PARIS: Twenty years after the event, the full truth of the scandal known as France’s Watergate may finally come out following a decision this week to send for trial 12 men accused of running a huge, secret and illegal wiretapping operation for Francois Mitterrand.

The Paris public prosecutor’s move follows a long inquiry into the activities of the late president’s Elysee palace anti-terrorist cell, which on his orders tapped the phones of some 150 people, from lawyers and rival politicians to journalists and an actor, between 1983 and 1986.

“We are a long, long way from what a democracy should expect after such a monumental violation of people’s rights,” said Antoine Comte, one of several lawyers who were the victims of eavesdropping. “In America, an affair like this would — and did — lead to the resignation of the president.” Several figures still prominent today, including Louis Schweitzer, head of Renault, are accused of illegal phone-tapping, maintaining computerised records of private information, and infringing privacy laws. At the time, all worked at the Elysee palace or for the prime minister of the day.

The head of the anti-terrorist cell, Christian Prouteau, is also among the accused. “The president called me to his office,” Mr Prouteau reportedly told investigators. “He opened the newspaper and showed me an article. He was extremely angry. He said the article contained information known only to him and the interior minister. He suspected his rooms may have been bugged, but they hadn’t. He said he wanted the journalist’s phone tapped ... So we did.”

The journalist in question, Edwy Plenel, is now editor of Le Monde. In 1985, he was an investigative reporter and was getting close to confirming that the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship that sank in Auckland harbour that year, had been blown up on government orders by the French secret service.

Investigators say Mitterrand’s anti-terrorist unit was formed secretly in 1982. It began overstepping the mark the following year when lawyers acting for a suspected IRA cell in Vincennes were placed under illegal surveillance, and went wholly off the rails with the Rainbow Warrior affair.

“It seems Mitterrand just became more and more paranoid,” one source close to the inquiry said. “Anyone and everyone who looked like posing a threat to his public image had their phones tapped, against the law and against the express instructions of two successive prime ministers.”

Among the targets of the eavesdropping campaign was Jean-Edern Hallier, an author and one-time Mitterrand ally who was threatening to disclose the existence of the president’s daughter by his mistress. The actress Carole Bouquet was put under electronic surveillance because of her then partner’s reported links with the regime in Algeria.

The scandal, revealed by the daily Liberation, first surfaced in 1993. The investigating magistrate, Jean-Paul Valat, battled against a political establishment determined to cover up the affair to the extent of hastily classifying mountains of documents as secrets of state.

The former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin finally opened the archives in 1998 — two years after Mitterrand’s death — allowing Mr Valat to complete his 400-page case, based in large part on 5,000 incriminating phone call transcripts left anonymously at his office in 1995.

According to their lawyers, the accused aim to plead either that they have forgotten what exactly they were supposed to have done, or that they were following orders.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.