In one of those surprise statements, which had become a hallmark of the Blair government, it was announced after the ninth anniversary of Diana’s death that a replacement for the Royal Coroner had been found. She was Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, a retired High Court judge. She had agreed to come out of retirement to preside over the inquest into Diana’s death. An indication of the formidable reading task she faced came when Lord Stevens announced his detectives had so far taken 1,500 witness statements, many more than the previous figure.
On the day of the Butler-Sloss appointment, Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, published his latest revelations about her death. It included a confidential police report about the items recovered from the crash scene. The inventory was prepared by Captain Christophe Boucharin of the Paris Criminal Brigade, marked BC No 288/97. It listed fourteen personal effects, including a pair of black Versace shoes size 40, a Ralph Lauren belt, a Motorola mobile phone, a Jaeger-Lecoultre gold watch, a Bulgari seed-pearl bracelet held at each end with diamond-encrusted drags, and a gold ring. In a footnote Captain Boucharin wrote: “The funeral directors took responsibility for all the artifacts. They put the bracelet on Diana’s right wrist and the ring on her right finger.” Burrell wrote that “she had agreed on my advice when she received the ring from Dodi to wear the ring on her right hand as a friendship ring—not on her left hand denoting an engagement.”
The position of the ring would contradict Mohamed al-Fayed’s persistent claim that his son and Diana were engaged to be married. The veracity of this would be one of the many factors that Baroness Butler-Sloss would have to consider when she eventually presided over the inquest.
In Tel Aviv the latest developments were carefully filed in the Mossad library. Meir Dagan had made his decision about not involving Mossad in the investigation. He had heard nothing to change his mind.
Being driven to his appointment through Washington in a government car, Meir Dagan saw that across the Potomac the memorial stones as usual stood proudly in ranks on the slopes of Arlington Cemetery. The graveyard was so different from the smooth sandstone, brain-shaped monument at Glilot, north of Tel Aviv, and its engravings of the dead of Mossad. Ahead, the Washington Monument’s long shadow gave the last reading of the day before fading into darkness. Along the sidewalk people still pounded along as the lights blinked out in the buildings and flags dropped down poles to be swiftly gathered up. If there was a time he had to come to Washington, Meir Dagan preferred September. Until then the summer would be without a breeze and the atmosphere filled with fumes and ozone, often covering the city with a haze. Visitors said it was the result of car exhaust smoke and the swampy location. Cynical locals knew better, claiming it was a noxious mixture of wasted breath and oxidized hopes that turned to poison when the sun broke through. The cause, of course, was government.
It was its secret side, the CIA, which had once more brought the Mossad chief to Washington. He had arrived at the time for Washington’s powerful pretenders to lock away their documents and to ignore, until the morning, the telephone calls they had not returned. Those without a future headed home to their families. The ambitious, the Mossad chief knew, had further duties. A late drink at an embassy and later still, dinner with friends and enemies, a time when a secret could be quietly shared or a reputation tarnished.
Before leaving Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan had learned that Rafi Eitan, once Mossad’s director of operations and now the Pensioners’ Minister in the coalition that Ehud Olmert hoped would allow him to continue governing, had called for the readying of bomb shelters and reinforced rooms to be established in advance of a possible conflict with Iran. Eitan, once so secretive, had become adept at sound-bites on television.
Staging through London, Dagan learned that MI5 had discovered al-Qaeda had supplied its estimated 2,000 sleeper agents in Britain with what Eliza Manningham-Buller described as “the most sophisticated terror manual ever found in this country.” The document gave information on how to create liquid explosions far more powerful than those planned to be used to destroy ten passenger planes over the Atlantic in August 2006. The precise steps to produce the bombs were set out in chilling detail on an al-Qaeda DVD. On one part of the disk were instructions that mimicked the style of a cookbook—only its pages provided recipes for unparalleled carnage. An example shown to the author reads:
