Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (26 page)

And, after her death from cardiac arrest in the hospital, why was her body immediately embalmed, before a postmortem could be undertaken? Had she been pregnant? Was it possible that MI6 and the British royal family wanted her – and her lover, son of one of Britain's richest businessmen, Mohammed Al-Fayed – out of the way? Had the Princess's indiscretions – her affairs, her criticism of the royal family, her increasingly eccentric behaviour – earned her enemies in high places? Al-Fayed senior claimed that the couple had been murdered, that they had been planning to marry and that the British establishment had decided that it was time to get them out of the way.

At first, Al-Fayed's claim was seen as paranoid but as time went on and more anomalies in the case surfaced, the theory began to seem less outlandish. Soon, others began to be convinced that this was no ordinary accident but a case of foul play.

D
ID
MI6
KILL
D
IANA
?
Initially, the press reported the tragic event as a car crash caused by the fact that Henri Paul, the driver, had simply made a mistake. But it then began to emerge that Paul, a security officer at the Ritz hotel, was an experienced and careful driver who had taken driving courses in the past. Not only this, but the car was only travelling at about sixty or seventy miles per hour, not at a hundred and twenty as had at first been reported. Next, there were allegations that Paul had been drunk at the wheel, but security cameras at the hotel showed that he was acting in a perfectly normal way minutes before taking the wheel. Moreover, he was unlikely to have been drinking when on call to such important hotel guests as Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed. Later, it was found that even before they took samples of his blood the police had in fact announced that Paul was drunk.

So, if the car was not going too fast and Paul was not drunk, why had the accident happened? Conflicting reports by some witnesses told of a car blocking the way so that Paul had to turn off his normal route into the tunnel and of cycles ramming the car as it travelled along, causing it to swerve. Some suggested that Paul had been in the pay of MI6, that he had been hired to kill Princess Diana and Dodi and that something had gone wrong at the last minute so that he ended up killing himself as well. What was odd, and is still unexplained, is why Dodi asked Paul to drive the couple home instead of using his usual driver, Philippe Junot.

T
HE FATAL MOMENT
According to some reports, all the lights in the tunnel went out shortly before the car approached, and the security cameras in the tunnel also failed. On this evidence, a theory has been constructed that Paul was used as a dupe, and that the French authorities deliberately arranged for the car to crash, thus killing the inmates. It has even been suggested that Rees Jones was somehow in on the plot because he survived, protected by his safety belt when Princess Diana and Dodi were not wearing theirs. However, his involvement is somewhat implausible. Deliberately travelling in a car that is destined to have a fatal accident seems a little too risky a strategy – even for a man trained by the Parachute Regiment, one of the toughest regiments in the British army.

What does emerge as odd, however, is how the French authorities responded at the scene of the accident. In the immediate minutes after the crash, Diana appeared not to be seriously harmed. It later emerged that she was suffering from internal bleeding, but to the off-duty doctor who arrived first on the scene, Frederick Mailliez, she did not appear to be in a fatal condition. As she clearly needed medical attention, an ambulance was called but, strangely, it took it over an hour to get to the hospital. It even stopped on the way for ten minutes! Afterwards, it was explained that the ambulance had stopped in order to administer a shot of adrenalin to the princess and that it had travelled slowly to avoid jolting her.

However, many remain unconvinced by this and they still cannot understand why Princess Diana was taken to a hospital some distance away, when there were several nearby that could have attended to her. After all, this was no ordinary car crash victim. This was Diana, the Princess of Wales, one of the most famous and recognizable women on the planet.

Not only that, but important evidence was also cleared away from the scene of the accident immediately after the victims had been taken to hospital. Within just a few hours, the tunnel had been cleaned and disinfected and it was soon open to traffic once again. In normal circumstances, one would have expected the authorities to have sealed off the tunnel and have sifted through the evidence in order to find out exactly what had happened. But in this case they did not, which was curious.

T
HE AFTERMATH
Once Diana had died in hospital, the British royal family reacted oddly to the news. They reportedly sent an emissary to the hospital to retrieve any valuable family jewellery on the body. They then ordered the hospital to embalm the body right away, thus making it impossible for a post-mortem to be carried out. In particular, it was not possible to ascertain whether the princess had been pregnant or not. (She had apparently confided to Doctor Mailliez that she was.) When the press learned of the tragedy, the royal family were roundly condemned for not issuing an official statement and for failing to fly the palace flags at half-mast.

To this day, new theories are still pointing to the possibility that the top ranks of the British establishment joined in a conspiracy to kill Diana, Princess of Wales, because she had not only become an embarrassment to the royal family but also to the state in general. Other theories have also emerged, one of which is that she faked her own death so that she could disappear, thus avoiding the media circus that followed her everywhere she went. Perhaps we will never know the full truth.

What is clear, though, is that the circumstances of her death were not as straightforward as they at first appeared. Also, many of those who dealt with the accident, whether in Britain or in France, were guilty of incompetence, if not murder. In 2005 the official enquiry into Diana's death has been reopened in France.

Some events are so utterly bizarre and apparently inexplicable that conspiracy theories inevitably grow up around them, if only just to try and explain what on earth happened. One such event was the Jonestown Massacre, in which more than 900 people, all members of a cult living in a commune in Guyana, committed suicide by drinking Kool-aid laced with cyanide. Many of the dead were children who were given the lethal cocktail by their parents. Could it really be that they were all so much in awe of the cult leader, the Revd Jim Jones, that they willingly obeyed his order to commit suicide? Or were more sinister forces at work?

Before we can begin to answer that question we need to look at the facts of the matter. At the heart of whatever happened in Jonestown was the enigmatic figure of Jim Jones. Jones was born in Indiana in 1931. As a boy he became an avid member of a local Pentecostal church. By the time he was in his mid teens he had become a preacher, taking his message to the streets of Indianapolis, to both black and white communities. At the very beginning of his career his core values were apparently based around a sympathy with the underdog, regardless of race.

N
UCLEAR WAR
Jones became a preacher at a Methodist Church in a white area and made a point of inviting black people to attend. By the late fifties he had his own church in Indianapolis, which he called The People's Temple. It ran programmes for the poor, including a soup kitchen, and his message of racial tolerance gained in popularity as the civil rights movement began to emerge. As he became increasingly critical of organized religion he moved closer to a kind of revolutionary socialism.

The prospect of nuclear war was also becoming a worry to Jones and he conceived the idea of moving his congregation abroad to somewhere that would be safe from nuclear attack. From 1963 to 1965 he travelled around looking for such a place, while assistants ran his church. He spent time in Hawaii and Brazil and then, on his way back to the United States, he visited the newly-socialist South American country of Guyana. Here, he thought, might be the perfect place for his new community.

Such a move would involve money that Jones did not yet have, so instead he moved his church to Ukiah, California, a place he believed to be relatively safe from nuclear attack. At first his church fared badly, with Jones himself becoming increasingly paranoid and dependent on prescription drugs. Following a link with a much larger organization, however, the Disciples Of Christ, his fortunes started to rise again. His following increased and he opened new churches in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Increasingly, his congregation was drawn from the poor black ghettoes. After Jones moved to San Francisco his church there was seen to be a real force for good and he became an influential political figure in the city during the early- to mid- 1970s.

T
HE JUNGLE
U
TOPIA
In 1973, Jones began work on building his long dreamed of community in the Guyanese jungle. He named it Jonestown in his own honour. When, in 1977, his church, now with some thousands of members, came under investigation for tax evasion he made the decision to move his whole operation to Jonestown.