Tale of ineptitude and machismo

The Rainbow Warrior the day after it was bombed at Marsden Wharf Auckland New Zealand. Picture / Herald file

Tongues are now loosening among France's principal actors in the Rainbow Warrior affair, who feel the passage of time is taking some heat out of the controversy, enabling them to set the record straight.

As a result, they are adding valuable pieces to this extraordinary mosaic.

The picture that emerges is of a mission that was bigger than many ever thought and whose historical roots touched on insecurities in the top brass in the French Navy.

And its failure is a bizarre tale of ineptitude in the top ranks of government, and machismo in the secret unit tasked with carrying out the sabotage itself.

The operation to cripple the Rainbow Warrior saw less of the suave efficiency of James Bond and more of the fumbling farce of Yes, Minister.

Pierre Lacoste, the former head of the French foreign espionage service, the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), which was in charge of the attack, this week became the first top official to publicly confirm that a third team had taken part in the operation.

Lacoste's acknowledgement, in an interview with the Herald, bolsters suspicions that New Zealand managed to capture just a fraction of a larger squad, some of whose members laid low for weeks before they fled the country.

Alain Mafart, the secret service agent, blamed the fiasco on pressure from the political chiefs who ordered the operation.

Less than four months was given to prepare for the operation, which led to fatal mistakes on the ground, in terms of logistics and in under-estimating the vigilance of the New Zealand people, Mafart says in his memoirs. (Mafart and Prieur both refused to give interviews for this article.)

Alain Chouet, a senior DGSE official at the time, scorns Mafart's version of events.

"The operation was put together by amateurs, who trailed clues behind them like Hansel (in Hansel and Gretel fairy stories) dropped stones behind him," Chouet, then head of the DGSEs counter-terrorism intelligence and operations co-ordination unit, told the Herald.

"Mafart was an honest underling, but no more. Prieur was hopeless at everything ... she got her job because she was pretty and became a mascot in a male-dominated branch of the service where the only female presence amounted to a few unpleasant moustachioed warrant officers from the women's Army Corps."

He describes Mafart and Prieur - both decorated after their return to France - as a pair of cretins for sticking around after the bombs were planted instead of making themselves scarce, and says they should have "kept quiet or played dumb" instead of panicking and making phone calls back to the DGSE.

But Chouet says the debacle's roots went beyond operational blunders.

He and others take aim at the top military hierarchy's preoccupation with Greenpeace and with hazy orders that left political chiefs almost laughably ignorant about what was being cooked up in the DGSE's "Action Service".

The Action Service is described as a machismo-driven unit, run by former paratroopers who were obsessed with reversing their humiliation in French-run Indochina and Algeria more than two decades before.

The idea of sabotaging the Rainbow Warrior originated with then Defence Minister Charles Hernu, who had had his ear bent by the French Navy.

We now know that these admirals had been in a state of paranoia about Greenpeace for nearly 20 years before the Rainbow Warrior affair.

What happened on July 10, 1985, was only a culmination of this.

Unabashed, the DGSE - and "several other European services," claims Chouet - launched numerous operations to hamper the anti-nuclear movement, seeing in it a hindrance to its nuclear programme and a target for Soviet manipulation.

In 1966, says French journalist Jean Guisnel, French agents poured sugar into the fuel tank of a protest yacht, the Trident, before it left Sydney Harbour for Mururoa.

The following year, he says, the Trident got as far as Rarotonga; there, a crew member fell sick with jaundice and French diplomatic pressure prompted the Cook Islands authorities to place the whole crew under quarantine, which was lifted several weeks later, after, of course, the batch of tests was over.

Pierre Favier, a journalist with the French news agency AFP and co-author of a book on the Mitterrand era, says a DGSE plot to sink Greenpeace vessels in 1973 was thwarted thanks only to the energetic efforts of Bernard Stasi, minister for the French overseas territories at the time.

And he suggests a blaze that destroyed a protest boat in a Chilean port in the mid-1970s was also the work of French agents.

Other incidents were bouts of food poisoning that broke out among crews, engine breakdowns caused by defective diesel oil and propellers that mysteriously unscrewed.

Mafart claims that in 1985 the DGSE had already brewed up a batch of special bacteria that would cause long-term contamination of the Rainbow Warrior's fuel lines.

But this "soft option" was ruled out in favour of a decision to sink the ship with explosives. This daft decision, it now emerges, resulted from a political screwball comedy.

The President, Francois Mitterrand, was briefed by Hernu about the French Navy's concerns and about the need for a mission to "prevent" (empêcher) Greenpeace from nearing Mururoa.

In typical Sphinx-like manner, as keen as ever to preserve deniability, Mitterrand signed nothing and gave no clear oral orders. Instead, says Chouet, he made a "vague grimace" which Hernu interpreted as meaning, "probably rightly, 'do what has to be done, let's not hear about it and don't bother me with it, I don't want to know'."

Bolstered by what he construed to be Mitterrand's approval, Hernu ordered Admiral Lacoste, the DGSE chief, to carry out the mission.

Lacoste in turn entrusted the mission to the head of the Action Service, Jean-Claude Lesquer, who had held the post less than six months.

A paratroop colonel, Lesquer ordered the use of two limpet mines, a small one to damage the propeller shaft and scare everyone off the ship, followed by a larger one to blow a hole in its side and sink the vessel.

Back in Paris, Mitterrand and his Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, only learnt about this testosterone-generated caper after the event.

"What's this story all about?" Mitterrand, clutching a news agency dispatch on the sinking, asked Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, who was waiting to see the President at the Elysee Palace.

Over at Fabius' office, there was stupefaction and outrage. The Prime Minister's chief aide, Louis Schweitzer - now boss of Renault - first read of the incident in the left-wing daily Liberation.

"Look what those arseholes have done!" Schweitzer said, storming into Fabius' office. Belatedly, the Prime Minister's Cabinet discovered it had authorised money - 1.5 million francs ($399,000) approved only on July 8 - for an operation about which it was completely in the dark.

In the coming weeks and months, the situation would worsen as the Government denied responsibility.

The stonewalling was partly to ensure that France's remaining agents in New Zealand could escape and partly because Mitterrand was fumbling for a way to deal with the crisis.

But it was mainly because the President's old chum, Hernu, was blowing up a smokescreen of denial, both to the head of state and prime minister as well as the French public and the rest of the world.

Mitterrand was so fed up with the mess that after everything was sorted out, he reputedly banned anyone from uttering the word Greenpeace in his presence again.

What about France today? Contrary to what some may believe, the country has changed a lot.

Hernu died in 1991 and Mitterrand went to his grave in 1996.

The Gaullist-era generation is fading away, old threats have receded and governments, far more sensitive to the power of the media and to global opinion, are keen to show a friendly face towards the world.

As a result, France is far less haughty and nationalistic than it was 20 years ago. Greenpeace itself acknowledges France has been a big supporter on many environmental issues, notably in helping to create the Antarctic whaling sanctuary and championing the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Within the DGSE, Lacoste had already started to ease out the paratroopers who commanded the Action Service.

After he resigned, the DGSE accelerated the process, transforming the unit from a Special Forces squad into discreet undercover unit, run by civilians and military officers "who don't carry the baggage of the colonial wars and the Cold War", says Chouet.

That has been accompanied by a big shift in targets for the agency, which got on to the threat of Islamist terrorism a dozen years ago, far quicker than its counterparts in Britain and the CIA, says Pierre Martinet, a former DGSE operative who has just written his autobiography.

Reflecting that priority shift, the present DGSE head, Pierre Brochand, is an Arabist.

For all this, France remains fiercely attached to the nuclear bomb and national self-interest.

Twenty years ago, the threat was that of extinction by the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at Western Europe, says Lacoste, pointing out that "the realities" of that time may be easily forgotten today.

The Soviet threat has since been replaced in French eyes by one that is smaller but still mortal - from rogue states such as North Korea and Iran.

Even so, France's attachment to the bomb is so visceral that one cannot imagine the country giving it up.

Would France ever resume nuclear testing?

Theoretically, no. It resumed nuclear blasts in 1995 but signed up to the just-completed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996 when the programme was over.

But the treaty remains weak. The United States signed it but did not ratify it because the deal could not muster enough votes in the US Senate. Though the Clinton Administration pledged to uphold the moratorium in the treaty, the Bush Administration is under pressure to ditch that promise.

The neo-conservatives' argument is that tests will be needed at some point to modernise US nuclear warheads and to test existing ones for reliability. If the US resumed testing or if a rogue state went nuclear, there would be rising pressure in Paris to return to Mururoa.

Could this ever happen?

The French Defence Ministry was asked by the Herald to give its response to this scenario and other questions but there was no reply, despite persistent requests.

"France retains its position on the nuclear issues," a ministry source said, a reply that today - as 20 years ago - conveys France's bluntness and its ambiguity.