'They didn't care if they killed everybody'

Rainbow Warrior skipper Pete Willcox says the two French nationals who planted the bombs on the ship knew exactly what they were doing - and the possible outcome. Picture / Chris Skelton

Captain Pete Willcox clearly remembers the days after the July 1985 bombing that sank Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior in Auckland and killed a member of his crew.

The young American sailor was finding it hard enough keeping his devastated team's spirits together, let alone dealing with his new-found fame as a character in an international spy scandal.

So when a tall, dark stranger sidled up to him at the Waiwera hot pools, where he had taken his crew for a break one day, he wasn't particularly keen to chat.

"I understand you're off the Warrior," the stranger boomed.

"Yup," Willcox replied, with a bowed head.

"Rough business."

"Yup," said Willcox, hoping the man would leave him alone.

The stranger was undeterred. Was Steve Sawyer, who had been celebrating his birthday on the Warrior the night it was bombed, with the crew at the pools?

"No!" snapped the captain, finally looking up to glare at the big man standing in the tuck shop queue next to him. "I'm sorry to bother you," the man smiled. "I just thought maybe I could save him a trip to Wellington. My name is David Lange. He's supposed to meet me tomorrow."

It's a reflection of those days that in the middle of an international spy scandal, New Zealand's prime minister would hop in his car, not a bodyguard in sight, and drive to the hot pools to find some bedraggled sailors.

It will be 20 years in July since French agents literally blew away our nation's innocence. Lange is now gravely ill and refuses to talk again about the bombing.

But Captain Willcox has returned to face the past, sailing into Auckland harbour last week at the helm of the new Rainbow Warrior, on a new environmental mission and demanding a long-awaited apology.

On July 10, the anniversary of the bombing, he will take the new Rainbow Warrior to Matauri Bay and visit his old boat for the first time, diving to the bottom of the sea where it was scuttled.

Sitting in his cabin abord the current Rainbow Warrior, Willcox looks out at Princess Marina through the same portholes he peered from 20 years ago when he was woken just before midnight as the first of the bombs went off.

The portholes, along with the ship's bell and its name, were among the few things he managed to salvage from the old boat before it was scuttled.

Willcox insists he holds no animosity for the French people, perhaps not even Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, the agents who were convicted over the affair.

They were mere soldiers, dumb enough to follow orders, he says. But after 20 years, it is time their Government said sorry.

"It certainly put a wrench in my life, not that I didn't survive [the bombing] quite well. But I had lived on the boat for four years, and was really looking forward to another three or four years of campaigning on the Rainbow Warrior in the Pacific, so I would have appreciated an apology. And yes, I think it's time."

It was the sudden silence of his ship, rather than the noise of the first bomb exploding, that alerted Willcox to the fact that something was wrong that dark night.

Grabbing a towel, he dashed out into the hall to find the engine room filling with water. The chief engineer was standing at the stairs saying: "Well she's finished, it's all over, she's done."

The crew were ordered out on to the wharf while he and a few others tried to get into the bottom of the boat to check everyone had got out safely.

Then the second bomb went off. Willcox left the ship as the water was finally creeping over the top of the door wells.

He refused to believe it when some of the crew said that photographer Fernando Pereira could still be down there. "I remember looking at the cold, black salt water and thinking 'I can't go down there'," he recalls.

By 3am he had formally identified Pereira's body.

It didn't take long for police to make the French connection.

The spies had run an almost arrogantly sloppy operation, leaving a trail leading straight back to France all over Auckland.

The diver who had planted the two bombs was seen by locals driving his Zodiac inflatable up to the shore and hopping in to a campervan rented by Prieur and Mafart, and had left French-bought oxygen tanks on the harbour floor.

Mafart and Prieur were pretending to be a married Swiss couple, but their ruse was instantly obvious when officers swooped on them two days later, police say.

Mafart was suave, straight-backed, professional, and handsome, with a deep scar that ran through his nose and a silk cravat around his throat. Prieur, on the other hand, was plain, jittery and dumpy.

Eventually France conceded the couple were Government agents; defence minister Charles Hernu and the head of the secret service Pierre Lacoste were sacked, and Prieur and Mafart were sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter.

But they didn't stay there for long. After 18 months they were shifted to Hao Atoll in a United Nations-brokered deal to stop French trade sanctions intended to bully New Zealand into giving the pair up.

The couple were to stay on the island for three years, but France allowed them to leave within a year and a half. Prieur was pregnant and Mafart had a stomach complaint.

A New Zealand doctor who went to Paris to examine the pair found them in perfect health, but had his hotel room ransacked, and a threatening switchblade left on a shelf.

Meanwhile, up to 13 other French agents believed to be in New Zealand as part of the operation had slipped out of the country.

Police eventually identified several of them, issuing warrants for their arrest. But it was not until 1991 that one of them showed up on the international radar, when Gerald Andries attempted to travel to Switzerland.

In many respects, Andries was even more of a catch than Prieur and Mafart. Then-detective inspector Maurice Whitham says Andries was the person found to have bought the Zodiac inflatable and outboard motor used on the night of the bombing. "He was right in the thick of it," says Whitham.

But French threats again began to mount, and the National Government of the time buckled.

"The French president had just been out to sign a friendship treaty with New Zealand. Prime Minister Jim Bolger had wanted to put the whole thing behind them, not knowing that we still had three warrants out for their arrest," says Whitham.

The Government gave the police two weeks to prepare an extradition order - a seemingly impossible task which Whitham says was deliberate.

Officers worked around the clock and got the papers together, only to have the Government order them to drop the order against Andries, and throw out all the remaining warrants. So, did he make a fuss?

"We were not in a position to," he says. "It was the same as in 1986. We did our job. But yes, from our point of view it was disappointing."

Mafart and Prieur have since left the military and written books about the affair. Mafart wrote in 1999 of their devastation to learn someone was killed in the bombing - an unintended consequence, he said.

But Willcox finds that hard to stomach. "The power of the explosives they used blew a six-by-seven-foot hole, like you've punched your hand through a paper bag, and caused the boat to sink in 30 seconds.

"Shrapnel came up through my floor and the floor of another room right across the way. We were lucky more people weren't killed. No, they didn't care if they killed everybody."

About six weeks after the bombing, Willcox left New Zealand on the Greenpeace yacht Vega.

"I didn't want to stay here and see the boat I had spent four years putting together scrapped. I felt it was important not to be stopped by the French. So that's what we did.

"I sailed off to Moruroa where we were arrested for breaking the 12-mile limit and was held on board a warship for about five days, then deported and banned for life.

"So I can't go back to French Polynesia now," he smiles.

"Which is funny, considering everything that happened in the whole scheme of things."

- HERALD ON SUNDAY