France’s ‘Operation Satanique’ bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, 40 years ago this month, was state-sponsored terrorism – and Australia had a part in helping French secret agents to escape.

A DECLASSIFIED AUSTRALIA SPECIAL REPORT

The French Government terror bombing of Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, 40 years ago in Auckland harbour backfired on the French disastrously. It added to mounting Pacific and global pressure to force France 11 years later to abandon nuclear testing on its Pacific island colonies. 

Australia’s obstruction of the New Zealand police investigation of the French secret agents who conducted the terror bombing still rankles, 40 years on.

David Robie, the only journalist on board the ship in the weeks leading up to the bombing, looks back on the event and on the legacy of this sordid act of state terrorism in a New Zealand port. 

Was dubbed “Blunderwatergate”. This was an apt epithet for the Jacques Tati-like farce marking the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents on 10 July 1985.

And the bungled attempts to cover up the murky trail leading back to the highest levels of government, the military and intelligence in Paris.

It was tragic too. The killing of Greenpeace’s photojournalist Portuguese-born Fernando Pereira that night at Auckland’s Marsden Wharf was a shock to the crew – and to me as a journalist who had been on board documenting the ship’s voyage for 10 weeks.

But we had no illusions about French involvement. The Greenpeace ship had just arrived in Auckland and was preparing for a protest voyage to Moruroa Atoll, in the French Pacific territory of Tahiti, to highlight the French nuclear testing.

A combination of a swift investigation by New Zealand police, and curious bystanders, led to the arrest and charging with murder of  two French secret agents from France’s secret service, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE). The arrested agents had been posing as Swiss honeymooners in the days that followed the bombing.

A lack of co-operation and actual obstruction by Australian authorities stymied an attempt to arrest four more French DGSE agents who had fled to Australian territory of Norfolk Island.

French terror in Opération Satanique

In a sense it was lucky that the death toll on board the Rainbow Warrior that night wasn’t a lot higher. Fernando had gone below deck after the first blast looking for a missing crew member and to rescue his camera gear.

In their appropriately titled “Opération Satanique”, the French spies used a deadly double detonation to bomb the ship twice, precisely seven minutes apart. This technique has similarities to the now-familiar “double tap” bombing that often results in first responders and rescuers being targeted, and has been described as a war crime as it violates the Geneva Convention by targeting civilians and the wounded.

Fernando died when the second bomb exploded, rapidly flooding the ship further and crippling the propellor shaft just behind his cabin – and next to my own.

Ten other crew members on board scrambled off, some thrown into the water. More people could have died, as several had been asleep after the lively 29th birthday party for campaign co-ordinator Steve Sawyer earlier in the evening.

Some were still chatting in the mess when the first French Naval limpet mine went off, blasting a massive hole the size of a garage door in the hull at the engine room, at 10 minutes to midnight.

There had been no warning from the French to the crew or others on board in this worst case of state terrorism ever to happen in New Zealand. And no warning of the second blast to come.

The final voyage

The man killed in the blast, Fernando Pereira, aged 36 and the father of two young children, was on the Rainbow Warrior’s Pacific voyage almost by chance.

At the beginning of the voyage, co-ordinator Steve Sawyer had been seeking a wirephoto machine for transmitting photographs to the world of the campaign voyage to the Marshall Islands.

He phoned Fiona Davies, then heading the Greenpeace photo office in Paris. But he wanted the machine and a photographer separately.

“No, no – I’ll get you a wire machine,” replied Davies. “But you’ll have to take my photographer with it.”

So Fernando Pereira joined the Rainbow Warrior in Hawai’i and he covered the voyage to Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands The islanders there wanted help to leave their contaminated ancestral home, and in May 1985, Greenpeace’s ship, the Rainbow Warrior, set out to help them.

They suffered serious health problems because of radioactive fallout that had dusted their island home from at least five “dirty” US nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. Marshall Islands, 3500kms north-east of Australia, had been occupied by US forces since WW2, and in 1979 voted to exercise sovereignty in a Compact in Free Association with the United States.

The 15-megaton “Bravo” test on 1 March 1954, a thousand times more powerful than the US atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima, was the most lethal to the islanders. Hundreds of people were living on the downwind atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik, barely 150km to the east. They are left with a deadly legacy of thyroid tumours, cancers, still births, and a host of other illnesses.

Neglected by both the US and Marshall Islands authorities, and despite losing their homes and much cultural heritage, the islanders urged the Greenpeace flagship to  evacuate them to Mejatto on Kwajalein Atoll, 120km away.

It took four return voyages for the Rainbow Warrior to move about 320 Rongelapese with their dismantled homes and belongings — some hundreds of tonnes — to their new atoll.

Their future and their health remain uncertain four decades after Greenpeace helped them. But the media spotlight on the humanitarian voyage helped pressure the US to partially make amends.

The US did provide US$150 million as part of the agreement for the Compact of Free Association, to establish a Nuclear Claims Tribunal to deal with health claims over the testing. Established in 1988,  the Tribunal ran out of funds in 2011 and ceased to function.

It also provided US$45 million to the Rongelap people to “clean up” the atoll – but so far just one of 60 islands has been cleaned up. The islanders are debating a return to their homeland of Rongelap, but many are not convinced that their atoll is safe yet.

Australian involvement in Opération Satanique

One aspect of the police investigation that rankled with New Zealanders was the lack of co-operation verging on obstruction by Australian authorities. This was the pursuit of the DGSE agents posing as the crew of the yacht Ouvéa that had been chartered in New Caledonia and was suspected of smuggling the explosives into New Zealand.

On 15 July, five days after the deadly bombing, a team of eight New Zealand detectives — including two French speakers — and a forensic scientist on the hunt for the fleeing French agents, were flown in a New Zealand Air Force plane to Australia’s Norfolk Island.

They interviewed the three crew on board (they missed the leader Dr Xavier Maniguet, who had earlier managed to fly to Sydney) – DGSE agents Chief Petty Officer Roland Verge, 32; Petty Officer Gerald Andries, 32; and Petty Officer Jean-Michael Barcelo, 33. They all claimed to be “tourists”.

The next day the detectives searched the Ouvéa, took scrapings from the yacht’s bilges to check for explosives, and seized documents. They also found a map of Auckland with a near-harbour Ponsonby address of a Greenpeace member handwritten on it – later shown to be a map sent by the French spy Christine Cabon, who had  infiltrated Greenpeace, to the DGSE. She later fled to Israel, but managed to elude a New Zealand detective who tracked her down.

The 11-metre yacht the Ouvéa had been secretly chartered by the “covert action” arm of the DGSE French spy agency, to carry the two limpet bombs, the diving gear, a zodiac dingy, and radios and other gear to Auckland harbour.

The information collected after analysis produced enough evidence to charge the three agents with murder on the same basis as the two DGSE agents already arrested, but the New Zealand police needed time for the analytics, and even the passport checks took five days.

However, the Australian police and immigration officials on Norfolk Island, without doubt operating under instructions from Canberra (where the Bob Hawke Labor Government was in power), would not allow extra time for holding the suspects.

They gave New Zealand police just one day — an impossible deadline of 2pm on 16 July — and after that the yacht crew and their boat were free to depart, unimpeded by Australian authorities.

By the time the New Zealand police had obtained arrest warrants for the arrest of the Ouvéa crew on 26 July on charges of arson and murder, they and their boat had already sailed away from Australian territory.

Australian assistance to the French may have been more than mere obstruction.

A former head of DGSE in his memoir admitted to many covert sabotage and espionage operations against Greenpeace. He  described how its “traditional allies” had ”on several occasions” been informed of plans for covert operations and had either lent a hand or “turned a blind eye on such-and-such a day”.

Whether Australia’s intelligence agencies also directly assisted the French with intelligence, surveillance, or preparations for carrying out the bombing, or in the escape of their agents, is unclear.

Tahitian sources said the DGSE agents, after being released by Australian authorities from Norfolk Island, had rendezvoused with the French Navy’s nuclear-powered attack submarine Rubis which was used for Special Forces deployment and surveillance, and had been conveniently deployed to the Coral Sea area.

The Ouvéa yacht was then scuttled. An empty life raft was  detected in the area shortly after by a New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion surveillance plane dispatched to hunt for the yacht and for the French submarine  known to be in the area. The DGSE agents were landed ashore from the submarine at the French Pacific territory of Tahiti.

Four other French agents remained undetected in New Zealand. One of the agents nonchalantly flew out unimpeded through Sydney, while the others laid low under cover for two weeks before quietly slipping out of the country.

French state violence against Greenpeace

So why was the Rainbow Warrior bombed? Many in the French military were blinded by an intense paranoia over Greenpeace and other activists working to highlight nuclear testing in the South Pacific and in supporting independence struggles in their Pacific colonies.

The French secret service, the DGSE, was given a free hand by Defence Minister Charles Hernu to “neutralise” the environmental organisation.

The French prime minister at the time, Laurent Fabius, claimed in a TVNZ interview in 2005 that he had been “betrayed” by his defence minister. Hernu died in 1990 – still popular in France over the bombing.

The sabotage attack on the Rainbow Warrior certainly wasn’t out of character with many other brutal actions taken by French authorities against Greenpeace vessels protesting against nuclear testing in the Pacific.

In 1973, for example, French commandos boarded the Greenpeace yacht Vega off Moruroa Atoll and savagely beat two of the crew, including one of the founders of Greenpeace, David McTaggart, who almost lost an eye.

McTaggart filed a civil action against the French Navy, accusing it of piracy. The Paris court found the Navy guilty of having deliberately rammed the Vega.

In 1995, Greenpeace led another flotilla to Moruroa. Ten years after the lethal bombing in Auckland, French commandos boarded the Rainbow Warrior II, smashed equipment, fired tear gas at crew on the ship’s bridge, arrested Greenpeace activists, and seized the ship.

France only returned the vessel to Greenpeace several months later.

And I also had my personal run-ins with French authorities as a journalist covering environmental and independence issues in the 1980s.

In January 1987, a year after the  first edition of my book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, was published, I was arrested at gunpoint by French troops in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia /Kanaky, near the New Caledonian village of Canala.

The arrest followed a week of being tailed by secret agents in the capital, Nouméa. When I was handed over by the military to local gendarmes for interrogation, accusations of my being a “spy” and questions over my book on the _Rainbow Warrior_bombing were made in the same breath.

After about four hours of questioning by the gendarmes, I was released.

Greenpeace, after being awarded $8 million in compensation — but no apology — from France by the International Arbitration Tribunal, finally towed the Rainbow Warrior to Matauri Bay and scuttled her off Motutapere, in the Cavalli Islands in northern New Zealand on 12 December 1987, to create a living reef.

Her namesake, the Rainbow Warrior II, formerly the Grampian Fame, was launched in Hamburg exactly four years after the bombing, to continue the environmental advocacy work

Cutting a deal

The diplomatic pressure from France heaped upon New Zealand to release the DGSE agents was huge. A deal was finally agreed but it sparked almost as much anger in New Zealand as the bombing itself, when France threatened to block trade access to New Zealand’s European markets.

The compensation deal for New Zealand, mediated in 1986 by then UN secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar, awarded the government $13 million. The money was used to fund anti-nuclear projects and the Pacific Development and Conservation Trust.

The compensation agreement and an apology by France was in exchange for the deportation of the two jailed DGSE secret agents, Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur (“the honeymooners”), after they had served less than a year of their 10-year sentences for manslaughter and wilful damage of the bombed ship.

They were transferred to Hao Atoll in French Polynesia to serve three years in exile at a “Club Med”-style nuclear and military base.

But the bombing scandal didn’t end there. The same day as the “burial at sea” of the Rainbow Warrior in 1987, the French government told New Zealand that Mafart had a “serious stomach complaint”.

French authorities repatriated him to France – in defiance of the terms of the UN agreement and protests from David Lange’s Labour Government.

It was later claimed by a Tahitian newspaper, Les Nouvelles, that Mafart was being smuggled out of Tahiti on a false passport hours before New Zealand was even told of his “illness”.

The other French agent, Prieur, was also repatriated to France in May 1988 because she was pregnant. France ignored protests by the New Zealand Government, and the secret agent pair were honoured, decorated and promoted in their homeland.

A supreme irony is that such an act of terrorism should be publicly rewarded, given the past two decades efforts against terrorism in the so-called “war on terror”.

Satanique mea culpa

In May 2005, the French agents’ lawyer, Gerard Currie,  tried to block footage of their 1985 guilty pleas in the New Zealand High Court — shown  on closed circuit to journalists, including myself, at the time but not seen publicly — from being broadcast in TVNZ’s Sunday program.

Losing the High Court ruling, the DGSE ‘s lawyer appealed against the footage being broadcast. But the two former agents had lost any spurious claim to privacy over the act of terrorism by publishing their own memoirs – Agent Secrete (Prieur, 1995) and Carnets Secrets (Mafart, 1999).

More than three decades after the bombing, in September 2015, the French secret agent who planted the French Naval limpet mines on the hull of the Rainbow Warrior, “outed” himself and apologised to Greenpeace, the Pereira family, and the people of New Zealand, describing the operation as a “big, big failure”.

Retired colonel Jean-Luc Kister (alias Alain Tonel), revealed in simultaneous interviews with TVNZ’s Sunday program reporter John Hudson and French investigative journalist Edwy Plenel, publisher of _Mediapart_, his role in the sabotage.

Colonel Kister revealed that an early French proposal to merely damage the ship’s engine in Auckland Harbour was rejected.

“There was a willingness at a high level to say: ‘This has to end once and for all. We need to take radical measures’.

“We were told we had to sink it,” Kister said in the interview.

“I have the blood of an innocent man on my conscience, and that weighs on me. We are not cold-blooded killers. My conscience led me to apologise and explain myself.”

The legacy of nuclear resistance

Bengt Danielsson, a Swedish anthropologist, and his French wife, Marie-Thérèse, were an inspiration to the nuclear-free and independent Pacific movement, especially in the Cook Islands, New Zealand and Tahiti.

Along with Elaine Shaw of Greenpeace Aotearoa, they played a vital role in raising public awareness of the plight of Tahitians harmed by the years of French atmospheric nuclear tests.

While the Danielssons published several scientific studies and popular books on the islands, including  _Moruroa, Mon Amour_ and Poisoned Reign, they constantly campaigned to expose French nuclear colonialism.

They were honoured for their commitment and achievements with Bengt being awarded the Right Livelihood Award, an alternative Nobel Peace Prize-style international recognition, “exposing the tragic results of and advocating an end to French nuclear colonialism”.

However, Bengt Danielsson’s health deteriorated after this honour and he died in July 1997, barely a year after  French nuclear testing in the Gambier Islands ended for good. Marie-Thérèse died six years later in 2003.

France agreed to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty after a swansong package of eight planned nuclear tests to provide data for simulation computer software.

However, such was the strength of international hostility and protests and riots in Pape’ete that Paris ended the nuclear program after just six tests. France officially ratified the CTBT on 10 September 1996.

Elaine Shaw worked for Greenpeace Aotearoa for 16 years and developed it with a core group into the small but lively movement it had become by the time of the bombing.

But she was not comfortable with the changes and rapid growth of the organisation after the bombing. She worked tirelessly for the people of Rongelap as well as “French” Polynesia, the victims of nuclear testing until she died of cancer in 1990.

“I sensed that her interest stemmed from her concern for the people rather than any political ideology,” said Tahitian activist Tea Hirshon. “She went to many islands and saw for herself what people in the Pacific wanted.”

Still other Greenpeace stalwarts have died since the Rainbow Warrior bombing, including Warrior of the Rainbow author and journalist Robert Hunter (2005), founding president of Greenpeace; and David McTaggart (2004), for many years the inspirational chairman of Greenpeace International.

Kawhia-based Owen Wilkes, who had joined a Vega voyage to the Cook Islands in mid-1986, and Fijian nuclear-free and independent Pacific campaigner Amelia Rokotuivuna, both also died in 2005.

The campaign co-ordinator of the fatal voyage, Steve Sawyer, died of pneumonia caused by lung cancer in 2019. One of the crew members on the Rongelap mission, the Rainbow Warrior’s chief engineer Davey Edward, also died of cancer in 2021.

The best possible memorial for Elaine Shaw, Amelia Rokotuivuna, Owen Wilkes, the Danielssons and other Pacific campaigners came in 2004 when Tahitians elected Oscar Temaru as their territorial President.

He had established the first nuclear-free municipality in the Pacific Islands when he was mayor of the Pape’ete suburb of Faa’a.

Since the Temaru coalition came to power, demands increased for a full commission of inquiry to investigate  new evidence of radiation exposure from the atmospheric tests in the Gambiers in French Polynesia from 1966-1974.

Altogether France carried out 193 nuclear tests in the South Pacific, 46 of them dumping more than nine megatons of explosive energy into the atmosphere – 42 over Moruroa, and four over Fangataufa atolls.

It was recently revealed that the French Atomic Energy Commission has spent at least €90,000 in a vain campaign to undermine the research by an investigative journalism unit called Disclose and revealed in the book  _Toxique,_ published in 2021 and an associated website "The Moruroa Files".

The investigators trawled some 2000 pages of declassified documents and carried out scores of interviews, concluding that French authorities consistently underestimated the scale of the impact on the environment, geology and the health of the islanders of the French nuclear testing in Polynesia.

The CEA produced its own booklet, “Nuclear tests in French Polynesia: why, how and with what consequences”, printed 5000 copies, and distributed these around Pacific countries.

However, the pressure on France to atone for its actions will continue.

From death springs life

The sordid Rainbow Warrior affair was a diplomatic debacle for the French, and it has taken years for Paris to recover some mana — spiritual power and authority — in the South Pacific region.

Greenpeace and the general environmental movement have grown dramatically and matured over the past four decades. Greenpeace is currently operating Rainbow Warrior III as its campaign flagship.

Campaigns have broadened from the  dangers of nuclear power, into issues such as the climate crisis, driftnet fisheries, genetic engineering, glacier retreat, the illegal rainforest timber trade, and now the growing threat of deep sea mining industry.

The original Rainbow Warrior’s last voyage and the death of Fernando Pereira were not in vain. The struggle lives on.

 

Republished from Declassified Australia , 1 July 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.