President Nicolas Sarkozy has taken the unprecedented step of suing the former chief of a French internal intelligence service, pursuing his long, vicious quarrel with the clan of the former president, Jacques Chirac.
The President has accused Yves Bertrand, the former head of the Renseignements Generaux (RG), of "invasion of privacy, malicious accusation and forgery". This follows the publication of extracts from note-books kept by M. Bertrand between 1998 and 2003, which mingled private dentist's appointments and shopping lists with lurid rumours about the sexual and financial activities of French politicians, including M. Sarkozy.
M. Bertrand, 64, a protege of former President Chirac, was the head of the RG - which sprawled over some of the duties covered in the UK by MI5 and Special Branch - for 12 years from 1995. His notebooks were seized by magistrates in January as part of a criminal investigation into the Clearstream affair, a tangled saga of personal hatreds and alleged dirty tricks at the highest levels of the French state.
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