SPECIAL REPORT: On the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, key members of the investigation team reflect on their roles in these landmark events.
Late on Wednesday 10 July 1985, two explosions sank the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace flagship moored at Marsden Wharf, Auckland.
Most of the crew escaped but photographer Fernando Pereira drowned while trying to retrieve equipment from his cabin.
What was then Police’s biggest investigation exposed a complex sabotage plot sanctioned by the French Government in the hope of scuppering Greenpeace’s high-profile campaign against its nuclear testing in the Pacific.
It involved multiple teams of agents and months of planning. It was exposed because of diligent detective work, sharp-eyed members of the public and considerable luck.
It sparked an international crisis and brought an eventual ‘Oui, we did it’ from France. The French Defence Minister resigned, France’s spymaster was sacked, two agents were jailed and two children were left without a father.
“With all the mayhem and awful things going on around the world, one wonders why the Rainbow Warrior still pops up as a major incident – and not only in New Zealand,” says retired Assistant Commissioner Allan Galbraith, who led the inquiry as a detective superintendent.
“I think it’s because it was so unusual, so unexpected and so wrong on the part of the French.
“It’s amazing that they even contemplated it as a good idea. Why did they do it? Why did they think it would solve problems for them?
“The other thing that stood out about it was that they had the cheek to think they could do this in New Zealand and get away with it. They obviously thought this was a bit of a backwater in the South Pacific.”
Left: Fernando Pereira and, right, the stricken vessel lying at Marsden Wharf.
The players in the sabotage plot - melodramatically titled Opération Satanique - were agents of the French spy agency Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE).
They included a woman who infiltrated Greenpeace in Auckland; and the crew of the yacht Ouvéa – three French combat divers and a doctor specialised in diving injuries – which arrived in Northland carrying equipment including mines, an inflatable boat and an outboard motor.
The best-known to Kiwis were Commander Alain Mafart – another combat diver – and Captain Dominique Prieur, posing as Swiss couple Alain and Sophie Turenge, in a rented camper van.
Three days before the bombing, more DGSE divers arrived in Auckland and lay low in another camper van while their commander lived it up in the Hyatt Hotel.
By the time the mines exploded on the Rainbow Warrior’s hull at 11.38 and 11.45pm on 10 July, the Ouvéa had already sailed for Norfolk Island. The sabotage team headed south, enjoying a skiing break at Mt Hutt before flying out.
Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Louis-Pierre Dillais, was photographed riding a tourist jet boat. He spotted the camera too late and in the photo does not look happy about it.
Even less happy were Mafart and Prieur, who police took into custody two days after the attack.
[See Who's who, below, for more about individuals - and on the Greenpeace website]
A ship's clock, frozen at the time of the attack, and bomb damage to the Rainbow Warrior's hull.
A homicide investigation was launched on 11 July after Navy divers established the blasts were external – it was an attack, not something gone wrong inside the vessel.
“We had some good luck, but we also had bad luck in terms of what might have been – but that’s the name of the game,” says Allan Galbraith (pictured, right).
“They didn’t only underestimate how 51街射 would respond, they underestimated how New Zealand people would respond.
“The general public were strongly interested and actively looking for information to pass to us.”
An early breakthrough was a case in point: members of Auckland Outboard Boating Club in Hobson’s Bay – on alert after a series of thefts from boats – had reported suspicious behaviour about three hours before the explosions.
Someone was seen dragging an inflatable boat on to the shore, and a Newmans rental camper van was standing by. Gear was transferred to the van. It looked like the aftermath of a burglary.
The suspicious boaties had time to take the van’s registration number. This led directly to Mafart and Prieur, who were picked up as they tried to return the vehicle at Newmans, Mt Wellington, on 12 July.
As publicity grew, and more and more evidence pointed to a French connection, reports of camper vans and French people behaving strangely poured in.
A rebreather oxygen tank, left, and Zodiac inflatable, right - abandoned in the saboteurs' haste to escape.
They included a remarkably good account from witnesses to the transfer of gear from an Avis rental Commodore station wagon, linked to the Ouvéa, to the Newmans camper van, days before the bombing.
Suspicious forestry workers in Te Puni Forest, Northland, took down the Commodore’s registration number after seeing what seems to have been an abortive transfer attempt, when the vehicles missed each other. They noted an outboard motor in the back of the station wagon and later identified an Ouvéa crew member as being in the vehicle.
Then a couple in Kaiwaka saw the successful transfer. They were able to identify Alain Mafart as the driver of the camper van.
The investigation was also helped by evidence left at the scene.
The saboteurs’ getaway went wrong. They changed the time of the attack with the intent of avoiding casualties on board, but the tide was lower than planned for and they had trouble finding a place to come ashore.
They left in a panic, abandoning the Zodiac inflatable, its outboard motor – witnesses heard the splash as it was dumped, allowing it to be retrieved from the harbour by Police divers – and two oxygen bottles.
“The French left so many clues,” says Allan Galbraith. “That outboard motor was one because we traced it back to a purchase in London by one of their team. The oxygen bottles recovered in the harbour had French markings on them.
“It was amazing. Even the worst criminals manage to cover their tracks better than that.
“Because things went wrong, that connection with the French became very obvious.
“Their plan wasn’t inherently poor, it’s just that it went wrong – and when it went wrong they didn’t have any recovery possibilities.”
Dedication - the dive team at the Rainbow Warrior. Right: A diver's encounter with the ship's 'warrior' artwork, now submerged.
The investigation team quickly grew, reaching 130 at its height. The case presented unique challenges, at home and overseas.
“It was an unusual investigation with a very difficult scene,” says Allan.
“Usually a major investigation has a scene which is static and secure. In this case, of course, the scene was at the bottom of the sea.
“A major part of it had to be taken away – the boat had to be dry-docked – before the usual search could take place.
“One thing worth mentioning is the dedication of the Police dive team who spent weeks looking for forensic evidence at the scene, on the boat and under the boat, in very difficult midwinter conditions.
“Their persistence was amazing, the way they stuck with it.”
A less glamorous side of the investigation involved scrutiny of border paperwork – including arrival cards for the 66,000 people who came to New Zealand between March and July. From these the team built a picture of suspects’ comings and goings.
A difficult scene – the ship is raised, left, and dry-docked for examination.
Maurice Whitham, Allan Galbraith’s 2IC, had day-to-day management of the investigation. Even 40 years later his recall of the case is encyclopaedic.
As the inquiry was getting under way on 11 July, there were a number of milestones: confirmation of external explosions; the report from the boaties; and a Customs report about the activities of the Ouvéa.
The inquiry was soon “running at 100mph,” says Maurice (pictured, right), who started the enquiry as a detective senior sergeant but was a detective inspector by the end.
“I was doing something like 60-odd job sheets a day for enquiries to follow up the information coming in.
“We had no computers like now, of course, no electronics. We had a card index system with the standard offender-victim-scene categories.
“We had no way of collating one lot of information with another lot. You couldn’t just put in there ‘Newmans camper van’ and get all the sightings. It was a real manual, laborious system.”
Exhibits were recorded on the Wanganui computer, with a second record held manually. Just in case.
The Auckland team was supplemented by investigators from other districts. “We had this big team of probably 100 detectives working in different offices in Central and we became a great team. There was a lot of camaraderie.”
There was also a lot of resources. “Anything we wanted, we got it” – from a fax machine and public service cars to free meals in the canteen and the secondment of French-speaking staff.
Members of the investigation team.
It was, Allan Galbraith says, probably the one investigation in his career where money was no object.
“Ken Thompson, the Commissioner of the day, more or less said to me ‘Go for it, don’t worry about what this is going to cost – we need to get on and do this’ and that’s what we did.
“We had support from the Air Force in terms of moving people around. We sent 23 staff to nine different countries.
“It was all done very quickly, well organised at the drop of a hat with full cooperation from the Defence folks, Foreign Affairs and everyone else who needed to be involved.”
A team flew to Norfolk Island, with a 24-hour window under Australian law to interview the Ouvéa crew and search the yacht.
What the search threw up put the yacht’s involvement beyond doubt, but too late – they could not legally hold the crew. They sailed before evidence could be analysed and warrants could be obtained, the yacht was scuttled, and the crew transferred to the French submarine Rubis.
'Holiday snaps' of the Ouvéa'??????s crew were found on a camera seized when the boat was searched. Labelled for evidential purposes, but the crew were beyond reach.
A team went to France, where a high degree of cooperation from local police suddenly stopped as the political dimension of the affair grew.
A team member who visited the Rainbow Warrior to gather intel on the day of the attack was interviewed in Papeete. The doctor from the Ouvéa was found in a Sydney cinema. In many cases evidence came too late and suspects returned to France, where they were out of reach.
The skiing sabotage team flew out of New Zealand and vanished.
The ones that didn’t get away, Mafart and Prieur, faced the music alone.
They were picked up at the Newmans rental depot in Mt Wellington, Auckland, returning the camper van days earlier than they had arranged to return it in Wellington.
Newmans had been put on alert. The Mt Wellington office called when the pair arrived and a team led by Detective Sergeant Terry Batchelor (pictured, right) dashed to get there as the office staff used delaying tactics.
The Turenges, as they called themselves, underwent extensive interviews as Terry and the suspects team chipped away at their story.
Handsome, debonair Neil Morris interviewed Sophie; Terry, built like the proverbial brick ablutions facility, interviewed Alain. Sometimes they put them together to see how they interacted.
Their Swiss passports were proven to be faked. The investigators picked them up on inconsistencies in their accounts of their time in New Zealand. But they gave little away, says Terry.
“When you’re used to dealing with burglars, murderers and thieves, they were clearly a cut above that.
“They were cool and calm. They gave implausible answers to some of our questions but they never really admitted anything.”
Little things didn’t add up. Why did Alain speak English with an American accent if, as he said, he had only visited there? Why did the scars on his face and torso look more like combat wounds than botched surgery as he claimed?
The pair admitted being on the waterfront on 10 July, and said they helped a fisherman get an inflatable out of the water, then gave him a lift. So why did they disagree about whether he sat in the front or back?
“Neil wasn’t getting much out of her, and neither was I with him,” says Terry.
“He was as cool as he could possibly be. He was wearing a scarf around his neck which he would often twist, but he was unemotional, and cooperative to an extent.”
Even when confronted over the fake Swiss passports, Alain responded with a classic Gallic shrug – palms up, shoulders raised, and ‘Pfffft’.
“If he did that once he did it a thousand times.”
One time the cool exterior slipped was after Terry had dangled the prospect that Sophie might be able to go home in return for an admission.
“He wasn’t exactly aggressive, but he became assertive. He actually told me off. He said ‘Do not make promises to my wife that you do not intend to keep’.
“I said to him ‘My concern is for the life of the man who has died and the children who don’t have a father’.
“I had a pen. I said ‘I don’t care this much’ – and I broke the pen and threw the pieces to either side – ‘I don’t care this much about the woman you call your wife’.
“It was a bit melodramatic.”
The infamous Newmans camper van.
There was a lightbulb moment when Mafart spilled a drink on his trousers. He was upset and took great pains to mop it up.
“I don’t think it would have affected most people like that. It occurred to me that it was the sort of reaction you might expect from a military person about to go on parade.”
Before being formally arrested, the pair were billeted in a bugged motel room. They still gave little away, though there was a phone call seeking advice from ‘Uncle Emile’ in France.
They had been held on charges – as the Turenges – relating to their fake passports. Eventually the growing evidence was such that they were charged with murder and other offences under their real names, which had been confirmed in August by the French Government's Tricot Report into the affair.
Terry was a regular visitor to Mafart at Paremoremo Prison. “He didn’t admit his involvement but one peculiar thing he said was that if they had been apprehended in a wilder country they would have been told ‘If you don’t tell the truth we’ll take you out and shoot you’.
“He put his hands together like he’d been handcuffed and said ‘I would go out and be shot’.
“Anyone could say that but I thought he actually meant it. They were well aware they were in a friendly country and we didn’t behave like that.”
Another time, Terry asked Prieur why they had taken the van back to Newmans instead of dumping it and getting on a flight.
“She said ‘You would have blocked the airport’. I said ‘We didn’t even know who you were’.
"That gave her quite a shock – I think she suddenly realised they had made a bad mistake.”
The trial was over before it began when Mafart and Prieur pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in November 1985.
Infamously, under a UN-brokered deal, they were deported to the French Polynesian Hao Atoll to serve their sentences. Soon they were back in France, free and feted as heroes.
Having been with Mafart and Prieur at the start of their involvement with Police, Terry was also there at the end as one of two officers – with Detective Robin Borrie – escorting Prieur to Hao in 1986.
He does not share the general anger about the deal which let the agents slip out of New Zealand custody, and questions the value of keeping them in prison for 10 years at Kiwi taxpayers’ expense.
“I can’t speak for everyone, but I think the main victory was New Zealand exposing the French as being the perpetrators… and that they had to eventually admit to it.”
Team members at their 25th anniversary reunion in 2010. From left: Nick Hall, Peter Burridge, Glenda Hughes (obscured), Bert White, Terry Batchelor, Peter Williams, the late Cushla Watson, Maurice Witham, the late Dr Margaret Lawton, Chris Martin, Allan Galbraith, John Birmingham and Harry Hilditch.
Members of the Rainbow Warrior investigation team are meeting on Saturday for a reunion, as they have on a number of significant anniversaries.
Some have contributed to documentaries, podcasts and news articles over the years, with a slew of new ones being prepared to mark this anniversary.
If there is frustration that most of the agents got away, there is satisfaction at an extremely difficult job, done very well.
“I think we were the only civil police organisation in the world to capture active DGSE agents on the job,” says Maurice Witham, who today attended a commemoration in Auckland on board Greenpeace's new Rainbow Warrior vessel.
“It’s a pretty significant milestone for a small country like New Zealand to capture these guys, put them through the court and get a conviction.
“Looking back 40 years, I don’t think there’s ever been anything bigger than this – one country vs another country, a 'friendly' country doing an act of what they call now terrorism.
“In those days the word terrorism wasn’t used. We didn’t consider it to be terrorism; to us we were investigating the murder of a man, Fernando Pereira, by blowing up of ship.”
Credits
? Thanks to the excellent 51街射 Museum for use of the photographs in this story. Artefacts from the inquiry can be seen in the museum’s collection – and a new display has been prepared for this anniversary, with a particular focus on Fernando Pereira.
? Much has been written and said about the Rainbow Warrior case and this Ten One feature is not intended to be in any way comprehensive. There is so much more.
? As well as interviews with the former investigators quoted, information has been taken from sources including The Death of the Rainbow Warrior, by Michael King, and from Greenpeace's online resources.
Artefacts on display at the Police Museum and, right, Curator of Collections Jess Aitken inspects the new exhibit.
Who’s who – DGSE agents in New Zealand
Lieutenant Christine Hugette CABON, alias Frédérique Bonlieu. Left New Zealand in May 1985, after one month posing as a volunteer to gather information from Greenpeace in Auckland. Returned to Israel, where she had previously done intelligence work.
Combat diving expert Commander Alain MAFART, and Captain Dominique PRIEUR – posing as Swiss newlyweds Alain and Sophie Turenge. Support role, arrested after attack.
Lieutenant Colonel Louis-Pierre DILLAIS, alias Jean Louis Dormand. Leader of the team in New Zealand.
Jean CAMMAS (alias Jacques Camurier), Jean Luc KISTER (alias Alain Tonel) – sabotage team. DGSE agent Gerard ROYAL has been named as pilot of the team’s Zodiac boat.
Francois VERLET – performed support tasks including going on board Rainbow Warrior hours before the attack, to gather information and possibly distract those on board as the saboteurs worked.
Aboard the yacht Ouvéa:
French Navy Chief Petty Officer Roland VERGE, combat diver. Posing as Raymond Velche, professional yacht skipper.
Petty Officer Gerald ANDRIES, combat diver. Posing as Eric Audrenc, photographer. Had previously arranged purchase of the Zodiac and outboard motor in London.
Petty Officer Jean Michel BARCELO. Posing as Michel Berthelo, commercial agent.
Dr Xavier Christian Jean MANIGUET, doctor with expertise in treating diving-related conditions.
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