Tricot now says agents might have had orders

Press, 30 August 1985, Page 4

Tricot now says agents might have had orders

NZPA-AFP Paris Mr Bernard Tricot, author of the report clearing the French secret service of involvement in the Rainbow Warrior bombing, was quoted yesterday as theorising about whether three French agents might have done it under orders after all. In an interview with the newspaper, “Liberation,” Mr Tricot, a senior civil servant and former aide to the late President Charles de Gaulle, was asked about the three Intelligence agents who are wanted in New Zealand concerning the July 10 bombing of the vessel.

The three, Chief Petty Officer Roland Verge and Petty Officers J. M. Bartolo and Gerald Andries, are free in France. Mr Tricot met them during his investi-

gation for the report accepted on Tuesday by the French Government.

“Did they deceive me by concealing orders that had been given them? I don’t think so”, Mr Tricot said. “But if they did do the operation, it was almost certainly under orders. I cannot imagine their taking the initiative.”

Mr Tricot’s report exonerated the French Government and the foreign Intelligence agency, the General Directorate for External Security (D.G.S.E.), of involvement in the bombing. He said he did not know who had done the bombing.

He concluded that the mission of five French agents — the three men plus a man and a woman held in New Zealand — was merely to conduct surveil-

lance of Greenpeace in view of its upcoming protest campaign against French nuclear testing at Mururoa atoll near Tahiti. New Zealand has rejected the report as a cover-up. The three Frenchmen were crew of the Ouvea, a charter yacht they sailed to New Zealand from New Caledonia, a French Pacific territory.

In the interview with “Liberation,” Mr Tricot appeared to suggest that President Francois Mitterrand was unaware of the surveillance operation beforehand, although his military adviser was informed as part of budgeting for the operation. “The affair was not sufficiently important to go further than the director of the President’s military office

(General Jean Saulnier), Mr Tricot said.

He acknowledged the involvement in the Intelli-gence-gathering operation of Christine Cabon, a sixth French agent, who infiltrated Greenpeace in New Zealand. But he said he had not sought to interview her for his report. “This young woman had already undertaken missions in other parts of the world, and some people were not exactly fond of her as a result,” Mr Tricot said.

“She may have carried out infiltration operations in very dangerous movements, capable of taking brutal vengeance,” he said. “I thought, therefore, that if I tried to make her come in' from the cold, she would be exposed to great danger indeed.”