Saboteur spills the French beans

By Catherine Field


PARIS - Rainbow Warrior bomber Alain Mafart's book, The Secret Diaries of a Combat Diver, suggests that a more discreet, low-key attack on Greenpeace was vetoed by French Defence Minister Charles Hernu.

A gruff individual, Hernu was pushing for France to react swiftly and punitively against terrorists or groups that threatened its interests.

Political demands for quick results, Mafart says, had already caused the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service, to foul up an operation in 1983, when French agents tried to blow up the Iranian Embassy in Beirut in reprisal for a terrorist attack in Lebanon.

The truck bomb did not go off and an attempt to ignite it with a rocket-propelled grenade also failed, leaving behind equipment with the DGSE's insignia.

No one in the agency heeded the warning signs, and it was against this backdrop of meddling and incompetence that Operation Satanique, the codename for the attack on the Rainbow Warrior, was conceived in 1985.

Mafart says in his book that all operations at that time were codenamed to start with the letters S and A after the agency's Service Action, which carries out undercover operations abroad. He says there was no satanic or cult significance.

Hernu demanded that the operation be carried out quickly, which meant there was no time for reconnaissance, a process that should have taken several months and been followed by lengthy briefings. Operation Satanique was launched in mid-April, with the attack scheduled for mid-July.

There were no meetings to coordinate work between the various units.
Mafart, full of misgivings, was in charge of planning the attack itself, using a three-man team that arrived in Auckland on board the yacht Ouvea.

Neither Mafart nor fellow agent Dominque Prieur, who was in charge of logistics and getting the team out after the bombing, had any first-hand knowledge of the situation on the ground before their arrival. Their advance information depended on DGSE agent Christine Cabon, who had infiltrated Greenpeace under the name of Frederique Bonlieu.

Cabon was able to give useful details about the movements of the Rainbow Warrior but could not help with operational matters.

As for New Zealand, Mafart says there was dismal ignorance of the country within the DGSE and French political circles.

"It is an insular country, distant, withdrawn, which does not think for a second that it will get caught up in the turbulence of the world," he writes, describing New Zealand as the "little Switzerland of the Pacific."

"We did not know that in this country you cannot make a move without being observed, that informing the police is a national duty."
The saboteurs left plenty of clues for the locals to discover.
But Mafart says the demon seed of trouble was sown when Hernu gave orders that
the Rainbow Warrior be sunk, not just immobilised, to make Greenpeace think twice about carrying on with its protests.

The political thinking, the intellectual path used by Hernu when he gave the order to sink the Rainbow Warrior, eludes Mafart.

"I will probably never know [the reasoning]. But as far as the DGSE is concerned, it merely carried out, in haste, the instructions it received, and its job is not to disobey the orders of its supervising minister."

Mafart had argued for a single bomb to be placed on the ship's propeller shaft, which would have crippled the vessel. But the heads of the DGSE, yielding to Hernu, decided that a second, larger charge was needed.

For reasons that Mafart says he cannot fathom, even today, they insisted that the devices carry a four-hour timing delay, instead of the usual 24 to 48-hour delay that enables agents to make their getaway.

Service Action, Mafart says, took every precaution to prevent loss of life. It acquired copies of the builder's drawings of the Rainbow Warrior and made special charges for parts of the hull where there were no cabins.

It also timed the attack to occur late at night, when there was less likelihood of many people being on board.

But, as Mafart himself says, fate intervened. After the first blast, Fernando Pereira went back to recover his photographic gear, just as the second charge went off.

The desire for a quick, spectacular show was the fatal error - it left Pereira dead and enabled the police to capture the two key operatives before they had a chance to leave the country.

It was only the following morning, when Prieur and Mafart listened to the radio after snatching a few hours sleep, that they learned of Pereira's death.
"Catastrophe ... Dominique and I are speechless. Both of our faces are etched in shock. Silence takes root," Mafart recalls.

"But personal problems that this accident causes for each of us are not allowed, for the time being, to dominate. We have to carry on. We must pursue our mission."

At that point, according to Mafart's version, the DGSE cruelly abandoned him and Prieur to their fate.

Holed up in a Hamilton motel, they make a distress phone call to the DGSE. No help or guidance is offered, and their case officer is, inexplicably, unavailable.

As panic sets in, they discuss whether to take shelter in the French Embassy in Wellington or disappear into the New Zealand countryside and live rough.

They decide in the end that their best hope is to use their fake Swiss passports, which they used to enter New Zealand, in the hope that the authorities will not check them. It proves a vain hope.

Paris' disavowal of the officers was, according to Mafart, the work of Hernu, who brushed aside an appeal by the DGSE chief, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, for France to make a clean breast of things with Wellington.

Back in New Zealand, Prieur and Mafart were in shock. The entire responsibility for the operation fell to them. Charged with murder, they were facing life imprisonment.

Only when the scandal became public in France did the Government accept responsibility. Hernu quit on September 20, 1985, followed by Lacoste six days later.

The charges were scaled down to manslaughter, with the reduced penalty of 10 years.

Mafart gives an insight into the supposedly top-secret negotiations between Wellington and Paris over the transfer of the pair to Hao, a French atoll in the Pacific.

The deal was announced to great fanfare on July 7, 1986 - but, writes Mafart, he had known of it as early as June 24, when he was asked to sign a document agreeing to his expulsion from New Zealand.

Mafart gives no details of his illness on Hao, saying only that it was a recurrence of problems he had experienced in adolescence. The French daily Liberation said last week that he had almost died at the age of 14 from an intestinal infection.

The motive for his book is clearly anger at his former bosses and at what he sees as a whispering campaign among erstwhile colleagues that he botched the operation.

Mafart styles himself as a professional soldier. He is eager to talk about his love of the Army, where he trained as a paratrooper and diver before being picked up by the DGSE for operations abroad.

He retired in 1995 with the rank of colonel and now, at age 48, lives on a pension, making adventure trips to exotic locations such as Arctic Canada and Madagascar.

He says the Rainbow Warrior affair deeply marked him, especially the loss of his secret identity. Because of his brief encounter with fame, he is suspicious of people who seek to befriend him.

The former secret agent says he was treated fairly and decently by New Zealand at every stage.

His book shows no remorse for the attack, although he admitted to Liberation that Pereira's death was a matter for his conscience.

"If that hadn't happened, the business would have ended quite differently. We could have had a good laugh about it as time went by. But now, we never will."