Astonishing Greenpeace tale sails along like a thriller
Plenty of documentaries aim for the look and feel of a thriller. Murder in the Pacific (BBC Two) succeeds. It is the story of the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship blown up in Auckland harbour in 1985. Crew member Fernando Pereira was killed in what was swiftly identified as an act of sabotage by the French.
This three-part series is a comprehensive account because it features interviews both with the captain and crew and with some of the special forces agents who delivered and planted the bombs, plus the New Zealand police, with former British government ministers (Lord Heseltine, Sir Malcolm Rifkind) providing context. It is an astonishing tale, and one that has faded from memory.
The first episode explains why Greenpeace were in Auckland. They were on a mission to the South Pacific, with the aim of disrupting French nuclear testing. En route, they had helped to resettle inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, who had become guinea pigs in US nuclear tests. US newsreels from the 1950s showed, shockingly, how little the authorities cared for the “savages” they had poisoned with radiation.
Rainbow Warrior’s captain, Peter Willcox, described his idealistic crew as “a bunch of crazy hippies”. Foreign
governments, however, claimed that Greenpeace had been infiltrated by the KGB, the Soviet Union having a clear interest in disrupting their nuclear testing programmes.
Episode one ends with the bombing, and the subsequent episodes (iplayer) deal with the police investigation. This is where the thriller element comes in. A force unused to dealing with crimes of this kind, led by a dour Scot and with lapses into Keystone Cops territory, had to identify the culprits before they escaped. They included two agents posing as tourists in a camper van, and the detectives’ race to reach the van rental office is nailbiting stuff.
And, despite the global stakes, it is the ordinary police work and help from the public that pays off: a local watch team who spotted suspicious activity, a forestry worker who wrote down the registration of a strange car.
Episode three explores the political ramifications, asking if the bombing was sanctioned at the highest level of government, and looking at the cover-up. One of the agents speaks of his remorse, insisting that the goal was to disable the boat without harming anyone. Instead, by planting the bombs “we become murderers – assassins – and all our failures are destined to be exposed.” This film skilfully exposes them once more.
There were so many individual stories of heroism during the Second World War that we can never know them all. The extraordinary actions of Willem Arondeus and Frieda Belinfante can now be more widely known, thanks to Stephen Fry: Willem and Frieda – Defying the Nazis (Channel 4).
Fry made the film after hearing Willem and Frieda’s story from a friend, and presented it with great care. Rather depressing, though, that his name is in the title: a sign that Channel 4 thought nobody would care to watch without a celebrity link?
Willem and Frieda met in Amsterdam during the Second World War. Frieda was a remarkable character, a cellist and conductor who was the first woman in Europe to lead an orchestra. She was also a lesbian. “She never hid the fact – she simply thought it was her business,” the film explained. Willem was also gay, an artist who came out to his father at 17 and was thrown out of home.
The Nazis invaded Holland; while Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David, gay people were made to wear pink triangles. In this atmosphere of terror, Willem and Frieda were part of a group who forged identity cards, allowing thousands of Jews to escape death. They were helped by Henry Heineken of the brewing dynasty. Frieda approached Heineken for help to keep the operation running and came up with the idea of selling her cello to him for the equivalent today of 125,000 euros, a transaction which would appear above board for the chairman of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. In reality, the cello was worth around 1,000 euros.
We know that Frieda survived the war, because the film featured her being interviewed in her old age (these excerpts told you what a marvellous woman she was). But Willem was executed by firing squad. Defiant to the last, he mocked the Nazis at his show trial and said before his death: “Tell the world that homosexuals are not cowards, that they are no less courageous than anyone else.”
It is a moving story, and one which deserved this prime-time airing.
Murder in the Pacific ★★★★ Defying the Nazis ★★★★