Word: rainbows
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...possibility of a cover-up at the highest levels of government spurred the press into action. French newspapers and weeklies vied with one another to dig up detailed and colorful accounts of the operation against the Rainbow Warrior. It was inconceivable, Le Monde claimed, that Vice Admiral Lacoste, the foreign espionage chief, would have acted without orders. Among those who might have authorized the attack or allowed it to happen, the paper said, were Lacoste's superiors: General Jean-Michel Saulnier, Mitterrand's personal chief of staff when the surveillance scheme was conceived; General Jeannou Lacaze, then overall armed forces...
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...