French Agents Sink the Rainbow Warrior

On the night of 10 July 1985, two underwater explosions tore through the hull of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior while it lay berthed at Marsden Wharf in the Port of Auckland. The ship had recently arrived in New Zealand to lead a protest flotilla against French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. The initial blast at 23:38 blew a car-sized breach in the vessel, prompting an immediate evacuation. Several crew members shortly returned on board to inspect the damage and retrieve possessions, including Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira, who went below deck to collect his cameras. A second detonation seven minutes later flooded the vessel rapidly. Pereira drowned inside the ship, while the other crew members escaped as the flagship partially settled on the seabed.

The attack was an orchestrated operation conducted by the Directorate-General for External Security, the foreign intelligence agency of France. Codenamed Operation Satanic, the mission aimed to halt Greenpeace's planned expedition to monitor nuclear detonations from within the exclusion zone around Mururoa. French operatives had infiltrated regional networks weeks earlier; agent Christine Cabon, working under an alias, gathered maps and monitored communications at the Greenpeace office in Auckland. Three agents transported limpet mines to New Zealand aboard the chartered yacht Ouvea, handing them to another pair who then passed the explosives to two combat divers, Jean Camas and Jean-Luc Kister. The divers attached the timed limpet mines beneath the vessel's waterline before retreating.