The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
Auckland, New Zealand, 1985
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
On the night of 10 July 1985, the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship moored in Auckland harbour, was hit by two mines attached to the hull by divers, the first at 11:38 pm and the second a few minutes later. The ship was preparing to protest against French nuclear tests at Mururoa atoll. The photographer Fernando Pereira, who had gone below to fetch his photographic equipment, drowned.
The New Zealand police traced a couple who presented themselves as Swiss tourists on their honeymoon: they were detained two days later, when returning the rented van whose number plate residents had noted down on the night of the attack. The Swiss passports were false, and the two were Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, agents of the French secret service (DGSE). They pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison. In September 1985, Prime Minister Laurent Fabius admitted that French agents had sunk the ship on orders from above; Defence Minister Charles Hernu resigned.
Sources
In the game
The Ship in the Harbour
Auckland harbour, New Zealand, July 1985, Thursday, 9 am. On Wednesday night the Green Tide, ship of the environmental group Living Sea, sank at the quay after two explosions in the hull.
By agreement between the two countries, the agents were transferred to Hao atoll and returned to France before their time was up, which a UN arbitration tribunal later found to be a breach of the agreement. France paid compensation to New Zealand, to Greenpeace and to Pereira's family. The game borrows the couple of false tourists, the charges attached to the hull and the photographer who went back for his camera; the characters and the interrogation are fiction.
