Paris court tries 12 over wiretapping

[JackSpratts]

Can't happen here? Already has.

The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Antiterrorist Unit Used For Political and Personal Vendettas

PARIS Twelve former government officials and senior police officers went on trial in Paris on Monday, charged with running a phone-tapping operation that was used decades ago by François Mitterrand to keep tabs on the late president's personal enemies.

Twenty-two years after the undercover listening room was set up at the Elysée Palace, the 12 - who include the current head of Renault, Louis Schweitzer - are accused of breach of privacy. Each faces a maximum sentence of a year in jail and a fine of €45,000, or $58,000.

Originally conceived in 1982 as a special antiterrorist unit that answered to the president, the team ended up eavesdropping on journalists, lawyers and businessmen in a bid to discover embarrassing information and snuff out potential scandals.

One of the targets was even an actress and Chanel model, Carole Bouquet.

At the trial - which is to last three months - the defendants are expected to argue that they were following orders from Mitterrand and other politicians, none of whom has faced charges in the matter.

"Our tool was diverted for political ends, for dirty police work, for manipulation," said the unit's deputy chief, Paul Barril, who is one of the accused. "The orders came from Mitterrand's office. I always denounced the abuses."

Yves Bonnet, head of the DST intelligence service at the time, told the Le Parisien newspaper that "the wiretaps the Elysée asked for never served the struggle against terrorism."

Mitterrand used the wiretaps "for extra-administrative and even personal reasons," Bonnet said.

Mitterrand died of prostate cancer in 1996, after serving as president from 1981 to 1995.

Among the public figures who were targets during the unit's three years in operation was Edwy Planel, current editor in chief at Le Monde newspaper. At the time, Planel was investigating claims - since shown to be true - that Barril and others had manufactured evidence against alleged Irish terrorists.

Another target was the late Jean-Edern Hallier. The writer was threatening to publish the story of Mitterrand's secret daughter Mazarine. On one occasion the Elysée allegedly learned that Hallier was to appear on a television chat show and had the program canceled.

Other targets were journalists and lawyers looking into the 1985 Rainbow Warrior incident, in which French agents in New Zealand blew up a vessel belonging to an environmental group, Greenpeace, killing a crew member. In all, the phones of about 150 people were tapped.

Barril's lawyer, Jacques Vergès, said he hoped the trial would "reveal the truth about everyone - even those in the highest places. Who gave the orders, and who manipulated it all."

The scandal first broke in 1992 and gathered strength three years later when an unidentified person passed a computer disk with records of the wiretaps to a court policeman.

But the wide powers of France's presidency and the secretive ways of its judicial system meant the matter was kept quiet for years and then faded from the public eye while the investigating magistrate, Jean-Paul Valat, quietly conducted his inquiry.

It was not until 1998 that the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, a former Mitterrand aide critical of the "monarchical secrecy" that Mitterrand maintained, waived the official secrets act in the case to require officials to divulge information they had kept quiet.

Of those on trial, Schweitzer, 62, was cabinet director for another Socialist prime minister, Laurent Fabius, from 1984 to 1986. He is alleged to have transmitted phone-tap orders to the undercover cell. Mitterrand's cabinet chief Gilles Ménage, 61, is also a defendant, as is the unit's former chief Christian Prouteau, 60.

The former head of an elite gendarme squad, Prouteau was allegedly told by Mitterrand to set up the secret unit after a bombing in central Paris in August 1982 that killed nine people.

Loosely billed as France's Watergate, the matter is most notable for its contrast with the American wiretapping scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign as president of the United States in 1974.

"France never had its Watergate," Le Monde newspaper said published Monday. "François Mitterrand was never held responsible."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/15/news/france.html