French feared Prebble assassination attempt

Tensions between New Zealand and France led to fears that a New Zealand MP visiting Paris after the Rainbow Warrior sinking would be assassinated.

Richard Prebble, a member of the Lange government and the first New Zealand Cabinet minister to visit France after the bombing, says he was confronted with machinegun-toting French soldiers when he arrived in Paris - authorities were worried he might be an assassination target because of the animosity towards New Zealand.

The soldiers clambered aboard his aircraft and rushed his party through the airport terminal to a waiting motorcade to take him to the OECD meeting he was attending as Associate Finance Minister.

Prebble says he told the New Zealand ambassador, John McArthur, how impressed he was with the attention he was getting.

"He said 'I'm afraid, Mr Prebble, it is not quite like that. The French Government is absolutely petrified you are going to be assassinated by right-wing extremists'."

With gendarmes outside his room, he was asked not to leave his hotel without escort during his three-day stay.

Following the bombing, Prebble says he suggested to Cabinet colleagues that the Air Force constantly circle Norfolk Island to keep the yacht Ouvea under surveillance and the SAS be kept on standby to pounce on its crew, who were the back-up team of bombers, once the yacht was back in international waters.

Police questioned the four-member crew on Norfolk Island after their voyage from New Zealand but there was insufficient evidence to detain them. They later disappeared en route to New Caledonia, despite a search by Air Force Orion.

"If I had had my way, I would have grabbed the lot and argued later," says Prebble. His advice was ignored. In retrospect, however, he says Prime Minister David Lange's more circumspect approach was probably the correct one.

"Given the diplomatic difficulties we had with the two agents we actually caught, we might have gone to war with France if we had caught all of them," he says.

Another Cabinet member at the time, then Deputy Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, has also cast light on the diplomatic difficulties, and dismissed suggestions Britain snubbed New Zealand.

The oft-repeated notion that the United States and Britain deliberately turned a blind eye to the act of state-sanctioned terrorism in retaliation for the Lange government's anti-nuclear policy did not square with actual events, he says.

Sir Geoffrey says Mrs Thatcher, then Britain's Prime Minister, became "very co-operative" when she learned France was behind the bombing.

"They lent us a mines expert to analyse the explosives and their police were very helpful in finding out where the Zodiac [the inflatable dinghy used by the bombers] was purchased."

Sir Geoffrey says he also had a meeting with United States Attorney-General Ed Meese, at which he expressed surprise Washington had not condemned the bombing.

"He put out a press statement after that condemning it."

David Lange is refraining from comment during the anniversary. However, in his book Nuclear Free - The New Zealand Way, the former Prime Minister wrote that the leaders of the Western alliance were "curiously silent" about what happened on Auckland's harbour.