Gideon's Spies

By 1997, Mohamed al-Fayed’s name had also been added to the global computer search. ECHELON may well have been the first outside his family circle to know of his hope that his son would marry a princess of the line—and then later his claim that on the eve of their deaths he had planned to announce their engagement.

There is much in the NSA documents that may still cause further surprise—and provide proof, through Diana’s own words, that she had indeed planned to marry her lover.

I only became aware of ECHELON’s role shortly before publication of the original edition of this book in March 1999. It was then that I also became aware of just how far the deaths of his son and Diana had continued to consume Mohamed al-Fayed. It was a jolting experience to be exposed to such uncontrolled grief and his anger and belief in a conspiracy that fed it.

On a March afternoon I met Mohamed al-Fayed in the privacy of his private salon on the fifth floor of Harrods. Guarding its approaches were his personal bodyguards. Al-Fayed told me they “are all former SAS soldiers, totally loyal to me. I pay them well. They make sure I live. I have been threatened so many times. My car is bulletproof.”

These revelations, delivered in a tense low voice, came as he entered the salon. I was not sure whether I should take his outburst as a warning or a reassurance I was safe to tell him anything he wanted to know.

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.