SECRETS DIANA Never Told

Those close to the late Princess Diana reveal the truth about her first big love affair — and what she was really like behind closed doors

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Nearly three decades after her death, he’s still defending her. In an interview with Good Morning Britain on Feb. 25, Princess Diana’s lover James Hewitt condemned the BBC, saying late journalist Martin Bashir “inveigled” and “lied” to land a controversial 1995 Panorama interview with the royal. “I think it’s appalling.”

But Diana accused James himself of some pretty awful behavior. “I was absolutely devastated,” she confessed in that same interview, of how he shared intimate details of their five-year romance with author Anna Pasternak for the 1994 book Princess in Love. “It was very distressing for me that a friend of mine, who I had trusted, made money out of me.... I was in love with him. But I was very let down.” Ever since, the former British Army cavalry officer has been alternately avoiding the spotlight and courting the press. “And now he’s speaking out again, leading many to believe he may be planning another tell-all,” a source says of the former British Army cavalry officer, who’s already written one memoir, Love and War, in 1999. “He could clear up a lot of myths and tell the truth about Diana.”

James knows secrets Diana took to the grave, according to her longtime butler, Paul Burrell. “He knew the princess intimately for years. She wrote to him almost every day during their passionate affair. He has information and a personal insight which is unrivaled,” Burrell tells In Touch. “Certainly enough to write another book.”

DANGEROUS LIAISON