Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

In the meantime in Tehran, Mohammed-Reza Bahonar, the deputy speaker of Iran’s parliament and a staunch ultra-conservative supporter of President Ahmadinejad, warned that Iran would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “if our patience finally runs out with the international community, our country may have to produce nuclear weapons as a defense measure.”

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan told his own senior staff that “once more the clock is moving closer to midnight.”

In London another clock had stopped, at least for the moment: the long-awaited report into the death of Princess Diana nine years before had gone into limbo. The Royal Coroner, Dr. Michael Burgess, who knew the contents of the report by Lord Stevens, had astonishingly resigned, deciding he was “too busy” to preside over the most significant and high-profile case of his or any coroner’s life. In a letter to interested parties, including Prince Charles and Mohamed al-Fayed, the mild-mannered Burgess had written about “my heavy and constant workload.” As the ninth anniversary of Dodi al-Fayed and the Princess’s death were marked by the annual surge of visitors to the midnight car crash location in Paris, the questions continued to be asked and the speculation was rampant. Had Dr. Burgess refused to continue because there was pressure upon him to declare the crash had been nothing more than a tragic accident? Or had he resigned because he would not discount that murder had been committed—and that powerful figures in the intelligence world and in Britain’s Royal Family had exerted their combined influence to dismiss any suspicion of foul play? More certain is that if there was finally to be an inquest it would require months of searching for a replacement for the sixty-year-old Burgess. By August 2006, it had appeared that Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, had been unable to find one. Lord Stevens, who had headed the inquiry into the two deaths, knew that any new coroner would have to read a massive dossier to familiarize himself with its myriad contents numbering ten thousand pages. That would take many months. The experienced Stevens knew that the moment any fresh legal figure examined the results of his team’s two-and-a-half-year investigation he would be “bound to want supplementary inquiries to be made.” That would, one of his handpicked detectives told the author, “add another year or even more to our work.” Privately Lord Stevens has told friends that the inquiry “could go on for years.”

In September 2006, a date for when the inquest might take place was put at the earliest 2007, possibly 2008. Even then, asked the conspiracy theorists, would everything be disclosed? How “routine” had Diana’s “partial embalming” been? Why didn’t the National Security Agency in Washington release their surveillance tapes of Diana and Dodi it had made in the last weeks of their lives? Did the tapes add anything of value to the investigation? Even if the couple had clipped on their seatbelts as the Mercedes hurtled them to their deaths, would that have saved their lives? Was Diana pregnant? Her close friend, Rosa Monckton, had told the Stevens investigators that on August 20, 1997, when she said good-bye to Diana eleven days before her death, Diana’s menstrual cycle had started. But even then the questions had been asked. How long was her menstrual bleeding? Had she been able to bear a child by the time her menstrual cycle stopped? And finally, what had the investigators discovered about the role of the intelligence service—not least Mossad?

In one of those surprise statements, which had become a hallmark of the Blair government, it was announced after the ninth anniversary of Diana’s death that a replacement for the Royal Coroner had been found. She was Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, a retired High Court judge. She had agreed to come out of retirement to preside over the inquest into Diana’s death. An indication of the formidable reading task she faced came when Lord Stevens announced his detectives had so far taken 1,500 witness statements, many more than the previous figure.

On the day of the Butler-Sloss appointment, Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, published his latest revelations about her death. It included a confidential police report about the items recovered from the crash scene. The inventory was prepared by Captain Christophe Boucharin of the Paris Criminal Brigade, marked BC No 288/97. It listed fourteen personal effects, including a pair of black Versace shoes size 40, a Ralph Lauren belt, a Motorola mobile phone, a Jaeger-Lecoultre gold watch, a Bulgari seed-pearl bracelet held at each end with diamond-encrusted drags, and a gold ring. In a footnote Captain Boucharin wrote: “The funeral directors took responsibility for all the artifacts. They put the bracelet on Diana’s right wrist and the ring on her right finger.” Burrell wrote that “she had agreed on my advice when she received the ring from Dodi to wear the ring on her right hand as a friendship ring—not on her left hand denoting an engagement.”

The position of the ring would contradict Mohamed al-Fayed’s persistent claim that his son and Diana were engaged to be married. The veracity of this would be one of the many factors that Baroness Butler-Sloss would have to consider when she eventually presided over the inquest.

In Tel Aviv the latest developments were carefully filed in the Mossad library. Meir Dagan had made his decision about not involving Mossad in the investigation. He had heard nothing to change his mind.

Being driven to his appointment through Washington in a government car, Meir Dagan saw that across the Potomac the memorial stones as usual stood proudly in ranks on the slopes of Arlington Cemetery. The graveyard was so different from the smooth sandstone, brain-shaped monument at Glilot, north of Tel Aviv, and its engravings of the dead of Mossad. Ahead, the Washington Monument’s long shadow gave the last reading of the day before fading into darkness. Along the sidewalk people still pounded along as the lights blinked out in the buildings and flags dropped down poles to be swiftly gathered up. If there was a time he had to come to Washington, Meir Dagan preferred September. Until then the summer would be without a breeze and the atmosphere filled with fumes and ozone, often covering the city with a haze. Visitors said it was the result of car exhaust smoke and the swampy location. Cynical locals knew better, claiming it was a noxious mixture of wasted breath and oxidized hopes that turned to poison when the sun broke through. The cause, of course, was government.

It was its secret side, the CIA, which had once more brought the Mossad chief to Washington. He had arrived at the time for Washington’s powerful pretenders to lock away their documents and to ignore, until the morning, the telephone calls they had not returned. Those without a future headed home to their families. The ambitious, the Mossad chief knew, had further duties. A late drink at an embassy and later still, dinner with friends and enemies, a time when a secret could be quietly shared or a reputation tarnished.

Before leaving Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan had learned that Rafi Eitan, once Mossad’s director of operations and now the Pensioners’ Minister in the coalition that Ehud Olmert hoped would allow him to continue governing, had called for the readying of bomb shelters and reinforced rooms to be established in advance of a possible conflict with Iran. Eitan, once so secretive, had become adept at sound-bites on television.

Staging through London, Dagan learned that MI5 had discovered al-Qaeda had supplied its estimated 2,000 sleeper agents in Britain with what Eliza Manningham-Buller described as “the most sophisticated terror manual ever found in this country.” The document gave information on how to create liquid explosions far more powerful than those planned to be used to destroy ten passenger planes over the Atlantic in August 2006. The precise steps to produce the bombs were set out in chilling detail on an al-Qaeda DVD. On one part of the disk were instructions that mimicked the style of a cookbook—only its pages provided recipes for unparalleled carnage. An example shown to the author reads: