World Of Secrets - Al Fayed, Predator at Harrods: 4. Surveillance state

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Security cameras were everywhere - in Harrods and in a luxury apartment used by staff. There’s an atmosphere of paranoia. Vanity Fair magazine was investigating the rumours swirling around Mohamed Al Fayed. Would the truth about him be exposed, even as potential witnesses say they were intimidated? This season of World of Secrets is about sexual abuse, and includes descriptions which some listeners might find distressing. For a list of organisations in the UK that can provide support for survivors of sexual abuse, go to bbc.co.uk/actionline.Presented by Cassie Cornish-Trestrail and Shaimaa Khalil, and produced by Neal Razzell and Sally Abrahams. The editor is Matt Willis. It’s a Long Form Audio production for the BBC World Service.Special thanks to series consultant, Keaton Stone, director Erica Gornall and executive producer, Mike Radford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. A warning before we get started. This series is about sexual abuse and includes descriptions which some listeners might find distressing. I was laid with my back on the bed but my legs up on the wall. This is a woman we're calling Alice. Her words are spoken by an actor. It's the late 1980s and she's stretching out her back after a warm bath. It's been a long day. She's 17 and has an office job, working as a personal assistant to Mohamed Al-Fayed.

Alice has worked late, so rather than travel all the way home, she's staying in a flat on London's exclusive park lane that Al-Fayed has provided for her. She's just starting to relax when the phone next to her bed rings. It can only be one person. My heart sank because I thought I was being summoned. And so I picked it up and he came onto the phone and he just went, yeah, why are you lying like that? and he came onto the phone and he just went, yeah, why are you lying like that?

And I was naked at the time. I just got out of the bath. I was naked, I was just lying there and my whole body turned cold. Because what I then realised was clearly there was some sort of surveillance actually in the apartment itself. Alice knows all about the surveillance at work inside Harrods. The camera that sat over my desk

was a tiny, tiny, tiny little pinprick in a wall. But inside the apartment, it never crossed her mind. He just laughed. He laughed and I put the phone down and I remember going into the bathroom and wrapping this towel around me just feeling absolutely horrified. Her mind is whirring. She's been here multiple times since joining Harrods at the age of 16. Then going back over all the previous times that I've sat in the flat,

wandered around after I've had a shower, I don't know whether he's watching at any of those previous times, but there was obviously a possibility that he was, and also whether I was just being watched or whether that was being recorded, because that wasn't clear either. So it was another pretty sleepless night in my apartment, knowing that there was potential of somebody watching me. How deep does this surveillance operation run?

How many people are involved? And what's it like to be on the receiving end? This is World of Secrets. Season four, Al-Fayed, Predator at Harrods, from the BBC World Service. A story about power and control at the top of British society. I'm Shaima Khalil. I'm Cassie Cornish-Trestrail. Episode four. Surveillance date. It's Saturday, December 17th, 1983.

One of the busiest shopping days before Christmas. After a very cold night, London is bustling. Shoppers wrapped up against the chill. Harrods is heaving. Inside, kids queue for the luxurious Santa's Grotto. Parents in the toy department hoping to find this year's hot gift, a cabbage patch kid. And the food hall is filled with the fragrant smells of all things festive.

Puddings, pies and gingerbread. It's all excitement and delight. But for Harrods security officer Eamon Coyle, there's a sense of dread. He's just received a tip-off. Somewhere in this sprawling, crowded complex may be a bomb. There was a coded call made to Scotland Yard from the IRA that a bomb had been placed. The threat is real. The IRA, the Irish Republican Army,

has set off bombs in London before as part of its long and bloody campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland. A former cop, Eamon knows what to do. A store-wide search is ordered. Staff in every department quietly scour their areas for suspicious packages.

We would satisfy ourselves as best we could that there were no bombs within the store. But outside, in a small car park nearby, a timer is counting down. And when it hits zero, up to 14 kilograms of explosives detonates. The blast rips through the busy streets. I actually went out to the scene of the bomb whilst the smoke was still emanating from the car outside. It's mayhem, a scene of panic, blood and screams. 90 people are wounded, six are killed. Obviously shocked. There was still a lot of smoke. The car bomb was right

outside number five door in Hans Crescent and it blew all the windows in of the man's shop on the ground floor. So I went in there and there was a pall of smoke trapped within the man's shop in that area. Visibility was low. Just a horrible atmosphere. And yet, after crunching over the broken glass and peering through the smoke, there are no casualties inside Harrods. Eamon's team had managed to clear this section just before the bomb went off.

Thank God that we had. But the blast prompts a root-and-branch review of security at Harrods. How did the bombers manage to get so close without being spotted? Really, it highlighted the fact that the camera coverage etc was quite inadequate. The emphasis on security and surveillance would only increase when a new owner takes charge soon after the attack. A little-known Egyptian businessman, Mohamed Al-Fayed. It was fairly apparent early on that it was going to be tough. He was obsessed by security,

which, as far as he was concerned, wasn't up to scratch. Al-Fayed wants more men on the doors. A smart dress code, even for customers. No detail is too small. It's clear he's intent on controlling everything. It just became one thing after another. Almost on a daily basis there was a new drama about something he had observed. We went from a sleepy, well-established, dignified retail store into absolute mayhem within a fairly short time.

An air of insecurity verging on paranoia creeps in. Eamon now spends his days personally escorting executives, fired by Al-Fayed, out of the building. Is anyone's job safe? But there is one group of staff that is in favour with the new boss. We were aware that he had this very strong interest in young girls. While others are getting marched out of the building, young female staff spotted on Al-Fayed's daily walkabouts through the store are being sent up to work in his executive suite.

Al-Fayed's transformation of Harrods continues. He supercharges the security budget. There's more money for everything. Guards, communications. We were able to get the best possible equipment. And cameras. They were quite sophisticated. They had very good focus.

They were high quality. They were able to record. They were all time-lapsed. Yeah, it was a top system. Cameras go up everywhere, including the executive suite. It was over the top. It almost became intrusive. But for all the uncomfortable changes at Harrods,

Eamon chooses to stay. He likes his colleagues and is loyal to the Harrods brand, if not the boss. And the job does bestow status. Harrods is arguably Britain's biggest name in retail. In 1989, a decade after he joined Harrods and four years after Al-Fayed took over, Eamon is promoted to Deputy Head of Security. He now has a seat at Harrods' top table. The new job brings new responsibilities.

It moves beyond keeping the staff and the stock safe and into something else entirely. My first introduction to bugging was when I was newly appointed to my senior role. Bugging. The secret recording of conversations. On the Harrods' telephones. He bugged everybody that he wanted to bug. Now that he's being asked to snoop on his own colleagues, Eamon redesigns his office.

One-way mirrored windows allow him to keep an eye on the security team while he secretly listens to the recordings behind his locked door. I was spending maybe three or four or five hours a day listening to various tapes. There is so much tape to listen to. He even plays them in his car during his long drive home. Most of the tapes involve Harrods' male executives and directors. Eamon says his orders were to report any hint of disloyalty

or nuggets of information Al-Fayed might use to control his staff. He always weaponised anything that he heard about individuals. You have no secrets from me, and if you don't behave yourself, you know, I will use this that I know about you. It was a form of control, for sure. One day, the voices on the tapes change. Now, it's young women, Al-Faid's personal assistants. There was a suggestion that they were all talking amongst themselves.

Something had happened which they were all gossiping about. And basically, Fayed wanted their monitor to see if anything was being said against him. Eamon listens and thinks they're speaking in some kind of code. The level of stress and excitement or whatever in their voice, it was quite obvious to me that they were all talking about something that had occurred and they were expecting something big to happen. Eamon knows the emotional energy of the tapes is what Al-Faid would want to know about. He catches him descending an escalator with his bodyguards. Al-Fayed turns around, and they go back up to his office.

Eamon reports what he's heard, and Al-Fayed thanks him. Shortly after, he says, many of the women on the tapes are fired. fired. I didn't have any moral dilemma insofar as all I was doing was listening to tapes. If I had heard anything on those calls that indicated that someone had been sexually assaulted or molested, well then that would be a different matter altogether. But that never occurred. Of course the women were speaking in code. They knew they were being monitored and had no trust that Eamon or anyone else in Al-Fayed's security team would help.

Today, Eamon, who always knew Al-Fayed had a thing for young women, says he is shocked by the stories we're now reporting. In one of our first conversations, he was brought to tears. For Alice, who got that creepy call from Al-Fayed in the Park Lane apartment, Eamon says he personally never saw or heard any tapes from there. But... It would not surprise me that he would have covert cameras in a bedroom or whatever. He was a pervert.

And quite clearly, he had the money and the resources to do that sort of thing. But what happens when surveillance isn't enough? How will Al-Fayed keep his secrets? Even when women begin to speak out. For just as long as Hollywood has been Tinseltown, there have been suspicions about what lurks behind the glitz and glamour. Concerns about radical propaganda in the motion pictures. And for a while, those suspicions grew into something much bigger and much darker. Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I'm Una Chaplin, and this is Hollywood Exiles. It's about a battle for the political soul of America, and the battlefield was Hollywood. All episodes of Hollywood Exiles from the BBC World Service and CBC are available now. Search for Hollywood Exiles wherever you get your podcasts. September 1995.

America's sweetheart, Sandra Bullock, shines out from the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. She's laughing. And why not? There's a feature on how she's become one of Hollywood's brightest stars. Vanity Fair is always about America's most famous and infamous figures. Glossy and glamorous, its reporting can have real grit. The cover also teases stories about Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand and O.G. Simpson. There's also a story out of London titled Holy War at Harrods. It's about Mohammed Al-Fayed's battle to become British. Here's a man taking on the crusty old

British establishment, which he was. At the time, Henry Porter is Vanity Fair's UK editor. Reporter Maureen Orth had secured Al-Fayed's cooperation with the piece. In the article, she describes going into Al-Fayed's heavily-scented office at Harrods, where he laments the government's refusal to grant him a British passport. But she's a really good reporter, and she found out a lot about him and couldn't help, having started off with this rather positive idea of Fayyad, couldn't help putting in three or four allegations about his racism, about his constant surveillance of his staff and his exploitation and sexual abuse of women.

In her reporting, Orth speaks with ex-Harrods employees, who describe Alfire's desire to work only with attractive, young, white women, how he would hug them or subject them to crude or humiliating comments about their appearance. The point about a Vanity Fair piece is very, very fact-checked. I mean, we knew we were on solid ground because Maureen is, first of all, an exceedingly good and experienced reporter, but also the fact-checking department of Vanity Fair

was a whole section of the building. Vanity Fair's legal editor also sees the piece. By the time it hits the newsstands in September, Porter's confident every word is true. The piece describes Al-Fayed as perhaps the most litigious man in England. Sure enough, within days of publication, Al-Fayed's lawyers tell Vanity Fair they're suing for libel. Now, when you get a libel case like that, when you get a letter like that, the first

reaction is you think, my goodness, we're going to have a real problem here. But Porter comes to see hope in the sheer breadth of Al-Fayed's claim. In preparing for its defense, Vanity Fair gets to interview even more people close to Al-Fayed. What he did was open up his life to us, so we could investigate all aspects of his operation. His really vocal racism, his abuse of the surveillance system in Harrods to spot women he fancied, to look at people, to intercept their phone calls. So it turned out good for us. Vanity Fair sets to work on its defence. Porter is shocked at how much more material there is about Al-Fayed

than the original article contained. And there was this sense which suddenly dawned on me that we were dealing with a little fiefdom, a little state, where he was dictator and he did exactly what he wanted. But due to the legal process, none of the information Vanity Fair is gathering will be made public until the lawsuit goes to trial. For now, Al-Fayed's secrets are safe,

and he still has some moves left to play. left to play. Al-Fayed's offensive against Vanity Fair actually begins in the weeks before the article hits the shelves. Remember Safaya, one of his former personal assistants who had wanted to become a buyer? It's been three years since she went to Al-Fayed's Parisian home, Villa Windsor, where she says he tried to rape her. She's got ties with him and Harrods and is working as a receptionist at an ad agency. When the phone rings... I picked up the phone and one of the PAs said,

I've got Mohammed for you. And boom, there he was on the phone going, hey, how are you? You know, I'm like, what the, how the hell does he, what does he do? How does he know where I work? Very scary. Sophia's heart is racing. Al-Fayed is straight to business. Vanity Fair is working on an article, he tells her, if they reach out. You don't talk about me. If you talk about me, all you say is good things. You make sure you say good things about me.

If they contact you, and I'm like, yeah, what? I was just so sort of like freaked out that he had rung. It was scary. It made me feel paranoid. It made me feel scared. Is someone following me? The scare tactic works. Safaya maintains her silence. She doesn't contact Vanity Fair, and they don't contact her. But Vanity Fair is reaching out to other women who worked for Al-Fayed.

One afternoon I got a phone call from one of the girls who I knew had been one of Mohammed's secretaries at Harrods. This is the woman we're calling Sarah, the Harrods human resources manager, who told me Al-Fayed tried to rape her at Villa Windsor earlier in 1994. For her, that night was a turning point. For her, that night was the turning point. The way I dealt with everything was to try and bury it and not pretend it didn't happen because it did, but to get as far away as possible from mention of his name.

The woman on the phone asks Sarah if she'd be interested in joining a number of former Harrods employees in talking to Vanity Fair about Al-Faed's predatory behaviour. I knew I could support other people, but I decided for my mental health and to get on with my life, I wanted nothing to do with it. Days later, Sarah is given another opportunity to talk to the reporter. Again, she says no. She just wants to move on. But that's not the end of it. Soon, Sarah's getting pressure from Al-Faid's side.

And a couple of weeks later, I got a phone call from one of the secretaries in his office at Harrods. Al-Faid would like to see you, the secretary says. And she said that he had heard that I'd been approached by the journalist who was writing an article for Vanity Fair. And he understood that I had refused to enter into the conversation with them. How on earth does he know that, Sarah wonders.

And he was extremely grateful and he wanted to show his gratitude. And I remember being really angry and saying, you've got to be kidding me. And again repeating, I want absolutely nothing to do with that man ever again. And I put the phone down. But days later, Sarah's phone rings again. This time, it's a man who wants to know, can she help with the legal fight against the magazine by bearing witness to Al-Fayed's good character?

And I said, I have already said I want absolutely nothing to do with this. And if you think I'm going to bear witness to his good character, you've got another thing coming. I have zero interest and they said it would be in your interests to meet with us and discuss it. And I took that to infer that it would be in my disinterest to not go. And I was still fearful of somebody coming after me for what had happened. And so I agreed to meet them. In an office in London,

Sarah says two men ask her to sign a document bearing witness to Al-Fayed's good character. Again, she refuses. I can't tell you how much you've got the wrong person for this job. There is nothing that would persuade me to do this. She says one of the men replies, well, you do know we could subpoena you if this goes to court. Sarah tells him, you don't want my truth coming out in court.

Then she leaves. She hopes that is the end of it. But... Days later, Sarah's at home when a courier arrives with a package. That included a statement that I had supposedly given witnessing Mohammed's good character, signed by me. Mohammed's good character, signed by me. And I had not given that statement and I had not signed a statement.

At which point I was absolutely terrified because I thought if this can happen, what else could happen to me? Because I thought if this can happen, what else could happen to me? This behaviour seems to be out of a Mohamed El-Fayed playbook. Intimidate, frighten, silence your victims. Vanity Fair editor Henry Porter experiences some of these tactics firsthand. He and lawyer David Hooper spend more than a year on a painstaking investigation to defend the magazine and reveal Al-Fayed's full horror. He finds women all around the world who testify to a pattern of abuse, of promises made to boost their careers,

of invitations to luxurious locations, followed by isolation and attack. There is also another pattern. They're all terrified by the prospect of crossing our side. We knew that they'd been told that he would seek every way of going after them if they talked to us. We knew that, which is why it was so hard to get people to talk. There was a realistic fear that your life could be ruined by him. And yet, despite the threats and personal risks,

some victims do agree to come forward. Vanity Fair now has enough to force Al-Thaid to back off. And they let him know. That was like a missile sent into his camp because he would not have wanted to have gone to court with our knowledge of what had happened in the south of France and at the Villa Windsor. So yeah, we had him. By June, July that year, we had him.

The trial is set for October 1997, more than two years after the Vanity Fair story first appeared. But in the early hours of August 31st, everything changes. Diana, Princess of Wales, has died after a car crash in Paris. Her friend, Dodi Al-Fayed, also died in the accident, which happened in a road tunnel near the River Seine. Police said the princess's car was being followed by press photographers at the time. The world obviously has lost a princess who is simply irreplaceable, but Mr Al-Fayed has lost his beloved eldest son.

And at that moment, the fight with Vanity Fair becomes irrelevant. The moment the crash happened and Gainer was dead and Dodie was dead, just forget it, you know? It was a bigger event. It was more important than our dispute. Porter says his bosses at Vanity Fair are keen to settle. The lawsuit had been costing them in all sorts of ways. Al-Fayed had instructed his Harrods business to stop advertising with them.

And the trial always carries risk. A jury could rule in Al-Fayed's favour. Anything other than a victory in court would leave Vanity Fair liable for legal fees and possibly damages. So, above Henry Porter's head, Vanity Fair's bosses strike a deal with Al-Fayed's people. Both sides agree to drop the case. Vanity Fair pays no damages.

There's no trial. The women get no day in court. All the evidence is locked away. Once again, our fired secrets are safe. That was really cross because I knew what was going into locked up storage. I knew all the stuff that he'd done. Within those documents, within those affidavits, there is evidence of serial criminality. So I disagree with it completely. This all happened in 1997, 27 years ago. I'm still angry. There are a lot of people who would not have been abused, if we'd been able to go to court, our evidence would have been available to other journalists, which is what I wanted it to be. We've already heard testimony of several women Al-Fayed abused after this case was shut down. It's not that other journalists subsequently didn't try to publish stories like

this, but none had the resources of Vanity Fair, and all ran up against the same determined effort to shut them down. In short, hidden surveillance, intimidation and aggressive lawsuits work. They're effective, silencing those who dare expose our fired stark secrets. But a sea change is coming. A whole new culture that refuses to let stories like this be buried. These men need to be taken down. They need to be shown for the monsters that they are. I've spent so many years being quiet and silent and not speaking up.

And I hope talking about it now helps. But is it enough to bring Al-Fayed's reign of terror to an end? That's next time on World of Secrets. you've been listening to episode four of world of secrets season four al-fayed predator at harrods it's a long-form audio production for BBC World Service. It's presented by me, Shaima Khalil. And me, Cassie Cornish-Trestrail. Special thanks to series consultant Keaton Stone and director Erica Gornall.

If you've been affected by any of the issues in this series, please contact support organisations in your own country. For a list of organisations in the UK that can provide support for survivors of sexual abuse, go to bbc.co.uk forward slash action line. We'd like as many of you as possible to hear our investigations. So please leave a rating and a review and do tell others about World of Secrets. It really does help. It really does help. individuals i'm zing singh and each week my co-presenter simon jack and i take a closer look at the world's mega rich and we try to decide whether they're good bad or just another billionaire

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