Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  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 eas
y 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

  But had he stopped and turned it over in his mind, as perhaps the boneheaded and smug did, Glover would have realized that the letter constituted supporting evidence for her murder only if you believed one of three very unlikely things. The first possibility was that Diana was genuinely psychic and could forecast the future. The second possible causal explanation was that the future assassins, having got hold of the letter, looked at it and agreed with her that this would indeed be a good way of arranging her permanent exit. Or third, that Diana was warned by someone else that a car accident was the preferred method of her execution, but that for some reason she neglected to include this information in her letter. None of these seems ordinarily plausible, and we are therefore left with Glover’s simple desire to believe. As the journalist and Paris correspondent for the Daily Telegraph Colin Randall noted in his online diary, “I long ago accepted that in any gathering of five otherwise sensible people, there will probably be at least two who sincerely believe Diana was murdered.”53

  It was not wholly unexpected that the conclusions of the Stevens Report failed to satisfy Mr. Al Fayed, though its 832 pages, written in agonizing forensic detail, answered and countered almost every aspect of the main conspiracy claims from motive to aftermath, its failure to get around to the Order of the Solar Temple notwithstanding. Nevertheless, it might have been anticipated that Stevens had shown to any reasonable and intelligent observer that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. Sadly, this was not so. The day after publication of the report, the Independent newspaper, founded in 1986 to be an impartial journal of record, declared itself unhappy with Stevens’s conclusions. “No one,” its editorial began, “likes to be labeled a conspiracy theorist” and therefore to be associated with the kind of people “who believe the world is run by aliens disguised as humans,” but the newspaper was concerned that too officious a desire to avoid such a label might impair its capacity to ask questions. “Skepticism,” it pointed out, “can be a healthy instinct.”

  This proposition is, in abstract terms at least, undeniable. But where would such skepticism lead one in the case of the Stevens Report? There were, concluded the Independent, a number of awkward questions that had not been resolved. For example, there was the issue of the white Fiat Uno belonging to a conveniently dead French paparazzo, which might just have been the one clipped by the princess’s Merc in the Paris underpass. There was also the problem of “all of the closed circuit television cameras monitoring the underpass [which] inexplicably failed to record the incident.” In addition, said the newspaper, “the question of whether anyone had the motive to murder the couple remains unresolved. The report says there is no reason to believe Diana and Mr. Fayed were preparing to marry. Mr. Fayed’s father maintains that there was.”54

  These observations came close to being perverse. In fact, Stevens, in exhaustive detail, showed both that the Fiat Uno in question could not conceivably have been the one in the Paris tunnel, and revealed, camera by camera, that almost all the CCTV installations en route were trained on the entrances of the buildings to which they belonged. Furthermore, Stevens established that everybody in whom Diana had regularly confided did not believe that she was planning marriage, and some said that she had explicitly ruled it out. In fact, only Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of the Mercedes that crashed and employer of the man who was driving the car at the time, testified to having been told that there was to be a wedding.

  It wasn’t clear whether the writer of the Independent editorial had plowed his or her way through the Stevens Report or not, but in any case, the newspaper allowed itself two tangential arguments that by now may be familiar to the readers of this book. The first was that the absence of complete certainty (“We should beware the assumption that all the circumstances of this case have now been fully explained and all the loose ends neatly tied up”) somehow permitted an almost impossible explanation to be regarded as being as true, if not truer than a likely one. The second was that the prevalence of an opinion somehow conferred a degree of truth upon it. “According to a recent poll,” said the Independent, “a third of the British public believe what happened to Diana was not an accident. This cannot be written off as a fringe belief.”

  Conspiracy on Trial

  But there are other ways of determining whether a belief is justified. It seldom happens that conspiracy theories are held to the same evidential standards as official versions; the 1934 trial of the Swiss publishers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a rare example of the propagators of a theory being forced to substantiate it in court. However, this is more or less what occurred between October 2007 and April 2008 in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. In the beechwood environs of Court 73—many of the press and public accommodated in a large overspill room, watching on TV monitors—coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker presided over what became, in effect, a trial of the assertions that Diana was murdered. Despite Lord Scott Baker’s early suggestion that the process was not an adversarial one, the jury of five men and six women sa
w highly paid counsel for the various protagonists cross-examine witnesses with antagonistic vigor.

  Al Fayed’s team was led by one of the most celebrated and radical Queen’s Counsel in England, Michael Mansfield—as one Guardian journalist put it, “the light shining off the silver highlights in his well-coiffed hair, his brilliantly colored silk ties illuminating an otherwise drab courtroom.”55 A TV technician covering the event described Mansfield to me as “chasing every hare he could; trying to force open every little chink. But they were all dead ends.”

  One dead end was the possible role of the queen’s husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, for a decade the target of accusations by Mohamed Al Fayed. Al Fayed’s team simply could not provide any evidence that would make the octogenarian consort a material witness at the inquest. But major figures within the Establishment certainly did testify, including Lord Stevens, Sir Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6), and Lord Fellowes, the queen’s private secretary and also brother-in-law to Princess Diana.

  The most theatrical performance belonged to Al Fayed himself, who, during his day in court, named as conspirators the duke; former Prime Minister Tony Blair; two former commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, including Stevens; Lord Fellowes; Diana’s older sister; the former ambassador to Paris; and the Prince of Wales. His own former bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, the only survivor of the crash, was a “crook” and also in on the plot, according to Al Fayed. Others were castigated. Dodi’s former girlfriend Kelly Fisher was “just a hooker” and Diana’s former boyfriend, the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, was dismissed as a man who “lived in a council flat and has no money.” However, none of this talk, so colorful on the page, seemed convincing in court, especially as the props of conspiracy collapsed one by one, to be replaced by evidence of the incompetence of Al Fayed’s own security operation, an incompetence originating with the Al Fayeds themselves.