Double- page graphic on the bombing and sabotage teams.
The French secret agents who sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland’s harbour 30 years ago were minutes from getting away. Phil Taylor talks to the woman who stopped them
Behind every daring spy is a miserly bean- counter demanding a receipt. That may be the single most significant factor in the French Government being exposed as the perpetrator of one of the most outrageous acts of terrorism on a friendly country.
Waiting for a modest refund led to the capture of t wo of the dozen or more saboteurs who came to New Zealand and, in turn, the unmasking of the French Government’s operation to sink the Rainbow Warrior.
Just before midnight on July 10, 1985, two bombs ripped gaping holes in the Greenpeace flagship that was to lead a flotilla to Mururoa atoll to protest against French nuclear testing. The Rainbow Warrior sank in four minutes. Portuguese- born crew member Fernando Pereira drowned after going to his cabin to retrieve his camera gear.
By morning it was known that the source of the explosions came from outside of the hull, enabling investigation head, Detective Superintendent Allan Galbraith to comment, “It is possibly murder and possibly terrorism.”
In the following days, leads flooded in. Four Frenchmen, claiming to be on a winter yachting holiday in Northland, made themselves conspicuous almost everywhere they went. An abandoned French- made inflatable was located shortly before the explosions and an outboard motor soon after. The driver of the inflatable was reported getting into a campervan on Tamaki Drive a few hours before the bombs went off. Alert citizens noted the number plate.
Detectives caught up with Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur on the morning of July 12 as they waited at Bunny McDiarmid, who was on the Rainbow Warrior on the day of the bombing, throws a wreath from Marsden Wharf. Newman rentals for a refund of about $ 130 for the early return of the camper van used to support the bombers.
Newmans staff delayed them long enough for detectives to arrive. “That was 100 per cent crucial,” says Maurice Whitham, second- incommand of the police investigation. “Newmans did a really good job. They could have walked out. They could have just left the camper van on the side of the road, got on the flight and they would have been gone.”
Mafart and Prieur, posing as Swiss honeymooners Alain and Sophie Turenge, had their tickets to freedom, having changed their flight to 11am that day – 36 hours after the explosions. They could have used the Swiss passports they flew in on as police had yet to discover they were fake, that Mafart was using the identity of a dead man.
According to the police statement of facts tabled in court, they were in Hamilton the day before, from where they had telephoned their DGSE contact in Paris in a panic. Police traced the number to the French Defence Ministry.
The accountants at the DGSE – the French Secret Service – may have been right never to trust their spies. Another team of agents used a yacht, the Ouvea, to bring in the explosives, the Zodiac inflatable dinghy and specialist combat diving gear that did not leave tell- tale bubble trails. When New Zealand police caught up with the crew in Norfolk Island five days after the bombing, a search of the boat turned up a receipt from the Dome Valley tearooms, north of Auckland. It had been doctored — the amount changed from $ 8.50 to $ 58.50.
What resonated for Kiwis about the bombing, aside from the breathtaking gall of a supposedly friendly nation, was how it exposed the hubris of the French, who thought the mission would be a doddle in a backwater such as New Zealand. The mission to disable the ship was achieved, but a catalogue of errors ensured lasting embarrassment for the French.
In the New Zealand of 30 years ago, foreign accents were novel and the unusual was noted. From the nosey, blunt scout, Christine Cabon, who posed as scientist Frederique Bonlieu to infiltrate Greenpeace’s Auckland office, to the yacht Ouvea almost running aground with its clandestine cargo upon landfall on the perilous sandbar of the Far North’s Parengarenga Harbour, to the crew’s sexual escapades ( including bedding a policeman’s wife), to their suspicious behaviour at an attempted rendezvous with Mafart and Prieur in a Northland forest — that prompted a logging contractor to note down their car registration — to mis- judging the tides, to Mafart and Prieur waiting for a refund, the DGSE’s plan unravelled speedily and profoundly.
Mafart blamed politicians. The mission, he wrote in his book, The Secret Diaries Of A Combat Diver, was ill- conceived, executed in haste and based on a dismal ignorance of New Zealand, “a little Switzerland of the Pacific”.
“It is an insular country, distant, withdrawn, which does not think for a second that it will get caught up in the turbulence of the world,” Mafart wrote. “We did not know that in this country you cannot make a move without being observed, that informing the police is a national duty.”
Mafart claimed Defence Minister Charles Hernu rejected a more discreet, low- key operation based on many months of reconnaissance in favour of a quick and grand action. Operation Satanique was launched in April and the attack scheduled for mid- July.
The DGSE preferred to blame amateurish behaviour of some of the saboteurs. They “trailed clues behind them like Hansel [ in Hansel and Gretel]”, lamented Alain Chouet, a senior DGSE official at the time.
The chain of events that led detectives to Mafart and Prieur may have begun with a decision to plant the bombs earlier than planned.
A Frenchman by the name of Francois Regis Verlet, claiming to be a Greenpeace supporter, went on board the ship on the evening of the bombing. Though Verlet’s clean- cut appearance and ignorance of French peace groups struck some of the crew as odd, he learned that a skipper’s meeting was imminent and would be followed by a birthday party for one of the crew.
According to a plausible narrative, the agents changed plan to place the bombs hours later and instead attached them to the hull about 8.30pm to take advantage of the skipper’s meeting, which meant crew would be preoccupied. They supposedly set them to go off during the party. The French have claimed this was to guard against loss of life because the party was on the relative safety of the upper deck. However, many in the peace movement see this as propaganda and point to factors such as that no warning was given, the blasts were at night and the bombs were designed to rapidly sink the ship as indications that the intention was to kill and to strike fear into the hearts of all crews of all protest vessels.
Greenpeace New Zealand executive director Bunny McDiarmid, who was on the ship earlier on the day of the explosions, is emphatic.
“No one will believe that a bomb placed on the side of our ship, in the middle of a cold winter night, while most people were sleeping on board was a warning. The bomb blew a hole the size of a truck at our waterline and sunk the Warrior in four minutes. A bomb is not a warning.
“The French agents were certainly incompetent but the suggestion that the first bomb was supposed to be a warning is cowardly and insulting and
doesn't change the fact that they remain guilty of murder.”
After the bombs were placed, the Zodiac made its way to a ramp by Teal Park on Tamaki Drive to find the tide too low to get the dinghy and motor out of the water, a consequence of the changed plan. By now the frogmen who placed the bombs had disappeared into the night and the inflatable, helmed by one man, headed towards Okahu Bay looking for an easier landing place along the waterfront, with the Turenges trying to track it in their campervan.
According to French media reports, the driver was Gerard Royal, brother of Segolene, the current number three in the French Government and the Socialist Party candidate in the 2007 presidential election.
The dinghy and its driver were seen by two fishermen and a cyclist on his way under Ngapipi Rd bridge and into Hobson Bay. One reported hearing a splash under the bridge from where an outboard motor was later recovered. Next, men on neighbourhood watch duties at the Auckland Boating Club in Hobson Bay saw a dinghy being pulled from the water. They watched as bags from the dinghy were loaded by t wo men into a campervan. Convinced they were watching the aftermath of a burglary, the boating club members noted the camper’s registration number, LB8945, and phoned the police.
The campervan was long gone by the time police arrived. It was noted that the serial number was missing from the French- made Zodiac.
Next morning at the first Auckland CIB briefing about the bombing, Verlet’s name was mentioned as a possible suspect. He’d left on a flight to Tahiti shortly before the explosions. Sometime during the day the report about the strange rendezvous of the dinghy and the campervan was followed up, even though the sighting was nearly three hours before the bombs went off.
Rebecca Hayter and her flatmates returned from the movies 23 hours after the explosions to find the message light flashing on the new answerphone bought by a flatmate for his freelance photography business. It was from a colleague from Newmans rentals asking her to ring urgently, the police were at the office asking about the Turenges.
Hayter, now editor of Boating New Zealand, had been working for the company for just a few months while she took a break after university and contemplated a career in journalism. The couple were neat and tidy, she told police. He was friendly, she wasn’t. Hayter had met them on July 8, t wo days before the bombing, when they came in having broken the windscreen.
“The only thing that was a tiny bit odd was his insistence on staying with the van,” Hayter told the Herald. When she offered to help transfer their gear into the replacement campervan, Mafart was polite but firm. “No thanks.”
Hayter didn’t make the connection to the sinking of the protest ship downtown but arrived at work in Mt Wellington next morning curious about the foreign couple.
“I nearly blew it,” she recalls. “I walked in and said [ to another staff member] do you remember those people, the Turenges?' She said, ‘ That's them there'.”
Mafart and Prieur had come in to drop off the campervan, having moved their flight forward to later
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