Richard Baker: This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation. We pay our respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to culture. We would also like to thank the people of Norfolk Island, Aotearoa, New Zealand and the Pacific for
allowing their stories to be told. Young Kiwi detective Chris Martin is holding his breath as the French secret agents eyeball him and his fellow cops.
Chris Martin: They came, off their beds when we burst in ready for a fight.
Richard Baker: It's just gone 11pm on a colder than usual winter's night on Norfolk Island, July 15, 1985. Chris and a mix of New Zealand and Norfolk Island police, are blocking the doorways of the Frenchman's rooms at the South Pacific resort.
Chris Martin: They're assessing us in terms of if it got violent. It was a real confrontation in those rooms. Six of us and the three of them. We would have had an interesting time of it had it exploded into violence.
Richard Baker: Thankfully, cool heads prevail. Roland Verge, the oldest and highest ranked of the French agents, takes charge.
Chris Martin: He was clearly the man. The other two were clearly deferring to him, waiting if he gave an order or said something.
Richard Baker: Using passable English, he introduces himself as Raymond Velche, the alias from his false passport. He says he's a professional skipper for a Paris travel company called Odyssey, which is actually a front for France's intelligence services. The other men also give their aliases on of Eric Audrenc
and Jean Michel Bertholet They tell the police they're members of the yacht's crew. I'll refer to the men using their real surnames of Verge, Andries and Bartelo. As they glance around the room, the detectives notice two glass medicine bottles sitting at the foot of a bed with the word Adrenaline
printed on them. Bartelo clasps his fists and thumps his chest over his heart. He says four words in broken English. Diving. Long time and heart. Chris's bullshit detector's already going off.
Chris Martin: No one goes diving in July in New Zealand because it's freezing. You'd come here and go skiing, maybe not chuck on a wetsuit and jump into freezing cold water.
Richard Baker: This is fallout. Spies on Norfolk Island.
David Robie: Essentially the mood in, New Zealand at the time was absolutely frustration and disappointment. In Australia,
Lopeti Senituli: I mean, the French were so arrogant. Bastards.
Chris Martin: I said, you will be going to prison for 25 years. And I could just see a little tear start to form up in his eye.
Dennis Muray: It's got to be done in 24 hours or stiff shit, sort of thing. They didn't give him much time.
Richard Baker: Episode 3 Clocks Ticking With all this action, police resources on Norfolk Island are stretched. So another local special constable is called into service.
Cheryl Jelovich: My name's Cheryl Jelovich I'm a sixth generation Pitcairn descendant, so my family descends from George Hunn Nobbs Through the Nobbs the Buffett and the Quintels side.
Richard Baker: That's quite a good representation. Back in 1985, Cheryl was just 21 years old. The island's first female customs officer and special constable, Cheryl is briefed about the Frenchman and their suspected connection to the Rainbow Warrior bombing. Her job's a simple one. Go to the South Pacific Hotel
and, watch the comings and goings while Cheryl makes sure no one enters the Frenchman's rooms or interferes with any potential evidence. Verge, Bartelo and Andries are taken to the administrator's office and split up. Their passports have been taken to be checked with Interpol. Interrogations are
about to begin. There'll be no sleep tonight. But just as the Kiwi police are about to get started, they cotton onto something important. Considering they're dealing with men they suspect are highly trained and dangerous terrorists, they've only got one gun between them and it actually belongs to
Norfolk Island Sergeant Paul Macintosh They need the Frenchman to keep believing they're hopelessly overpowered.
Chris Martin: Throughout the time that we held the crew, we all took turns wearing the gun. It was in a, shoulder holster and it was to give the impression to the crew, the Ouvea we're all armed. So I wore that pistol two or three times in that 24 hours. And other guys wore it as well. I don't even know if there
were bullets in it. But it was just to create that impression that we, you know.
Richard Baker: Don't bother,
Chris Martin: Don't bother.
Richard Baker: It's getting on for midnight when the most senior Kiwi detective on Norfolk Island, Senior Sergeant Lex Denby, sits down to interview Verge. I've got a hold of a police transcript which helps me tell the story. Lex starts by saying that he's a police officer from New Zealand investigating the
sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Verge again gives his false name and tells Lex his date of birth, July 10, 1950. Lex tells Verge his birthday coincides with the day the Rainbow Warrior was sunk. The Frenchman smiles and shrugs his shoulders. While Chris Martin and his policemates, are dealing with
things on Norfolk Island. their boss, Inspector Maurice Witham, is scrambling to catch up with Dr. Xavier Maniguet.
Chris Martin: Everything was going like, at 100 miles an hour at this stage the good.
Richard Baker: Doctor had left Norfolk Island on the afternoon of Monday July 15th on a flight for Sydney. Maurice wants Maniguet to be watched from the moment he gets off the plane. But he has no officers in Sydney to do the job. He has a detective mid air en route to Australia. But it's going to be too late. So
Maurice calls the Australian Federal police to ask. A favour
Chris Martin: Time was against us and so we got hold of the surveillance team to meet the flight when it arrived with Dr. Maniguet on it to follow him.
Richard Baker: Maurice says Maniguet is greeted by a French VIP at the airport.
Chris Martin: Maniguet had met a man who turned out to be the French consulate of all people.
Richard Baker: Maniguet checks into his hotel. He doesn't know there are federal police officers in the room next door. Then the Frenchman takes a walk around Sydney and pops into a cinema.
A Passage to India: Tell me dear, what's going on out there? Mrs. Moore, we are almost there. I will now explain to you about the ladder. It is to be your big surprise.
Richard Baker: A Passage to India starring Alec Guinness and Judy Davis is showing in what appears to me to be classic spycraft. Maniguet finds another French dignitary, Pierre Roussel, watching the film. And it just so happens the seat next to him is empty. The late Roussel is an impeccably connected delegate to
a French government advisory body that represents its citizens abroad. In those days movies had intermission so the audience could go to the toilet or get some food. And this happens to be the time that Maurice's detective turns up.
Chris Martin: And of course when they came out for their ice cream at halftime, Dr. Maniguet was met by New Zealand police officer plus a series of Australian police officers as well. So the cooperation from Australia was very good at that point.
Richard Baker: Maniguet is taken in for questioning which will last seven hours.
News Archive: Zero hour bikini for the explosion of America's first airborne hydrogen bomb. Radar weather stations indicate perfect conditions throughout the mid Pacific proving ground. So the control ship gives the go ahead. Brighter than flying 500 Suns. America's most highly developed thermonuclear weapon. A
detonation equal in force to 10 million tonnes of TNT.
Benetick Kabua Maddison: They talk about how the sky turned red suddenly the earth shook, they felt rumble and how all of a sudden plants died and there were white and ah, yellow powder.
Richard Baker: Benetick Kabua Maddison is a young and proud Marshall islander. he's describing to me what his elders told him about a fateful day in March 1954. It was the day the United States detonated the world's first thermonuclear bomb. In a test known as Castle Bravo at Bikini Atoll. The bomb had 1,000
times the power of the one dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima nine years earlier. You can watch footage of Castle Bravo online. It's terrifying. The sky really did turn blood orange. The bomb produced a yield triple what American scientists had predicted. And a big wind shift caused
radioactive ash to descend upon Rongelap Atoll and its people.
Benetick Kabua Maddison: They talked about how Marshallese ran into their traditional homes praying to God for forgiveness because in their minds they thought it was armageddon. Marshallese are Christians and so you can imagine the shock, the fear, the confusion of the Marshalles who were alive then.
Richard Baker: This was the test that poisoned Rongelap Atoll and led to the Rainbow Warrior evacuating the island's 300 residents in May 1985, just six short weeks before it was sunk in Auckland's Harbour. I talked with more young Pacific Islanders like Benetick who are now leading the charge for justice when it
comes to the deadly legacy of nuclear tests by the French, Americans and British.
Tamatoa Tephuarii: yes, my grandma first she got the breast cancer and she died when I was kid.
Richard Baker: Tamatoa Tepuari is a young man from Ma’hanui, the indigenous name for French Polynesia
Tamatoa Tephuarii: and my grandpa as well who worked on the nuclear site and he died from cancer so I couldn't meet him and see him because I wasn't born at all.
Richard Baker: Tamatoa is now watching some of his friends parents battle forms of cancer believed to be linked to French nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll. His friend in Tahiti, Hina Cross, knows what it's like to suffer.
Hina Cross: My grandmother and my aunt got the thyroid cancer and my mom she didn't have the cancer but she had thyroid problems so she had to be operated and to take pills and my sister also, she have to take pills for the rest of her life.
Richard Baker: Hina was seven years old when the last French nuclear test took place in 1996, 18 years after the final French test, she was diagnosed with leukaemia, a blood cancer. Now in her 30s, Hina needs constant medication to stay alive. Getting a cancer diagnosis at 25 made her ponder life's biggest
Hina Cross: Are we allowed to have kids when we know that we're sick and when you realise you and your family have been poisoned by radioactive.
Richard Baker: It was a big decision to decide.
Chris Martin: To have a second child after I knew that I had leukaemia.
Richard Baker: In March 2025, Benetik, Tamatoa and Hina were at the United nations headquarters in New York City as part of the third meeting of state parties to the UN Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. While nuclear testing in the Pacific may have ended almost 30 years ago, death, disease and
uncertainty linger. It was great to talk to these young islanders as they continue their quest for transparency from big powers like the US and France.
Hina Cross: We need the truth because they are still minimising what happened. We feel that we have poison in our blood because of what happened. So the one question that I think every territory that has been used for nuclear experimentation wants to know, it's for. How long are we going to be sick?
Richard Baker: When the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in 1985, Fiji's Vijay Naidu was that era's version of Benedict Tamatoa or Hina. Young, educated and articulate, Vijay was and still is a powerful advocate for a nuclear free and independent Pacific. Over a video call I asked Vijay, now an adjunct professor at the
University of the South Pacific to recall his reaction to the news of the sinking of the Greenpeace ship.
Vijay Naidu: We were all astonished. We were appalled and very sorry, you know, that Pereira the photographer drowned as a result of the boat sinking. And we were very saddened by that. We were immediately suspicious of the French. It was a particularly blatant example of state terrorism. And the asymmetry of
power between France and New Zealand.
Richard Baker: I like Vijay's phrase, asymmetry of power. When you think about it, the Pacific region has been one big asymmetry of power for a long time. Would more than 300 nuclear weapons have been detonated in the Pacific had its islands, atolls and peoples not been the playthings of colonial powers?
Vijay Naidu: I mean you had colonialism, a ah, good number of Pacific island countries had not gained the independence. And then on top of it, you know, places like the Marshall Islands and the former US trust territories were not only colonies but places where you know, the US military and navy set up the
facilities for nuclear weapon testing. This wasn't acceptable and as you would know, more than 317 odd nuclear weapons were tested. If you include the tests that were conducted in Australia.
Richard Baker: That's more than twice the number of nuclear weapons required to send the earth into a nuclear winter. Should they all be detonated in a short period of time, a nuclear winter would kill billions, plunge global temperatures, devastate agriculture and and caused long lasting famine. Tongan lawyer
Lopeti Senituli, Vijay's old comrade in the anti nuclear scene, was in Australia. When news of the Rainbow Warrior bombing broke. We met Lopetti earlier in this podcast where he described being constantly monitored by Fiji police as well as French and US security services during his student activist
days. Like Vijay Lopeti knew immediately who was behind the bombing.
Lopeti Senituli: When I first heard it, I said these bastards. Have they done it? How dare they. I mean the French were so arrogant bastards as they have been all this time. They wanted to actually do it and they did it in New Zealand because New Zealand was talking about a nuclear free New Zealand policy and this
was their way of saying up yours.
Richard Baker: It wasn't just the anti nuclear campaigners suspecting the French as the culprits from the get go. It only took a few days after the bombing for the New Zealand Secret Intelligence Service to suspect it was the dirty work of its French counterpart, the D.G.S.E. How do I know this? Well, a few years
ago the Kiwi spy agency released a previously secret report on its role. It states we were confident of D.G.S.E involvement within a few days of the attack. Interestingly, outside of this, New Zealand's top secret files on the Rainbow Warrior remain locked away. Apparently some parts of the story
remain too sensitive for the public to know. My hunch is that some of the most sensitive stuff relates impartedly to the Ouvea and the four French agents on Norfolk Island. Even in the report the N.Z.S.I.S made public, several large passages relating to the Ouvea and Norfolk Island are blacked out.
The phrase so much for close calls and what might have been appears after one of the blacked out sections of of the report relating to the Ouvea As for the confidential report that I uncovered from the National Archive by Norfolk Island Sergeant MacIntosh, two pages are missing. If anyone out there
has a full copy, I'd really like to see it. Back on Norfolk Island it's the early hours of Tuesday, July 16, 1985. Six days after the bombing, the interrogation of the three French agents is underway.
Police Officer: Police transcript from Senior Sergeant Lex Denby. Interrogation of Raymond Burge, July 16, 1985.
Lex Denby (voice actor): We have a witness in New Zealand. Who saw two Frenchmen in a Commodore car south of Whangarei. They were meeting a camper van,
Roland Verge (voice actor): not me.
Richard Baker: New Zealand Senior Sergeant Lex Denby's transcript has a note stating how Verge looked shocked and agitated by what he'd been told.
Lex Denby (voice actor): They wrote down your registered number. It was your rental car.
Roland Verge (voice actor): No, impossible. I have the keys. The car is with me or Bertholet We only go on Little Journeys We are too busy.
Richard Baker: Bertholet is the false name Used by the agent Bartelo Denby's transcript refers to Verge looking frightened and alarmed.
Lex Denby (voice actor): The same witness said you had an outboard motor in the back of your car.
Roland Verge (voice actor): No, I only have the outboard I buy in, Whangarei. I take that from the shop to our zodiac. One night we go to town from the yacht, we go to, to the restaurant. When we return, the motor, is stolen. I, I forgot to lock the car.
Lex Denby (voice actor): Did you meet with any other French. People in New Zealand?
Roland Verge (voice actor): No.
Lex Denby (voice actor): Do you know Alain and Sophie Turenge
Richard Baker: Denby shows Verge photos of the pair. His notes record Verge being visibly shocked and squirming in his seat.
Roland Verge (voice actor): I do not know these people.
Lex Denby (voice actor): Do you know why I need all this information?
Roland Verge (voice actor): I read in the papers about the bomb? You think because I'm French, I, have something to do with it?
Richard Baker: Dennis Muray, the Australian policeman serving on Norfolk island, remembers the Frenchman doing their best to remain calm.
Dennis Muray: They were cool. The interviewer, wasn't as fluent obviously in French as these blokes are. So, he was probably more thinking his questioning and they were just hitting him back with their answers. And it just seemed to be that, this is what I've been doing. I've got my story. I'm here on a, sailing
Richard Baker: In a nearby room, Detective Chris Martin is questioning Verge's youngest compatriot, Bartelo. The language barrier is making a tough job even tougher.
Chris Martin: We only had two employees, interpreters with us, but I found it very difficult to, you know, in an interview situation like that is if you ask a question, you're looking at the person's face, you're looking at how they react to the question and then how they respond. And it's very difficult when
it's in a foreign language because it gave him time, more time to consider the answer. and then he'd answer in French and I would mis nuances of what he'd replied.
Richard Baker: The Kiwi police had a little extra ammunition when it came to Bartelo because of something Dominique Prieur, AKA Sophie Turenge, said in a private conversation to her supposed husband, Alain Marfat. The French speaking New Zealand officer, who'd been eavesdropping on the pair, heard Dominique say
the money for their time in New Zealand had come via Bartelo's bank account. If the crew of the Ouvea were telling the truth about not knowing Alain and Dominique or ever having met them, then why would one of them be bankrolling their time in New Zealand? Despite Bartelo's tough exterior. Chris
senses an underlying softness. He ups the ante.
Chris Martin: I said, you will be going to prison for 25 years. I had no idea. I mean, if I said 25 years, I'd be. And I could just see a little tear start to form up in his eye. And I thought that hit home. And he was really starting to look at the reality of it as a young man, you know, he'd probably be in
prison till he was 45, 50, you know, which is quite a blow.
Richard Baker: MacIntosh's report also makes special mention of Bartelo becoming, quote, visibly shocked when shown photos of Alain and Dominique. The tactic of separating the Frenchmen begins to pay off. Although all three are trained to withstand interrogation, little discrepancies in their accounts begin to
appear. Denby turns up the heat on Verge.
Lex Denby (voice actor): I think you've been telling me lies. What happened the day you went to Auckland?
Roland Verge (voice actor): I have told you.
Lex Denby (voice actor): I now know you did meet a Frenchman,
Roland Verge (voice actor): but I don't know.
Lex Denby (voice actor): You meet him at the tea rooms.
Roland Verge (voice actor): No.
Richard Baker: Denby's notes again refer to Verge being shaken up. He then pulls out a receipt from a clutch purse found in Verge's room at the South Pacific Resort. It was for the Dome Valley tea rooms from July 2, 1985.
Roland Verge (voice actor): Yes, I remember.
Lex Denby (voice actor): And you met another Frenchman there?
Roland Verge (voice actor): I cannot remember.
Lex Denby (voice actor): I want the truth.
Roland Verge (voice actor): I, don't understand.
Richard Baker: Denby grabs a French English dictionary and points to the relevant page.
Roland Verge (voice actor): okay. truth.
Lex Denby (voice actor): Will you tell me the truth about your meeting with the Frenchman?
Roland Verge (voice actor): I can't remember.
Lex Denby (voice actor): Did you go to the tea rooms with Berthelo?
Roland Verge (voice actor): I can't remember.
Lex Denby (voice actor): I think you helped bring ashore the materials used to sink the Greenpeace ship. Explosives and outboard motors, diving gear and a Zodiac inflatable.
Roland Verge (voice actor): No, I did not do this thing. I am a good man. I am, sorry the man was killed, but this is not my problem. It is your problem. I cannot help you.
Richard Baker: Daybreak isn't far off. The Frenchmen are allowed to go back to bed before breakfast. When the sun comes up, the Kiwi police forensics team will head to Cascade Pier to search the Ouvea Meanwhile, Dr. Xavier Maniguet was questioned for seven hours in Sydney by a New Zealand detective with the
assistance of the Australian Federal Police. He played the straightest of bats right throughout. He said he had no idea the men he was sailing with were French naval divers, frogmen working for the D.G.S.E Maniguet said he simply hired the Ouvea and her crew for a diving cruise around the South
Pacific. He claims he left the yacht and her crew for a week in New Zealand to go skiing on the south island, saying he was sick of feeling seasick. Yes, it was true. He had a connection to the mysterious Frenchman who appeared on board the Rainbow Warrior hours before the explosions. He had worked
with the man's father in law in the past. Small world. The demands of his busy medical practise back in Paris was the reason he was not returning with the yacht to Noumea. According to the New Zealand Secret Intelligence Service report, Maniguet arrived in Singapore on July 19. His travel schedule
showed he'd be in Singapore for two days. That was enough time for New Zealand police, according to the New Zealand spy agency report, to issue a warrant for his arrest. The evidence to justify a warrant for Maniguet was found on board the Ouvea in Norfolk Island. Unbelievably, the Kiwi police's
plans were foiled by a New Zealand journalist who called Maniguet at his Singapore hotel room to advise of his impending arrest. Maniguet fled to Paris as soon as possible, as the New Zealand intelligence report adroitly states. So much for operational security. So what did the police find when they
searched the Ouvea? Why was it enough to issue a warrant for Maniguet's arrest? Detective Inspector Maurice Witham tells me the first thing his forensic team did was to swab the bilge of the Ouvea. The bilge is the part of a boat that would rest on the ground if it were out of the water.
Specifically, police were looking for traces of.
Maurice Witham: Explosives, all that sort of thing.
Richard Baker: The police photographer and fingerprint expert were busy poring through the roadmaps, brochures and receipts on board the Ouvea
Maurice Witham: we took back documents upon documents, from the ovea, all the receipts.
Richard Baker: But technology was antiquated in those days. No smartphones or digital cameras, no email, no mobile labs sufficient to test for traces of explosives.
Maurice Witham: We had no time to work out what we'd taken.
Richard Baker: While the Kiwi police were comparing notes after their questioning of the French suspects and searching the Ouvea the Norfolk island authorities had been conferring with the Attorney General's department in Canberra. Mid morning of Tuesday, July, July 16, 1985, Norfolk Island Administrator John
Matthew shocks the New Zealand police by telling them they have until 2pm to charge the Frenchman or he'll let them go. Who actually made the decision to impose this strict deadline? I can't say. MacIntosh's report says it was made after, I quote, consultation with Australian authorities and that it
was imperative New Zealand authorities make a decision by 2pm why this deadline was necessary remains unclear even after 40 years. What is clear is that it made it impossible for the Kiwi police to do their job properly. Chris Martin
Chris Martin: We could have done our forensics, fingerprints, all sorts of things that would have tied them back to the rest of their New Zealand crew.
Richard Baker: Those swabs of the yachts, bilge for traces of explosives had to be flown to Auckland for lab analysis. The photos of maps and other documents had to be developed. The fingerprints had to be checked against other prints back in New Zealand. The checks on the passports being used by the Frenchmen had
yet to yield a response to determine if they were genuine. All this had to be done and yet Australia insisted on a 2pm deadline. Doesn't seem all that fair to me. The reality was that a 24 hour clock had been set from pretty much the moment Norfolk Island police got the order to not let the
Frenchman leave the island. And that clock started ticking while Chris Martin and his police colleagues were flying to Norfolk Island, wasting time they didn't have. Chris was furious when with the 2pm deadline.
Chris Martin: Clearly we weren't getting 24 hours on one minute. It was 24 hours and if you've got enough to charge them, then you can hold them. If you haven't, then you need to let them go. So 24 hours was just insufficient.
Richard Baker: I've always wondered why, once the pieces were beginning to emerge, why couldn't you hold them in relation to a murder inquiry?
Chris Martin: Look, I don't know. I wasn't involved obviously in the politics of everything, but there was obviously some big cards being played in the background between various nations. We were simply trying to do our job, investigate a murder, and capture the people responsible.
Richard Baker: Chris tells me the police and other authorities on Norfolk Island were professional and helpful.
Chris Martin: One thing I felt was there was no real camaraderie, if you will, that you might expect with members of foreign police forces coming together. There was none of that fraternity. They were very professional. The sergeant who was in charge, very professional. But he has obviously been told you go this
far and no further. So which you know, he was, as I say, was professional. He helped us gain entry to the motels, transportation arranged to transport everyone back to where we did the interviews. But there it stopped. There was nothing more given. And I believe he was probably under some quite
strict orders as to how far you helped these guys.
Richard Baker: I asked Dennis Muray, one of the Australian police officers on Norfolk Island, what he remembered of the instructions coming out of Canberra.
Dennis Murray: It's gotta be done in 24 hours or stiff shit sort of thing, really. That's when you think about it. they didn't give him much time.
Richard Baker: Kissard, the boss of Norfolk Island Customs, was also taken aback by the 2pm deadline.
Alan 'Kissard' Buffett: It certainly did appear to be really short and, you know, given the circumstances of what had happened, it did appear really short to us, really, given the fact that someone was killed. And, I think they were, sold short by not, you know, being given a bit more time to really prove what they
Richard Baker: During the afternoon of Tuesday, July 16, 1985, Verge asked the Norfolk Island police to return his cruise passports. They want to leave for Noumea. Lex Denby, the most senior New Zealand cop on Norfolk island, telephoned Superintendent Alan Galbraith, head of the Rainbow Warrior investigation in
Auckland. Denby tells his boss they need to immediately issue warrants to extradite the Frenchmen to New Zealand or they'll be let go by Australian authorities. He takes Galbraith through the overnight interrogations of the Frenchmen. They're clearly hiding something, but they've made no admissions.
They need more time for the samples from the yacht's bilge to be analysed, more time for the documents to be examined, more time for the passports to be checked. But they're out of time. Galbraith tells Denby the Frenchmen have to be let go. Chris Martin recalls his bitter disappointment.
Chris Martin: We were spot on. We had the right guys for it. Again, just going on the body language their reaction to us, we had gathered the evidence from the Ouvea, which would have been sufficient to prosecute them as parties to the murder.
Richard Baker: The problem for Chris and his colleagues was they just didn't know how good the stuff they had was. Around 6pm on Tuesday, July 16, 1985, a crowd gathers at Cascade Pier to watch the Frenchmen row their dinghy out to the yacht. Chris Martin's one of them
Chris Martin: And we watched them from the wharf and it was. We all knew that this is the last we're going to see of them and that yacht and they couldn't get out of there quick enough. I don't think that they truly believe that they, were being let go as well.
Richard Baker: MacIntosh's confidential report mentions the New Zealand police's reaction to the decision not to extradite the French agents. This advice was contrary to the feeling of the investigatory team, who were convinced.
Paul Macintosh: That they were on the right track.
Richard Baker: McIntosh listed the circumstantial evidence that pointed to the Frenchman's involvement. There was A visible shock when shown photos of Alain and Dominique in custody in Auckland. A receipt for an outboard motor, but no motor on board. Three sets of diving gear. Photos of a rubber zodiac sign
similar to that used in the Rainbow Warrior attack. A briefcase containing wire and electrical tape. A map of New Zealand's north island with a pencil mark on the rendezvous point where the crew's rented Commodore was spotted meeting up with Alain and Dominique's camper van. I asked Maurice Witham,
the two I see on the Rainbow Warrior investigation, if he would have taken a punt and charged the Frenchman with something.
Maurice Witham: My view was roll the dice and charge into something. Bring them back to New Zealand and we'll pick up some evidence in kitty. You know you always pick up something later on. The, Air Force would not kidnap people from Norfolk Island. If we had a commercial flight, maybe we could have got them back
to New Zealand. But that wasn't to be because it was protocols and things. If we had more time, we would have. Yeah, I'm sure there could have been a way.
Richard Baker: The next morning, July 17, Chris Martin and his colleagues are sifting through hundreds of receipts and documents taken from the Frenchman's yacht. They find something really interesting. A motel receipt issued to someone with the surname Turenge. The COVID name being used by the supposed
honeymooning couple, Alain and Dominique. Why would these French sailors have a receipt issued to people they swore they'd never met? Soon after this, the police find in a notebook a handwritten entry in French referring to a known rendezvous point with the French couple with the surname Tarenge
next to it. Bingo. But too late. The next 10 days bring more gutting findings. The samples from the yacht's bilge returned positive for high explosives. The passport used by the Ouvea's crew were confirmed to be false. And a clever use of new laser technology by the police's fingerprint expert found
an indisputable connection between the honeymooning couple and and the Ouvea crew.
Chris Martin: And he found Sophie's fingerprint on another document from the Ouvea There's a definite connection between now the Ouvea and the Turenge couple in Auckland.
Richard Baker: Sophie was the cover name used by French agent Dominique Prieur. A postcard found on board the yacht also revealed the Auckland address where the French agent Christine Cabon was staying during her infiltration of Greenpeace in the months before the Rainbow warrior bombing. That 2pm deadline set by
Australia is proving a really bad call.
Chris Martin: But we needed time, and time wasn't our friend.
Richard Baker: And I'm wondering whether Australia really was either. Next time on, Spies on Norfolk Island.
Marco De Jong: I think New Zealand being the good cause cop to Australia's bad cop. Ours is a process of damage containment.
David Robie: They could have just said, look, in these circumstances, we'll let you have the maritime surveillance satellite, data. But they didn't. It existed. It had been cut off. And they were happy to just leave us high out to dry.
Maurice Witham: In the afternoon, we heard a transmission from the Ouvea to a place in France, saying that they caught a cold in Norfolk island and they needed assistance.
