Word: tricot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...weeks the French press has steadily stripped away the credibility of the government, which had firmly denied any responsibility for the attack on the Rainbow Warrior, in which a Greenpeace photographer lost his life. In its first hasty search for culprits, the government had appointed as special investigator Bernard Tricot, a respected former chief of staff for President Charles de Gaulle. Tricot's report, completed in 17 days, revealed only a murky picture of French spies trying to learn about Greenpeace's plans for a floating protest against France's nuclear tests on the Pacific atoll of Mururoa this autumn...
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...
...that agents had been sent to New Zealand to spy on the ship before it set sail to lead a protest against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. But the inquiry cleared the agents of any involvement in the bombing, in which a Greenpeace photographer was killed. Wrote Tricot: "I believe in their innocence...
While the report cooled pressure for the resignations of top government officials, it brought sharp criticism from David Lange, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, who claimed that Tricot had ignored evidence submitted by the New Zealand authorities. The report, fumed the angry Prime Minister, was "too transparent to merit the description of whitewash." Lange seemed somewhat mollified later in the week when Premier Fabius made a conciliatory public statement calling the bombing "a criminal act" and pledging that "the guilty, whoever they are, will have to be punished...
After 17 days of reviewing government documents, reading diplomatic wires and questioning officials, ranging from Premier Fabius and Defense Minister Charles Hernu to the three agents who were aboard the Ouvea, Tricot said that he had "absolutely no idea" who was behind the bombing. Tricot himself fanned the skepticism when, in a newspaper interview following the report's release, he conceded that he "did not exclude the possibility that I was duped...