Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (24 page)

This may seem a curious remark, especially in the light of everything that happened that autumn, but I honestly think she was sincere. She had remonstrated with her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, about the negotiations for the separation, demanding action (and, ultimately, divorce). While the world waited for the next instalment in the royal marriage saga, Jephson and Diana’s other advisers had been thrashing out a deal with Prince Charles’s team. A single small incident particularly upset her. At one point, the Prince’s private secretary, Richard Aylard, had asked Jephson for the name of Diana’s lawyers. This was little more than routine, especially given how far down the line to a formal separation the couple had gone. For some reason, however, it came as a surprise to Diana. She learned of it just before she and I set off for an official engagement, and when she got in the car she was furious.

‘I don’t want to speak to his bloody lawyers, Ken, I want to speak to him. Why won’t he speak to me?’ she raged, tears of pent-up frustration flowing down her cheeks. ‘I have been that man’s wife, I am the mother of our children and he cannot be bothered to talk to me face to face. What sort of person is he?’ she screamed. I tried to calm her down, but she was still fuming when we reached our destination.

I felt desperately sorry for her, for at the time she seemed to be nearing breaking point. Typically, however, she soldiered on. She knew what her job was and nothing and nobody, not even the heir to the throne, was going to stop her from doing it. As she defiantly remarked, ‘I am not going to have anybody say that I have let the side down. Nobody!’

Ironically, when the separation was formally announced in Parliament by the Prime Minister on 9 December 1992, I have never seen Diana so calm. She greeted this sad moment in her own and her country’s history with a kind of fatalism.

‘Oh well, Ken,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s that!’ With that she began going through the paperwork for her next engagement, as though nothing had happened.

AT SIX MILES BY EIGHT, Nevis is one of the smallest islands in the northern Leeward chain in the eastern Caribbean. Nestled between Saint Kitts and Montserrat, it is dominated by a 3,500-foot dormant volcano, its peak shrouded with a blanket of cloud. The island’s name derives from the Spanish word
nieve
, snow, for the volcano must have appeared, from a distance, to be snow-capped, to Christopher Columbus when he first sighted it in 1493. Exactly 500 years after Columbus, Diana and her sons made a voyage of discovery to the tiny island, on my recommendation, and fell in love with the place. As a result, it was to provide the backdrop to some of the most stunning photographs of the Princess ever taken.

To understand the importance that the Princess attached to this holiday, it has first to be seen in context. At the end of 1992 all hell was breaking out back home. The year had become
not just an
annus horribilis
for the Queen, but for everyone connected with the royal family. On 9 December in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister, John Major, had stepped to the Despatch Box and announced the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales to a hushed House. There was, he stated, no question of a divorce, and in the event of the Prince becoming King, Diana would be Queen Consort. Even then, as people close to the Princess tried to come to terms with the enormity of what was being said, no one really believed the Prime Minister. How could Charles reign with the wife from whom he was separated at his side? It was a preposterous idea.

Diana did her best to put a brave face on it, largely by hiding from the harsher realities of the situation, as she had so often done before. Within a few days of the announcement, however, it was clear that the strain was beginning to tell upon her. Decisions had to be made, and members of staff had to declare their allegiances – one wore the colours of the Prince or the Princess, not both. Unlike me, their respective staffs had their livelihoods to think about. Not surprisingly, in all this upheaval, the Princess became increasingly agitated. She admitted to me that she felt she was becoming paranoid, but said that she could not help feeling betrayed if any member of her inner circle showed signs of veering towards the Prince and his team of advisers.

‘I can’t help thinking of them [Charles and his staff] as the enemy, Ken. I know that’s how they think of me – that madwoman who just keeps causing trouble,’ she told me over one of our many lunches at San Lorenzo. In this atmosphere, working alongside her was like walking a tightrope. So
when, in early December, she telephoned me at my office from Kensington Palace and implored me to help her find a Caribbean hideaway, I knew that it was imperative to act fast. Christmas at Sandringham with her estranged husband and his family, she said, was simply not an option.

‘Ken, I need to get away. I cannot stand it here another day. I need some sun on my face.’ There was a slightly frantic edge to her voice over the phone. She went on to tell me that she had heard about a resort in the north of Jamaica which she thought would be the perfect escape for her and the boys. ‘But nobody, I mean
nobody
, must know about it, Ken. You are the only one who knows my plans and I need it to stay that way.’ The line clicked and the phone went dead in my hand. Tightrope, I thought.

A few days later, on 16 December, without even telling my bosses in Royalty and Protection the precise details of what I was doing, I boarded a flight from Gatwick under an assumed name, bound for Jamaica. This was a part of my job that I loved. It was not exactly life-and-death stuff, but it was surely better than walking the beat in Tottenham.

After a ten-hour flight, we landed at Montego Bay airport and I hit the ground running. There was no time to lose. I hired a car and headed straight for Ochos Rios in the north of the island, to investigate the suitability of a hotel the Princess had asked me to investigate. Surfing through holiday brochures was one of her favourite pastimes, a form of escapism that somehow made her feel normal, as though she too could just jet away on an ordinary package holiday, like other people. As soon as I arrived at the Ramada Beach Hotel, however, I knew that it was
not the right place for a royal holiday. There was no privacy, security was inadequate, and to cap it all soft drugs were being openly sold on the nearby beach. I visualised headlines: ‘Di and the Drug Dealer’. I made some further enquiries, but they only confirmed my first impressions. There was nothing I could do but telephone the Princess and break the news to her as gently as possible, knowing that she would be deeply disappointed. She was clearly living on the edge of her nerves and needed to escape; she was also extremely anxious that the press should not find out about her projected holiday.

‘Ken, I need to get away. I can’t stand this dreary place any more. You must not come home until you’ve found somewhere.’ This was a directive, not a request. It was a tall order, too, but I was perfectly certain that she meant it. I therefore called Colin Trimming back at the headquarters of the Royalty Protection Department to tell him, in the vaguest terms possible, what I was doing, and then headed back to the hotel to make a few calls, in the hope of finding a new destination for the Princess. As luck would have it, one of the people I spoke to told me about Nevis, and it sounded perfect. The only problem, for me, was getting there. Given the urgency in Diana’s voice, I had to find somewhere that fitted her criteria as soon as possible. Unfortunately, though, I was travelling undercover, and could not tell a soul who I was and why I was in the area. So, posing as a British businessman, I contacted the airport and eventually located two Australian local-charter pilots who were willing to fly me to Nevis.

In their twin-engined, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants aircraft, which had clearly seen better days, we headed south in search of
paradise, or the Princess’s concept of it, anyway. The two pilots did not ask me what I was doing; they were simply happy to take the money. What was to happen next was typical of what could befall someone on a ‘Diana mission’. Bad weather meant that we had to divert to Puerto Rico, which is a self-governing commonwealth (rather than state) of the United States. When we touched down on the island, however, my rollercoaster ride through the Caribbean was to come to an abrupt end. While the Australian pilots were refuelling, a chisel-faced US Marine in uniform marched across the tarmac to where I was standing by the aircraft, glared at me accusingly and demanded to see my passport. ‘You, sir, are on American territory. Where are your papers and what is your business here?’ he boomed. I tried my best to bluff my way through without giving anything away about my mission. I waffled on about being a businessman (I had dropped the false name, and my passport doesn’t show my profession) and needing to get to Nevis as quickly as possible. It must have sounded incredibly suspicious, and in my by now rather frazzled state I hated to think what the shaven-headed marine thought I was up to or into. He was not interested in that, however. What he did not like was that I had flown into an American territory on business with no visa and no papers. As far as he was concerned I was an illegal alien, and he was not about to take any nonsense from me. At this point one of the pilots tried to intervene, but succeeded in making matters worse by winding the marine up even more.

‘Why don’t you loosen up, mate? It’s not his fault we had to put down here and get some fuel, for Christ’s sake!’ the pilot drawled in an authentic Australian twang. This proved
to be the final straw. I was duly frogmarched into the airport’s security office and given the grilling of my life. The easiest way out would have been to reveal who I was and what I was doing, but that would have meant that Diana’s holiday plans could have leaked out, and the media would swiftly have arrived. Playing the businessman was a risk I had to take, but it was a close call. Eventually, they relented and admitted that there was not much point in throwing me in the cells, even though they told me that they did not believe a word I had said. With that I was fined $100 (£75) and ordered to leave American soil immediately. The final indignity came when the marine yet again demanded my passport. He flicked through it once more, studying every entry, which showed that on my royal missions I had crisscrossed the globe more times than Superman. He eventually located a blank page, and then rifled through a drawer in his desk for the appropriate stamp. Then, like a particularly small-minded Dickensian clerk, he thumped it down to mark my passport with the words ‘Illegal Alien’. I boarded the plane and as we taxied along the runway I could not help wondering how I could explain the incident – and the stamp in my passport – to the Commander if he pulled me up on it.

A couple of hours later we touched down at the tiny aerodrome on Nevis. Unshaven and looking a little the worse for wear, I arrived at my sanctuary, the Montpelier Plantation Inn, which had been recommended to me by one of the contacts I had called from Jamaica. I had called ahead to say that I was on my way, and there to greet me were the owners, an English couple, James and Celia Milnes-Gaskill, who handed me a
suitably refreshing Caribbean concoction and led me to my chalet, where I was able to shower and change. The Milnes-Gaskills had moved to Nevis in the 1960s and had begun to renovate the site, an old sugar plantation, in 1964; over the next thirty years they had managed to develop a small but successful hotel business. The main house stood on sixteen acres surrounded by secluded gardens and stone terraces, and there were sixteen chalets dotted around the grounds. Privacy seemed to be the watchword, and I knew instantly that this was the perfect retreat for the Princess and her sons. As a Caribbean hideaway it had everything she could want, but most significantly it offered a discreet haven into which she could disappear and no one would ever know she was there. That, at least, was the hope. I admit now I might have been a little too optimistic in my prediction.

I still could not say what I was doing on Nevis, so I kept up the pretence and told the owners that I was representing a VIP, but that I could not divulge any more details other than that the person insisted upon privacy and needed total security. The Milnes-Gaskills were charming people, the embodiment of unostentatious hospitality. Their business had been built on discretion and quality of service, and had thrived as a result. They therefore knew exactly what was required, and immediately set about preparing to accommodate the mystery VIP, at the same time providing me with all the information I needed. As I sat on the veranda of my chalet that evening, I could not help feeling a little pleased with myself. Mission impossible was now mission accomplished. In the privacy of my chalet I had telephoned the Princess to let her know the
good news. I could hear the joy in her voice over all those thousands of miles between us. The stress seemed literally to melt away.

Before I flew home I had to complete the reconnaissance to make sure that everything was in place for a secure royal holiday. At this stage, however, I decided against discussing the operation with the West Indian Police Service, believing that it would be best to do so when I arrived as the advance guard just prior to the arrival of the Princess and her party. On my return to England on 21 December I sent the Princess a brochure about the hotel and a memorandum about the holiday. She was thrilled.

‘Ken, you’re so wonderful,’ she gushed. ‘If you recommend it then I know it will be perfect.’ Her pleasure and excitement summed up our relationship. She would often say in her darkest moments, ‘Nobody understands me,’ but she knew in her heart that at least one person did his best to. Persuading Diana had been the easiest part of the operation. I now had to write a report to my senior officer, justifying the expense for the high level of protection, and therefore the cost to Scotland Yard. My reconnaissance report to the department had recommended a total of four personal protection officers: myself, Inspector Trevor Settles and Sergeants Dave Sharp and Graham Craker, all to be under my operational control. While I would have overall responsibility for twenty-four-hour policing, Trevor would take charge of William, Graham would look after Harry, and Dave would assist me in protecting the Princess and would fly with her to the island, since I would travel ahead of them to ensure that effective security was in place from the moment
of their arrival. In addition, I requested that PC Tony Knights should join the team as a night-corridor officer, which I felt was necessary because of the lack of any in-house night security. I also pointed out that during Diana’s holiday on Necker in 1989 I had caught two locally based officers sleeping at their post at 2 am, and had sacked them on the spot after they had explained that they fell asleep on the job because they had to work during the day to supplement their low police income.

The final part of my report stressed that the separation announcement would only have intensified press interest in the holiday, and that although I had planned it on a ‘need-to-know’ basis it would be foolish to believe that the press would not find out. I reminded my superior that the Princess, as was usual, would not be taking a private or press secretary, and that I would therefore need all the help I could get to ensure that the holiday went smoothly and, above all, safely.

My recommendations were officially sanctioned once the usual rumblings about cost had subsided. So, on 28 December, armed with a Home Office radio (my Glock self-loading pistol would come out with the main party), I set off for Nevis for the second time. The Princess, with the boys, her old friend Catherine Soames and the rest of my police team, would follow two days later. Getting to Nevis without the press finding out that Diana and the boys were on the move was no easy feat. All the major newspapers have paid informants at airports to alert them when a famous person is travelling, and in late 1992 they did not come more famous than Diana. I had, of course, taken the precaution of making everyone travel under assumed names, and made use of the excellent Special Services
Department of British Airways, but I knew there was still a better than good chance that the press would soon find out that the Princess was heading for the sun.