Long before Twyford Down, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, Peter Willcox was a convert to the power of direct action.
As a child in 1960s America, his activist parents took him on civil rights marches in Alabama, following Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery. And three decades on, as skipper of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, he was hopeful once again that peaceful protest could make a better world.
It was 1985, and the converted fishing trawler was docked in Auckland, New Zealand, its dozen crew preparing to journey 3,000 miles into the South Pacific to disrupt a planned French nuclear test at Mururoa Atoll.
“I was hugely impressed by how Martin Luther King used non-violent direct action,” Willcox, now 69, tells me from the US. “It just confirmed to me that you never solve anything through violence.”
Someone, somewhere, was keen to prove him wrong. Late on July 10, the Warrior crew were retiring to bed after celebrating an activist’s birthday with a rainbow-decorated cake. Just before midnight, Willcox was woken from his bunk by an explosion.
“The boat suddenly shook – at first I thought another boat had hit us,” he recalls. “I went down to the engine room and there was two or three feet of water in it already. Then I thought maybe someone had just left a tap on, and that it was going to be a hell of a clean-up job.”
Willcox evacuated the ship, but seven minutes later, a second blast took place, leaving the ship half-sunk in the dock. When the Greenpeace crew did a head count, they realised one person was missing. Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese-born photographer who was documenting the protest had gone back below decks after the first explosion to grab his camera gear. The father-of-two drowned in his cabin.
As police arrived, the first guess was that it was a gas explosion. Then, when New Zealand navy divers found their way through the murk of spilt diesel round the stricken craft, they discovered the blasts had come from explosives attached to the hull. One had blown a hole big enough to drive a car through.
It was clearly a professional job. Sleepy New Zealand suddenly had its first ever international terrorism inquiry. As the world’s media descended, a 66-strong detective squad was assembled, the country’s largest ever. But who on earth would want to kill a group of peaceful activists?
As Willcox recounts in a new BBC documentary, Murder in the Pacific, there was one potential suspect with both motive and means – the French government, which did not like pesky activists interrupting its nuclear tests.
The more remote reaches of the South Pacific had been used as a nuclear testing area since the end of World War II, but America and Britain had both stopped doing so by the early 1960s, amid concerns about the effects of fall-out on islanders. France, however, had continued, having relocated there after protests over its previous test site in Algeria’s Sahara desert.
During the 1970s, Greenpeace had sent in yachts to try to disrupt the tests, leading to the French navy detaining them, and once beating some activists up. It had become a growing logistical and PR headache for Paris – and the Warrior, being much bigger than the yachts, would be harder to stop and intimidate.
But even so, the idea that France would resort to deadly force to stop the Warrior seemed like a wild conspiracy theory. France was an ally of New Zealand, a fellow democracy. And democracies didn’t do this kind of thing, did they?
“I can’t say we thought it must be the French,” recalls Chris Martin, one of the detective squad. “Blowing up a shipload of people celebrating a birthday party? You couldn’t pick a more passive target.”
It turned out to be both conspiracy and cock-up. France had indeed ordered secret agents to plant the bombs, in a mission whose very codename – “Opération Satanique” – sounded like an overexcited thriller novel.
The agents would later claim that they never planned to kill anyone. But they also never planned to get caught. And they might well not have done – were it not for some lesser maritime skullduggery further down the coast.
At a marina a few miles from the harbour, boat owners had set up a Neighbourhood Watch group after a spate of thefts. They told detectives that just two hours before the bombing, they saw a frogman dragging a dinghy ashore and being picked up by a campervan, whose registration they took.
Police traced the van to Newmans, a local car hire firm. But with the bombing already making world headlines, there was every chance that whoever had rented it had already fled the islands. Then employees at the firm called the police inquiry hotline. Sitting in their office were the young couple who had hired the van – and were now returning it a day early.
“We told the staff to delay them while we got there,” Martin recalls. “They told the couple they owed them a refund because the car was back early, but that they’d have to wait until the manager arrived to sign the cheque. If the couple had said ‘don’t worry about the refund’, we might have lost them.”
On paper, the couple looked the picture of innocence: newly-weds Alain and Sophie Turenge, on honeymoon from Switzerland. Under police questioning, though, their story began to unravel. Both denied knowing the frogman, claiming he’d simply flagged them down for a lift. But both also give differing accounts of where he’d sat in their van. Nor was Alain convincing as a hapless tourist. “He came across as very suave and intelligent, but I could sense a military hardness to him,” Martin says.
Checks with Swiss authorities revealed the couple’s passports were high-quality forgeries. Meanwhile, a police appeal for sightings of the camper van prompted a call from a forestry worker who had seen it rendezvous mysteriously with a grey estate car. He’d scrawled the estate car’s registration down on a dusty panel on his own vehicle, and then forgotten all about it. Luckily, a spate of recent thunderstorms hadn’t washed it off.
The grey estate car turned out to be another hire vehicle, this time rented from Avis by four Frenchmen, who wrote on the rental form that they had come to New Zealand on the Ouvea, a yacht. They had passed themselves off as holidaying divers, mingling in bars and even romancing local women. But by the time police got onto them, they had already left for Norfolk Island, a remote Australian territory 500 miles north.
Martin and his colleagues tracked them down to a hotel on Norfolk Island, armed with a gun in case they put up a fight. They came quietly; although as Martin questioned them in his schoolboy French, he once again sensed he was dealing with tough military types, not tourists. Alas, under Australian law, they could only be held for 24 hours without charge. When time was up, police had no option but to let them leave the island on their yacht.
The case against the agents, though, continued to build. Swabs from the Ouvea later showed up traces of explosives consistent with those on the Warrior. The yacht also had fingerprints from Alain Turenge, the suspicious “Swiss tourist”. Three months later, amid mounting international pressure, France’s Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, finally admitted responsibility. “The truth is cruel,” he said. “Agents of the French secret service sank this boat.”
“I was outraged, as was the rest of New Zealand,” says Martin. “I used to fish with my younger brother at the wharf where the Warrior was tied. The idea that a country we were friendly with would bomb it was unbelievable.”
The Turenges – in reality, French agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur - were subsequently jailed for ten years for manslaughter by a New Zealand court. The rest of the sabotage squad – a dozen in all – were never brought to justice. However, in 2015, one agent, Jean-Luc Kister, broke his silence, voicing his regrets to a reporter from New Zealand TV.
In a follow-up interview for the BBC documentary, Kister claims the agents felt uneasy about the mission from the outset, but were told by superiors that Greenpeace had been infiltrated by the KGB. (There is no known proof of such infiltration.) The bombers, he added, had also expected the crew to evacuate before the second explosive went off. “The mission was a failure, the goal was not to slaughter people,” he says.
Why, though, use such strong-arm measures in the first place, which would obviously bear the fingerprints of a nation state? After all, as another unnamed agent admits in the documentary, other much subtler tactics could have been used, such as contaminating the fuel or disabling the propeller. “I think the authorities wanted a strong gesture," he says.
The man insisting on that “gesture”, it seems, was France’s hawkish defence minister, Charles Hernu, apparently keen to impress his boss, socialist President Francois Mitterrand. While Hernu was forced to resign, Mitterrand survived the scandal. In 2005, nine years after Mitterrand’s death, French newspaper Le Monde published a document written by a senior French secret service chief saying that Mitterrand had given the operation his “personal authorisation".
The scandal left bitter aftertastes. Hernu remained popular in France, despite his sacking, and was later awarded the Légion d'Honneur. While France later paid undisclosed compensation to Mr Pereira’s family and around £7 million to Greenpeace for the loss of the Warrior, it never formally apologised. Willcox has declined offers of meetings with the repentant French agents, saying their displays of remorse came far too late.
Nearly 40 years on, Martin has retired from policing, but still has a belaying pin from the Warrior in his office, given to him by the crew in thanks for the police’s efforts. Willcox, meanwhile, remains an activist – and has continued to fall foul of the strong arm of the state.
In 2013, after skippering the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise in an action against a Russian oil drilling platform, he and his crew were jailed for 15 years for “piracy”. They spent two months in a grim Russian prison before being granted an amnesty. Willcox, who spent 23 hours a day in his cell, believes the amnesty was partly due to protests by eco-activists worldwide.
Indeed, he says that one benefit of the Warrior outrage was to put Greenpeace and environmentalism on the map politically, shifting it from the fringe to the mainstream.
But as someone who remains committed to changing by peaceful means, he can never forget that the boost to the cause’s profile came at the cost of human life.
“Sure, Greenpeace went overnight from being a bunch of kids trying to have demonstrations to a massive political force,” he says. “But we lost a shipmate – and two children lost their father.”
Murder in the Pacific begins on March 2 at 9pm on BBC Two
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