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When DS Terry Batchelor received the call informing him of the whereabouts of the French couple suspected of bombing the Rainbow Warrior, he was eating a pie. The suspects were in Auckland, he learned, preparing to return their hired Toyota HiAce campervan to the rental depot. A scoop! Batchelor, who was based nearby, gathered his team and set off in hot – and ultimately successful – pursuit. And the pie? “Actually,” reflects the retiree, peering at us over his moustache, “I hadn’t started the pie yet.” A pause, heavy with the threat of italics. “But I was about to.”
There is a lot of this sort of thing in Sky Documentaries’ Rainbow Warrior, a feature-length retelling of the events surrounding the July 1985 sinking of the titular Greenpeace flagship. That is to say; granular recollections, delivered by elderly men with combative facial hair, seemingly irrelevant in isolation but riveting and oddly comforting when viewed as part of a startling and frequently unhinged whole.
By the time the documentary docks in New Zealand, we have already been on quite the journey. Greenpeace was, by 1985, an international endeavour, an extraordinarily effective campaigning network that had ballooned from a Vancouver-based collection of be-denimed eco-activists and anti-war protesters into a million-member network featuring – as one astonished archive report splutters – “paid researchers and computers!” Its successes were, by that point, quite something. Here, a pressure-led ban on large-scale whaling; there, the evacuation and relocation of the residents of the Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, after US nuclear tests in the 1950s had led to decades of illness and birth defects.
Little wonder, then, that when the rusting former fishing trawler known as the Rainbow Warrior chugged into Auckland’s Marsden Wharf, it was met with whoops and banners of the “WE LOVE THE FUTURE OF OUR KIDS” variety. Its mission? To head to the South Pacific and monitor France’s imminent neutron warhead tests. Oh no vous don’t, replied the French government, busily preparing to put paid to the activists’ aims with a plan of its own. “And the rest is history,” says Greenpeace veteran Rex Weyler. “The rest is the violent history.”
Enter, stage gauche, Opération Satanique, a top-secret mission involving “the crème de la crème” of France’s foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE. Chief among said operatives were Dominique Prieur (dark glasses, collar turned up, “an expert in hand-to-hand combat”) and her colleague Maj Alain Mafart (weak chin, air of near-parodic Gallic indifference, “an accomplished marksman, parachutist and wildlife photographer in his free time”). Together they would pose as Swiss newlyweds honeymooning around New Zealand in their rented campervan. Among their fellow operatives were two expert frogmen (assigned cover story: “gym instructors at a girls’ college in Tahiti”) and one Dr Xavier Maniguet, who wore a Milk Tray polo neck and would later die while attempting to land his plane on a glacier. It’s all very mid-period Bond, with much archive footage of yachts and speeding police cars, and snippets from a 2005 interview with Maniguet in which he claims his team would’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those pesky New Zealanders and their hopelessly démodé penchant for justice and not blowing people up. “If we’d known about the culture in New Zealand,” he honks, “perhaps we would have been more discreet.”
Significantly less fun times is the bombing itself, which resulted not just in the destruction of the Rainbow Warrior, but the death of the freelance photographer Fernando Pereira. Similarly shameful is the litany of lies and denials that followed, with the French government attempting to reduce murder and international terrorism to the level of scuttlebutt and paranoia. It’s gasp-inducing stuff, even if the documentary is at pains to keep the mood fizzy via skittish editing and a soundtrack consisting of wine-bar jazz and, inexplicably, Wang Chung.
The last word goes to Terry Batchelor, who eventually tired of a life of half-eaten pies and is now an actor. “The biggest surprise was the arrogance of the French,” he chuckles. “Thinking that they could come to New Zealand, plant a bomb on a ship and somehow get away with it.” Quelle idée!
