Bugging Charles

Are the royal tapes real fakes?

The presses were already rolling at the Nuremberg plant of the West German women's weekly Die Aktuelle (circ. 550,000) when local court officials slapped the publication with an injunction at 4 a.m. last Friday. Facing a $200,000 fine or six months' imprisonment, the publishers nevertheless ordered the staff to proceed; by midmorning, an outsize print run of 925,000 copies was being distributed throughout West Germany. The offending article: a six-page cover story headlined "The Whole Truth About the Phone Calls Between Prince Charles and Lady Diana: No Scandal, but Love, Longing and a Touch of Sadness."

Die Aktuelle was publishing what it described as transcripts of several telephone conversations that were secretly taped while Charles was touring Australia last month. The magazine said it had purchased the transcripts from a Munich literary agent who had obtained them from the British agent of Freelancer Simon Regan. Regan, 38, a longtime contributor to the sensation-seeking News of the World and antimonarchist author of Charles--The Clown Prince, said he got the tapes from an unidentified Australian who had bugged the Prince to embarrass the monarchy. But Regan insisted that he had not authorized their sale. As Die Aktuelle's staff tried to peddle the transcripts on both sides of the Atlantic (asking price: $50,000), palace reaction was swift--and angry. "If this is true," rumbled a royal spokesman, "this is a bad day for journalism." The palace won an injunction from Britain's high court forbidding Regan from "disclosing, divulging or making use of the contents of the tapes of the telephone conversations or publishing transcripts of them." Mid rumors that British papers wanted to publish the royal chitchat, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced the transcripts as "despicable" in the House of Commons.

By the time Die Aktuelle appeared on West German newsstands, Scotland Yard had been called in to investigate, and Simon Regan was promising his full cooperation. Said the Prince's solicitor, Matthew Farrer: "We are quite satisfied that the telephone conversations of which this purports to be a transcript did not take place." That afternoon, British Secretary of Trade John Biffen banned the import of the offending issue. By Friday night, Charles and Diana had seen all of Die Aktuelle's transcripts. Their verdict: all were fake.

The transcripts themselves were not very convincing. They contained little that had not already been reported or speculated about in the press. Most of the purported conversations were completely innocuous. Diana is quoted as telling Charles how much she misses him, and pleading with him not to leave her alone so long in the future. Charles complains that he is bored with Australia and the lack of humor in Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Diana says some of her relatives are getting on her nerves as the wedding approaches.

The London Times, in an editorial titled "Euthanasia for Eavesdroppers," urged British papers to refrain from publishing the transcripts even if Die Aktuelle did. Repeating bugged conversations, the Times said, would be the same as endorsing "a monstrous invasion of personal privacy." Some Fleet Street papers might not have felt constrained by this argument. But they faced a more formidable restraint than principle: the High Court ruling against Regan applied to publications as well. Thus on Saturday morning, though the story commanded headlines, not one paper printed the magazine's excerpts. The Guardian came close, paraphrasing portions touching on Prune Minister Eraser's sense of humor and Diana's reported surprise at learning her Prince had a bald patch on his head. For the time being, at least, monarchy-mad British readers would have to content themselves with sanitized hints.

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