WikiLeaks: US spied on French presidents

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks says the US has been spying on the highest levels of the French political establishment since at least 2006.

In revelations it calls Espionage Elysee, it published on Tuesday (23 June) extracts from five US intercepts of former French leaders Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy and from the current president, Francois Hollande.

A Hollande intercept, dated 22 May 2012 and tagged “top secret”, says Hollande and his then PM, Jean-Marc Ayrault, agreed to hold “secret meetings” on fears of a Greek euro exit.

It says they also agreed to hold secret Greece meetings with the German centre-left SPD party, despite worries on “diplomatic problems” - a bad reaction by the centre-right German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

The intercepts show Sarkozy, who is planning to run afresh in 2017, trying to take charge of the then emerging financial crisis in 2008 and trying to take charge, in 2011, of the Middle East Peace Process.

They also show Chirac, in 2006, trying to orchestrate sensitive UN appointments.

Another Sarkozy intercept, dated, 24 March 2010, shows that the then French ambassador to Washington, Pierre Vimont, and a Sarkozy aide, Jean-David Levitte, voiced annoyance about lack of US-French intelligence co-operation.

“As Vimont and Levitte understand it, the main sticking point is the US desire to continue spying on France”, the US note says.

The WikiLeaks revelations were co-ordinated with French newspaper Liberation and investigative website Mediapart.

The Liberation story, co-written by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is still living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, cites a French official as saying Hollande had asked US leader Barack Obama, in February 2014, to stop the espionage.

It adds: “French readers can expect more timely and important revelations in the near future”.

The Mediapart story publishes another secret US document showing that the National Security Agency (NSA) targeted Hollande’s personal mobile phone as well as the phones of most of his top cadre.

For his part, Hollande has called a meeting of French security chiefs on Wednesday morning to discuss the affair.

Stephane Le Foll, the French agriculture minister, told iTele TV on Wednesday, that “what happened is not acceptable, but we won’t let it turn into a crisis”.

He noted that the affair recalls previous revelations, in German media, that the US also eavesdropped on Merkel’s phone.

Michele Alliot-Marie, a former French defence and foreign minister, told iTele TV: “We are not naive, the conversations that took place between the defence ministry and the president did not happen on the telephone.”

She added: “That being said, it does raise the problem of the relationship of trust between allies”.

Ned Price, a US National Security Council spokesman, told press in Washington: “As a general matter, we do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there is a specific and validated national security purpose”.

He added: “We are not targeting and will not target the communications of president Hollande. We work closely with France on all matters of international concern, and the French are indispensable partners”.

The WikiLeaks publication comes on the eve of an EU summit on Greece and on immigration.

It also comes amid EU-US talks on a free trade agreement and on better exchange of data for counter-terrorism purposes.

WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010, when it published tens of thousands of secret US diplomatic cables from around the world.

Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who lives in exile in Russia, has also revealed that the US spies on its EU allies, on EU institutions in Brussels, and that it hoovers up massive amounts of personal information on EU citizens.