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 three, hosts John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy bust some myths about the fate of
Why French spies’ getaway nuclear sub plan collapsed – Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History
By John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy
NZ Herald·
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DGSE agents brought the bombs into New Zealand on the yacht Ouvea. Image created for the podcast Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History. Photo / Maurice Whitham
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New Zealand police caught up with the crew at Australia’s Norfolk Island but had to let them go for lack of evidence.
The crew then disappeared and were picked up by a French nuclear submarine, the Ruby, and whisked away back to France – or so the popular legend goes.
In fact, the Ruby evacuation never happened because of political game-playing in the higher levels of French bureaucracy, according to the man who planted the bombs on the Rainbow Warrior, Jean Luc Kister.
The former DGSE (Directorate-General for External Security) combat diver, who spoke to the podcast at length about the details and planning of the operation, said the nuclear sub could have been a getaway option for the spies.
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The Ruby was in the Pacific at the time and the divers were used to working with submarines, he said.
The Ruby could have waited in international waters about 20km offshore and sent a Zodiac dinghy to collect the crew from a beach.
But the plan collapsed because senior DGSE staff didn’t want the Navy to know anything about their secret mission in New Zealand and the crew had to use a boat instead.
“They say, ‘No, we don’t want to involve the Navy in that’. And so it was abandoned.”
Kister explodes another longstanding myth about the Rainbow Warrior operation – a mysterious secret agent called Francois Verlet, who allegedly visited the Rainbow Warrior posing as a tourist on the evening of July 10, asked questions of the crew and then flew out to Tahiti.
After the bombing, everyone assumed he was a DGSE agent doing last-minute reconnaissance.
New Zealand authorities dismissed his vehement denials as lies – perhaps not surprisingly, as by this stage they had several captured French spies spinning similar cover stories – and Verlet even appears in a declassified SIS document as the mission co-ordinator.
But Kister said he had never heard of Verlet and he knew everyone involved in the mission.
“This guy, he was just there – and he was French, unfortunately.”
The podcast also examines the role the SIS played in the police investigation, including an “embedded” officer Jamie Mercer (not his real name) who earned an international reputation for turning spies to the West.
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Mercer was a close colleague of John Daniell’s stepfather “Jim” and Daniell still has a photo of Mercer teaching him to shoot a slug gun at the age of 10 in Mercer’s back yard.
“I remember saying to him, ‘Are we allowed to be shooting guns here? Like, what about the police?’
“And he said, ‘Oh, I work with the police quite a lot, I think it’ll be okay.’”
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 New Zealand Herald.
Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History is supported by New Zealand on Air.
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