“Ziad Takieddine was seeing Brice Hortefeux,” explained Alain Juillet. “I told Mr Hortefeux to be wary. I know that Mr Hortefeux once went on Takieddine’s boat.”
“How did he react?” asked Nathalie Gavarino, the presiding judge at this Paris trial of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and 12 other defendants over allegations that the ex-head of state's 2007 election campaign was part-funded by Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime.
“He said to me, ‘Do you think so?’ [...] I told Mr Hortefeux to be careful because Mr Takieddine was dangerous. When you're a minister, you represent France’s interests, and our role is to protect [those interests],” responded the witness.
“Was he a minister at the time you spoke to him?” the judge asked.
“Yes, I told Mr Hortefeux, ‘Stop this because you're walking into a trap’,” replied Alain Juillet.
The witness on the stand was a man of substance: a former director of intelligence at the French external intelligence service the DGSE, who joined the agency in 1964 and who spent seven years advising the prime minister's office on economic intelligence. Giving evidence on Wednesday January 29th, Alain Juillet, 82, wiped away some of the evasions of Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-hand man Brice Hortefeux, whose own explanations had been characterised by phrases such as “I don’t remember”, “I can’t recall” and “I couldn’t have known.”
A solid figure, the former intelligence officer was dressed in a loose-fitting suit with bulging pockets, his bushy eyebrows arching over piercing eyes. However, the three defendants he might have confronted had abandoned the courtroom that day. The seats of former minister Brice Hortefeux, the ex-president's former chief of staff Claude Guéant, and middleman Alexandre Djouhri were empty on Wednesday. Only Nicolas Sarkozy was present. The judges' questions were aimed at him.
“Alain Juillet says that he warned Brice Hortefeux about the dangers of associating with Ziad Takieddine. If Brice Hortefeux was warned, did he not mention it to you?” presiding judge Nathalie Gavarino wanted to know.
“I’ll speak to Brice Hortefeux about it,” the former president replied, turning towards the empty chair of his close ally. “He didn't warn me.”
'A kind of thug'
Alain Juillet recounted a tale of influence. Of a time when agents of corruption became kings, pulling strings behind the scenes. The former DGSE official said he had also warned Claude Guéant about the risks of dealing with middleman Alexandre Djouhri.
“I told Mr Guéant he had to be wary,” Alain Juillet explained. “Mr Djouhri started out in the criminal underworld. He's a man from that world who made it big - that shouldn’t be forgotten. In the early 1980s, they were shooting at each other, car to car; he was wounded. He was a kind of thug.”
“When did you issue this warning?” the judge asked.
“When Claude Guéant was at the Élysée [editor's note, as secretary-general, the president's de facto chief of staff]. I said ‘Be careful.’ He listened to me very politely, very courteously.”
“I was one of those people who saw Claude Guéant as a reference point, a statesman,” Juillet continued. “I found it very hard to accept that he could have done certain things. I thought to myself, ‘This can’t be real.’ I wondered how they had managed to trap him.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
There has been no lack of murky episodes in the lives of these two intermediaries. Alain Juillet recounted them. Ziad Takieddine was implicated “in the Pakistan affair [editor's note, involving the sale of French Agosta submarines to that country],” linked to the financing of conservative prime minister Édouard Balladur’s 1995 presidential campaign. Later, both Alexandre Djouhri and Ziad Takieddine featured in the negotiations for the huge MIKSA border surveillance contract for Saudi Arabia, a deal over which France's Ministry of the Interior and the Élysée were at loggerheads.
“The Saudis wanted to build a barrier along the border with Yemen,” Alain Juillet told the court. “Thales [editor's note, the French defence contractor] was best positioned, but it became a battle between two intermediaries, Djouhri and Takieddine, each representing the French state.” At the time, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant were already accompanying Ziad Takieddine to Riyadh. The contract, drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior, was blocked by the Élysée.
“In Saudi Arabia, they couldn’t understand why the French had halted negotiations,” continued Alain Juillet. “And why the intermediary then offered the same contract with a 10% increase.”
“That was Mr Djouhri,” interjected the judge.
“Yes, and of course, the contract was stopped,” said the former DGSE intelligence director.
Alexandre Djouhri had shown himself to be greedier than his rival. In the end, the Germans won the deal. The two intermediaries also found themselves in competition again in Libya from 2005 onwards when Ziad Takieddine approached Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s brother-in-law. This was because Alexandre Djouhri already had a solid network there, built around Bashir Saleh, the Libyan dictator’s chief of staff.
During the hearing there was reference to a “shopping list” of deals proposed by the French, which had been drawn up by Takieddine. Among them was a version of a software designed to counter the American surveillance system Echelon.
A document from the French company Amesys referred to the “genuine knowledge” of the French minister of the interior at the time – Nicolas Sarkozy - which had been “corroborated by collaboration”. Introduced by Ziad Takieddine, Amesys went on to sell and install an internet communication interception system in Libya, working closely with Abdullah Senussi’s team at military intelligence. The supply of this equipment - widely used to repress opposition - is considered to be one of the alleged quid pro quos in the suspected corruption pact between Nicolas Sarkozy and Muammar Gaddafi.
The former president himself insisted that he did nothing to help Amesys. “There was never any mention of Amesys, nor any surveillance software, during my visit on October 6th 2005 or during my meetings with Gaddafi in 2007,” he told the court. “I had no knowledge of this company, this software or its executives.”
Yet these security contracts appear in several of Ziad Takieddine's documents, including preparatory notes for meetings with Claude Guéant. The court will have to wait for the latter’s court testimony to learn more on this.
'These people, they carry out attacks'
Alain Juillet’s encounter with the Libyan affair took place in June 2006, when he heard “from several sources” that Ziad Takieddine was “wandering around Libya” with “a letter” signed by Nicolas Sarkozy, promising to end legal proceedings against Abdullah Senussi - convicted in absentia in the case of the bombing of UTA airline’s DC-10 in 1989 - and to lift his international arrest warrant.
“As far as I was concerned it was impossible that the minister of the interior could have signed such a letter,” commented Alain Juillet, who had then decided to summon the intermediary.
“Takieddine kept on saying, ‘I have this letter, I’m using it.’ I told him, ‘You can’t do that.’”
“Did Mr Takieddine show you this letter?” asked presiding judge Nathalie Gavarino.
“He did not show it to me.”
“But he confirmed its existence?” pursued the judge.
“Yes, he told me, ‘I have a letter.’ I told him, ‘Bring it to me,’ but I never got it.”
At the same time, Alain Juillet, in his role as head of economic intelligence, convened a meeting of industry figures operating in Libya to inform them of this “stupid story about a letter” and to try to defuse a conflict between the French defence contractors Safran and Dassault over military aviation contracts. “After that, Takieddine never used the letter again. It was over. He knew we were watching him,” Alain Juillet assured the judge.
“How did he come across to you?” asked the judge.
“He was very aggressive at first,” replied Alain Juillet. “You can oppose him, but you mustn’t back down.”
“Did he seem like someone who knew what he was doing?”
“He's a very smart man, but like all intermediaries, he's extremely tough. They operate in pretty difficult circles, and they're used to being extremely hard-nosed,” replied the former DGSE intelligence director.
For Nicolas Sarkozy, this was all “nonsense” and while he insisted the infamous letter - whose actual contents no one could confirm - “never existed”, the former president still regretted not having been warned of these manoeuvres by Alain Juillet.
To the intelligence official, the situation back then was highly volatile. “At the time, Senussi was ill and was desperate to have his conviction overturned so he could come to get treatment France,” said Alain Juillet. “If Abdullah Senussi believed in this, even though it was impossible, it could have led to a lot, a lot, of consequences. It could have led to terrorism. These people, they carry out attacks.”
'Quid pro quo'
“Did you get the impression that Mr Takieddine was working for the Libyan authorities?” asked the judge.
“An intermediary is someone who works for everyone. When he was with us, he claimed to be defending French interests. He had a network in Libya, but his key man was Senussi. He met with Senussi regularly - there’s no doubt about that,” Alain Juillet replied.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The secret meetings between Claude Guéant, Brice Hortefeux and Abdullah Senussi in 2005 left Alain Juillet dumbfounded. “It's problematic because Abdullah Senussi was wanted by the French judiciary, and it was not Claude Guéant’s place to meet him. It's the job of the French intelligence services to engage with people who are not supposed to be met. That's the profession.”
Giving evidence to the investigating judges back in 2019, Alain Juillet had described these visits, carried out without the knowledge of the French Embassy in Tripoli, as “troubling”.
“Yes, it's still incredible that they went several times to meet Libyan figures without alerting the embassy,” he told the court on Wednesday. “If you meet someone who 's been convicted in absentia, you're obviously obliged to report it to the French state. It's important to know exactly what he's thinking, and that's useful for everyone.”
But it was equally as “incredible” that the information “remained between the two of them”. Even more so if it was a “trap” as Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux unconvincingly claim. “When you fall into a trap and you're someone of integrity, you report it immediately,” stated the former senior DGSE official.
“When did you first hear about Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign? You said it was after the release of the Bulgarian nurses?” asked presiding judge Nathalie Gavarino, referring to the case of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were freed and flown to safety in a French government plane in July 2007 having been held in jail for years by the Gaddafi regime.
“It was a little later. There was talk that money had flowed in all directions to secure that release, and then the rumours about the campaign financing began,” replied Alain Juillet.
“There was the question [editor's note, of a payment] from Qatar,” noted the judge, referring to the Bulgarian nurses case.
“One must be very cautious. In 2007, people were wondering how it had been paid for. No one thought Gaddafi had freed those people for nothing. It was a quid pro quo.”
“Everyone looked into it, and no one found anything,” he clarified.
When it came to suspicions, Alain Juillet said he was struck by the “disappearance of certain people”. These included the man who “committed suicide in the Danube” - former Libyan prime minister Shukri Ghanem - in April 2012. They also included those who “disappeared” at the end of the war that toppled Gaddafi's regime in 2011. And finally, there was the case of the person who had been exfiltrated first from Libya and then France, Bashir Saleh, who is one of the defendants in this trial and who is now on the run.
“People at the DGSI [editor's note, France's domestic intelligence agency] were wondering why this key figure in the Gaddafi system had been taken out, brought to France, then exfiltrated to South Africa, where he happened to take a stray bullet [editor's note, he was wounded in 2018 in an apparent carjacking],” explained Alain Juillet. “There's something not quite right here: you don't carry out the exfiltration of someone unless there's a very good reason for it. Why was he taken out and not the others? And then, why send him to South Africa? Perhaps to stop him from talking about certain things...”
All defendants deny the charges. The trial, which is expected to last until April, continues.
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The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter