Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (25 page)

When Diana died, one obvious and common question was “What exactly happened?” The answer to this question seemed apparent enough. But if one were to ask “Who stood to gain?” then the answer might lead the questioner in a very different direction. Every week thousands of people are killed in car crashes: a truck drives into the back of a stationary car, a bus goes through a median, a hatchback full of teenagers fails to negotiate a sudden bend. It is rare for the immediate reaction to be “Who gets the insurance money?” This is just as well, because it is always a short step from a suggested motive to a suggested crime.

Princesses are not immune to the malign coincidences of poor high-speed driving, impulsive decision-making, and bad luck. In an abrupt change to an earlier plan, Diana, leaving the Paris Ritz, was put in the back of a Mercedes and driven recklessly fast by a man who had been drinking into a tunnel with a disguised ramp. Since nobody, it seemed, could have had advance notice of the journey or its timing, the idea that an elaborate and well-planned conspiracy ended the princess’s life seemed, almost intuitively, more than usually difficult to support.

Even so, in the decade following the accident, a steady fifth to just under a third of British people, and a similar proportion of Americans, continued to believe that Diana was murdered. Even higher numbers could be found supporting the notion that aspects of Diana’s death had been covered up.
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Less reliably, self-selecting phone polls conducted by pro-conspiracy newspapers invariably tripled or quadrupled the numbers of those backing the conspiracy theory. In the meantime, more than $13.4 million and countless hours of police and juridical time were spent investigating whether or not the princess was the victim of an implausible murder plot. It was a lengthy process, but finally, on April 7, 2008, ten years, seven months, and eight days after the Paris crash, a jury gave the verdict that Diana, Princess of Wales, died by accident: the fatal Paris car crash had been caused not by malicious conspirators but by the gross negligence of the dead driver, Henri Paul, and the actions of the infamous paparazzi.

How had this absurdly elongated investigation come about?

Executive Intelligence

The persistence of Diana conspiracy stories after August 31, 1997, owed much to the work of two men: the first, Harrods owner and father of Dodi, Mohamed Al Fayed; the second, the lesser-known Lyndon LaRouche. A former Trotskyist and prison inmate (he was sentenced for mail fraud and tax evasion), LaRouche has been a presidential candidate in most U.S. elections for the last thirty years, and his adherents continually attempt—with little success—to infiltrate the Democratic Party. According to LaRouche, the world is dominated by a financial oligarchy centered on the City of London and partly directed by the British Establishment, headed, naturally, by the British royal family. The queen, among her other duties, is behind the world trade in narcotics, and not only did her retainers murder the People’s Princess, but they have also planned to assassinate Lyndon LaRouche. This would be bad for the world because LaRouche is, according to his own publications, “the world’s foremost economic forecaster, who has inspired a worldwide political movement to reverse the depression collapse and bring about a new classical renaissance.”
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Of course, such an ideology makes great demands on those encountering it for the first time. Too great, in fact. But most people coming across a LaRouche-initiated campaign will not be inducted into the full program. Instead they may see a TV documentary or visit a website featuring Jeffrey Steinberg, the “counterintelligence” editor of the
Executive Intelligence Review
, where it is revealed that his research indicates this or that hypothesis or suggests this or that conclusion. It was in
Executive Intelligence Review
that LaRouche’s Diana conspiracy theories were given their most substantial airing. Brushed with a patina of scholarship, as a forger of old manuscripts applies egg white to give the effect of age, the LaRouchian view of the Paris accident was sold to a largely unsuspecting world as “disturbing questions” or “troubling anomalies” in the official version.

From the beginning, Jeffrey Steinberg acknowledged that without Mohamed Al Fayed, the Diana conspiracy theories would probably never have taken off. It was, he told readers, Al Fayed who “brought the whole tempo of developments around the case to a kind of a fevered pitch when he . . . said he’s 99.9 percent certain it was murder.

“And, I frankly happen to agree with him, and I’m privy to less evidence than he has.” In the reflexive world of conspiracy, such evidence can be circular. On Al Fayed’s own, rather impressive website, the Harrods millionaire revealed, “One of the world’s leading magazines,
Executive Intelligence Review,
is supporting my campaign to shed light on the truth surrounding the crash.”

In the years after the crash, Al Fayed’s website would display a plethora of newspaper articles and speculation about who was responsible for Diana’s death. Set against such memorabilia as portraits of Dodi and Di framed by interlinked D’s, adorned with Mediterranean foliage and supported by a bronze fountain, “which plays into reflecting pools of water—the symbol of eternal life,” the message was clear: it was the secret services or the royal family rather than a series of unfortunate decisions leading to the princess being chauffeured by an inebriated and incompetent Al Fayed employee that were responsible for the deaths. Al Fayed related, for example, how Annie Machon, a former employee of MI5 and the partner of another former MI5 officer, David Shayler, had written a book,
Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers
, in which she speculated that the accident was planned by British intelligence but not supposed to be fatal. Al Fayed quoted Machon as saying, “The vast majority of the British people, of course, now believe that the crash was no accident. Although the British media continues to call the matter a ‘conspiracy theory,’ we feel there is compelling information to indicate that events were anything but accidental.”

Al Fayed’s tone has always been impressively committed: agreement represents confirmation of his views concerning a plot, but so does disagreement. When one journalist questioned his assertion that Princess Diana had been pregnant with Dodi’s child, he wrote that the reporter and his cronies were “the very worst kind of establishment and Royal family arse-lickers,” claiming that the article could “only have been prompted by the Security Services who are clearly very nervous about the positive findings the investigation is uncovering.” And, for years, many of the stories suggesting that Diana’s death was not accidental had their origin in activities carried out by employees or agents of Mr. Al Fayed. One interesting example of this process came in a story in the
Sunday Express
from June 23, 2002. Billed as an “exclusive” with the byline Gordon Thomas, the piece began: “Explosive tapes on the secret life of Princess Diana will prove that she was pregnant and intended to marry Dodi Al Fayed, it was claimed last night,” and continued:

American secret agents regularly monitored Diana’s conversations and collated 1,000 secret documents using its [
sic
] “spy in the sky,” the National Security Agency. They were obtained by its Echelon satellite surveillance system and contain highly sensitive material including her marriage plans, her views on Prince Philip, who was known to be highly critical of her, and new details of her love affair with James Hewitt. Now, lawyers acting for Mohamed Al Fayed are trying to obtain the tapes through America’s Freedom of Information Act.
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The source of the claims, in other words, was Al Fayed. The suggestion that these tapes monitoring Diana existed at all also came from Al Fayed. But Thomas is himself a major player in the conspiracy business. He is the author of several dozen books ranging from
The Jesus Conspiracy
to
The Assassination of Robert Maxwell
and, important for the particular conspiracy theory under discussion here, an account of the history of Mossad,
Gideon’s Spies—
which, worryingly, is often quoted by mainstream journalists as a respectable and reliable source of information about Israel’s intelligence agency.

The 2000 edition of
Gideon’s Spies
begins with these words: “When the red light blinked on the bedside telephone, a sophisticated recording device was automatically activated in the Paris apartment near the Pompidou Center in the lively Fourth Arrondisement.”
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This supposedly happened on the night Diana died, and was connected to the fact that Henri Paul, variously asserted by other theorists to be an employee of French and British intelligence, was, actually, according to Thomas, a Mossad asset. Mossad it was, said Thomas, who also helped bring down Jonathan Aitken, the pro-Saudi British Cabinet minister, following his famous and ultimately disastrous stay at the Ritz.

Thomas got both stories from one of his most fertile sources, Ari Ben Menashe, who, he claimed, had been a major figure in Mossad for many years. Menashe had also advised Thomas on how Mossad had done away with its own agent, the tycoon Robert Maxwell, making his fall from his yacht look like an accident. Thomas, by his own account, put Menashe in direct contact with Al Fayed, and the Israeli told the Egyptian that, yes, there was a chance of Mossad involvement and that he, Menashe, would hunt it down in return for a retainer of $750,000 a year.
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The impatient Al Fayed, however, wanted some material up front and Menashe refused—being, in Thomas’s words, “more used to dealing with governments than ‘a man with the manner of a souk trader.’ ” Interestingly, the government for which Menashe worked as a consultant was the Zimbabwean regime of Robert Mugabe—until, that is, Menashe was involved in trying to trap the leader of the Zimbabwean opposition into a taped act of treason against Mugabe. Unfortunately, the Zimbabwean court preferred to believe Morgan Tsvangirai rather than Menashe, and threw the case out.
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But despite Menashe’s failure to strike a deal with the Harrods owner, the Al Fayed- Thomas combination was still able to create a newspaper headline in the middle of 2002. Al Fayed got his coverage; what Thomas got by way of payment we don’t know.

The death of Diana, though nothing like as lucrative as the life of Diana, has always been seen as financially exploitable. There have been books on Diana’s loves, Diana’s dresses, Diana’s boys, Diana’s mother; there have been memoirs of her butler Paul Burrell, of her housekeeper, of her bodyguards, of her “spiritual adviser,” and of her “dream analyst.” And there have been the conspiracy theories.

Landmines

Almost all conspiracy theories about Diana start with the same basic “doubts” about the accident: the mysterious white Fiat Uno that was struck by Henri Paul’s Mercedes and then disappeared, the disputed blood tests on the dead driver, the mysterious money that Henri Paul may have earned . . . They then add speculative motives, possible additional facts, and purported culprits.

Some of the conjecture has been easily dealt with. For example, according to both Diana’s closest friend and to those who examined her body, she was not pregnant, which removes the satisfyingly straightforward theory that action was taken to prevent the birth of a Muslim who would be a half brother or sister of the heir to the throne. But the loss of one piece of supposed evidence or motivation for murder did not seem to diminish the life force of the conspiracy creature itself. For example, nine years after her death, a former
Mirror
journalist, Nicholas Davies, in his book
Diana: Secrets and Lies
, speculated that Diana was killed because of her plans to highlight the plight of the Palestinians. Early theorists may have missed this possibility because back in 1997, with the peace process in the Middle East still in play, a possible link between Diana and the plight of the Palestinians might have seemed somehow less topical. By 2006, when Davies was publishing, the subject was far more fashionable.

Where there is money there is often considerable ingenuity. A stereotypical Diana conspiracy book, selected almost at random, is David Cohen’s
Death of a Goddess
. Most of Cohen’s previous works had been about popular psychology, including works on Piaget and behaviorism. But in the winter of 1994, he somehow became involved in making a documentary for Channel 4, about a cult called the Order of the Solar Temple, fifty-three of whose members had burned themselves to death that December.

Not long after this documentary was aired, Cohen was approached by a Frenchman designated only “Guy,” who claimed to have been the “driver, personal assistant, and enforcer” for a senior member of the order. What Guy told Cohen formed the basis for another Channel 4 film—one of those revisionist documentaries that were so popular on Britain’s television channels in the mid-1990s—this one about the film star and Monegasque princess, Grace Kelly. Kelly, said Guy, had been a member of the order, had been inducted in a weird sexualized ritual, had paid $8 million to the cult, and had finally been murdered by them, her death disguised as an automobile accident on the winding roads of the Riviera.

Despite having just made this questionable film, Cohen claims that “as a trained psychologist” he was “skeptical about conspiracy theories”
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and that initially his only contact with the Diana story was to be called into the TV studios after her death (as many of us were) and pumped for his limited expertise. But then, nineteen days after the Paris accident, Guy made contact again. This time, Guy’s story was that two months earlier he had been asked to launder $500,000. “His client,” said Cohen, “was a man I will call Roland, who had been in the East German secret services and had gone to live in Cuba after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Roland had done some freelance jobs for Jo di Mambro, the leader of the Solar Temple, which was why he had turned to Guy for help.”
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