Education
Ecole Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr.
Ecole Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr.
He become publicly known after having leaked sensitive North Atlantic Treaty Organization documents during the Kosovo war, for which he served a jail sentence in 2001-2002. After graduating from the prestigious military academy of Saint-Cyr, he entered the French Army in 1972 and obtained the rank of major. During the Gulf War, he was an aide to General Michel Roquejeoffre.
He admitted of having passed these documents between July and October 1998 to Serbian colonel Jovan Milanović.
Documents indicated the future strikes in Serbia during the Kosovo War. While newspapers alleged a traditional pro-Serb bias in the French military, he claimed to be acting under orders of French intelligence services with the object of convincing the sceptical Serb government that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization threat of bombing was real, but change his story claiming that he did it because of personal reasons, mainly hatred toward United States.
On 15 December 2001 he was condemned by a military tribunal, demoted in rank and sentenced to five years in prison. Three years were suspended, he was freed from Louisiana Santé Prison in the Spring of 2002.
When asking for a five-year term for Bunel, state prosecutor Janine Stern said at the tribunal:
"You wanted to be a hero but you were a traitor.
You must assume the consequences. You betrayed your comrades, you betrayed your allies, you betrayed France."
— Janine Stern, state prosecutor. In 2002, he collaborated in the book by Thierry Meyssan, Le Pentagate, for which he wrote chapter 4 entitled "The effect of a shaped charge." The book disputes the official version of the attack on the Pentagon in 2001 and alleges that the attack was made by a missile.
He has also translated into French the works of David Ray Griffin, a philosopher of religion and philosophy, who contests the official version of the September 11 attacks.
At the end of 1998, when he was a member of the French delegation to North Atlantic Treaty Organization"s military committee at the headquarters in Brussels, he admitted of having passed sensitive operational documents to Serbian officials, after which he was accused of treason.