Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Read online

He did not waste time in telling me what that was: access to all my Mossad contacts. “You give me the names. They give me the information I want. I give you one million pounds in whatever currency you want. No need to pay tax. I will take care of everything.”

  I had been warned that there is still an element of a souk trader in al-Fayed. For the next twenty minutes he launched into a diatribe that I was not quite prepared for. He attacked the Queen and Prince Philip and well-known figures he called “establishment whores and pimps.” He reserved his greatest venom for the intelligence service, branding them “killers.”

  Picking up my book, which had been marked and annotated in the margin, he said again: “Mossad are the people who can tell me the truth. Bring them to me and I will make you a very happy man.” Before I could respond, he launched an attack on Henri Paul: “I trusted him, really trusted him. I would have done anything for him because Dodi liked him. My son, like me, was too trusting. That was one of the reasons Diana loved him, wanted him to be her husband, a father to her children. But they didn’t want it. The Queen and her husband, her lackeys, that awful brother of hers, Earl Spencer … none of them wanted it. None of them wanted a Wog in the family. You know what Wog is? A Wily Oriental Gentleman. Only they didn’t see that Dodi was a gentleman. They smeared his character when he was alive. They continue to do so now he is dead. Yet all Diana needed was what she told me she needed: someone she could trust after all she had gone through …”

  Those words do not convey the intensity of his delivery, the profanities he used, the wild hand gestures and, above all, the painful torment on his face. Mohamed al-Fayed was a man in pain. I could only listen as he continued to unburden himself.

  “Did you know Diana was almost certainly pregnant … maybe eight weeks … and that Dodi, my son, was the father? Did you know that at the hospital in Paris, after her death, they removed many of her organs and that she came home to London as a mummy? Did you know that when we last met she told me how much she loved Dodi and how happy they were together?”

  I said I did not know any of those things. For a long moment Mohamed al-Fayed sat there, tears close, his face working, lost in some inner world.

  Then he said: “Tell me who can help me to find out all the truth about who arranged for my son and his beloved Diana to die?”

  I told him I had in mind two people. One was Victor Ostrovsky (see chapter 10, “A Dangerous Liaison,” pp. 192–94, 208–10). The other was Ari Ben-Menashe.

  “Find them. Bring them to me,” commanded Mohamed al-Fayed. At that moment there was more than a hint of an imperious pharaoh about him.

  It took me a week to locate them. Ostrovsky was living in Arizona; he would only speak with me through an intermediary, a journalist who works for an Arab news magazine. In the end Ostrovsky had a short discussion with John MacNamara that led nowhere.

  Ari Ben-Menashe had just returned from Africa when I spoke to him in Montreal. I told him about my meeting with al-Fayed. Ben-Menashe said “it is not altogether crazy what he says. That much I know already. There was a definite intelligence presence around Diana and Dodi in that last day in Paris.”

  He agreed to meet Mohamed al-Fayed in London the following week, early April.

  Ben-Menashe’s account of that meeting echoes what Mohamed al-Fayed had told me at our meeting. Ben-Menashe, a fastidious, unfailingly polite man, had been frankly shocked at the emotive language al-Fayed had used to attack members of the Royal Family. Nevertheless, he had agreed to make further enquiries in Tel Aviv to see how much more Mossad would be prepared to add to the material I had already published in the original edition of this book.

  Ten days later he met with al-Fayed in his Harrods salon and told him that a number of intelligence services “might well have a case to answer.” Ben-Menashe added he would be happy to put his own staff to work on building such a case and suggested a retainer fee of $750,000 a year plus expenses to be agreed mutually.

  Meantime, independent of Ben-Menashe, I had continued to make my own enquiries to establish the role ECHELON had played in the last days of Diana and Dodi’s lives.

  I discovered through sources in Washington and elsewhere that the couple had continued to be under surveillance during the week they had spent cruising off the Emerald Coast of Sardinia on the Jonikal, the 60-meter yacht owned by Mohamed al-Fayed. ECHELON had also tracked the posse of paparazzi that had chased them in speedboats, on motorcycles, in cars. Time and again the Jonikal had evaded its pursuers. But ECHELON’s computers picked up Diana’s chagrin at being hunted. Conversations between her and Dodi, between the couple and their bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, recorded by ECHELON, all reflect her tense mood. On that Friday night, August 28th 1997, she told Dodi she wanted to go to Paris “as soon as possible.”

  Within hours, arrangements had been finalized. A Gulfstream-IV was ordered to fly to Sardinia’s private airport the following day. Tomas Muzzu, an elderly Sardinian with many years experience of driving celebrities around the island, was retained to drive the couple to the airport.

  Muzzu’s account of the conversation in the car is striking confirmation to what an ECHELON satellite had scooped up.

  “They spoke in English, very loving words. From time to time Dodi, who spoke good Italian, spoke to me. Then he switched back to English. I do not speak that language very well, but my impression was of a couple very much in love and making plans for their future.”

  My sources insist that a portion of the ECHELON tapes show the couple talking of marriage and the life they planned together. Dodi continuously reassured her that he would ensure their privacy by enlisting the services of the al-Fayed protection team.

  The private jet left Sardinia after the pilot made an urgent call to European air traffic control center in Brussels to give him a priority take-off slot.

  During the two-hour flight to Le Bourget airport ten miles north of Paris, the aircraft’s occupants were monitored by ECHELON, the conversations of Di and Dodi once more uplifted to a satellite and then downloaded to computers at Fort Meade in Maryland.

  While my source could offer no “smoking gun” proof, he was “in my own mind,” convinced that “relevant parts” of the conversation were relayed to GCHQ, Britain’s communications center. “From there they would find their way up through the Whitehall network. By then anything Diana said, any decision she made, would have been of prime interest to certain people in authority.”

  I put all this to Ari Ben-Menashe. His response was gratifying but frustrating. “You’re very close to being on the button. How close I can’t tell you.” Ben-Menashe’s position was simple. He was hoping to sign a lucrative contract with Mohamed al-Fayed. Any information would have to go to him first.

  In the end, the contract would not materialize. Al-Fayed wanted first to see what “evidence” Ben-Menashe could show him before agreeing to pay.

  Ben-Menashe, more used to dealing with governments than “a man with the manner of a souk trader,” found himself handling “a number of somewhat hysterical telephone calls from MacNamara insisting I should show him documents. This was very surprising for a man who should have had some experience of how the security services work from his own days at Scotland Yard. I had to tell him that Mossad doesn’t hand out documents willy-nilly. I had to explain to him, much as you do to a new copper on the beat, the facts of life in the intelligence community.”

  Thwarted, al-Fayed refused to retreat into silence. His spokesman, Laurie Meyer, found himself waging new battles with the media who, with increasing force, challenged al-Fayed’s view of an “Establishment plot to murder my son and his future bride.”

  Watching from a distance, Ari Ben-Menashe felt that al-Fayed “was his own worst enemy. From all the enquiries I had made, at no expense to him, the sort of preliminary investigation I made before assigning my company to any such work, it was clear that the Royal Family as such has no case to answer. It may well be that privately they would not have wished Diana to marry Dodi. But
that is a long way from saying they wanted the young couple murdered. That said, I did turn up some hard evidence that does point to the involvement of security services around the time of their deaths. There are serious questions to be asked and answered. But al-Fayed will not get answers the way he continues to behave. Fundamentally he does not understand the mentality of those he is trying to convince. And worse, he is surrounded by lackeys, ‘yes men’ who tell him what he wants to hear.”

  Early in May 1999, John MacNamara flew to Geneva, Switzerland, to meet Richard Tomlinson, a former staff officer with MI6. For four years Tomlinson, who had once been tipped to be a high-flier in British intelligence, had run a relentless campaign against his former employers. Originally recruited at Cambridge University by an MI6 “talent spotter,” Tomlinson had been abruptly sacked in the spring of 1995 after telling his MI6 personnel officer of his growing emotional difficulties.

  In a telephone conversation he told me that “my honesty cost me my job. The ‘powers-that-be’ decided that despite my impressive results, I lacked a stiff upper lip.”

  Tomlinson described how he had tried to sue MI6 for unfair dismissal but the British government had successfully stopped his case coming before a court. Then its offer of a pay-off—“cash for my silence” was how Tomlinson put it—was withdrawn after an Australian publisher to whom Tomlinson had sent a synopsis of a book about his career with MI6, submitted the document to MI6 to see if publishing would lead to legal action. MI6 moved swiftly. Tomlinson was arrested as he was about to leave Britain and sentenced to two years in jail for breaching the Official Secrets Act.

  Released from prison in April 1998, Tomlinson moved first to Paris and then to Switzerland. There he began to use Internet cafes to post highly embarrassing details of MI6 operations. This included revealing a high-level mole in Germany’s Central Bank claiming the man—code-named Orcadia—had betrayed his country’s economic secrets to Britain. He also disclosed details of a plot by MI6 to assassinate President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia in 1992.

  Then came the moment he moved from being just another disgruntled former spy into the world of Mohamed al-Fayed, already wellpeopled with conspiratorial figures.

  To the billionaire Tomlinson, by now almost penniless, was, al-Fayed told me, “like a sign from heaven.” He encouraged Tomlinson to tell all he knew to the French judge investigating the deaths of Diana and Dodi.

  In a sworn affidavit, Tomlinson claimed MI6 was implicated in the couple’s deaths. Agents of the service had been in Paris for two weeks prior to their deaths and had held several meetings with Henri Paul, “who was a paid informer of MI6.” Later in his affidavit, Tomlinson alleged “Paul had been blinded as he drove through the underpass by a high-powered flash, a technique which is consistent with MI6 methods in other assassinations.”

  Such allegations brought Tomlinson even deeper into al-Fayed’s inner circle. The former agent was now more than “a sign from heaven.” He had become, in al-Fayed’s words to me, “the man who could unravel the terrible truth of an incident of such magnitude and historical importance.”

  It was to further encourage Tomlinson to continue with his campaign that MacNamara had flown to Geneva.

  Ever since he had arrived in the city, Tomlinson had faced increasing insolvency. He could barely find the rent for his studio apartment. His efforts to raise money by writing travel articles had come to nothing. His efforts to be employed as a private detective had also failed because he feared to travel around Europe in case MI6 agents “snatched me.” On the advice of MI6, he had been banned from being admitted to the United States, Australia, and France. Only Switzerland had offered him sanctuary on the grounds that any breaches of the Official Secrets Act was “a political crime” and therefore not a subject for extradition.

  MI6 sources I have spoken to suggest that MacNamara had gone to see Tomlinson with a view to resolving the former spy’s financial plight. More certain is that shortly afterwards Tomlinson had sufficient funds to launch what he called “my nuclear option.” Using a sophisticated Microsoft program he had installed in his state-of-the-art computer, Tomlinson began to publish on his specially created and very expensive website the names of over one hundred serving MI6 officers—including twelve he said had been involved in a plot to kill Diana and Dodi.

  There was no clear-cut, smoking-gun evidence offered against any of those agents. But within hours their names had been flashed around the world.

  A stunned MI6 desperately tried to close down the website, but no sooner had they managed to close one than another opened. In London the Foreign Office admitted the breach of security was the most serious since the Cold War—“and the lives of some MI6 agents and their contacts have been put at risk.” Certainly those named as working in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other Middle East countries had to be urgently withdrawn.

  But neither Tomlinson or Mohamed al-Fayed could have calculated one effect. So grave was the overall breach of security that the claim that a handful of MI6 agents had been involved in a plot against Diana went virtually unnoticed. It was dismissed as being part of al-Fayed’s obsession.

  In June 1999 matters took a more serious turn when al-Fayed’s Harrods website published the name of a senior MI6 officer. The website alleged that the agent, who was then serving in the Balkans, had orchestrated “a vicious campaign” to smear al-Fayed and “destroy his reputation.”

  Britain’s ministry of defense took the unusual step of publicly warning that publication had endangered the agent and his contacts in Kosovo and Serbia.

  The agent’s identity had been revealed alongside the site’s online book where thousands of visitors have left messages commemorating the deaths of Diana and Dodi.

  Laurie Meyer, the Harrods spokesman, promised to have the agent’s name removed—“obviously it is an error.”

  Reports then surfaced in Germany’s mass-circulation Bild that Richard Tomlinson had evidence that Henri Paul had installed a bugging device in the Imperial Suite at the Ritz Hotel and had obtained tapes of the “last intimate moments” of Diana and Dodi. Shortly before Paul drove them to their death, the couple had spent several hours alone in the suite.

  The tapes, according to Bild, had become the subject of a hunt by MI6 to locate them.

  Around this time Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother, decided to intervene. He told American television audiences that at best “the romance my sister had with Dodi al-Fayed was no more than a summer fling. She had absolutely no intention to marry him.”

  Mohamed al-Fayed pointed out, with some justification, that the relationship between Spencer and Diana was hardly close at the time of her death.

  None of this was any surprise to Ari Ben-Menashe. He had continued to follow the never-ending saga of al-Fayed’s attempts “to prove his fixation that the Queen and Prince Philip organized a plot to kill Diana.”

  The highly experienced Israeli intelligence officer felt that, “in throwing in his lot with Richard Tomlinson, al-Fayed had lost the plot. He is now reduced to running to the tabloids. Yet I know for a fact that if he had gone about matters properly and organized a serious investigation he would have turned up some very surprising results. There is something very strange about the deaths of Diana and Dodi. No doubt about it. There was a case to investigate. But the trail has been muddied by al-Fayed himself. It may not even be his fault. He is surrounded by people who tell him to look here, not there. For some of them, keeping the whole thing going is a sort of pension for them. They know that every new, half-baked theory they come up with will encourage al-Fayed to spend more of his money in pursuing it. Along the way he tramples out of sight what evidence there may have been to uncover.”

  A hint of what that could be came in late June 1999 when it emerged that the mysterious white Fiat Uno seen zigzagging way from the scene of the death crash of Diana and Dodi was destroyed in a car crusher. In moments the Uno, from which traces of paint scrapes had been found in the tunnel, had been reduced to a block of s
crap metal.

  The claim was contained in a secret Mossad investigation that began within hours of the fatal crash. It had been launched by Mossad’s then director general, Danny Yatom. He had been concerned that Mossad’s determined attempts to recruit Henri Paul could lead to accusation that this had played a part in Diana’s death.

  The investigation focused on a period that covered the two weeks before the accident—or what al-Fayed still calls “the appearance of an accident to cover up murder”—and the days afterwards.

  Mossad investigators discovered that as well as the agency’s own presence in Paris prior to the death of the couple, there was a four-man MI6 team in the city. They were based at the British Embassy for the first week, but later moved into a rented apartment—“an MI6 safe house”—near the Ritz. One of the team checked into the hotel itself four days before the death of Dodi and Diana.

  The Mossad report reveals that around August 14/15 1997, a CIA team also arrived in the city. The team had been tracking Diana for some time, keeping tabs on her attacks on land mine manufacturers, many of which are U.S.-based.

  The CIA reports form part of the 1,051 documents Mohamed al-Fayed has to battle through the American courts to obtain copies of. The U.S. Justice Department has claimed the documents contained material “sensitive to national security.”

  The Mossad report suggests that sensitivity could refer to why Britain had asked the United States to help in monitoring Diana.

  “Britain saw her as a loose cannon,” insisted al-Fayed. “In fact she was a woman of great courage who was ready to confront the land mines issue.”

  The Mossad investigation details how the various intelligence services hurriedly left Paris after the deaths of Diana and Dodi.

  Mossad’s report contains a detailed timetable of Dodi and Diana’s last hours. It is partly based on firsthand observations by Maurice and his contacts. Other information came from Mossad’s “back channel” contacts with agents in the French capital, from MI6, the CIA, and French Intelligence.