THIRTEEN
There exist several conspiracy theories which suggest that the ambulance taking Diana from the crash scene to hospital deliberately dawdled, so that by the time she reached the operating theater, and could be dealt with by skilled surgeons, her death was already assured. The truth, I am convinced, is far simpler.
The French bungled the rescue operation, as they would bungle the police investigation which followed, and allowed a “play-it-by-the-book” medical team, lacking both the initiative and ingenuity to dictate the best sequence of care for the princess’s urgent needs, to control her vital early treatment. Their true dedication, it appeared, was in following the rigid French emergency service procedures, rather than acting in Diana’s best interests. There was also the added complication of her heart having twice stopped beating during the rescue mission.
It was 1:30
A.M.
when the French emergency rescue vehicle, or mobile surgery unit—it would be totally misleading to call it simply an ambulance—pulled away from the Alma tunnel with its escort of two police cars and two police motorcyclists. It has been argued by many doctors in Britain and the United States that had Diana been driven at high speed to the nearest hospital and undergone surgery within thirty minutes of the crash taking place, she might well have survived. As it was, the emergency vehicle traveled so slowly that the short journey took thirty-six minutes to complete—an average speed of seven miles per hour. Driver Michel Massebeuf explained later that the reason for going so slowly was to prevent passage over bumpy road surfaces from aggravating the patient’s condition.
As they were crossing the Austerlitz bridge, Diana’s heart appeared to have stopped beating for the second time, her blood pressure became dangerously low and Dr. Jean-Marc Martino ordered the convoy to stop. By now they had already passed two major hospitals and were outside the botanical gardens, less than half a mile from Pitié-Salpêtrière. Many might have been tempted to make the thirty-second dash to the waiting operating theater and state-of-the-art medical equipment at the surgeons’ disposal, particularly as the SAMU vehicle was not equipped to perform major surgery. But Dr. Martino, using his temporary authority, opted to deal with the emergency himself. This added a further, and some would argue later, an unnecessary ten minutes to the journey. Again he applied external heart massage, and injected a large dose of adrenaline directly into the heart, before ordering Massebeuf to drive on.
Senior politicians, police and one diplomat—British ambassador Sir Michael Jay—were already gathered at the entrance to the hospital. Paris police chief Philippe Massoni, who had driven another route from the crash scene, was also there, and they were all becoming highly concerned at the non-arrival of the princess. No one could explain, or justify, the seemingly interminable delay. Massoni admitted afterward that he genuinely believed at one stage that the emergency convoy might even have got lost! This could explain why Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the interior minister, looked so patently anxious as he strove to reassure Sir Michael that the princess would arrive shortly.
When the mobile emergency unit did finally arrive, at 2:06
A.M.
, the hospital’s head of intensive care Professor Bruno Riou was standing by to take over responsibility for Diana’s medical treatment. Yet inexplicably, and despite the flow of radio data from the emergency SAMU team highlighting two cardiac arrests in little over thirty minutes, there was no specialist heart surgeon on standby. Nor did the medical team suggest having a heart–lung bypass machine available, which is used to keep patients alive during major heart surgery or transplant operations. Diana was unconscious when she arrived, and receiving artificial respiration, but her heart was still beating at this point. X-rays revealed both massive internal hemorrhaging and appalling internal injuries.
The princess was being drained of the blood, which had spilled into her chest area, when she suffered a further cardiac arrest at 2:10
A.M
. It was Professor Bruno who ordered duty surgeon Maniel Daloman to open her chest on the right side while he applied external heart massage. Not until the operation was well under way did Professor Alain Pavie, a belatedly summoned specialist heart surgeon, arrive to take charge. Having quickly confirmed that the massive internal bleeding was coming from a ruptured pulmonary vein—a major link between the heart and the lungs—Pavie sutured the 2.5-centimeter split while heart massage continued to be administered. Throughout the operation a nurse was giving constant injections of adrenaline to keep Diana’s heart going. A staggering total of 150 5ml doses were injected.
But no cardiac activity could be re-established.
At 3
A.M.
, Professor Pavie extended the original incision and began massaging the heart by hand. This procedure was explained to the interior minister and Sir Michael at 3:30
A.M.
by Professor Bruno Riou, who warned them that the diagnosis was pessimistic. After all other attempts to produce a spontaneous heart rhythm had failed, Professor Pavia ordered electric shock therapy in a last-ditch effort to restart the princess’s heart. Time after time massive electrical charges were arced between the hand-held terminals pressed on her chest. But her heart failed to respond.
Finally, and by mutual consent, all attempts at resuscitation were abandoned, and the princess was declared dead at 4
A.M.
The last rites were administered by Roman Catholic priest Father Clochard-Bossuet, who anointed Diana with holy oil.
An official bulletin, signed by Professors Riou and Pavie, stated:
The Princess of Wales was the victim of a high-speed car crash tonight in Paris. She was immediately taken by the Paris SAMU emergency services which carried out initial resuscitation.
On her arrival at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, she had massive chest injuries and hemorrhaging, followed rapidly by cardiac arrest.
An emergency thoracotomy revealed a major wound on the left pulmonary vein.
Despite closing this wound and two hours of external and internal cardiac massage, circulation could not be re-established and death occurred at 4 o’clock in the morning.
Diana had also sustained a broken arm and had an unusual puncture wound in her hip, for which no explanation has ever been given.
Dr. Patrick Goldstein, vice-president of SAMU said, “We can’t do the impossible. Diana had no chance of making it. The accident was too violent. The internal injuries she suffered were incompatible with life.” Criticism and outright condemnation of the French emergency medical system poured in from around the world, however—the consensus being that if the princess had been transferred to hospital sooner, then she might have survived. The French counterclaimed that it was exceptional for anyone with such injuries as the princess had suffered even to reach the hospital alive.
American surgeons then reminded them that President Ronald Reagan’s pulmonary artery had been torn by an assassin’s bullet in 1981 and that he had survived, in his seventies, because of the speed with which the Secret Service rushed him to hospital.
No doubt it is a debate that will continue for years to come.
What is not in dispute is that Princess Diana’s heart was actually knocked sideways, several inches, by the violence of the impact, and that this tore her pulmonary vein which caused her to bleed to death. One rumor which began circulating immediately after her death was that blood tests, which showed that the princess was pregnant, were removed from the hospital laboratory later that day. This was vehemently denied by the hospital, and their public affairs department went as far as issuing a press statement denying that blood samples had ever been taken from the princess.
“She would have needed an awful lot of blood transfusions to keep her alive,” said one leading trauma surgeon, however. “And they did that without typing or testing her blood in any way? Nonsense!” In fact, the hospital confirmed she had received seven liters of blood. So why the denials that her blood was tested?
The public announcement of Diana’s death was made at 5:45
A.M.
by Sir Michael Jay. By this time, photographs of Diana receiving treatment inside the wrecked Mercedes had already been electronically distributed around the world.
One agency, Laurent Sola, had photos scanned into its computer to be e-mailed internationally. These were already attracting offers totaling over £1 million from England alone. But after being told that the princess was dead, Laurent Sola himself scrapped all deals in the making and withdrew the photos from sale. It took him only a moment, he said, to make this costly decision. “There was never a question we would try to cash in on this tragic situation,” he said. He ordered his staff to remove all traces of the photos from the computer, and arranged to hand over the unused photos to the British Embassy to be handed to the families of the victims.
Other picture agencies in Paris, which had received paparazzi photos from the crash site, showing the injured and dead, also withdrew them from the market and, in the end, not one questionable photograph was sold.
Earlier, while Diana was still alive and before the crash victims were cut free, the first harrowing calls were being made to the victims’ relatives. One of the first was to Mohamed Al Fayed.
The “decoys”—the Range Rover driven by Philippe Dourneau and carrying Kez Wingfield, and the Mercedes driven by Jean-Francis Musa—had taken a more direct route to Dodi’s apartment, but had become caught up in the gridlock of traffic which rapidly built up after the crash. When they finally reached the rue Arsène Houssaye, Kez went up to the apartment and tried to contact Trevor Rees-Jones on the land line, having previously failed to get him using his mobile. He believed then that Dodi had probably decided to go into a nightclub and that this was the cause of their non-arrival. In the street below the drivers Dourneau and Musa mingled with a small group of waiting journalists, and were close by when one of them received a call about the crash from a colleague. The two drivers alerted Kez that Dodi’s car had been involved in an accident, before jumping into the Range Rover and driving as close as they could get to the Alma tunnel.
Kez telephoned the bare information to the London operations desk, and urged Philippe Dourneau to get as close to the crash scene as possible on foot and try to get more details. When he did, the news was devastating. Dodi was dead, he told Kez. Henri Paul and Trevor Rees-Jones were dead too. Diana had hurt her legs but seemed OK.
Kez passed the awful news directly to Mohamed Al Fayed’s chief of personal security, Paul Handley-Greaves, in London. At 1:30
A.M.
, the lights snapped on in Barrow Green Court, the Surrey farmhouse home of the Harrods chairman, who listened to Handley-Greaves gently breaking the news that his beloved eldest son, Dodi, was dead, and that Princess Diana could be dying.
Bodyguards drove the grief-stricken tycoon the twenty miles to Gatwick airport, where his private helicopter was waiting for him on the tarmac. Within minutes it had taken off for Paris.
At the same time, a telephone call from the switchboard at Buckingham Palace—alerted by the Foreign Office—awakened Prince Charles, who was holidaying with his sons in a shooting lodge in the grounds of gloomy Balmoral Castle. Prince Charles later told friends that he listened with mounting horror and then called his mother who, with Prince Philip and the rest of the court hangers-on, was spending her traditional summer holiday at Balmoral.
Before dawn, ashen-faced, Charles went to see his mother and told her it was his intention to fly to Paris at first light. He intended bringing home the body of his former wife aboard an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight. The Queen said it was not a good idea, and it wasn’t until after breakfast, in a conference with courtiers during which Charles remained adamant that he was leaving for Paris, that she finally relented—and only then after an unusually courageous equerry had asked, “Would you prefer, ma’am, that the body of the Princess of Wales be brought home in a Harrods van?”
In Paris, Kez Wingfield and the Ritz Hotel’s acting manager Claude Roulet drove to Le Bourget airport in the northern suburbs of the city, and arrived at 4:55
A.M.
just as the Harrods helicopter arrived hovering overhead. It touched down as the Range Rover and Al Fayed’s Mercedes drew to a stop.
At that exact moment Kez Wingfield took a call from the British Consulate.
“Princess Diana is dead.”
When Al Fayed, flanked by two bodyguards, stepped from the helicopter, Kez, who had never touched his boss before, put his arm around his shoulders and said, “I’m sorry for your loss, sir, but I have some more bad news for you.”
“The princess?”
“I’m afraid they’re all dead.”
As they drove back into the center of Paris, Kez, in the front of Al Fayed’s car, heard him suddenly erupt, “I hope the British government is satisfied now.”
“Nobody could have wished this, sir,” gasped a shocked Wingfield, but Al Fayed had slumped in his seat, quite inconsolable, and did not reply. They arrived at the hospital front entrance shortly before the official announcement was made that Princess Diana was dead.