Three Days in May by Edward Jay Epstein

Author:Edward Jay Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRUE CRIME/Espionage
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2012-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

PIECES OF A PUZZLE

Chapter VI

Surveillance

The French Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, or, as it is called, the DCRI, is highly regarded by U.S intelligence officers who have liaised with it. A former CIA executive, in describing the DCRI’s technological competence in remote surveillance, told me how French intelligence had once bugged the first-class seats on Air France flights to eavesdrop on conversations of a few targeted individuals. This provided “unexpected intelligence,” since the targets would assume that their conversations could not be intercepted 30,000 feet above the Atlantic. The DCRI is equally innovative when it comes to smart phones. It now has a special unit, called r1, dedicated entirely to surreptitiously using targeted individuals’ cell phones to spy on them. If necessary, it can also employ traditional methods, such as “black-bag jobs,” to fill gaps in its remote surveillance. One such technique involves planting devices on targets’ phones that both bypass the security encryption and act as spare batteries to supply power if a user attempts to temporarily disable the phone by removing the battery. “One should never underestimate how good the French have become at this game,” the ex-CIA official added.

There is little doubt that the French Ministry of the Interior, under whose authority the DCRI operates, had kept data on DSK. According to a December 2011 article in Le Monde entitled “What Sarkozy Knew About DSK,” the DSK dossier may have extended back to 2006, when Sarkozy was the minister of the interior. It cites an incident in which DSK was stopped by the Paris police on the periphery of the Bois de Boulogne because it was an area notorious for prostitutes. It was also only about 200 meters from DSK’s home, and he was then allowed to proceed without incident. Even though no crime had been alleged and no report was ever officially filed with the police, years later Claude Guéant, the new minister of the interior, revealed in an interview such precise details about this Bois de Boulogne incident that they could only have come from a secret report. Guéant denied that such a dossier existed in the Ministry. But wherever that information had come from, in 2011, after DSK emerged as a possible Socialist candidate preparing to run for the presidency of France, he was presumably of great interest to the Sarkozy administration. He had also become in 2011 a “target” of the DCRI, according to the recent book The President’s Spy. The authors, Didier Hassoux, Christophe Labbé, and Olivia Recasens, are all investigative journalists with the French weekly Le Point, and they based their findings heavily on interviews they had with present and former members of the DCRI. They describe in some detail how the director of the DCRI, Bernard Squarcini, had set up “a special group” in collaboration with the Élysée Palace to focus on DSK in March 2011—two months before he was arrested in New York. If this was true, Sarkozy’s staff was likely privy to the intelligence that was being collected by the DCRI.

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