Original subtitles

In 1985, I was 25 years old.

On the night in question, I remember feeling absolutely shattered.

I'd been out drinking for five days and nights with all these detectives, and I

was pleased to get some sleep.

Two o'clock in the morning, phone rang.

It was my detective sergeant. He said, there's been an explosion on a boat. Can

you come in?

I'm like, oh, my gosh.

So I was called to Auckland Central Police Station.

The flagship of the environmental group Greenpeace was sunk today at the harbour

in Auckland, New Zealand.

One crew member was killed. There were two explosions on board the ship, and

police call them suspicious.

It became apparent we were dealing with a serious crime.

Police in New Zealand say it was a bomb which sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow

Warrior. They're treating the death of a crewman as murder.

Someone had been murdered.

The boat had been deliberately destroyed.

It started to wash over us. This was going to be one of the biggest police

inquiries of the century.

In New Zealand tonight, police are launching a major investigation into the

explosions aboard the Rainbow Warrior.

We consider this to be a scandal of the nuclear age.

This was no accident.

Somebody, somewhere, decided they wanted to blow up our boat.

Things like this just don't happen in New Zealand.

When you're powerful, you don't have to pay for your crimes.

Murderers can't go unpunished. They've got to be exposed.

have characters if you like almost like personalities and they have

smells as well you know how evocative smell is

well the warrior had that smell her deck had that smell in the heat when the tar

would be melting a bit between the seams of the planks

but she was not

just a boat that was tangible, she also carried the intangible too.

What we could do with her and what kind of hope she would carry and what kind

of, all of that was part of what the warrior was as well.

She was really, she was really a lovely ship.

1985 was our year of protesting nuclear testing in the Pacific.

We were eager to go out and try to change the world to someplace better.

But before we took the Warrior halfway across the world, we found ourselves in

Jacksonville, Florida.

We had to get the Warrior ready to take on this campaign.

We were turning the Warrior into a sailing boat.

We had to put two masks on her.

It was this really long, huge bit of steel that they were picking up with a

crane.

And we had put Rosemary and Danster Hooley around the collar and everything

before we dropped it onto the deck just to make sure she was going to, you know,

have the right mojo to carry us across the ocean.

Doing this work on the warrior.

It was what joined us at the hip as a crew, making her a boat that we would

sail together.

She was a North Sea trawler, and that's like saying she was built like a tank.

You couldn't find a better boat to send a bunch of crazy hippies out with in the

ocean.

The warrior was a place of good energy.

Everybody was there because they wanted to be.

They were there because they believed in what Greenpeace was trying to do.

Martini was the first mate.

He looked a little bit like Keith Richards.

Davy Edwards was the first engineer.

Hannah Sorensen was the second engineer.

She already had a lot of history with Greenpeace.

Just a beautiful worker.

Hank Hasen was the third engineer.

Hank and I were already a couple when we joined the Warrior.

And then there was Pete, one of Greenpeace's best skippers.

And then we had a photographer.

Fernando Pereira was a wonderful laid-back guy, brilliant photographer.

We had a darkroom on board, which was just really a cupboard.

And he would be in there developing the photograph as we were going.

That was part of the way of getting the story out there.

And then we had Deccan's Grace O'Sullivan from Ireland, Andy Biederman,

a Swiss doctor, and there was Bunny McDermott.

She was a hard-working crew member.

When I was in my 20s, I was traveling around the U.S.

trying to figure out how to explain the world to myself.

You know, I liked music, I liked dancing, but what was my role and

purpose in being in the world?

And then I fell in love.

Hank and I, we met in New Orleans.

We both had, I think, quite a strong sense of what was fair and unfair.

And then one day, we ran into a friend.

He was telling us about the Warrior and what the Warrior was going to be doing

and we thought, oh my God, that sounds wonderful.

It was going to do the anti-nuclear campaign through the Pacific, which is

where I was from.

That's how I ended up on the Warrior for my first ever Greenpeace campaign.

On the Warrior in 85, we were going to go to the Marshall Ions, where the U.S.

tested nuclear bombs for many, many years.

In less than a minute, you will see the most powerful explosion ever witnessed

by human eyes.

The U.S. started nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1946.

They tested 67 nuclear bombs.

Some of them larger than the ones that blew apart Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the

Second World War.

Five, four, three, two, one.

And they chose a place that they thought that nobody would care about.

And that was the Marshall Islands.

The U.S. government told the Marshallese that it was for the good of all mankind.

They said it was safe to detonate these horrendous things out in the middle of

nowhere, but it's not out in the middle of nowhere for the people who live in

the Pacific Islands.

In 1985.

The testing in the Marshall Islands was over.

But the legacy of those tests, the contamination of both the people and the

land, was still very much alive.

There was one test called Bravo in 1954.

The nuclear fallout.

Like all the stuff that got sucked up in the explosion.

The wind blew it all on these inhabited islands.

One of the inhabited islands was Rongelap.

The tremendous yield resulted in a serious fallout situation on Rigelap

Atoll.

These people.

They were like guinea pigs, basically.

. .

.

. .

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

The U.S. were awarded the Marshall Islands after the Second World War

to look after.

And what they did was set up a nuclear testing program and bomb the shit out of

people and then take no responsibility for what they did to them except to

study them.

The Marshallese caught by fallout got 175 wrenchings of radiation.

These are fishing people, savages by our standards.

So a cross-section was brought to Chicago for testing. The first was John,

the mayor of Rongelap Atoll.

We did not know the extent of the damage that was done by the nuclear testing in

1954 until recently.

From the beginning, the United States has been telling these people that there

is nothing wrong.

They can cover up the wrong thing they did.

John, as we said, is a savage, but a happy, amenable savage.

The Iron Room.

is a radiation detector for human beings.

One dot, one gamma ray.

If we are okay, why are they coming twice a year to monitor our health?

We know something is wrong.

Even though we love this small island.

It is highly contaminated by radioactivity.

Every time I ask for assistance from the American government,

seeking a better place for my people, I have

never get any assistance.

So we got in contact with the people of the Greenpeace organization.

In 1985, the Rongelap Islanders appealed to Greenpeace to move them off

Rongelap to another atoll.

So of course we agreed making their story heard was important

to all of us.

We wanted to get press involved, and so we invited journalists

to come with us.

I had written about Greenpeace before, so I signed up.

But this was perhaps the most ambitious thing they had ever done, and it was a

huge risk.

They were going to go and interfere with American affairs on a completely

contaminated island.

I became Secretary of State for Defence in January of 1983 and remained in that

position until 1986.

I was answerable to the Cabinet for the policies of the nation's defence.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Prime Minister.

At that time particularly, nuclear deterrence was essential.

We face in the Soviet Union...

A power whose declared aim is to bury Western civilization.

In the 1980s, the USSR was a very real threat.

The Russians had deployed a modernized nuclear deterrent system in large parts

of Europe.

There was no doubt whatsoever that democracy did need defending.

The appropriate response was for us to have an equivalent of deterrence, which

took the form of the American cruise missile system.

Based upon the partnership with America, our capability was real and up-to-date

and effective.

The cost of keeping tyranny at bay is high, but it must be paid.

Greenpeace? Oh, of course. We all knew about Greenpeace. And I think some of us

might have felt that there was a sort of legitimacy about the arguments they were

deploying.

But we might have hesitated about the techniques that they adopted.

People thought we were crazy.

This is pre-internet, pre-mobile phones.

We were doing something about issues rather than just talking.

Doing nothing is part of the problem.

We didn't care who we angered.

We swung right in front of the harpoon. Whale-killing boat stopped dead in its

tracks.

Greenpeace was notified that the Rainbow Warrior could be arrested if she was

found in Spanish waters.

I mean, I've been arrested about a dozen times.

And I was not willing to stay home and watch the world go to hell.

Nuclear weight tipped overboard by a British ship.

Corporations and governments were always threatening them.

And they were just putting up two fingers and getting on with it.

That meant they had a lot of enemies.

I don't think any of us were worried about safety, but

we were in it to live, not to die.

sailing across the Pacific as an American, thinking about what we had

done.

The role the U.S. government played there, for me, the sense of

responsibility was profound.

I grew up in Connecticut, on the water.

My family were sailors.

There was a time when I might have become a professional yacht racer but i

was number one in the draft lottery in the 1970s i was expected to go to

vietnam to fight but vietnam war is nothing i wanted to get involved with

and i was the ceo conscientious objector wasn't going to happen

i read about greenpeace in a book and i just fell in love with it i fell in love

with

sailing for a purpose.

And so I joined in 1981.

I was told they would take me on as a possible deckhand.

Within three months, I was captain of the boat, and I never wanted to get up.

Sailing into Rongelap was quite extraordinary.

Because it is extraordinarily beautiful.

And you know, you can't see nuclear contamination.

We arrived on the beach.

They were singing to us, welcoming us to Rongelap.

It felt warm.

and welcoming, and kind of sad, too.

They were sad.

It was hard for them.

You know, they were leaving their home, their ancestral land.

When we first arrived, we were just shocked by realizing what we had

volunteered to do, taking 350 people and their housing.

across the open ocean to another atoll.

That's a huge operation.

We loaded the warrior to the gunnels.

It was unbelievable how much we put on that boat.

We also had all these plastic buckets on board, and I remember having a fight

with... Martini, the first mate, when we left Jacksonville, Florida, because we

were given all these plastic buckets there and I was being all righteous

about, no, we cannot take plastic to the Pacific.

And he was like, load the buckets, Bunny. I'm the first mate. Like, put

them on board. And I go, OK, we're loading the buckets.

And I was so grateful because some of the Rongelap people got really seasick.

So those buckets came in really handy, just dishing them out all over the

place. Thank God he's the first mate, not me.

We became aware that some of their children were quite ill as a result of

the radiation.

It was frightening to discover every person on Rangalap had a scar on their

throat where their thyroid had been taken out.

I think we actually did four trips.

It was 11 days of us going backwards and forwards all the time.

Fernando, our photographer, he took lots and lots of photos.

He was a wonderful photographer.

The island we moved them to was an island called Majato.

It was about 150, 180 miles away from their contaminated atoll.

No other community lived there.

So they could stay intact as a community.

But there was also a reason why there was no community living on there.

It wasn't great for growing and wasn't great for fishing either.

But it wasn't contaminated.

And we got them there and we got them, all their stuff landed.

And that's where they sit today.

I had never experienced anything like that before in my life.

It affected us all, I think, to see

What had happened to these people?

It wasn't so much as a political event as just helping a group of people out.

It was really one of the best things I ever did in Greenpeace, for sure.

That was quite... hard to say goodbye to them.

But we had a campaign that we were on, and another part of the Pacific, nuclear

testing, was still going on.

That summer, the French were going to conduct a nuclear test out in French

Polynesia.

After we'd moved the Rongelap people, it certainly made us ever more determined

to do whatever we could to stop that from happening.

hidden in the vast expanse of the South Pacific Ocean.

Murowa is situated on the outward reaches of an area known as French

Polynesia, a cluster of tiny Pacific islands under the colonial rule of the

government of France.

The French had been nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific since the mid

-60s. They mostly tested at Murowa Atoll in French Polynesia.

And they tested the buff ground until the early 70s.

And then they started doing underground nuclear tests.

Holes were bored underneath the center of the atoll, deep into the coral.

And that's where they set off their bombs.

And of course, coral shatters very easily.

The explosions caused cracks in the reefs.

It was widely believed that all these cracks were letting the radioactivity

out.

The French were endangering the health of the Polynesians.

But of course, the French said it was perfectly safe.

They were still testing when other people had given up.

I was in the army when the first French nuclear tests took place in the Sahara.

Some of them almost got contaminated because I knew they were in the Sahara.

And unfortunately, or fortunately, fortunately for the nuclear capacities

of France, unfortunately for the French energy policy, it was decided to conduct

submarine tests, or at least in areas where we lived, where we could not live.

That's how it was chosen.

The Warriors

of

the Rainbow, heroes of many famous campaigns, are now in Auckland on a new

campaign to try to stop French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

So the plan was that we'd be in New Zealand for about two weeks so that we

could resupply and then we'd leave for Muroroa.

Now, Bunny, I think you're the only Kiwi member of this crew. What's it been

like, the trip? You haven't got bored or desperate?

No, not yet.

Are you going back to Muroroa? Yes.

Well, not going back. It'll be the first time I've been there.

Our plans were to stop them from testing.

And we were going to do that by sailing into Moreroa.

We were going to go into territorial waters without permission and get as

close as we could to the nuclear testing site.

So they would be too nervous to test while we were there, or they would have

to remove us. But this was a military base, which was off limits.

We are ready to be arrested.

But we also had the capacity to take photographs, send them out and tell

a story about what was going on, and then add that to the opposition that we

were trying to build globally with others to drive more nuclear

disarmament.

for the abolition of nuclear weapons was very largely run by people on the

left of politics.

That's not to say that it was exclusively of the left. The

organisations and the leaders of the campaign were all

associated with left-wing organisations.

I have not the slightest doubt that there were people who were sympathisers

with the communist cause.

I was, at that time, a junior minister in the Foreign Office.

I was given responsibility for our relations with the Soviet Union and

Eastern Europe, all the communist countries.

People really did believe that Greenpeace were infiltrated by the KGB.

Well, they might very well have been. Of course they would want to encourage

organisations of that kind. It was a very tense period.

The people who would get most satisfaction if Greenpeace had had its

way... would have been the guy sitting in the Kremlin.

Yeah, that's a factor that can never be ignored.

I don't have the information as to who was a Soviet student, who was not, but

I'm sure they existed.

I mean, infiltrating Greenpeace is like trying to infiltrate the YMCA.

But we weren't protesting anything that was against the U.S. or against France

or that wasn't against Russia.

I mean, they had a perfectly legitimate right to make their views known.

But from the government's point of view, they'd obviously created problems of a

kind that we could well do without.

That night, the sun sets about 5.30 in the afternoon.

Our campaign manager, it was his birthday that night, so we had a party.

We all sang him happy birthday and had a piece of cake, some wine,

and then danced.

People just burned off steam.

Everyone loved dancing, loved music, yeah.

It was fun.

People were really excited about the next stage of the campaign.

We were eager to go out and try to change the world.

Sometimes change can happen when you least expect it.

Hank and I left around 10 o'clock.

We were going to stay with my parents that night.

The party, it went on and on.

Some of the crew members, they went off into town that night.

I went to bed at 10 o'clock.

I hanged my glasses up on the bookshelf that was right there, and they stayed

there through any kind of weather.

I went to sleep, feeling like there was not a problem in the world.

All of a sudden, I was awake.

My first thought was, have we hit somebody? Is it my fault?

I looked out my forward porthole.

I could see the lights of the dock, which meant we were tied to it.

And I lay back down, relieved.

Then I realized I could hear the generators had gone off.

Something's not right.

So that's when I got up.

Everything in my room was upside down.

My glasses were gone.

Ten meters down the hall, there's the engine room door.

That's where I saw Davey looking at the water rising.

Then I realized that that space was now underwater, and that was full of people.

Maybe 15 people were sleeping back there.

And then the second explosion happened.

The whole boat jumped up.

There's really something bad going on.

So that's when I shout, abandon ship.

We have to get people out of here.

I crawled up on the dock and stood there looking at the boat sinking into the

water.

The whole boat sank in 40 seconds.

As a captain, your biggest concern is the safety of the crew.

When I was standing there on the dock, I realized Hannah and Fernando, they were

missing.

And I thought, Fernando always goes into town.

But Hannah...

She never went off the ship at night.

She was one of the people who just didn't go out partying.

The phone rang around 2 o'clock in the morning, and it was

Martini calling.

He told us that the boat had sunk.

It wasn't believable.

And so we both went straight down to the harbour.

It was dark still, but we could see the warrior laid

on her side against the dock.

That's the only thing I remember of seeing her.

At this point, we're just stumbling along in the dark.

We were worried and upset about Hannah.

As second engineer, she would have gone down and been checking something.

That's what we were convinced of.

We shined a light down into the engine room, and

all we saw was thick, greasy black water six feet from the surface.

Figured my chances of jumping down 10 feet into freezing water, finding scuba

gear and going down into a cabin where I might find somebody, they were just

not very high.

And I chickened out.

I wished I had tried, but I didn't.

She was just a real infectious, happy young woman.

Brilliant and beautiful.

It was just devastating to think that she was gone.

And about 10 minutes later, the Ockham police showed up.

Everybody was taken across to the police station that was right across the

street.

And that's where I found Hannah.

She had gone off for a walk, which we were incredibly

glad for.

I've never been that relieved.

And I put my arm around her, and we walked back into the rest of the crew.

And that's when Davey came up to me and said, Fernando's down there.

He didn't go out into town that night, and he was missing.

Hank and I, we went straight away to where the crew were staying to find out

from them what was going on.

They told us there was a strong possibility we'd lost Fernando.

Police divers came.

Of course, we spilled a whole shipload of fuel into Auckland Harbour.

So much they couldn't get down through the fuel.

When the Navy dive team came three hours later, they were able to get through it

and find Fernando dead in his cabin.

And they brought him up out of the water.

There was stuff coming out of his mouth from the decomposition of the lungs.

It was all so unreal at that point.

I was pretty stunned.

I mean, everybody was just disbelieving that

that happened and that he was gone.

And we were just realizing that we had lost one of us.

You know, and not knowing why or how.

After the first bomb, he went down to get his camera gear, of that I have no

doubt, and when he was down there, the second bomb went off, and that's what

trapped him in his cabin, and it flooded probably instantly.

Being a part of Greenpeace was something that he was willing to dedicate his life

to.

But he wasn't willing to give up his life for it.

Rainbow Warrior now lies sinking in New Zealand's Auckland Harbour after two

explosions on board.

Two explosions killed one crewman. Police said no cause has been

determined.

In the morning, everyone was trying to figure out what could have happened.

Like, was it us?

Some of the crew members were concerned about the possibility of something in

the engine room.

And it could have exploded like that.

But I knew there was nothing that could have gone off like that on board.

I felt sure.

that it wasn't us.

That night, I was told that a boat had blown up in the harbour.

The initial police thoughts were that it perhaps had been a gas explosion on

board the boat.

However, they were putting together a team just in case it was

more serious.

Throughout the early hours of the morning, we got a chance to look at the

damage that had been caused to the boat.

It became apparent that it wasn't a simple gas explosion.

One of the divers came up.

I was standing right there when he did.

He said, all the plates are going angled in.

That indicates an explosion.

occurred from the outside of the boat.

After that, their attitude changed significantly.

It became apparent we were dealing with a serious crime.

There was a hole the size of a truck on the side of the ship.

Bombs had actually been fitted to the hull and propeller.

The boat had been deliberately destroyed.

The next morning, things really started to ramp up into a full homicide inquiry.

The indications are that whoever planted such a device, and we're assuming they

did, that they did know what they were doing.

It started to wash over us just how serious this was.

We never had a crime like that.

We had a phone call to say, those people you're looking for are in our office

now. We were like, keep them there.

So I was starting to feel pressure.

You could clearly see they were anything but tourists.

And gradually you start to wonder, who the hell am I dealing with here?