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I. The Volunteer

On April 24, 1985, the New Zealand office of Greenpeace received a telephone call from a woman named Frédérique Bonlieu. She had just arrived in Auckland, she said in broken English, and she wanted to volunteer. Elaine Shaw, a local director, welcomed the call. She had already received a letter of recommendation from a trusted associate who’d met Bonlieu in Paris in January, and she needed help. 1985 was going to be a big year for Greenpeace in the South Pacific.

During the month Bonlieu volunteered, she folded newsletters, stuffed envelopes, and occasionally helped with translation. But she spent much of her time in the Auckland office asking everyone who came in if they spoke French. Her English was terrible, she explained, though New Zealand police later came to believe she was in fact fluent. She seemed lonely, Shaw thought, and eager for any conversation, even though conversations often went badly: She openly supported French colonialism in Polynesia, very much not the position of anyone else in the office, and when challenged, she told them the issues were simply too complex for them to understand.

Though Bonlieu’s snootiness often turned off the women in the Greenpeace office, in other respects she fit right in: Like many of her compatriots, she was young, down at the heels, and a lesbian, and she acted proud to be affiliated with this small environmental organization that had achieved real results. Greenpeace was famous for its derring-do, and for years had been a thorn in the side of whalers, seal hunters, and in particular the French navy, who objected to protest of its government’s nuclear weapons testing. One time a Greenpeace member captured photographs of French sailors boarding their boat and savagely beating Greenpeace’s chairman, David McTaggart; as officials pounded on the cabin hatchway to confiscate the camera, the activist inserted the film roll into her vagina and smuggled it off the ship. The photos were a sensation, humiliating the French government and leading it to abandon atmospheric nuclear testing in the region.

Greenpeace’s ship the Rainbow Warrior served as the base for attention-getting actions across the world’s oceans. Crew members plowed through ice, buzzed vessels attempting to dump nuclear waste, dodged harpoons, and spent almost a week in a Siberian prison. In 1980, the Warrior was seized by the Spanish navy, who removed a thrust bearing from the propeller shaft and held the ship for $142,000 bail. Greenpeace members, pretending to be drunk, smuggled a 120-pound replacement bearing onto the ship by disguising it as a load of beer, then sailed the boat out of the Spanish base at El Ferrol under cover of darkness.

In 1985, Greenpeace’s plans were more ambitious than ever, and the Rainbow Warrior was at the heart of them. The ship would be the linchpin of the Year of the Pacific, a slate of protest and rescue actions meant to highlight the dangers and injustices of nuclear weapons testing by world powers on the tiny, impoverished islands of the world. As Bonlieu toiled away in Auckland, Warrior crew members were moving a community of cancer-stricken Marshall Islanders, ignored by the American government that had irradiated their atoll, to a new home. Soon the Warrior would arrive in the friendly nation of New Zealand to prepare for a dangerous and headline-making mission to French Polynesia. Bonlieu and her office mates were working to support this planned action at Moruroa, where the Rainbow Warrior would lead a convoy of ships to call attention to the lasting damage done by French nuclear testing—still conducted underground and underwater—to the fragile atoll. For maximum newsworthiness, the flotilla was scheduled for the 40th anniversary of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bonlieu was in New Zealand, she told her new compatriots, to write essays about Greenpeace’s work for French journals, and to that end she interviewed the organizer of the upcoming flotilla, asking him exactly when the boats would arrive in Auckland and where they would berth. She fielded personal phone calls in the office, chattering away with friends who she said were about to visit New Zealand, drawing maps of Auckland for them. She spent a weekend with other volunteers in the Coromandel Peninsula, just across the water from Auckland, and took photograph after photograph of the coastline. One afternoon she asked a co-worker to call a dive shop for her because she worried her English was not up to the task. Bonlieu was glad to hear that the shop could lend out scuba tanks but disappointed that it had no inflatable boats available for rent.

So hierarchy-free was the office that she had access to anyone and anything she wanted, which came in handy, because Bonlieu’s real name was Christine Cabon, and she was a spy. She’d been sent to infiltrate Greenpeace—a task about as challenging, one longtime member joked, “as infiltrating the YMCA.” Cabon was just the first of as many as 13 agents in the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure—the intelligence and espionage service of the French government—who would slip into New Zealand over the next three months, perpetrators of a covert operation on friendly soil. The DGSE’s goal was to stop Greenpeace’s actions in the South Pacific by attacking its flagship.

Opération Satanique would, in some respects, succeed: The Rainbow Warrior would never lead a flotilla to protest French nuclear testing. Instead, it would become the center of one of the most sensational crimes and investigations in the history of New Zealand, with an outcome watched closely by a furious public—a scandal largely forgotten outside the country but still painful there. It’s a tale of heroism and tragedy, of bungled spycraft and sharp police work, of a mystery solved but justice diverted. Now, 40 years later, as Greenpeace’s very existence is threatened once again—this time by a shocking $660 million judgment in a North Dakota courtroom—it’s a blunt warning of the lengths to which foes of the environmental movement will go to crush dissent.

II. Operation Exodus

The Rainbow Warrior’s journey began 30 years earlier, as the Sir William Hardy, a 131-foot research vessel commissioned by the British government. Greenpeace purchased the ship in 1977 with a £40,000 grant from the World Wildlife Fund. In 1985, as the Year of the Pacific approached, the ship’s captain was Peter Willcox, a lifelong seaman and conscientious objector from Vietnam who’d devoted his career to environmental action on the oceans. It was Willcox who, exasperated by both the expense and the optics of an environmental organization spending thousands of dollars on diesel fuel, oversaw a $110,000 refitting in the port of Jacksonville to convert the trawler to sail, installing two towering steel masts and adding 20 tons of concrete ballast to offset their weight.

Willcox was thrilled to test out the new sails as the Warrior headed from Florida into the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, and southwest toward the South Pacific. “The boat barely sailed to windward, but off wind and reaching, it was superb,” he recalled to me. “The trip from Panama to Hawaii was mostly motoring because there wasn’t much wind. But then from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands, I think we sailed almost the entire way.”

Though Greenpeace was scrappy and underfunded, the crew of the Rainbow Warrior wasn’t a bunch of hippie know-nothings. In fact, said Bunny McDiarmid—then a 28-year-old deckhand sailing her first mission on the Warrior—they were hippies who happened to be very skilled at their jobs. Many had spent years on merchant ships before signing on to Greenpeace. “Peter, our skipper, was exceptionally good,” she told me. “We had three really competent engineers. They might have trained in a mercantile or other type of marine institution, but they wanted to put their skills to work for a greater cause.”

The 1985 itinerary for the Warrior and its international crew of 11 was to culminate in the ship leading that protest flotilla to the French island of Moruroa. But the first of the summer’s actions was Operation Exodus, a mission that demonstrated the depth of Greenpeace’s commitment not only to the environment but to the people forced to deal with the consequences of its despoilment. Operation Exodus was an enormous undertaking, one that was profoundly meaningful to the crew because, as McDiarmid said, “it wasn’t about weapons and technology and missile silos. These were human beings.”

The operation concerned a 50-mile-wide atoll, Rongelap Island, in the Marshall Islands. Its residents were given no warning before March 1, 1954, when a giant mushroom cloud appeared in the west: the United States’ 15-megaton hydrogen bomb Castle Bravo, 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, tested on Bikini Atoll, less than 100 miles away.

Journalist David Robie chronicled the stories that Rongelapese told him about that day in his book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. A hot wind tore through the village, blowing out the thatched roofs of most houses. And then the snow began to fall, tiny flakes of ash, pulverized radioactive coral blown 25 miles into the air. Children played with the snow. Adults tasted it. When storms came later in the day, the snow mixed with rainwater in the island’s catchment tanks. “It was dark yellow, sometimes black,” one islander told Robie. “But people drank it anyway.”

To fully chronicle the ordeal the people of Rongelap went through in the years since the United States deliberately poisoned them would require an entire book. The day after the explosion, islanders suffered vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, severe burns. Two days after the explosion, the American military evacuated everyone, telling them to bring nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Three years later, the Americans told them they could return. No cleanup was ever undertaken on Rongelap. Department of Energy scientists visited yearly, always bringing in their own food. “The habitation of these people on the island,” one Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist wrote in a 1957 report, “will afford the most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.” And it did: Nearly everyone on the island the day of the explosion was, eventually, diagnosed with cancer. Seventy-seven percent of islanders who were younger than 15 in 1954 would one day undergo thyroid surgery. Infants were born without skeletons—“jellyfish babies”—or with other birth defects.

By 1985, the community’s senator in the Marshall Islands’ parliament, Jeton Anjain, was desperate. The United States had paid some reparations but had still not cleaned up the island—just told islanders to avoid fishing on the north side of the lagoon. Anjain, whose nephew Lekoj Anjain had died of leukemia at age 18—the first official fatality from Castle Bravo—asked Greenpeace for help. “We want to move,” he told campaign director Steve Sawyer over the phone. “You’ve got a big boat. Can’t you help us?” And so the plans for Operation Exodus were set: The Rainbow Warrior would move the entire population of Rongelap 100 miles south, to the uninhabited island of Mejato.

On May 17, when the Warrior arrived at the village on Rongelap, no one knew quite what to expect. No supply boat had visited the island for six months; the only communication had been a scratchy phone call the night before. The crew was astonished at the beauty of the atoll, a postcard photo of South Seas paradise. The Rongelapese were as astonished, in their own way, to see the activists: For months their senator had told them a big boat was coming to move them off their island, but, Anjain said, “it wasn’t until they saw the Rainbow Warrior in their lagoon that they really believed me. They thought I might be bluffing.”

A group of women in floral dresses puttered out to meet the Warrior on a bum-bum, an inboard motorboat. Circling the larger ship, the women sang the Marshall Islands’ national anthem:

I love my home island, where I was born

I will never leave it

This is my home, my only home

And it is better that I die on it

And yet leaving their only home was exactly what they intended to do. The women held a banner aloft that explained why: We Love the Future of Our Kids. “It was quite moving,” McDiarmid said. “It was just this community saying thank you and welcome, and us being a bit blown away by the place and the people and the joy mixed with sadness.”

“We all thought it would be a big job,” Willcox said. “But when we got there and looked at what we were going to be moving, we were awestruck.” Many of the island’s 300-plus residents had already disassembled their ramshackle homes, and bundles of plywood, timber, and corrugated iron lay lashed on the beach.

Filling the Warrior with its first load took two days. One of the bum-bums stopped working immediately. The only U.S. food aid had come in the form of countless cans of salmon; soon, the Warrior crew was laughing in despair when yet another resident would produce a case to be loaded into the boat. They were unbearably heavy in the 100-degree heat.

All that cargo, plus the residents—many of them elderly, ailing, or pregnant—had to be lifted from a motorboat to the deck of the Warrior. At dusk on the second day, about 75 Rongelapese crowded the decks and cabins of the ship, many of them huddling under a tarp the ship’s first mate, Martini Gotjé, had strung up. They were surrounded by lashed-down piles of housing material, overstuffed bags, and trunks, many of them still bearing the logo of Brookhaven laboratory. Willcox eased the boat out of the lagoon by eyeball, then set a course to the south.

The Warrior dodged storms overnight and arrived at Mejato early in the morning. Unlike at calm Rongelap, where the Warrior could get as close as half a mile to shore, the water around Mejato was thick with coral and sported two visible shipwrecks to warn Willcox away. He anchored about 2 miles offshore in rough seas, from which spot unloading the ship was a difficult, dangerous ordeal.

By the end of that day it was clear everything needed to happen faster. Greenpeace had set aside only 10 days for the entire task. McDiarmid remembered just tossing bundles of plywood and timber into the surf and letting the tide carry it in to Mejato. The second round trip took place in seas so high that all 40 Rongelapese passengers got seasick, covering the decks with vomit. (David Robie and other accompanying journalists cleaned it up.) In the end it took four trips to move 304 islanders and more than 100 tons of cargo. As he left on the final trip, Gotjé looked at the concrete church with its little yard of whitewashed graves. Wrote the New Zealand journalist Michael King in his comprehensive book on the bombing: “It was still a beautiful place, he realized, as near to paradise as he had seen. But those were the only people who could stay there: the dead.”

And once the living got to Mejato, then what? “There was sweet fuck-all there,” McDiarmid said. Nearshore fishing was good, but there were no........

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