The day French secret services sank a Greenpeace ship protesting nuclear tests in the Pacific

"It wasn't just a tangible ship, it also carried the intangible: what we could do with it and the hope it would carry... all of that was part of what the Warrior was."

This is how New Zealander Bunny McDiarmid described, in the BBC documentary Murder in the Pacific , the Greenpeace ship that was attacked 40 years ago, in 1985.

McDiarmid would become co-executive director of Greenpeace International, but at the time she had just joined the organization and was a sailor on the crew of the Rainbow Warrior .

The inspiration for the ship's name came from a Native American prophecy that predicted that humanity would unite to protect the Earth's treasures: "When the world is sick and dying, the people will rise up as warriors of the rainbow..."

Loaded with all these dreams and eco-activists from around the world, the ship had been sailing the oceans since the late 1970s.

True to the NGO's strategy of using ships in its protests and campaigns, the Rainbow Warrior participated in actions to prevent the slaughter of seals and intimidate whaling fleets from Russia and Japan.

"She had been a North Sea trawler, which is to say she was built like a tank," commented her captain, Peter Willcox.

"You couldn't find a better ship to send a bunch of crazy hippies out to sea."

The advantages were several: the Rainbow Warrior served as a flagship for smaller protest vessels that, if unaccompanied, could be intimidated by larger vessels.

Furthermore, it could carry large quantities of supplies, allowing protest actions to be conducted over longer periods.

And with their onboard communications equipment, the crew could maintain radio contact with the outside world and send breaking news and photos to international news agencies.

Nuclear year

"1985 was our year of protest against nuclear testing in the Pacific," Willcox recalls.

The first operation, called "Operation Exodus," had a bold objective: to relocate the population of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands to another island about 180 km away.

The Marshall Islands had been the site of 67 nuclear detonations as part of US military tests during the Cold War, between 1946 and 1958.

Bombs had been detonated on Bikini and Enewetak atolls, including a device 1,100 times larger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

Although Rongelap was not one of the so-called "Pacific testing grounds," it was contaminated by radioactive fallout.

After years of suffering the terrible consequences and seeking justice and help without success, the atoll authorities turned to Greenpeace to try to raise awareness of the local situation.

The group was also asked to transport about 350 people, their livestock and 100 tons of belongings to Mejatto Island, a 14-hour boat ride away.

"It was a massive operation," Willcox recalled, "which put a human face on the nuclear issue," McDiarmid noted.

After the transfer was complete, the crew sailed to Auckland, New Zealand, to refuel and then protest nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in the South Pacific.

At that time, the US and the UK had already stopped detonating atomic bombs in that region, but France refused to do so, downplaying the risks.

"Our feeling was: if it's so safe [to do these tests], do them in Paris or Washington, DC, but don't make small or developing countries your testing grounds," Willcox explained to the BBC's Witness History programme.

The day before

The plan was to depart on July 11 for French Polynesia so that the Rainbow Warrior could lead a flotilla of ships toward the test site with the intention of disrupting them and thereby attracting international attention.

"It was a military base, with restricted access, so we were prepared to be arrested," McDiarmid explained.

"But we had the ability to take pictures, publicize them, and explain what was happening to fuel the opposition we were trying to mobilize globally and push for further nuclear disarmament."

Docked in Auckland Harbor on the evening of July 10, spirits were high. The crew aboard the Rainbow Warrior celebrated the campaign manager's birthday and shared their excitement about the South Pacific voyage.

"We were really looking forward to going out and changing the world," Willcox said.

"Sometimes change happens when you least expect it," McDiarmid observed.

She and her boyfriend went to spend the night with her parents; other members of the group continued the party in the city.

Willcox went to bed "around 11 p.m."

Suddenly, the ship rocked violently.

"My first thought was, 'Did we hit someone? Is this my fault?'"

"I looked out the bow porthole. I could see the dock lights, which meant we were connected to it."

"I lay down again, relieved. And then I realized the generators had shut down. Something was wrong."

Willcox got up and went to the engine room, where he found engineer Davey Edward "standing there in disbelief, saying, 'It's over. It's over,' as he watched the water rise."

Without understanding what had happened, the captain realized that the area where many people were staying was flooded.

"I went to the stairs, saw down there that Martini (Gotje), the first officer, was there, and he had already gotten everyone up.

And then the second explosion happened. The whole ship jumped.

"That's when I got scared. I thought, 'Something really bad is happening,' and I started yelling, 'Abandon ship!'"

From outside, they saw the Rainbow Warrior sinking.

"As captain, our biggest concern is the safety of the crew."

"At the pier, I noticed that Hanne (Sorensen, a Danish engineer) and Fernando (Pereira, a Portuguese photographer) were missing."

Willcox was not worried about "Fernando, for he always went into town. But Hanne never left the ship at night."

"We shined a spotlight into the engine room and all we saw was thick, greasy, black water.

"I figured my chances of jumping in and saving someone weren't very high. I chickened out."

"I wish I had tried, but I didn't."

Portraying reality

The police arrived shortly and took the crew to the police station, which was across the street from the pier.

Hanne was there, she had gone out for a walk.

"I've never felt so relieved. I hugged her, and that's when Davey came up to me and said, 'Fernando's downstairs.'

"He didn't go out into town that night."

Police divers tried to search for him, but were unable to reach where they thought he was.

Three hours later, the Navy dive team succeeded.

They found Fernando dead in his cabin.

“It was all so surreal at the time,” Willcox recalls.

"I was astonished."

"We couldn't believe this had happened. We had lost one of our own, without knowing why or how," said McDiarmid, who went to the scene as soon as he heard the news.

Portuguese Fernando Pereira, who had recently turned 35, was a freelance photographer and lived in the Netherlands with his wife and two children, Marelle and Paul.

He had joined the crew of the Rainbow Warrior to record the reality of nuclear testing and show it to the world.

In time, it was learned that the second explosion that rocked the vessel before midnight left him unconscious on the lower deck, and with the ship sinking rapidly, he drowned.

But that night, no one understood what had happened.

'A serious crime'

The next morning, everyone was trying to understand what could have happened.

"Police initially thought it may have been a gas explosion on board the ship," said Detective Constable Chris Martin of Auckland police.

"Throughout the early morning hours, we could see the damage to the ship, and it became clear that this was not just a gas explosion."

Someone had planted bombs on the vessel's hull and propeller.

The ship had been deliberately destroyed.

"It was a serious crime."

And, as there had been a fatal victim, it was a homicide.

"We began to realize the gravity of it," the detective recalled.

"We were a small country in the South Pacific. We had never seen a crime like that. It was just huge."

"They were very nervous," Willcox observed. "That kind of thing just doesn't happen in New Zealand."

"We have a homicide. We have a serious criminal act. We have the implication of political terrorism," declared then-Prime Minister David Lange.

"As a country, we have an urgent need to investigate this. The New Zealand Police are doing this effectively and will be given all the resources necessary to do so."

The investigation team was expanded as needed.

The problem was where to start.

Destroy the spirit

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the crew of the Rainbow Warrior had no idea who had shot them. The list of enemies Greenpeace has made over the years is long, and it was already long back then.

However, 1985 was the year in which the group had decided to focus particularly on the nuclear issue.

And of all the campaigns carried out by Greenpeace, this one perhaps had the most markedly political connotation, due to the Cold War.

Since the end of World War II, they had operated under the belief that peace was maintained by force. And that force was atomic.

The US and the Soviet Union had guaranteed parity in destructive power with the idea of protecting each other, under the principle of "mutually assured destruction" (any attack by either side would result in the total destruction of both).

The theory of deterrence also gained prominence: an inferior nuclear force with extreme destructive power could prevent a more powerful adversary from attacking it.

From this perspective, any success for Greenpeace in its campaign against nuclear weapons was a victory for the enemy of the affected country.

The problem was that often taking action against the organization, even legal ones, only generated more negative publicity for the target of the protests and encouraged support for the cause.

For some reason, however, someone had resorted to violence to try to stop them.

"If they think they can make us stop, that's a big mistake," Martini said at the time.

"Because you can kill people, you can sink ships, but you can't destroy the spirit. And the spirit of the 'warrior' lives on."

Opération Satanique

Auckland police needed more than hypotheses, they also needed clues.

And the New Zealanders were more than willing to help.

The public provided information so diligently that a couple claiming to be newlyweds from Switzerland were quickly arrested.

They were, in fact, Major Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur, French secret agents.

Paris initially denied any involvement in the sinking, dubbed Opération Satanique ("satanic operation"), and described it as a "terrorist attack".

Under pressure, François Mitterrand's government launched an investigation that concluded that the secret agents had done nothing more than spy on Greenpeace.

In New Zealand, however, police gradually uncovered evidence that proved a highly organized operation involving more than 10 agents from the French intelligence service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE).

In France, the scandal intensified as the media published new allegations of French involvement.

French Defense Minister Charles Hernu was forced to resign, and DGSE chief Pierre Lacoste was fired.

On September 22, 1985, French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius gave a televised address in which he revealed that French agents had bombed the Rainbow Warrior and that they had done so under orders.

'It must be sunk'

Mafart and Prieur, the only two participants arrested, were sentenced to 10 years in prison, much to the dismay of many, thanks to a pre-trial agreement: they would plead guilty if the charge was reduced to manslaughter.

Two years later, they were repatriated "and received a hero's welcome upon arrival in France," McDiarmid recalled.

"It was all very sad. There was no justice for Fernando, nor for his family. I don't forgive these guys. They murdered one person and luckily they didn't hurt more people."

"And for what?"

This question would be partially answered three decades later by one of the agents at the French investigative journalism website Mediapart.

Jean-Luc Kister was revealed to be one of the two DGSE divers who placed the explosives on the Rainbow Warrior .

"We are not cold-blooded killers. My conscience tells me I must apologize and explain myself," he declared, speaking on the subject for the first time in 2015.

He said that upon receiving the order and knowing it was a Greenpeace protest, officers presented alternative, less drastic suggestions to authorities in Paris, but they were rejected.

The French government considered its nuclear testing program essential to France's security.

"There was a willingness at the top to say, 'No, no, this has to stop definitively, we have to take much more radical measures. We have to sink it.' And it's simple: to sink a ship, you have to make a hole in it, and that brings risks," Kister said.

He would later say in an interview with New Zealand's TVNZ that it was "like using boxing gloves to kill a mosquito."

"We had to obey the order, we were soldiers."

"But it was an unfair clandestine operation, carried out in an allied, friendly and peaceful country," he said, adding that he considered the mission a "huge failure."

'You can't sink a rainbow'

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior failed to quell protests on Moruroa Atoll.

The activist group not only sent another large ship, the Greenpeace, to lead the protest, but also gained global sympathy and raised awareness about the issue of nuclear testing.

Contrary to what the French intended, the attack on the Rainbow Warrior helped transform Greenpeace from a group of protesters into one of the largest environmental organizations in the world.

In 1987, under international pressure, France paid the NGO $8.2 million in compensation, which helped finance another ship, the Rainbow Warrior II .

That year, the Rainbow Warrior was towed and sunk in Matauri Bay.

France also paid an undisclosed sum to the Pereira family. But it continued to conduct nuclear tests in the South Pacific until ratifying the international nuclear test ban treaty in 1998.

Until then, it had carried out 193 tests on the Polynesian islands of Moruroa and Fangataufa.

Before one of them, in 1995, the Rainbow Warrior II was approached by French commandos while leading another protest.

When Greenpeace activists were asked for their names, they provided only one: Fernando Pereira.