By Ken Thomas
On the last day of August 1997, driver Henri Paul (with Prozac and the sedative Tiapridal in his system, and perhaps drunk to some degree) took Diana Princess of Wales and her boyfriend Dodi Fayad on a ride into the Pont D'Alma tunnel in Paris.
The car passed a white Fiat and, after a blinding flash [1] and smashed into a concrete pillar at over 90 miles per hour and ricocheted into a tunnel wall. Paul and the 42 year old Dodi Al Fayad died immediately.
Paramedics gave the 34 year old Diana a blood transfusion at the scene, but her heart stopped in the ambulance. She died four hours after the crash.
Like the Kennedy assassination, the details of how Diana died cause great conspiracy theorizing. [2] Just as JFK's death was officially investigated and declared the result of a single gunman acting alone, official investigations of Diana's death concluded that it was a simple automobile accident.
The unlikely coincidences of the crash, however, and unanswered questions left most people interested in the topic with the suspicion that it was an assassination, done for the sake of keeping Diana from pursuing her relationship with Dodi Al Fayad, an Egyptian, a Muslim and the son of powerful businessman, Mohamed Al Fayed, at odds with the crown and other power elements in the UK [3].
Conspiracy columnist Jim Keith suggested that Diana was pregnant with Dodi Al Fayed's child at the time of her death, and Keith himslef died under unusual circumstances shortly thereafter, leading some to speculate that it had something to do with the revelation.
What keeps Diana's death a topic of intense interest among conspiracy students are the facts, rumors and weird connections that relate it directly to Danny Casolaro's Octopus research.
In fact, four years after Diana's fatal wreck, which occurred six years after Casolaro's mysterious "suicide", the disaster in the Pont D'Alma tunnel brought the story of the Octopus, the PROMIS software, and Casolaro's world of Iran-Contra spies, arms merchants and corrupt politicos back in the news.
Noted almost immediately was the shadowy presence of Adnan Khashoggi in the background of the Diana death.
Khashoggi was Dodi Fayed's uncle and a well-known broker of military hardware deals in volving Saudi Arabia stretching back to the 1970s. [4] A few days before his death, Casolaro took his friend Ben Mason down into his basement and proudly showed him several photocopied pages documenting contra arms transfers involving Khashoggi and a partner, Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Casolaro even had copies of BCCI checks drawn on Khashoggi's accounts.
Mason later reported that Casolaro was elated over a source he was about to meet in West Virginia, someone Casolaro described to Virginia McCullough as being involved in guns-and-drugs transfers.
Casolaro told a fellow hotel guest, Mike Looney, that he was meeting with an Arab.
No one has suggested that Casolaro planned to meet Khashoggi or even a compatriot, but he was investigating Iran-Contra arms dealings and he did place great importance on that final meeting, and called it something that would wrap up his Octopus research.
As with all of his research, however, this final tributary led to others involving Octopus entanglements beyond Iran- Contra and beyond PROMIS and Inslaw.
Casolaro's focus on the Khashoggi documents at the end almost certainly involved knowledge of Khashoggi's April 1986 meeting with Tony Rowland, Australian tycoon, publisher of The Observer newspaper and an adversary of Mohammad Al Fayed's attempt to gain British citizenship.
[5] Khashoggi, Gorbanifar and journalist/Israeli foreign adviser Amiram Nir attempted to persuade Rowland to join the Iran-Contra effort by helping sell arms to Iran.
The attempted alliance bogged down after the meeting, when Rowland inquired into US circles about covert support for such an effort. It seems very likely that Casolaro knew about this alliance between Dodi Fayed's maternal uncle, Khashoggi, and his father's bitter enemy, Rowland. Its deeper significance, of course, became clear after Casolaro's death, and after Diana's. [6]
But it came as no surprise coincidence that in search of justice in what he regards as the murder of his son and Princess Diana, Mohammad Al Fayed returned to the history and speculation about the multinational Octopus cabal that was so important to Danny Casolaro.
In the early fall of 2000, Al Fayed filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the CIA and several other US intelligence services. He declared his intent to recover documents orignally surfaced by a self-proclaimed CIA agent named Oswald LeWinter.
LeWinter previously had tried to sell documents to an Al Fayed cohort in Austria, documents purportedly implicating the British government in the Diana crash. LeWinter was arrested as a fraud, however, and sentenced in Vienna, 1998, to four years imprisonment.
LeWinter apparently still holds to the authenticity of the doucments, stating that "I had a choice at my arrest to identify the documents as genuine or as fakes. If I said genuine, I would face charges in the US of high treason . . . so I said they were forgeries and was arrested for fraud."
Rumor and speculation continued to move Diana and the Octopus closer together in the thinking of conspiracy students as Michael Riconsociuto, Danny Casolaro's main informant, himself emerged again to make a connecting link.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, key players in the original tale of the PROMIS software piracy, reopened its investigation into the affair in 1999/2000 when it conducted a series of interviews with a former stockbroker in Ontario named John Belton.
Reporters from the Toronto Star discovered from Belton that the RCMP had reopened its investigation into the Canadian role in the Inslaw affair and the possible threat it represented to Canadian security. "Belton said RCMP officers have already confirmed to him that they do use the PROMIS software [and the security of the RCMP has been compromised as a result of trap doors in the software.] . . .
The chainsmoking Belton unraveled his story at the kitchen table of his sprawling, ramshackle house near Ottawa. The table is stacked with thick binders jammed with documents detailing his allegations.
Court documents, detailed notes of telephone conversations and newspaper clippings are marked up with highlighter and neatly organized." The Star quoted Belton as saying "You're not dealing with paranoid crazies, or the UFO guys. I'm very serious about this." [7]read more
http://old.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id902/pg1/index.html
On the last day of August 1997, driver Henri Paul (with Prozac and the sedative Tiapridal in his system, and perhaps drunk to some degree) took Diana Princess of Wales and her boyfriend Dodi Fayad on a ride into the Pont D'Alma tunnel in Paris.
The car passed a white Fiat and, after a blinding flash [1] and smashed into a concrete pillar at over 90 miles per hour and ricocheted into a tunnel wall. Paul and the 42 year old Dodi Al Fayad died immediately.
Paramedics gave the 34 year old Diana a blood transfusion at the scene, but her heart stopped in the ambulance. She died four hours after the crash.
Like the Kennedy assassination, the details of how Diana died cause great conspiracy theorizing. [2] Just as JFK's death was officially investigated and declared the result of a single gunman acting alone, official investigations of Diana's death concluded that it was a simple automobile accident.
The unlikely coincidences of the crash, however, and unanswered questions left most people interested in the topic with the suspicion that it was an assassination, done for the sake of keeping Diana from pursuing her relationship with Dodi Al Fayad, an Egyptian, a Muslim and the son of powerful businessman, Mohamed Al Fayed, at odds with the crown and other power elements in the UK [3].
Conspiracy columnist Jim Keith suggested that Diana was pregnant with Dodi Al Fayed's child at the time of her death, and Keith himslef died under unusual circumstances shortly thereafter, leading some to speculate that it had something to do with the revelation.
What keeps Diana's death a topic of intense interest among conspiracy students are the facts, rumors and weird connections that relate it directly to Danny Casolaro's Octopus research.
In fact, four years after Diana's fatal wreck, which occurred six years after Casolaro's mysterious "suicide", the disaster in the Pont D'Alma tunnel brought the story of the Octopus, the PROMIS software, and Casolaro's world of Iran-Contra spies, arms merchants and corrupt politicos back in the news.
Noted almost immediately was the shadowy presence of Adnan Khashoggi in the background of the Diana death.
Khashoggi was Dodi Fayed's uncle and a well-known broker of military hardware deals in volving Saudi Arabia stretching back to the 1970s. [4] A few days before his death, Casolaro took his friend Ben Mason down into his basement and proudly showed him several photocopied pages documenting contra arms transfers involving Khashoggi and a partner, Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Casolaro even had copies of BCCI checks drawn on Khashoggi's accounts.
Mason later reported that Casolaro was elated over a source he was about to meet in West Virginia, someone Casolaro described to Virginia McCullough as being involved in guns-and-drugs transfers.
Casolaro told a fellow hotel guest, Mike Looney, that he was meeting with an Arab.
No one has suggested that Casolaro planned to meet Khashoggi or even a compatriot, but he was investigating Iran-Contra arms dealings and he did place great importance on that final meeting, and called it something that would wrap up his Octopus research.
As with all of his research, however, this final tributary led to others involving Octopus entanglements beyond Iran- Contra and beyond PROMIS and Inslaw.
Casolaro's focus on the Khashoggi documents at the end almost certainly involved knowledge of Khashoggi's April 1986 meeting with Tony Rowland, Australian tycoon, publisher of The Observer newspaper and an adversary of Mohammad Al Fayed's attempt to gain British citizenship.
[5] Khashoggi, Gorbanifar and journalist/Israeli foreign adviser Amiram Nir attempted to persuade Rowland to join the Iran-Contra effort by helping sell arms to Iran.
The attempted alliance bogged down after the meeting, when Rowland inquired into US circles about covert support for such an effort. It seems very likely that Casolaro knew about this alliance between Dodi Fayed's maternal uncle, Khashoggi, and his father's bitter enemy, Rowland. Its deeper significance, of course, became clear after Casolaro's death, and after Diana's. [6]
But it came as no surprise coincidence that in search of justice in what he regards as the murder of his son and Princess Diana, Mohammad Al Fayed returned to the history and speculation about the multinational Octopus cabal that was so important to Danny Casolaro.
In the early fall of 2000, Al Fayed filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the CIA and several other US intelligence services. He declared his intent to recover documents orignally surfaced by a self-proclaimed CIA agent named Oswald LeWinter.
LeWinter previously had tried to sell documents to an Al Fayed cohort in Austria, documents purportedly implicating the British government in the Diana crash. LeWinter was arrested as a fraud, however, and sentenced in Vienna, 1998, to four years imprisonment.
LeWinter apparently still holds to the authenticity of the doucments, stating that "I had a choice at my arrest to identify the documents as genuine or as fakes. If I said genuine, I would face charges in the US of high treason . . . so I said they were forgeries and was arrested for fraud."
Rumor and speculation continued to move Diana and the Octopus closer together in the thinking of conspiracy students as Michael Riconsociuto, Danny Casolaro's main informant, himself emerged again to make a connecting link.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, key players in the original tale of the PROMIS software piracy, reopened its investigation into the affair in 1999/2000 when it conducted a series of interviews with a former stockbroker in Ontario named John Belton.
Reporters from the Toronto Star discovered from Belton that the RCMP had reopened its investigation into the Canadian role in the Inslaw affair and the possible threat it represented to Canadian security. "Belton said RCMP officers have already confirmed to him that they do use the PROMIS software [and the security of the RCMP has been compromised as a result of trap doors in the software.] . . .
The chainsmoking Belton unraveled his story at the kitchen table of his sprawling, ramshackle house near Ottawa. The table is stacked with thick binders jammed with documents detailing his allegations.
Court documents, detailed notes of telephone conversations and newspaper clippings are marked up with highlighter and neatly organized." The Star quoted Belton as saying "You're not dealing with paranoid crazies, or the UFO guys. I'm very serious about this." [7]read more
http://old.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id902/pg1/index.html
