Sarkozy’s women ‘used in smear plot’
Sunday Times
Matthew Campbell
October 12, 2008

A TALE of skulduggery and intrigue has emerged in France, where the former intelligence chief is suspected of spying on President Nicolas Sarkozy’s wives and lovers as part of an effort to smear him.

Evidence that the telephone of Marie-Dominique Culioli, Sarkozy’s first wife, had been bugged even after their separation was one of the secrets leaked last week from the private notebooks of Yves Bertrand, head of the Renseignements Généraux, or secret police, for 12 years until 2004.

The revelations have cast an unusual light on the grubby underbelly of French politics and the extent to which the intelligence service has been used as a tool for settling personal vendettas instead of defending state interests.

In January 2003, Bertrand filled two pages of his notebook with an account of how “Sarko”, as he called the then interior minister, had left Culioli in the late 1980s for Cécilia, who became his second wife in 1996.

The diary entry made liberal use of a transcript of a telephone conversation between Culioli and her best friend in which they discussed Sarkozy’s adultery with Cécilia. The transcript was presumed to have come from a phone tap.

Filled with explosive claims about the drug habits and sexual exploits of various top politicians, the diaries were seized from Bertrand’s home last January as part of an investigation into dirty tricks against Sarkozy. They were leaked last week to Le Point magazine, which called them “an alarming journey under the skirts of the republic”.

The large round handwriting covers at least 23 notebooks that were found in Bertrand’s cellar. References to the secret lives of the leaders are interspersed with shopping lists, Bertrand’s bank balance and memos to himself such as “change cat litter”.

Bertrand, 64, who is described as representing the “old school” of French intelligence, last week denied any attempt to discredit Sarkozy, who had moved him to another post in 2004 after accusing him of “plotting”.

“It is pure fantasy,” he said, defending his interest in the personal lives of other politicians on the grounds that “it is normal that I be kept informed at an early stage . . . When a politician takes cocaine, that can have an impact on the life of the country”. He added, however, that “rarely did these rough drafts [of reports] ever become a subject for official exploitation”.

Even so, the diary shows him to be somewhat obsessed with Sarkozy. In one entry, in 2002, he writes: “Sarkozy building a villa near Sartrouville. Using construction companies from Neuilly. All on the black [using illegal labour].”

Another entry noted that Guillaume Sarkozy, a textile entrepreneur, vice-president of the French union of employers and brother of the president, was the victim of a “blackmail” attempt.

In the view of Le Point, the diaries offered the first credible evidence that the intelligence services had played an active role in the efforts of Jacques Chirac, the former president, to stop Sarkozy succeeding him last year. It called Bertrand the “key player in a black cabinet . . . in the service of Chirac”.

“One could smile,” said the magazine, “if this below-the-belt police work had not sometimes shattered careers and undermined democracy.”

French leaders have often used – or abused, say critics – the intelligence services to further their goals.

François Mitterrand, the former Socialist president, liked to keep tabs on friends and foes alike by eavesdropping on their telephone conversations.

Chirac had his reasons for keeping an eye on Sarkozy. Once a mentor to the younger man, he had never forgiven him his treachery in backing a rival for the presidency in 1995. Sarkozy had compounded this betrayal by dating and dumping Claude, Chirac’s daughter. Chirac apparently wanted to get even.

He left no stone unturned in trying to thwart the man he might once have regarded as the perfect son-in-law. He was even rumoured to have ordered the intelligence service to inform Cécilia about her husband’s affairs in the hope that this would weaken Sarkozy: in one of his diary entries, Bertrand claimed Sarkozy was having an affair four years ago with the wife of an MP who is now in his cabinet.

Whether or not the information was passed on to Cécilia – she was said by one source to have received photographs in an unmarked brown envelope – Sarkozy’s alleged infidelities, say friends, were a factor in driving her into the arms of Richard Attias, the Moroccan-born events organiser, just as Sarkozy was preparing his assault on the presidency.

Sarkozy was devastated by the loss of Cécilia but consoled himself in the arms of a journalist with whom he conducted an affair over several months.

A guilt-stricken – and apparently jealous – Cécilia returned to Sarkozy in time for the election but left again after only a few months in the role of first lady. Sarkozy quickly filled the vacancy by marrying Carla Bruni, the former model and singer, in February.

Several pages were found to have been ripped out of Bertrand’s notebooks when judges examined them. Even so, they contained extraordinary hints of how the intelligence service was at the beck and call of Chirac.

An attempt to spare Bernadette, the first lady, from embarrassment, was made with a plot to implicate Bruno Gaccio, the creator of a satirical television puppet show, in drug trafficking. Les Guignols had relentlessly targeted Bernadette as a frumpy matronly figure obsessed with her handbags.

Bertrand notes that Gaccio was placed under surveillance by the drug squad but nothing incriminating was found in his behaviour.

The diaries offer evidence that it was also Bertrand who tipped off judges about the so-called “Angola-gate” arms trafficking affair. This was simply in the hope of discrediting Charles Pasqua, another former interior minister who Chirac had feared might run against him – and win – in the presidential election of 2002.

The trial, with 42 defendants including Pasqua and Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of the Socialist leader, began last week amid calls from their army of lawyers for Bertrand’s diaries to be included as evidence.

However, the diaries were seized by a judge in a different case – the “Clearstream” affair – in which Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s former prime minister, faces a possible prison sentence for trying to paint Sarkozy as a beneficiary of bribes on a sale of warships to Taiwan.

Bertrand’s diaries show that he held 33 meetings between 2001 and 2002 with de Villepin, the poet and politician who went on to become foreign minister in time for the war in Iraq.

De Villepin insisted that they had discussed only national security matters. Bertrand said they talked about things “that could threaten the head of state”.

Sarkozy, who has pledged “rupture” with the bad old ways of the past, has sought to reorganise intelligence undera new agency called the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence. High time, say critics of French espionage.

Notes on a scandal

Bertrand’s notebooks also disclose:

A former minister had sex with “little boys” in the Mamounia hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco

Another minister was addicted to cocaine A third minister was investigated by the tax authorities

A French police chief got involved in a big gold purchase in Lebanon

Chirac had a facelift in Canada

2.5 million - The number of citizens on whom French intelligence keeps files