Chirac 'to sack intelligence chiefs for spying on him'
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Your support makes all the difference.President Jacques Chirac is preparing to settle a personal score with the two main French intelligence services by sacking their top officials.
The newly re-elected President, who holds all the levers of power for the first time in five years, suspects the French equivalents of MI5 and MI6 of conspiring with the previous Socialist-led government to investigate his private life and financial dealings.
According to the newspaper Le Monde, Mr Chirac will take his revenge in the next few weeks by firing the head of the main French espionage agency, the Direction Générale de La Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) and the principal counter-espionage agency, La Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST).
Although it is common for the heads of leading national agencies to be changed by a new government, sources in the Elysée Palace say that Mr Chirac has personal reasons to want to get rid of Jean-Claude Cousseran, the head of the DGSE, and Jean-Jacques Pascal, the head of the DST.
He suspects the DST of re-opening investigations last year into his alleged involvement in the payment of ransoms for the release of French hostages in Lebanon when he was Prime Minister between 1986 and 1988. The French state has always officially denied that money was handed over but it was widely rumoured at the time that a ransom was paid through a third party.
There have also been rumours that part of the cash was siphoned off and used for party political purposes by Mr Chirac's party, the RPR.
Mr Chirac also reportedly suspects the DGSE of attempting to investigate his financial links with Shoichi Osada, a disgraced Japanese banker who was arrested in 2000 for insider dealing.
Elysée officials also toldLe Journal du Dimanche yesterday that the DST may also have been involved in attempts to investigate Mr Chirac's "private life" – almost certainly a code for extra-marital sexual affairs. Since these have been referred to by his wife, Bernadette Chirac, in her book published last year, it is unclear why a counter-espionage agency should need to investigate.
In all cases, Mr Chirac believes that the agencies agreed to dig up dirt for the government of Lionel Jospin that could be used in the presidential election in April and May this year. Senior Socialist figures dismissed the allegations yesterday as a "witch-hunt" intended to justify a progressive "Chiracisation" of the intelligence services and all other leading law agencies.
In the Lebanese and Japanese cases, the spy agencies do appear to have mounted an investigation but intelligence sources told the French press that Mr Chirac was not the target.
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