None of these symptoms are apparent from the mass of CCTV footage which covers his movements in the hour before the party left the hotel.
In short, this blood sample, which matched the alcohol content of the initial police leak, had a carbon monoxide content which proves it could not have come from Henri Paul. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the French authorities have consistently refused to allow test specimens to be examined by outside pathologists, or that their top judge refuses to allow DNA samples from those specimens to be compared with DNA samples from Henri Paul. Astonishingly, Commander Mules still maintains the ridiculous fantasy that the carbon monoxide was inhaled during the last moments of Henri Paul’s life. Mercedes airbags, according to the Paris Criminal Brigade, still contain large amounts of carbon monoxide—irrespective of the denials of the car’s manufacturer.
Perhaps they would benefit from a chat with their own firemen. Those attending the crash were wearing carbon monoxide detectors. None of these indicated any trace of the gas in or near the wreckage.
What is beyond argument is that there were twenty-two other victims of “investigable death” in Paris that night. I was told by an extremely reliable police informant, attached to the city’s pathology units, that one of the victims of “investigable death” that night was a man with money and marital problems, taking drugs for depression, who had drunk over half a bottle of vodka, before attaching a hose from the exhaust of his car to the interior and killing himself by sucking in carbon monoxide.
A sample of this man’s blood would certainly have shown all the constituents of that purporting to come from Henri Paul, and would have had a similarly high percentage of carbon monoxide in it. Identifying the source of this carbon monoxide would have presented no problem. It would certainly have shown alcohol three times the legal limit, which was, for the police, the main criterion. The sky-high carbon monoxide content was clearly something which they had not anticipated—hence the bungled attempt at a cover-up.
My police informant refused to accept any payment for supplying the above information. He did so because he felt a major injustice had taken place and that Henri Paul had been made a scapegoat for something for which he was not responsible. He also pointed out that pathologists have been unable to explain the equally embarrassing autopsy report which showed that Henri Paul displayed absolutely no signs of the liver damage normally found in heavy drinkers, or even regular drinkers.
The police, not unexpectedly, utterly refuse to identify any of the other twenty-two persons classified as “investigable deaths” who were dealt with that night. Their pathology results are guarded more closely than the French mint.
Whether the switch was made accidentally or deliberately, I have no doubt at all that the blood samples purporting to have come from Henri Paul were not taken from the Ritz security chief’s body, and were almost certainly from the body of an anonymous suicide victim.
Clearly Judge Hervé Stephan was not impressed with any of the answers given him by doctors.
“The blood is the great mystery of the affair,” he concluded.
FIFTEEN
Renegade former MI6 agent D/813317 Richard John Charles Tomlinson, who worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service from September 1991 to April 1995, says he believes there are documents held by his former employers that would yield important evidence into the cause and circumstances leading to the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed.
When Tomlinson was first recruited by MI6, he was expected to be a high-flyer. His qualifications were as good as they get. A British and New Zealand citizen, he was educated at Cambridge University and was later a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is fluent in French, German and Spanish. He was recruited, under the trusted old-boy university network, as a fast-stream intelligence officer into Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in 1991, and completed the six-months initial training course with the highest marks ever achieved.
In revealing inside secrets on how Princess Diana died, Tomlinson lifted the lid on the murky world of MI6 and told how Diana was spied on for fifteen years until the night of the crash.
“I saw various documents during my four years with MI6 that I believe would provide new evidence and facts into the investigation of their deaths,” he says. “I also heard various rumors which—though I was not able to see supporting documents—I am confident were based on solid fact.”
Tomlinson, whose job also involved recruiting new spies for England, spoke out against some of the extreme methods being used by MI6 and was dismissed without warning and without reason in 1995. Intelligence chiefs kept their reasons hidden under the Official Secrets Act.
In 1996, under his campaign against MI6 abuses of power, Tomlinson wrote, but did not publish, a book. A five-page synopsis he gave to Australia’s Transworld Publishers was handed to MI6 and Tomlinson was arrested under the Official Secrets Act. Writing from his prison cell while on remand, he said in the
Sunday Times
that he saw himself as a political prisoner, and described the extraordinary lengths MI6 had gone to hunt him down. He said he relished the opportunity from open court to expose the hypocrisy, dishonesty, unaccountability and mismanagement at MI6.
The opportunity was never granted. On December 18, 1997, Tomlinson was sentenced at the Old Bailey to twelve months in a maximum-security prison. In passing sentence, the judge said he was doing so “in the national interest.”
It was after his release from prison that he began seriously probing the Alma tunnel death crash, and realized he recognized some of the personalities involved. “I do believe there was MI6 involvement in the crash which killed Princess Diana and the others,” he says. “I came across Henri Paul’s personal file in 1992 while I was involved in a complicated operation to smuggle advanced Soviet weaponry out of the Soviet Union. The operations involved a large cast of officers and agents of MI6. On more than one occasion, meetings between various figures in the operation took place at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. There were several intelligence reports of these meetings in the file written by a Paris-based MI6 officer, identified in the file by a coded designation.
“The source was an informant in the Ritz Hotel, who again was identified in the files by a code number. The MI6 officer paid the informant in cash for his information. I became curious, as his number cropped up several times and he seemed to have extremely good access to the goings-on in the Ritz Hotel, and I ordered his personal file from MI6’s central file registry.
“I learned that the informant was a security officer at the Ritz Hotel. Intelligence services always target the security officers of important hotels because they have such good access to intelligence. I remember, however, being mildly surprised that the nationality of this informant was French, and this stuck in my memory because it is rare that MI6 succeeds in recruiting a French informer. This was Henri Paul.
“I am confident the relationship between him and MI6 would have continued until his death, because MI6 would never willingly relinquish control over such a well-placed informant. I am sure that the personal file of Henri Paul will therefore contain notes of meetings between him and his MI6 controling officer right up until the point of his death.
“I firmly believe that these files will contain evidence of crucial importance to the circumstances and causes of the incident that killed Monsieur Paul, together with the Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed.
“The most senior undeclared officer in the local MI6 station would normally control an informant of Monsieur Paul’s usefulness and seniority. In Paris, at the time of his death, there were two relatively experienced but undeclared MI6 officers. The first was Nicholas Langman. The second was Richard Spearman. I firmly believe that either one or both of these officers will be acquainted with Monsieur Paul, and most probably also met Monsieur Paul shortly before his death. I believe that either or both of these officers will have knowledge that will be of crucial importance in establishing the sequence of events leading up to the death of Princess Diana.
“Mr. Spearman in particular was an extremely well-connected and influential officer because he had been, prior to his appointment in Paris, the personal secretary to the chief of MI6, David Spedding. As such he would have been privy to even the most confidential of MI6 operations. I believe that there may well be significance in the fact that Richard Spearman was posted to Paris in the month immediately before the deaths.
“I told Judge Stephan that I believed MI6 might have ordered Henri Paul to drive into the tunnel. He would not have known it was an ambush.”
Tomlinson said that it was also in 1992 that he saw a three-page document which was an outline plan to assassinate the Serbian leader, President Slobodan Milosevic. “The plan was fully typed and attached to a yellow ‘minute’ board, signifying that this was a formal and accountable document. It was entitled ‘The need to assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia’.
“It was noted that the document had been circulated to several senior MI6 officers, including the head of Balkan operations and the personal secretary to the chief of MI6. The proposal was to cause Milosevic’s car to crash in a tunnel using a brilliant flash of light at just the right moment to blind the driver. Some elements were chillingly similar to those involved in the death of Princess Diana.”
During his service in MI6, Tomlinson also learned, unofficially and secondhand, something of the links between MI6 and the royal household.
“MI6 are frequently and routinely asked by the royal household, usually via the Foreign Office, to provide intelligence on potential threats to members of the royal family on overseas trips. This service would frequently extend to asking friendly intelligence services, such as the CIA, to place members of the royal family under discreet surveillance, ostensibly for their own protection.
“This was particularly the case for the Princess of Wales, who often insisted on doing without overt personal protection, even on overseas trips. Although contact between MI6 and the royal household was officially only via the Foreign Office, I learned while in MI6 that there was unofficial direct contact between certain senior and influential MI6 officers and senior members of the royal household. There is an arrogant faction in MI6, a part of the Oxbridge clique, which doesn’t try to hide dedication to the royal family and their self-appointment as defenders of the realm.
“I firmly believe that MI6 documents would yield substantial leads on the nature of their links with the royal household, and would yield vital information about MI6 surveillance on the princess in the days leading to her death.”
Tomlinson gave much of this information to Judge Hervé Stephan on Friday, August 28, 1998—almost exactly one year after Diana’s murder.
“The lengths MI6, the CIA and the DST took to deter me giving evidence, and subsequently stop me talking about it, strongly suggests they had something to hide,” he says. “They have continued to attempt to harass me at every opportunity they can.
“On July 31, 1998, the DST arrested me in my Paris bedroom. Although I had no record of violent conduct, I was arrested with such ferocity, and at gunpoint, that I received a broken rib. I was taken to the headquarters of the DST and interrogated for thirty-eight hours. Despite my repeated requests, I was never given any justification for the arrest and was not shown the arrest warrant. Even though I was released without charge, the DST confiscated from me my laptop computer and Psion organizer. They illegally gave these to MI6 who took them back to the U.K. They were not returned for six months.
“The following week, on Friday, August 7, 1998, I boarded a Qantas flight at Auckland, New Zealand, for a flight to Sydney, Australia, where I was due to give a television interview on Channel Nine.
“I was actually in my seat awaiting take-off when an official boarded the plane and told me to get off. It seemed the airline had received a fax ‘from Canberra’ saying there was a problem with my travel papers. When I asked to see the fax I was told it was not possible.
“I don’t think the fax existed. The whole thing was just a ploy to keep me in New Zealand so the police there could take further action.
“Within half an hour of my returning to the hotel, both the police and the NZSIS, the New Zealand Secret Intelligence Service, raided me. After being detained and searched for about three hours, they eventually confiscated from me all my remaining computer equipment that the French DST had not succeeded in taking from me. Again, I didn’t get some of those items back until six months later.
“Moreover, shortly after I had given my evidence to Judge Stephan, I was invited to talk about this evidence in a live television interview on America’s NBC television channel. I flew from Geneva to JFK airport on Sunday, August 30, 1998, to give the interview in New York on the following Monday morning.
“Shortly after arrival at John F. Kennedy airport, the captain of the Swiss Air flight told all passengers to return to their seats. Four U.S. immigration authority officers entered the plane, came straight to my seat, asked for my passport as identity, and then frogmarched me off the plane. I was taken to the immigration detention center, photographed, fingerprinted, manacled by my ankle to a chair for seven hours, served with deportation papers, and then returned on the next available plane to Geneva.
“I was not allowed to make any telephone calls to the representatives of NBC awaiting me at the airport. The U.S. immigration officers, who were all openly sympathetic to my situation and apologized for treating me so badly, openly admitted they were acting under instructions from the CIA.
“In January the next year I booked a chalet in the village of Samoens in the French Alps for a ten-day snowboarding holiday with my parents. I picked them up with a rental car from Geneva airport on January 8 and set off for the French border.
“At the French customs post our car was stopped and I was detained. Four officers from the DST held me for four hours. At the end of this interview I was served with deportation papers and ordered to return to Switzerland.
“In the papers my supposed destination had been changed from Chamonix to Samoens. This was because when first questioned I told a junior DST officer my destination was Chamonix. When a senior officer arrived an hour or so later, he crossed out ‘Chamonix’ and inserted ‘Samoens’ without even asking or confirming this with me. I believe this was because MI6 had told them of my true destination, having learned the information through surveillance on my parents’ telephone in the U.K.
“My banning from France was entirely illegal under European law. With a British passport I am entitled to travel freely within the European Union. MI6 did a deal with the DST to have me banned from France because they wanted to prevent me from giving further evidence to Judge Stephan’s inquest, which at the time I was planning to do.
“Whatever MI6’s role in the events leading to the death of the Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul, I am absolutely certain that there is substantial evidence in their files that would provide crucial evidence in establishing the exact causes of this tragedy.
“I believe they have gone to considerable lengths to obstruct the course of justice by interfering with my freedom of speech and travel, and this, in my view, confirms my belief that they have something to hide. I believe that the protection given to MI6 files under the Official Secrets Act should be set aside in the public interest in uncovering once and for all the truth behind these dramatic and historically momentous events.
“Why don’t they yield up this information? They should not be allowed to use the Official Secrets Act to protect themselves from investigation into the deaths of three people.”