Say Anything Blog

The Daily Mail:

American intelligence agencies were bugging Princess Diana’s telephone over her relationship with a US billionaire, the Mail’s sister paper has learned.

Evening Standard reports that she was even forced to abandon a planned holiday with her sons in the US with tycoon Teddy Forstmann on advice from secret services, who passed on their concerns to their British counterparts.

Both US and British intelligence then forced Diana to change her plans to stay with Mr Forstmann in the summer of 1997, saying it was too “dangerous” to take her sons there.

Instead the princess took the fateful decision to take a summer break with Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed. This ultimately led to her going to Paris with his son Dodi, where they died in a car crash.

The revelation from independent inquiries by the Evening Standard comes as it emerged that Princess Diana’s phone was bugged by US intelligence agencies on the night she died without the permission of the British secret intelligence services.

Authoritative leaks say the extraordinary revelations will be published this week by Lord Stevens and is bound to raise fresh questions about conspiracy theories. . . .

The US secret service was monitoring Diana’s friendship with the controversial financier Mr Forstmann for some weeks. . . .

The Standard has learned that Diana had agreed to a week’s holiday with princes William and Harry in the US.

She had accepted an invitation from her one-time American boyfriend Mr Forstmann to stay with him at his house in the Hamptons.

But as she was travelling with the princes, she needed the trip to be cleared by the British security services. They surprisingly vetoed Diana’s plans because of concerns about the security surrounding the billionaire’s homes or perhaps a possible threat from elsewhere.

The decision by the security services ultimately led to Diana striking up her friendship with Dodi and returning to the south of France to holiday with him.

This led to her being in Paris on 31 August, the day of the crash.

So, from appearances now, Diana had her phone bugged because of her relationship with Forstmann.  Who is Teddy Forstmann?  His Wikipedia entry seems rather devoid of anything all that controversial (as well as the entry for his company), but this jumped out at me:

Forstmann has become an advocate for the Republican platform of school vouchers, and other methods of education reform.

A little more Googling on Mr. Forstmann indicates that he is well-connected in Republican circles and a staunch advocate of school vouchers.  So, could the tapping of Diana’s phone have to do with her relationship with a well-connected Republican player here in America?  And his support of a controversial issue (school vouchers) that the Clinton Administration fiercely opposed? 

After all, Forstmann was spending millions on advocating for school vouchers, which at the time of Dianna’s death in 1997 was one of the biggest political issues here in America.

It’s a stretch, I know, but I just can’t fathom another reason why the Clinton administration would authorize monitoring without British approval on a dignitary as prominent as Princess Diana unless it had to do with her relationship with one of Clinton’s Republican political enemies.

The article above states specifically that the Secret Service was monitoring Diana’s relationship with Forstmann “for weeks.” Why?  Outside of being a political opponent of the Clinton administration, what other reason did the Secret Service have to be monitoring that relationship?