Revealed - French gifts for Rainbow Warrior bombers

By EUGENE BINGHAM

French politicians tried to shower their secret service agents with gifts of cognac and fine wine just weeks after they had been sentenced for the Rainbow Warrior bombing, newly released documents reveal.

A previously top-secret dossier shows that a diplomatic spat broke out when New Zealand prison officials refused to give Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur the Christmas gifts sent from Paris.

The Weekend Herald can reveal that just weeks after the pair had been imprisoned for the manslaughter of a Greenpeace photographer killed in the blast, the French External Relations Minister, Roland Dumas, sent the agents a case of Bordeaux region wine for Christmas. The bottles were from his own vineyard.

Another French MP sent them a bottle of the finest cognac.

Mr Dumas was upset when he found out that prison authorities had rejected the gifts.

His complaint, sent via the NZ Embassy in Paris in January 1986, was knocked back with a terse response informing him that the pair would not be given special treatment.

"Alcoholic beverages are under no circumstances allowed into New Zealand prisons," said a cable to Paris. "Our authorities could not permit an exception in a matter which is so sensitive in New Zealand."

The incident is revealed among hundreds of boxes of Department of Justice papers released in Wellington.

Stamped "confidential" and "restricted," the papers were tucked away and largely ignored when the department was restructured in the early 1990s. Ministry of Justice officials rediscovered them last year and have made some of them available to the public for the first time.

The files provide an insight into some of New Zealand's most dramatic moments, such as the 1985 Rainbow Warrior bombing and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 1979 Erebus disaster.

After obtaining access to the documents under the Official Information Act, the Weekend Herald yesterday viewed papers once considered the most secret in the country. Among them were security plans drawn up to protect Mafart and Prieur from assassination and prevent them from being snatched by fellow agents before they could be tried for the bombing on the Auckland waterfront.

Anti-terrorist experts wanted the pair shielded by 51mm-thick bulletproof glass in court, though this proposal was eventually rejected.

The plans included specially reinforced police wagons to transport the pair to court. Commercial armoured vans were considered but abandoned when it was discovered they could be penetrated by .303 rifle fire.

The forgotten files show how Prieur, in particular, caused problems for justice officials, who had to spend more than $25,000 improving security at Christchurch Women's Prison.

Authorities were so wary of her that a special order had to be issued when she asked for the use of a skipping rope. Prieur was given permission to skip but prison superintendent Jack Allen ordered that the rope be taken from her as soon as she had finished. The order did not say if it was feared she would hurt herself or others.

While she was in Christchurch, officials gave approval for an hour-long ceremony in July 1986 when Prieur became a godmother for the child of a couple called Weiss. The papers did not state what relationship she had with the Weiss family.

Other people who wanted to visit the agents were not so lucky.

A cable to Paris in January 1986 showed that Prime Minister David Lange had refused permission for French author Alain Robbe-Grillet to visit the pair while he was in the country for the International Festival of the Arts.

Other papers show security concerns had led to Prieur being moved from Mt Eden to the Ardmore military prison while she was on remand "in the interests of her security and proper protection."

An Auckland District Court official set out the fear of "a rescue or elimination attempt" against the agents, and pleaded for increased security arrangements for the depositions hearing.

Justice officials quickly prepared the old High Court building for the court proceedings that followed.

Mafart and Prieur pleaded guilty to manslaughter in November 1985 and were sentenced to 10 years' jail.

They were transferred to a French military facility on Hao Atoll in July 1986 to complete their sentences, but both were back in France within two years.