened his seatbelt, the white Fiat Uno was careering into the path of the Mercedes but Rees-Jones does not remember that....
His memory falls apart when it comes to events in the Alma Tunnel. He can remember belting up, not verbally at that time, but cannot remember seeing the white Fiat Uno in the tunnel nor a blinding white flash. If he can remember fastening his seatbelt, he can remember what happened in the very next seconds involving the white Fiat Uno and the blinding flash of light and the escaping motorbike.
It is little wonder that the majority of people do not believe Rees-Jones. We will go further and state that he is lying about not being able to remember the juicy bits, the crucial events immediately before the Mercedes crashed. Either that, or he has made it all up about seeing a white Fiat Uno and fastening his seatbelt and encouraging the others to do the same. But then, why would he do that? This man wants his cake and to eat it but the majority of people do not swallow his 'sweetened' version of events.
Rumours are rife in the media world that Rees-Jones has been threatened by British intelligence. If he opens his mouth and suddenly remembers what happened in the crucial seconds to impact, he might not be so lucky a second time. Rees-Jones is also still subject to the Official Secrets Act and government lawyers can make that mean whatever they want it to mean. Theoretically, the OSA should apply only to the period one was in service but the strictures of the Act apply for the rest of one’s life and Rees-Jones knows this only too well.
There is also the fact that in Northern Ireland, Rees-Jones, a former paratrooper with experience of putting enemy targets under surveillance, worked closely at times with British Army Intelligence and he will know only too well what the Force Research Unit, MI6 and The Increment are capable of. On his testimony that he cannot remember the vital seconds before I impact, Rees-Jones should not be believed. The claim is that he suffers from amnesia, only in part mind you, and that we should have sympathy for him.
We genuinely sympathise with the fact that he suffered terrible injuries in the crash but one must remain logical and rational and not succumb to emotional impulses. In his book, The Bodyguard’s Story, he repeats the same old tale, over and over again: he cannot remember the ‘juicy bits’ but has no problem dishing out all the old crumbs of information he wants us to know. And we know people in the media world, who are certain that Rees-Jones has been silenced by British Intelligence.
An important note to end this article on comes in the form of a quote from former MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson: “There is an arrogant faction in MI6, part of the Oxbridge clique, which doesn’t try to hide dedication to the royal family and their self-appointment as defenders of the realm.” And spooks excel at the lying game, as par for the course of their ‘training’ and ethics by prerequisite, are irrelevant.…
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