Twenty years ago French agents, with president Mitterrand's knowledge, blew up a Greenpeace boat, killing a man. It was France's Watergate, writes Lara Marlowe
Around 8pm on the night of July 10th, 1985, two combat frogmen from the French intelligence agency DGSE (General Directorate for External Security) slipped into the waters of Auckland harbour in New Zealand and swam to The Rainbow Warrior, the former fishing vessel that the international group Greenpeace had converted into a ship of protest against nuclear proliferation.
On board the ship, they were celebrating the 29th birthday of Steve Sawyer, who was then director of the South Pacific anti-nuclear project. About the time Sawyer blew out the candles on his cake, the French agents were clamping two limpet mines onto the hull, timed to explode a few minutes apart, four hours later.
At 11.30pm, the group split, with Sawyer and a half-dozen other Greenpeace members leaving for a hotel, while six others stayed. "About 1am, the New Zealand campaign co-ordinator called and said: 'There's been a fire and an explosion on board the ship. Come now'," Sawyer recalled in a telephone interview from New Zealand. When he reached the harbour, one of the ship's crew greeted him with the words, "They've blown up the boat and they've killed Fernando."
Fernando Pereira (35) was a Portuguese photographer who took asylum in the Netherlands to avoid serving in the "dirty war" in Angola. The French agents believed the first explosion, in the propeller shaft, would scare everyone off the ship. But Pereira went back for his precious cameras and was killed by the second explosion.
The Rainbow Warrior episode is often compared with the Watergate scandal, which led to the impeachment of US president Nixon. Along with the framing of three Irish people on false terrorism charges in 1983, and widespread tapping of his adversaries' phones, the attack on Greenpeace did much to discredit the then French president François Mitterrand.
After initially denying all responsibility, defence minister Charles Hernu and Admiral Pierre Lacoste, head of the DGSE, were forced to resign two months later. A year after Mitterrand's death in 1996, Lacoste revealed that he had discussed the plot with the president before it was carried out.
Mitterrand's chief of staff provided the funds for what was dubbed "Operation Satanic". Two days after the explosion, New Zealand police arrested Captain Dominique Prieur and Maj Alain Mafart of the DGSE when they turned in their rental car.
Prieur and Mafart had met the inflatable boat used by the team of frogmen that night. A night watchman who saw them removing diving equipment from the boat assumed they were thieves and wrote down their licence plate number. Under questioning, their claim to be a honeymooning couple unravelled. Their Swiss passports were fake, and the Paris telephone number they called in panic turned out to be DGSE headquarters.
Grace O'Sullivan, a mother of three from Tramore, Co Waterford, spent 19 years working for Greenpeace and was a member of The Rainbow Warrior's crew. "We intended to wreak havoc in [the French under-sea nuclear test site at] Mururoa," she admitted. "But to think that a government like France, a democratic government, would resort to those means; to me it was inconceivable."
Sawyer and O'Sullivan will participate in tributes to Fernando Pereira this weekend. In New Zealand, Sawyer and other crew members will travel to the shipwreck. In the presence of Pereira's daughter Marelle, now 28, Peter Wilcox - who was the captain of The Rainbow Warrior and is now captain of Rainbow Warrior II - will dive down and place a sculpted wreath on the hull.
Sawyer describes the murdered photographer as "a bon vivant, a fun guy. He was always turning up the music and trying to get people to dance and have a party and chasing the ladies, and he was a damn good photographer."
When I spoke to her on the telephone, O'Sullivan was on her way to Paris for another ceremony in memory of Pereira. She knew the photographer well - they had earlier sailed on Greenpeace ships at Sellafield and to protest the culling of seals in Norway. "Fernando was older than me," O'Sullivan recalls now. "I was 23 or 24, coming from Tramore and having never been abroad. Fernando had been on the scene around Amsterdam (where Greenpeace has its headquarters). He was pretty cosmopolitan, a character. Always had the cameras around his neck. Dark hair, good-looking, happy-go-lucky but hard-working as well."
On their way to New Zealand, The Rainbow Warrior's crew stopped in the Marshall Islands to evacuate the people of Rongelap, which had been contaminated by US atmospheric testing decades earlier. Pereira photographed children with disabilities caused by radioactivity.
"There's a classic photo of a very badly deformed child we carried," O'Sullivan says. "In a vegetable state, just limp. She couldn't walk or talk."
After The Rainbow Warrior sank, O'Sullivan telephoned her mother in Tramore. "She said, 'Just come home now. You've done your bit for the environment.' I said, 'I cannot. We have to be together now.' The support from the people of New Zealand was incredible. They saw the bombing as an act of terrorism, an act of war in their country."
A few weeks later, O'Sullivan and several of The Rainbow Warrior's crew sailed into the Mururoa nuclear testing zone on a 38ft yacht called the Vega. French commandos boarded the yacht and arrested them. After being held on a French warship, they were taken to Papeete - the capital of French Polynesia, on Tahiti - and deported back to their home countries.
Greenpeace still opposes nuclear weapons and civil nuclear power, but has made the need to fight climate change its main priority. Steve Sawyer is now the head of climate policy for the organisation. Grace O'Sullivan has spent the last three years studying ecology at UCC.
Though both are now well into their 40s, neither has lost their youthful idealism. "We were talking about climate change 15 years ago, and no one would listen," says O'Sullivan. "Now the entire scientific community agrees that the climate is changing under the impact of humankind on the planet."
O'Sullivan believes the world will eventually wake up to the colossal waste of nuclear weapons. "An organisation like Greenpeace is full of hope; otherwise we wouldn't continue," she says. "There will be a time when nuclear disarmament will have to happen."
The French agents Prieur and Mafart served two-and-a-half years of 10-year sentences for manslaughter. Both returned to France and were promoted before eventually leaving the army.
Christine Cabon, the DGSE agent who infiltrated the Greenpeace office in Auckland to monitor The Rainbow Warrior's communications, disappeared before the explosion. A defence ministry spokesman said she is now a happy housewife, living under her husband's name.
Lt Col Louis Pierre Dillais, the officer who headed "Operation Satanic" in New Zealand now works for a US arms group.
Col Jean-Claude Lesquer, the "brains" behind the operation at DGSE headquarters in Paris, was promoted to major-general and commanded the Daguet division in the 1991 Gulf War. In 1995 he was given the honorific title of "grand officier de la Légion d'honneur". By that time, Le Monde reported, he had left the army to sell weapons in the Gulf.
France never revealed the identity of the two combat frogmen who blew up The Rainbow Warrior and killed Pereira.