In a sensational twist to the celebrations of the 90th birthday of the iconic Spitfire fighter thePipeLine can reveal that disgraced former Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, was attempting to sell proof that the legendary Buried Spitfires of Burma are indeed real and that secret papers belonging to the British Royal Family prove that the former Prince’s famous relative, Lord Louis Mountbatten, did order more than twenty of the aircraft to be buried in crates at former RAF Mingaladon, now Yangon International Airport, in Myanmar.
Proof of the existence of the legendary fighters comes in an email buried among the millions of pages of the of the so called Epstein Files, published by the US Department of Justice, in which the former Prince Andrew confirms to his friend, the convicted paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, that pages redacted from Lord Louis Mountbatten’s diaries by the UK Government describe the clandestine burial of the fighters in the Autumn of 1945, shortly after the War in the Far East ended.
The e-mail also confirms that the burial operation was so secret that Lord Mountbatten, at the time the head of South East Asia Command, borrowed a unit of the famous American CeeBees [Construction Battalions] to undertake the work.
In the E-mail the then Prince, who was also a UK Business envoy working on behalf of the UK Government, suggests that he and Epstein form a consortium of New York and Russian business contacts to recover the aircraft and oversee their restoration and sale in the UK and USA.
Participants on the project would have had to be prepared to do business with the sanctioned Myanmar military regime, but the rewards might have been considerable.
Had it gone ahead each participant could have netted several million dollars from the sale of the aircraft and associated media rights.
Planning for the recovery was so advanced that the Prince even raised the possibility that one of the restored aircraft could be painted all over in gold at the request of one of the members of the proposed consortium.
The disgraced Royal signed off the e-mail saying,
“If this comes off I will lead the flypast over the Palace myself.
Let’s keep and close touch and let’s play again soon and not just with Spitfires.
A, HRH The Duke of York, KG”
However, the project collapsed when the financier pleaded guilty to charges of solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor in June 2008.
There is no evidence in the Epstein files so far released that the former Prince attempted to reboot the project during his visits to Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein’s release from prison, including the notorious visit to New York in 2010 which saw the two men photographed together in Central Park.
However, it is also understood that the famous BBC2 Newsnight interview conducted by Emily Maitlis and now the subject of not one, but two film adaptations, originally included a question about the Burma Spitfires project, but Buckingham Palace intervened at the highest level of the UK Government to have the question and answer removed by the BBC from the broadcast version of the interview.
The BBC has declined to comment.
Meanwhile the British Government continues to cover up the secret burial, with a high profile million dollar plus expedition to find the aircraft in 2013 diverted to the wrong part of the airport to an area which the British and Myanmar authorities had prepared with fake evidence suggesting that the story was a hoax.
The UK Ministry of Defence told thePipeLine, that these allegations refer to the operations of the Security Services and it is a longstanding policy of Governments of all parties not comment on such matters.
The US Department of Justice also declined to comment.
However, a spokesperson for Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York was more forthcoming.
Ms Ferguson’s press secretary April Fisk told thePipeLine.
“Sarah does remember conversations about the buried Spitfires and she was very disappointed when the project fell apart because she had intended to feature the aircraft in one of her “Budgie the Helicopter” children’s books.”
Lead Image: An RAF Spitfire like the aircraft secretly buried in Burma in 1945 , thePipeLine
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