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Spies cover up Diana 'murder'

Padraic Flanagan
UK Daily Express
Monday, November 6, 2006

THE Princess Diana inquiry is in danger of stalling after French spy chiefs blocked British detectives’ attempts to establish the final hours of driver Henri Paul.

The team led by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens has been trying to obtain the "agent handling" files on the chauffeur, who was working for several secret service agencies.

The detectives are desperate to find out what Paul, deputy head of security at the Ritz in Paris, was doing between 7pm and 10pm on the night of the fatal car crash.

The £4million inquiry, codenamed Operation Paget and launched in January 2004, has ground to a halt because of the reluctance of the French intelligence services to surrender all their documents on their contact, Paul.

Well-placed sources say such blocking tactics cast serious doubt on the French police conclusion that the crash was a drink-driving accident – and strengthen fears of secret service involvement in a murder plot.

The role of Henri Paul and his whereabouts on the night of August 31, 1997 – he met secret service handlers hours before taking the wheel – are now the key points in the increasingly complex inquiry.

"Paul’s movements in the hours leading up to the crash are a total blind spot in the investigation at the moment," said a source close to the inquiry. "We know he was working for the French and British secret services and was in contact that evening. The French have got to hand over the records of what he was doing. We need to know."

The deadlock is certain to further delay the inquests into the deaths of Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed, now in the hands of former High Court judge Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss.

Legal experts fear the full inquests will not be heard until 2008, well over 10 years after the deaths. A preliminary hearing will be held next year once Lord Stevens presents Lady Butler-Sloss with his exhaustive report.

Concern is growing that she will take the potentially explosive decision to hold the inquests without a jury, raising the likelihood of public outrage and accusations of a cover-up.

"The problem is that if members of the public were on the inquest jury and presented with what appears to be a mountain of unanswered questions, then they would almost certainly come to the conclusion that the deaths were suspicious," said a legal source.

"If the inquest is held without a jury, the finding will be down to Lady Butler-Sloss alone and the public will never be satisfied by the verdict because they will be convinced that there has been a cover-up."

Responding to questions from the Daily Express, Lady Butler-Sloss confirmed she has only had a brief meeting with Lord Stevens to discuss the investigation and said she was unable to fix a date for the inquest.

"I have met Lord Stevens briefly," she said. "I have also met other members of the investigation team. I do not propose to meet any of the interested parties.
"I hope to receive the Stevens report soon and thereafter to hold the preliminary meeting early in the New Year but I cannot yet fix a date."

It is believed the answers to the Henri Paul mystery could overturn the official assumptions about the deaths of Diana and Dodi, both rear-seat passengers in the Mercedes that hit column 13 of the Alma underpass in Paris.

Since that night, conspiracy theorists have maintained that intelligence agents were responsible for the deaths – amid mounting evidence that the secret services of several countries had varying connections to the crash and its victims.

The renegade MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson has claimed he saw a file on Henri Paul while working on an arms smuggling case in 1992. One of the sources was an informant in the Ritz and MI6 paid him for his services in cash.

Tomlinson said: "I learned that the informant was a security officer at the Ritz. Intelligence services always target security officers of important hotels because they have such good access to intelligence. This was Paul."

After Paul’s death, French police discovered he had amassed a small fortune despite his modest salary, controlling 13 secret accounts containing more than £200,000 in banks across France.

His salary at the Ritz was £20,000 a year, yet at the time of his death Paul had £2,000 in cash on him. He had also lodged £4,000 in cash into his accounts on five occasions in the previous eight months and was paying £300 an hour for flying lessons.

Scotland Yard sources disclosed earlier this year that the French government had finally confirmed Paul’s employment by the country’s domestic intelligence service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) during discussions last year.

Paul was also known to be in regular contact with the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), the French equivalent of MI6.

The theory that Paul had been pressured into taking the fateful route through the Alma tunnel on the orders of his secret service handlers was strengthened when intelligence sources in the US corroborated claims the chauffeur had met French and British spies earlier that evening.

The National Security Agency – the globe-spanning surveillance and eavesdropping arm of US intelligence – made a number of recordings of Diana’s conversations at the Ritz as an incidental part of a separate monitoring operation.

Sources said the NSA never directly targeted Diana but does admit to holding 39 classified documents about the Princess totalling 1,054 pages.

It refuses to officially acknowledge the existence of its tapes.

But according to an American law enforcement official and an American intelligence agent, Paul spent the last hours before the crash with a security officer from the DGSE.

That contradicts the official line from French police. In an internal report a police commander called Jean Paul Copetti concluded that it was "not possible" to determine Paul’s whereabouts during that time.

For Dodi’s father, Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed, answers must be found and the facts placed before the public. He said: "I still maintain that my son and Diana were murdered. I will always be convinced that there has been a cover-up. I will not rest until I learn the truth."