U.S BUGGED LADY DI

U.S. bugged Princess Diana’s phone

LONDON - The Central Intelligence Agency was bugging the telephone conversations of Britain’s Princess Diana on the night she died, a British newspaper reported Monday. But current and former U.S. officials told NBC News that intelligence agencies never targeted the late Princess of Wales.

The Observer newspaper, citing the findings of a British inquiry into Diana's death to be released later this week, said the CIA was listening in on the princess in the hours before she died in a car crash in Paris.

The 36-year-old princess, her friend Dodi Fayed, 42, and driver Henri Paul died when their Mercedes crashed inside the Pont d’Alma tunnel Aug. 31, 1997, while being followed by media photographers. The British Broadcasting Corp. reported over the weekend that Paul had three times the French legal limit of alcohol in his blood.
Story continues below ↓ advertisement

The Observer reported that the CIA did not have British intelligence's permission to tap Diana's phone.

U.S. officials deny allegations

However, a Homeland Security official told NBC News it is untrue that the Secret Service ever gathered intelligence information on Diana.

“The Secret Service had nothing to do with it,” the official said.

Separately, a former senior U.S. intelligence official said Diana was never targeted for intelligence gathering in any way. But, the former official said, her voice may have been picked up while others were targeted. Even so, he said that as far as he knows, there were no intercepts of her in Paris the night she died, contrary to British reports.

He also confirmed that there were, indeed, many references to her in the National Security Agency database, some of them innocuous, including references by targets overseas to romantic liaisons with people who the targets thought looked like Diana.

“So if you did a search on her, references like that would show up,” he said.

And he explained that if U.S. officials had learned of any threats to the British royal family, they, too, would have been recorded in the database.

The fact that U.S. intelligence agency files contained references to her has long been known. As far back as 1998, the National Security Agency said in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that it had a Diana file amounting to 1,056 pages.

At the time, NSA officials were quoted as saying the references to her were incidental and that she was never a target.