Secret life of Mitterrand on trial in bugging case

The Times
From Charles Bremner in Paris

THE secret life of François Mitterrand reached the criminal courts yesterday when 12 former officials and police officers went on trial over the telephone-tapping of personal enemies of the late French President.

Louis Schweitzer, head of the Renault corporation, was among those accused of breaching the privacy of hundreds of personalities including writers, lawyers, journalists and businessmen from 1983 to 1986. Among them was Carole Bouquet, the actress and model.

One aim of the alleged operation was to prevent the public from learning of the existence of Mazarine Pingeot, Mitterrand’s illegitimate daughter with Anne Pingeot, an art curator. Mlle Pingeot, now a novelist and lecturer, was finally presented to France at the age of 18 in 1995, a year before her father’s death.

The bugging case, likened to the American Watergate affair, came to light in 1993 when it emerged that an anti-terrorist unit at the Elysée presidential palace was, in fact, a rogue eavesdropping operation that trawled through the telephone talk of people who might make trouble for the President, or who simply intrigued him. The revelation contributed heavily to the atmosphere of sulphurous intrigue in the final phase of Mitterrand’s 14-year reign.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1360412,00.html