KEY POINTS:
Dominique Prieur, one of two spies arrested and jailed in New Zealand for their part in bombing the Rainbow Warrior, has started a new life - with the fire brigade.
The satirical French weekly Le Canard Enchaine, in a report confirmed by the Paris Fire Brigade (BSPP), said Prieur had been hired as the service's director of human resources, working for two days a week on a one-year contract.
She will be working under her maiden name, Dominique Maire.
Her husband, Joel Prieur, is commander of the BSPP "and is probably not unfamiliar with the hiring", Le Canard noted acidly, in a piece headlined "Pompiers en famille" (Firefighters in the family).
The BSPP has a staff of 8200 men and women and has military status. Joel Prieur, who holds the rank of general, has been its commander since October 2007. Dominique Prieur is retired with the rank of colonel in the army reserve.
She and Major Alain Mafart, of the French foreign espionage service the DGSE, had support roles in the July 10, 1985, destruction of the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace flagship, in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour.
They handed two bombs to combat divers, who attached the devices to the vessel.
The operation was designed to sink the vessel and cripple Greenpeace protests against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, but a Dutch-Portuguese photographer, Fernando Pereira, was accidentally killed as he went below to get his camera gear.
Mafart and Prieur, who was aged 29 at the time, were travelling with fake Swiss passports. They were picked up two days after the attack.
On November 22, 1985, they were handed 10-year jail terms for manslaughter.
French lobbying, including threats of retaliation against New Zealand agricultural exports to Europe, led to a deal under which they were transferred to Hao Atoll, in French Polynesia, in exchange for reparations payments.
Mafart returned to France in December 1987, on medical grounds. Prieur followed in May the next year, having become pregnant after her husband joined her on the atoll.
In 1995, Prieur published a book, Agent Secrete, to give her version of events, but has otherwise kept a low profile. In an interview with l'Express magazine in October 2007, she said: "The affair is over and today, I only seek one thing: the right to be forgotten."
