Was Princess Diana’s Crash A Spy Hit? Renegade Agent Says MI6 Planned It For Years

Princess Diana was ‘murdered by heartless MI6 spies’ who used a strobe light to force her car off the road in Paris and plied her chauffeur with alcohol beforehand, a former British intelligence officer has alleged in explosive claims emerging on what would have been her 65th birthday.

For context, the death of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul in a Mercedes in the Pont de l’Alma underpass on 31 August 1997 has already been exhaustively examined by French investigators and the UK’s Operation Paget inquiry, which both concluded it was a tragic accident caused by excessive speed and an over-the-limit driver pursued by paparazzi. Those official findings have never stopped conspiracy theories breeding in the gaps, and former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson has long been one of the most vocal outliers.

His allegations, resurfacing as Diana’s family and supporters prepare to mark her milestone birthday, are brutal. Tomlinson insists that MI6 ran an operation to monitor Princess Diana for around 15 years, that Henri Paul was secretly on the agency’s payroll, and that the fatal crash was the end point of a plan that involved blinding the driver with a flash of light inside the Paris tunnel.

According to Tomlinson, who was educated at Cambridge and MIT, Paul vanished for an unaccounted hour on the night of the crash and may have met an MI6 handler who both paid him and encouraged him to drink heavily. Tomlinson claims a large sum of cash found on Paul’s body is consistent with that scenario, calling the Frenchman ‘a pawn’ in a sophisticated assassination operation.

He argues that a close reading of MI6 files would show as much. ‘Examination of his MI6 file would clarify this and might shed light on the mysteriously high levels of alcohol and carbon monoxide found in his blood,’ he has said. He goes further, contending that a secret dossier, locked away in an MI6 vault, contains full details of what he describes as a plot to kill Princess Diana that will never be voluntarily disclosed.

Celebeat cannot independently verify Tomlinson’s claims, and nothing he alleges has been accepted by any official inquiry. All of it, bluntly, needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Princess Diana, MI6 And The ‘Missing Hour’

To recall, Diana and Dodi dined at the Ritz hotel in Paris on the evening of 30 August 1997 before leaving shortly after midnight in a black Mercedes S280 driven by Henri Paul, the hotel’s acting head of security. They crashed seconds later in the underpass, with only bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones surviving.

For starters, it is the gaps in that night that fuel Tomlinson’s story. Paul, a 41-year-old known to be a heavy drinker, left the Ritz between 7pm and 10pm believing his duties were over, before returning when Diana and Dodi unexpectedly came back for dinner. Where he went in those three hours has never been fully pinned down, though French investigators found nothing to support sinister meetings with intelligence officers.

There is also an unexplained eight-and-a-half-minute window at around 10.22pm when Paul was not picked up on any CCTV cameras. After the crash, the equivalent of almost 2,600 US dollars in francs was discovered in his pocket.

At the 2008 inquest into the princess’s death, French medical tests were cited showing carbon monoxide levels in Paul’s blood between 12 and 21 per cent, far above the usual two to four per cent. His blood alcohol level was put at 0.19 per cent, around three times the French legal limit. Doctors told the court that such a combination could trigger staggering, double vision and intense headaches. A later analysis of his hair and spinal cord also detected Prozac and Tiapridal, medicine used to treat alcohol withdrawal.

Tomlinson seizes on those anomalies. He has suggested Paul may have been poisoned, arguing the toxin levels did not tally with a driver who still managed to operate a powerful car at high speed. He portrays the chauffeur as disgruntled, drinking Scotch, beer and wine at home before being called back in, and therefore easier to manipulate.

The Strobe-Light Plot And The Y-File On Princess Diana

The more outlandish part of Tomlinson’s account rests on what he says he saw inside MI6 a decade earlier. While serving in the agency’s East European Controllerate in the early 1990s, he claims he read a two-page document, known as a ‘Y-file’, discussing three ideas for assassinating Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. One method allegedly involved creating a staged car crash in a tunnel by blinding a driver with a powerful strobe light.

‘What later struck me about the deaths of Diana and Dodi was that the claims about how they had died mimicked what was in a so-called “Y-file” document on how to assassinate Milosevic,’ he has said. In his telling, that technique was ‘consistent with MI6 methods’ at the time of the Paris crash.

Witness evidence has added fuel to that theory. At the inquest, a taxi passenger, Brian Anderson, testified that he saw a ‘significant flash of light’ inside the Pont de l’Alma seconds before the collision. Others mentioned a sudden glare. To conspiracy-minded readers, it is the kind of detail that lodges in the brain and refuses to leave.

The British state, for its part, has consistently rejected any suggestion of an assassination. The inquest jury in 2008 returned a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ by grossly negligent driving, not murder, and the coroner specifically ruled out conspiracy by the security services. MI6 has never commented in detail on Tomlinson’s claims but previously branded his allegations ‘fantasy’ and pointed to multiple court rulings against him.

A Renegade Spy, Princess Diana And A Story That Will Not Die

For context, Richard Tomlinson is hardly a neutral commentator. The New Zealand-born officer joined MI6 in 1991 as agent D/813317 and worked as a targeting specialist in the Balkans and Moscow. He was sacked in 1995, later jailed for a year in the UK in December 1997 under the Official Secrets Act after attempting to publish a book about his work, I Spy.

He has since reworked those experiences into a more extensive volume, The Big Breach, which includes his full theory on Princess Diana and MI6. Extracts from the book have been circulating again among Diana obsessives online as the 30th anniversary of her death in 2027 creeps closer. That, frankly, is how this stuff survives, by being passed around in forums and fan groups, each repetition sanding away the caveats.

Tomlinson has claimed in a rare 1998 interview from Geneva that he and colleagues were given a long-term instruction to watch Diana. ‘We were given a standing instruction to keep her in our sights,’ he said at the time, describing how her phone calls were allegedly monitored and her movements recorded on film and tape. At one point, he alleged, a ‘whole squad of marines’ lay in ditches and behind hedges with infrared cameras outside a house she visited.

He is also among those who believe, or at least argue, that elements of the British government and royal establishment wanted Diana gone because of her outspoken campaign against landmines and her relationship with Muslim film producer Dodi Fayed. Millions of people, as Tomlinson likes to remind interviewers, suspect something similar. Popular suspicion is not evidence of course, but it is part of the story.

That enduring suspicion continues to haunt the royal family. Prince Harry, now 41, has spoken publicly about the pain of his mother never meeting his son Archie, and any fresh theory, however far-fetched, inevitably cuts across that raw space in the public imagination. Every time a renegade ex-spy resurfaces with another version of events, the official account has to fight for oxygen all over again.

Nothing Tomlinson has said has persuaded a court. None of his documents have been produced in public. If there is a classified Y-file and a locked MI6 dossier detailing a plot against Princess Diana, nobody outside that building has seen them. And perhaps that is precisely why his claims keep finding an audience.