The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Diana, Princess of Wales

It was news that shocked the world. In the early hours (GMT) of Sunday 31 August 1997, reports started coming from Paris that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been injured in a car accident. Then came updates reporting she was dead. Also killed in the car crash in the tunnel beneath Pont de l’Alma were Diana’s lover, Dodi Al-Fayed, and the driver, Henri Paul. Dodi’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was seriously injured.

The cause of the crash seemed clear. Chased by paparazzi on motorcycles, Paul had driven too fast—75 mph (120kph) according to one French police estimate—into the tunnel, clipped a white Fiat Uno and, in overcorrecting, had swerved the Mercedes S280 into the thirteenth pillar. There were also reports that he had been drinking. None of the occupants had been wearing seatbelts.

Autumn seemed to come early to Britain that year, as a stunned nation shed tears for “the Queen of Hearts”. As the sorrow subsided, people began to wonder how the female icon of the latter half of the 20th century, the most famous and photographed woman on the planet, could have died in something so mundane as a car crash.

Perhaps, people began to say, it wasn’t an accident. The loudest voice of suspicion belonged to Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of the Harrods department store. According to Al-Fayed, Diana and his son were assassinated. Al-Fayed even named the guilty party: Prince Philip of the British Royal Family. Naturally, Philip didn’t dirty his hands personally—he ordered the security service MI6 to carry out the hit on his 36-year-old daughter-in-law. There are legion other Diana conspiracies (it was the IRA whatdunnit, it was Le Cercle who sponsored her death because of her opposition to wealth-generating landmines, she was a ritual sacrifice by Satanists, she faked her death to live a paparazzi-free life…) but Al-Fayed’s retains the pole position.

In his view, the British Royal Family needed Diana eliminated because she had become pregnant by Dodi and intended to marry him. Their child would be a Muslim half-brother to the second and third in line to throne, an impossible embarrassment to the white, Anglican Windsors. Al-Fayed claims that Diana told him personally that her life had been threatened. “The person who is spearheading these threats,” she said, “is Prince Philip.” Diana also told a number of other people that she feared for her life. In his account of life as Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty (2003), Paul Burrell recorded that ten months before her death she wrote to him claiming that “XXXX is planning an ’accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry.” She also told her voice coach Peter Settelen that she thought that her former lover, bodyguard Barry Mannakee, had been murdered in a faked motorcycle crash. Evidently, Diana had concerns over safety. And the Windsors had a motive of sorts.

Suddenly, it wasn’t only Al-Fayed raising questions about the crash in the tunnel under Pont de l’Alma. Why had the lights and security cameras in the tunnel been turned off just before the crash? Why did the ambulance take 43 minutes to get Diana to Pitie-Salpetriere hospital? Why had her body been embalmed before a proper autopsy could be undertaken? Why had the crash site been cleansed and disinfected before a forensic examination could be carried out? And where was the driver of the white Fiat Uno? Wasn’t it too convenient that Rees-Jones had “no memory” of the crash?

Then a former MI6 agent, Richard Tomlinson, revealed that MI6 had been planning an assassination at the time of Diana’s death. In a sworn affidavit Tomlinson stated that MI6’s Balkans operations officer had shown him the service’s plan to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, in a car crash… in a tunnel. Tomlinson stated that MI6’s planned assassination of Milosevic showed “remarkable similarities to the circumstances and witness accounts of the crash that killed the Princess of Wales, Dodi Al-Fayed, and Henri Paul”. How had MI6 caused the car to crash? Possibly, suggested Tomlinson, with a disorientating strobe light held by an operative in the tunnel, or by another car forcing the Mercedes into the pillar. There were rumours that Henri Paul was a CIA/DGSE/MI6 agent and had deliberately taken the roundabout Pont de l’Alma route to the Al-Fayeds’ Paris flat to get Diana into the killing zone. (If Paul was a spook this might explain, people said, the series of 40,000-franc deposits in his bank account.) A more farfetched suggestion was that Rees-Jones, a former paratrooper, wrenched the wheel from Paul’s grasp. Suspicions of a cover-up mushroomed when the body of James Andanson was found in a burnt-out car in 2000. Andanson, a paparazzo, had owned a white Fiat Uno three years before and had been investigated by the French police. There was a final oddity: just after Andanson’s death his office was burgled. Meanwhile, an investigation by French forensic specialists found no significant mechanical faults in the Mercedes S280, ruling out the possibility that the crash had been caused by some internal failure.

So far, so bad for the Windsors. Yet Al-Fayed’s case has a number of weaknesses:

The only source for the story that Dodi and Diana were to be married, and that an engagement ring had been bought from Repossi in Paris, is Al-Fayed himself.

Despite a multi-million-pound personal investigation, Al-Fayed has been unable to establish any link between Prince Philip and MI6.

Although Diana reportedly told Frederic Mailliez, the off-duty doctor who first attended her in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, that she was pregnant, the only other evidence of pregnancy came from an anonymous French policeman who said he had the papers to prove this but to date has not made these public. By contrast, scientific tests carried out on Diana’s pre-transfusion blood have shown no evidence of pregnancy. Myriah Daniels, a holistic healer who travelled with Dodi and Diana on their cruise aboard the Jonikal yacht at the end of August 1997, stated:

I can say with one hundred per cent certainty that she was not pregnant. I will explain how I can be so sure of this fact. Firstly, she told me herself that she was not pregnant. Secondly… It is incomprehensible to me that Diana would have allowed me to carry out such an invasive treatment [massage] on her stomach and intestines if she thought she was pregnant.

The Operation Paget Inquiry (see below) was given access to MI6 to investigate Tomlinson’s claims. The inquiry tracked down the assassination plan he referred to and found the target to be not Slobodan Milosevic but another Serbian figure. Since it is against British government policy to carry out assassinations, the memo’s author was disciplined. Tomlinson admitted this memo was the one he was referring to in his claim.

Given the long-standing antipathy between France and Britain, why would the French police/security services collude in the conspiracy to kill Diana?

In December 2006 the Independent newspaper stated there were at least 14 CCTV cameras in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, yet none recorded footage of the fatal collision. Mohamed Al-Fayed has also raised the absence of CCTV images of the Mercedes’ journey on the fateful night as evidence of conspiracy. A Brigade Criminelle investigation, however, found only 1 °CCTV cameras along the route, and it was for a quite simple reason that none had relevant images: they were security cameras on buildings and were pointed at those buildings’ exits and entrances. Inside the Alma underpass there was one camera, which was under the control of the Compagnie de Circulation Urbaines de Paris (Paris Urban Traffic Unit). The CCUP closed down at 11 p.m. and made no recordings after that time.

The lengthy “43-minute” ambulance journey of Diana from the Pont de l’Alma tunnel to hospital was no such thing, taking from 1.41 to 2.06. The SAMU ambulance did admittedly stop en route for 10 minutes, but that was because the accompanying doctor needed the ambulance to be stationary while he gave Diana blood-pressure treatment. The ambulance did not go to the Hotel Dieu, the nearest hospital to the crash scene, because Pitie- Salpetriere was the main centre for multiple trauma cases.

Fayed challenged the French investigators’ conclusion that Henri Paul was drunk (with an alcohol level three times the legal limit) on the evening of the tragedy; his bearing, as captured on the Ritz hotel CCTV that evening, showed a man apparently sober. There were also suggestions that the blood samples tested belonged not to Henri but to another subject. There certainly seem to have been irregularities in the report of French forensic pathologist Dominique Lecomte, but in December 2006 DNA testing confirmed that the blood samples showing a level of alcohol in excess of legal limits did indeed belong to Paul.

Al-Fayed nonetheless maintained that his son and Diana died as the result of a vast conspiracy by the Royal Family and MI6. In response, the coroner of the royal household requested Lord Stevens, a former chief of the