A FORMER French spy chief has revealed how a bunker beneath Napoleon’s tomb was used by hundreds of secret policemen to monitor the conversations of politicians, writers and celebrities.

Pierre Charroy, 69, a retired general, lifted the veil last week on one of the most sensitive secrets of French intelligence when he told a court about the so-called inter-ministerial control group, or GIC, that he ran for 16 years.

He is one of 12 accused in the “Elysée-gate” scandal, a case that has made history by showing the extraordinary lengths to which the late President François Mitterrand went to keep tabs on his enemies.

Abusing the near absolute powers of the French presidency, the Socialist leader set up a cell of security officials in the Elysée Palace to protect secrets such as the existence of his illegitimate daughter and his work as an official in the collaborationist wartime Vichy government.

According to court testimony, members of the unit, whose official mission was to combat terrorism, came to compare themselves to the Three Musketeers of the days of Louis XIII. They were fiercely loyal to the monarchical Mitterrand, who died of prostate cancer in 1996.

By the time of Mitterrand’s funeral his mistress and daughter were public knowledge and a host of other scandals have since exposed the corruption of his 14-year reign.

Efforts to put his “dirty tricks” brigade in the dock have been blocked until now — for years the government opposed a trial, citing state secrecy — and only two decades later is the full extent of the skulduggery coming to light. It is a subject that will fascinate historians for decades to come.

Charroy, who employed 400 secret policemen in his subterranean listening post beneath Napoleon’s mausoleum in Paris, said he was simply carrying out orders from the special Elysée unit. His role had been to provide transcripts of conversations — not to question why they had been ordered.

“In 16 years (in charge of the GIC) I must have listened to 50,000 people,” he said in an attempt to explain a less-than-perfect memory about individual targets.

One name he did remember was Carole Bouquet, although he was at a loss to explain why the actress and former Chanel model was of interest to the head of state. Mitterrand’s musketeers insultingly gave her the codename “blockhead” during the winter of 1985 when they listened to her telephone conversations.

Bouquet, who is married to the actor Gérard Depardieu, with whom she has set up a restaurant, is seeking compensation from the government and is a plaintiff in the case. The hearing is expected to continue until February.

Some of her friends believe that the real target of surveillance was a former husband who was friendly with the president of Algeria. Others are just as convinced that Mitterrand was obsessed with the beautiful Bouquet and simply wanted to learn more about her.

Although married, Mitterrand entertained a string of mistresses — including Anne Pingeot, the mother of his daughter Mazarine — and may have been hoping to bed the Bond girl after he saw her play Melina Havelock in the 1981 film For Your Eyes Only.

There is evidence that for all his lofty airs as a world statesman, Mitterrand was just as obsessed with Parisian gossip about who was sleeping with whom as he was about his relations with Helmut Kohl, the then German chancellor, and the construction of a united Europe.

Pierre Joxe, a former interior minister under Mitterrand, told the court last week that the chief of police would bring him files each day containing information gleaned from phone tapping. “It was mainly about affairs of the heart,” he said.

“I told him (the police chief), ‘That sort of stuff doesn’t interest me’.” Joxe was dismissed after two years.

The case might never have come to trial had it not been for a mysterious woman in black who in 1995 handed police an envelope filled with computer disks containing 5,000 transcripts.

Many of the transcripts bear the word “seen” in Mitterrand’s handwriting. Several hundred pages were devoted to Jean-Edern Hallier, a writer who had attracted attention by announcing plans to publish a book that would reveal the existence of Mazarine and recall that Mitterrand had been awarded a medal by the Vichy regime.

Hallier also planned to cast doubt on Mitterrand’s claim to have been wounded in the war and to prove that he had faked an assassination attempt against himself in 1959. The book was finally released in 1996.

Also under surveillance was Edwy Plenel, a journalist at Le Monde who was until recently its editor-in-chief. “Mitterrand detested Plenel, everybody knew that,” said Joxe last week.

He added that he had tried to persuade the president to disband his secret unit, which went as far as to put phone taps on the cafes and restaurants that its targets frequented.

The accused face a year in prison and fines of up to £30,000 if they are found guilty of invasion of privacy.

They claim that they were defending the state — and that protecting Mitterrand amounted to the same thing.

Mitterrand obviously subscribed to the declaration of Louis XIV: “L’état c’est moi — I am the state.”

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