A SPY STORY

On July 10, the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior was sunk by an explosion, with the loss of one life, in Auckland harbor, New Zealand. The ship was allegedly sabotaged by French secret agents, for it was on its way to disrupt French nuclear weapon tests in the Pacific. A French couple has been arrested and identified as officers of the DGSE, the French secret service; both were trained in combat diving. They are to be tried in November. Another group of French agents was in Auckland at about the same time, but no evidence against them was found.

A preliminary report by Bernard Tricot, an old de Gaulle adviser appointed by the French government to investigate, was dismissed as "too transparent to be a whitewash" by New Zealand's prime minister David Lange, a Willy-Brandt-type socialist who is all for freedom provided others dirty their hands with its defense (he banned nuclear-powered ships of the US Navy from New Zealand harbors). His lie was widely repeated by the US press, but in fact, the Tricot report drew no conclusions other than to recommend a full-fledged investigation (which is now underway); it toyed with various theories and in no way discredited the possibility that it might indeed have been a botched DGSE operation.

But it did not deal with three questions of elementary common sense: 1) Why would the French take such an enormous risk for such a minuscule benefit? 2) Why does everything, including even a trail of French cigarette butts from the crime, point so super-neatly to the French? 3) Who tipped off the New Zealanders on the presence of two groups of secret agents who (says the Tricot report) did not even know about each other?

If the French did do it, on their own and without Soviet manipulation, it is a sorry landmark in Western attitudes. Two decades ago, the French navy would have closed off the space needed to test whatever national defense required, and if any Greenpunks approached to interfere with government's only legitimate function, they would have openly blown them to the Eternal Wilderness Grounds.