New Revelations About the Rainbow Warrior

Anatomy of a State Sabotage

<Auckland, July 10, 1985>

The Rainbow Warrior sunk in Auckland Harbor, July 10, 1985. New Zealand herald, AFP Archives.

In the stillness of the harbor night, two silent charges tore through the hull of the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace’s flagship, sending it to the bottom of the bay. The attack—carried out by France’s external intelligence service, the DGSE—killed Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira and ignited an international firestorm. Now, four decades later, new investigative work and Russian-language documentation raise difficult questions about what was really known, and when, by the highest levels of power in France and what that means for state behavior today.

Dear Readers and Subscribers,

New revelations are challenging the sanitized version of events long accepted by Western media. Drawing on overlooked Russian archival sources and recent investigative findings, this piece revisits a covert operation that exposed the raw nerve of state power and the quiet complicity at its highest levels.

Officially, the act was chalked up to “excessive zeal” by overreaching military planners. In the sanitized version that followed, President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Laurent Fabius were presented as distant, perhaps misled by their own intelligence services. But that narrative, long treated as fact, is beginning to crumble.

A Postscript Becomes the Story

A crucial detail, buried for years in classified reports, has now been substantiated: Mitterrand himself authorized the operation in a private meeting with Admiral Pierre Lacoste, then head of the DGSE. This revelation, once dismissed as a minor footnote in journalistic archives, now anchors a broader reevaluation of the state's complicity in the act of sabotage. Far from being a rogue mission, the bombing was a calculated state operation, signed off at the highest level.

The implications are vast. The French president greenlit a military-style attack on peaceful environmental activists in a foreign democracy.

The cost: one civilian life, a diplomatic rupture with New Zealand, and the endangerment of France's global standing.

Portuguese-born photographer Fernando Pereira. Image: © David Robie 1985.