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Knocking down the Diana bug report

Current and former U.S. officials say no U.S. intelligence agency ever targeted Princess Diana for intelligence collection.

Their comments follow stories over the weekend in British papers, reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies were spying on her. Some say her phone calls were being monitored, and some say specifically that it was done by the U.S. Secret Service.  These stories are said to be based on the British report due out later this week on her death.

However, Homeland Security and U.S. Secret Service officials today say it is untrue that the Secret Service ever gathered intel information on Diana. "The Secret Service had nothing to do with it," the official says.

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

He also confirms that there were, indeed, many references to her in the NSA database, some of them innocuous, including references by targets overseas to romantic liaisons with people who the targets thought looked like Princess Di. "So if you did a search on her, references like that would show up," he said. And he explained that if the U.S. 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, NSA 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.

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