France’s armed forces minister was targeted by the Pegasus spyware, sold to states worldwide by Israeli surveillance technology firm NSO Group, bringing the known number of French ministers whose phones were infected with the software, along with that of President Emmanuel Macron, to seven.
Mediapart has learnt that the name of Florence Parly, who was armed forces minister throughout President Emmanuel Macron’s first term in office, from June 2017 to May 2022, features on a “notice to victims” issued on May 11th by the magistrate in charge of a judicial investigation into the espionage, which was first discovered in 2021. Parly, who left government last year, was bugged by the spyware while serving as minister.
Pegasus is a surveillance tool which can infect a mobile phone to extract all of its data and also activate its microphone to listen in on conversations. It is operated at distance, and in a manner totally invisible to the targeted individual.
Contacted by Mediapart, Parly declined to comment.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It was in mid-July 2021 that worldwide use of the Pegasus spyware for secret surveillance was first revealed by Paris-based “Forbidden Stories”, a nonprofit journalism organisation, in collaboration with Amnesty International. It had gained access to leaked data, which it sifted and shared with a number of media organisations for further investigation.
The NSO Group, which sold its tool to governments around the globe, claimed that its clients were contractually bound to use it only for combatting “serious crime and terrorism”.
The discovered traces of the use of the software virus against targets in France concerned the years 2019 and, to a lesser extent, 2020. The traces have been established in expert analyses led by France’s National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI), a body that reports to the General Secretary for Defence and National Security (SGDSN), and the domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI.
It was also found on the devices of people outside the French government, including five journalists, among who are Mediapart’s publishing editor, Edwy Plenel, and its gender issues editor, Lénaïg Bredoux. In all, 23 individuals in France are known to have fallen victim to the bugging.
The other French ministers targeted by the Pegasus spyware between 2019 and 2020 were Jean-Michel Blanquer (then in charge of education), François de Rugy (ecological transition), Julien Denormandie (agriculture), Jacqueline Gourault (territorial cohesion and relations with regional and local public authorities), Emmanuelle Wargon (junior minister, in charge of housing), and Sébastien Lecornu (French overseas territories).
Lecornu is France’s current armed forces minister, succeeding Parly in May last year.
The former industry minister in France’s 2012-2017 socialist government, Arnaud Montebourg, and a former Member of Parliament with Macron’s then LREM party, Cédric Villani, also feature on the judicial investigation’s established list of those targeted.
After the July 2021 revelations by Forbidden Stories, the French executive was coy in its reaction to the scandal and over who it believed was behind it. “I think it would be a little irresponsible on our part to say things as long as we don’t know exactly what there is,” then French prime minister Jean Castex told TV channel TF1. “At this stage, no certainty has emerged, so prudence is required in comments,” said the presidential office, the Élysée Palace, adding that Macron had changed his phone and its number “for some of his exchanges”.
At the end of July 2021, Florence Parly discussed the Pegasus scandal when she met in Paris with her Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz, but no detail was given of their discussions. At the time, no-one knew that Parly, who as armed forces minister was responsible for the activities of France’s military and domestic intelligence agencies, was herself spied upon by the NSO software.
Suspicions over Morocco's involvement
The French investigations have established that at least three other journalists were targeted: Dominique Simonnot, a former reporter with the investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné (and who is now General Controller of prisons and detention centres), and Moroccan journalists Omar Brouksy and Hicham Mansouri.
The official list of suspected crimes cited in the French judicial investigation, led by Judge Serge Tournaire, illustrates the breadth of the scandal. They include “invasion of privacy”, “criminal conspiracy”, “interception, misappropriation, use of and disclosure, of correspondence”, “introduction, extraction, transmission, [and] fraudulent reproduction in a system of automatic treatment of data”.
According to the investigation by Forbidden Stories, which was conducted with the collaboration of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, many of the French victims of the spyware were targeted on the order of the Moroccan authorities.
Among the targets, according to the French judicial investigation, were Claude Mangin, the partner of Naâma Asfari, a human rights activist and militant for the independence of the Moroccan-controlled territory of Western Sahara, a highly sensitive issue for Rabat.
The Moroccan journalists Omar Brouksy and Hicham Mansouri are known for their criticism of the regime of Moroccan king Mohammed VI. Two books by Brouksy, the former editor of the now defunct Moroccan weekly Le Journal hebdomadaire, who later joined French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), were censored in Morocco. Mansouri, the co-founder of the Moroccan association for investigative journalism (AJMI), today lives in exile in France. He was one of the guests of a special video discussion programme organised by Mediapart in 2021 on the subject of the Pegasus scandal (available in French here).
As for Mediapart, the mobile phone of publishing editor Edwy Plenel was infected with the Pegasus spyware just several days after a visit he had made to Morocco, during which he publicly spoke out in support for human rights activists in the country. Gender issues editor Lénaïg Bredoux had been in the sights of the Moroccan security services for having written several articles critical of France’s accommodating relationship with them and their head, Abdellatif Hammouchi, suspected of “complicity in torture”.
The Moroccan state engaged legal action for defamation in France against those media and NGO’s who openly suspected its use of Pegasus (these were Forbidden Stories, Amnesty International,the dailies Le Monde and L’Humanité, public broadcaster Radio France, France Médias Monde, which supervises the international programming of public broadcasters, and Mediapart). But the complaint was thrown out by French magistrates, the second time on appeal. The magistrates ruled that, with regard to France’s 1881 law on press freedom, which remains in force, a state (as opposed to an individual) cannot engage legal action against the media for defamation. Morocco has since announced it is to take its case to France’s highest appeal court.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse