Prince Harry

by Duncan Larcombe

  This was a prince who was already well on his way to soaring popularity. A Royal who could truly break the mould – and carry it off without looking stupid.

  CHAPTER 11

  STEALING AWAY

  ‘If this is stolen then we might as well take this taxi straight to Belmarsh prison,’ I said, and I was deadly serious. ‘Make no mistake, guys, you will not get away with it,’ I added.

  The memory stick I was holding in my hand was dynamite. If the pictures it contained were sold on the open market they would be worth a small fortune. Once they had been published in The Sun, newspapers and magazines all over the world would be bidding for the rights to publish them. There was little doubt in my mind that they would be worth upwards of £250,000.

  No doubt it was this very fact that stopped the two strangers I had met an hour earlier from seeing sense and taking my advice, even after I added: ‘If you guys had anything to do with stealing this, or if they turn out to be stolen, the police will be all over you.’ It was no good. My new acquaintances were determined to make some money and there was nothing I could say to make them see sense.

  I was well qualified to offer advice. Just five months earlier, in spring 2008, I had appeared at the Old Bailey as a lead prosecution witness for the Metropolitan Police. They were prosecuting two guys who had contacted The Sun more than a year earlier.

  That time the men were trying to sell video footage of a man who worked for one of the Royal family. He was taking drugs and bad-mouthing his employer. I was sent to meet one of the men I would eventually testify against in the Central Criminal Court. Fortunately, I took the view that he was far too dodgy to deal with and left it at that. However, I later discovered that the man and his accomplice had gone to other newspapers and after being knocked back several times had decided to try and blackmail the Royal in question by exposing his drug-taking employee. As a result, they were arrested in a police sting and were found guilty and sent to prison.

  The experience had taught me that when it comes to the Royal family, the police take any suggestion of criminality extremely seriously. And more importantly, a jury are far more likely to side with the establishment than offer the benefit of the doubt to the defendant.

  Five months on, I once again found myself meeting strangers who seemed blissfully unaware of the forces they were about to come up against. Now we were on our way in a black cab from Paddington to the office, where the news and pictures editors were awaiting our arrival.

  Earlier that day a member of the newsdesk had come over to me in the office and said: ‘I’ve just taken a call from a guy who claims to have a memory stick full of pictures of William and Kate on holiday. Here is the bloke’s number. I want you to give him a call and arrange to meet him to see if it checks out.’

  It was September 2008 and I was well aware that the future king and his stunning girlfriend had just returned from the island of Mustique in the Caribbean. As my finger hovered over the office landline, I thought to myself that if these pictures were taken by a friend of William and Kate, or another holidaymaker on the island, then maybe, just maybe, they were useable.

  But as soon as I heard the voice on the end of the phone my heart sank. The ‘source’ who had phoned The Sun didn’t exactly sound like one of William’s old Eton chums. He spoke with a broad south London accent and seemed mainly interested in finding out what his pictures would be worth. I arranged to meet the man once he had finished work that day, but even as I left the office I had some serious reservations.

  Working as a Sun reporter I had dealt with all kinds of people. I knew several of William and Harry’s close friends but was also well used to getting information from ordinary punters.

  I decided to take a photographer with me, not least because if there were pictures of Wills and Kate, and they did turn out to be stolen, I would need him to take discreet shots of the person trying to sell stolen goods.

  I had at least two hours to kill while waiting for the ‘source’ to turn up. Arrangements like this were fairly common at The Sun. Often the person who rang in would get cold feet, sometimes they were just on a wind-up and enjoyed wasting your time, but from time to time they were genuine. But as I sat waiting in Paddington I kept thinking about what we were being offered. How could a set of holiday pictures that could not have been more than a few days old get into the hands of the person I had arranged to meet?

  One thing was absolutely clear to me. If they were – as I suspected – stolen, the paper wouldn’t run them in a month of Sundays. And if I was about to meet a thief and offer them money for stolen goods, surely I was putting myself at risk of being arrested.

  As these thoughts span around my head I decided to make a call. I contacted the Clarence House press office and luckily spoke to one of the more friendly press officers with whom I had a good working relationship.

  I said: ‘Look, the paper has been offered some pictures of William and Kate on their recent holiday in Mustique. I’m not sure whether this is a wind-up, but perhaps in the meantime you may want to make a few calls and check nothing has gone missing, if you know what I mean.’

  The press officer knew exactly what I meant. She was well aware that I was concerned about how these pictures, if indeed they existed, had come into our caller’s possession. At the same time I knew that if the pictures had been obtained legitimately, then there was little the palace press office could do to stop us publishing them.

  Eventually my phone rang and the source told me where to meet. The photographer then got out one of his longest lenses and found a position from where he could take pictures of me meeting the source without being spotted.

  A few minutes later a white van pulled up at the agreed place. Two young guys got out and it was clear they were workmen of some kind. Even if their clothes hadn’t given them away, a bigger clue was the name and company logo splashed across their van.

  They claimed that earlier that day they had been doing a job in Chelsea and had found a memory stick in the gutter. They had then bought a digital camera so that they could view the pictures contained on the memory stick and couldn’t believe their eyes when they realized the pictures showed Kate and William together on holiday.

  The story sounded highly implausible, and it was extremely naive of them to think we would simply stick them in the paper without doing any checks. But from what I had seen I knew I had to get the guys to agree to come to the office to show them to my bosses. They were after money, and the kind of money they were hoping for was well beyond my pay grade.

  I took the opportunity to call my office and tell them what I had seen, but insisted to the pair that the only way we could do a deal was if they came into the office in person to meet with executives. After a few minutes they agreed to get in a taxi and to come with me to our office in Wapping.

  When we arrived at the office the source and his friend were still very excited to be doing a deal with The Sun. As far as they were concerned we would simply hand over the cash without asking questions.

  The news editor had already prepared a conference room and a computer for us to look at the pictures together. The picture editor had been briefed and the associate editor was also on standby, ready to view what we were being offered.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said the picture editor as the first of what must have been fifty pictures flashed up on the computer screen. The pin-sharp images showed William and Kate enjoying their holiday on the exclusive Caribbean island from where they had just returned.

  But they were no ordinary snaps. One after another, they showed the future king and queen enjoying their time together in paradise. There were shots of William in the villa they had rented, dressed in a white outfit and pulling funny faces for the camera. Others showed the couple drinking and relaxing as they holidayed in one of the world’s most exclusive resorts. And the most stunning pictures showed Kate in a tiny bikini doing what looked like a yoga session on the beach. In one of the snaps she was smiling back at the camera while hold
ing her head between her legs.

  ‘How on earth did you get hold of these pictures?’ asked the associate editor.

  Sensing that all their Christmases had come at once, the two men repeated their story about finding them in a gutter earlier that day.

  After we had seen all the pictures the guys agreed to hand over the memory stick on condition that we would not run them until we had agreed a figure. They even agreed to fill in a contract with their names and addresses, on the understanding that we could do business with them.

  After showing them out of the office I returned to the conference room to discuss the situation with my superiors. In chorus we all agreed that they must have been stolen and there was no way we could ever run them in the paper. Even though they represented the most intimate set of photographs any of us were ever likely to see of Wills and Kate, there was only one option open to us. The news editor decided that we would wait to hear back from Clarence House before making any decisions, but we all knew what was coming.

  That night I drove home and met my wife and some friends at a restaurant near our home. A few minutes after I arrived my phone rang and I rushed outside to take the call. It was the woman from the palace I’d spoken to several hours earlier.

  She said: ‘Hello, Duncan. Thank you for your call earlier. If it is OK you are about to get a call from the Met Police. They want to talk to you about the memory card but I wanted to fill you in before they rang, out of courtesy.’

  Less than a minute later my phone rang again. ‘Hello, I was hoping to speak to Duncan Larcombe,’ said the voice at the other end.

  ‘Speaking,’ I replied.

  ‘Hello, Duncan, it is Sergeant Richard Head here from Chelsea and Westminster Police. I understand that you met with someone earlier today in relation to a memory stick. I would like to talk to you about that if that’s OK. Earlier today a car belonging to Pippa Middleton was broken into. A handbag was stolen and it contained a digital camera on which were stored a series of pictures.’

  I said I needed to call my office to inform them of the update and would ring the officer back within the next few minutes. The Sun’s head of legal agreed that I should cooperate fully with the police, and so when I returned Sergeant Head’s call I was able to give him all the information I had. He was pleased to hear that we had the memory stick in our possession, and even more delighted to learn that we had the names and addresses of the two men who had tried to sell the pictures to us.

  The following morning the source’s house was raided and he was arrested. In the end the two of them pleaded guilty to stealing the handbag from Pippa Middleton’s car and their early plea spared them a custodial sentence. The memory stick was handed back and The Sun never ran the pictures.

  Whatever people may say about the British press, the reality is we do not operate outside the law. We will always protect our sources, but on this occasion the individuals trying to sell what they had stolen were fully informed of the risks. We could not join a criminal conspiracy by withholding their details and, as it transpired, they were guilty of breaking into a car and trying to benefit from what they had found.

  The day after the two men were arrested I was at home with my wife watching a documentary about the anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. The programme showed the young princes with their heads bowed behind their mother’s coffin. As I sat there watching, my phone rang and the number calling was one with which I was not familiar.

  It was Prince William’s private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton. He had taken the very unusual step of ringing me to say he had been asked to call and say thank you for what had happened. It turned out that William had taken the incident so seriously that one of his trusted protection officers had joined his Met Police colleagues for the raid the previous day. The fact that Lowther-Pinkerton was calling was an indication that William himself had asked him to make the call.

  Although Harry hadn’t been involved with the events that weekend, he was well aware of what had happened and the role The Sun had played in making sure the precious holiday pictures had been returned and the thieves arrested.

  It was an odd time for Harry. With his Afghan tour cut short, he had been left twiddling his thumbs for several months. The visit to Lesotho with his men had provided a focus, but by the late summer of 2008 he had been left pondering where his military career was heading.

  The media blackout had at least enabled the prince to have ten weeks in the front line, but following the breakdown of the agreement Harry was told in no uncertain terms it would never be repeated. The blackout had come in for a lot of criticism in some areas of the media, and the ethics of deliberately withholding information from the public had been questioned. For some media purists, agreeing not to report something as fundamental as the third in line to the throne fighting the Taliban was simply a bridge too far. While the blackout had worked to a certain extent, it was never going to be more than a one-off.

  So for Harry his dream of fighting with his regiment seemed to have been and gone. He therefore faced a huge dilemma. Did he carry on with a military career which would amount to little more than sitting behind a desk? Or did he quit the Army and embark on something new?

  Harry’s feeling was that he was not ready to leave the Army and become a full-time working Royal. Yes, his charity Sentebale was something that gave him a sense of purpose and the satisfaction of doing something useful with his Royal status. But he felt that he was simply too young to resign himself to a lifetime of promoting good causes and carrying out Royal duties.

  The solution was as brilliant as it was unsuspected. Harry had always had a keen desire to fly helicopters just like his father and his uncle Prince Andrew before him. And while in Afghanistan he had noticed the role that the Army played in providing top cover support and even embarking on missions with their fleet of Apache and Lynx helicopters. By the time it was made clear to him that he would never be likely to see active service in Afghanistan as a troop commander on the ground, he had already begun to consider what might happen if he could make the grade as an Army pilot.

  Although most people assume that the job of flying is only for members of the Royal Air Force, Harry was aware that it might just be possible for him to fly helicopters while remaining an officer in the British Army. In the early summer of 2008 he began to explore the possibility of switching regiments from the Blues and Royals and joining the Army Air Corps.

  One military source close to the prince recalled: ‘There was no way Harry would be allowed to serve in Afghanistan for a second time as a member of the Blues and Royals. However, he had seen the role played by the Army Air Corps during his ten weeks in the war zone. Harry raised the idea of transferring with his private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton. Returning to Afghanistan in secret was impossible. Serving in the front line on the ground was also seen as impossible, given what happened before he was supposed to have been deployed to Iraq. So the notion of a “third way” began to take shape in the summer of 2008.’

  The beauty of serving as a pilot with the Army Air Corps was that Harry could, in theory, complete a tour of duty without increasing the threat level to any of his fellow soldiers.

  The Apache and Lynx fleet in Afghanistan were based in the relative safety of Camp Bastion and its sprawling air base. The only time they went outside the wire would be during missions. The Apaches, in particular, never landed outside the wire. They were deemed far too valuable to risk them ever going below a certain altitude and thus becoming a target for rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons on the ground.

  On the other hand there would still be a risk if Harry were to serve as a pilot. What would happen if his helicopter malfunctioned and was forced to land behind enemy lines?

  And the other potentially major obstacle to Harry’s plan to be a helicopter pilot was the fact that only the elite make the grade. To qualify as a pilot for the Army Air Corps, he would have to reach some of the highest standards in the military. Flying helico
pters is something that requires unusual natural ability and aptitude; even some of the most promising recruits never make it through the tough training regime.

  But the war in Afghanistan was intensifying month by month. The Taliban were claiming more British lives than ever before, and for Harry to stay in the Army without being deployed was looking increasingly difficult.

  The source added: ‘At first the idea of Harry becoming a pilot with the Army Air Corps was dismissed. But the more that senior members of the military thought about it, the more it seemed that this was Harry’s only remaining option. The view was taken that they may as well let Harry try to earn his wings because there was nothing left to lose. If he made the grade, then fantastic. If he failed to make the grade, then that was still a better option than Harry simply resigning his commission and leaving the Army.’

  Once again it fell to Harry’s private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, to enter into negotiations with the chief of the general staff and head of the Army.

  Meanwhile Harry had to find something to occupy himself. Since leaving Afghanistan he had been left in limbo, unsure what the future held. So while he waited to hear back from the Ministry of Defence, he and William decided to make the most of their time.

  By chance a charity that organized an annual motorbike trek in Africa called the Enduro had agreed to donate funds from their event to Sentebale. And when Harry heard about this he persuaded William to take part in the 2008 ride. Both the boys are keen bikers, having been taught to ride by their Met Police bodyguards. But it’s not just their love of speed and the unique adrenalin rush of charging about on two wheels that appeals to the princes. Out on the open road, with crash helmets covering their faces, they get the added benefit of the anonymity they long for.