Leaked Papers Shed Light on Fresh Australian Angle in Ship Bombing Incident

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Forty years ago, Alan ‘Kissard’ Buffett was looking out an aeroplane window on the approach to land at Norfolk Island when he noticed a lonely yacht moored at Cascade Bay.

As the island’s collector of customs in 1985, it was Buffett’s job to know where the yacht was from and who was on it. After touching down, he immediately went to one of his officers at the airport to ask about the yacht.

“He said, ‘I smell a rat’,” Buffett said. “And in Norfolk, that means you think there’s something fishy going on.”

“Sure enough, he was on the money.

“The crew sort of stood out a fair bit because they had really nice gear. They didn’t look like rough-type yachties.”

The 11-metre yacht named Ouvea had been chartered by four Frenchmen who had just sailed from New Zealand en route to New Caledonia.

A man standing outside b the ocean posing for a photo.

Alan ‘Kissard’ Buffett was Norfolk Island’s collector of customs in 1985. Source: Supplied

The Frenchmen said they were on a South Pacific diving and pleasure cruise.

But Buffett and other officials on Norfolk Island soon received warning from the Australian government that the Frenchmen were not who they claimed to be.

New SBS Audio investigative podcast Fallout: Spies on Norfolk Island has uncovered previously unreleased confidential Australian government documents which reveal concerns the men were actually French secret service agents suspected of being involved in the bombing of environmental group Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour days earlier.

France initially denied any involvement, but then-prime minister Laurent Fabius months later admitted French agents had been ordered to bomb the ship.

What the documents reveal

The bombing — the 40th anniversary of which was this week — killed photographer Fernando Perriera, made global headlines and sparked one of the biggest police investigations in New Zealand history.

The Rainbow Warrior was preparing to lead a flotilla of protest boats in an attempt to blockade a French nuclear weapons test at Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

The documents detail how Norfolk Island’s three-man police force was authorised by then-prime minister Bob Hawke to shadow the Frenchmen until a party of New Zealand detectives arrived.

Dennis Murray, a federal police officer stationed on Norfolk Island at the time, said his orders were simple.

“Make sure they don’t leave the island. Make sure they don’t get on a plane,” Murray said. “That was the biggest thing.”

Norfolk Island’s administrator at the time, former Australian naval commodore and defence intelligence agency head, John Matthew, cabled Canberra to express “strong doubts” about police approaching the Frenchmen’s yacht because of the possibility of “armed retaliation”.

Matthew ordered Murray and his police colleagues to remove the Frenchmen’s dinghy and hide it so they could not leave the island to reach their yacht, which was moored a distance from the shore.

Nearing midnight on 15 July, it was decided that Norfolk Island police and the New Zealand detectives would conduct a raid on the motel rooms where the Frenchmen were sleeping and take them into custody.

Murray told the podcast that nerves were running high ahead of the raid.

“When you hit those doors, you don’t know what’s going to happen on the other side … it could be firearms, it could be anything,” he said.

In the end, the French agents played it cool and cooperated with the police.

They’d been well trained by France’s foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security, to withstand interrogation and maintain their cover stories.

An impossible deadline?

On the morning of 16 July 1985, New Zealand detectives who had flown to Norfolk Island got a shock when they learned the Australian government had set them a deadline of 2pm that day to find enough evidence to charge the Frenchmen with a crime or they would be let go.

The detectives had to wait until daylight to search the Frenchmen’s yacht. They seized dozens of documents and receipts that needed to be analysed.

More importantly, they had taken samples from the yacht’s bilge to test for traces of explosives. These needed to be taken to Auckland for analysis because Norfolk Island did not have any laboratory facilities.

Fallout: Spies on Norfolk Island investigates why this deadline was set and whether it was necessary.

Senior police in Auckland decided they did not have enough evidence to charge the Frenchmen before the Australian deadline expired despite the strong feelings of their detectives on Norfolk Island who believed they had the right men in custody.

Murray said he felt for his New Zealand police colleagues.

”It’s got to be done in 24 hours or ‘stiff shit’ sort of thing. When you think about it, they didn’t give them much time,” he said.

The French secret agents sailed away from Norfolk Island later on 16 July. Their yacht, the Ouvea, was never seen again and the agents are believed to have been picked up by a French submarine.

A photograph showing a yacht out on the water.

The 11-metre yacht Ouvea had been chartered by four Frenchmen who had just sailed from New Zealand en route to New Caledonia. Source: Supplied

The samples from the Ouvea’s bilge returned positive results for traces of explosives. And documents taken from the yacht proved a connection between the Frenchmen on Norfolk Island and two other French secret agents already in custody in New Zealand.

Forty years later, Buffett is still puzzled by Australia’s decision to impose such a tight deadline on the New Zealand police.

“It did appear really short to us, really given the fact that someone was killed,” he said.

“I just wonder whether Australia was pressured by France or some other power. Because it, as I say, it seemed pretty strange that they only gave them that really small window of time to try and find evidence to keep those fellas in under the police guard.”

Despite it being beyond doubt that the Rainbow Warrior was blown up by limpet mines smuggled into New Zealand by French agents Roland Verge, Gerald Andries, Jean Michel Bertholet and Dr Xavier Maniguet onboard the Ouvea, none of the men ever faced prosecution after being allowed to sail away from Norfolk Island.