A call that duped the White House

Canadian radio pranksters tricked George W. Bush's White House in 2007 into giving them telephone access to the Situation Room to try to speak with the US president, they said on Tuesday.

"It was a simple plan," Marc-Antoine Audette of the comic duo Masked Righters of Wrongs, said, explaining they posed as aides to newly-elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

"We had an accomplice in Paris who re-routed our call from Canada through a line near the Elysee Palace" in case they traced the call, he said.