A new book published in France has accused the US of regularly spying on French President Jacques Chirac by tapping his phone. The book’s title translated into English is “Chirac versus Bush, the Other War.” One U.S. official reportedly told the authors, “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.” The surveillance was possible because Chirac rarely uses secure phone lines. Last year British whistleblower Katherine Gun leaked internal documents that showed the US was spying on other nations in the Security Council in the lead up to the Iraq invasion. Former British minister Clare Short has also publicly said Tony Blair’s government spied on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at his UN headquarters in New York in the run-up to the Iraq war. The new book also charges that France was preparing to provide as many as 15,000 troops to the Iraq effort but didn’t after relationships soured between the Bush administration and Chirac.