It has never been established where he went, or what he was doing, during the three hours between leaving the Ritz at 7
P.M.
and receiving the call from Fendel at 10
P.M.
It is perfectly possible, as no one can positively remember seeing him in his usual haunts during that period, that he was at home. He had told Dodi, before leaving at 7
P.M.
, that he would be available to give any assistance for the rest of the night if he should be needed. It is highly unlikely that he would have risked alienating his boss by turning up drunk if he were recalled. Losing his job would cost him £35,000 a year from the international intelligence market, in addition to his £20,000 salary.
“And as an agent of MI6 he probably had an even better reason to remain sober,” said Richard Tomlinson. During the day Henri Paul had acquired £2,000 in cash which he was carrying in his pocket and which the police would discover was still on him after the crash. According to American investigative journalist Gerald Posner, Henri Paul was indeed involved in his clandestine work. He quotes an American law-enforcement official and an American intelligence officer who told him Paul spent the hours before he returned to the hotel with an agent from the DGSE (
Direction Général de la Sécurité Extérieure
—the French equivalent of the CIA). The sum of £8,000 had been paid into several of Paul’s bank accounts in the past few weeks—since Diana and Dodi had become close. This was only a part of the £140,000-plus which he had accrued in seven bank accounts in the past few years—earnings from his MI6 and other intelligence-agency work.
Was the latest cash payment, as Tomlinson suspects, to cover Henri Paul’s efforts yet to come during that weekend? Was his main task to influence the route they would follow if they left the hotel again that night? To persuade Dodi he must go back to the apartment?
Said his close friend and neighbor Claude Garric, “I knew all along that Henri did work for intelligence agencies. He was in touch with the British secret service and the Israelis and others. The hotel had important clients from all over the world. He did have alcoholic drinks at home, but his favorite drink was Coca-Cola Light and he had 240 bottles of this when the police went to his home the next day. He almost invariably drank Coca-Cola at home. I had the key and let them in. They were only interested in listing the few alcoholic drinks that were there. They didn’t bother writing down the names or the quantities of soft drinks. Their search was focused on alcohol. They even wrote down the names of alcoholic drinks they claimed they had found, which were not there. They found no medication in the apartment of any description.”
Three friends who had regular weekly dinners with Henri Paul did not know him as a big drinker. At Chez Armand, one of the favorite haunts of the four friends, the manager said Paul usually had a pastis and a couple of glasses of wine with his meal. “He never drank much.”
The manager of Le Grand Colbert where they also ate regularly said, “Nobody ever got drunk. Henri Paul was not a heavy drinker.”
Just three days before the crash he had undergone his annual medical as a private pilot. He had passed all the tests, including urine, reflexes, hand–eye coordination and mental health. He had never had a health or drink problem in the twenty-five years since he had been attracted to a flying club near his home town of Lorient when he was still only fifteen. He obtained his private pilot’s license when he was sixteen.
Kez Wingfield and Trevor Rees-Jones saw him on several occasions in the two hours after he returned to the hotel, and at no stage did he act as though he had been drinking. CCTV footage shows him to have been behaving impeccably. At one stage he is seen squatting down to tie a shoelace. He switches his weight from one foot to the other, and then rises gracefully and effortlessly, an extremely unlikely event had he had the amount of drink, drugs and carbon monoxide in his bloodstream which the police later claimed was the case. He would have been more likely to have toppled on his side, say medical experts.
Henri Paul had worked in the Ritz security service since it was first established eleven years earlier, and was considered a model employee. His loyalty and professionalism were highly rated by the Fayeds, and he was a particular favorite of Dodi’s.
Shortly before 10:30
P.M.
, Dodi had spoken to the hotel night manager, Thierry Rocher, and told him that their intention was to return to the apartment. He asked Rocher to tell Henri Paul to contact him in the suite for a conference and instructions.
Dodi had already, say his family, formally proposed to Diana, and in a telephone call to his father the princess is said to have confirmed they were to marry, and that she had finally found, in Dodi, the man who would make her happy. The
Sunday People
later arranged a taped interview with Mohamed Al Fayed, in which he reiterated what he claimed Diana had told him. They had the recording tested by the finest forensic criminologist in America, Dr. Steven Laub, using the latest lie-detecting equipment. After six hours of tests Dr. Laub reported, “I am convinced he is telling the truth.”
It would certainly explain why Dodi and Diana were so keen to return to the familiar intimacy of his apartment rather than consummate their engagement in the impersonal surroundings of the Imperial Suite—however luxurious and expensive it might be. An hour later Dodi told Thierry Rocher that they would be leaving from the back entrance in the rue Cambon. He was satisfied that Henri Paul could take care of himself and the princess and drive them to his apartment. Dodi told Rocher to organize an extra car, to be taken to the rear entrance after midnight. The two vehicles used earlier would remain outside the front entrance to act as decoys when the moment came for departure.
It has to be assumed that Henri Paul had used some very persuasive arguments in order to convince Dodi to scrap all the rules his father had drummed into him and the family for twenty years or more. In a single conversation he had arranged, with Dodi, to change all of the hotel’s, and Al Fayed’s, long-standing security regulations. These were actually written down in a manual and known to the bodyguards by heart. One instruction, covering the movement of VIPs, stated that the personal bodyguard and up to seven other bodyguards must operate within the immediate area of the VIP, and be directly responsible for the VIP’s safety at all times. Whenever Al Fayed moved, he used an armored limousine, a backup car and eight bodyguards. Dodi was now proposing to take the world’s most famous woman across Paris in a single car with no bodyguard in attendance, on the simple assurance of his friend and acting security chief.
At 11:30
P.M.
, Henri Paul went to the Imperial Suite, where Kez and Trevor were seated outside waiting for instructions, and told the stunned bodyguards that they would not be traveling with Dodi and the princess. He, Henri Paul, would be responsible for driving them and for their safety. No second backup vehicle or bodyguard would be needed. “We will be leaving in half an hour,” he told them. “And you will be with the decoy vehicles.”
Was this Henri Paul, Ritz Hotel employee, talking; or was it Henri Paul, paid lackey of MI6, setting Dodi and Diana up for a surprise? And was he, in turn, being set up by MI6 and the CIA for a surprise of a very different kind?
Trevor’s anger was instantaneous. “No fucking way is he leaving without a bodyguard—no way in a million years it’s going to be without me. I’ll be coming with you if we go with this,” he told Henri Paul.
When Kez added that they would have to report the plans to London, Henri Paul told him, “It has already been OK’d by Mohamed Al Fayed.” It was a difficult call to make for the two bodyguards. They had no easy way of checking Paul’s statement without causing offense—and possibly being sacked. But this plan went against all their training. It was a situation unprecedented in their combined experience as bodyguards and close-protection specialists.
Moments later, almost as though on cue, Dodi emerged from the suite and confirmed Henri Paul’s instructions. Only one car would leave from the back with Henri driving. Trevor remembers being forceful. “You aren’t leaving without security,” he told Dodi. “I’ll be coming.” When Dodi refused to consider an alternative plan, Trevor dug in his heels. “There’s absolutely no way you’re going without security,” he told his boss.
“OK. One of you can come in the car, in the front,” Dodi finally relented. But on the subject of a backup car he refused to budge, and returned to the Imperial Suite, leaving the bodyguards with a situation that, however much they hated it, they had to get on and work with.
Trevor called in Philippe and Musa, who were on standby in the Etoile Limousines offices opposite the Ritz, and told them to organize an extra car. As he was briefing them, Claude Roulet, who had returned unexpectedly to the hotel, joined in. He had clearly already talked to Dodi or Henri Paul and told Musa to lay on another car immediately. It would be driven by Henri Paul. Musa knew that Henri Paul was not officially licensed to drive the replacement limousine which he planned to use, but in the tension of the moment no one seemed prepared to make a big thing out of this. Henri Paul was qualified on his ordinary license to drive a Mercedes S280—the proposed replacement car. But in France the police insist on a special license to drive a large limousine for hire. If Henri Paul had convinced Dodi he could get them home that night, then Claude Roulet was not about to split hairs about a special license being needed, or about backup security. He simply wanted his boss’s son to be happy.
Meanwhile in the Imperial Suite Kez was trying one last appeal with Dodi. “Two cars are best,” he said.
But Dodi silenced him. “It’s been OK’d by my father.” The matter was closed.
Al Fayed would later deny he knew anything, that night, about the plan for Henri Paul to drive to his son’s apartment. When Dodi had telephoned saying he would feel safer with Diana at his apartment, Al Fayed had told him that if he had any doubts at all then he should stay in the Imperial Suite which provided the best luxury and security that money could buy. “Paul convinced my son that he should go to the apartment. That all their things were there,” said Mohamed Al Fayed later. “He said they should leave from the back entrance and he would get them home. He changed Dodi’s mind and persuaded him to go along with him. That it was safe.”
After his earlier conversation with the bodyguards, Henri Paul appeared at the front entrance to the hotel on several occasions, calling to the paparazzi that Diana would be leaving soon. He seemed to be trying to convince them that she would be leaving by that entrance. But some suspicious photographers had already decided to go around to the rue Cambon entrance and wait there. They would remain in constant telephone communication with their fellow hunters at the front.
Shortly after midnight, Frederic Lucard, who worked as a chauffeur at Etoile Limousines, was told to drive a Mercedes S280—registration number 688 LTV 75—to the rue Cambon entrance. It was a standard limousine with neither bulletproof armor nor darkened windows.
At 12:14
A.M.
, Dodi and the princess left the Imperial Suite, laughing and looking very relaxed and happy. A few glasses of wine had obviously worked their magic and the princess’s tears of two hours earlier were just a distant memory. They went straight down one flight of stairs, which led them to the back entrance, and waited in a narrow service corridor. A smiling Henri Paul chatted to them while Trevor kept watch for the limousine. As he looked out, he remembers spotting a small hatchback—a three-door car that was either white or light in color, with a trunk that opened at the back, a car which could easily have been a Fiat Uno—and perhaps a scooter or motorcycle with two or three journalists.
At 12:19
A.M.
, as the Mercedes arrived, the security cameras captured Dodi sliding a hand gently to the small of Diana’s back.
The changeover went smoothly. Frederic Lucard gave the keys to Henri Paul and, as the tubby security chief slid confidently behind the wheel, Trevor Rees-Jones shepherded his charges, Diana with her eyes lowered as flashbulbs lanced the darkness around them, into the back. Then he took his place in front.
Trevor alerted Kez, in the Mercedes in front of the hotel, that they were about to move. Two minutes later the original Mercedes and the Range Rover sprinted away. The decoy was running but the birds had already flown. Most of the paparazzi were either already in, or on their way to the rue Cambon where, at 12:20
A.M.
, Henri Paul had pulled away from the Ritz back entrance at speed and with flashbulbs still popping.
One of the last things Trevor remembers is the white or light-colored car following them—that and the fact that Henri Paul, at that moment, appeared absolutely normal and sober and completely in control. Kez Wingfield is also adamant that Henri Paul was totally sober at all times when he saw him in the hotel that night. Both men swear that had there been the slightest hint or indication that Henri Paul was other than completely sober, they would have removed him from the plan rather than risk the safety of their charges. They would never knowingly have allowed a drunk man to drive, they said. They had been extremely close to Henri Paul on several occasions, and neither of them had noticed any whiff of alcohol on his breath. Night security manager François Tendil, hotel night manager Thierry Rochet and Claude Roulet, the Ritz’s number two, also swear that Henri Paul conducted himself perfectly normally and gave no sign, either by movement or voice, of having been drinking.