The Final Word On Diana’s Death (Don’t Bet On It)

Taken from The New York Times, December 15, 2006
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, Dec. 14 — No, she did not stage her own death and sneak off with her boyfriend to a remote island love nest. Nor was she murdered by MI5, MI6, the Mossad, the C.I.A., the N.S.A., the Freemasons, the Scientologists, the military-industrial complex or a cabal of sinister British establishment figures led by Queen Elizabeth II’s 85-year-old husband, Prince Philip.



Instead, an exhaustive British police inquiry into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a Parisian underpass early on Aug. 31, 1997, concluded Thursday that she had been killed the way the authorities always said she had been: in a car accident, with her boyfriend, Emad Mohamed al-Fayed, known as Dodi, and their driver, Henri Paul.

“Our conclusion is that, on the evidence available at this time, there was no conspiracy to murder any of the occupants of the car,” Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, who led the inquiry, told reporters as he presented his findings here. “This was a tragic accident.”

The inquiry, known as the Operation Paget, was hardly the Warren Commission. But it did take three years, cost about $7.3 million and produce an 832-page report.

A dozen investigators interviewed some 300 witnesses, re-examined extensive evidence compiled by the French in two investigations, collected more than 600 exhibits and looked into details about, among other things, the alcohol in Mr. Paul’s refrigerator (Champagne and beer) and Diana’s fears that her apartment in London was filled with surveillance devices.

The idea was to investigate definitively the notion, disseminated on the Internet and encouraged by accusations from Mohamed al-Fayed, Dodi al-Fayed’s father, that Diana, Dodi and Mr. Paul had been murdered.

The elder Mr. Fayed has repeatedly said that the British royal family and MI5 and MI6, the British security services, killed Diana, 36, because they did not want her to marry Dodi, 41, and have children with him. While the two French investigations concluded that the crash was an accident, 27 percent of Britons surveyed in a poll two years ago said they believed that it was deliberate.

Lord Stevens’s report will be used as the basis for the formal inquest into the deaths, which is to resume next year. Inquests — which determine who died and when, where and how — are standard practice in Britain in cases of violent or unnatural death. This one has been delayed, officials said, by the long and complicated French investigations, by various lawsuits brought by Mr. Fayed and by the practical difficulties of gathering so much information.

The inquest functions like a court and, because Diana’s body was moved to St. James’s Palace, is being conducted by the royal coroner, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. She must decide whether to hear the case herself or put it to a jury — which, according to an odd quirk of royal law, would have to be made up of members of the queen’s household.

In its examination, Operation Paget, a name generated randomly, appears to have considered every small inconsistency, unexplained fact and niggling question that conspiracy theorists and seekers of sinister motives have raised over the years. It has found explanations for most of them, though it has not located the white Fiat Uno said to have been lurking in the area around the time of the crash, 12:23 a.m., nor has it explained what Mr. Paul, 41, was doing between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Among the report’s conclusions: Mr. Paul was driving drunk. No one flashed a strange bright light in his eyes, disorienting him and causing him to lose control of the car. No one swapped his body for someone else’s in the morgue in Paris, or switched blood samples, or doctored his toxicology reports.

Diana’s apartment was not being bugged, Philip, her former father-in-law, was not out to get her and neither the National Security Agency nor MI6 was monitoring her calls. She was not pregnant with Dodi al-Fayed’s baby.

And, although he was perhaps planning to propose that night and indeed had a ring in hand, Diana needed marriage, she had confided to a friend, “like a rash on my face.”
In the course of their work, the investigators interviewed people Diana spoke to on her cellphone in the days before she died, including a self-styled spiritual adviser, a tabloid reporter, a car salesman turned friend and the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States.

They interviewed an American model who believed that she was engaged to Dodi al-Fayed and had a ring to prove it, even as he turned up in France with his new girlfriend, Diana. They interviewed pathologists, toxicologists, members of the paparazzi, MI5 and MI6 officials, embalmers, British diplomats, Prince Charles, drinking buddies of Mr. Paul’s, two newly discovered witnesses to the crash, a gaggle of Diana’s former boyfriends and hangers-on, her butler, her sister and — many times — Mohamed al-Fayed.

“I very much hope that all the work we have done and the publication of this report will help to bring some closure,” Lord Stevens said.

Fat chance. Speaking to reporters on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Fayed said the report was “garbage” and called Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner, “a mental case” and “a tool for the establishment and the royal family and intelligence.”

“I’m certain 100 percent that a leading member of the royal family has planned that and that the whole plot was executed on his order with the help of members of MI6.”

In speaking to reporters, Lord Stevens took care not to lay the blame for the accident on either Mr. Paul or the paparazzi, who many say caused the crash by pursuing Diana’s car. “A crash of this nature is similar to a major crash of an airliner,” Lord Stevens said. “There is a long chain of events. Take out any link of that chain, and this would not have happened.” He called Mr. Fayed a “genuinely grieving parent,” but said that “there are other people who are grieving also” and urged everyone to “draw a line in it and move on.”

Lord Stevens and his team spent three weeks trawling through records from MI5 and MI6 to determine whether the agencies were involved in Diana’s death. They were not, he concluded.
A C.I.A. spokesman, Mark Mansfield, said Thursday that while everyone could understand Mr.

Fayed’s grief and sense of loss, “the notion that the C.I.A. spied on Princess Diana is ludicrous.”
Curiously, Louis F. Giles, the director of policy for the central security service at the N.S.A., told the inquiry that the agency had 39 documents mentioning Diana that it had “acquired from intelligence gathering of international communications.” He refused to release the documents, but said that the N.S.A. had not been monitoring Diana’s calls — the implication being that it had been monitoring other people with whom she had happened to speak.

Lord Stevens said he felt confident that nothing had been withheld from him, and added that even if the intelligence agencies had been eavesdropping on Diana, which they had not been, they would not have heard anything interesting.

For instance, the American investigative writer Gerald Posner says in the report that through a source, he heard an intercept of a telephone call between Diana and Lúcia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian ambassador at the time. The inference, the report says, was that the embassy, not Diana, was being bugged.

What did he hear? “I could only decipher a British woman and a woman with a slight Hispanic accent talking about hairstyles,” he said.

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Diana's death was very tragic, and like JFK's will continue to be speculated for many years. A lot of attention has been on Diana but we must also remember that two other people died, the driver and also Dodi Fayed - the families of the two men deserve answers and rest assured they and many of the public will not stop until the truth is revealed.

BBC Video (Real Palyer): Lord Stevens' briefing

BBC News: At-a-glance: Diana death inquiry