ALMA

Four lines

• THE COLUMN

  Thomas identified a foreign service that pressed Henri Paul.

  Gordon Thomas, 21 Sept 2006, Canada Free Press: he wrote that Mossad tried to recruit Henri Paul from 29 June 1997 to report on Ritz guests, and that an operative he calls Maurice met Paul again the night before the crash and threatened him. Thomas was an intelligence author (Gideon’s Spies), not the coroner and not Operation Paget. The tweet calls him an investigator. The column is the source of the one-word answer.

• THE REPLY

  Country only.

  Israel. That answers the question as asked: which country did Thomas name. It does not answer who killed her. A one-word reply on a million-view post reads as a verdict. It is a citation.

• THE INQUEST

  A service had Henri Paul.

  The service on the inquest record is French. Claude Roulet, assistant to the Ritz president, told the London inquest that Paul put him in touch with the DST — then France’s domestic security service — about hotel guests, including a Russian diplomat. Two documents in Judge Hervé Stéphan’s French dossier say the same: Paul was in touch with DST officers who worked hotel circles. Operation Paget found no trace of Paul in MI6 files back to 1990. Low-level French informant is the ceiling the police would sign. Israel is not on that page.

• THE VERDICT

  The crash was a hit.

  French inquiry, then Operation Paget (Lord Stevens, Dec 2006, 832 pages): no murder conspiracy. Henri Paul was about three times the French drink-drive limit and driving at excessive speed through the Pont de l’Alma underpass, pursued by paparazzi. A white Fiat Uno made contact and was never traced. That gap is real. It is not a service. On 7 April 2008 the inquest jury said unlawful killing by the gross negligence of the driver and the paparazzi. Mohamed Al-Fayed’s theory was MI6 on the Duke of Edinburgh’s orders. Paget rejected it. Pregnancy was tested and not found.