From the crackle of an urgent exchange on the military radio, Prince Harry deciphered the news he had been dreading. Ten weeks into his four-month tour in Afghanistan, his carefully concealed presence on the front line had been busted by the press. Harry’s heart sank.
It was February 2008, and he was on duty near the former Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala in the northern Helmand Province with a seven-strong Spartan vehicle team. The operation was part of a push to seize control of a village and carve a route to the Kajaki Dam, where nearly two years earlier a British soldier had been killed and six critically injured when they stumbled upon a Soviet minefield.
Within minutes of learning that the secret of his Afghan deployment was out, Harry felt a tap on his shoulder. It was his commanding officer. “Lieutenant Wales, pack up your bag. You’re off.”
The words were plain, and shattering. In less than an hour, Harry had to abandon his men, grab all his things, and run up the ramp of the Chinook helicopter that was making a dangerous daytime landing to retrieve him. On board were six heavily armed SAS soldiers and his Metropolitan Police backup protection team, who had stayed back at Camp Bastion while Harry was on the front line. An Apache attack helicopter flew overhead, rightly described as a “£46 million flying fortress,” equipped with state-of-the-art laser-guided missiles to protect the juicy royal target from Taliban fire. From there it was back to Camp Bastion in the Helmand Province desert and Harry’s return to RAF Brize Norton airbase in Oxfordshire.
The heart-crushing curtailment of his Afghanistan deployment was not Harry’s first disappointment. Ten months before, he had been all set to head to Iraq with the Blues and Royals as the leader of a unit of twelve soldiers and four Scimitar armored reconnaissance vehicles stationed in Basra. Britain had been at war with Iraq since 2003, when, bedazzled by the notion of playing Winston Churchill in reverse to George W. Bush’s Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Tony Blair committed British troops to join America’s effort “to remove Saddam Hussein from power and disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.” It was a deeply unpopular war, which, perhaps, made it all the more important that a precious royal was seen sharing the risk of potential loss of life or limb with ordinary Britons.
No sooner had the Ministry of Defence—in its infinite unwisdom—announced Harry’s deployment in Iraq than the “tabloid press GPS” worked out where he’d be stationed. And inevitably, a radical cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, issued credible threats to Harry’s life based on that information. British troops were already experiencing increased insurgent attacks. The third in line to the throne would be regarded as a “bullet magnet” who could endanger everybody else around him. In the third week of April 2007, army chiefs feared that a fatal roadside bomb attack on two British soldiers was a dry run for an attempt on Harry’s life. In May, the MOD abruptly canceled his deployment to Iraq.
The twenty-two-year-old Prince was gutted. Everything he had trained for had gone up in smoke. He had made it clear how keenly he felt the importance of active service. “I hope I would not drag my sorry arse through Sandhurst….I would not have joined if they had said I could not be in the front line,” he told the press on his twenty-first birthday.
As a decorated officer himself, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton was also deeply frustrated. He had worked for months to make the Iraq deployment happen. The private secretary felt it was essential for the young Prince to get his “knees brown” in operational experience. There had been endless delicate negotiations with Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the general staff of the British Army, to get Harry to Basra. Now that Iraq was out of the question, there was a strong fear Harry would quit the army altogether. William had to help talk him off the ledge. He told Harry that if he bailed now he would undo all he had achieved as a young officer, and would come off as petulant. Had another opportunity to deploy—this time to Afghanistan—not been created, said Lowther-Pinkerton, “We’d have had a really shattered, disgruntled, sapped—morale-wise—individual on our hands who can kick up and be dangerous if he wants to be.”
There was plenty of evidence of that already. Temperamentally, Harry was a human IED. At Eton, he regularly got into fights that turned physical, ending up on crutches after kicking in a window during a dispute with another student over a girl. A former head teacher told writer Chris Hutchins, “We used to say that Harry was like a firecracker, and when other people saw him coming, they used to pass a by-now-familiar warning: ‘Don’t light the blue touch paper.’ ” (The British instructions for how to ignite fireworks.)
Harry would have been much happier in the nineteenth century as a pistol-waving, roistering aristocrat of the Flashman school (except that Brigadier General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the hero of George MacDonald Fraser’s novels, is a swaggering, cowardly reprobate, which the real Harry is decidedly not). The Spencer annals are full of the intemperance and recklessness of his red-haired ancestors. After a heated argument, Sir William Spencer, in the early 1500s, killed a stag in a rage. The hot-tempered Charles Spencer, third Earl of Sunderland, declared during a debate in the House of Commons that he “hoped to piss upon the House of Lords.” The Red Earl appalled Queen Victoria when he was sent to be Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and ended up converting to the cause of Irish independence. Their exploits are all chronicled in a colorful family history by the current Earl Spencer, whose reckless eulogy of Diana was every bit in the tradition of his forefathers.
While William became more and more of a Windsor as the years went by, the Spencer blood coursed hard in Harry’s veins. He seems to have embraced it. On the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death, at the memorial service held at the Guards’ Chapel, Wellington Barracks, William sat (as he no doubt had to) with the Queen and Prince Philip. But Harry chose to sit with all the Spencers. He acknowledged his affinity with Diana’s side of the family in his 2021 interview with Oprah: “Family members have said: ‘Just play the game and your life will be easier.’ But I’ve got a hell of a lot of my mum in me. I feel as though I am outside the system, but I’m still stuck there.”
It’s fair to say that joining the army in 2006 saved Harry from going off the rails. While William was away at St. Andrews, and his father was frequently traveling, Harry drank too much and smoked weed with his mates in the basement of Highgrove, where he and William had a teenage den they called Club H. When the brothers were home they were regulars at the nearby Rattlebone Inn, a sixteenth-century pub just a few miles from Highgrove. Its lethal specialty was the snake bite, a cocktail of beer and cider that didn’t help Harry’s sobriety. A couple of nosy reporters were drinking at the bar in 2001 when a still underage Harry took part in a “lock-in,” an illegal but not uncommon British tradition where drinkers spend the night locked in the pub to continue the party. An over-served Harry proceeded to get into a fight with a French employee whom the pre-woke Prince called a “f—ing frog.” Things unraveled from there, and Harry was kicked out. The News of the World featured the boorish incident in a multipage splash. Harry’s late teens and early twenties were a litany of front-page debacles, from punching a photographer in October 2004 when clearly the worse for wear from booze at three a.m. outside a Piccadilly nightclub to wearing that infamous Nazi armband at a costume party in 2005 two weeks before the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Chris Uncle, the photographer involved in the 2004 paparazzi scuffle, told the Evening Standard that Harry had suddenly “burst out of the car” and “lunged” toward him while Uncle was still taking pictures. “He lashed out and then deliberately pushed my camera into my face,” Uncle said. Royal protection officers dragged Harry away, and Paddy Harverson artfully spun it as excessive press harassment of an upstanding young man. To add to the princely pandemonium, it happened just as a sacked Eton art teacher named Sarah Forsyth told an employment tribunal that she had helped Harry with a project required to pass one of the A levels he needed to get into Sandhurst. An exam board cleared him of cheating, but you can hear the pain in Harry’s disconsolate gripe: “Maybe it’s just part of who I am. I have to deal with it. There’s lots of things people get accused of. Unfortunately mine are made public.”
Sandhurst gave him a hiding place from all that—“the best escape I’ve ever had,” he called his military career. Never was a temperament as well matched as Harry’s with the life of a soldier. It was clear he was a natural, even at Eton, where he was chosen to be parade commander in the school’s Combined Cadet Force.
In his zesty twenty-first birthday interview, he said he chose the army over the navy, where his father and grandfather had served, because “I do enjoy running down a ditch full of mud, firing bullets. It’s the way I am. I love it.” “The navy is so technical now,” a retired officer said to me. “Most of the warships are sort of closed down permanently. When you’re at sea you’re in a sort of dark operations room, not the sort of good old Jack-Hawkins-on-the-bridge type stuff people imagine.”
Being a soldier was critical to Harry’s self-image. He said he could “easily see” himself spending “thirty-five or forty years” in the army.
Military life was his passport to anonymity. Both Clarence House and Sandhurst made it clear that Officer Cadet Wales would be treated just like everyone else; the same grueling forty-four-week boot camp, the same predawn wake-up calls, the same chores of polishing his boots and making his bed. Like every other cadet, he had to arrive with his own ironing board. His warrant officer famously said at the time, “Prince Harry will call me sir. And I will call him sir. But he will be the one who means it.”
Harry preferred a war zone any day to the supposed safety of London, where he had a different target on his back. During missions off base in Afghanistan, his helmet and goggles hid his famous face. The “bro” bonds he forged with soldiers from modest homes were real, not PR confections. At Forward Operating Base Delhi, a godforsaken desert outpost five hundred meters from the Taliban’s front line, he shared a room with a constantly changing contingent of Royal Artillery soldiers. “This is what it is all about,” Harry told reporters. “Being here with the guys rather than being in a room with a bunch of officers….It’s good fun to be with just a normal bunch of guys, listening to their problems, listening to what they think….The guys I am sharing a room [with make] it all worthwhile.”
It was balm to Harry after Eton that the army valued innate skills that did not depend on academics. He was an excellent shot for a reason. “He’s got extraordinary natural hand-eye coordination and, as a consequence of that, he rolls with things,” Major General Buster Howes, former military attaché at the British embassy in Washington, told me. Howes recalled how Harry, on a visit to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado in 2013, was handed an American football and threw two beautiful spiral passes, just as he later whacked two baseballs thrown to him by a Boston Red Sox pitcher.
The army was the one place where the dynamic between Harry and William favored the younger brother. Harry became a commissioned officer at Sandhurst just months after William graduated from St. Andrews. It pleased Harry no end that his older brother would have to salute him. They bonded, says biographer Christopher Andersen, over hearing drill sergeants scream at them, “You ’orrible little prince!” as they scrambled under barbed wire and marched until their feet bled. It was gratifying for the more experienced Harry to be a military mentor to the brother who usually guided him.
If the army was a vocation for Harry from earliest childhood, for William the grueling training was essentially résumé building to burnish his credentials as a future monarch. “I feel it is important for me to understand the military and to be able to look soldiers in the eye with at least a tiny bit of knowledge of what they have gone through,” William told a reporter in 2005. And yet, like Prince Charles in the navy, he still found it galling to train endlessly with no hope of real action.
William’s decision to join the RAF Search and Rescue Force in 2010 was a stroke of genius. It gave him his operational kicks without putting anyone in danger but himself. Based out of Anglesey for three years, he flew out into the North Atlantic, rescuing yachtsmen, swooping down to pick up stranded climbers on the mountains of Snowdonia, and airlifting bodies from car crashes on the highway. In 2015, he moved on to the East Anglian Air Ambulance, flying a team of doctors and medics to scenes of human distress—accidents, suicides, fires. It gave the young heir a greater insight into the challenges and workings of the National Health Service than any member of the Royal Family before him.
The two brothers did their helicopter flying training at the same time in 2009 at RAF Shawbury and shared a tiny cottage off base together. “The first time and the last time, I can assure you of that,” joked Harry in a joint interview. Harry did so well that the military promoted him to training to fly an Apache—considered the most lethal and challenging of aircrafts, weighing nearly twelve thousand pounds. He won the award for best co-pilot gunner in his class. “He is a seriously brilliant pilot and co-pilot gunner,” Lowther-Pinkerton said. After Harry trained, he “just suddenly realized, ‘I’m brilliant at this. I can’t take exams, I can’t do this, can’t do that,’ ” one of his military circle said. “But the people that know, they say he’s always been exceptional. He went out to Afghanistan, and by all accounts he was absolutely superb. His commanding officer came back and said, ‘He was really, really, really twenty-four karat out there.’ ”
A Palace source made the observation to me that the kind of helicopters each of them flew pretty much summed up their distinctive temperaments, one boy superbly martial, the other bravely empathetic:
Harry flew an Apache armored attack helicopter, which should do about 200 knots at 10 feet above the ground, doing 39 functions at once, firing guns in every direction. Whereas William would fly this big beast of a search and rescue aircraft, with extra fuel tanks, working out the fuel notes, working out a straight line towards it, and hammering his way through the storm, picking somebody out of the ocean and coming back. It’s a classic description of the two blokes.
If Harry had dropped out of the army after the Iraq disappointment, Lowther-Pinkerton believes it would have been a disaster not just for the Prince personally, but for the monarchy, blowing up his potential to be a critical asset for the Crown. Evidently, his grandmother thought so too. For the Queen, military service was anything but an ornamental necessity. She is the last head of state to have served in the military during the Second World War and the last, as Robert Hardman put it, to “know the fear, the spirit, even the songs of that generation.” She joined, as soon as she turned nineteen, the Auxiliary Territorial Service—the equivalent in the United States of the Women’s Army Corps—the first female royal to take a course with regular people with no special rank or privilege at the decree of the King. It equipped her to drive a range of vehicles, including an ambulance, and to deconstruct and rebuild an engine. She adored getting dirt under her fingernails and grease on her hands. It became something of a family joke that over dinner she would earnestly discuss pistons and cylinder heads. If there was any kind of mechanical problem with her Land Rover at Balmoral, she would leap out herself and go under the hood. (In 2003, she shocked the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia when she drove him round the Balmoral estate herself. The Prince, who never gave women the right to drive during his long reign, had to ask her to slow down. One has to think she was sending him a message.)
On VE Day in May 1945, she and Princess Margaret slipped away with a group of young Guards officers and joined the jubilant throngs, linking arms with the revelers surging round the Palace. The experience of the war was fundamental to shaping the Queen’s notion of duty. The uniform of the armed forces has always had a deep emotional resonance for her. Until she ceded the responsibility to Prince Charles in 2017, she regarded the wreath laying at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day every November as one of her most sacred, and unmissable, royal duties.
A Downing Street insider told me that he believes it was the persistence of the Queen in her sessions with the new Labour prime minister Gordon Brown that resulted in Harry’s second chance to deploy—this time to Afghanistan—despite the strong resistance of the military. The Queen was apparently concerned that Harry was showing all the signs of the unhappy drift that bedevils the younger sibling of the heir. She had seen it in Princess Margaret’s recalcitrant youth, and in the aimlessness of Prince Andrew. She knew how important it was to Harry to serve his country. “Her Majesty was aware of the limitations of Harry being the ‘spare’ and the bad things that can happen when you’ve got a sense of worthlessness,” the insider said. “The Queen went out of her way to find an elegant solution….Gordon Brown would never talk about those sessions to anybody, but there was clearly lead being put in his pencil.” It was the Queen, as his commander in chief, but more likely in the role of his proud grandmother, who got to tell Prince Harry that he was to finally fulfill his dream of serving in a war zone. With more troops in Afghanistan now than in Iraq and with British soldiers serving at half a dozen locations, army chiefs believed they could protect him—if the media kept quiet.
That would have seemed an outlandish proposition. How to muzzle a voracious and competitive media wolf pack? The only way was to try to co-opt them.
This is where the enterprising double-teaming of private secretary Lowther-Pinkerton and communications maestro Harverson worked to perfection. The Netflix series The Crown has spawned an outdated view of Palace advisers as crusty reactionaries. People tend to imagine that the Queen’s first private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, unforgettably played by Pip Torrens as a lugubrious mustachioed bloodhound who existed only to thwart a progressive idea, is still running the royal show. In fact, a band of sophisticated strategists compose the modern Palace’s think tank. Things work well or badly for the royals depending on who is employed in the critical private secretary and communications roles at any one time.
In June 2007, Lowther-Pinkerton and Harverson decided to go straight for the beast’s belly. They set up meetings with Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun, and sat down with the limpet-like royal scoop-monger Duncan Larcombe and hoary defense editor Tom Newton Dunn. As recounted in Larcombe’s book, Prince Harry: The Inside Story, Harverson opened the meeting with “We want to know if you think it will ever be possible for Harry to go to war.”
“Have you considered trying to get a media blackout on any future deployment?” Newton Dunn asked.
“Would that really work?” asked Lowther-Pinkerton.
Larcombe replied, “Well, it seems to me that this is the only way Harry would ever be able to serve in the front line. If his deployment is publicized before the event, he will not be able to go. So perhaps this is the only option available.”
Bingo. The strategy of co-option landed, and the Palace had even made it appear that the tabloid tormenters in chief had come up with it. Though neither Larcombe nor Newton Dunn thought the Palace could ever pull off the media going dark on a royal celebrity of Harry’s profile and popularity, Lowther-Pinkerton, Harverson, and General Dannatt went into overdrive, meeting with other editors and news producers to sell the idea.
Critical to the success of the scheme was Miguel Head, then chief press officer for the Ministry of Defence, who negotiated agreements with the press that came with a reward. If newspapers could be persuaded to keep mum about Harry’s deployment, Head pledged faithfully, the Prince would do interviews before, during, and after his tour, on the condition the conversations would be held until he returned from the front line. With the print media on board, Head next convinced the broadcast media to honor the news blackout. They balked, especially the BBC. It took five months for General Dannatt to persuade them to use as a model the kidnap template, when police have the right to request that media organizations don’t report an abduction while negotiations are under way, in case it endangers the hostage. In return, the police accept responsibility to update the media regularly and do a “reveal” on camera once the situation is resolved.
In an interview with The Journalist’s Resource, Head explained how he shamed the usually rapacious press to stand down on one of the biggest royal stories:
The competitive nature of media had the inverse effect of none of them wanting to be the bad person. Prince Harry is so popular, and back then he was still very young. It had been only 10 years since Diana, Princess of Wales, had died. There was still a very strong sense in the country of the public, in effect, bringing the two young princes into their arms and saying, “We will look after them. And you, press, you had better keep your hands off them. Don’t you dare do to them what you did to their mother.”
In the end, hundreds of news organizations, including U.S. broadcasters, were brought into what Miguel Head called “the circle of trust.” Remarkably, this was a gentlemen’s agreement, not a legal one—which is why Head thought the embargo would last for forty-eight hours, tops. Royal watchers who were used to relentless Prince Harry updates were not tipped off by photos disseminated of him riding around in the desert on a rusty motorbike in a mysteriously uncredited location. William took part in the subterfuge by signing up for army duties over Christmas 2007 to help along the fiction that both brothers had elected to spend the day on base with their units. Thankfully, Prince Charles provided a useful news distraction, yelling at a photographer when exercising his horse, “Get out of the way, you annoying little prat!”
While the rest of the royals were eating Christmas pudding, and Princess Anne was picking up dead birds at Prince Philip’s Boxing Day shoot, Harry was eating curried goat meat with Gurkha soldiers in the desert of Afghanistan. In many ways, the fates had conspired to pluck him from a war in Iraq that people hated and insert him, instead, into a battle theater—Afghanistan—that was, at that time, less controversial. There is a folk memory of Afghanistan in Britain’s fighting forces, and Harry seemed to fit right into a place of which both Kipling and Churchill had written so eloquently.
No one could say that his deployment was a sinecure. For most of it, he lived without running water or heat during the freezing nights. Working as a forward air controller, he scoured the feed of live footage to a laptop terminal, known as “Taliban TV” or “Kill TV.” His job was to call in air cover for NATO troops under fire from the Taliban, using his call name Widow Six Seven. Pilots tuned in would hear the message “Cleared Hot” (permission to fire) relayed in Etonian cadences they had no idea belonged to the grandson of the Queen.
It took ten weeks for the anonymity deal with the press to fall apart, which, all things considered, was a credit to the usually carnivorous media, and a testament to Harry’s popularity. His cover was almost blown after a month, when a little-known Australian women’s magazine called New Idea somehow found out about his deployment and, unaware of the blackout agreement, published a small item on its website about the Prince on the front line. (The editor later published an apology and resigned—which did not stop the hate mail and death threats she received for outing the Prince.) Happily for Harry, New Idea was on no one’s media radar, and the blackout held for a further seven weeks. Miguel Head was right. There was little appetite in the British media to be the delinquent press outlet that blew open a brave warrior-prince’s service to his country, but U.S. gossip buccaneer Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report had no such concerns. He ran it as his own scoop, trumpeting, “They’re calling him ‘Harry the Hero!’ ” The post ended with the ominous signature Drudge sign-off, “Developing…”—which he had patented during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
It was over. When the RAF TriStar troop transporter plane bearing Prince Harry landed at RAF Brize Norton, he was the embodiment of wretchedness. He was wearing his dirty camo uniform and body armor with sand from Afghanistan still in his boots. “He was very upset,” Miguel Head recalls. “He was really down. I wouldn’t describe him as angry—he’s far more mature than that, and he understood why it had happened. He was just very sad about it.” He’d had two and a half months of normal life—and only normal because it was war.
His flight home had been traumatic. On board were two seriously wounded British soldiers who were in induced comas with tubes coming out of their arms. One of the men was Ben McBean, a twenty-one-year-old Royal Marine who had lost his right leg and left arm after stepping on a Taliban-planted IED. Tucked into the hand of the other soldier was a test tube of the shrapnel that had been removed from his neck.
Harry never forgot Ben McBean. Five years later, the Prince turned out to cheer him on as he competed—with his prosthetic leg—in a grueling thirty-one-mile run on behalf of an armed forces charity. McBean said afterward he was stunned to see Harry there. The bravery of the injured veterans on the plane had left a forever mark on the Prince’s psyche. Their silent suffering later inspired him to found the Invictus Games, which enable wounded veterans to reclaim their sense of worth in competitive sports.
At Brize Norton, Harry’s father and brother were there to meet him when he landed. Miguel Head, who was also present, said:
It was the first time I realized, that I saw with my own eyes, the closeness of the relationship between the two brothers. Think about the mixed emotions Prince William would have had, because he wasn’t allowed…he never got to go. So he would have known how Prince Harry felt, and he was very protective of him.
On Harry’s deployment, William had written him a letter telling him how proud their mother would be.
The media agreement that Miguel Head had negotiated now was an unbearable prospect for the exhausted Prince. He was expected to sit down in front of television lights and do an on-camera interview for the press pool. For once, the British media stood on moral high ground. The leak had come from America, not from the red-tops. Harry thanked them for keeping mum.
“It’s a shame,” he said with admirable poise. “ ‘Angry’ would be the wrong word to use. I’m slightly disappointed. I thought I could see it through to the end and come back with our guys.” Still shaken from the sight of the seriously injured soldiers on the flight, he admitted experiencing shock and a “bit of a choke” in his throat. “Those are the heroes. Those were guys who had been blown up by a mine that they had no idea about, serving their country, doing a normal patrol.”
William, watching from the back of the room, sensed how fragile his brother was beneath his media façade. He suddenly stood up and drew his hand across his neck in a gesture that said “Cut.”
“It was simply a brother realizing that at that point nothing was more important than his [brother’s] welfare, and none of the other agreements mattered at that point,” Miguel Head recalled.
And it says something about the closeness of the two brothers and their authenticity, as well. They will not fake who they are simply to play a game or to go along with other people’s expectations. And they are perfectly courteous and loyal and they will abide by agreements up to a point. But there will come a point where they say, “Well, actually our humanity is more important.”
The BBC producer who had been promised a full-length interview was apoplectic and yelled at Head about the broken agreement. Later the brothers were so appreciative of the way Miguel handled it, they asked Paddy Harverson to hire him as their first joint press secretary, which he duly did.
Harry, Charles, and William quickly exited the scene of the interview. William carried Harry’s two duffel bags to a waiting station wagon, and they drove away. Like any family welcoming a beloved soldier safely home from war.