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Nearly three decades after her death, he's still defending her.

In an interview with Good Morning Britain on February 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 long-time 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."

Diana first met James at a cocktail party in 1986. The princess, then 25, asked the dashing 28-year-old -- who had played polo with her husband, King Charles III, and had even been in charge of her royal wedding procession in 1981 -- to give her riding lessons. Their pair finally gave in to their growing mutual attraction, described in bodice-ripper-style prose in Princess in Love, after a private dinner at Kensington Palace.

"That night, our affair began," James wrote in his memoir. "It was Diana who initiated it."

Burrell was in charge of arranging their clandestine rendezvous.

"When I joined the household in 1987, I was entrusted with this secret," he tells In Touch, revealing that he often helped smuggle the "very charismatic" young man in to see Diana. "Diana was in love with James and trusted him with everything in her world."

She poured her heart out to him.

According to Pasternak's book, Diana revealed explicit details about her lack of physical intimacy with Charles and shared her jealousies over his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. She also confessed to her struggles with bulimia and self-esteem.

"What it seemed she most craved from him was his approval," Pasternak writes. "It was not only that she hungered for personal acceptance, that she needed to be constantly reassured that she was a beautiful, sexual woman.... She also needed someone to voice some appreciation for her public life and duties."

James gave her all that and more.

"He was a great friend of mine at a very difficult ... time, and he was always there to support me," she told Bashir. She saw him as her "knight in shining armor," Burrell tells In Touch, and even introduced him to her sons, Prince Harry and Prince William. Burrell believes that "they know that he loved their mother and that she loved him."

James spent a lot of time with the two princes.

"I never claimed to be a father figure," James told The Telegraph in 1999. "I played with them, swam with them, taught them to ride."

Instead, the pair remained friends. ("It was clear ... she adored the man, even after the affair had cooled," her former bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, told The Daily Mail.) Diana wrote James letters while he was stationed in Iraq, signing them "Julia."

In 1993, he says, she called him to come to her rescue.

"I was asked to talk to the press by Diana," he told The Telegraph, in order to engender sympathy at a time when her marriage to Charles was crumbling.

After Pasternak wrote a series of articles for The Daily Express about their friendship, James "said that [Diana] thanked him on the phone for 'talking, as you know I can't. At least people will know the truth,' " Pasternak wrote on her blog.

And though Burrell denies that Diana authorized James to discuss their relationship in "an intimate manner," Pasternak claimed James later instructed her to write about their affair at Diana's behest.

"She insisted to Hewitt that if the world could see that their love was genuine and could understand why she had turned to him in the face of Charles's rejection," Pasternak wrote on her blog, then the public "would not condemn her."

Burrell insists that Diana saw Princess in Love as a "betrayal" mostly because she was "embarrassed" by what her sons would think. But both James and the author have said they felt Diana manipulated them to bolster her public image.

"She was quite clever in the way that she used people and I do think she used me," James, whose reputation was destroyed by the scandal, told The Telegraph.

And yet James, who never married, admitted to the paper that he still regards her as the "love of his life." He still has a trove of her letters, and though a few were leaked when he was accused of trying to sell them for $16 million in 2003, most of them have never seen the light of day.

"She never intended or wanted the contents to be made public," Burrell tells In Touch. "They reveal how passionately in love and how isolated the princess was."

Her words, written just a few years before her tragic death in a 1997 car crash, could also provide insight into her motivations as she transitioned from Charles' future queen to the People's Princess.

"Diana was misunderstood, maligned and misrepresented," Burrell tells In Touch. "She said to me, 'All I ever wanted in life is to be loved.' "