France Innocent Agents

At 9:30 one evening early last week, a neatly groomed 65-year-old man emerged from his office at 72 Rue de Varenne on Paris' Left Bank, climbed into his Peugeot and was driven 150 yards to No. 57, the Matignon palace. There he was quickly escorted to a second-floor office, where, on a Louis XV desk, in front of Premier Laurent Fabius, he placed a folder containing 29 typewritten pages. After a 20-minute conversation, the man left, and the Premier began studying the document. The 17-day labor of Bernard Tricot, Charles de Gaulle's former chief of staff, was finished.

When it was made public the next day, the eagerly awaited government-ordered Tricot report on what has become known as l'affaire Greenpeace answered some questions but left others as tantalizingly mysterious as ever. All through the summer, Paris papers and French politicians had speculated endlessly about whether the government was responsible for the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, the flagship of the environmental group Greenpeace, in Auckland harbor in New Zealand on July 10. Tricot's conclusion: "Everything I have seen and heard gives me the certitude that at the government level there was no decision aimed at damaging the Rainbow Warrior."

The report admitted 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."

Seven French agents had been sent to keep the Rainbow Warrior under surveillance before it set out on its protest mission, the report said. Two of them, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, are being held in custody in New Zealand on charges of murder and arson. Three other agents, all men, were identified by the report as crew members of the Ouvea, a chartered yacht spotted in New Zealand waters shortly before the explosion. The fact that Mafart and the Ouvea crew members were all experts in underwater demolition raised new suspicions. Alain Madelin, a rightist member of the French Assembly, spoke for many doubters when he bluntly questioned "the need to dispatch frogmen to take photographs."

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."