Home > US ’bugged’ France’s Chirac calls
by BBC
A book published in France says the US regularly monitored French President Jacques
Chirac’s phone calls.
The book, which charts the breakdown of the leaders’ relationship in the run-up
to the Iraq war, says several sources reported the surveillance.
The US told a senior French military official the French-US relationship at a
personal level was "irreparable".
The book, Chirac contre Bush - l’autre guerre (Chirac versus Bush - the other
war), comes out on Wednesday.
The two leaders were at loggerheads over the war in Iraq, which culminated with Mr Chirac pledging to use his UN veto against the war.
"The relationship between your president and ours is irreparable on the personal level. You have to understand that President Bush knows exactly what President Chirac thinks of him," a US official is reported as telling a senior French military official in the book by journalists Henri Vernet and Thomas Cantaloube.
Surveillance was possible because Mr Chirac rarely uses secure phone lines, except in scheduled calls to world leaders, Mr Vernet told BBC News Online.
Mr Chirac and the then French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led a very small team inside the Elysee palace which made decisions on France’s strategy on Iraq, Mr Vernet says.
They were aware their policy was popular with French public opinion and that as such there were "no moderating elements" inside the team, according to an Elysee source close to the team, Mr Vernet says.
The book’s two authors, who are journalists based in Paris and Washington for Le Parisien newspaper, investigated the US-France relationship for a year as the Iraq crisis unravelled, speaking to various military and security sources.
UN bug claims
The book lends further credence to reports that the UN is routinely bugged by larger powers to monitor diplomatic conversations.
In the run-up to the Security Council sessions on Iraq in early 2003, the French and members of other European delegations had to meet in the German mission’s anti-bugging glass cage to avoid their conversations being monitored, Mr Vernet says.
In the early 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the then US Ambassador to the UN, warned her French counterpart through sign language that Washington was listening in, Mr Vernet says.
Earlier this year, a former UK government minister, Clare Short, said the British had spied on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN’s headquarters in New York in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Forum posts
8 October 2004, 10:43
Yeah, and what are they going to do about it? They should just join Bush’s enemy of the month club.
8 October 2004, 15:53
This is proof this administration main objective is to suppress dissent at home and abroad. This is the behavior of a dictatorship. I guess you can always claim you are democratic if no one notices that the tactics that you use are undemocratic. Bush and his clan must think everyone is stupid like he is.
11 October 2004, 08:40
Those behaviors are reminisent of the cold war. The U.S has had the CIA for a long time, these surveillance activitys have been commonplace for some time. The chinese and even some of our "allies" in Europe have initiated programs to absorb U.S secrets and intelligence. Lets not mention the Russians giving top baathist party members advice on U.S military tactics and hardware as the war started, or the fact that the russians and france spying on our occupation. The french have sowed an alliance with communist China, and back Chinas ideology about Taiwan. I would be suprised if that Sino-French/ Sino-Euro alliance didn’t become openly anti U.S withing a year or two. Thinking about it makes you refer back to some of the WWIII recipes....
12 October 2004, 04:26
Ohooo not Communist China....those dirty buggers that have been lending us billions of dollars to keep our wonderful democracy afloat. Not those commie pinkos that produce about 90% of all of the goods in Wal-Mart where we all go everyday of our lives and buy all of those nasty commie pinko products......we really should kick those dirty creditors of ours in the balls.....
12 October 2004, 04:46
Why should this suprise anyone? Chirac has not been a friend to America.