The head of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service during the Rainbow Warrior bombing left a briefing note claiming Prime Minister David Lange privately wanted the French agents who were caught to be ejected from New Zealand as soon as possible.
New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) director Lindsay Smith wrote that Lange would have preferred the French agents responsible for the bombing to be removed from New Zealand jurisdiction before the case became locked into the courts.
Instead, French intelligence agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur pleaded guilty to manslaughter just months later and were sentenced to 10 years in prison, heightening the intensity of fractured relations between New Zealand and France.
“The operation had political dimensions which were not disclosed,” Smith wrote. “In truth, the Prime Minister would have been well pleased if the French couple, once apprehended, were removed from New Zealand jurisdiction quickly.
“Once they chose to plead guilty and accepted their sentence, we were subjected to French political and economic pressures.”
Smith’s briefing is one of three “secret” documents released after fresh checks by the NZSIS. The other two documents are a behaviour and character analysis of Mafart and Prieur, clearly informed by NZSIS wiretapping, and a forensic examination projecting how the attack could have taken place.
The documents were sought as part of research into the Herald’s Rainbow Warrior podcast – A Forgotten History – but have only recently been made available by the NZSIS.
Regardless of Lange’s wishful thinking, his deputy Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer told the Herald there was only one pathway open to the Government – and that was the prosecution of Mafart and Prieur.
“That was an act of war,” he said of the bombing. On the prospect of letting the spies go, he said: “How do you think the New Zealand public would have reacted?
“The thing about the Rainbow Warrior is it was one of the most terrible things we had suffered in peacetime.”
Mafart and Prieur were among the French spies who worked to bomb and sink the Greenpeace protest ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour as it prepared to sail to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific.
The attack killed photographer Fernando Pereira, leading to a murder investigation and the arrest of Mafart and Prieur just days later.
Following their guilty plea and sentencing, relations with France plunged to a new low, with French threats to cut New Zealand exports into the European market if Mafart and Prieur were not returned.
A United Nations’-mediated settlement saw France apologise and pay compensation while Mafart and Prieur were transferred to French custody on Hao Atoll in the Pacific. France later removed the pair from the atoll early, causing upset in New Zealand.
The NZSIS briefing written by Smith shows what was happening behind the curtain during one of New Zealand’s most historically significant events.
Smith, who served as Director of Security from 1983 to 1991, dated the briefing October 1996, writing alongside an individual whose name is redacted. In a covering letter, he suggested the aide memoire could be used as a training course.
He also offered a caveat that the briefing was the product of “subjective distillations”, writing: “Any serious student must have recourse to the base files. There were many twists and turns and some blind alleys as we felt our way towards the truth.”
Smith referred to the bombing as “the first terrorist operation in New Zealand” and the NZSIS involvement as the Service’s “first counter-terrorist operation”.
Police took the lead on the investigation and appeared to keep the NZSIS largely at arm’s length. The briefing document describes senior public servant Gerald Hensley, perennial insider and career diplomat, organising the first government meeting after the bombing, at which Smith offered NZSIS support.
“I was told no assistance was required,” he recorded. It was only hours before that changed and Police Commissioner Ken Thompson [who died last month] was on the phone asking for help.
First, police needed a “trace check” using the service’s foreign partner connections to pull together a profile on a couple going by the name Turenge – actually Marfart and Prieur – and secondly, the NZSIS’s “technical attack team” were needed urgently in Auckland.
Smith recalled how the bugging team had to race to Auckland, racing through the winter night by military aircraft from Ōhakea to Whenuapai, arriving at the motel where Marfart and Prieur would be staying with only 15 minutes to spare to plant bugs.
Also on the hoof was legal cover – Smith described there being no time to issue a warrant to authorise the bugging and how he proceeded on the basis of a verbal instruction from Lange the year earlier to go ahead on his own authority in the event of a terror attack.
It meant, he wrote, that there might have been no legal carve-out for the NZSIS officers working the case. It also meant that period was never examined too closely to find if the law had been broken, he said.
The intercepts of the conversations in the motel room were translated by an NZSIS officer fluent in French. She provided more than a translation, Smith said, with insights into the French agents’ “demeanour, morale and attitudes”.
As the investigation progressed, the NZSIS accumulated names for further trace checks.
It also had what Smith described as an “extraordinary occurrence”: a phone call to the NZSIS office in Auckland from someone with a French accent urging it to check flights from New Caledonia and Tahiti – both French territories – for passengers who had been Navy divers.
The call came the morning after the bombing with Smith noting: “The caller was never identified.”
Smith said within days the NZSIS knew it was dealing with agents of the French foreign secret service, the DGSE (Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure). He linked this confidence to the NZSIS bugging and how, when Prieur appeared to go into a “state of shock”, Mafart walked with her outside and used counter-surveillance techniques as they spoke.
Smith wrote of how the Service pushed to widen its involvement in a counter-terrorist operation to scoop up any remaining French spies. By the time Mafart and Prieur were arrested on July 23, two members (DGSE divers Jean-Luc Kister and Jean Camas) of the “attack team” that planted the mines were still in New Zealand.
Rather than push further, Smith said there was a “pattern of diverging attitudes and emphasis”.
“[Lange] personally was of the view that it would serve New Zealand’s ends well if the two left the country. He was disappointed when they pleaded guilty, more so when they did not appeal the sentence.”
Smith recounted police attempts to pin down suspects as they dispersed across the world, including those who had been aboard the DGSE’s marine support base, the yacht Ouvea.
In the case of one DGSE agent, Smith said Dr Xavier Maniguet – spy, doctor, soldier – had escaped while on a stopover in Singapore after a journalist from the Listener magazine managed to connect a call to the spy’s hotel.
He said the journalist told the spy “he understood the New Zealand police were planning his arrest”, and two hours later he was gone from Singapore. “So much for operational security!” Smith said.
Smith was convinced there were those who had been involved and hadn’t been identified. The service had urged police to focus closely on the Rainbow Warrior ahead of the bomb going off.
“In our view, a DGSE agent was responsible for removing the majority of those in the ship elsewhere before the attack,” he wrote.
Smith drew from the events what he called “observations”. He said the Government needed to be more tightly focused on the possibility of a terror attack.
The second observation of Smith’s was on the DGSE operation – its faults and flaws which had exposed the foreign agents. He pointed to the French spies’ habit of collecting receipts, or refunds, that encouraged suspicion, and the excellent passport forgeries let down by simple giveaways such as sequential numbers.
Finally, he wrote that the word “unique” was one to be used sparingly. He added: “A terrorist attack by a liaison service ... mounted in Auckland in circumstances where there was no New Zealand national interest directly involved must be close to unique.”
As Deputy Prime Minister and Attorney-General, Palmer was deeply involved in handling the aftermath of the bombing and working to untangle the attack from economic relations with France.
Palmer led efforts to internationalise the dispute, taking it to the United Nations and addressing the UN General Assembly in September 1985. After early negotiations with France stalled, Palmer pushed for an international law solution, which saw the dispute referred to the UN Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.
That led to the 1986 settlement in which France formally apologised and paid compensation to New Zealand. The settlement also allowed the two convicted agents to be transferred to the French military base at Hao.
Palmer agreed with the Herald’s suggestion that Smith’s memo was a “curiosity”, saying that public opinion – and the outrageous nature of France’s actions – meant there was no other pathway than prosecution.
“It was done appropriately and properly and in accordance with Cabinet and government systems.
At one stage, he said the “entire police file” was flown by police to Paris, where it was given to the French “so they could see we knew everything about them coming in” and carrying out the attack.
That the attack was conceived and approved at the highest levels of France’s Government baffled Palmer. “How do you authorise that?” he questioned.
Time moved on quickly, he said. “Our relations with France are now perfect and have been completely restored.”
David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He joined the Herald in 2004.
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