By Judi McLeod
Friday, October 6, 2006
It was faraway Shamwari where prolific, British-based author Gordon Thomas
chose to set his fascinating screenplay, Mambo, and it was there, deep in the bush, that he received a telephone call from Princess Diana.
Shamwari, the game reserve in South africa's Eastern Cape, has a musically sounding name, and adds to the romance of Diana's all too fleeting flirtation in the making of Mambo.
as Mambo's executive producer, Diana had placed the telephone call to Thomas from the Jonikal, the magnificent yacht of Mohammed al-Fayed, the Egyptian-born owner of Harrods, of Knightsbridge, the "Royal" store. On board with her was Mohammed's son, her lover, Dodi, the movie producer.
Diana had asked Thomas to write a landmine scene in which Mambo would rescue film star Brad Pitt from a field sewn with landmines. But a single day after she suggested the scene, she was dead, along with Dodi. Both were killed in the first hours of Sunday morning, august 30, 1997, in a car crash in a Paris underpass.
It was a fateful phone call to trail an author for the rest of his days, a haunting Diana whose image still flickers still like the candle's flame.
Meet Gordon Thomas, the latest regular columnist carried by www.canadafreepress.com.
Gordon Thomas is the author of some 40 books, with total sales exceeding 50 million copies.His Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad became a major documentary, which he wrote and narrated for Britain's Channel 4 and was later shown worldwide. It followed three years of research during which he was given unprecedented access to Mossad's key personnel.The book has been published internationally.
and that's just the fate of one Gordon Thomas book. Overseas, several more were Main Selections for the US Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and the Readers Digest Book Club. The author has received two Mark Twain Society awards for Reporting Excellence.Seven of his books are major motion pictures, including the three-times academy award nominated Voyage of the Damned; and Enola Gay, which won the Emmy awards Foreign Critics Prize.Experiences won the Jury's and Critics' prizes at the Monte Carlos Film Festival.He holds an Edgar allan Poe award for Shipwreck. In april 2006, he received the Citizens Commission for Human Rights Lifetime achievement award for Investigative Journalism.
That's the Gordon Thomas of legendary author fame.
as a journalist, it's the jungles of terrorism as opposed to the one of the four-legged beast, where he excels.
Thomas writes on intelligence matters for The Sunday Express (UK), Welt am Sonntag and Bild (Germany); Wprost (Poland); Facta (Japan); Daily Telegraph (australia); and G2 Bulletin (the Internet's leading intelligence newsletter). He has been a regular broadcaster on current affairs for the BBC and US networks and has lectured widely on the intelligence world.
For all of his literary achievements and head-turning accolades, there is nothing plumy about author-journalist Gordon Thomas. Down-to-earth, easy to take, and always eager to learn, he was asking me questions about CFP the first time we talked by telephone.
When he's not traveling to all corners of the globe to lecture on international terrorism, he calls home an historic 1649 abode where the writer Thomas Wolfe penned two of his novels.
We're already learning new things from our newest columnist. For instance, having relegated the mysterious Dodi al-Fayed to some dark recess of my mind, I was surprised to read the Thomas description of how Dodi had "made the classic Chariots of Fire. To Dodi's credit he "had seen in Mambo a chance to fulfil Diana's passion for protecting wildlife and continuing her campaign against landmines."
Our mutual friend David Dastych, someone the writer of this column views in epic heroic fashion, brought CFP's latest contributing columnist to us.affectionately dubbed "David, the Door Opener" by Yours Truly, the Polish-based legend and former CIa operative once imprisoned by Polish communists, had already ushered in the celebrated Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir.
"Did you know that Gordon was the first to learn about the attempted nationalization of the Suez Canal, which provoked a war between Britain, France and Egypt?" David asked in a letter telling me how happy he is that Gordon has joined the CFP fold. "He was also a witness to Mehmet ali agca's attempt against the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981, and he covered the Tianmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989."
The ever-industrious Dastych is currently working on translating a new part of Thomas's popular book, Gideon Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad to be printed in Poland in 2007.
He helped to release the first Polish edition of this book, two years ago, and is also working on publishing, in Poland, Thomas's book about the papacy: PONTIFF, a world's best-seller of the 1980s. It's about three consecutive popes: Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II and many of the Vatican insiders, Dastych explained.
Like his friend Dastych, Thomas is a chronicler of world events--sometimes reporting from right in the very middle of them.
The memory of Diana still haunts Thomas from the grave.
The Thomas screenplay, Underpass, which received the Best adaptation Prize at the 1998 Mipcom Film Festival at Cannes, is currently slated to be an MGM release as a feature film that deals with the intelligence mystery around the death of Princess Diana.
His column Cry from the Heart of a Princess: The Moving Story of Diana and Mambo: an Elephant Like No Other, a compelling read, is posted on today's CFP website.
Thank you, David Dastych, for opening the CFP door to Gordon Thomas.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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