Gideon's Spies

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.”