It has taken 40 years before the making at last this year of a documentary that tells, honestly and conscientiously, the story of the 1985 sinking of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in the New Zealand port of Auckland. Broadcast in three episodes on French public channel France 2, and no< available for replay online, Qui a coulé le Rainbow Warrior ? (Who sunk the Rainbow Warrior?) is directed by Julien Johan and Frédéric Ploquin.
The events and the cover-up that followed were to prompt a founding moment for investigative journalism in France. Along with several other journalist colleagues (Jean Guisnel from the French daily Libération, Georges Marion from the satirical and investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné, and Jean-Marie Pontaut from weekly news magazine L’Express), who together took part in the summer of 1985 in a sort of relay race to expose the lies of the French state, I am also one of the journalists interviewed in the documentary, having at the time investigated the story for Le Monde (see Black Box at the bottom of this page).
To summarize briefly, it was on July 10th 1985 when the Rainbow Warrior, the flagship of the environmentalist group Greenpeace, which was due to soon lead a campaign against French nuclear tests in the southern Pacific Ocean, was sunk by the successive explosions of two mines while docked in Aukland. Fernando Pereira, 35, a Portuguese photographer working for Greenpeace, drowned in the sinking while trying to retrieve his camera gear.
Whereas everything pointed to France’s responsibility for the bombing, and notably after the rapid arrests by the Aukland police of two French foreign intelligence agency (DGSE) operatives, Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur (disguised as a married tourist couple under the family name of Turenge), Paris vigorously denied any involvement in the sabotage, admitting only that its agents had been engaged on a secret surveillance mission.
Two months after the bombing, the revelations of an article published in Le Monde dated September 18th 1985 forced the government, in a statement by then prime minister Laurent Fabius, to recognise France’s responsibility for the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. At the same time, the then defence minister, Charles Hernu, and the head of the DGSE, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, were forced to resign.
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“They acted on orders.” That comment by Laurent Fabius, in his statement confirming Le Monde’s revelations, designated those who carried out the sabotage, and has long since remained hanging in the air, unclarified. Whether they be cynical or sincere, those devoted ‘guardians of the temple’ dedicated to promoting the life and memory of François Mitterrand, the then French president, together with those journalists servile to the government, conformist by activity and habit, have managed to prevent the “orders” from ever being identified or attributed.
Mitterrand, who as French president was head of the country’s armed forces and, as such, its secret services, served another ten years in office following the Rainbow Warrior sinking, but was never questioned about it by the media. Nor did parliament publicly demonstrate any interest in the events, never creating a commission of inquiry. Such is the fortress of France’s presidential system.
I would never have launched myself into such an operation without the personal approval of the president.
Using as its main thread the accounts of the agents belonging to the DGSE’s “Action” service, and notably that of the naval frogman who placed the explosives – colonel Jean-Luc Kister, who revealed his role in an interview with Mediapart in 2015 – the documentary Qui a coulé le Rainbow Warrior? has dissipated the fog that has surrounded the affair for four decades, and which protected the principal perpetrator of this state-sponsored crime, namely François Mitterrand.
Telling the story through already established evidence, including Admiral Lacoste’s 1986 report, which was revealed by Le Monde in 2005, the lengthy investigation led by the documentary includes, for the first time, an account of the events by Patrick Careil, who at the time was chief of staff to defence minister Charles Hernu (before later entering the world of banking and finance).
A news saga that occupied the top of the media agenda during the summer of 1985, the Greenpeace affair became a hunt to establish who was lying. The known facts demonstrated that the two secret agent teams already identified – the fictitious “Turenge” couple, in charge of the coordination of the operation, and the crew of the yacht Ouvéa rented out to carry the equipment used in the attack – could not have placed the mines on the ship. The identity of those who carried out the bombing therefore remained unknown, and the government showed itself ready to lie through its teeth, despite all the suspicions that were circulating.
Le Monde’s subsequent revelation of the existence of a third team of DGSE divers, who were directly responsible for the bombing of the Greenpeace boat, lifted the lid on the official line. It was the missing piece of the puzzle, or to use a different imagery, it was the card that, once pulled, brought down the pack of lies fed to the media.
However, the account given now by Patrick Careil demonstrates that it was not the government as a whole which had been lying, but rather the defence ministry and the presidency. Careil explained in substance that Mitterrand, who was informed beforehand of the DGSE operation, had also lied to his prime minister, Laurent Fabius.
Fiercely loyal to Hernu, to the point of taking it upon himself to lead the cabal against those journalists investigating the affair, Careil did not hide the regrets he has now, for it was this lie (at the heart of political power) within a lie (that addressed to the French but also the whole world), that would in fact serve the ultimate impact of the revelations by journalists, helped by the divisions within the state apparatus.
At the time, far from being a passive witness to events, Careil was an active protagonist in the clandestine operation targeting Greenpeace. It was he who, on March 19th 1985, requested, as Lacoste would later report, that the head of the secret services “put in place the means of the DGSE to prohibit the Greenpeace movement from carrying out its projects to intervene against the French nuclear tests on [the Pacific Ocean atoll of] Mururoa, in the summer of 1985, the minister being firmly decided to oppose them”.
After parliamentary elections in March 1986, a conservative Gaullist government led by Jacques Chirac arrived in power, replacing the socialist government of Laurent Fabius. It was the first example of a so-called process of “co-habitation”, the sharing of political power, with socialist president François Mitterrand remaining in post above his conservative prime minister.
The new defence minister appointed in March 1986 requested a report on the Greenpeace affair from DGSE boss, Admiral Pierre Lacoste. Dated April 8th 1986, and revealed 20 years later in Le Monde by journalist Hervé Gattegno (and which is again cited by him in his recent book on the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior), Lacoste’s report is unambiguous in pointing to the direct role played by Mitterrand in the DGSE operation.
“I would never have launched myself into such an operation without the personal approval of the president,” wrote the admiral, who detailed his decisive talks with Mitterrand at the Élysée Palace on May 15th 1985, beginning at 6pm.
“I asked the president whether he authorised me to put in place the neutralization project that I had studied at the request of Mr Hernu,” Lacoste recounted. “He gave me his agreement while indicating the importance he attached to the nuclear tests. I did not then enter into greater detail about the project, the authorisation being sufficiently explicit […] I did not find it unusual to not receive a written order to activate a clandestine action. It had been the same previously, and it was the rule in this type of activity.”
Concerning the final debacle of the operation, in which the secret agents on the ground paid the price (the “Turenge” couple were imprisoned in New Zealand, while most of the others were publicly identified), Lacoste wrote: “We became lost in a tissue of lies and intrigue, ending up in a veritable disaster.”
It was thanks to the labyrinth of lies that were put about that François Mitterrand, during his lifetime, was able to avoid his personal responsibility in the crime from being revealed. Mitterrand, who holds the record in France for the longest period in office as president (14 years, from 1981 to 1995) was unquestionably a master in the art of dissimulation, which was not without damaging consequences for the socialist political family which he had latterly ended up joining.
The tardy revelations, despite his persistent denials, of his support early in his career for the ideology of Charles Maurras, and his participation in the Second World War collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, hardly helped the need for clarity in face of the electoral and ideological rise of the far-right during his presidency. Similarly, his talent for obscuring his opposition, during the 1950s, to Algerian independence and his support for France’s presence in Africa did not help the anti-colonialist movement within the Parti socialiste. Mitterrand was a staunch champion of the French Empire, however shrunk it had become, to the point of being a precursor of French neocolonialism, as detailed by researcher Thomas Deltombe in his book L’Afrique d’abord !
The two other lessons that emerged from the crime against the Rainbow Warrior obviously concern French presidentialism and journalism. Apart from his talent for covering over his tracks, Mitterrand was also protected by the institutional bunker of the Fifth Republic. This renders the French head of state out of range of contestation and revelations, even election results, as demonstrated today by Emmanuel Macron’s anti-democratic stance regarding France's parliamentary crisis.
As for journalism, the Rainbow Warrior affair serves as a reminder of a time when, at the heart of a French media system in which Le Monde was the newspaper of reference, there existed a press that was totally independent, at both an economic and a political level, and which could take the risk of publishing the revelations of September 18th 1985 (an evening newspaper, Le Monde's report on the "third team" actually hit newsstands on September 17th).
It was a risk, of course, because concerning clandestine operations by secret services, there are no documents, written traces or public accounts. “We had to absolutely protect what constituted our ultimate security: the identification of a third team,” wrote Lacoste in his memoirs published in 1997.
Only an independent newspaper, free of subjection, as was the case in 1985 of Le Monde under editor André Fontaine, and whose share ownership was controlled by its editorial team, could take that risk. The risk of running a headline, based on an investigation in which the sources were necessarily confidential, which declared the existence of the “third team” of two DGSE naval frogmen, who were the perpetrators of the attack against the Rainbow Warrior.
It succeeded in throwing the light on the lies of the state, demonstrating the force of the impact of a journalism that serves the public interest and the right to know. Which is the same purpose and principle that Mediapart, since its creation, endeavours to serve and to illustrate.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse