enough out came a piece of paper with a short line on it. Horowitz returned from behind the wall and held up the ruler, which he had bent into a L shape while hidden from view. Oddly, work continued. A month later another demonstration further revealed the hoax. Omega was shown to be outputting graphics projected from within the box. Further investigation showed that what was inside one cabinet did not simply appear to be a photocopier, but actually was a photocopier. This was the reason the devices' output always looked so similar to previous reports; Bonassoli was hand-copying them, and then simply pressed "copy" to generate output that looked similar, but slightly different, than the originals they had provided. Bonassoli attempted to deflect all criticism by stating that the entire secret of the device was one key component, which was locked in a box that he refused to open. But it was too late, Elf realized they had been hoodwinked. Even after the hoax was discovered, the government did little to address the problem. Bonassoli managed to successfully return to Italy, where he became something of a folk hero. Elf never completed paying for the final contract, but nevertheless had spent over $150 million in total. Political scandal All of France's quasi-public corporations were audited by the Cour des Comptes. In 1979 the magistrate in charge of Elf's audit, François Giquel, asked about the sudden change in certain accounts. These had contained only small amounts of money for many years, around 3 million Francs, and then suddenly grew to hundreds of millions of Francs over the last three years. The President personally informed Giquel that it was a matter of military secret, and he was sworn to secrecy. In 1982, Bernard Beck, president of the Cour des Comptes and a political ally of Giscard d'Estaing, shredded three key documents about the case at the auditor's office, as well as Giquel's office copy. The story finally broke in December 1983. The junior Secretary for the Treasury publicly accused Beck of forfaiture ("abuse of authority") for destroying the documents. The same week Pierre Péan published a complete history of the story in the satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné, apparently tipped off by government insiders. The new president, François Mitterrand, seized on the story to attack his predecessor for his involvement in the "cover up", going on to claim that they had