This article was amended on 31 May 2013 to remove a number of inaccuracies regarding Sir Christopher Geidt in the article, which overstated his role as the Queen's private secretary in relation to the royal charter for the press. We have also clarified aspects of his legal action against John Pilger and Central Television. We apologise for the errors. Read the PCC adjudication
When the Queen turned around to reveal herself as James Bond's spymaster in a skit for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, jaws dropped in living rooms around the country at the audacity and humour. But for those that know Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen's highly trusted private secretary who has been credited with her deft presentation in recent years, it was more a case of eyebrows raised.
Geidt, 51, now in his sixth year by the Queen's side at Buckingham Palace, has a past that includes suggestions of involvement in and around the secret services. When he successfully sued for libel after being wrongly accused of being part of an SAS operaton training allies of the traitor Pol Pot in Cambodia, questions were nonetheless raised in parliament as to whether he had links with the intelligence services.
Geidt had a three-year spell in the army intelligence corps before seven years with the Foreign Office, the United Nations and the European commission in the Balkans.
The man who would be consulted by government about the process by which the royal charter can be approved by the privy council won "substantial" damages in a 1991 libel action against Central TV and the journalist John Pilger.
Geidt and a fellow former army officer brought the libel action over a documentary which, they said, accused them of having been SAS members training Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines.
Pilger later wrote that he had not intended to make any such accusation. He accepted that the two men had not trained any guerillas. The trial was settled on the third day of the hearing, with Pilger and Central TV apologising and accepting that the programme did make the allegations complained of.
In his 1994 book Distant Voices, Pilger described how the Treasury solicitor warned that it was "prepared to intervene in the proceedings at any stage … in respect to evidence from any witness".
Pilger said the authority for a public interest immunity certificate – a gagging order – signed by the then defence secretary, Tom King, was presented to the judge.
"Evidence regarding the SAS and the security services, such as MI6, which might have been produced as evidence … would be challenged," wrote Pilger.
A long-standing friend of Geidt, the journalist William Shawcross, wrote in the Guardian on 15 May 2013 that Pilger's account of the suppressed evidence in the trial was "bluster" and that it was "nonsense" for anyone to suggest that government "gagging" had prevented him from defending his case.
In his palace role, Geidt now represents the Queen in any processes involving a charter to regulate the press. Royal charters are ultimately overseen on an ongoing basis by the Queen's private secretary and the head of the privy council – in practice, the government.
Buckingham Palace is at pains to stress that, as private secretary, Geidt is responsible only for the process of any royal charter in so far as the Queen has a role, not its substance.
Described by former colleagues as unflappable, strategically shrewd, modernising, suave and charming, Geidt caught the attention of the Queen in 2002 when he was appointed to her household as an assistant private secretary. He took over from Sir Robin Janvrin in 2007 as perhaps her closest male confidant after Prince Philip.
It is a position that requires the utmost discretion and the highest level of vetting. As well as acting as the daily conduit between the Queen and Downing Street, he has access to all summaries of MI6 intelligence. Through daily red boxes of secret state documents, an open channel with the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and advising the Queen on everything from constitutional law to her Christmas message, it is a role that puts him at the heart of the British establishment.
"One of the tasks of the private secretary is to ensure that the monarchy is modernised, but the monarchy cannot afford to be ahead of public opinion," said Professor Vernon Bogdanor, an expert on constitutional affairs.
Geidt was born in 1961, attended private schools in Oxford and Scotland and studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He had been invalided out of Sandhurst when he began working for the Royal United Services Institute before taking a post in army intelligence. That experience made him a natural choice as the British government's man at the headquarters of the European Community monitoring mission in Sarajevo in 1994 at the height of the Bosnian war. The European monitors in their distinctive white outfits – many Brits wore their cricket whites – could travel on both sides of the front line and included active and former spies from around Europe.
"He was always popping up and disappearing again, working at his own rhythm, doing his own stuff," said one international official who worked with him. He later became senior adviser at the Office of the High Representative, set up after the war by the international community to oversee implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace treaty.
A former colleague there remembers him as "suave and charming, very proper, clipped and British with a regimental tie, but also with a touch of the spook about him".
But Geidt first came to the attention of a group of MPs and campaigning journalists towards the end of 1989 in Cambodia. After the genocide by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot in the 1970s, fears persisted in Cambodia that factions resisting the incumbent government, including the Khmer Rouge would try and take power again.
Geidt showed up at a mission to see Vietnamese troops pull out of Cambodia in October 1989. His visit caught the attention of MPs concerned about that issue and they unearthed varying accounts of why he was there. During a Commons debate which touched on the matter, the Labour MP Bob Cryer asked under parliamentary privilege: "Surely not MI6?"
A spokesman for Buckingham Palace said: "He didn't comment on the accusations at the time and, as then, he will let the legal judgments speak for themselves. We won't comment on the questions relating to Sir Christopher's work before joining the royal household."