The French president, François Hollande, has called an emergency meeting of his country’s defence council for Wednesday morning after claims that American agents spied on three successive French presidents between 2006 and 2012, reports The Guardian.
According to WikiLeaks documents published late on Tuesday, even the French leaders’ mobile phone conversations were listened to and recorded.
The leaked US documents, marked “top secret”, were based on phone taps and filed in an NSA document labelled “Espionnage Elysée” (Elysée Spy), according to the newspaper Libération and investigative news website Mediapart. The US was listening to the conversations of centre-right president Jacques Chirac, his successor Nicolas Sarkozy, and the current French leader, socialist François Hollande, elected in 2012.
The recorded conversations, which were handled by the summary services unit at the NSA, were said to reveal few state secrets but show clear evidence of the extent of American spying on countries considered allies. WikiLeaks documents suggest that other US spy targets included French cabinet ministers and the French ambassador to the United States.
“The documents contain the ‘selectors’ from the target list, detailing the cell phone numbers of numerous officials in the Elysée up to and including the direct cell phone of the president,” a report of the taps published in the French media revealed.
According to the documents released by Wikileaks, Sarkozy is said to have considered restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks without US involvement. They also purport to show that Hollande feared a Greek euro zone exit as far back back as 2012.
Read more of this report from The Guardian.
Read Mediapart's revelations here.