French intelligence bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour

The bomb in the harbour

The Rainbow Warrior was a former trawler that Greenpeace had turned into the flagship of its fleet. In July 1985 it was berthed at Marsden Wharf in Auckland, New Zealand, preparing to lead a flotilla of yachts to Mururoa Atollto disrupt France's programme of nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific. Interfering with those tests is what the ship was built to do, and it is why France decided to stop it.

Shortly before midnight on 10 July 1985, two bombs detonated against the hull minutes apart. The first opened a hole in the engine room; the second, moments later, finished the job. The ship settled onto the harbour floor in a matter of minutes. Most of the crew got off. One did not. Fernando Pereira, a 35-year-old Dutch-Portuguese photographer aboard to document the anti-nuclear voyage, went back below after the first explosion to save his camera equipment. The second blast, and the water that poured in behind it, trapped and drowned him.

This was not a remote act of war. It was an explosion in the biggest city of a friendly, allied country, in a busy commercial harbour, that killed a civilian. That combination is what made it impossible to bury.

The spies who got caught

The operation was slick in conception and clumsy in execution. A team of agents from France's external intelligence service, the DGSE, had entered New Zealand under cover. Some crewed a support yacht, the Ouvéa, which had ferried in the divers and the explosives. Others posed as tourists. Combat swimmers from the service's “action” branch placed the limpet mines and slipped away. On paper, no thread led back to Paris.

In practice, a sharp-eyed neighbourhood watch and alert police unravelled it fast. A couple travelling as Swiss honeymooners, Alain and Sophie Turenge, had hired a campervan seen near the waterfront; their behaviour and paperwork did not add up. Within two days they were under arrest. They turned out to be Major Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur, serving officers of the DGSE carrying forged Swiss passports. The Ouvéa crew and the divers who actually planted the mines got out of the country; Mafart and Prieur were left holding the case.

A covert operation designed to leave no trace back to Paris was undone within forty-eight hours by a campervan and a suspicious neighbour.

New Zealand now had two French intelligence officers in custody, a sunken ship, a dead photographer, and a set of very awkward questions for the government in Paris.

From denial to confession

France's first move was the usual one: deny everything. Officials insisted the state had nothing to do with the bombing and floated the idea that the arrested pair were merely observers. In August 1985 a senior civil servant, Bernard Tricot, produced an official inquiry that duly concluded there was no evidence France had ordered the sinking.

The Tricot reportdid not survive contact with the press. It was widely dismissed as a whitewash almost on arrival. New Zealand's prime minister, David Lange, said its author had made an international fool of himself, and French papers, Le Monde foremost among them, kept reporting that the DGSE had run the whole thing. The official story was visibly coming apart.

Then came the moment that sets this case apart from almost every other alleged state crime. On 22 September 1985, the French Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, went before the television cameras and admitted it. “Des agents de la DGSE ont coulé ce bateau,” he said. “Ils ont agi sur ordre.” Agents of the DGSE sank this boat. They acted on orders. Defence Minister Charles Hernu resigned; the head of the DGSE, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, was dismissed.

“Agents of the DGSE sank this boat. They acted on orders.” A sitting prime minister, confessing on television.

It is worth pausing on how rare that sentence is. Governments almost never admit to covert attacks; they stonewall for decades and let historians fight over the fragments. Here the confession came within ten weeks, from the head of the government that did it.

The bill, and the soft landing

The legal reckoning was real but uneven. In November 1985 Mafart and Prieur pleaded guilty to manslaughterand wilful damage and were each sentenced to ten years in a New Zealand prison. The charge reflected the finding that the agents had expected the ship to be evacuated between the two blasts, so Pereira's death was treated as a killing they caused rather than one they intended.

France wanted its officers back, and New Zealand wanted redress from a far larger power on which it depended for trade. The matter went to United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who handed down a mediated ruling in July 1986: France would deliver a formal, unqualified apology and pay compensation to New Zealand, and the two agents would be transferred to the French military base on Hao Atollin French Polynesia to serve three years there. France also compensated Greenpeace through separate arbitration, and paid Pereira's family.

The soft landing came next. Rather than serve three years on Hao, both agents were spirited back to metropolitan France within about two years, Mafart citing a medical condition and Prieur a pregnancy. To New Zealanders it looked like the deal had been gamed, and their government said so, taking the breach back to international arbitration, which duly found France had violated the agreement and ordered a further payment. The killers of a man in Auckland harbour were, in the end, home and free in France well ahead of schedule.