by Jon King
It was in this place and this circumstance, then, that I first met Rob Lacey, the man who, over the course of some years, would not only provide me with nailed-on insights into the grubby, unscrupulous world of geopolitical espionage. But the man, too, who would play such a key role in my investigation into Princess Diana’s death.
The man who would spill the beans.
CHAPTER 3
Kensington Palace, Westminster—October 1995
The sound of the grandfather clock ticking time from the corner of the room seemed somehow portentous as Diana entered the study, closed the door behind her and sat herself down at her desk.
She was alone. It was where she always came when she wished to be alone, away from the madness, the constant turmoil and terrible anguish that seemed to have engulfed her life in recent years. It was where she came to gather her thoughts, and on occasion, like this occasion, to record them in writing.
Picking up her pen from off the desk top she gazed down at the blank page in front of her. Could she do it? The thoughts she wished to record seemed almost too upsetting for her to write down, almost too painful to relive, even in her mind. She’d known this even before she’d made the decision to come here, of course, even before the tears she was starting to cry had welled there in her eyes. But she’d made the decision, even so, and now her mind was made up. She would suffer quietly no longer. Her husband was cheating on her, she’d come to realize. His security team was spying on her and his cronies were surreptitiously bullying her and planning her demise. Should something untoward happen to her, as she so greatly feared it might, the letter she was about to write would at least reveal to the world who was to blame.
Who had planned her ‘accident’ and who had carried it out.
As she peered up at the grandfather clock standing so tall and unafraid there in the corner of the study, she knew the time had come. Despite her pain she would write the letter and release it to the safekeeping of her close friend and lawyer, Lord Victor Mischcon.
Dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief she adjusted the pen in her hand and started to write.
I am sitting here at my desk today in October, longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head high…
A sound at the door, the creak of floor boards, the faint sound of footfall disappearing along the hallway.
Was someone spying on her?
Immediately Diana stopped writing and gave her full attention to the noise as she pushed herself up from her desk and tip-toed across the room to investigate.
Warily, so warily, she squeezed the handle of the oak-panelled door and turned it just sufficiently that she could pull the door ajar and peer out into the hallway.
Nothing. No one. Not even one of the staff going about their daily duties. She closed the door, and for several moments simply stood there, her back tight to the door, her hands grasping the handle behind her back as though too terrified to let it go.
Was someone playing games with her? she was thinking. Was someone deliberately trying to unsettle her? Frighten her?
She knew the answer, of course. She knew the answer to all of these questions. At length she let go the handle and made her way nervously back to her desk, and continued to write.
This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous – my husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry…
She paused, considering whose name to write. Camilla? Or Tiggy? With which of his current mistresses was Charles most infatuated? Or perhaps more to the point: With which of his current mistresses was Charles expecting a child?
…To make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy, she eventually wrote. Camilla is nothing but a decoy, so we are all being used by the man in every sense of the word.
But still she was unsure…
She knew, of course, that Charles had been seeing Camilla all along, from the very beginning, from their very first introduction and throughout their extraordinarily public courtship. He’d even continued to see her throughout their marriage – their fake, ill-fated marriage – the fact of which Diana was only too aware. He simply couldn’t bear to be without her was the truth of the matter, and Diana had always known this, even though she’d always tried not to believe it. Rather she’d tried to believe – so desperately tried to believe – that he would one day love her more than he loved Camilla: that he would love his wife and the mother of his children more than he loved his mistress. But now, of course, with the separation formalized and their divorce looming hideously, she knew it could never be. She knew now beyond all doubt that Camilla and Camilla alone could satisfy Charles’ longing for love, the love he’d clearly craved from childhood, but never received—not from his mother, not from anyone during his formative years, except perhaps the string of older women in whom he’d found solace, both as a boy and, later, as an adolescent.
And there was the key, Diana knew. There was the reason for his obsession with Camilla, his infatuation with the older woman and divorcee who over the years had served him not only as lover, but as mother, too: mother, lover and wet nurse, all rolled in one.
His whore.
But now even Camilla was facing competition, from the boys’ nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, although Diana of course knew it wouldn’t last. She knew that Tiggy, like so many before her, including herself, would never ultimately prise Charles away from his paramour, that she was simply another fleeting fancy who would fail to claim her prize the way so many had failed in the past. Charles would never love anyone but Camilla, and that was the end of the matter. The only difference on this occasion, if the hearsay was to be believed, was that Tiggy was already pregnant with Charles’ child.
What a mess. What a horrid, horrid mess.
Letting her head fall desperately into her hands Diana again started to cry, the tears that had been welling there all morning finally breaching the banks of her eyes and spilling down her cheeks in small torrents. The grandfather clock counted a full two minutes before those tears finally ebbed and her crying ceased. Only then did she pick up her letter from the desk and, regretfully, fold it into an envelope marked Lord Victor Mishcon.
My Dear Victor, was the last thing she had written. I entrust this letter to your safekeeping, so the world will know that if something does happen to me, it will be MI5 or MI6 who will have done it. Lovingly yours, Diana.
CHAPTER 4
At the time Lacey had his meeting with MI6 enforcer, Richard Mason, at Whitehall’s Sincerity Club, I was working as senior editor of Britain’s most popular independent X-Files-style magazine, UFO Reality. It was the mid-1990s and the X-Files was far and away the most popular show on British TV, setting a climate and a trend that had seen around a dozen or so similar magazines launched within an eighteen-month period. Of these, UFO Reality was the high street’s most popular seller.
True to its name, the magazine for the most part covered UFO-related stories—anything from alien abductions (widely reported at the time), crop circles (widely reported at the time), UFO sightings (even more widely reported at the time), to well-known UFO incidents and alleged government cover-ups: Roswell, MJ-12, Area 51 and others. Plus many other aspects of a phenomenon that, quite simply, was more popular in the UK at this time than afternoon tea. Due largely to the success of the X-Files, and in particular Mulder’s conviction that the truth about aliens was being covered up, what seemed to pique public interest most of all about this strange new phenomenon was the tantalizing notion that the British and American governments knew more about it than they were letting on.
And that’s where I came in.
As well as editing the magazine and contributing various reports and articles, I also wrote a regular feature called Jon King’s X-File Document, which became very popular with our readers—not least, I guess, because it helped introduce the nefarious activities of our governments to what until then had been a fairly drip-fed audience. Fa
ir to say, in fact, that this was one of the first regular ‘conspiracy’ columns to hit the British high street. It was the days before the internet had reached orbit, don’t forget, and the only access people had had to this information prior to the X-Files explosion was contained in a few difficult-to-acquire books, most of which were American. The timing couldn’t have been better. So long as I could find at least a tenuous link to UFOs (and sometimes not even that much) the feature allowed me to explore areas of government ‘conspiracy’ and ‘cover-up’ scarcely before exposed to the public—illegally run advanced technology programmes, for example; top-secret biotech programmes.
And perhaps more to the point: the government’s oil-and-diamond-driven crimes in countries like Angola.
Together with our more manifestly UFO-based features, these were topics that clearly caught the public imagination. At its peak, UFO Reality’s circulation topped 60,000 (not bad for an independent magazine, even in those days). And the core contribution, edition-on-edition, was Jon King’s X-File Document—the very reason, I would later learn, that UFO Reality would so suddenly and inexplicably disappear from the high street newsagents.
And I would end up the munchkin of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
CHAPTER 5
Richard Mason’s Office, MI6 Headquarters—March 1997
Mason sat alone in his darkened office, in a chrome-and-leather armchair facing the wall. In his hand a multi-purpose remote control. As his thumb selected a button on the remote and pressed it a false panel on the wall slid electronically back to reveal a bank of nine square plasma screens, each identical to the next. He then hit a second button on the remote and the screens came alive, all nine simultaneously.
All nine showed the same image.
It was an image of Diana. Or rather, a series of seemingly random images of Diana, one and then another, and then another, each one depicting the princess at a particular stage in her life. Mason was studying them intently, each one in turn, like a stalker obsessing on his prey—Diana as a child, diving into a swimming pool; a teenager, attending a garden party; the shy young children’s nanny, recently introduced to the media as Charles’ new love interest: Lady Diana Spencer … is this the girl he’s going to marry?
Mason hit another button on the remote. A new sequence of images started to play. Charles and Diana were now standing, arm in arm, before reporters at Buckingham Palace on the day they announced their engagement, cameras flashing, Diana appearing blushed and star-struck. Charles looked resigned.
“Can you find the words to sum up how you feel today?” the reporter put to the happy couple.
“It’s difficult to say,” was the best Charles could offer.
“In love?”
“Of course,” Diana was quick to affirm.
Charles was more ambiguous. “Whatever in love means,” he said.
Again Mason hit the remote and again the sequence of images changed—the wedding; Charles and Diana emerging on the steps of St Mary’s Hospital following the birth of Prince William; Diana sitting alone at the Taj Mahal in India, the desperate, almost bereft expression on her face telling the story no words could. The sequence made little sense except to Mason, who’s arctic stare never left the screens, even when the in-house phone buzzed beside him and demanded his attention. He took the call on speaker mode.
“We’re settled on Paris, then?” the anonymous telephone voice said, before even Mason had spoke. When he did speak his eyes remained fastened to the screens.
“My posting at the embassy has been arranged,” he confirmed.
“So I understand. But what I don’t understand is … why Paris?”
“Because Paris is a deniable dreamland. A distinct lack of CCTV cameras, incompetent emergency procedures, an expendable agent inside the Ritz Hotel. It’s the perfect location.”
“When you say ‘incompetent emergency procedures.’…?”
“The French emergency services are notoriously inept. If need be we’ll make sure they live up to their name. The last thing we need are survivors.”
“Ah.”
Just then the image on the screens flicked to a newsreel shot of Diana in Angola, making her way bravely through a minefield, protected only by body-armour vest and a transparent head shield and visor. Mason’s eyes flared. The sight of Diana spotlighting Angola, bringing the resource-rich country to the attention of a global audience, clearly rankled.
“You know the CIA favour Angola,” the telephone voice was saying. “If she were to step on a misplaced landmine…?”
“The CIA can go to hell,” Mason replied. “They’re passengers on this one. They should remember that.” He hit the remote and a new image came up on screen—a man of average height, if a little portly, emerging from the front entrance of the Ritz Hotel, Paris. A different control on the remote allowed Mason to zoom in on the face of Henri Paul. “On this occasion it’s our man who’s in the driving seat, if you understand what I’m saying. Everything’s under control. He knows perfectly well which route to take.”
The telephone voice cleared its throat. “Yes, well, we can’t afford any mistakes with this, Richard. You know that. No paper trails, no ghosts.”
“As if.”
“Here’s wishing you a successful posting, then. And remember, this conversation never took place.”
With that, the line clicked dead.
Mason got back to his private movie show—just him, the princess, and the inebriated chauffeur: the man who would be ‘patsy’.
Footnote: Code Name ID – Richard Mason
Mason wasn’t his real name, of course. It was a legend, a cover name he used in conjunction with his special operations work. He was a high-ranking Freemason and he’d always enjoyed the irony of using Mason as his operational code name. Needless to say, if you were to toothcomb the Diplomatic Service and Overseas List 1997 you’d find nobody listed at the British Embassy in Paris by the name of Richard Mason. But he was there. Oh yes, he was there, listed under his official name so as not to blow his operational cover: so as not to reveal the real reason for his posting, which was of course to orchestrate the operation that would end Princess Diana’s life.
CHAPTER 6
It was a regular day at the office the day the phone call came...
Earlier that morning I’d said goodbye to Katie and the kids as normal.
“Don’t shoot!” I said as I entered the breakfast area, hands in the air, confronted by the notorious King Boys. Fortunately Jack and Ben were only 9 and 7 years old respectively, and the guns they were pointing at me were of course make believe. Still, you could never be too cautious.
“We wouldn’t shoot you, Daddy,” young Jack reassured, beaming ear to ear, still pointing his imaginary gun in my direction.
“We’d have no one to pick us up from school,” Ben pointed out.
They laughed.
Silly me. “I’m safe then?”
They both assured me I was indeed safe as they holstered their guns and got back to eating their cereal. I kissed them on the cheek and said goodbye.
“And you be a good girl for mummy,” I turned and said to 4-year-old Rosie, and then I kissed her on the cheek, too. “Love you.”
“What about me?” Katie said. She was busy helping Rosie butter her toast. “Are we still on for a date tonight? It’s divorce papers if you say no.”
“I’ve booked the table,” I reminded her. “Babysitter’s arranged.”
I kissed her on the lips and grabbed my attaché case.
“Don’t forget to pick the boys up from school,” Katie said as I headed out the door.
“I’ll be there.”
Closing the door behind me, heading out to the car, I couldn’t help thinking how very lucky I was. A beautiful wife, three gorgeous kids and I even had a job I quite liked doing. What more could I have wished for?
What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that the CIA was about to call me up. Everything was about to change.
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I arrived at the office to find the team all there and ready for the tough week ahead. It was copy deadline week, when all the major stressing and fine-tuning had to be done prior to the magazine finally being designed up and sent off to the printers. For that reason I was happy to see a full quota of staff on parade, in particular JB (John Beveridge, my associate editor on the magazine, co-author of my book, Princess Diana: The Evidence and, perhaps more pertinently, my brother-in-arms during the gruelling investigation that neither of us yet knew lay in wait, just around the next bend). I knew when it came to the grind it would be JB who I could call on to put in the extra hours.
This week he’d been working on a story about Phil Schneider, the former US government structural engineer who claimed to have worked on the construction of top secret underground bases in America. He also claimed to have been involved in a gunfight with ‘grey’ aliens at the notorious Dulce underground base in New Mexico. Personally I never took these kind of stories too seriously, but I knew it would appeal to a large section of our readership. In particular news of Schneider’s mysterious death the previous year was still the talk of the town in conspiracy circles, so I’d assigned JB the task of investigating.
“Any more on the Schneider story?” I put to him, sipping my hot coffee. It was mid-morning, and having just made my third caffeine hit of the day I was heading back through the editorial suite en route to my office. “Are they still pushing the suicide theory?”