According to the Observer, the Stevens Report on the death of Princess Diana is to reveal that the NSA bugged Diana on the night of her death without the permission of MI6. (hat-tip to the Yorkshire Ranter).
This account makes for an interesting contrast with the version in Stephen Dorril’s history of MI6, which also sheds some light on Rosa Monckton, the key witness in refuting Mohammed Al-Fayed’s version of events.
The youngest brother of [Dominic] Lawson’s second wife, Rosa Monckton, had joined MI6 in 1987. In 1996, Anthony Monckton was appointed First Secretary (Political) in the Croatian capital Zagreb.
Quite separately, one of Rosa’s closest friends and a godparent to the Lawsons’ daughter, the late Princess of Wales had clearly been under some kind of surveillance, as evidenced by the 1,050-page dossier held by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in its archive, detailing private telephone conversations between Diana and American friends intercepted at MI6’s request. While all stories linking MI6 to the Princess’s death in the car accident have been complete nonsense, it has been alleged that working closely with I/Ops in an attempt to deflect inquiries away from the security services has been a chief of staff to ‘C’, Richard Spearman, temporarily posted to the Paris embassy with his assistant, Nicholas Langman. (MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service)
Dorril’s version would fit with the judgement of former Whitehouse policy analyst Jack O’Neill that Diana was unlikely to be of interest to the NSA.
If Diana were under MI6 surveillance, surely not an outlandish suggestion, it might explain the leap into cover-up mode, without requiring the assumption of a plot to kill her. Given the furore about the role of the paparazzi, the idea that MI6 was among those ‘hounding’ Diana would have been pretty damaging in itself, especially if physical surveillance was involved.
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