Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (33 page)

Then came the fatal error. During the meal Dodi ordered his security team to make arrangements for him and Diana to return to his apartment. He ruled that his regular chauffeur, Philippe Dourneau, who had driven so coolly and sensibly earlier in the day when the paparazzi had given chase, should drive the Range Rover away from the hotel on some kind of decoy run, in the hopes that the photographers would follow it. When they were ready Diana and Dodi would leave from the back entrance in a leased Mercedes driven by Henri Paul, who,
although off duty by now, would be called back. Apparently, both Rees-Jones and Wingfield thought that this plan was a bad one, telling Dodi that it was wrong to separate the vehicles, something which, in their view, ran contrary to their training and to other guidelines on the safety of their principals.

They were overruled by Dodi, however. Rees-Jones and Wingfield seem to have been persuaded to focus on evading the photographers, rather than on providing security.

I have referred in this book to several occasions when I was required to negotiate photo opportunities that had involved scores of journalists and photographers. As a result of these arrangements, security was strengthened. I am convinced that had there been similar communication between the bodyguards and the media outside the Ritz, then they could have arranged a properly controlled and timed departure. Instead, they committed a grave error of judgment, in my opinion, by continuing with the game of ‘beat the paparazzi’, a game they lost.

Dodi was courting disaster. His decision to keep ferrying the Princess around Paris was simply agitating the paparazzi, who actually needed guidance – as strange as that may sound – if order was to be maintained. During publicised events, both royal and government, official media representatives brief and advise the assembled media. These briefings are essential to both sides. Had a statement been issued to the media that night, explaining that Dodi and the Princess were tired after a long day and had decided to stay overnight at the Ritz, most of the press would have simply given up the chase and left the area, if only for a few hours.

Rees-Jones’s lack of understanding of the paparazzi is crucial. He appears to be reverting to his army days when he describes the press as ‘the enemy’ and refers to the photographers as if they are ‘snipers’, comparing their long lenses with rifle barrels. In adopting this attitude, he failed to appreciate the situation he faced.

There were a number of other factors that contributed to the failures in security. Rees-Jones claims that Henri Paul ‘turned out to be drunk’ when he appeared in answer to Dodi’s summons. In fact, Henri Paul was so intoxicated that any protection officer should have known immediately that he was incapable of driving a car, and acted decisively as a result. The autopsy showed that Paul’s blood/alcohol count was more than twice the legal limit for drivers, and his blood also showed traces of other prescribed drugs that would have affected his ability to drive.

Rees-Jones states in his book that Ben Murrell, one of Fayed’s British security men posted to the Windsor villa, had noticed while chatting with Henri Paul that day that he ‘smelt as if he had had a very good lunch’. Significantly, in addition to Murrell’s comments, Wingfield and Rees-Jones sat in the bar of the Ritz around at 10 pm with Paul, and watched him drink, although Paul apparently told the two bodyguards he was drinking pineapple juice. He ordered a pastis, a very strong liquor with a pungent and easily detectable aniseed smell. It is usually drunk mixed with water, which turns the liquid cloudy, producing a colour similar to that of a pineapple juice. I am convinced, however, that if two Scotland Yard protection officers had been sitting alongside Paul, they would have detected immediately that he was drinking alcohol.

Why didn’t the bodyguards stop Henri Paul from driving, or, if that failed, prevent the principals from travelling with him? The answer, I think, lies in the employees/employer relationship between them and Dodi Fayed. They had no opportunities for negotiation, or even to offer suggestions, and least of all for a show of initiative. By contrast, Henri Paul was a senior man in the Fayed organisation in Paris. Under these circumstances, even knowing that something was wrong, the bodyguards may have been prepared to sit tight and say nothing, rather than advise Dodi and the Princess of their doubts about Henri Paul’s fitness to drive.

It is possible that Henri Paul had an extraordinary capacity to consume alcohol and conceal its effects. That said, however, one glaring action by Paul should have alerted Rees-Jones to the state of the driver. As the Mercedes pulled away, Paul is said by some sources to have leant out of the window and issued a ‘catch-us-if-you-can’ challenge to the waiting paparazzi. It was not the act of a sober, cool-headed driver, and it acted upon the photographers like a red rag to a bull.

It was said at the time that Henri Paul had been trained as a chauffeur by Mercedes and had attended an evasive anti-hijack driving course. Yet his erratic driving on the way to Dodi’s apartment was not in line with the skills and the ability to remain calm in difficult situations that I have come to expect in a chauffeur trained to such high standards, and which Philippe Dourneau had demonstrated so well earlier that day.

According to Rees-Jones, at the crucial moment, when those expert driving skills were most needed, Paul failed to recognise that he was in charge of a high-powered Mercedes
automatic. In his book, Rees-Jones states that Henri Paul ‘throws the gear into neutral’, believing it to be a manually operated gearbox, which causes the Mercedes to free-wheel at more than 110 kph (over 60 mph) into the unforgiving concrete pillar in the Alma tunnel.

It is clear that the bodyguard was not comfortable with the way Paul was driving just prior to the accident, for he apparently tried to put on his seat belt, pulling it partly across his chest, but failed to buckle it in time (what saved his life was the air bag). What concerns me, however, is that as the bodyguard he should have instructed all of the passengers – including the driver – to fasten their seat belts before they left the Ritz. When I worked with the Princess, she would automatically fasten her belt the moment she got into the car, whether as driver or passenger. Yet she was not wearing one at the time of the crash. I can only assume that Rees-Jones did not feel comfortable in addressing matters with Dodi Fayed that might have been controversial, even confrontational.

One statement in Rees-Jones’s book seems to epitomise his layman’s approach to security, and perhaps allows us an insight into why and where he went wrong. His claim to be a ‘good bloke in a fight’ raises serious questions about his suitability for the job he was tasked with. The ability to acquit oneself well in a brawl is, unequivocally, not qualification enough to protect someone like Diana. In fact, the last thing a protection officer should be involved in is a fight. The primary role of a protection officer is to use his or her intelligence, contacts and instincts to avoid the principal becoming embroiled in any dangerous situation; essentially, to keep their charge out
of harm’s way by avoiding confrontation. Except during an actual attack, aggressive action is the last option, and must only be used when all other courses of action have been tried and exhausted. In my protection career I used such physical tactics only very occasionally, and then only as a last resort.

The basic key to good protection is preparation. When Rees-Jones first heard of his appointment to guard Diana in France, instead of informally contacting Scotland Yard for a briefing or off-the-record advice, he simply reflects that it is going to be ‘a hell of an interesting trip to be on’. Again, there is no suggestion in his book that he or Wingfield carried out reconnaissances before escorting Dodi and Diana to any destination in Paris, something that would, for instance, have saved them a good deal of trouble at the Benoit bistro.

I suspect, too, that the bodyguard was somewhat overawed by the Princess – as many people were – and in his book he recalls that he wanted to do things to please her, and mentions how attractive he found her. As I have said often before, however, if your job is to guard someone, you have to be able to talk to that person honestly. You cannot, for their safety’s sake, be in awe of them. A protection officer’s most crucial skill is not strength or the ability to fire a gun, but communication. You need to have the confidence and the strength of purpose to say no to your principal. Rees-Jones and Wingfield should have questioned the necessity to leave the Ritz and return to Dodi’s apartment. And if, as Rees-Jones repeatedly states, his primary concern was the presence of the paparazzi, he should have told the Princess and Dodi that, in the absence of local police help, they should stay at the hotel and leave in the morning
at daybreak. If Dodi had remained adamant about returning to the apartment, Rees-Jones should then have insisted that, in order to put this plan into operation, he needed local police assistance. I am entirely confident that had such a request been made to the senior police officer on duty, it would have been met with alacrity. Having worked in Paris with the Princess myself, I know that the French authorities would have taken the situation very seriously, and offered every assistance they could. Gendarmes would have arrived to control the waiting press, and the journey from the hotel to the apartment would then have been made under police escort. They would have dictated the route and a safe speed for the journey, while any pursuing photographers would have been held back at a safe distance. There would have been no accident.

Some readers may think that I have judged Rees-Jones too harshly. I have nothing against him personally, and am genuinely sorry that he had to endure such pain and mental suffering in the years after the crash, as well as having to live with the physical effects of his injuries. My assessment of what he did and, perhaps more importantly, what he did not, do, is based on my professional experience, as well as my detailed knowledge of the woman whom I protected for years. Diana was used to security being carried out competently, quietly and without fuss by Scotland Yard. It must have seemed very simple to her, and virtually invisible. She would have been quite unaware that private security guards like Trevor Rees-Jones were not capable of giving her the total security blanket that Scotland Yard had done. Nor would Fayed, who hired Rees-Jones, have had the experience of dealing with the massed
paparazzi that Diana engendered. In my opinion, they were all completely out of their depths.

One of the more depressing aspects of the aftermath of the Princess’s death is the proliferation of conspiracy theories, most saying that she was murdered by some agency or other, for one nefarious purpose or another. Yet her death is not comparable to the assassination of John F Kennedy. There were no bullets, just a drunken driver, a bodyguard who was inexperienced in protecting such a high-profile principal, and an overzealous boyfriend trying to impress. Like so many thousands of others each year, the Princess of Wales died in a mundane road accident.

Mohamed Fayed, his then press spokesman, the former BBC correspondent Michael Cole, and his chief security officer, former Scotland Yard Detective Chief Superintendent John McNamara, have all supported the view that Dodi and Diana were assassinated as part of a conspiracy involving US and British intelligence agencies.

Essentially, Fayed’s conspiracy theory rests on a claim that the British Establishment was unhappy that the mother of a future heir to the throne was planning to marry into the Fayed family (and, in some versions, that she was expecting Dodi’s child) because they are Arabs and Muslims.

He also claims that the US Central Intelligence Agency was electronically eavesdropping on the Princess and Dodi; and that both the CIA and MI6 (the British intelligence and espionage agency) had agents in Paris on the night of the crash, and that both agencies were working together monitoring the
movements of the couple in preparation for an assassination. He states that the driver of the Mercedes, his own deputy head of security at the Paris Ritz, Henri Paul, was an MI6 agent and that he was used as a disposable ‘pawn’ in this plot, and had been ordered to take the river route via the Alma tunnel on the night of the crash rather than the direct route by the Champs-Élysées.

The crux of the conspiracy, he says, centres on an elaborate assassination of the Princess involving a white Fiat Uno car, which was never found. The Fiat was used to slow the speeding Mercedes, thereby enabling the passenger on a motorcycle that overtook the Princess’s car (both rider and passenger being secret agents) to fire a flashgun or similar high-intensity light in the face of Henri Paul in order to blind him momentarily, forcing him to lose control and crash.

Other issues raised by Fayed’s spokesman, Cole, include a belief that the blood samples supposedly from Henri Paul, which show that he was excessively over the prescribed legal alcohol limit for drivers, were not in fact his. He claimed, too, that Diana’s body was embalmed, contrary to French law, apparently as part of a conspiracy to cover up her alleged pregnancy. Fayed maintains that his son, Dodi, told him that the Princess was pregnant some hours before the crash.

In my professional opinion there is no evidence to support this conspiracy theory or any part of it; it is pure speculation. Even if Fayed’s claims that Diana was pregnant and about to wed his son were true, it is impossible to believe that the Queen, Prince Philip and the British government, among others, were prepared to murder four innocent people in order to remove the most popular and high-profile member of the royal family.
Nevertheless, this needs to be seen in perspective. The royal family has undergone a metamorphosis, and is no longer locked in a royal time warp. In her fifty years on the throne, the Queen has acknowledged change and reacted to it, even within her family. Her own sister, Princess Margaret, married a commoner and became the first senior member of the royal family to divorce. Of the Queen’s own four children, three have divorced; all three married commoners, and the Prince of Wales currently maintains a liaison with a divorcee and another commoner, Camilla Parker Bowles. I have to say that, in my experience of working with the royal family for the past sixteen years, if the Queen, or any other member of the royal family, believed that Diana was in love with Dodi Fayed and wished to marry him and have his child, then she would have given the union her blessing.