Who Killed Diana, and Why? Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

10

On 30 Aug., Dodi and Diana flew to Paris from 

their cruise, and dined at the Ritz. That night they 

headed by car to Dodi’s apartment, but crashed in 

the Alma Tunnel. Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul died 

there, Diana at the hospital—where she was taken 

only nearly two hours after the crash. The morning of 

their deaths, 31 Aug., coincided with a second, now 

famous Mirror article, which reported: “At Balmor-

al next week, the Queen will preside over a meet-

ing of The Way Ahead Group where the Windsors 

sit down with their senior advisers and discuss poli-

cy matters. MI6 has prepared a special report on the 

Egyptian-born Fayeds which will be presented to the 

meeting.… The delicate subject of Harrods and its 

royal warrants is also expected to be discussed.… A 

friend of the Royals said yesterday, ‘Prince Philip has 

let rip several times recently about the Fayeds…. He’s 

been banging on about his contempt for Dodi and 

how he is undesirable as a future stepfather to Wil-

liam and Harry. Diana has been told in no uncertain 

terms about the consequences should she continue 

the relationship with the Fayed boy’”.

19

 Morgan de-

votes many pages to documentation and analysis of 

the inquest coroner’s failure to allow either this re-

port, or the minutes of the WAG meetings in ques-

tion, before the jury.

Evidence Withheld and Testimony  

Not Taken

John Morgan has examined in detail all of the 

above events, and more: how Diana was treated at 

the crash scene and thereafter, the handling of her 

body after death, and the subsequent investigations. 

Many of his conclusions are necessarily in the nature 

of surmise (often prefaced by Morgan with “I suggest 

that” or a statement that the evidence “may point to” 

a given conclusion), but for each case, he provides 

the relevant documentation. That evidence is avail-

able to readers of Morgan’s books, but the amount 

of it that was not heard, and the number of interest-

ed parties who were not called to testify, in either 

Operation Paget or the subsequent Royal Courts of 

Justice inquest, are astounding. Two instances exem-

plify this pattern.

Movements of key British personnel. Morgan gives 

extensive citations from newspaper articles, testimo-

ny, and other sources on the relationship between 

MI6 and the Crown, which may operate through 

government channels, or directly—under the “Royal 

prerogative power” still held by the Queen. Then, in 

his Diana Inquest: Part 5 compendium, he has grid-

ded the official staffing lists of the British Embassy in 

Paris around the time of Diana’s death, against the 

inquest testimony of MI6 officials identified only by 

numerical designations. He found evidence identi-

fying the officer who testified as “Mr 4”, the chief of 

MI6 in France, as Eugene Curley, posted under cov-

er as a political officer at the British Embassy. Mor-

gan then posed a number of questions concerning 

the man who arrived to succeed Curley at the Em-

bassy apparently the very day Diana died—career 

diplomat and intelligence operative Sherard Cowp-

er-Coles, whose autobiography recounts his training 

at the Foreign Office’s Middle East Centre for Arab 

19. Jeffrey Steinberg, Allen Douglas, “French Police Hush Up 

New Leads on Diana’s Murder”, EIR, 12 Dec. 1997.

Studies (MECAS) in Lebanon, dubbed by Egyptian 

President Nasser “the British spy school”.

20

 

And yet, Morgan points out, no testimony from Cow-

per-Coles was taken at the inquest, although presiding 

Lord Justice Scott Baker had announced that the involve-

ment of British security services was a major topic for re-

view. That omission is even more striking in view of Cow-

per-Coles’s relationship to the Anglo-Saudi al-Yamamah 

arms deal,

21

 in which Prince Charles and Prince Andrew 

20.  Sherard Cowper-Coles, Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a 

Foreign Office Mandarin (London: HarperCollins, 2012).

21.  Jeffrey Steinberg, “Scandal of the Century Rocks British Crown 

and the City”, EIR, 22 June 2007. 

Cowper-Coles had headed the Hong Kong Department of the 

British Foreign Office, until the handover of Hong Kong to China 

in 1997. As Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (2003-07), he played a 

decisive role in 2006 in shutting down the British Serious Fraud 

Office investigation of the al-Yamamah deal, which Prince Bandar 

had negotiated with the huge British arms company BAE Systems. 

Al-Yamamah generated a slush fund of $100 billion, used to fi-

nance the Afghan mujahedin networks that gave rise to al-Qaeda. 

Cowper-Coles was later the British Ambassador to Afghanistan 

(2007-09) and the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative to 

Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009-10). In 2007, Afghan President 

Karzai expelled two MI6 agents caught funding the Taliban, one of 

whom, Michael Semple, was a close associate of Cowper-Coles. 

(Ramtanu Maitra, “Does the U.S. Understand What Is at Stake 

in Afghanistan?”, EIR, 24 Sept. 2010, details the involvement 

of Cowper-Coles in the matter of British dope-promotion in 

Afghanistan, while also mentioning his track record with respect 

to Diana’s death and the Saudi arms scandal). After leaving the 

Foreign Office, Cowper-Coles became a senior executive at none 

other than BAE Systems. He left BAE in 2013 and is presently 

Senior Advisor to the CEO of another elite British company, one 

with a background in the narcotics trade, HSBC Group. In 2004 

Queen Elizabeth made Cowper-Coles a Knight Commander of 

the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

Phases of al-Yamamah, as well as other BAE-Saudi arms deals, were 

negotiated by Charles himself, most recently during his February 

2014 state visit to Saudi Arabia. In November 2010, major British 

press reported on Andrew’s advocacy for BAE, as revealed in a U.S. 

diplomatic telegram, exposed by WikiLeaks, expressing shock at how 

he had “railed at British anticorruption investigators, who had had the 

‘idiocy’ of almost scuttling the al-Yamamah deal with Saudi Arabia”. 

Morgan has documented the exact timing of career British intelli-

gence operative Sherard Cowper-Coles’s presence in Paris during 

the 1997 assassinations of Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed, yet Cowp-

er-Coles was not called to testify at the inquest. He is otherwise 

famous for intervening, as British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to 

halt the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation of the terrorism-financing 

al-Yamamah arms deal.

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