By Barbara Jones The Star March 9, 1999
Top-secret telexes, tapes and never before seen photographs will prove that Princess Diana and Dodi were assassinated in cold blood - and British and American intelligence agencies worked together to cover up their murder.
That's what Dodi's grieving father, Mohammad Al Fayed, told a Washington D.C., court in a successful bid to force the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to turn over 1,056 pages of secret files to the French judge investigating the devestating August 31, 1997 crash.
Now Al Fayed has told Judge Herve Stephan - who had previously announced he's ready to turn over his vast dossier to a public prosecutor - that what is in these files will blow open the 18-month probe.
In an exclusive interview with the Star, Al Fayed says the documents contain crucial evidence of a cloak-and-dagger conspiracy involving the CIA, the DIA, the National Security Agency (NSA) and their British pals in MI6 which resulted in Diana's death.
"I believe the judge will now suspend his findings until he has seen the CIA and DIA paperwork," said Al Fayed.
Al Fayed told the Star that he believes the stunning new intelligence documents will show:
Meanwhile, a new witness has also come forward with what could be blockbuster information about the fatal crash. The witness claims he was in the white mystery car that fled the scene - and which authorities have been looking for ever since in the hope that the driver could shed new light on the deadly events in the Paris tunnel.
Photographers at the crash scene filmed the mysterious white car, believed to be a Fiat Uno, and two suspicious motorbikes - and then wired the stills to a photo agency in London. But the crucial photographs disappeared 12 hours later when the agency's offices were burgled.
Al Fayed claims that the plot to kill Diana was kicked into high gear as soon as British authorities found out from the CIA that Dodi had picked out a $215,000 star-shaped diamond ring for his future bride - thanks to the bug on Di pal Lucia's phone.
"The only reason my son and Diana were in Paris that night was so that he could personally collect the ring and propose to her," he told Star.
He had seen it 10 days previously and called earlier from the south of France (the couple had been on an idyllic cruise on Al Fayed's luxury yacht) and arranged to pick it up that fatal Saturday afternoon.
"Later I spoke to Dodi and he was so excited and happy. Diana was too," said Al Fayed. "They deserved a lifetime's love together, and this beautiful ring was to put a seal on that."
Al Fayed says that just looking at the ring - now preserved in a glass case at his Paris apartment - makes him weep. It was handed to him along with all his son's other personal belongings when he flew to France to identify his body.
The billionaire owner of Harrods, the upscale London department store, has spent a year and a half - and a fortune - trying to make sense of his son's tragic death.
On Feb 5, Judge Henry Kennedy ordered the CIA and the DIA to hand over all their files on Al Fayed, Dodi, and Di.
"Diana believed all her married life that she was under surveillance by British and foreign intelligence agencies who reported back to her husband Prince Charles and the British establishment," Laurie Mayer, Al Fayed's London spokesman, told Star.
"She had every reason to think they intercepted her phone calls. The call she made to Lucia on the afternoon of her death could have alerted them she really was going to marry Dodi and that he, a practicing Muslim and the son of a man who helped bring down the British government, would be stepfather to Prince William and Prince Harry."
Al Fayed also wanted - and got - files on two photographers, a Frenchman and a Dutchman. He is trying to discover what they know about the death plot.
"These men know what went on that evening," says John McNamara, Al Fayed's director of security, who has worked full time on the investigation since the fatal crash.
"They filmed the motorbike we know was blocking the exit road, forcing the Mercedes to take the tunnel. That could show the license plate of that bike and another one we believe shot into the tunnel behind the white Fiat Uno. The Fiat Uno was waiting at the mouth of the tunnel. There was a collision and since then the bikes and the Fiat have vanished.
"Immediately after the crash, the photographers sent their pictures round the world. Some of those wired to an agency in North London had vital frames showing the vehicles we cannot now trace. The agency was broken into just hours after the crash and neither we, nor the police, believe it was an ordinary burglary," says the former Scotland Yard senior detective.
"Many photographs show Diana lying in the rear seat of the Mercedes, one arm flung across Dodi and her legs buckled up under, have been seen across the world. Some have even been published in Europe. But none has shown the bikes or the car."
Just one of the unanswered questions is why the NSA has files on one of the photographers on the scene that night.
"He has a criminal record and is not an accredited photographer. His role is unclear, but we find it strange that there are files on him in American," adds McNamara, who told Star he's been chasing down every lead since the terrible night that Diana and Dodi died.
Just last week, a mystery man came forward to claim the $1 million reward money Al Fayed put up for information about the crash. The man claims he was a passenger in the mystery car they were looking for which fled the scene - not a Fiat Uno as it was orginally described, but a white Citroen AX.
The witness claims he fled the scene because his car was uninsured - and that now he's terrified for his life. French police say tests confirm that paint chips and pieces of rear light covers came from a Fiat Uno, but McNamara and his team are carefully checking this new story.
Al Fayed's also trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious operation in which he was offered alleged CIA files for information on Di and Dodi's deaths for $20 million.
McNamara said that on April 1, 1998, Al Fayed was contacted by Keith Fleer, a high-flyer lawyer who has pulled off many multimillion dollar deals in Hollywood. "He arranged for us to meet a man called Oscar LeWinter and others in Austria, where they had secret government files from the CIA with a price tag of $20 million." After an extraordinary series of meetings involving false names and passwords, McNamara said he discovered that LeWinter and his associates had suspicious backgrounds.
Working with the Austrian authorities, he established that the documents were forgeries and had LeWinter arrested.
"He's doing two-and-a-half years in a Viennese prison and we still haven't tracked down the con men working with him," says McNamara. "We have tried to persuade the FBI, offering them video of conversations with Fleer, to take legal action against him and his cronies. If he is not prosecuted for fraud, we will not hesitate to take civil action against him. Either he has been involved in a huge con trick or else he has been attempting to sell genuine government files."
Al Fayed's belief that intelligence agencies played a role in the deaths of his son and Princess Diana was fueled by ex-British intelligence agent Richard Tomlinson's detailed description of an Mi6 assassination plot against a Serbian leader, which eerily mirrored the death of Dodi and Di.
Tomlinson told Star readers in an exclusive interview last year that the deputy head of British intelligence was in Paris at the British Embassy on August 31 and returned to London immediately after Di and Dodi's tragic deaths.
He also says that the driver of the death car, Henri Paul - head of security at the Rtiz Hotel, owned by Al Fayed and where Di and Dodi were staying - was a low-level informer for the British and was likely plied with drinks and told to drive fast because there was a terrorist threat.
Al Fayed employed a team of four pathology professors to study evidence - and they have submitted reports to Judge Herve Stephan which say that an extraordinarily high level of carbon monoxide in Paul's blood cannot be explained.
McNamara says that Al Fayed is determined to find out about all the surveillance activities being carried out on Diana and Dodi - and to bring to justice the people responsible for their deaths.
"Mohammad Al Fayed will continue his own inquiries forever, long after the authorities have given up. He will never believe his son died in a simple road accident. He firmly believes that Dodi and Diana were killed and that secret service agencies were involved. He wants to know the truth and he will not give up until he gets it."
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