Word: rainbows
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first revelation appeared in early August in VSD, a weekly popular- interest magazine. It reported that "Sophie-Claire Turenge," the "Swiss honeymooner" arrested by New Zealand police after the bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, was in fact a captain in the French intelligence service...
...Sept. 11 issue the magazine speculated that another, heretofore unknown, team of French agents might have been sent to New Zealand to blow up the ship. A week later Le Monde Reporters Bernard le Gendre and Edwy Plenel revealed that two frogmen had placed mines on the Rainbow Warrior before escaping. Their orders, the paper said, had to have come from a high level within the government, since none of the military figures involved would credibly have acted on their own. The tone of the articles was so authoritative that the government did not even bother to deny them...
...worst political crisis to hit the four-year-old government of Socialist President Francois Mitterrand seemed to be turning into a nightmare. For weeks French officials had denied charges that the Paris government was directly involved in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, flagship of the Greenpeace environmental movement, in Auckland, New Zealand, last July 10. Nonetheless, a police investigation in New Zealand and a stream of press revelations in France steadily increased suspicions that Mitterrand and his advisers had indeed played a role in the affair. Early last week, after forcing the resignations of France's Defense Minister...
Almost until the moment the scandal exploded last week, Mitterrand's government clung to the findings of the Tricot report. But doubts were already growing within the Cabinet and the Socialist Party. Le Monde, among others, charged that the true saboteurs of the Rainbow Warrior were neither the jailed pair of French agents nor the three-man crew of the spy yacht Ouvea, which allegedly had been sent from the French territory of New Caledonia to back up the operation. The real hitmen, claimed Le Monde, were two unidentified frogmen, probably from France's underwater demolition training base in Corsica...
...brass, who feel that their colleagues were sacrificed for political expediency. Yet Mitterrand had little choice, not only for his own government's future but for France's battered image. In New Zealand, Prime Minister David Lange responded sharply to Hernu's resignation. Said he: "France has handled the Rainbow Warrior affair in the most destructive way possible...