France: DGSE attacks on Greenpeace
01 September 1995
Ten years after French intelligence agents sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, New Zealand, they were ordered to prevent the movement's new vessel "Greenpeace" from interfering with new nuclear tests at Mururoa. The DGSE, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, considered a "virus attack" on the Greenpeace crew before opting for sabotaging the ship's communications facilities. In September 1985 the ship was in Curaçao in the Dutch West Indies. The DGSE station chief in the Venezuelan capital Caracas was sent the order: "Detain the Greenpeace vessel at Curaçao by every possible means". The station chief went to Curaçao and worked out a plan to require the crew to be vaccinated under a "new regulation" which would inject a virus causing violent diarrhoea or yellow fever. DGSE HQ in Paris rejected the idea in favour of bribing a customs official who allowed the radio frequencies on communications equipment to be installed on the ship to be photocopied thus enabling them to jam all transmissions.
Government honours intelligence chief
The French government has awarded the commander of the agents' responsible for the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, with the Legion of Honour. Major General Jean Claude Lesquer was a colonel in French intelligence at the time of the limpet mine attack in New Zealand, which killed Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira. His decoration in July coincided with the French navy storming of the Rainbow Warrior II when it entered the French exclusion zone around the Mururoa nuclear testing site in advance of the recent French nuclear test.
The first test took place on 5 September when a nuclear device, equivalent to 20,000 tonnes of TNT, was exploded underground at the Mururoa atoll despite protests by the indigenous inhabitants and anti-nuclear demonstrators. It provoked furious riots at the French colonial capital, at Papeete in Tahiti, which were only quelled with the arrival of French Legionnaires and paramilitary police. Despite environmental concerns over the damage inflicted on the fragile Mururoa atoll by previous tests France plans to explode several larger nuclear devices in the near future.
Times 3.8.95; Le Monde, 12.9.95.