A decade ago, on July 10, 1985, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace environmental protest flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour. Portuguese-born photographer Fernando Pereira died. New Zealand journalist DAVID ROBIE, now a University of PNG journalism lecturer, was on board for the fateful voyage and wrote a book about the sinking. His reporting won NZ's Media Peace Prize. Here he writes on the legacy of the nuclear terrorism.
Fernando Pereira was on board the Rainbow Warrior's ill-fated voyage to the Pacific a decade ago almost by chance.
Campaign coordinator Steve Sawyer had been seeking a wire machine for transmitting pictures from the Marshall Islands and Moruroa atoll. He phoned Fiona Davies, then heading the Greenpeace photo office in Paris. But he said he wanted a machine and a photographer separately.
"No, no ... I'll get you a wire machine", promised Davies. "but you'll have to take my photographer with it."
Agreed. The deal would save the international environmental organisation's campaign budget about $8000.
But it would also cost the Portuguese-born Pereira his life. Less than three months later he was dead — he drowned as the Rainbow Warrior, bombed by French secret service agents, sank to the bottom of Auckland Harbour.
The ship's successor, Rainbow Warrior II, is now back in French Polynesia ready for another tilt at the French over nuclear testing. Again, Steve Sawyer is on board with at least one other crew member from the bombed ship.
For thousands of people in the Pacific — from Papua New Guinea to New Zealand and Belau to Tahiti — the French plan to resume nuclear tests in their "back yard" has reopened a deep and bitter wound.
New Zealand has long played a key anti-nuclear role. Twice in 1973 it dispatched frigates to the Moruroa testing zone to protest over against atmospheric tests. A World Court case filed jointly with Australia forced France to switch to underground tests the following year.
Yet in spite of persistent small boat protests over ensuing years, it was not until a decade ago that this major act of French state terrorism in New Zealand's largest port suddenly projected nuclear tests at Moruroa firmly into the international limelight.
On July 10, 1985, the Rainbow Warrior was sunk in Auckland Harbour by two French secret service agents who planted two limpet mines on the vessel's hull.
The first blast ripped a hole the size of a garage door in the engine room. The force of the explosion was so powerful that a freighter on the other side of Marsden Wharf was thrown five metres sideways.
As the Rainbow Warrior rapidly sank until the keel touched the harbour floor, the shocked crew scrambled onto the wharf.
But Fernando Pereira dashed down a narrow stairway to his stern cabin to rescue his expensive cameras. The second explosion probably stunned him as the seawater surged into the cabins. He drowned with his camera straps tangled around his legs.
I had been on board the Rainbow Warrior for 11 weeks, and my cabin was opposite Fernando's. But I had left the ship three days earlier, on arriving in Auckland, to return to my Grey Lynn home.
A planned visit to the ship that night with my two sons and their scout troop was cancelled at the last moment.
When the Rainbow Warrior was refloated and towed to the Devonport naval base dry dock, I was able to recover my passport, which sank with the ship. (The passport had actually been rescued by police divers along with other documents from the ship's bridge.)
I also discovered my old cabin had a huge bulge and hole where my bunk had been. An alarming sight.
Fernando had fled Portugal during the colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and East Timor while he was serving as a military pilot. He settled in Holland, the only country that would grant him citizenship.
An amusing, engaging and likeable environmental photojournalist, he joined the Amsterdam daily newspaper De Waarheid. Our birthdays were on successive days, and we had a double celebration five weeks before the bombing — he was just 35 when he died.
Fernando's daughter, Marelle, then aged eight, last month appealed in the French newspaper Liberation to anybody who was involved in the bombing operation to tell her what happened.
"Now I am 18, I am an adult and I think by now I have the right to know exactly what events transpired surrounding the explosion which cost my father his life", she wrote.
Ironically, the Rainbow Warrior was bombed on the night of another birthday party, for coordinator Steve Sawyer.
Fernando and I were among seven journalists accompanying the Greenpeace campaigners. He was also a crew member; the rest of us were independent reporters filing for Australian, British, French, Japanese, New Zealand and Pacific news media.
Our task was to travel to the Marshall Islands to report on the evacuation of the stricken islanders from Rongelap atoll.
The Rongelap people had been contaminated by radioactive fallout three decades earlier in the most tragic disaster of US atmospheric tests of the 1950s — the 15 megaton Bravo H-bomb on Bikini atoll on March 1, 1954.
A decade later, the full reasons for the French sabotage operation in New Zealand are still unclear, in spite of Paris eventually admitting responsibility after the cover-up was blown.
A French government-ordered official inquiry headed by leading civil servant Bernard Tricot in August 1985 was widely rejected as a whitewash. While admitting French agents were involved, it cleared the government of ordering the sabotage.
However, in September, after further revelations of French involvement, Prime Minister Laurent Fabius admitted on state television that the French secret service DGSE had indeed sunk the Rainbow Warrior under orders, and that there had been a cover-up of the operation. Defence minister Charles Hernu was forced to resign, and the DGSE chief, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, was sacked.
The scandal, dubbed "Underwatergate" or "Blunderwatergate", was a public relations disaster for France, while Greenpeace's membership and finances soared.
My book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, was the only eyewitness account out of nine books published on the affair, including one written by a French secret service agent (not involved in the operation) that has been widely discredited as disinformation.
Thirteen secret agents — one of them infiltrating the Auckland office of Greenpeace — were used in the operation. And today it is still not widely known what information the NZ Security Intelligence Service had about the French agents, or why the agency did not cooperate more fully with the police investigation.
The plot by the DGSE — code-named Operation Satanic — was complicated. A Zodiac and outboard motor were flown from Britain to New Caledonia.
The bombs and diving equipment were obtained in Noumea and hidden on board a chartered 11-metre yacht, Ouvea. Four secret agents — Chief Petty Officer Roland Verge, petty officers Gerald Andries and Jean-Michel Barcelo, and freelance physician Dr Xavier Maniguet posed as tourists on a winter diving voyage to New Zealand.
A second team of agents flew into Auckland from London, posing as Swiss tourists on their honeymoon. They were Major Alain Mafart, deputy commander of France's Aspretto combat diving base, and Captain Dominique Prieur with the "married" name of Turenge.
Eight days before the Rainbow Warrior arrived in New Zealand on July 7, Operation Satanic's chief, Colonel Louis-Pierre Dillais (alias Jean-Louise Dormand), flew into Auckland from Los Angeles.
During the next two weeks, the Ouvea crew played out a Jacques Tati-like farce, seducing women and leaving obvious clues to their presence from Whangarei to Auckland. But they eventually linked up with the Turenges, and the bombs and sabotage gear were handed over.
A third team of two divers, Jacques Camurier and Alain Tonel, flew into Auckland a few hours before the Rainbow Warrior arrived in Auckland from Vanuatu. After planting the bombs, Camurier was spotted by yachtsmen vigilantes on the lookout for petty thieves. He was loading bags into the Turenges' rented campervan.
The car number plate, LB8945, was jotted down and two days after the Rainbow Warrior was sabotaged, the fake honeymooners were detained by police on false passport charges.
They were later charged with murder and arson, but they pleaded guilty to manslaughter and wilful damage. On November 22, 1985, Chief Justice Sir Ronald Davison sentenced them to 10 years' imprisonment.
Although New Zealand police pursued the agents on board the Ouvea to Norfolk Island, the detectives were forced to release them. The three petty officers and the yacht later "disappeared" in the Coral Sea — the agents were picked up by the French nuclear submarine Rubis and the yacht was scuttled.
Faced with steadily deteriorating relations with France after the sabotage of the Rainbow Warrior and growing threats to the country's trade future, the New Zealand government decided on international mediation as a solution.
United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar ruled in June 1986 that France must make a formal apology for the attack and pay US$7 million in compensation in return for a three-year deportation of Mafart and Prieur to remote Hao atoll, a military base in French Polynesia.
France broke the exile agreement, repatriating both agents to France within two years — treating them as national heroes and promoting them.
Mafart was smuggled out of Tahiti as a carpenter called Serge Quillan on a fake passport on December 12, 1987 — hours before New Zealand was told he was being repatriated because of a "stomach illness". Prieur was repatriated in May 1988 because she was pregnant. France ignored the protests by New Zealand.
In January 1987, I was detained at gunpoint by French troops near a military outpost while on assignment in New Caledonia.
After veiled accusations of my being a "spy" and being held several hours without charge at Canala police station, I was finally released. News media reports at the time linked my arrest with intimidation over the Rainbow Warrior book and my coverage of the Kanak independence struggle against French rule.
The Rainbow Warrior saga still leaves a bitter taste with most New Zealanders. And although Prime Minister David Lange's Labour government was revered for standing firm on its nuclear-free policy, many New Zealanders were unhappy with it for backing down in the face of trade pressure and handing over the two jailed agents to French jurisdiction.
The timing of President Jacques Chirac's resumption of tests so close to the 10th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing has again fuelled outrage.
"You cannot sink a rainbow", claimed a slogan peddled by nuclear-free campaigners in the months after the bombing. A cliche, but it's true.