POLITICS-FRANCE: French Watergate Suspects Face Prosecution

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Aug 6 2002 (IPS) - The decision by the French judiciary to prosecute the aides of former President Francois Mitterand for the illegal recording of the private telephone calls is a reminder of the bleak political practices of the controversial leftist leader.

Last week French prosecutor, Jean-Paul Valat, confirmed that dockets have been opened against 12 former close aides to Mitterrand. They are accused of having taped the telephone conversations of some 150 people – including journalists, lawyers, authors, and movie actors – between 1983 and 1986.

Valat says the former state officials committed “attacks against the intimacy of private persons, illegal interception of telephone conversations, and illegal electronic storing of private conversations.”

Those charged include Mitterand’s former chief of staff Gilles Ménage, military prefect Christian Prouteau, the prime minister’s chiefs of staff Louis Schweitzer and Michel Delebarre, generals Pierre-Eugene Charroy and Jean-Louis Esquivié, and captain Paul Barril.

The former state officials worked for the so called “anti terrorist cell” created by Mitterrand after being elected to office in 1981. According to the prosecution, Mitterrand personally directed the group and frequently listened to the recordings.

Mitterrand, who presided over France between 1981 and 1995, allegedly ordered the recording of telephone conversations of journalist Edwy Plenel, lawyer Antonio Comte, actress Caroline Bouquet, and others. Until his death in January 1996, Mitterrand denied any implication in the affair.

The recordings were first reported by the daily newspaper Libération in 1994. The publication accused Mitterrand of ordering the illegal tap of Plenel’s phone. Plenel, then reporter at the daily Le Monde and today the newspaper’s chief editor, had published stories on the Soviet military system.

According to the prosecution Mitterrand and his aides used imaginary arguments such as accusing their victims of gunrunning or of plotting against the president or against the state to justify the illegal recordings to other government officials

Political analysts say the recordings were mostly motivated by Mitterrand’s capricious decisions and sometimes by other governmental blunders. They say that while Plenel enjoyed a reputation of being an obstinate reporter, lawyer Comte was, at the time of the recordings, the legal counselor of a group of Irish citizens accused by Mitterrand’s government of organising terrorist attacks both in France and in Northern Ireland.

Actress Bouquet’s telephone conversations were likely recorded, they say, because at the time she was married to film producer Jean-Pierre Rassam, who was a friend of journalist Jean-Edern Hallier, a personal enemy of Mitterrand’s.

Hallier had, for years, unsuccessfully tried to make public the fact that Mitterrand had an illegitimate daughter and that the girl’s mother lived directly at Elysee Palace, the French presidency official seat, and that Mitterrand had been suffering from cancer since the late 1970’s. Mitterrand died in January 1996 reportedly of cancer.

Mitterrand allegedly even ordered the surveillance of a garbage collector, whom he accused of gunrunning, of two house cleaners and of a cashier. He apparently argued that the three women represented a threat to national defense.

Immediately after Libération revealed the illegal recordings of Plenel’s private conversations, the French judiciary opened an inquiry. But the prosecutors were stopped because the case was classified as a state secret. But despite this classification, prosecutor Valat was still able to establish the facts of the newspaper’s allegations.

Several of Mitterrand’s aides publicly confirmed the recordings. Gilles Ménage, the president’s former chief of staff, said: “The ensemble of the state apparatus was involved in the recordings, we didn’t work in a secret corner far away from all control.”

Valat’s investigations suffered a setback in December 1994, when Pierry-Yves Guézou, one of the military police officers accused of having participated in the tapings, committed suicide in his apartment in Paris.

The suicide raised popular awareness of the affair, both in the sense of its gravity, as well as in the participation of lower status public officials whose lives were affected by it.

In the years to come prosecutor Valat accumulated even more evidence on the recordings. In February 1995, Valat obtained from anonymous sources several computer disks containing some 5 000 files on the recordings of the telephone conversation of 23 personalities.

In February 1997, Valat discovered in a garage near Paris the private archives of Christian Prouteau, who served as head of Mitterrand’s so called anti terrorist cell.

These files provided the ultimate confirmation. Under the president’s directs orders, more than 3000 telephone conversations of some 150 people had been illegally recorded by state instances during more than three years.

Prouteau, who also died in January 1996, had denied the existence of the recordings.

The French press have dubbed the illegal recordings “the French Watergate”, in reference to the illegal tapings ordered by US president Richard Nixon. But, in contrast to Nixon’s fall due to the Watergate affair, Mitterrand was able to complete his second mandate as president and peaceably retire from politics in 1995.

The judiciary inquiry into the French Watergate was only officially authorized in 1998 by former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who had served as minister of education during the first years of Mitterrand’s presidential mandate.

Most of the former state officials accused by the prosecution are now retired. Two of them died several years ago. Louis Schweitzer, who between 1984 and 1986 acted as chief of staff of then Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, works today as head of the state owned car manufacturer, Renault.