Prince Harry

by Duncan Larcombe

  Bingham was a young and talented journalist working for the Press Association (PA) when the blackout deal with the British media was forged. It was agreed that a reporter and photographer from PA would make the trip to Afghanistan, take pictures and interview the prince. In return their pictures and copy would be shared with the British media as and when the blackout was lifted. It was a high-pressure assignment but one that Bingham jumped at. A year earlier he had embedded with British troops in Afghanistan and sent stories home for the PA from the front line. This made him the obvious choice when his news editor was tasked with finding one of his reporters for the job.

  Bingham’s account of what really happened during Harry’s first tour in Afghanistan is the most reliable on record. By his own admission, the one thing many people assume about Harry’s deployment is that he was kept well out of harm’s way, that it was more of a PR stunt than a genuine stint serving his country.

  When I spoke to Bingham, it was clear he still finds this misconception a frustration, having had first-hand experience of life in the front line with Harry. ‘In the intervening years I have lost count of the number of people who remarked that, of course, Prince Harry was nowhere near danger,’ he said.

  In reality, the bases where Harry spent the bulk of his ten-week deployment came under regular attack. Barely a day went by when insurgents were not firing rockets and small arms fire in Harry’s direction, Bingham told me. ‘I was there as the sole print journalist along with a photographer from the Press Association, where I worked at the time, to see the prince at home in a setting as far removed from the nightclubs of London as it is possible to imagine.

  ‘Then a 23-year-old Household Cavalry officer, he was serving as forward air controller, responsible for controlling military air movements from the ground and – on occasion – calling in air strikes such as the one that morning. To the pilots and air controllers in other parts of Afghanistan he spent hours speaking to over the radio, he was just another voice – known only by his call sign Widow Six Seven.

  ‘It was early January 2008. The prince had already been serving in Afghanistan for about a fortnight as part of a deployment which had to be shrouded in secrecy for fear of putting his fellow soldiers in extra danger.

  ‘By the time we arrived on our first visit he had already slipped the leash. We had been briefed that he would be based at a forward operating base in the middle of the desert, experiencing what were euphemistically called “austere” conditions, doing an important job but not exactly in harm’s way. Instead he had wangled a transfer “forward”.

  ‘We first caught up with him at a base on the edge of Garmsir, then the southernmost corner of NATO control in Helmand. At the time Garmsir was a virtual ghost town, a handful of streets of empty shops and abandoned houses, complete with worthless banknotes blowing in the breeze. The base was even more austere, a ramshackle complex of half-ruined buildings, without doors, windows and – in some parts – roofs. It was chilling in the bitter Afghan winter when night-time temperatures regularly touched -10°C.

  ‘He evidently loved it. When not at work, he spent his time hanging out with a company of Gurkhas manning the base. Some of the food, it has to be said, was sensational: scrawny cockerels, slaughtered with Gurkha kukri knives and transformed into Nepalese curries.’

  And was Harry doing a real job in Afghanistan? Details of the role he played in engaging with the enemy have often been played down. But there is no doubt that he played a role in killing Taliban fighters that had tried to launch attacks on the base where he served. As Bingham recalled: ‘The black-and-white footage was grainy but unforgettable: the silhouette of a man running for cover as a fighter jet swooped down ready to strike. Moments later the outlines of fields and mud-walled compounds vanished into a cloud of dust.’

  It is probably not a term he would use to describe it, but this was Prince Harry’s first ‘kill’. Bingham continued: ‘I watched it unfold like a surreal video game on a laptop screen a few miles away in a base in the far south of Helmand Province. With the Army’s customary black humour, they called it “Taliban TV”.’

  If Harry’s deployment had been nothing more than a PR charade, then that is not how it felt to Bingham. That night he and his photographer had been forced to take cover as insurgents launched missiles from a trench no more than 500 yards away from the FOB. It was, according to Bingham, a frightening experience but by no means unique for Harry. ‘The base was under daily attack,’ Bingham said. ‘There was no way this was staged for our benefit. Harry was in the war zone and the dangers were all around. On the second day there, we went up a nearby hill, which had been turned into an observation point. Things got a bit hairy when a firefight broke out on the way down the hill. Harry was already back at the base when we returned and just laughed: “I see you got contacted.”’

  Even in the midst of battle Harry seems to have let his sense of humour shine through. He often talks publicly about his dislike for the press, which is understandable in many ways. But when Harry is with reporters he is surprisingly engaging, almost as though he enjoys the chance to tease them.

  Bingham’s brief encounter with Harry has left a lasting impression on him. ‘I was quite surprised and impressed by how Harry seemed to be enjoying his time in Afghanistan,’ Bingham told me. ‘It was clear that he had made a point of learning everyone’s name, from the cooks and the most junior soldiers, to the captains and officers of a more senior rank. He came across as very natural. There were no issues about him being a Royal and he acted as if he was just one of the men, doing a job in a difficult environment.’

  The words and pictures gained by the Press Association on that trip would eventually fill the pages of newspapers all over the world. It was on their first visit that Harry was famously filmed firing a high calibre machine-gun from his base. At one point he is seen turning around and facing the camera with a large grin on his face. Because of this, many people – including myself – have always assumed this was staged for the media. However, Bingham revealed this was not the case.

  Speaking about the moments leading up to when Harry opened fire, Bingham said: ‘The footage of Harry firing the machine-gun may have looked staged, but it wasn’t. We were with him at the base when the shout went out that there were insurgents spotted in the no man’s land nearby. We could hear shots coming in from small arms. Harry immediately ran to his post and began to fire rounds back. He didn’t even have time to put on his body armour and helmet. But the reason he was smiling was because he was pleased he’d managed to get to the machine-gun first and had beaten others to the post.’

  The footage had to be shown to commanders at the MoD before they could be given the green light for release ready for when the blackout was lifted. When they saw the images of Harry without his protective gear they were worried about allowing the public to see the footage of him in nothing more than a brown T-shirt. In the end they relented, but it showed just how sensitive the top brass were when it came to making sure their VIP soldier’s first encounter with battle went smoothly.

  A great deal of planning had gone into Harry’s deployment. The months dealing secretly with the media were just the tip of the iceberg. His private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton had lobbied hard for him to be allowed to fight, and a careful plan had been put in place to ensure he was able to see action. However, as is so often the case in the heat of war, Harry’s desire to get stuck in shone through when he was finally out on the ground.

  Bingham noted that when he made his second visit to Afghanistan a few weeks later, the plan for Harry had altered. ‘The next time we joined him, about five weeks later, he was back with his Household Cavalry comrades moving around in a convoy of tank-like Spartan armoured vehicles in the desert near Musa Qala further north.

  ‘We were dropped off in the middle of the night from the back of a Chinook helicopter at a grid reference, with a consignment of mail and some boxes of supplies. As the helicopter’s dust cloud receded, a familiar
face emerged in the darkness nonchalantly welcoming us back, a souvenir kukri on his back.

  ‘If comforts at Garmsir were basic, here they were non-existent. At night, like everyone else, he took his turn “on stag” from the turret of his Spartan, when not sleeping in a hand-dug trench. Again it seemed he had slipped the leash. When his battlegroup moved its headquarters to a base outside Musah Qala – then recently recaptured – he left Garmsir to join them. But within a week or two he had already negotiated permission to join a “Mog” (Movement Operating Group) – a sort of nomadic armed convoy.

  ‘On the night Prince Harry was flown home from Afghanistan I went to the MoD to interview General Sir Richard Dannatt, now Lord Dannatt, who was then head of the Army, about how the highly sensitive deployment had gone. When he referred to the base Prince Harry had been ostensibly deployed to, I mentioned in passing how much he had enjoyed roughing it in the desert. For just a moment, the general glanced up, looking genuinely puzzled.’

  Even the head of the Army appeared not to have known just how far forward Harry had managed to get. There was never a plan for him to sleep outside of the relative safety of the FOBs. But it seems Harry’s hunger for getting closer to the front line meant that he had managed to wangle his way onto different task forces.

  Footage from the second time the press pool visited Harry in Afghanistan was memorable because he was filmed riding a rusty old motorbike in the desert. This baffled Royal-watchers, who had no idea what he was doing, or how he managed to get his hands on what was clearly not a military machine.

  Bingham laughed as he recalled the back story. He said it happened as the troops Harry was with were waiting to push on into an area that had been held by the Taliban. They camped out in a trench under the stars while they waited for the command to advance. In the morning when the press pool woke up, they saw a group of British soldiers wheeling the motorbike about, trying to get it started. When dawn broke they had found it lying there just a few yards from where they had been camping.

  To this day no one knows how it ended up there, but the best guess is that a local must have been riding it when they spotted the troops nearby. In a panic they must have abandoned the bike and disappeared into the night.

  As soon as the soldiers had managed to get it running, Harry ran over and grabbed the handlebars. To the delight of his comrades, the young Royal wobbled away on a joyride as they looked on. The incident was caught on camera and became one of the lasting images of Harry in the front line. In at least one paper the pictures eventually appeared under the headline: ‘Easy Rider’.

  In spite of all the smiles, it would not be long before the media blackout was to crumble spectacularly. The PA team returned home and prepared their copy and pictures for when the Ministry of Defence and the palace would allow them to be printed. But then, just ten weeks into the deployment, an Australian magazine and a US website revealed the secret that journalists in the UK had been keeping from the readers for weeks.

  Within hours Harry had been hoisted out of the front line and was back at Camp Bastion. There was no way he could stay on the front line now that his presence in Afghanistan was all over the internet.

  It was only years later that Harry finally revealed just how hard it was for him leaving his men behind in Afghanistan. In an interview with Good Morning America in 2016, he said: ‘I had done everything I could to get out there. All I wanted to do was prove that I had a certain set of skills. Literally being plucked out of my team, there was an element of me thinking, “I’m an officer, I’m leaving my soldiers and it’s not my own decision.”

  ‘I was broken. I didn’t know what was going to happen to them, and then, suddenly, I find myself on a plane that’s delayed because a Danish soldier’s coffin was being put onto the plane.’

  No matter how frustrating it must have been for Harry to have his dream deployment cut short, the experience of serving in the front line remains one of the most important in his life. There is no better way of gaining an understanding of the military than to have served your country for real. There is no doubt that this ten-week period has helped shape the way he thinks about the men and women who risk their lives in the course of their jobs.

  In reality Harry had no special protection in the front line and he did indeed put his own life in danger. The role he performed in that first tour of Afghanistan was typical of the work thousands of British troops have experienced, and this will always give him a special bond with his fellow servicemen and women. Being able to look them in the eye and have a mutual respect and understanding will prove invaluable now that Harry is a full-time working Royal. But the legacy of this tour runs far deeper than that.

  The British media agreed to bend the rules of journalism to enable him to get to the front line, and although the blackout was broken, he did have a chance to live out a childhood ambition. It is impossible to understand what makes the Harry of today tick without grasping the impact those ten weeks had on his life.

  Harry’s passion to support the forces, particularly those who have been injured or the families of those killed, comes from a deep affinity with the risks taken by ordinary men and women who serve their country in war.

  It is ironic that the ten weeks that we might expect to have been the most challenging and horrific of a young man’s life were in fact the most special. The truth is, he suited life in the front line. Harry’s wit and natural charm endeared him to all those he met while in Afghanistan. He was willing to muck in with everyone else, never complained about being away from his family and friends, and spent most of his brief deployment trying to get closer to the action.

  If the Harry that set off from Brize Norton in the cold December morning of 2007 was naive and inexperienced, the young soldier who returned to the base from Afghanistan less than three months later had grown up.

  The experiences gained would later prove invaluable when the prince would return to the war in a very different role. His knowledge of what it was like to be on the ground, yards from the enemy, gave him an insight that few of the Apache pilots he would serve alongside on his return would ever have.

  The young warrior prince also learned more about himself in that short space of time than in all of his years at school.

  CHAPTER 17

  ROYAL WEDDING

  ‘Are you ready?’ Harry asked his brother as the signal came through that it was time for them to leave St James’s Palace. William looked nervous and as white as a sheet as he nodded back.

  Fear manifests itself in many ways – cold sweats, butterflies in the stomach, a dry mouth and visible shaking to name but a few. Prince William was on the verge of experiencing at least one or two of these symptoms, so when he made his way up the steps of Westminster Abbey on the morning of 29 April 2011, he needed his younger brother more than ever.

  Inevitably the future king had chosen Prince Harry to be at his side on what was always going to be one of the biggest days of his life. For his part Harry was delighted to accept his brother’s request for him to be his best man on the day he would tie the knot with long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton.

  But as they took in the grandeur of the abbey that day, William and Harry were both blown away by the magnitude of the occasion. Sure, they had both spent months carefully rehearsing this moment in their heads but nothing could have prepared them for the sheer scale of what was happening around them that morning.

  Even before he had stepped into the building where Britain’s most senior clergyman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, would pronounce them man and wife, William had been given a taste of what was to come. The streets along the Mall and throughout the route from St James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey were crammed with tens of thousands of well-wishers, many of whom had camped out all night to ensure they got a view of the groom and his best man. As soon as William’s limousine came into sight they cheered and waved Union Jack flags in excitement at what was to be one of the biggest public events in British history.

  Wh
en it had been announced that the happy couple would marry on a Friday, the government had declared the day a national holiday, which meant that millions of Britons would be glued to their television sets to watch the events unfold. And as William and Harry approached the abbey, any thoughts that this event would be an all-British affair were quickly quashed. At the front of the abbey every available space had been crammed full of temporary stands from where television crews from all over the planet beamed coverage back to their respective countries. The bright lights of their legions of broadcast sets beamed down on the steps of Westminster Abbey like floodlights on a football pitch.

  The bigger broadcasters had even forked out tens of thousands of pounds to rent the rooftops of buildings nearby to ensure a good view. This was a media event on a scale rarely seen before. Half of Green Park, next to Buckingham Palace, had been sealed off and transformed into a vast mobile broadcasting event, with dozens of satellite vans, make-up tents and crew marquees filling every square inch. One American broadcaster had flown in more than 120 staff to ensure that their coverage went well. And with this many mobile units in position it was clear that the global hunger for up-to-the-minute live coverage had reached fever pitch.

  It was estimated that more than two billion people worldwide were glued to their sets to see the future king tie the knot. Even for William and Harry, who had been paraded in front of the cameras since the day they were born, the Royal wedding was on a different scale from anything they had experienced.

  Choosing his wife was probably the most important judgement Prince William would ever have to make. No matter what events and challenges lay ahead for the eldest son of Prince Charles, the choice of bride was going to rank at the very top of the list of decisions for the young Royal.