A new book says French leaders acted like cavalry officers in Iraq feud.

America regularly eavesdrops on the telephone conversations of President Chirac and his entourage in the Elysée Palace in Paris, according to a book to be published tomorrow. The Americans indirectly confirmed their electronic reach a few months into the crisis over the Iraq war by telling a senior French military official: ‘The relationship between your President and ours is irreparable on the personal level. You have to understand that President Bush knows exactly what President Chirac thinks of him.’

Henri Vernet and Thomas Cantaloube, two French journalists, report the alleged spying in Chirac contre Bush – l’autre guerre (Chirac versus Bush – the other war), an account of the bad blood between the two leaders and the breakdown between Paris and Washington over Iraq. The authors, who gathered material from dozens of French and American officials, do not say what the notoriously blunt-spoken M Chirac said of Mr Bush, but they quote the US President as habitually referring to the Frenchman as ‘the Jackass’.

M Vernet and M Cantaloube say that several military and intelligence sources told them of the American surveillance, which is relatively simple because M Chirac, a compulsive user of mobile and landline phones, rarely uses secure, encrypted lines. The Elysée declined to comment on the report, but one senior French military officer told The Times that it was normal to assume that non-secure lines were under surveillance by foreign intelligence services. French officials also described the more widely known mutual spying that goes on at the United Nations in New York.

In the run-up to the Security Council sessions on Iraq in early 2003, the French would meet in a secure room in the German mission because it was the only unbuggable place, the book reports. In the 1990s Madeleine Albright, then the US Ambassador to the United Nations, warned the French UN Ambassador that Washington was listening to his conversations, it says. The book depicts the feud between the White House and the Elysée, which culminated with M Chirac pledging to use his UN veto against war, as driven by mutual ignorance and failure to communicate. On one side Mr Bush and his aides were hell-bent on war, the book says. But the authors, who are the diplomatic editor and Washington correspondent for le Parisien, make no apologies for the French side, saying M Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, his Foreign Minister, were carried away by their sense of power. ‘Chirac and Villepin were like two cavalry officers who were goading each other on and there was nobody to bring them back down to earth,’ an Elysée aide told the authors. They conclude that the freeze between Paris and Washington is far more severe than realised and will last for years.

The book also reveals a lighter side to the Franco-American quarrel. The French Embassy in Washington reacted with apoplexy last autumn when it heard that the Paris Tourism Ministry had recruited Woody Allen for a US television commercial campaign to restore France’s image. The ministry had failed to understand that although Allen was adored in France, he was not popular in the United States, where many people saw him as a ‘dirty old man’  who had married his adopted daughter. The commercials duly appeared to widespread derision.

In another incident last June, the Americans demanded a French concession before allowing Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former President, to attend President Reagan’s funeral service. The concession was that M Chirac agree to remove his tie at the Sea Island G8 summit in Georgia along with Mr Bush and the other leaders. The besuited President duly dropped his refusal to join in the informal unbuttoned look. The book describes the refusal of the White House to take any telephone calls from Paris for weeks after the invasion. But the sharpest exchange between Mr Bush and M Chirac came when they met at the UN a year ago. Mr Bush told M Chirac that he disagreed with everything the President said about Iraq. M Chirac replied: ‘We will talk about this again in a few years’ time.’

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