Pierre Péan

Pierre Péan (born 1938 in Maine-et-Loire, France) is a French investigative journalist and author of many books concerned with political scandals.

In 1983 Pierre Péan was the first to break the story of the Great Oil Sniffer Hoax in Le Canard enchaîné.

In his 1990 book L'Homme de l'ombre ("Man of the Shadows"), Péan went into great detail about Jacques Foccart, who was Charles de Gaulle's adviser on African matters, describing him as a man of mystery and yet the most powerful person in the Fifth Republic. As a result of Péan's revelations, Foccart unsuccessfully sued for libel.

In 1994, he published Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand (A French Youth: François Mitterrand). The book is a biography covering the life of François Mitterrand from 1934 to 1947. It became a best-seller, and started a controversy over the ambiguous behaviour of Mitterrand with respect to both Marshal Philippe Pétain and the French Resistance during the occupation of France by Germany. Péan himself was unhappy about the press coverage of certain aspects of the book and considered the interpretations of some commentators to be unfair to Mitterrand.

In Manipulations Africaines (African Manipulations), published in February 2001, Péan investigated the sabotage of UTA Flight 772. He alleged that evidence pointed to Iran and Syria (acting through the Hezbollah movement), but that due to political context (notably the Gulf War), France and the United States tried to put the blame on Libya. He accuses judge Jean-Louis Bruguière of deliberately neglecting proof of Lebanon, Syria and Iran being involved to pursue only the Libyan trail. He also accused Thomas Thurman, a Federal Bureau of Investigation explosives expert, of fabricating false evidence against Libya in both the Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772 sabotages.

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