Gordon Thomas: Gideon's Spies

There was no clear-cut, smoking-gun evidence offered against any of those agents. But within hours their names had been flashed around the world.

A stunned MI6 desperately tried to close down the website, but no sooner had they managed to close one than another opened. In London the Foreign Office admitted the breach of security was the most serious since the Cold War—“and the lives of some MI6 agents and their contacts have been put at risk.” Certainly those named as working in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other Middle East countries had to be urgently withdrawn.

But neither Tomlinson or Mohamed al-Fayed could have calculated one effect. So grave was the overall breach of security that the claim that a handful of MI6 agents had been involved in a plot against Diana went virtually unnoticed. It was dismissed as being part of al-Fayed’s obsession.

In June 1999 matters took a more serious turn when al-Fayed’s Harrods website published the name of a senior MI6 officer. The website alleged that the agent, who was then serving in the Balkans, had orchestrated “a vicious campaign” to smear al-Fayed and “destroy his reputation.”

Britain’s ministry of defense took the unusual step of publicly warning that publication had endangered the agent and his contacts in Kosovo and Serbia.

The agent’s identity had been revealed alongside the site’s online book where thousands of visitors have left messages commemorating the deaths of Diana and Dodi.

Laurie Meyer, the Harrods spokesman, promised to have the agent’s name removed—“obviously it is an error.”

Reports then surfaced in Germany’s mass-circulation Bild that Richard Tomlinson had evidence that Henri Paul had installed a bugging device in the Imperial Suite at the Ritz Hotel and had obtained tapes of the “last intimate moments” of Diana and Dodi. Shortly before Paul drove them to their death, the couple had spent several hours alone in the suite.

The tapes, according to Bild, had become the subject of a hunt by MI6 to locate them.

Around this time Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother, decided to intervene. He told American television audiences that at best “the romance my sister had with Dodi al-Fayed was no more than a summer fling. She had absolutely no intention to marry him.”

Mohamed al-Fayed pointed out, with some justification, that the relationship between Spencer and Diana was hardly close at the time of her death.

None of this was any surprise to Ari Ben-Menashe. He had continued to follow the never-ending saga of al-Fayed’s attempts “to prove his fixation that the Queen and Prince Philip organized a plot to kill Diana.”

The highly experienced Israeli intelligence officer felt that, “in throwing in his lot with Richard Tomlinson, al-Fayed had lost the plot. He is now reduced to running to the tabloids. Yet I know for a fact that if he had gone about matters properly and organized a serious investigation he would have turned up some very surprising results. There is something very strange about the deaths of Diana and Dodi. No doubt about it. There was a case to investigate. But the trail has been muddied by al-Fayed himself. It may not even be his fault. He is surrounded by people who tell him to look here, not there. For some of them, keeping the whole thing going is a sort of pension for them. They know that every new, half-baked theory they come up with will encourage al-Fayed to spend more of his money in pursuing it. Along the way he tramples out of sight what evidence there may have been to uncover.”

A hint of what that could be came in late June 1999 when it emerged that the mysterious white Fiat Uno seen zigzagging way from the scene of the death crash of Diana and Dodi was destroyed in a car crusher. In moments the Uno, from which traces of paint scrapes had been found in the tunnel, had been reduced to a block of scrap metal.

The claim was contained in a secret Mossad investigation that began within hours of the fatal crash. It had been launched by Mossad’s then director general, Danny Yatom. He had been concerned that Mossad’s determined attempts to recruit Henri Paul could lead to accusation that this had played a part in Diana’s death.

The investigation focused on a period that covered the two weeks before the accident—or what al-Fayed still calls “the appearance of an accident to cover up murder”—and the days afterwards.

Mossad investigators discovered that as well as the agency’s own presence in Paris prior to the death of the couple, there was a four-man MI6 team in the city. They were based at the British Embassy for the first week, but later moved into a rented apartment—“an MI6 safe house”—near the Ritz. One of the team checked into the hotel itself four days before the death of Dodi and Diana.

The Mossad report reveals that around August 14/15 1997, a CIA team also arrived in the city. The team had been tracking Diana for some time, keeping tabs on her attacks on land mine manufacturers, many of which are U.S.-based.

The CIA reports form part of the 1,051 documents Mohamed al-Fayed has to battle through the American courts to obtain copies of. The U.S. Justice Department has claimed the documents contained material “sensitive to national security.”

The Mossad report suggests that sensitivity could refer to why Britain had asked the United States to help in monitoring Diana.

“Britain saw her as a loose cannon,” insisted al-Fayed. “In fact she was a woman of great courage who was ready to confront the land mines issue.”

The Mossad investigation details how the various intelligence services hurriedly left Paris after the deaths of Diana and Dodi.

Mossad’s report contains a detailed timetable of Dodi and Diana’s last hours. It is partly based on firsthand observations by Maurice and his contacts. Other information came from Mossad’s “back channel” contacts with agents in the French capital, from MI6, the CIA, and French Intelligence.

“I have been told by a former senior Israeli intelligence officer that all those services had a vested interest in Diana and Dodi,” Mohamed al-Fayed has insisted.

Mossad’s account of the final moments of the lives of Diana and Dodi begins at 11 :45 P.M. Saturday, August 29, 1997, when Henri Paul was put in charge of the operation to whisk them away from the Ritz Hotel.

Mohamed al-Fayed still remembers vividly the instruction he had telephoned to Paul.

“I told him he must drive carefully, that he must never forget he had the life of the mother of the future king of England and my beloved son in his hands. I trusted him never to forget that. God knows, how I trusted him. God only knows now why I did.”

The next Mossad entry is 11:50 P.M. In the Ritz bar Trevor Rees-Jones, who was there to body-guard Diana and Dodi, was in a huddle with other security men from the hotel staff and Henri Paul, discussing the route he would use.

Paul was very bullish. He said the hotel would provide two Range Rovers to act as decoys for the waiting paparazzi. That would give him enough time to get away. Rees-Jones is reported to have said the plan “sounds good to me.”

00:15 A.M. Sunday, August 30. In the hotel lobby Henri Paul was using his cell phone to mobilize the two decoy vehicles.

00:19 A.M. The two decoy vehicles roared out of the Place Vendome that fronts the Ritz. Paparazzi give chase.

00:20 A.M. At the hotel’s rear entrance Paul arrived with the Mercedes. He was seen by one of the eyewitnesses that Mossad subsequently interviewed as “drumming his fingers nervously on the steering wheel.”

00:21 A.M. At the top of the Rue Cambon, a Mossad agent kept watch. He would later report that “a white Fiat Uno passed the top of the street.”

The Mossad report states that in the car were two intelligence officers from the French security service, DST. The DST—more formally known as the Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory—is the largest and most powerful of France’s intelligence agencies. With several thousand employees, it operates both internally and overseas. Its wide-ranging responsibilities include surveillance of all foreign embassies in Paris and conducting a number of clandestine operations. It reports to the incumbent minister of the interior.