DRIVER ‘MET MI6 SPY’ ON CRASH NIGHT
James Murray and Gordon Thomas
Renegade spy Richard Tomlinson will tell the Princess Diana inquest that he believes Ritz hotel security chief Henri Paul met an MI6 handler on the night she died.
Today we also reveal a French spy chief allegedly seen chatting to Paul on the night of the crash is refusing to give evidence at the inquest.
Mr Tomlinson, a former MI6 officer once jailed for leaking Government secrets, will make sensational claims via a videolink from his bolthole in France to the inquest in London.
He is refusing to return to Britain to give evidence in person because he fears he will be arrested and jailed. Cambridge-educated Mr Tomlinson, 40, will give evidence supporting the claim by Harrods tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed that there was an Establishment plot to kill Diana to stop her marrying his son, Dodi, a Muslim.
Private testimony that Mr Tomlinson gave earlier caused ructions within MI6, leading to him being closely monitored by the British security services. Mr Tomlinson told the French examining magistrate Herve Stephan that a Frenchman working in the security department at the Paris Ritz was on MI6’s books.
He added: “I cannot claim that I remember from reading this file that the name of the person was Henri Paul but I have no doubt with the benefit of hindsight that it was he.”
In 2001 he claimed: “Henri Paul, who was the driver at the time of the accident, was an MI6 informer and, rather interestingly, he was missing for about half an hour before the accident.
“No one knows where he was and then when he was killed he was found with a very high alcohol level in his blood and a very substantial amount of money in his pocket.
“Now putting those three pieces of circumstantial evidence together, I suspect that shortly prior to his death he was in a meeting with his MI6 handler.
“I think that MI6 should hand over his personal file as a witness statement because clearly in an inquest into his death, knowing where he was for that missing half hour, who he was with and how much alcohol he had drunk are very important factors.
“What I am saying is that there is important information in MI6 files and I think that they should be handed over to the judge in charge of the inquest.”
Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Express from his home in France, Mr Tomlinson said he will reveal discussions he had within MI6 in May 1992 with a colleague about an assassination plot.
The Sunday Express has been given the identity of the MI6 man he spoke to but we are not publishing his name on the grounds that his security may be compromised.
Mr Tomlinson said: “I was having a serious discussion with a colleague on developing and targeting operations in the Balkans. These were known as P/40s. He handed me a Y-file, identified as most restricted by the yellow stripe on the front. Inside was a document, two typed pages long, with a small yellow card attached to signify it was an accountable account rather than a draft proposal.
“Accountable meant it was in a ready to act state. It was entitled ‘The Need to Assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia’. I distributed it to senior MI6 officers.
“There were detailed discussions and the consensus was that a stun device could be used to dazzle the driver’s gaze of Milosevic’s car as it passed through the Geneva tunnel, forcing him to crash.”
Milosevic was to attend an international conference on the former Yugoslavia.
Mr Tomlinson added: “What later struck me about the deaths of Diana and Dodi was that the claims how they had died mimicked what was in the document on how to assassinate Milosevic.
“I will testify that the Y-file document shows Henri Paul could have been blinded as he drove through the Paris underpass by a high-powered flashlight.
“The Y-file proves this was a technique which, at the time of Diana and Dodi’s deaths, was consistent with MI6 methods.”
The inquest into the death of Diana and Dodi has seen CCTV footage of the couple in and around the Ritz Hotel in Paris on the night of August 30, 1997.
But the inquest has been told there were gaps in the movements of Henri Paul, the hotel’s acting head of security. He left the hotel between 7pm and 10pm, thinking his duties were over, but returned when Diana and Mr Fayed unexpectedly returned to the hotel for a meal.
Where Mr Paul went during those crucial three hours has never been fully explained. There is also a period when he went missing for eight and a half minutes from 10.22pm when he was not picked up on any CCTV cameras.
The investigation into the crash carried out by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens decided that Mr Tomlinson was unreliable and that he had embellished his accounts.
Scotland Yard detectives working for Lord Stevens carried out detailed investigations at MI6. They discovered that an MI6 officer, codenamed Fish, did write a proposal in 1993 to assassinate an extremist Balkans leader, but it was not Milosevic, and senior officers in the service said the man was acting alone and the plan would not have been sanctioned.
Mr Tomlinson said: “The two Stevens’ detectives said in their own inquiries at MI6 that it became very clear that what I had told them, and which they had confirmed in the MI6 files, would have an important influence on how the Stevens inquiry finally reported.
“There is no doubt at all there was a major intelligence presence in events leading up to the death of Princess Diana and Dodi.”
New Zealand born Mr Tomlinson joined MI6 as agent D/813317 in 1991. He worked as a “targeting officer”, serving in the Balkans and Moscow. Later he served in the East European Controllerate, one of the most important departments in the Secret Intelligence Service. It gave him access to the highly restricted Y-files.
He was sacked in 1995 and was jailed for a year in December 1997 for breaching the Official Secrets Act, a sentence which has left him with bitter memories.
He says he does not know why he was sacked, but admits he was depressed when he finished working in Bosnia because of the dreadful sights he witnessed. Last March the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not be prosecuting Mr Tomlinson for offences under the Official Secrets Act.
The then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith decided it would not be in the public interest to continue legal action against him.
It was alleged that Mr Tomlinson had committed blackmail offences by threatening to make more disclosures because Scotland Yard would not return computers seized from him.
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This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Breaking News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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