Black pantyhose helped NZ police nail French spies – Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History

The Rainbow Warrior after the bombing, from police photos. Photo / Maurice Whitham

The six-part podcast series Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History tells the full story of how and why French spies bombed a Greenpeace protest ship in Auckland’s harbour 40 years ago. In episode five, hosts John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy discover the lingerie link between the secret agents and the crime.

A pair of black pantyhose helped New Zealand police crack the case against the French spies who bombed the Rainbow Warrior.

The secret agents wrapped the French-made pantyhose around the divers’ white oxygen bottles to make them less visible.

But when police found a bottle with the distinctive pantyhose, they went shopping in Paris for a match - and found it.

Jean Luc Kister, one of the pair of combat divers who planted the bombs on the Rainbow Warrior, explains that the team was given orders to drop the bottles in Auckland Harbour.

Although the air was let out, the bottles still washed up.

Maurice Whitham, who was second in command of the investigation, says that gave police a lead to follow. They contacted France’s Nato allies, the British Navy, who gave them a dive bottle supplied only to the French military.

“Our scientists went through this whole thing of checking the bottles found in Auckland Harbour with the one given to us from the British. The construction of the thing was identical.”

The second part of the match, involving the pantyhose, fell to young Constable Nick Hall, who spoke French and had been sent to Paris as part of a small police team.

Whitham recalls that Hall was tasked with buying “some black pantyhose like grandma would wear with the seam down the back. And so he was going around all these shops. We suspected he was being followed wherever he went.”

Whitham laughs about it now.

“They must have been thinking ‘he’s pretty kinky this fella’”.

Ultimately, after Hall brought home about a dozen samples, scientists discovered one pair was an identical match to the pantyhose on the oxygen bottle.

They were made on a very old 1945 machine and never exported from France.

As Whitham put it, “Suddenly we were getting there...”

Kister and the other diver had escaped, so linking the bottles and the pantyhose back to France was important for the police case against DGSE officers Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, who still denied involvement in the bombing.

The oxygen bottle wrapped in black pantyhose used by the French spies who bombed the Rainbow Warrior. Photo / Maurice Whitham

Meanwhile, the police team in Paris found the early co-operation from their French counterparts had mysteriously dried up, apparently because of orders from higher up.

They were getting most of their useful information from the French newspapers, which Hall translated for his colleagues each day.

They did not know at the time that behind the scenes, Pierre Verbrugghe, a high-ranking French police officer was pushing French journalist Edwy Plenel towards the truth.

Plenel, who explained Verbrugghe’s crucial role to the Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History series, says he met several times with his police source, but the most important meeting was in a Paris restaurant.

Plenel said they had “a very long conversation with good cooking and many, many alcohols, very long in the night and you don’t take notes, you must remember what he said”.

The story about a previously unknown third team in the Rainbow Warrior operation – published by Le Monde the week after that boozy restaurant meeting – would break open the case and lead to the French Government admitting guilt.

Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History is a six-episode true crime series. Follow the series on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released on Thursdays.

The series is hosted and produced by John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy of Bird of Paradise Productions in co-production with the NZ Herald.

Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History is supported by NZ on Air.