Greenpeace<\/a> flagship. That is to say; granular recollections, delivered by elderly men with combative facial hair, seemingly irrelevant in isolation but riveting and oddly comforting when viewed as part of a startling and frequently unhinged whole.<\/p>\nThe sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Photograph: Sky<\/p>\n
By the time the documentary docks in New Zealand, we have already been on quite the journey. Greenpeace was, by 1985, an international endeavour, an extraordinarily effective campaigning network that had ballooned from a Vancouver-based collection of be-denimed eco-activists and anti-war protesters into a million-member network featuring \u2013 as one astonished archive report splutters \u2013 \u201cpaid researchers and computers!\u201d Its successes were, by that point, quite something. Here, a pressure-led ban on large-scale whaling; there, the evacuation and relocation of the residents of the Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, after US nuclear tests in the 1950s had led to decades of illness and birth defects.<\/p>\n
\u2018The rest is the violent history\u2019 \u2026 Greenpeace veteran Rex Weylor. Photograph: Sky<\/p>\n
Little wonder, then, that when the rusting former fishing trawler known as the Rainbow Warrior chugged into Auckland\u2019s Marsden Wharf, it was met with whoops and banners of the \u201cWE LOVE THE FUTURE OF OUR KIDS\u201d variety. Its mission? To head to the South Pacific and monitor France\u2019s imminent neutron warhead tests. Oh no vous don\u2019t, replied the French government, busily preparing to put paid to the activists\u2019 aims with a plan of its own. \u201cAnd the rest is history,\u201d says Greenpeace veteran Rex Weyler. \u201cThe rest is the violent history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Enter, stage gauche, Op\u00e9ration Satanique, a top-secret mission involving \u201cthe cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me\u201d of France\u2019s foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE. Chief among said operatives were Dominique Prieur (dark glasses, collar turned up, \u201can expert in hand-to-hand combat\u201d) and her colleague Maj Alain Mafart (weak chin, air of near-parodic Gallic indifference, \u201can accomplished marksman, parachutist and wildlife photographer in his free time\u201d). Together they would pose as Swiss newlyweds honeymooning around New Zealand in their rented campervan. Among their fellow operatives were two expert frogmen (assigned cover story: \u201cgym instructors at a girls\u2019 college in Tahiti\u201d) and one Dr Xavier Maniguet, who wore a Milk Tray polo neck and would later die while attempting to land his plane on a glacier. It\u2019s all very mid-period Bond, with much archive footage of yachts and speeding police cars, and snippets from a 2005 interview with Maniguet in which he claims his team would\u2019ve gotten away with it if it hadn\u2019t been for those pesky New Zealanders and their hopelessly d\u00e9mod\u00e9 penchant for justice and not blowing people up. \u201cIf we\u2019d known about the culture in New Zealand,\u201d he honks, \u201cperhaps we would have been more discreet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The photographer Fernando Pereira, who drowned when the Rainbow Warrior sank. Photograph: Sky<\/p>\n
Significantly less fun times is the bombing itself, which resulted not just in the destruction of the Rainbow Warrior, but the death of the freelance photographer Fernando Pereira. Similarly shameful is the litany of lies and denials that followed, with the French government attempting to reduce murder and international terrorism to the level of scuttlebutt and paranoia. It\u2019s gasp-inducing stuff, even if the documentary is at pains to keep the mood fizzy via skittish editing and a soundtrack consisting of wine-bar jazz and, inexplicably, Wang Chung.<\/p>\n
The last word goes to Terry Batchelor, who eventually tired of a life of half-eaten pies and is now an actor. \u201cThe biggest surprise was the arrogance of the French,\u201d he chuckles. \u201cThinking that they could come to New Zealand, plant a bomb on a ship and somehow get away with it.\u201d Quelle id\u00e9e!<\/p>\n
Rainbow Warrior aired on Sky Documentaries and is on Now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When DS Terry Batchelor received the call informing him of the whereabouts of the French couple suspected of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-581435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}