NSA’s Disclosure of Diana File Has Tabloids Atwitter

The National Security Agency has disclosed that U.S. intelligence is holding 1,056 pages of classified information about the late Princess Diana, inspiring a flurry of sensational headlines this week across London’s tabloids.

“America’s spy chiefs admitted last night they snooped on Princess Diana for years--and learned some of her most intimate love secrets,” the Mirror reported Thursday. The Daily Record claimed that NSA intercepts went on “right until she died in the Paris car crash with Dodi Fayed.”

The truth, while intriguing, is unlikely to be so lurid. The source of the Fleet Street speculation was a simple, two-page NSA denial of a Freedom of Information Act request released last month in which the supersecret U.S. spy agency based at Fort Meade, Md., admitted possessing a Diana file.

The document says nothing about the contents of those 1,056 secret pages, why they were gathered or how they were obtained. One U.S. intelligence official said Friday that the references to Diana in intercepted conversations were “incidental.”

Diana, the official insisted, was never a “target” of the NSA’s massive, worldwide electronic eavesdropping infrastructure. The NSA’s system sucks up millions of electronic signals around the world every hour, but only “targeted” communications are analyzed and deciphered after a vast array of supercomputers sort them out on the basis of programmed search terms, such as “Saddam Hussein.”

But the Diana controversy is not the only, or the most serious, dispute in Europe that has raised the profile of the reclusive NSA.

The agency has been the subject of intense controversy in Britain and across Europe since a report released in January by the European Parliament concluded that “within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted” by the NSA.

The report focused on a system called Echelon through which the NSA and its spy partners in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia share communications intercepted from around the world and systemically divide the huge task of analyzing the “take.”