The Rest Is Classified - 18. Attack on Greenpeace: France’s Nuclear Bomb (Ep 1)

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Why were the French exploding nuclear bombs in the Pacific in the 70s and 80s? How did a spy manage to infiltrate Greenpeace? And what on earth are limpet mines? In the 1960s, the French started testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, causing untold ecological destruction and worrying the surrounding island nations. Greenpeace, hot off the back of their successful anti-whaling and anti-sealing campaigns, heard this news and decided that nuclear weapons were their next battleground. Armed with an old English naval ship and some controversial publicity tactics, Greenpeace took on the French to free the Pacific of nuclear weapons. Join David and Gordon as they dive into the gripping tale of the Rainbow Warrior - Greenpeace’s fearless flagship - sunk in a shocking act of French espionage in 1985. ------------------- Pre-order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wealthsimple's Big Winter Bundle is our best match offer yet. Get a 2% match when you transfer over an eligible RRSP. For a $50,000 transfer, that's a $1,000 cash bonus. Enough to buy a fancy parka. A ticket to somewhere you don't need a fancy parka. Or just be responsible and top up your retirement fund. Plus, move any other eligible account and we'll give you a 1% match. Minimum $15,000 transfer.

Register by March 15th. Additional terms apply. Learn more at wealthsimple.com slash match. Parents, when you visit California, childhood rules. If you don't remember how awesome childhood is, just ask yourself, what would kids do? Let childhood rule your family vacation. Start planning your trip to the ultimate playground

at visitcalifornia.com. We were summoned to a meeting room and they revealed to me and my two teammates the purpose of the mission. All of a sudden we are told the target and the nature of the mission was to sink the Rainbow Warrior. Anti-nuclear activists, pacifists. We were a little surprised. There's always with secret agents this fear of being manipulated. We always have to ask ourselves, is what I am being asked to do really justified? We asked, but why Greenpeace, targeting a pacifist movement and in such a violent way, am I really serving my country?

Am I serving the interests of France? And then we were told Greenpeace. Well, they're infiltrated by the KGB, and behind Greenpeace was the Soviet Union. So we accepted the mission. Welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey, and that Gordon is testimony from Jean-Luc Kister of the French Secret Service, the direction general de la security exterior. The French double major finally paying off here,

talking about one of the most controversial sabotage operations conducted by I think a Western Secret Service over the last half century. Thanks David for that lovely bit of French, Very impressive, but a minor thing, actually. I'm Gordon Carrera. Today, we're telling the story of the Rainbow Warrior, a ship docked in Auckland, New Zealand, which meets a pretty terrible fate. In an episode of sabotage, which I think it's fair to say goes desperately wrong. We're hearing a lot of sabotage in the news today, aren't we David? We're hearing about Russian sabotage in Europe. We're hearing about incendiary devices being put on planes, perhaps, cargo planes and arson

fires in factories and things like that. I guess this is an interesting example about how those kind of sabotage operations can go wrong and escalate and take even the intelligence services, which is trying to do something covert into a kind of dramatically different direction and then perhaps in disaster. Well, right. And it's also Gordon, as we'll get into a story about the relationship between sort of the political masters and an intelligence service and what happens when an intelligence service who has conducted

an operation that really goes quite wrong, you know, who ends up holding the bag in the end? Is it the political masters who ordered the operation or is it the intelligence service that carried it out? and in this case, as we'll see, really botched it. We heard at the start your beautiful reading of John Luqistair and your great pronunciation of his name and the service he works for. We'll look at him because he is one of those people who is directly involved in this operation and to some extent carries the can and is pretty angry actually about what happens. It is a morally complex story, I think, including about those agents involved.

Let's start with Rainbow Warrior itself and the time. We're in 1985. It's the mid-80s. France is a nuclear power and it's carrying out nuclear tests. It carries these out in a place in the South Pacific called Muroroa. It's beautiful. I looked at some of the pictures of it. It's a kind of idyllic looking atoll, not the kind of place you'd expect to be testing nuclear weapons and blowing up. That's exactly what the French are doing there in this place. To say it's in

the middle of nowhere is wrong because there are people and islands nearby and that's part of the story. But the atoll itself is uninhabited and it's 8,000 kilometers away from Australia, halfway between Australia and South America, but it's vital for the French. Prior to, I think, 1962, the French had actually tested their nuclear weapons in Algeria, which had a colony but since Algeria had gained its independence the French had moved this testing infrastructure I guess into the South Pacific and despite the fact that these places look like wonderful vacation destinations it's very very remote right and so they've decided to conduct all of their nuclear tests out here in the lovely South Pacific. Yeah, and it's worth saying that for France, nuclear weapons are a kind of expression of sovereignty and power. I mean, they are for all nuclear weapons states, but I think particularly for the French, the idea that they have their own nuclear deterrence is very

kind of central to French identity. So they take the weapon seriously and they take the need to test them seriously. Set against them is this rather ragtag group of activists who are out to stop them, the protagonists of our story, which is Greenpeace. Set up in the 1970s, slightly anarchic, lots of Save the Whale t-shirts. They're busy out there campaigning for, amongst other things, a nuclear-free Pacific and then enter these tests. They're building up their campaign. They're getting lots of publicity. There's already some bad blood between them and the French because back in 1973, another vessel was rammed by a French minesweeper

in international waters near Mararoa. Greenpeace are out to stop the tests and to get to Muroroa and they want to lead a flotilla to basically kind of go where the test is going to happen and stop it happening. I am really frustrated with you, Gordon, that you're making us tell a story in which Greenpeace has become the protagonist against a spy service. We know which side you're on. Well, I'm not on, I'm not on the side of a French intelligence in the story, as, as we'll see, I mean, and I think it is also worth mentioning just how much havoc the French tests have wreaked in the South Pacific, you know, the French conduct over the span of what will end up being like 30 years almost two hundred nuclear tests in the south pacific i mean they've blasted radioactive fall out over some more and feed g they've actually had islands and at all so contaminated that they've had to be abandoned for five six years at a time Gordon, they actually were trying to conduct an underground test. The bomb got stuck halfway down.

They detonated it anyway, and it created an underwater landslide and a tsunami that killed a handful of people. So I think to some degree, I mean, it's understandable why you have Greenpeace, which I think had just been formed 10, 15 years prior, has really focused on the French and are really trying to stop and disrupt the French from conducting any more tests. At the heart of this is this ship, the Rainbow Warrior. Worth saying a little bit about the ship because it's got a character of its own, I think. It was called the Sir William Hardy.

It was once a 49-meter-old North Sea fisheries vessel built in the 50s for the British government. Greenpeace had found it as a rusting wreck in a basin in the East India docks in London, and they bought it for £40,000 in 1977 and then started working on it to turn it into what is their flagship, painting rainbow colors on it, even adding a mast and sails. It is an old ship. It's built like a tank. It's pretty smelly, those on board say, but they love it. For them, it has its own symbolic importance because it's the boat that they're going to take around not just the Pacific, but all kinds of places. Some of their missions are to try and stop Icelandic whaling off the Shetland Islands. They're taking it around the world to carry out direct action, which is the Greenpeace

way of doing things, to get in the way of people doing whaling or sealing or nuclear tests. Here we are in 1985 and the ship is heading for a big mission in the Pacific. On board are about a dozen or so people, a mix of nationalities, American, Swiss, German. Idealistic, I think would be the way you might describe them. I think the captain himself calls them a bunch of crazy hippies. So I think that's the type.

People out to change the world, basically. It's like sort of the environmentalist love boat, something like that. And it also, I will say just, once I realized that we were not talking about the Tom Clancy novel Rainbow Six, and this was actually a Greenpeace vessel, when I first saw photos of it, my thought was that the boat looked a little bit like a crafting project that my seven-year-old might do, right? Because you've got the sort of jerry-rigged sails, the kind of rather shoddily painted rainbow, the Green piece dove on there, this set against, as

we'll see, set against the might of France, it really has an underdog feel even before we start talking about anything they're doing just based off the way the ship looks. On board, there's a lot of partying and there's dancing, they're sleeping on deck under the stars playing the saxophone. It seems from the accounts, the main thing they argued about was whether to bring plastic buckets along, whether plastic was a bad thing to bring along, and the kind of battles they had between the meat eaters and the vegans over what would get served. That was the kind of source of main tension. It's this summer of 1985. It's going to go around the Pacific islands. It's first of all going to do a mission taking people away from islands which were actually contaminated by US nuclear tests because both

the US and UK also carried out nuclear tests back in the 50s. Then they're going to spend some time resupplying in New Zealand for a couple of weeks before then heading out to Mararoa to try and stop the test. Amongst those on board, a collection of people, one of them are kind of easygoing, mustachioed Portuguese photographer called Fernando Pereira, who's the one who's kind of taking pictures because the idea is to publicize what they're doing, to get the information out to the outside world. But what they don't know is that the French have had enough. Turn their sights on this floating love boat.

I think there's a really interesting sense of it from one French account of French intelligence from this period because they're getting intelligence reports in and the really kind of alarmist ones are coming actually from the French military. This is how they're described. Greenpeace constituted in their eyes a kind of abominable synthesis of the forces of evil, bearded environmentalists, often springing from leftist organizations and therefore part of the international subversion movement. They could only be wittingly or unwittingly KGB agents, while those of the movement's leaders who were of Anglo-Saxon origin clearly worked for US or British imperialism, with

which the complicity of the Australian and New Zealand pacifist movement was seeking to sabotage the French nuclear defense effort. That's a kind of paranoid sense, which the KGB, the Brits, the Americans, everyone is kind of ganging up on the French and trying to push to undermine their nuclear terrorists, maybe to also spur the kind of independence movements in some of the French islands in this area. And that's the kind of mindset which has taken over in the French establishment.

Why did it matter that they were bearded? That's the description I'm stuck on is bearded. Yeah, they're bearded. They're of Anglo-Saxon origin. We know to the French, that's a slur. You know, you've got Australia, New Zealand, the KGB. I mean, there's a whole host of different boogeymen there, but the facial hair seems

out of left field. Yeah, maybe that's the cultural difference, you know, between kind of the French military, I think, in the 80s was probably not one for beards, whereas Greenpeace were. I think the captain of the ship, if I'm recalling from the videos I've watched, was bearded. He had sort of a, you know, grizzly sea dog look to it. A lot of moustaches as well and big hair. Moustaches, big hair, vegan meals. Which is not the French military look, I think.

So this idea has taken hold in the French defense ministry, particularly. Charles Ernoux, the defense minister, is angry and he basically wants Greenpeace and the Rainbow Warrior stopped. He wants to throw a punch, as someone puts it. So he turns to the DGSE. La direction générale de la sécurité extérieure. You're going to say that as many times as you can. We're not going to abbreviate the French spy service. We're just going to say that as many times as you can. We're not going to abbreviate the French spy service.

We're just going to say it. Because it's also known as la boîte or the ferme or la piscine, which is the swimming pool, which is- You've shown your hand, Gordon. That's my schoolboy French. That might be below schoolboy level. La piscine. Yes, the piscine.

Thank you. Being lectured by an American on French is really a joy. I have hidden up to this point in all of our discussions about this podcast and actually doing it, I have hidden the fact that I am actually a Francophile. Uh, because yes, and it is now coming out. Um, as we talk about the rainbow warrior, La Piscine. Yes. So the French, the TGS has its headquarters out in the, I think in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, Gordon,

which is basically out in the sticks in the Northeast. And it is by a pool, a swimming pool that's owned by the French Swimming Federation, I believe. And so it has had, I think the DGSE is actually moving its headquarters in the not-so-distant future, but it is sort of colloquially known inside CIA as La Piscine because of the proximity to that pool. We should talk a little bit about what makes it interesting and different. One of the things is that it's a little bit more militaristic in background, isn't it? I mean, it reports through the defense ministry. So, not like MI6, which reports through the foreign office. It's part

of the defense ministry. Reading some of the histories about it, you get this sense it grew out of, I think, the culture of the French resistance in the Second World War, of kind of direct action, of using force, of covert work. I don't know how much you've had ever to do with them in the past. I think the sort of military bent to the service, I mean, I think a large portion of the DGSE is active duty military, you're almost conducting like a rotation through the DGSE. And it's kind of seen, I think, in the French national security establishment as a way, particularly if you're in the army or the military, to sort of advance more quickly is to do a run through the DGSE. I had a former colleague refer to the DGSE and it's sort of more kind of militaristic side.

Speaking of the good guys GRU, a reference to Russian military intelligence, the great people who brought you the poisonings in, you know, in Salisbury and London of Russian distance. Is it Salisbury or Salisbury? If you're going to pick me up accents, I'm going to pick you up an accent. So the militaristic point I think is spot on. I do think when we're talking in particular about the 1980s. This is the DGSE pre le bureau, the wonderful spy thriller featuring the French DGSE. And there is a piece of slang for French spies, calling them barbouz, which is basically, I can't believe we're going to have another facial hair link. It directly translates as bearded ones. But I think the closest equivalent in English would be like spook, but it has this kind

of derogatory connotation to it, that it's somebody who is deceitful, disguised, but not particularly clever. And I think it speaks a bit to, and we'll see some elements of this in the story, the fact that in the 80s, the DGSE, which by the way is pretty new at that point, it's been constituted out of a couple other security organizations in the early 80s, it's kind of a redheaded stepchild in the French establishment. It's not particularly trusted by the political elite, and it's not seen as the place you want to go

if you've graduated from one of the Grands Ecos in Paris. You don't want to be a DGSE officer. And so I think the service has, at that point, a different vibe than CIA or MI6, where I think you've got some cachet. I think the French have more of a natural suspicion of kind of spies and secrecy at least at that point. But it's a service. I mean, at least today, you know,

what you'll hear from agency folks or from MI6 officers is it is, and I think it was then too, it's a highly capable service. I mean, you know, this is not traveling to Paris or anything like that. I mean, they're the kind of folks who are going to be in your hotel room and it's a competent and well-regarded spy service. So maybe this is a good point to introduce Jean-Luc Kistère, who we heard from at the start and who you read about. He, at this time, I guess he's emblematic of that.

He'd joined as a military cadet, age 17. So he is from that military background. His grandfather had fought in World War I and had told him about the Battle of Verdun and how he'd been gassed and then his father had been forcibly drafted into the German army and taken prisoner at the Russian front. So the military culture is part of his family really and his background. He's joined the DGSE. He's a young, sandy-haired, proud, patriotic young man. He's kind of motivated by a deep sense of patriotism, by fighting the Cold War, and about the sense of defending France.

He's ended up as a captain at this point in the combat dive team of the DGSE. He's brought in at this point in 1985 and told, as we heard at the start, that his mission is to deal with the Rainbow Warrior. It's interesting because he seems to be cautious about it, at least from his recollections. But he's told, well, it's because it's been infiltrated by the KGB. That seems to be the way of convincing him, which I like, I think we'll see that time and time again. Things are put through the lens of the Cold War often to justify them. Is there some truth to it?

So I think what there's some truth to is that there were people in the French state who were convinced that Greenpeace had been infiltrated by the KGB and were being kind of backed by the KGB and that was all part of a plan to stop France having its nuclear deterrent by pushing independence in the Pacific. But I don't think there's any truth in the sense that there was a KGB role. There wasn't a KGB agent running the Rainbow Warrior and running that campaign. That's not true. But the perception, I think, the feeling that there could be was something that might have been there in some parts of the French state. And certainly, they seem to be using it with Jean-Luc Hister to try and persuade him basically, because clearly he's a bit unsure

about it, it seems, when it comes to dealing with this boat, because it is after all, just a bunch of environmentalists. I agree with you on the specifics of the Rainbow Warrior Point. It's not like it was that boat or the people on it were specifically a front for the KGB. But it is true that there is kind of a broader, I guess, at this point in time, anti-nuclear movement that has real legs in Europe. I think even in the mid early mid 80s in London, there were gigantic assemblies and protests of, you know, Londoners against nuclear weapons use or testing

in the British establishment. So you kind of have this, I think, bigger movement that the KGB is doubtless trying to influence and kind of shape, right? Even if it's not specifically running the Rainbow Warrior, I mean it is true, I think. And it's again, this is not to say that what happens next is justified or somehow, you know, targeted against actual Russian assets or anything like that. But it's got to be the case that,

you know, that's right out of the KGB playbook to use an anti-nuclear movement that has legs in the West try to feed it, nurture it, shape it. It's just a classic KGB playbook of disinformation and misinformation and influence operations, right? Yeah. But then also those who are opposed to these anti-nuclear movements, it's a classic thing to go, well, it's all KGB and the whole thing is backed by the Soviets and to try and use that to have a justification to often spy on these movements and act against it. I think it's a mix of reasons with the French and I think the kind of KGB stuff is really

only part of it. I think there is actually a deeper animosity towards Greenpeace within the French state. It's really interesting because when they're looking at what to do, they don't want to just kind of contaminate the fuel and stop it sailing, you know, or kind of mess with the propellers. The plan that they come up with and what they call on Jean-Luc Quistaire to do is to, you know, to coin a phrase, stop the boat, is to sink it. They want it dealt with firmly and that's the idea.

I do think it's worth mentioning here, before we get into the havoc of what the French are about to do and to contemplate that in the mid 80s, and this is just to set the French mindset in the mid 80s, that the French establishment understood that they did not have a working nuclear deterrent against the Soviet Union, they're not blowing up lovely vacation destinations in the South Pacific for fun. They're doing this in order to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that they have the capability to defend themselves and to learn from these tests to improve that capability.

I do think it is critical to see that even though, you know, we're talking about this group of mustachioed saxophone playing environmentalists that in the minds, I think of a lot of these French guys who were gonna make this decision, Greenpeace is the enemy and Greenpeace is standing in the way of the safety and security potentially in an existential fashion of the state of France. Okay, so with the decision made to do something about the Rainbow Warrior, I think that's a great place to take a break and see how the French go about it.

This episode is brought to you by our friends at NordVPN. Now Gordon, what do you find most useful about Nord? David, one incredibly useful feature I find is the ad blocking software. That stops you being targeted, we all know about that, by intrusive ads whenever you're browsing the internet. Along with the fact Nord blocks unwanted parties tracking me, it makes me feel much safer and confident that my privacy or my privacy is protected online. And you know how much I care about your privacy, Gordon. And you know that one feature from Nord that I really appreciate is that it also has offline protection, which works even when it is not connected, meaning you can be consistently secure.

So to stay secure online, you should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. All you need to do is go to nordVPN.com slash Rest is Classified. When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan. And there's no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The links also in the episode description box. Well, welcome back to the rest is classified. We are in Auckland, New Zealand and the French Secret Service Gordon. The DGSE has set its sights on the Rainbow Warrior, which is at a wharf docked moored

and the DGSE is going to try to figure out exactly where the ship is going and who's on it. Is that right? That's right. And it's been quite an operation because they've worked out, they need to know what the itinerary is of the Rainbow Warrior. So, months before, they actually put a spy inside Greenpeace. So, in New Zealand, in their office there, and it's a 33-year-old French woman turns up who goes by the name Frédérique Bonnieu. It's good.

I give it a B. Thanks. Thanks. So, she arrives at the offices in Auckland and she's got a letter of introduction from the London office of Greenpeace. She said she's a scientist, but of course she's not. She's really Christine Caban, an undercover DGSE officer. How was that?

That's pretty good. You're getting better as we're going along. I'm having a real influence. I like this. Yeah, thank you. By one account, she'd been invalided out of a commando unit after a parachuting accident, joined the Secret Service and was a kind of specialist in deep undercover work and had infiltrated the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon, and then had plastic

surgery. Now, I think some of those accounts- We need to do an episode on her. That's an exciting resume. Those were the kind of exciting reports at the time about what she got up to. I'm not sure all of that may be true, though, but that was the kind of the sense of mystery that surrounded this woman. When actually, when you look at pictures of her, she just looks like a kind of 33-year-old scientist who's turned up at the offices. Her job there is to kind of work her way into Greenpeace. She does that pretty effectively. She has some occasionally some views, which I think some of the other Greenpeace people think are a little bit more conservative than maybe the traditional kind of bearded environmentalist activists who are around her. She's kind of not entirely against nuclear

weapons, which in Greenpeace you think is a bit of a giveaway. This comes up in conversation with Greenpeace. Someone remembers that afterwards. You think, maybe she didn't quite hide her views as well as she should have done. Greenpeace counterintelligence has really dropped the ball on the story. Their security department was not on it. She manages to avoid being photographed, which is another telltale sign, watch out for that, and says very little about her personal life and where she's from. She hangs around in the offices a lot and has the chance to rifle through the draws and the files and is obviously collecting information there.

She also goes on some sightseeing trips up the coast of New Zealand. And what it looks like she's doing then is she's looking for spots where the undercover teams could later land and carry out some of their covert action. She's asking about kind of diving shops, hiring boats and vans. So there's an element where in hindsight, and it's always in hindsight, you know, you can see some of this activity is really suspicious. But she seems to be pretty

effective. She gets the details, and then she leaves in May. So she's gone by the time, you know, the boat arrives in July. She says she's going to a conference about coral reefs in Tahiti. Very nice. And never returns to Greenpeace. But it means the DGSE know when the boat's coming. They know the plan for it. July it arrives and it's supposed to be there for two weeks.

And at this point, we also get the rest of the DGSE teams turn up. And it's worth, I think, understanding a little bit about who they are what they do so there's one team who opposing as a swiss honeymoon in couple and they're there to kind of do the support i guess you know they're hiring the fans they're gonna kind of move things around pick people up before and after the operation and then the second team is the logistical team now this is the team who are. is the logistical team. Now, this is the team who are actually bringing in the explosives and bringing in the devices that are going to be used against Rainbow Warrior. And they have chartered a yacht. And it is a group of young French male DGSE officers who are going undercover on a yacht in the South Pacific. And it's fair to say that is not the worst operation you can imagine. And I think they also seem to enjoy it quite a lot, but they just party, don't they for several weeks while they're conducting recon and I guess, you know, I mean, for first two or CIA case officers might when scolded by a superior for

doing something similar would say that you're just living your cover looking back on this now with everything having been leaked, it looks absurd. But to put on my sort of de jay's apologist hat here for a second, which I will then remove in a few minutes, there is a world where you look at this and say, it actually makes operational sense for them to be out there at clubs, living it up a little bit because that's what they are. They're tourists visiting New Zealand. But, hang on a sec, these photos of them, some of them with their shirts off, these kind of strappy young men, and they're going around the bars and the bedrooms, it turns

out, including at one point the partner of a New Zealand policeman, I think. Not a good look, yeah. Which is not a good look. Getting their picture taken, that is going to get you noticed and get you remembered. But they're living it up while bringing in the actual explosives. Then you have the third team. The third team is really the dive team. That is led by Jean-Luc Kister, who we met earlier, our military cadet from the DGSE. He's arriving, I think, three days before the dive is going to be taking place. There are going to be two divers and then another person who's going to pilot a zodiac inflatable dinghy to carry out the actual attack. By the evening of July 10th, everything is in place, Rainbow Warrior is there,

Jean-Luc Kister and his colleagues have the explosives, having been delivered from the party yacht, and they head out that evening for the dive. It's worth saying at this time, it's July, but of course that's winter in the Southern southern hemisphere. So it's dark already in the evening as they go out. It's cold. They are linked together as they kind of go off the dinghy by a strap about one and a half meters long, the two divers, so that they can find each other because they're going to be operating in total darkness and they can't use torches or anything else. And with them, they're carrying these limpet mines, which seem to have been specially made,

I think, for the job. That was surprising to me because a limpet mine, of course, is not, I mean, they're carrying these limpet mines, which seem to have been specially made, I think, for the job. That was surprising to me because a limpet mine, of course, is not, I mean, they've been around, I think, at least since the Second World War and pretty much every modern Navy produces them. So I would have thought that the French would have just gotten a mine from British naval stocks or something like that. So it's deniable. There's no French sort of fingerprints on it, right?

I mean, it's basically a mine, an explosive that has a magnet on it and allows you to stick it to the bottom of a ship. It feels like if you're specially fabricating something, it's gonna set off more sort of alarm bells if there's an investigation afterward. But they go down there and Jean-Luc Kistephistep feels the hull. It's covered with small growths, seaweed, seashells on it. One of them holds one of the bombs. The other fixes some kind

of straps to clamp and attach it to the Rainbow Warrior underwater. Once they've done that, they give the other one the thumbs up and set off the timer. It's currently about 8.50pm and they program it for a three-hour delay on the timer. Then they go and place the second bomb. Now, they plan to plant the first bomb portside, but then Kistair has seen that there's another ship docked just next to the Rainbow Warrior, so he decides to put it on the starboard side. They've decided to put two bombs on it. The idea seems to be that they thought the first bomb would go off, anyone who was on

board would evacuate, and then the second one would sink the boat after a short delay if there was anyone on board. They put these two bombs onto the boat and swim away at that point. It's interesting because on board, there'd actually been a birthday party on the Rainbow Warrior that evening for one of the team. At one point, one of the Greenpeace team recollect seeing something strange bobbing in the water that evening. They go and take a look and it's a floating bag of Brussels sprouts rather than a French Navy diver.

Was that a plastic bag, do you think, or was it made out of something biodegradable? I think in those days, it'd be plastic. So, there's been a party on the boat, but some of the Greenpeace, and there's about a dozen or so people normally on the boat, some of them go off into town for partying. Others go to bed. The divers have left. Then three hours later, just before midnight, so at about 11.49, the captain is woken by this enormous bang. His initial instinct is that they've hit something. He thinks they're at sea or something's happened and they've collided. He looks out of the porthole and he sees that they're actually still at the dock and kind of goes, well, what's going on? Goes out into the corridor and 10 meters down the hall from

him is the engine room. He can already see water pouring into the engine room and it's filling up. It's actually hissing because the water that's coming into the engine room is hitting the kind of hot engine. It's like the sound of an angry steam bath, someone says. What's happened is a hole about two meters by three meters has been blown on the starboard side of the engine room. I think what's noticeable is it's a bigger hole than had been expected by that bomb. They didn't test it. Is that right? Well, if they did test it, something different happened when they used it on the Rainbow Warrior.

Now, because there's some reports claiming they'd run some tests of the dive, but perhaps they hadn't tested this exact bomb or against the kind of hull of the Rainbow Warrior. But whatever it is, it was a more dramatic explosion than they expected. Shrapnel rips through the upper decks and already things are kind of not going quite as they expected. No one had been in the engine room or the upper decks when it went off. But still, already, this is kind of going south from the French plan. And then just a minute or two later, you get the second explosion.

And the idea here was basically that this was going to be the equivalent of like coming up behind someone who's riding a bicycle very slowly and you're behind them in your car and you kind of hawk to give them a scare, right? And then they're going to get out of the way. Two thoughts on this. One is that in these kind of operations, it seems like something always probably goes not according to plan and you sort of have to plan for that. So you would think, and I would think without getting into any specifics just based off of some knowledge of how Western security services fabricate explosives today, I would have expected there

to be a lot of testing if they're really serious about not killing anybody. And it doesn't seem like they did that. No, I mean, Kisa suggests that they hadn't really tested the bombs in that kind of environment. That is one of the problems. They don't seem to have accounted for the fact they hadn't left long between the two bombs. By some accounts, it's just a minute for people who had been on board to get off. That seems, in the chaos of what was happening, a pretty implausible amount of time for someone

to wake up, work out what's going on, and get off. I mean, maybe, but not guaranteed. Some people are still on the boat, but then the second bomb goes off and the whole boat kind of jumps up at this second point. He shouts, abandoned ship, but it's dark and the people who are still on there are kind of throwing on their clothes. No one really knows what's going on.

The boat is already starting to list and starting to kind of throwing on their clothes, no one's kind of really knows what's going on. And the boat is already starting to list and starting to kind of move on to its side. And it's sinking much faster than expected. Part of the idea of sinking it in the dock have been that it wouldn't completely sink. It's not like sinking out in the ocean where people won't be able to get off. The French have thought about this a bit, because they've thought, you know, we'll do it in the dock, so we can sink the boat, but they'll kind of go halfway down and people should be able to get off.

But it's sinking faster than expected. So those who are still on board scramble onto the wharf, watch, you know, the Rainbow Warrior basically go down in 40 seconds or something like that. You know, a matter of seconds it's going down. And at that point, they realize that someone's missing. And it's Fernando Pereira, the photographer on board the Rainbow Warrior. Well, maybe they're Gordon with the Rainbow Warrior at the bottom of Auckland Harbour. We should call it.

And next time, we will get into the manhunt for the perpetrators of this bombing and really describe how it all unravels for the French intelligence service the DGSE on The Rest is Classified. See you then. There's a double agent, a mole, working for Moscow inside the upper reaches of CIA. Hi, I'm David McCloskey, co-host of The Rest is Classified, and in my latest novel, The Seventh Floor, in Operation Gone Wrong, has CIA officer Artemis Proctor convinced there is a mole working for the Russians. But who is it? To find the answer, she will have to dredge up her checkered past

in service of CIA, investigating a short list of her dearest friends and most cherished enemies. This is a story of modern-day espionage tradecraft, a peek at the actual spy war between Washington and Moscow, and most of all, it's a story about what friendship means in a faithless business. The book is available now in hard copy in all good bookshops, and also online in e-book and audio formats.