NINE
Dodi was a divorced Muslim playboy who had enjoyed casual love affairs with a score or more famous actresses and models. His father was an Establishment-unfriendly billionaire who had bought his way into British society, had serious question marks over the source of his wealth and was brother-in-law to the world’s biggest arms dealer. Every aspect of the relationship between Dodi, Mohamed Al Fayed and Princess Diana was alarming and, just one year after the divorce, the “loose cannon” seemed primed to explode.
One who appeared to see it coming was Prince Edward. When he was told she had been killed, he said, “It was the only way it was going to end. It was amazing it took that long for it to happen.”
To the horrified members of the Establishment who saw the growing probability of marriage to the Egyptian playboy, prompting Diana’s conversion to Islam, and the birth of a brown-skinned, Muslim half-brother or sister for the future King William, the unfolding scenario was totally unacceptable. Rumors already abounded that the princess was pregnant—rumors that were given greater credence after her murder by the illegal violation of her body, carried out in secret in Paris under the guise of embalming. Word in Paris is that a senior secretary in Charles’s office gave the go-ahead, which was passed on by Sir Michael Jay, the British ambassador; but whoever did give the French doctors their orders that day must have believed the rumors, otherwise why order the mini-embalming? The only possible reason was to muddy the waters of pregnancy speculation with formaldehyde.
Paris police commander Jean-Claude Mules, the man who signed Diana’s death certificate, says the decision to embalm a part of Diana’s body was made by a higher authority than himself. “Top police inspectors do not know about these things that take place at the diplomatic level,” he said. No one on the French side thought to question if it was Diana’s next of kin giving the orders. Prince Charles, remember, was not even related to her after their divorce. Her true next of kin were her mother and Prince William.
Confirmation that the princess was pregnant would have meant the racist element condemning her for producing a mixed-race child. The more liberal would have been supportive. Each faction would have had differing advice for William and Harry: to reject their mother’s half-caste baby, or welcome it into the family with open arms.
Former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson revealed that during his time with the British intelligence service he learned that there was unofficial but direct contact between certain senior and influential MI6 officers and senior members of the royal household, including those who practiced their dark arts in St. James’s Palace and its twin palace of Buckingham. Many of these men share an Oxbridge background and continue to intermingle throughout their lives. They would have been told about any CIA operation against Diana and would have supported further MI6 involvement, said Tomlinson, who worked for British intelligence for five-and-a-half years.
Tomlinson was arrested at gunpoint and beaten up by DST (
Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire
—the French secret service) agents. He suffered a broken rib before being interrogated for eighteen hours at DST headquarters in Paris, to deter him giving this, and other important evidence, to Judge Hervé Stephan, the French magistrate in charge of the official inquiry into Diana’s death. But he did appear before Stephan, and told him, “As long as they can get away with doing something then that’s their only limit about what they will do. This includes assassination.”
Tomlinson’s conclusions are supported by former MI5 officer David Shayler, who says he is also convinced that MI6 is implicated in the crash. “There is compelling evidence to indicate that an intelligence service was involved in the crash,” he told the
Daily Mail.
“Where evidence exists, it also points to MI6.”
The princess’s decision to embrace Islam could easily have affected relations between Church and state; in Israel, it was widely believed the union of Diana and Dodi signaled a change in world opinion in favor of the Arabs and consequently against Israeli interests. This concerned politicians on Capitol Hill as much as those in the Knesset.
Charles’s supporters had also reacted badly to the latest pronouncement from the Church that the prince’s divorce from Diana should not encourage a belief that he could ever win support or sympathy for a marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles. The only possible way that Charles could remarry legitimately—and still become king—was if Diana died and made him a widower in the eyes of the Church. Diana, however, was alive, and committed to upstaging Charles, as heir or king, for the rest of his life. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind about her continuing need for revenge, nor that it would get progressively more demanding. There was no doubt either that on the death of the Queen, Diana would become the natural figurehead of the royal family and would not hesitate to take what she would assume to be her rightful place.
Could anyone seriously believe that Camilla would be capable of repelling a determined coup by Diana when her son became king-in-waiting, and that, backed by the Al Fayed millions, she could not have set up a glamorous court successfully to rival that of her ex-husband? Neither could those with Charles’s welfare in mind forget that chilling promise the princess had made to him at the time of their divorce: “You will never be king. I will destroy you.”
Judging by their track record, the Establishment was prepared to go to any lengths to protect the prince, and to promote any grotesque fiction to win their master a more sympathetic press, even to the extent of willfully launching a vicious, and wholly fictitious, attack on his own youngest brother, Edward, merely to provide a new focus for hostile public attention. “He was thrown to the tabloids as certainly as any Caesar threw adversaries to the lions—particularly his relatives,” said one palace observer.
It followed Prince William’s first day at St. Andrew’s University. The press had agreed to leave William alone after that day, and
Ardent
, Prince Edward’s film-production company, was a party to that agreement. Then stories appeared in the tabloids that Edward had personally sent in a secret camera crew to spy on his nephew and sneak candid shots of the student prince from a basement peephole on campus, for use in a royal documentary destined to be sold to American television. The whole nation was appalled at this shabby betrayal, more so because it involved the treachery of a not-very-popular uncle against an adored nephew. Edward’s behavior was denounced as monstrous and deceitful, with colorful quotes provided by Charles’s aides, who claimed the prince was incandescent with rage. “He was alleged by his aides to have berated his brother in a thundering phone call,” said royal biographer and leading royal expert, Ingrid Seward. “Why was his son’s privacy being invaded by a member of his own family?”
One tabloid produced a giant, front-page headline quote from Charles to Edward, F*** YOU, which had been leaked to the papers by the prince’s aides along with all the other quotes allegedly used during the supposed family rows.
Not unnaturally, William was extremely angered, but also confused, by the press reports. While believing the stories about his uncle emanating from St. James’s Palace, William was, at the same time, suspicious that he was being used by people close to his father to get at Edward, says Ingrid Seward. His skepticism turned out to be well founded, for the stories were lies, supporting a scenario dreamed up inside the palace to humiliate Edward and cut short his film career, of which the dark forces and the royal family in general, disapproved. They were also aimed at deflecting public attention away from Charles and Camilla on to a new villain among the royals. Even when he realized what damaging nonsense was being perpetrated in his name, the prince had gone along with the whole, disgusting charade.
When Edward sent copies of everything his company had filmed, together with their diaries and schedules, to Buckingham Palace, it was discovered that the only shots
Ardent
had taken of William were on his first day of term—no more than all the other television and film cameramen. And on a day it was claimed they had been secretly filming William from a spy center on the university campus, they proved they were all sixty miles away on a different location.
The scandal, including the detailed dialogue from family rows which had been leaked to the newspapers and television over a week, had been invented by Charles’s aides to provide a new royal object of derision for the media. More importantly, far from exposing the truth and protecting his youngest brother’s good name and reputation, Charles had taken advantage of the attack on Edward to cause him maximum damage. The whole sorry episode only seemed to prove that a lack of honesty and decency was a common psychosis among the dark forces within the twin palaces. An ambition to rid themselves, once and for all, of the problem of Princess Diana, fitted very comfortably into this psychosis.
I was told by the former European head of a major foreign intelligence organization that MI6 was already committed, under existing arrangements with the CIA, to support any action the Americans chose to initiate. The St. James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace forces, opposed to the princess, would have been advised by their MI6 colleagues that strong support for cooperation with the CIA in arranging a solution would simply be an extension of existing house policy, said Richard Tomlinson, who was fired in 1995 when he announced he was writing a book about MI6. He was sent to prison for Official Secrets Act violations.
The whole operation would have been made a good deal easier when MI6 discovered they had one man who was very close to Dodi Fayed on its payroll, he said. “The acting chief of security at the Ritz Hotel, Henri Paul, had been working for the British secret service for years,” revealed Tomlinson. “I came across his personal file when I was working for them in 1993. Henri Paul was a long-standing agent. But Judge Stephan didn’t show the slightest interest in investigating his activities with MI6.”
Stephan was reflecting the attitude of the Paris police, who, after conveniently concluding at the very outset of inquiries that Diana had died in an accident, simply refused to consider any other possibilities. Six years after the crash, Commander Mules told
News of the World
royal editor Clive Goodman, “If you start off with an investigation into an accident, one cannot add things that would only complicate the original hypothesis. As the crime squad we have an extremely precise and rigorous method of working. We put forward a theory and we prove it with the elements which confirm it.”
Mules knew of Henri Paul’s links with MI6 but ordered his men not to investigate. His excuse? “Secrets are secret, so we never could have pierced the secret,” he said.
In Washington it was no secret just how violent had become the opposition from the Pentagon and its hawkish, arms-supply allies toward Diana’s meddling in their affairs. At this point, I was told by my international intelligence source, the ruthless element of the American arms interests felt ready to order the disposal of the troublesome princess. Diana had incensed American and international military and industrial forces with her land mines campaign sufficiently for them to want to be rid of her.
President Bill Clinton had created a new wave of outrage among domestic opponents, including the Pentagon, just twelve days earlier on August 18, by publicly confirming he would vote in favor of a land mines ban on September 19. This had launched a frenzied lobbying of the president from all angles.
Now, it was believed, the princess was considering championing the cause of Gulf War Syndrome victims, a hugely politically sensitive issue and one which the Establishment oligarchs—and their American counterparts—could not countenance. There was also talk of her being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize which could only have inflated her potency against the arms manufacturers and dealers and their military customers.
For some, simply protecting the royal family from further scandal and ensuring Prince Charles a relatively smooth path to fulfilling his destiny, including his determination to marry Camilla, was reason enough to be rid of her. Other factors would have merely added to the attraction of the solution and made it impossible to turn it down, explained one former intelligence agent.
Time was rapidly running out for the Americans, whose deadline for action was September 19 before Clinton signed that land mines ban. Intelligence officers and agents from the CIA and MI6 had kept Princess Diana under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance for weeks, awaiting, said the ex-intelligence man, a favorable opportunity to strike. The essential criteria still, even at this late stage, was that the assassination must appear to be an accident. Time was also running out for those in England who believed she was pregnant: soon the signs would become unmistakable. If the opportunity could be created, then Paris would be the location where their problems would, hopefully, be resolved.
Her visit to Paris with Dodi was the first feasible occasion to make the attempt. The plan would not be perfect, certainly not foolproof, and would rely, to a large extent, on part-time agents. But if the target could be placed in a car, traveling at high speed and preferably at night, on a route devised—and thus known in advance—by them, there was an excellent chance of success. MI6 was extremely proficient at arranging last-minute operations like this, says Richard Tomlinson. In almost identical circumstances, where opportunities to stage a fatal accident would be few, MI6 had already devised an assassination plan, he said.