New `Diana Wars' in Britain Put Focus on LaRouche

by Jeffrey Steinberg

On June 4, the London Daily Telegraph, the flagship publication of the British monarchy and the Club of the Isles' Hollinger Corp., published a crass slander against Lyndon LaRouche, headlined "U.S. Cult Is Source of Theories." The article charged that LaRouche, EIR, and the New Federalist newspaper were all behind a "Diana conspiracy industry," and that LaRouche, in league with London-based billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed, was "accusing the Queen of ordering the assassination of Diana, Princess of Wales." Apart from the fact that the article was pure fiction, there were two significant things about the story--which accompanied a much longer article that trashed a British Independent Television (ITV) documentary, entitled "Diana: The Secrets Behind the Crash," which had aired the previous night, and which had been followed by a live televised debate on the Princess's death: First, the Daily Telegraph smear was authored by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, an avowed British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) stringer, who spent from late 1992 through the spring of 1997 in Washington, D.C. orchestrating a similar slander campaign against President Bill Clinton. Allowing Evans-Pritchard's by-line to appear on the "icebox" slander of LaRouche was a blunder of strategic significance, which underscored the truth behind LaRouche's charge that all of President Clinton's enemies, including in the upper echelons of the British oligarchy, are also enemies of LaRouche. The blunder also underscored the fact that there is a "battle royal" under way within the British ruling class, which goes far beyond the issue of the death of Princess Diana. The battle touches on matters of global geopolitics, and how the British oligarchy intends to survive the worst, systemic financial breakdown crisis in modern history. The "Torygraph" slander also marked a decisive break in the Club of the Isles' policy of keeping LaRouche's name out of print in Britain. It has been long-recognized by the City of London-centered financier oligarchical grouping headed by the Royal Consort, Prince Philip, that LaRouche and EIR have been a powerful factor in exposing their dirty machinations worldwide, and have also been an important contributing factor in an eruption of political warfare against the Windsors, even from among the British elites. The LaRouche role in the Windsors' troubles came to the surface in 1994, when EIR published "The Coming Fall of the House of Windsor," a Special Report exposing the role of Prince Philip and his World Wildlife Fund (WWF, now the World Wide Fund for Nature), in triggering the worst genocide in modern history in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Even as EIR's exposés of the Windsors circulated throughout the world diplomatic community and among factions of the British establishment, with rare exceptions, the name "LaRouche" was banned from the British press.[FIGURE 1] All that changed, beginning with the June 4 Evans-Pritchard diatribe. The article not only accused LaRouche and EIR of heading the "conspiracy industry," and of accusing "the Queen of being the world's foremost drug dealer." But also, it linked LaRouche to Mohamed Al Fayed, Harrods department store owner and the father of the late Dodi Fayed, in a campaign, Evans-Pritchard wrote, "aimed at discrediting Tiny Rowland, Mr. Al Fayed's longtime business rival, ... according to Francesca Pollard, a former operative for the Fayed security machine." As EIR revealed in its 1993 unauthorized biography of Rowland, Pollard, whose family was robbed of its fortune by Rowland, was threatened and then paid off by Rowland, to be a source of trash against Al Fayed. Following the Aug. 31, 1997 car crash in Paris that claimed the life of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul, Rowland was deployed by the British royal family to lead a slander and harassment campaign aimed at silencing Mohamed Al Fayed, who has stated publicly that he is "99.9% certain" that Diana and Dodi were the victims of a murder plot. 

Battle of the Documentaries

The trigger for the slanders against LaRouche was the airing of the ITV documentary on the evening of June 3, followed by a live TV debate, which featured this author. The ITV documentary provided dramatic new evidence supporting the case that Diana and Dodi were murdered (see "New Holes in Cover-Up of Diana Murder Plot," EIR, June 12, 1998), and highlighted several investigative leads that were first published in EIR, including the possibility that driver Paul was blinded by an anti-personnel laser. During the live TV round-table debate, this author discussed Princess Diana's decade-long war with the House of Windsor, including the impact of her November 1995 BBC Panorama interview, in which she charged that her estranged husband, Prince Charles, was unfit to be King; and, the reaction of the establishment to her actions, which amounted to a collective shriek, "Off with her head!" Rowland's personal involvement in the campaign to cover up the truth about the Paris crash, and to destroy Mohamed Al Fayed, was also aired, much to the chagrin of the producer and host of a Channel 4 "Dispatches" documentary on the Diana death that aired the following night. Channel 4 tried to dismiss as fantasy every piece of evidence refuting the "drunk driver" theory.[FIGURE 2] The Channel 4 "Dispatches" program included a slander of this author and EIR that was even more explicit on the question of Prince Philip. Although this author was interviewed on camera for more than two hours by Channel 4 host Martyn Gregory, less than one minute of that interview was shown on the hour-long "Dispatches" diatribe. And, that brief segment waxed hysterical about EIR's refusal to "rule out" the possibility that Prince Philip ordered the murder of Diana and Dodi. Indeed, British press accounts of the relationship between Prince Philip and Lady Diana, particularly during the brief period of her relationship with Dodi Fayed, revealed that the Royal Consort was in a constant blind rage over Diana's public disdain for the Windsors, and particularly her implicit challenge to their legitimacy on the British throne. Gregory was given several pages in the Sunday Telegraph on June 7, to continue denouncing LaRouche, EIR, and Al Fayed. In an article regurgitating the "Dispatches" disinformation, Gregory wrote: "The numerous hares Mohamed Fayed has set running in the colours of sundry conspiracy theories are typified by Geoffrey [sic] Steinberg, chief reporter of Executive Intelligence Review, a small-circulation American magazine that specializes in conspiracy theories. He was yet another guest on the side of the motley crew supporting ITV's Wednesday night programme. "This is the man who told Dispatches he `could not rule out the possibility' that Prince Philip was involved in the `murder of Diana.' We decided not to take Steinberg seriously at all." 

   Defending `Mr. Big'

Not so for MI5, another British intelligence agency. On June 10, Francis Wheen, a writer for MI5's favorite leak sheet, the political satire magazine Private Eye, penned another anti-LaRouche diatribe, in the London Guardian. Wheen, who had published smears against LaRouche in 1996, fixated on EIR's targetting of Prince Philip, whom Wheen affectionately referred to as "Mr. Big." "Many weird characters enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame during last week's flurry of TV programmes about Princess Diana," Wheen began, "but none was weirder than Jeffrey Steinberg, who appeared on Wednesday night's `studio debate' and again on Channel 4's Dispatches the next evening. There was, he admitted, `no smoking-gun proof' that Prince Philip ordered British intelligence to assassinate the Princess; nevertheless, `I can't rule it out in all honesty.' " Wheen complained, "So who is he? For some reason, viewers were not informed that the grand-sounding Executive Intelligence Review is in fact the weekly propaganda magazine of Lyndon H. LaRouche." Wheen almost got it right, when he noted, "Executive Intelligence Review has supported Al Fayed in his vendetta against Tiny Rowland and Lonrho; and when Michael Howard refused Al Fayed's application for British citizenship, LaRouche published a defamatory article about the family connection between Howard and Harold Landy, the former chairman of a Lonrho subsidiary." Wheen then digressed into the ID-format slander that was perfected by the mid-1980s dirty tricks slander salon, run by Wall Street Anglophile spook banker John Train, as part of the "Get LaRouche" task force of the U.S. Justice Department and private agencies that framed up and railroaded LaRouche to prison. Wheen recited the litany of smears: LaRouche says "the Queen runs an international cocaine smuggling cartel," that "Henry Kissinger is a communist agent," and, interestingly, that "the Italian banker Roberto Calvi was murdered by the Duke of Kent." (Calvi was himself a member of the extended royal family.)

International terrorism

Wheen then touched on another sore spot of the House of Windsor and Club of the Isles: the British hand in sponsoring and harboring international terrorism. He tried to twist EIR's exposé of London's role in safe-housing dozens of major terrorist organizations, a fact the U.S. State Department and the CIA have acknowledged in written documents. "In recent years," Wheen wrote, "LaRouche and Steinberg have been pursuing another `unique' theory--that `international terrorism' is masterminded by none other than Lord [William] Rees-Mogg and the Daily Telegraph reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.... LaRouche claims [that] Rees-Mogg and Evans-Pritchard are part of a `powerful London-centerd apparatus that declared war on the United States immediately after the inauguration of President Clinton.' Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky--all these scandals can be traced back to our double-barreled desperadoes.... But Rees-Mogg and Evans-Pritchard are merely servants of the `powerful London-centered apparatus.' The Mr. Big whose orders they obey is Prince Philip.... The intention, according to LaRouche, is to discredit, and destabilise the U.S. until it is forced to become a British colony once again, thus taking the House of Windsor another giant stride on its road to world domination." Wheen continued, "Only one person in Britain was powerful enough to thwart the conspiracy--Princess Diana, who had `declared war' on the royal family in her Panorama interview. And so she had to be killed." Wheen ended on a curious, slightly ominous, note: "This alliance between Al Fayed and Lyndon LaRouche seems risky, to say the least. Why should a prominent public figure aid and abet such an unscrupulous fantasy-merchant? If LaRouche doesn't wish to sully his reputation, he must disown Al Fayed forthwith," Wheen wrote. A half-dozen other slanders followed the Guardian article, in the Scotsman, on BBC-4 Radio, and even in the Danish press. One factor that clearly got the royals' blood boiling was that, according to the major British TV rating service, 12.5 million Britons watched the ITV documentary, and most of them also watched the studio debate that followed the evening news. On June 4, German national television aired the entire ITV broadcast, and major German dailies published lengthy excerpts from the transcript. In contrast, fewer than 3 million British viewers watched the Channel 4 smear the following evening. And, a Mirror newspaper poll, published on June 7, suggested that an overwhelming majority of Britons are convinced that there was more to the death of Diana than a traffic accident. 

The Strategic Battle

As EIR has said from day one, the death of Princess Diana is the scandal that could hasten the fall of the House of Windsor. But, the future of the Club of the Isles oligarchy hangs in the balance today in a number of ways. The probe in Paris of Diana's death, if it turns up compelling evidence of a murder, or even of aggravated manslaughter caused by a paparazzi mob notorious for its links to British intelligence and the Crown apparatus, would certainly bring down both the Windsors and the current Socialist government in France, which also is deeply implicated in the crash and the cover-up. On other fronts, the British establishment is torn over how to deal with the onrush of the financial collapse. Prince Philip and his circle have no compunctions about throwing the world into decades of chaos and genocide, in order to retain oligarchical control. But other, less insane forces within the City of London financial elite are apparently asking, "What do we get out of such chaos and destruction?" and may be seeking a new political alliance, perhaps with the United States, and sane forces on the continent who are opposed to the suicidal Maastricht Treaty. Other issues that are causing divisions among the British elites include Britain's stance on the European Monetary Union, and the euro single curency. Furthermore, factions on the continent that share Prince Philip's impulse to play "chaos warfare," may be pressing for a new assault on the Asian currencies, including the Japanese yen, through the major continental banks and their offshore hedge funds, even though such a move at this moment would almost certainly trigger a global financial explosion with unpredictable consequences. Within the extended European oligarchy, which has, for decades, been under the boot of Prince Philip's Club of the Isles, there is intensive in-fighting and factional warfare, adding further to the crisis atmosphere spreading across Eurasia. The common point of agreement among the "chaos" factions within the British and continental oligarchies, is that the power of the United States, as the pillar of the nation-state system, must be destroyed in the immediate period ahead, lest LaRouche's ideas for a nation-state-centered New Bretton Woods solution to the present global mess, be adopted, along with LaRouche's vision for a Eurasian Land-Bridge plan of global economic reconstructed. 

New holes in cover-up of
Diana murder plot

Shortly after midnight, on Aug. 30-31, 1997, David Laurent, an off-duty senior French police official, was driving alone in his car on the right bank of the Seine River, heading toward the Place de l'Alma tunnel where, moments later, Diana Princess of Wales, her companion Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul would die in a car crash. As he drove, Laurent was passed by a speeding white Fiat Uno, according to accounts he provided nine months ago to French Criminal Brigade police probing the Diana crash. As he approached the tunnel, Laurent noticed that the Fiat Uno that had sped by him, was now crawling along in the right traffic lane, almost at a standstill, just before the tunnel entrance. Although the behavior of the Fiat driver was a bit bizarre, Laurent drove on. It was, after all, Saturday night on the final weekend of the summer, and there were a lot of strange goings-on on the streets of Paris. Less than a moment later, however, Laurent heard a loud explosion from inside the tunnel, as he was driving a short distance ahead. It was not until the next morning that Laurent realized that the explosion he had heard from inside the tunnel was the crash that claimed the lives of Diana and her companions. And it was not until several weeks later that police forensic tests confirmed that the crash had been caused by a collision between the Mercedes 280-S carrying Diana, Fayed, Paul, and bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, the sole survivor of the crash, and a Fiat Uno. Within hours of the crash, police at the scene had gathered up evidence--a side mirror and fragments of a tail light--suggesting that a two-car collision had occurred. A police sketch, drawn at the crash site, labeled a section of the tunnel the "collision zone." Several witnesses, interviewed during the first week after the crash, had described a small hatchback car, cutting in front of the Mercedes at the tunnel entrance, jamming its breaks inside the tunnel, fleeing the crash scene, and so on. But, until Laurent's critical piece of the story became public in early June, the role of the Fiat had remained ambiguous--despite the fact that the car and its driver have disappeared. Was the missing Fiat tragically in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was it critical to the most spectacular vehicular homicide in history? Laurent's description of the Fiat, speeding to a spot near the tunnel entrance, less than a minute ahead of Diana's car, which was under chase from several other cars and motorcycles, strongly suggests the latter possibility. For reasons yet unexplained, Laurent's crucial eyewitness account was withheld from the chief investigating magistrate, Hervé Stephan, for months. .

Tampering with evidence

This is not the first time that the French police in charge of the investigation have tampered with evidence. Within hours of the crash, French police had told reporters that the Mercedes carrying Diana had been travelling at speeds of more than 120 miles per hour. How did they know? They told reporters that the speedometer of the mangled Mercedes had been frozen at more than 120 mph. EIR investigators determined that the French "leak" had to be a lie. Daimler Benz safety experts had told EIR reporters that, in any crash, the speedometer immediately goes back to zero. Two weeks later, the French police "corrected" the error; but this time, the media scarcely reported the correction. Similarly, French police had lied to reporters that Diana had been pinned in the rear compartment of the Mercedes, and saying that this was why it took so long to get her into an ambulance and to a hospital. Photographic evidence and eyewitness accounts later proved that it, too, was a premeditated lie by the French police. In the case of the Laurent testimony, sources tell EIR that the police have claimed that they have withheld certain vital evidence from Magistrate Stephan, to avoid the information falling into the hands of the attorneys for the paparazzi. The police allegedly claimed that their investigation "would be jeopardized" if the paparazzi were to learn crucial details. The Laurent revelation, which was leaked to the London Daily Mirror on June 4 by a well-placed French police source, was not the only new piece of evidence to emerge in early June. On June 3, the British independent television network ITV aired a one-hour investigative report, "Diana: The Secrets Behind the Crash," that seriously discredits French police claims that driver Henri Paul was drunk at the time of the crash. 

Carbon monoxide found in Paul's blood

The assertion that Paul was drunk and high on two prescription drugs is pivotal to the ongoing effort, by the French government and the British establishment, to cast the crash as nothing more than a case of reckless, drunk driving. The claim that Paul had blood alcohol levels three times the legal limit at the time of the crash, was based solely on tests conducted by French coroners within hours of the crash. Independent forensic experts, including Dr. Peter Vanesis of the University of Glasgow, who reviewed the autopsy report, had harsh criticisms of the post mortem on numerous technical grounds. The ITV report revealed that the forensic tests also showed a near-lethal level of carbon monoxide as well. EIR has independently learned that it was a separate toxicological test on Paul's blood sample, that revealed a carbon monoxide level of more than 30% at the time of the crash. Yet, Dodi Fayed had no carbon monoxide in his blood. Is it possible that Paul could have had high levels of alcohol, traces of two prescription drugs, and toxic levels of carbon monoxide in his blood at the moment of the crash, and yet Fayed had no carbon monoxide present? Not if the carbon monoxide was inside the passenger cabin of the Mercedes. Furthermore, if Paul had been somehow poisoned with carbon monoxide sometime prior to getting behind the wheel of the Mercedes, experts interviewed by ITV say he would have shown obvious signs, such as dizziness, loss of balance, loss of depth perception, and an unbearable, throbbing pain in his temple. Security camera video footage of Paul, taken in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel between 9 p.m. and midnight, and aired in the ITV documentary, clearly showed that Paul had none of the tell-tale signs of being drunk or suffering from the effects of carbon monoxide. In a live television interview, aired one hour after the ITV broadcast, the documentary's host, Nicholas Owen, stated that he believed that the blood sample used in the post mortem was probably not taken from Paul. There were a dozen other corpses in the Paris city morgue at the time that Paul was brought in. This startling conclusion by Owen, adds further weight to EIR's charge that the French police--as distinct from chief investigating Magistrate Stephan--have been running a vicious cover-up of the events surrounding the crash. The ITV documentary also cited several eyewitness accounts that a powerful burst of light inside the tunnel, seconds before the crash, may have blinded Paul. Owen showed a commercially produced anti-personnel laser, that he purchased in a Paris shop for $300, to buttress the possibility that such a device was used in the vehicular attack. EIR Counterintelligence Director Jeffrey Steinberg appeared along with Owen and a half-dozen other investigators and expert analysts on the nationally televised interview show. Details of that broadcast and the vortex of media controversy, sparked by the ITV show and a second documentary, aired on June 4 on Channel Four TV in Britain, will appear in a forthcoming EIR 

(see also, the Editorial in this issue).

In a move that promises to raise even more questions about what happened in the Paris tunnel on Aug. 31, 1997, Magistrate Stephan convened an extraordinary group interrogation, or "confrontation," on June 5, at the Justice Ministry in Paris. Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi's father and a civil party to the case, was invited to participate, as were a dozen eyewitnesses to the crash. The nine paparazzi who stand to be prosecuted for manslaughter and interference in the rescue effort, were also interrogated by Stephan. Details of what took place are not yet available. 

in the murder  of Princess Diana can be found in EIR's 1997 Special Report, The True Story Behind the Fall of the House of Windsor.

This article appears in the  June 19, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.