International Stories
     
Home Page

Whats New

Artist Database

Artist Albums

Artist Spotlight

Download
Christian Music

Concerts 

music news

Books

Interviews

Top Rated Artists

Gordon Thomas
Chronicles

  

FBI IDENTIFIES 3000 “FRONT” COMPANIES IN US
AS COVER FOR CHINESE SPIES – BUT FRUSTRATED BECAUSE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS “SLOW TO ACT” AGAINST BEIJING
DUE TO MASSIVE BIG BUSINESS TIES
WITH PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

by
Gordon Thomas


Over 3,000 companies in the United States are controlled by China’s powerful Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS). Hundreds of Chinese intelligence officers and their well-paid informers are operating through the companies within this country.
Next to terrorism, the threat they pose is now regarded by the FBI as the most serious since the Soviet Union and Jonathan Pollard plundered America’s defence secrets.
The revelations are contained in a briefing paper which FBI director, Robert Mueller, presented to a Congressional Committee last month. Despite the undoubted gravity of the report, it has virtually gone unreported by the mainstream media and the networks.
David Szady, FBI assistant director for counter-intelligence has categorised the situation as a “most grave and present danger”. He added, “left unchecked, such a situation could greatly undermine US national security and US military and economic advantage. The Chinese have figured out that what they want”.
The FBI have sent a “red alert” to all technology companies that they are now the prime target for Chinese operatives.
Corporate executives have been asked to review their internal security. Universities like Harvard and Yale are providing the FBI with details about Chinese students on campus. Organisers of technology conferences – which have always attracted Chinese scientists – are being briefed on how to recognise a possible CSIS agent.
“While the measures will seem draconian, the truth is that in the past three years, we estimate as much as $24 billion of secrets have been stolen by the Chinese”, said a State Department intelligence analyst specialising in Asian-China affairs.
To meet the threat, Mueller has ordered 167 senior agents in 56 FBI offices to be transferred into anti-espionage operations for the first time.
They are working from a blueprint of CSIS methods provided by the highest ranking Chinese defector to reach America. He is Xu Junping, Director of Strategy in China’s Defence Ministry. For five years, he oversaw all secret operations by CSIS against the United States. In his CIA debriefing, he told CIA George Tenet that he had set up the structure for the 3,000 companies now operating across the United States.
Xu Junping is now deep inside the Witnesses Protection Programme. But he still regularly meets top FBI and CIA agents to discuss their latest discoveries.
At each meeting, Xu has urged that President Bush should sent a blunt warning to China that its spying is bringing it closer to confrontation with the United States.
But sources within the Washington intelligence community told American Free Press: “there is a clear reluctance to move against Beijing. The intelligence consensus is that the President is receiving intense pressure from major US business corporations in this country who do not want their huge holdings in the People’s Republic to be disturbed”.
There are currently $hundreds of billions invested in projects in China by corporations listed on the Forbes Top 500.
FBI efforts have been further hampered by the reluctance of the Canadian government to allow its own intelligence agencies to co-operate. In Canada, there are known to be over 300 companies which are also CSIS fronts.
Brian McAdam, a former Canadian foreign service officer, said that it “is very clear that political influence is at play”.
Adam worked on “Project Sidewinder” which detailed the penetration of CSIS into Canada. The report was never publicly released.
In the US, the “front” companies report to the Chinese embassy in Washington or to China’s consulates in other parts of the country.
The material is then sent to China’s secretive Leading Group on National Security (LGNS). It reports directly to prime minister Wen Jiapo. It also oversees CSIS operations.
The CIA’s China Desk analysts say the LGNS has concluded that by late next year, the US will “attack North Korea, possibly its first move to tame China”.
Meantime, the FBI are following up leads which include:
• How many Chinese students attending post-graduate courses in the US have their tuition secretly paid for by CSIS? Sophisticated software is being used to track their payments back to China.
• How many students, after qualifying in computers or science, receive orders to apply for jobs in key US corporations which have key defence contracts, or operate in the high-tech industry?
• How many students have been trained to steal trade secrets from their US employers?

Meantime, the CIA are investigating:
• How far has CSIS penetrated CIA operations in the Pacific rim?
• How did CSIS secretly contravene sanctions against Saddam to re-arm Iraq in between the first and second Gulf wars?
• What are the CSIS links to al-Qaeda?
• How far will China go in supporting other terror groups and rogue states like Iran and Syria?

Chinese Spies (Sidebar to Main Story)

China now has the world’s largest intelligence gathering apparatus. As well as CSIS (approx 4,000 staff), a third based overseas, the others are:
• STD. Headquartered in the monolithic Ministry of Defence building in Beijing, the Science and Technology Department (4,000 members) has two prime functions. Collating all signals traffic from the Chinese Navy, overseas embassies and satellites. Targeting all foreign firms at the cutting edge of military and civilian technology.
• MID. Reports to the Politburo and Army General Staff. Brief includes updating all foreign military capabilities. Members attached to every Chinese embassy and consulate. Number of staff estimated at 1,500.
• ILD. Small specialist unit (300 members). Conducts high-tech intelligence gathering.
• MSS (3,500 staff). Equivalent to MI5 but three times larger. Targets all foreigners in China and spies on its own citizens.
• NCNA. Nominally a news agency reporting on Chinese affairs. Based in all major countries. Has long been a cover for all other Chinese intelligence agencies engaged in clandestine activities.
US MISSILES TARGETED AGAINST IRAN BY ISRAEL
by
Gordon Thomas

US Harpoon missiles armed with nuclear warheads are now aimed by Israeli’s fleet of Dolphin-class submarines against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Following September’s exclusive report in American Free Press about Israel’s submarine nuclear attack capability, over 100 Harpoon cruise missiles have been secretly flown to the remote island of Diego Garcia, a joint UK-US base in the Indian Ocean.
The three Israeli submarines which arrived at the base early this month were each loaded with 24 Harpoon missiles.
They then set sail for the Gulf of Oman – bringing Iran’s nuclear facilities all within range of their submarines’ multi-payloads.
The decision to launch them is entirely in the hands of Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Just as he gave Washington only a short warning he was going to attack an alleged terrorist camp deep inside Syria, Sharon has made it clear to Washington that the same rule of engagement will apply if it comes to launching the Harpoon missiles.
Sharon made his position clear in a telephone call to President Bush the day after the attack on Syria.
According to one Israeli source, Bush said he “just wanted to be kept informed”.
Credible intelligence sources say the reality is that Sharon believes he would have the support of Bush if he did launch an attack.
But an indication of the deepening concern that some members of the Bush Administration now feel, is that national security advisor Condoleezza Rice last weekend allowed one of her senior aides to confirm our September report to the Los Angeles Times and London’s Guardian newspaper.
Both drew heavily on the original American Free Press story. The senior Pentagon and State department sources for our first story, about Israel’s Dolphin class submarines, have told us exclusively that, in the words of one high-level Pentagon source, “matters have now advanced considerably and for the first time Rice is sounding alarm bells in the Oval Office”.
Rice’s decision to leak is also the first clear indication of her concerns over Israel – as well as her own direct challenge to the authority of Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
She is now engaged in an internal power struggle with Rumsfeld – and has chosen to use what she sees as his failure in the Middle East to harness Sharon’s behaviour as her launch pad to have the Secretary of State ousted.
“Rice has a long-term strategy to become Secretary of State. While Rumsfeld is no supporter of Powell, he knows that having Rice in charge of State would give her more power than she even has now. And there is also the ultimate ambition for Condi, to be Bush’s running mate, if not in this election, then in the one afterwards. Her own inner circle say that she would relish a face-off with Hillary Clinton in 2008. If Condi became vice-President, then she is but a step away from becoming the first Black woman in the White House. That is what is driving her,” said a senior Washington analyst.
Meantime, Rice’s concerns have deepened following Sharon’s stark warning last Sunday that “states harbouring terrorists are legitimate targets”.
Aides in Tel Aviv have confirmed to American Free Press that “Iran and Syria are top of that list – with Iran in the top spot”.
The revelation comes at a time of rapidly escalating tensions in the region.
Israel’s senior Foreign Ministry spokesman, Gideon Meir, insisted “any country that harbours a threat to Israel is a legitimate target for us out of self-defence”.
Today, American Free Press can reveal, again for the first time, that a team of US computer specialists flew to Diego Garcia to fit the latest version of the software known as “over the horizon”. This would allow a Harpoon missile to hit any of Iran’s nuclear establishments with pin-point accuracy.
Originally developed by Inslaw, the Washington based specialist computer software company, the “over the horizon” capability has been enhanced to handle the sophisticated electronics of the Harpoon missiles.
In the meantime, Sharon has ordered Mossad to put together a specialist team to infiltrate Iran. Their mission is to snatch some of the scientists working in the country’s nuclear facilities at Natanz, Arak and Saghand.
G U A N T A N A M O -THE WORLD’S WORST PRISON
by
Gordon Thomas


There is a new sound inside the world’s most sinister prison. It is the construction of an execution chamber where the first of its 680 prisoners can be put to death by lethal injection in the same secrecy which surrounds their incarceration.
Led, ankle-shackled and handcuffed, to their deaths by US soldiers probably in the middle of the night, none of the condemned will have had the right to choose their own lawyers, would not have had a jury trial, or have been allowed any access to any proper appeal system.
Their attorneys will have to be US citizens vetted by the US Defence Department. The only appeal allowed to a prisoner would be to the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
Already anointed as the hardest of the hardliners in the Bush Administration, he is not expected to do anything but ratify the sentences handed down by the tribunal’s presiding judge.
The nearest the world has previously seen to such trials was during the People’s Courts in the Nazi regime and the Star Chamber Courts of the Stalinist era in Russia.
The prisoners of Guantanamo are alleged to be members of al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters picked up in Afghanistan and elsewhere in President Bush’s war on global terrorism.
Most are in their early twenties. One was only 13 when he was grabbed by US Special Forces. Another is barely fifteen.
The prisoners come from 43 countries. Most are Arabs, with Saudi Arabia accounting for over 100 of the detainees. Eighty-five are from the Yemen.
Many have been there for 18 months. Not one has been categorised as a prisoner of war, entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.
The United States is a signatory. But President Bush, in the full flush of his success in Afghanistan, pronounced that the prisoners were not entitled to the Convention’s protection.
Instead, he allowed the due process of justice to be reinvented for the men caged in Guantanamo. Officially the prison is known as Camp Delta, the name that the US Defence Department publicists prefer to use.
To facilitate journalists, there is a “media observation post”. It is about 250 metres from the nearest cell block. Close enough to need sunglasses to combat the glare off the metal roofs of the guard posts and the chain-link fences which surround the camp. The razor wire at the top and the green plastic drapes behind the fences are a further reminder there is no other prison like it on earth.
By night, the compound is lit by powerful white lights mounted on poles. The perimeter, all the way back to the media lookout, is sown with ground sensors. The nearby beach – the prison sits on a bluff above the Caribbean ocean – is patrolled day and night by US soldiers. At sea, US coastguard boats cruise back and forth, ready to thwart any attempt to rescue the prisoners. All the guards have orders to shoot to kill.
Yet despite draconian threats against anyone working at Camp Delta speaking to the media, details have leaked out.
We now know that the cell blocks are constructed from the 40ft steel containers used in shipping. The US government bought them from a San Francisco freight company.
Each container forms five cells. There are eight containers to a cell block. There are four blocks lined up on each side of a corridor.
Three sides of each container have been replaced by strengthened steel-mesh – strong enough to withstand bolt cutters. In the remaining side a window has been cut.
The Pentagon proudly point to the fact that the containers have floor level toilets – to conform with Muslim requirements to be able to squat – as “evidence of our understanding of their cultural needs”.
Detainees sleep on metal shelves. Each is covered with a thin mattress. Again, the Pentagon makes much of the fact that these are the same as used in US prisons.
But each cell is smaller than those on death row in the jails of Texas, President Bush’s home state.
Prisoners receive one hour’s exercise and a shower a day.
By the time they return from their ablutions, they may well find that they have been moved again to another cell. This is to avoid the risk of what the American guards call “clique making”.
Detainees are taken, shuffling in their restrictive ankle chains, to interrogation at any time of the day – or night.
Anyone who protests at being woken is shoved into an isolation cell. It has solid walls to stop any contact with other prisoners.
The isolation cells and interrogation rooms are air-conditioned.
But again the interrogations break the rules. Prisoners are not allowed to have a lawyer present. Legal representation is normal when a suspect has yet to be charged. Prisoners are questioned for hours at a time by a succession of CIA, and sometimes MI6, officers. Some of the interrogators are women.
Their presence is seen by most prisoners as a calculated insult to their Muslim upbringing – where women do not question men.
Such methods contravene basic human rights, say Amnesty. A spokesman added that “plans to deny those convicted by the military tribunals of a proper appeal is deeply disturbing”.
Pressure from Amnesty may well have led to the sudden release of some prisoners in the past weeks. They have now been flown back to Afghanistan.
But the nine British Muslims held in Guantanamo know they now have little hope of being sent back for trial in the UK.
The Blair government has received legal advice that the prisoners could not be prosecuted under the rules of British courts.
“There are problems with trying anyone who has been kept in confinement in the conditions operating at Guantanamo for such a lengthy period”, says Amnesty.
Meantime life – of a sort – goes on at Guantanamo. A recorded call to prayer comes over the compound loud speakers five times a day. Arrows point in the direction of Mecca – a place the prisoners may never see. All meals are prepared according to the halal diet. There is a copy of the Koran in each cell.
These are the only signs that America recognises the needs – and rights – of their prisoners.
But the prospect increases that one day – perhaps by the end of the year – trials will take place which will end with a prisoner being shuffled for the last time across the compound to the execution chamber.
There he will be strapped to a stretcher and a needle inserted into his arm to deliver the lethal injection.
Just as it’s done in Texas.
But the so-far 25 attempted suicides in Guantanamo exceed those in the Lone Star state for the same 18 month period as prisoners have been held in Camp Delta.
The clear purpose to hold people without trial belies the carefully crafted public relations spin the Pentagon likes to put on the world’s worst prison.
When a protest did come from within the prison from the prisoners’ American Muslim imman, a US naval officer, Lt Mohammed Saiful-Islam, that conditions were increasingly affecting the emotional and psychological stability of many of the prisoners, he was promptly shipped out to California. He is no longer allowed to speak publicly about what he saw.
We may never know when the military tribunals start, or when a prisoner will be taken to the chamber now under construction for execution. But that is how they do things at Guantanamo, as it continues to live up to its secret and sinister reputation.
BIN LADEN APPOINTS SON AS HIS SUCCESSOR
by
Gordon Thomas

Osama bin Laden has appointed his eldest son, Saad, as his successor – and ordered him to concentrate on attacks on British and US targets.
The news forced Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5, to use her second only public speech to warn that al-Qaeda was now a more potent force than ever – and that its reign of terror against Britain could “last five years or longer”.
And in Washington, CIA director George Tenet, told senior agency counter-terrorism officers that the emergence of Saad bin Laden as al-Qaeda’s next leader was a “most serious development”.
The decision of Osama bin Laden to hand over the running of its Jihad, holy war, against the West, is seen by MI6 and CIA analysts to indicate bin Laden is physically more ill than his last video appearance suggested.
Saad bin Laden is now “a prime target, dead or alive” in President Bush’s war against terrorism. The 26 year-old has been linked to last week’s killing of American personnel in Gaza.
The CIA believe that the bombing was planned during a meeting in Tehran two weeks ago between Saad and leaders of Hezbollah.
Israel also insists that the terror group has links to Yasser Arafat and that he is “guilty by association” of last week’s bombing.
Details of Saad bin Laden’s appointment were picked up by the GCHQ listening post on Cyprus last week. They came in a short radio message traced to the mountainous region along the Afghanistan-Iran border. Saad bin Laden is known to have a base there.

The message was from the “Jerusalem Force” – the name bin Laden has now chosen as a reminder he ultimately wants al-Qaeda to parade through the City for All Faiths as its conqueror.
“When that day comes, our son Saad will ride in triumph at the head of our great cause”, the message said.
Intelligence analysts say this is further evidence that Osama bin Laden may not expect to live to witness such an event.
Saad is the son of bin Laden’s first wife and his father’s favourite among the other 23 children he has produced by his five other wives. A CIA profile describes him as “the mirror image of his father, both physically and mentally”.
For the past year, Saad bin Laden has been based in Iran. A founder member of al-Qaeda when he was a teenager, he had served with his father in Afghanistan.
“His readiness to kill was a prerequisite for him to be groomed for leadership”, says the profile.
His connection with Iran has heightened both Israeli and US determination to consider pre-emptive strikes against terror targets in the country.
There are now three Israeli Dolphin-class submarines in the Gulf of Oman each loaded with 24 US Harpoon cruise missiles.
The weapons - with the consent of the Ministry of Defence – were flown from America to the remote tropical island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean last month.
The decision the launch them is entirely in the hands of prime minister Ariel Sharon. But Washington has made it clear that if Israel feels the threat from Iran cannot be ignored, then Israel would be justified in launching its missiles.
MOSSAD AND THE RUSSIAN MAFIA – AND HIGHLY EMBARRASSING CLAIMS THAT ISRAEL HAS BEEN TRYING TO BUY PLUTONIUM AND OTHER NUCLEAR MATERIALS ALLEGEDLY TO STOP IT FALLING INTO THE HANDS OF TERRORISTS
by
Gordon Thomas


Scientists at the European Trans-Uranium Institute at Karlsruhe in Germany, tracking the movements of all fissionable material from the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, have raised suspicions that Mossad has purchased some of the material to allegedly stop it falling into the hands of Islamic and other terror groups.
But there is also the real possibility that Israel has gone into the nuclear black market to buy fissionable material to bolster its own huge nuclear arsenal.
Israel already has one of the world’s largest arsenals – more than capable of decimating all its Arab neighbours. Its 200 nuclear bombs and missiles are stockpiled in the Negev desert.
The suspicion that Israel has also started to buy material stolen from the former Soviet Union surfaced a year ago when a quantity of Uranium-235 was found in the Paris apartment of three criminals known to broker arms deals with terror groups like al-Qaeda.
French intelligence officers arrested the men in an apartment rented by one, Raymond Loeb. They found documents confirming the uranium was of weapons-grade quality. Air tickets from Kazakstan were found in the apartment.
Loeb’s partners – Serge Salfati and Yves Ekwella were travelling on Cameron passports.
The Karlsruhe scientists established the material came from a nuclear storage site at Chelyanbisk-70 deep in the Ural Mountains.
A major intelligence operation began to trace the route along which the material travelled to the French capital: out of the Ukraine into Poland and across Germany to Paris.
The material was transported by Russia’s top Mafia boss, Semyon Yokovich Moglivich.
He is a specialist in every major crime: whole scale drug running, money laundering, trafficking in humans and gun-running. Since 1991, he had positioned himself to exploit the collapse of the Soviet Union.
To assist him he had obtained an Israeli passport for himself and 23 of his top associates. The travel documents had been arranged by the former newspaper tycoon, Robert Maxwell, and Edmund Safra, the US-based millionaire banker.
Later Maxwell was murdered by a Mossad assassination team after threatening to expose his links to the secret service. Safra died mysteriously in a fire in his penthouse in Monte Carlo.
Moglivich still runs the largest criminal family in Moscow, the Rising Sun. Its current speciality is smuggling fissionable material.
Graham Alison, a former Assistant Secretary of Defence in the Clinton Administration and director of Harvard’s Centre of Science and International Affairs, has summarised how easy it is to smuggle nuclear material. “A terrorist group could ship enough material through the mails or by a courier company”.
But the Rising Sun is into a much bigger market – supplying Israel with fissionable material that would otherwise end up in the hands of terrorists like Osama bin Laden.
That bombshell discovery came to light in the wake of finding the five grams of uranium in Paris. Consisting of 85 percent enriched uranium, it was sufficient to make a “dirty bomb”.
But before Mossad, on behalf of Israel, could buy it “out of the market”, the French had swooped – and the role of Mossad had started to emerge.
The first clues came from Intel-1. This is a smallish and highly specialised unit in Dutch intelligence.
For months before the Paris arrests, it had been investigating Mossad’s role in secretly buying up fissionable materials.
Intel-1’s investigation has been run out of a deep bunker – ironically built to shelter the Dutch Royal Family in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on Amsterdam. The bunker is near the city’s Central Railway Station. The terminus has been journey’s end for some of the nuclear materials which have been stolen from Russian weapons labs including Arzamas-16 in Nizhnii Novgorod, formerly Gorky.
Senior Mossad officers have insisted to Intel-1 that precisely because the deadly materials were stolen, their agents purchased them from the Russian Mafia as “it was the only way to stop the material being sold to Islamic and other terror groups”.
While conceding that the Mossad claim is plausible, Intel-1 investigators have become convinced that the nuclear materials have been secretly shipped out of Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport to Israel to boost the country’s own nuclear weapons manufacturing plant at Dimona in the Negev Desert.
That Mossad has been trafficking with the Russian Mafia has rekindled a nuclear nightmare that has never quite gone away. While the chilling Cold War doctrine of MAD – mutually assured destruction – has gone, in its place has come a more dangerous scenario where nuclear know-how and materials are on sale.
“It is capitalism, Wild East style, in which organised crime syndicates and government officials work in league to create new markets for nuclear materials – a bazaar with some of the world’s most dangerous weapons on offer,” said an intelligence source.
Much of the work of tracing the origins of stolen nuclear material is done at the European Trans-Uranium Institute. There, scientists use state-of-the-art equipment to track whether stolen materials have come from a military or civilian source. But they concede “it’s like trying to catch a thief who has never been fingerprinted”.
Mossad has been based at El Al’s facility at Schipol for the past six years, in second-floor offices in the complex – know at Schipol as “Little Israel”.
Intel-1 has established that the link between Mossad and the airline is an integral part of the traffic in nuclear materials.
Sources close to Intel-1 insist that Mossad would never have begun the dangerous business of buying nuclear materials unless those materials could be safely and secretly transported to Israel.
A highly efficient organisation like Mossad, supported by the vast resources Israel puts at its disposal, would have little or no difficulty in smuggling nuclear materials out of Schipol.
Intel-1’s interest in such smuggling was first aroused when it was tipped off that the El Al cargo freighter that crashed shortly after take-off from Schipol in October 1992 was carrying chemicals that could be used to produce nerve agents.
Since then, the agency has gathered what an Intel source describes as “at minimum strong circumstantial evidence” that Mossad has shipped nuclear materials through Schipol.
A “mule” – a courier – who in return for his cooperation was given a guarantee against prosecution, has told Intel-1 that he had smuggled nuclear materials from the Ukraine across Germany and finally into Holland.
The courier has claimed to Intel-1 that he was met at Amsterdam’s Central Station. Shown photographs, the courier picked out the person. It was a Mossad officer Intel-1 knew is based at Schipol.
SECRET NSA TAPES  COULD PROVIDE SENSATIONAL TESTIMONY  TO SUPPORT PRINCESS DIANA’S DRAMATIC LETTER
by
Gordon Thomas


One thousand and fifty secret electronic transcripts made by America’s “spy in the sky”, the National Security Agency, NSA, are believed to contain even more shattering evidence to support Princess Diana’s handwritten letter uncannily forecasting she would die in a car crash.
The NSA tapes show she and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed, were under surveillance by NSA and other intelligence agents before their deaths in Paris.
As pressure mounts for an inquest, these tapes could be a crucial exhibit.
The NSA tapes are stored in a climate-controlled vault at NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade outside Washington. They have been heard by only the agency’s most senior staff.
NSA controls a worldwide electronic eavesdropping system normally only used against America’s enemies.
Dodi’s father, Mohammed al-Fayed, the millionaire owner of Harrods, has waged an unsuccessful battle in the US courts to obtain copies of the tapes. He believes they also contain evidence that his son and Diana planned to marry – and that she may even have been pregnant before her death.
But equally explosive could be the revelations about the intelligence web that electronically enshrouded the Princess in the last weeks of her life.
Israel’s Mossad has never denied it had recruited Henri Paul, the driver of the car in which Diana, Dodi al-Fayed and Paul died. He was deputy head of security at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. It is owned by Mohammed al-Fayed.
Former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson has claimed the British Secret Intelligence Service was “actively involved in tracking Diana”. He has said that MI6 were helped by NSA satellite surveillance to maintain watch on Diana and Dodi al-Fayed as they sailed around the Mediterranean on his father’s yacht, the Jonikal, in the weeks before Diana died.
Senior Buckingham Palace aides have been told Diana reveals on the NSA intercepts, explicit sexual details about Prince Charles. She claims his behaviour forced her to have an affair with James Hewitt.
Hewitt, who has so far unsuccessfully failed to sell what he calls “steamy love letters” from Diana, claims the NSA transcripts boost his claims about life in Royal circles.
The Royal Coroner will also have to decide what steps to take to trace secret video tapes Diana is now known to have made months before her death.
Hints of their contents appeared last year at the trial of Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrel, who was acquitted of stealing her possessions. Mention of the tapes was made. But the judge stopped the trial before their contents could surface. Since then, the tapes are believed to be in the custody of Scotland Yard. Last week, they refused to discuss the matter.
There are seven tapes. Each is the length of a Hollywood blockbuster. But if made public – say London intelligence sources – no movie could have their impact.
“Just call them explosive. That’s all I need say”, said a London intelligence source.
While it is not clear what Diana intended to do with the tapes, any plans were ended with her death a few months later.
A Buckingham Palace courtier suggested Diana may have planned to use them as a bargaining tool to try and get a better financial settlement in her divorce. Or maybe to secure her place in history.
More certain, the tapes’ revelations, delivered in the same little-girl voice which was Diana’s carefully cultivated stock-in-trade to convey something sensational, go to the heart of what she saw as wrong in the House of Windsor.
The story behind those tapes is complex and revealing – and casts new light on Diana’s mindset in the months before she died in 1997.
The very existence of the tapes had been a closely-guarded secret until the collapse of the Paul Burrel trial. Then rumours began to emerge that the Queen’s intervention to stop the trial was because she had become aware of the contents of the tapes.
The tapes were shot in March, 1997, five months before her death. Diana sat before a VHS video camera in the main drawing room of her home, Kensington Palace,, and spoke in all for 12 hours over a period of ten days.
Only one other person knew she had made the tapes, Dodi al-Fayed. His father, Mohammed al-Fayed, confirmed he wants the Royal Coroner, Dr Michael Burgess, to listen to the tapes – and compare them with the 1,050 intercepts NSA made later that year.
In the past, the US Justice Department has said the intercepts contain matters of “national security”.
Mohammed al-Fayed has fought a lengthy, but unsuccessful, court battle in Washington to obtain copies.
A former Buckingham Palace aide has hinted that the video tapes are Diana’s video diaries.
“In a sense, they are an oral history of the Royal Family. She deals with each member in detail”, he said. He claimed last week that the videos reserve her most stringent criticism for Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles.
“She describes how she caught Charles and Camilla de flagrente. She reveals how she listened in on their phone sex talk. She says that Camilla was the raunchier of the two. She gives examples”, said the source.
He said that on one tape, Diana talks of the “sexual treachery” of her husband. Of how he would make late night calls to Camilla of “a sexual nature”.
“Diana paints a portrait of how she pleaded with him for the sake of the children to give up Camilla. She says that she turned to Anne (Princess Anne) and Andrew (Prince Andrew) for help. Both, she says, refused to lift a finger”, said the source.
“She describes how Charles and other members of the Royal Family – the Queen excepted – used to store expensive gifts in bin-liners.
“On one video Diana describes how there was a right old panic when a member of the Saudi Royal Family came visiting and his wedding gift had been binned. Staff spent hours going through the bags looking for a set of gold goblets.”
“She talks about how his welcome into the Family had turned to cold hostility once the marriage had broken up.
“Undoubtedly, the most revealing part of her video diaries is how Diana saw her future”, the source said.
“She makes it clear that she would do everything possible to make sure Charles never became King. She wanted William to succeed to the Throne when the Queen died. Diana clearly saw her role to be the power behind the Throne.”
Royal Coroner, Dr Burgess, will have to decide how much, if any, of these allegations will be allowed to surface in any inquest on Diana. His only public comment so far was to confirm: “this is a high-profile case and everything has to be weighed very carefully. The questions go behind the ‘survivability’ argument over whether she (Diana) should have gone to hospital sooner. The speed of the car, seatbelts, where people were sitting: these are all relevant questions for an inquest to consider”.
He could hear evidence from NSA officers as well as testimony from MI6, CIA and possibly from Mossad. All the agencies were closely involved in monitoring Diana and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed, in the weeks they spent together before their fatal car crash six years ago this past week.
The potential revelations at the inquest could be even more sensational than the Hutton Inquiry.

Gordon Thomas’s own relationship with Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed began six months before their deaths. Dodi was to produce Gordon Thomas’s screenplay, Mambo. Diana was slated to be the executive producer. The film focused on her interest in banishing land-mines. It was to be shot in South Africa. Brad Pitt, Gene Hackman and Embeth Davitz were slated to star. The first pre-production meeting was scheduled on the very day Dodi and Diana died.
GLOBE-INTEL is a free subscription service provided by http://www.globe-intel.net