546 • TOMLINSON, RICHARD
While in Paris Tomlinson met up with another intelligence officer
who was beginning to gain some notoriety,David Shayler, who had
leftMI5in early 1997 after five years in the service. SIS’s interest
in Shayler rested on his experiences while serving as a desk officer
for Libya in G Branch, MI5’scounterterrorismdivision, which li-
aised closely with its SIS counterpart in the Global Issues Controller-
ate. According to Shayler, SIS had failed to recruit Khalifa Baazelya,
the Libyan external intelligence servicerezidentin London, but had
succeeded in pitching a source codenamedtunworthwho had been
plotting to replace Colonel Moammar Gadhafi. He also claimed that
one of his SIS contacts, David Wilson, designated PT16B, had told
him that SIS had paidtunworthmore than £100,000 for informa-
tion and that he had acted as an intermediary with the Islamic group
that had tried to kill Gadhafi in Tripoli in February 1996. The sub-
stance of Shayler’s allegation was that this assassination attempt had
been sanctioned within SIS but had never been approved by the for-
eign secretary.
Tomlinson exacerbated the situation by claiming that he had been
consulted on a scheme to blow up Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic
in a Swiss road tunnel, a plot that he linked to the death of Princess
Diana in a Paris underpass. The revelations were intended to create a
political controversy, and they certainly succeeded in that objective.
SIS’s public affairs director, Ian Mathewson, issued a public denial
of any SIS assassination plot on behalf of the Foreign Office.
Tomlinson’s capacity for mischief-making was considerable, as
demonstrated by his assertion that Princess Diana’s driver on the
night she died, Henri Paul, had been a long-term SIS asset as well
as director of the Ritz Hotel’s security. Tomlinson, testifying to the
investigating judge in Paris, Herve ́Stephan, claimed to have heard at
Vauxhall Cross in 1992 from his immediate superior, Nick Fishwick,
that Paul had been on SIS’s payroll. Furthermore, he claimed that
Dearlove had been in Paris two weeks before the fatal accident and
had held meetings there with the two senior officers based at the Paris
station, Richard Spearman, formerly Spedding’s chief of staff, and
Nicholas Langman. The proposition that SIS had conspired to assas-
sinate the Princess of Wales was quite ludicrous, but it was taken suf-
ficiently seriously to be retailed across the globe, to the point that
MI5’s director-general,Stella Rimington, felt an obligation to make