Princess Diana

One of the reasons some many of us refuse to believe that a lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed John F. Kennedy is that we just can't believe that a loser like Oswald could have destroyed the magical dream of Camelot.

It's the same with Princess Diana. How could the gracious and elegant lady and her boyfriend Dodi die at the hands of a drunk driver?

Perhaps their glittering lives deserved a more fitting conclusion, but wishing won't change the fact that a driver, three-times over the French drink drive limit was the man principally responsible for their untimely deaths.

Before I get back to that, there are other conclusions in the official British report into the crash that killed them, which are sure to keep alive the conspiracy theory that she was murdered because the British government wanted to prevent the mother of the heirs to the British throne from marrying a Muslim. A Hollywood producer, Dodi Fayed's controversial father Mohammed Fayed, owns Harrod's, England's largest department store, and is a constant critic of the government.

Item: Due out later this week, the report concludes that the CIA did, in fact, bug Diana's phone. And that they supposedly did it without the kn owledge of their British counterparts. As incredible as that sounds, they even admit listening in on her conversations in the hours before she died.  Why would U.S. intelligence bug the princess, and did they over-hear anything that would shed light on the mystery of why she died?

Whether true or not, the claim is they did it because the spooks in Washington were worried that Diana's campaign against landmines could embarrass the United States. And, if you believe the CIA, it claims their agents didn't overhear anything relevant to Diana's subsequent death.

But that's not the only spy connection. The Scotland Yard report compiled by Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, will also allege that the drunk driver of the ill-fated Mercedes, Henri Paul, was indeed a French spy, in the pay of their version of the FBI. Stevens traced almost $200,000 Paul collected from the French government and deposited in 14 different bank accounts. But, according to the report, he wasn't being paid to snitch on Princess Di.

Back to the report's drunk driving conclusion. Dodi's father has long alleged that authorities involved in the conspiracy to kill Diana and cover up their evil deed simply switched Henri Paul's blood sample or spiked it with alcohol to make it appear he was drunk. But, while admitting an initial mix-up of samples on the night of the accident, the report says that D-N-A conclusively links the blood to Paul, and that he was drunk. Anyway, that's what the report says, although at this point I'm not sure I'd believe them if they told me Paris was in France.

As to the speculation that Diana was pregnant with Dodi's baby and about to marry him, last night the BBC ran a documentary quoting several of her friends denying both allegations.

After a bitter legal battle, Dodi's father did win one fight, the formal inquest into Diana's death, scheduled for next year, will be public. So we'll be able to decide for ourselves what killed Diana Princess of Wales.