Mitterrand Government Facing Political Scandal Over Sinking of Greenpeace Ship

The French government, sorely embarrassed and worried, is now facing a political scandal as the nation’s press continues to amass evidence that the government is directly responsible for the bombing and sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand last month.

Only a week ago, the incident had been looked on as a spy thriller, or a fantastic adventure. But that mood is changing. As the influential Paris newspaper Le Monde put it this week, the bombing “has been transformed into an affair of state.”

Many newspaper articles and television reports, in fact, now refer to the case simply as “the affair.”

Although Premier Laurent Fabius last week appointed a respected civil servant and jurist, Bernard Tricot, to conduct an investigation of the case, the press has refused to sit back and wait for the results.

In a devastating analysis Friday, Le Monde added its voice to the many French journals accusing the government of direct responsibility. Jacques Isnard, the paper’s military specialist, wrote that “the plot, since its conception, was coordinated from one moment to the next by a high level of the General Directorate of External Security”--France’s equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The evidence is mounting so rapidly that President Francois Mitterrand and Fabius have reportedly put pressure on Tricot this week to finish his investigation as soon as possible. The accounts are especially embarrassing because Mitterrand’s Socialists, in their years of opposition, often criticized the French intelligence agency for what they regarded as reckless adventures.

Additional embarrassment could be in store. At a crowded news conference in Paris on Friday, David McTaggart, the Canadian who heads Greenpeace, the anti-war and environmentalist organization, announced that another ship, the Greenpeace, would take the place of the Rainbow Warrior at the head of a convoy steaming toward the French nuclear testing site at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific in late September as a protest against French nuclear testing.

McTaggart was somewhat contradictory in alloting blame for the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, at times blaming France directly, at times saying he was waiting for the end of the investigation before reaching a conclusion.

“When our boat was sunk,” he said, “it was amazing. So many people said it was the French government. I said it could not be the French government. They could not be that stupid.”

Two bombs exploded on the Rainbow Warrior after midnight on July 10, as it was docked in the harbor of Auckland, New Zealand’s main port. A Portuguese photographer aboard the protest ship was killed.

In their analysis of the incident, all French press accounts agree that a French-speaking couple arrested in New Zealand and charged with murder, sabotage, and false identity were agents of the French intelligence agency.

The couple carried false Swiss passports with assumed names, but most news accounts have identified the woman as Dominique Prieur, a captain in the French intelligence agency. The man arrested in New Zealand has not been identified by name, but the news magazine L’Express said he was the commander of the naval frogman school run by the French intelligence agency on the island of Corsica.

New Zealand police are also looking for three Frenchmen who were seen in a sailboat near the Rainbow Warrior before the bombing. L’Express described them as frogmen from the school in Corsica. The police were also looking for a second Frenchwoman, who had infiltrated the Greenpeace organization in Auckland to gather material about the Rainbow Warrior. L’Express said she, too, was a French spy.

The news accounts made it evident that the attack was not the act of some rightist vigilantes but a sophisticated operation by the French intelligence service. It is not clear why the government might have wanted the Rainbow Warrior sunk. The press has suggested various motives, the most persuasive that French intelligence officials feared the Rainbow Warrior had sophisticated equipment for monitoring a French neutron bomb test. This has been denied by Greenpeace.

In the most detailed account, L’Express said that approval for the operation came from Adm. Pierre Lacoste, chief of the French intelligence agency, from the Ministry of Defense and from aides of Mitterrand. Other accounts did not find evidence for approval from the Elysee Palace.

In a biting editorial, Yves Cuau, the publisher and editor of L’Express, described the embarrassing attack as “a cruel debacle--a comedy of Charlie Chaplins in the Pacific.”