Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (26 page)

According to Guy, Roland had been paid the money—probably by British intelligence—to organize the assassination of the princess. This he accomplished by playing on Henri Paul’s secret homosexuality, setting him up with a lovely young transvestite “who called herself Belinda.” The treacherous Belinda at some point on the fatal evening planted a “tiny pin-like device” on Paul’s clothing. An instrument of death, this gadget was designed, on signal, to emit the nerve agent VX, which acts as a “synaptic disruptor.” Sure enough, when Paul’s vehicle was in the Alma Tunnel, the device sprayed him with the deadly chemicals, his synapses were disrupted, and bang!
⁴⁵
This was also apparently the way Roland, a serial assassin of European princesses, had accounted for Grace Kelly in September 1982.

Cohen never met Roland himself—though he did speak to a man with a deep voice on the telephone—and therefore could only conclude of Roland’s story, “I cannot prove it is true. I remain unsure.” But Cohen was struck when he found out that the dry cleaner in a village frequented by Solar Order members had once cleaned Prince Charles’s dressing gown. As Cohen pointed out, “This would place the Prince and Di Mambro in a tiny village at the same time.”
⁴⁶
And if this evidence seems a little thin, then there are always the collateral arguments. Doesn’t Charles, asks Cohen, share a lot of interests—stuff like spirituality—with the Solar Temple? Haven’t British intelligence plotted to assassinate people before? Such as the plan to kill Nasser in 1956, the preemptive murder of the IRA members on Gibraltar in 1988, and “possibly, Hilda Murrell, a peace activist in the 1980s.”
⁴⁷
It seems almost redundant to point out that, according to one source at least, Guy, a former customs officer, is a fairly well-known con man and hoaxer on the Continent.
⁴⁸

Cohen’s credentials, sources, and analytical method are representative. I could as easily have chosen
Princess Diana: The Hidden Evidence
by Jon King and Jon Beveridge. These two are billed by their publishers as “investigative journalists,” whose claim to that title comes from their both having worked for one magazine, apparently called
Reality,
and who now work for another, called
Odyssey.
In fact,
Reality
magazine was actually titled
UFO Reality,
and Jon King, far from being an investigative journalist, is a UFOlogist who has written several other books, including
Cosmic Top Secret
and
The Ascension Conspiracy. Princess Diana: The Hidden Evidence
was supposedly based on information received “from a veteran CIA contract agent one week prior to the crash in Paris” and “other highly placed sources.” It shows how the princess was done away with by MI6
and
the CIA because she “threatened to expose the Crown’s vested interests in Angola by pursuing her ‘landmines campaign.’ ” There is a foreword by “Prince Michael of Albany” (a Belgian, Michel Lafosse), who claims to be the lost Stuart heir to the throne of Scotland, and the book has been hailed as “the most historically and politically important book of its time”—by Stephen Reid, who is (or was) the book review editor of
Odyssey
magazine.

Studying the competing claims of various secret sources, one can see that to believe one is to disbelieve the others. Whether the authors who used these sources were complicit in what must, at the very least, have been a series of hoaxes, is impossible to say. But if one were to ask the old conspiracist question
Cui bono?
(Who benefits?), the answer seems obvious. I say “seems” because in this world, every debunkable theory could actually be disinformation put out by the Establishment/security services to throw investigators and the public off the scent. Such a hypothesis was put forward by the former MI5 officer Annie Machon on Channel 4’s
Richard and Judy
in 2005. It was the very stupidity of some of the theories surrounding Diana’s death, she told her interviewers, that first convinced her that the accident was, in fact, murder. She had been alerted to the conspiracy by the classic MI6 disinformation technique of suggesting conspiracies.
⁴⁹
Or, as Umberto Eco put it, “The Rosicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn’t exist.”
⁵⁰

Filing Down the Pins

This seems an appropriate point to celebrate another feature of conspiracy theories: the way in which they can mutate to accommodate inconvenient truths. There are a lot of inconvenient truths in the Diana story. For example, it stretches credulity to argue that the Diana conspirators would have been able to know what car she and Dodi would be traveling in on the fatal night, who would be driving it, where they would be going, and by what route. Indeed, it wasn’t at all impossible that the couple would just stay in the Ritz that evening. To overcome these objections, one has to imagine that Henri Paul was part of the conspiracy, either as a well-paid suicide or as a dupe, and that the route was prearranged. After that, we have to accept that one or more security agencies, the Parisian hospital service, and the French police were all in on the plot. But even this elaborate construction is destroyed by the simple observation that, had the princess been wearing a seat belt, then—like her bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones—she probably would have survived. What kind of conspiracy founders on the ability of the principal victim to save herself by taking the most elementary safety precautions?

This was the problem dealt with by Nicholas Davies, ex-
Daily Mirror
journalist and, according to Gordon Thomas, Mossad asset (but then who, according to Gordon Thomas, is not a Mossad asset?). In his 2006 book
Diana: The Killing of a Princess
, Davies (whose “contacts within the intelligence services” had told him as early as 2001 that Diana had been murdered by MI5 together with French intelligence, because of—you will recall—her pro-Palestinian proclivities) confronted the seat-belt problem in the following way. The security services ensured that the couple would use the Mercedes, having first installed listening devices and having tampered with the rear seat belts. Technicians had filed down the pins, so that with minimum pressure the belts would spring open, though for some reason they left the front passenger’s seat belt intact. Di and Dodi thought they had buckled up, but in reality they were totally vulnerable.

Davies’s explanation necessarily added one extra layer of complexity to an already absurdly complicated intrigue. The powers that be had not only to suborn the driver, know the route, arrange for and drive a white Fiat, have it sideswiped, create a flash, delay the ambulance, switch the blood samples, turn off the CCTV, and corrupt the investigators; they now had to identify, tamper with, and deliver the death-trap vehicle too. There must surely be simpler methods of killing someone. And even all this doesn’t square every circle. For example, a crash investigator, Dr. Vic Calland, told a 2006 Sky TV investigation that the crash was very nearly nonfatal. “It was a matter of inches as to whether the car would actually glance off [the pillar] or be spun,” said Dr. Calland. “If it had not actually hit the pillar at the angle that it did, it would probably have carried on down the tunnel having a chance to come to a halt and there probably wouldn’t have been a fatal accident at all.”
⁵¹

Short of there being some infernal mechanism that can make a crashing car describe a precise and predictable path, it looks unlikely that any theory will be able to deal with this objection.
^k

Papers, Mags, and TV Programs: The Transmission of Credulity

If one reason for the large number of Diana conspiracy theories was that they earned money for their discoverers or originators, another is media proliferation. Simply, there are ever more news and light current affairs outlets competing with fewer resources for a market whose size does not increase and which is under pressure from new media. The British
Express
newspaper titles have made Diana stories their main marketing ploy for several years, using and reusing the princess’s name and picture to try to maintain a circulation that has been declining badly over three decades. For years, practically any story or quote from Mohamed Al Fayed was guaranteed a place in the
Daily
or
Sunday Express
.

In January 2004, Lord Stevens, former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police—Britain’s top police post—at the behest of the queen’s coroner, started work on Operation Paget, a criminal investigation into the deaths of Diana and Dodi Fayed. The report of the inquiry took nearly three years to produce, appearing in December 2006, and covered almost every widely touted theory about how the couple had met their deaths. As the inquiry progressed, Lord Stevens, who had been conducting a simultaneous and similarly high-profile inquiry into corruption in British soccer, issued a number of gnomic comments. He suggested the existence of “new forensic evidence” from the crash meant Mohamed Al Fayed was right to raise some—unspecified—questions about the deaths, and commented that the case was “far more complex than any of us thought.” These remarks gave rise to a large number of stories. However, it is probable that Stevens made them to suggest his impartiality while conducting the investigation.

As any spin doctor or publicist can tell you, the modern media beast requires feeding. The publisher’s publicity for King and Beveridge’s
Princess Diana: The Hidden Evidence
boasted that Jon King “has appeared on numerous TV shows—including the UK’s number one morning show,
GMTV
; as well as Channel 4’s
The Diana Conspiracy
and many other TV and radio shows.” And this is almost certainly true, though it should be noted that
The Diana Conspiracy
was a debunking of conspiracy theories, presented by Martyn Gregory. Even what theorists like to call “the mainstream media” can sometimes be very undiscriminating about who finds his way into a studio as an interviewee.

Modern TV schedules in Britain, America, and elsewhere teem with daytime and evening talk shows, and the last two decades have seen the proliferation of twenty-four-hour news channels. This quantity of programming generates an enormous demand for items and guests, who have to be contacted and vetted by a relatively small number of hard-pressed and usually very young assistant producers and researchers. These trawl the PR handouts and publishers’ lists for stories that will divert viewers and are easy to grasp. The consequence is that conspiracy theorists, like royal biographers, security experts, or crime experts, manage to find their way onto factual TV programs, where their claims are treated with undiscriminating credulity.

With television documentaries, the process is slightly different. Here commissioners are looking for factual ideas that combine novelty with shock value. The “hidden truth” behind a life or an event can often provide just such value—always supposing that there isn’t a serious risk of legal proceedings for libel or slander. For example, a 2002 BBC program looking at the 1967 Israeli attack on an American warship, the USS
Liberty
, was made entirely from the conspiracist point of view, which stated that the attack, far from being accidental, as the Israelis claimed, was deliberate, and that this was subsequently covered up. One may imagine the bored response from the producers had Judge Jay Cristol, the author of the most painstaking of the studies of the event, approached the BBC with a proposal to make a documentary saying that the attack had indeed been accidental.
^l

There is a gulf, however, between the almost cavalier way in which some documentaries are produced and marketed by TV companies, and the way they are perceived by the public. In 1998, ITV aired a prime-time documentary fronted by a senior newsman that gave almost complete credence to all of Al Fayed’s claims about Diana: the pregnancy, the engagement, the happy couple going apartment-hunting, the notion of secret-service involvement. The next morning, the
Daily Mirror
reported that over 90 percent of those phoning a special polling line now believed that Diana had been murdered. Whether the executives who had commissioned the documentary were similarly convinced is anyone’s guess, but it feels too cynical to believe that journalists and writers are incapable of extraordinary credulity. An illustration of unexpected naivety is provided by Diana’s prophetic letter, disclosed in the autumn of 2003 by Paul Burrell, her former butler.

The letter, apparently written ten months before the Paris smash, claimed that X (the name was blanked out but was later revealed as that of Prince Charles) would somehow manufacture a car accident involving “brake failure and serious head injury” and leading to her death, allowing him to remarry. The
Daily Mirror
described this as Diana “predicting exactly how she would die,” though brake failure has never been credibly suggested as a possible cause of the accident. The paper accompanied this observation with a series of “unanswered questions” such as “Was she pregnant?” and “Had she taken drugs?”—most of which self-evidently could have had nothing to do with the Mercedes’s crashing into the wall of an underpass at high speed. But most surprisingly, in the upmarket and venerable weekly magazine the
Spectator
, the writer, former newspaper editor, and media commentator Stephen Glover told the readers that he had once scoffed at Diana conspiracists, but “now I am not so sure.” He continued, echoing the
Mirror
, “Isn’t it extraordinary that she foresaw almost exactly how she died?” adding that the letter was evidence that would “make anyone save the boneheaded and smug wonder a little.”
⁵²