Landis Elementary teacher wins Billman Excellence in Teaching Award
'We only had languages from our freshman year to senior year and now they can start at a younger age,' Mejia told the Pharos-Tribune in 2022. 'They are becoming more affluent in the language, too.'
For her passion and hard work, the Cass County Community Foundation on Wednesday announced Mejia as the 2025 recipient of the Elizabeth A. Billman Excellence in Teaching Award during the end of school year awards at Landis.
Deanna Crispen, CCCF president & CEO, and Luke Gangloff, CCCF chairman, made the announcement and commended Mejia for her dedication to her students and their families, ability to create an equitable learning environment and her passion for teaching and community.
'Elizabeth Billman was an educator, administrator, mentor and role model for young women and teachers,' Crispen said. 'When we thought about ways to honor her legacy, this award, to encourage teachers early in their careers, was the result and we know Liz would be proud we are continuing her legacy through the award.'
Mejia, who teaches the second-grade Spanish portion of the Dual Language program, was nominated by her assistant principal, Ashley Gangloff.
'Karina forms genuine connections with her students, taking time to understand their backgrounds, their families, and what inspirers them to learn,' Gangloff said in her nomination. 'She creates a warm and welcoming classroom where all students feel valued and supported.'
Mejia just completed her fourth year as an educator at Landis. She is the fifth recipient of the award.
The Excellence in Teaching Award was established in 2021 to honor the long legacy of Billman, who served on the Board of Directors of the Cass County Community Foundation for 16 years, including two terms as chairman of the board of directors and was on the board of directors at the time of her passing.
Billman retired as principal at Thompson Elementary School, now known as Lewis Cass Elementary. She also taught in the Southeastern School Corporation, beginning her teaching career at Washington Township School. She was a member of the Lewis Cass Alumni Association where she received the Distinguished Service Award. In total, she served in the Southeastern School Corporation for 38 years.
Mejia was selected for the award from a pool of nominees — submitted by elementary building principals of kindergarten through sixth grade from all county schools — who most exemplify Billman's commitment to the students.
The award consists of a $500 stipend for the teacher for their classroom and a commemorative plaque. A permanent plaque is on display at the CCCF office to honor each year's recipient.
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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. 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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 breadfruit trees, no church, no school, and only one plywood structure to shield older islanders from the elements. Though the crew wanted to stay longer to help, the timetable was firm: The Rainbow Warrior was due at its next destination. (McDiarmid and her partner, third engineer Henk Haazen, would return a year later and stay for four months, helping rebuild and securing a replacement for the islanders' unreliable motorboats.) There was time for one day off, and that was it. That day off happened to be Fernando Pereira's 35th birthday. The easygoing Portuguese-born photographer, a father of two, had joined the ship in Hawaii, where at first he rubbed the tight-knit crew the wrong way. 'He was about as useful on deck as a left-handed monkey,' Willcox recalled. But his good nature, his willingness to work hard at Rongelap, and the onboard darkroom where he could develop beautiful color portraits that he presented as gifts—all these soon won him the friendship of his crewmates. He particularly appreciated his crewmate McDiarmid, who liked to play her saxophone in the ship's theater, right next to his darkroom. At his birthday party, everyone danced and drank late into the night. Pereira wore his gift from the crew, a T-shirt reading: 'RAINBOW WARRIOR REMOVALS INC: We move anything anywhere.' A week later, the Rainbow Warrior arrived in Auckland. It was a joyous occasion, the payoff of years of work by Elaine Shaw and the women of Greenpeace New Zealand. Members of Parliament visited the ship at Marsden Wharf to show their support, and a Māori delegation led a welcome ceremony. McDiarmid brought Haazen to the suburbs to meet her family, and other crew members took off to enjoy the city. On the evening of July 10, a young Frenchman visited the boat. A birthday party had just ended, and he was offered a piece of cake, chocolate with a jelly-bean rainbow arcing across the frosting. The young man asked after the night's schedule and when the meeting going on belowdecks—captains of all the flotilla ships planning the sailing schedule—might be over. 'I hope you make it to Moruroa,' he said as he walked away. Around 11 p.m., the meeting broke up. While others stayed up for one more drink, Willcox went to bed. He'd barely fallen asleep when he suddenly awoke in the dark. His cabin was still swaying from a huge jolt. Had he collided with another ship? After months sailing across the vast, empty Pacific, it had been unnerving to navigate into bustling Auckland Harbour, dodging ferries and fishing boats. But his ship, he remembered, was moored at Marsden Wharf. He'd just gone to bed in his cabin. So if there had been a collision, it wasn't his fault. But what had that sound been, the whump? It wasn't a typical noise aboard the Rainbow Warrior. Now that he thought about it, he didn't hear anything. Most worryingly, he didn't hear the sound that had filled belowdecks for the past three months at sea: the hum of the ship's generator. He reached for his glasses on the shelf where he kept them every night. They were gone. So were his clothes, which he remembered draping over the back of the chair by his bed. He found the tipped-over chair only when he tripped on it in the dark. His grasping fingers finally brushed a towel, which he wrapped around himself, stumbling into the hallway. Through the dim emergency lights, he could see his chief engineer, Davey Edwards, standing at the open engine room door. As Willcox approached, Edwards pointed down to the engine room. 'It's over,' he said in his Yorkshire accent. 'She's done with.' When Willcox looked down, he saw nothing but dark water filling the room, already just a few feet from the floor on which they were standing. 'Let's get everyone off the ship and onto the dock,' Willcox said, and padded aft in his bare feet. The Warrior had crew cabins at its rear, some of them below the waterline. He saw Martini Gotjé at the bottom of the stairs. Willcox had just asked if everybody had gotten out when the second bomb went off. It was as if the ship leaped underneath him. He stumbled but didn't fall down. Maybe this was when he lost his towel. 'Abandon ship!' he shouted. He hurried to the entrance to the ship's hold, where earlier that evening he'd led the rambunctious captains' meeting. Were they still down there? On his first step down the stairs, his foot splashed in frigid water. Where were his glasses? Where were his clothes? He ducked back into his cabin but couldn't find anything, and then he felt the ship roll to starboard and saw water pour through his cabin door. 'Abandon ship!' he shouted again, splashing up the steps to the top deck. The Warrior was already riding so low that he had to pull himself up onto the pier where his crew stood, shivering with shock, in the 50-degree air of midnight. Still naked, Willcox joined them there and started counting heads. Edwards grabbed him by the arm. 'Fernando's down there,' he said. The Rainbow Warrior hit the bottom of the harbor and learned against the dock, four-fifths submerged. When the Auckland police arrived, they asked Willcox, 'Are there any more bombs on board?' 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They had seen the mission 'harden' during planning, its goal evolving from simply preventing the Warrior from leaving Auckland to sinking the ship outright. In his butt-covering memoir Carnets secrets d'un nageur de combat, published in 1999, Mafart wrote of his astonishment when he learned that 'the higher-ups want, to use our term, 'heat and light.' In plain language: a big, spectacular explosion.' So when Mafart and Prieur were told that they were being sent to New Zealand—that they would be the agents responsible for recon and for getting the explosives to the dive team—both had apprehensions, they later claimed. 'I have a bad feeling about this,' Prieur wrote in her butt-covering memoir Agent secrète, published in 1995. 'But if you're going to refuse a mission, you're in the wrong profession. So I banish my dark thoughts and prepare with even more zeal, because this time, I'm in.' 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The Ouvéa carried four DGSE agents, a Zodiac inflatable boat, and—hidden in a second life raft—the explosives meant for the Rainbow Warrior. This was Opération Satanique's second team. Cabon may have made a mistake in telling the DGSE that the north of New Zealand was remote and unpopulated enough that the crew could go unnoticed. In fact, seemingly everyone in Northland heard immediately about the glamorous French yachtsmen taking a holiday cruise in the dead of winter. Parengarenga was far enough away from the nearest official port of entry, however, that the crew had days to remove and hide the explosives, the Zodiac, and anything else incriminating before customs officers had time to inspect the boat. Or perhaps the crew had no interest in remaining unnoticed. Over the following weeks, as the Ouvéa made its way down the coast from town to town, the sailors hung le Tricolore over their stern, posed for photos with new friends, and cut a romantic swath across Northland. One had a whirlwind romance with a police officer's wife. Another would later brag to a detective that he seduced eight women in seven days—a boast that would be borne out by investigation. And in a pizza restaurant in Whangārei, the sailors signed a visitors' guestbook, filling a page with their exploits on the Tasman Sea and along the coast. At the bottom, one added a postscript—'Peut-être y a t'il autre chose en NZ'—along with a doodle, which has been endlessly parsed in the decades since. It could be a person watching a TV. If you look at it just the right way, it could be the bottom half of a ship. The translation? 'Maybe there is something else in NZ.' The leader of the third team, Louis-Pierre Dillais, was also the commander of the entire operation. He arrived on June 23 and checked into an Auckland hotel. His two compatriots on the dive team, whose job was to attach the explosives to the Warrior's hull, were due to arrive on July 7, the same day the Rainbow Warrior would sail into port. The weeks leading up to that arrival were a fever of driving, secret meetings, phone calls from motels, and equipment transfers. The 'Turenges,' the Ouvéa crew, and Dillais crisscrossed Northland, meeting one another on remote rural roads, laying plans for the bombing. The explosives had to make their way to the Turenges and then to the dive team. So extensive was their travel that the yachtsmen, for example, put more than 1,000 miles on their rental car. On July 9, the Ouvéa departed from Whangārei, making a point to clear New Zealand customs before departure. 'See you soon, in Paris, where it's warmer!' they said to their fellow agents. By then the third team, most likely, was laying low in the Coromandel Peninsula town of Thames, a spot scoped out by Christine Cabon months before. Mafart and Prieur visited Thames on July 10, as did a young Frenchman named François Verlet—whose connection to the bombing has never been proved. But from Thames Verlet drove straight to Marsden Wharf, where he visited the Rainbow Warrior, ate a piece of cake, and ascertained the schedule for the evening. Within hours of that visit, he was on a flight to Tahiti. Around the same time, the third team launched from the Teal Park slipway near Auckland's container terminal. As the Zodiac motored into the harbor, Dillais carried fishing gear for cover. The divers, Jean Camas and Jean-Luc Kister, lay down in the boat, awkwardly wrestling into wet suits. About a kilometer from Marsden Wharf, the divers slipped into the water, explosives strapped to their backs. Guided by phosphorescent compasses strapped to their wrists, the divers reached the ship in just a few minutes. Per procedure, one surfaced long enough to positively identify the Rainbow Warrior. It couldn't have taken long: The day before, Bunny McDiarmid and the crew had repainted the rainbow and dove on the ship's bow. The divers clamped one bomb to the rudder, then another alongside the engine room. They activated the four-hour timers. Dillais was to pilot the Zodiac back to Teal Park to meet Mafart and Prieur, waiting in their campervan. For some reason—the police cited low tide; Mafart claimed the problem was fishermen at the pickup spot—Dillais motored past Teal Park heading east. The result was a comedy of errors as Dillais searched for a safe landing spot, the campervan tearing down unfamiliar roads in the dark trying to keep up with him. The missteps in this messy half hour would, in the end, undo all the careful preparation of the previous months. A fisherman on Tamaki Drive by Point Resolution watched the Zodiac approach, then immediately turn around once the lone pilot saw him. A cyclist on Ngapipi Bridge, a mile away, heard a splash underneath him—Dillais jettisoning the motor—then saw the Zodiac coast under the bridge into Hobson Bay. At the Auckland Outboard Boating Club, members were having a Wednesday-night drink when one of them noticed a Zodiac lying abandoned on the causeway. The men joked about who might claim the coveted craft, not often seen in New Zealand. They agreed that when the owner, wherever he was, returned, they'd warn him that you couldn't just leave an expensive boat out under the lights like that. The club had reported a number of burglaries in recent days, enough that each night, two members were posted on watch. It was those watchmen who came to the boathouse to report that they'd spotted a man in a waterproof jacket drag the Zodiac up the embankment. A campervan lurking in the parking lot had flashed its headlights at the pilot, and the driver had hurried out to help carry a bundle from the boat. As the campervan peeled away, the vigilant watchmen, certain they'd just witnessed a drug deal, wrote down the license plate. Mafart and Prieur slept that night in Thames. When they awoke, they learned from newspaper headlines—'Midnight Blasts Rip Peace Boat'—that their mission had killed a man. When she got home from a movie with friends, Rebecca Hayter noticed a blinking light on her answering machine. It was Judith, the accountant from Newmans rentals, where Hayter worked as a meet-and-greet girl. When Hayter called her back, a detective got on the phone. 'A few days ago, you dealt with a couple who had a broken windscreen,' he said. 'Do you remember them?' He asked her to please call him directly if the couple returned to her office. Hayter was just out of college. She drove a Volkswagen with a 'Nuclear Free New Zealand' bumper sticker but hadn't read anything about the Rainbow Warrior. The next morning, she got to Newmans early, and asked the other meet-and-greet girl, 'Do you remember the Turenges?' 'Yes,' the other woman said. 'They're sitting right over there.' They had just checked in, and when she'd asked how their holiday had been, they had responded simultaneously. Alain: 'Fine.' Sophie: 'Awful.' The investigation into the Rainbow Warrior sabotage remains to this day the biggest criminal inquiry in New Zealand history. At its peak, 70 officers were working the case, often around the clock; they took 400 witness statements and collected 1,000 exhibits. Prime Minister David Lange had promised that no resources would be spared, and they weren't: In an interview with a BBC documentary crew, a detective, chuckling, recalled that one day a brand-new photocopier and fax machine showed up at headquarters. It was as big as a table and wrapped in plastic. 'None of us knew how to work it, so it sat there for months,' he said. This enormous investigation focused almost immediately on the campervan spotted at the boating club. And it turned on an unthinkable error committed by Mafart and Prieur. Why did the spies return the campervan to Newmans? Anxious that they'd been identified, they tried to change their plane tickets out of the country; the best that Air New Zealand could do was put them on standby for a morning flight to Singapore. In his memoir, Alain Mafart stressed that he felt it made the most sense to behave as normal—if their names were known already, he reckoned, they'd be picked up at the airport anyway. And yet it is incomprehensible not only that they came to Newmans but that they tried to collect a $130 refund on the early return. And when Hayter told Alain that the manager who could sign the checks wasn't in just yet, and could he wait over there, please, the Turenges sat in the waiting room for a half hour or more. Hayter called the Auckland Central police office, setting off chaos. The officers who fielded her call scrambled into the parking garage, only to discover that neither had remembered his car keys. The attendant was washing a supervisor's brand-new Commodore; the officers commandeered it, yelling 'Big case! Big case!' Then they got stuck in traffic trying to get clear across town in the middle of Friday morning rush hour. Back at Newmans, Hayter was beside herself trying to stall Alain Turenge. By now employees with briefcases, obviously managers, had arrived for the day, and her excuses were wearing thin. Then a different male customer approached the desk. 'His shoes were so shiny he was obviously a detective,' Hayter told me. 'I just said, 'They're right behind you.' ' The next thing she knew, the office was filled with tall men in suits. They approached the Turenges, and Alain stood calmly to greet them. 'I always remember him flicking his trousers so they hung well,' Hayter said. 'It was a very debonair thing to do.' In retrospect, it was simply impossible for the French spies to fly under the radar on their mission. 'It's Nosy Parker New Zealand in the middle of winter,' said Bunny McDiarmid, the only Kiwi among the Warrior's crew. 'You notice small things that are out of the ordinary.' In their memoirs, Mafart and Prieur bemoaned that they hadn't understood how everyone they encountered would be watching them. 'An incredibly empty country,' Prieur bitterly called New Zealand, 'where somehow every tree seems to hide a local.' During the pair's final meeting with the Ouvéa crew, the agents had missed one another in a forest park in Topuni. The yachtsmen pulled over to ask two loggers for help, and one of the loggers noticed an improperly secured outboard motor in the back seat of the rental car. When the car sped out of the clearing, almost causing a crash, one logger—convinced, like the boating club watchmen, that the Frenchmen were drug dealers—wrote their license plate in the dust on the side of his van. Amazingly, when he called the police four days later, the number hadn't been washed off by the rain. Another Nosy Parker, another example of the French agents creating a memorable spectacle: This was how the crew of the Ouvéa came under suspicion. Their conduct over their weeks in New Zealand meant that there were no shortage of memories, hurt feelings, and even photographs of the sailors available to detectives. Feverish news coverage was now pointing the finger directly at France, and the political counselor at the French Embassy in Wellington did not delay in addressing the rumors with Gallic hauteur: 'The French government does not deal with opponents in such ways,' he said. The pair who still insisted they were the Turenges spent a day in separate interrogation rooms, where detectives tried to pick apart their story. The police released them for the evening but kept their passports, which they were endeavoring to confirm with Swiss authorities. Housed in a motel provided by the police, the pair stepped outside into the cold for conversations, clearly aware their room was bugged—but nevertheless placed one phone call to 'Uncle Émile,' their handler, in France. 'Calling Paris doesn't seem risky to us,' Prieur later wrote. 'The service's numbers are protected—or so I naively believed at the time.' Over the weekend, detectives continued to interrogate the pair. On Sunday, the evidence of their false passports came back from Interpol, and they were soon officially arrested on false documents charges. But there was more news: The Ouvéa had arrived at Norfolk Island, a territory of Australia. Nine officers jumped on an air force plane and flew the 600 miles to Norfolk, where three crew members were holed up in a motel. (The fourth had already departed for Sydney.) The sailors were taken into custody, but the clock was ticking: Officials in Canberra had decreed that barring the discovery of evidence that would allow extradition, they could hold the men for only 24 hours. The sailors had just endured a rough winter crossing and were almost as sleep deprived as the officers, many of whom had barely taken a break since the night of the bombing. A full day's interrogation, with the help of a French-English dictionary retrieved from a nearby school, couldn't get any of the spies to break. And though a forensics expert swabbed the interior of the yacht for explosives, there were no testing facilities on the island, said Allan Galbraith, the superintendent in charge of Operation Rainbow. 'We collected the samples, but there was no remote capability to actually find the evidence.' The New Zealand investigators got a few extra hours from local officials, but eventually they were forced to release the crew. The next morning, the Ouvéa was gone. 'That was a critical point, and that was one of the things we've regretted ever since,' Galbraith said. When I asked him if he'd been working the phones to Canberra to get someone in the Australian government to permit them to hold the crew longer, he chuckled. 'That was beyond my pay grade,' he said. In the end, it took nearly two weeks for the police to determine that documents on the yacht connected the Ouvéa to Cabon, Mafart, Prieur, and other DGSE agents—and for the forensics tests to reveal traces of explosives on the boat, probably from detonator cords. Warrants were finally issued and a New Zealand air force search plane sent out to locate the yacht; the pilots sparked a diplomatic incident when they flew over a French warship in New Caledonian waters. The searchers found a life raft but no sign of the Ouvéa or its crew. Years later, it would be revealed that the ship had been scuttled at sea and the crew picked up by the French nuclear submarine Rubis. After the bombing, the third team took the ferry to the South Island for a skiing holiday, hoping the furor would blow over. It did not. People they met on the slopes would joke, 'I hope you're not that lot who blew up that ship!' But unlike the first two teams, the third had covered its tracks with care. For years after the attack, there was no proof that there even was a third team. (Books written at the time speculated that Dillais had performed the dive alone, or that the Ouvéa had delayed its departure long enough for its crew to plant the bombs.) Only in 2015 did a joint investigation by TVNZ and the French news site Mediapart uncover the DGSE's Jean-Luc Kister, who confirmed the third team's existence, admitted that he had planted the bombs, and apologized for his actions. In late July, the third team flew back to France with little fuss. 'When the plane took off, we were relieved,' Kister told the BBC. 'But that doesn't mean we were proud, as you would be after a victory.' Mafart and Prieur were not so fortunate. They were charged with murder and confined to maximum-security prisons while awaiting trial. By now the police knew that they were DGSE agents, and that the French department of defense was covering up their connection. They'd discovered this in the most ridiculous of ways: Galbraith had asked France for information on the phone number the Turenges had called from the motel room after their arrest. French authorities told him the number did not exist, but when Galbraith called it himself he heard, on the other end, 'Allô?' It was a number designated, it turned out, to the DGSE. 'That really put the cat amongst the pigeons, as far as the French government was concerned,' said Maurice Witham, the investigation's second-in-command. All along the way, French intelligence underestimated the New Zealand police's capabilities. Four decades later, the police still seem amused and offended by it. 'They almost considered us a police force still on horseback,' Witham told me. Galbraith agreed: 'They made a major mistake when they thought they were dealing with a bunch of hicks from the sticks.' New Zealand officials feared that France would launch a raid to free the spies, but from Mafart and Prieur's perspective, they had been entirely hung out to dry—it even seemed to them that the DGSE was sharing information with the French press. Prieur's wedding photo somehow ended up on the cover of Paris Match, a gossip magazine. Indeed, it was the French media that dug most profitably into the case, sensing a scandal in the making. 'Once they were onto this, they were like terriers,' Galbraith said admiringly. Reporters descended upon La Piscine, as everyone called DGSE headquarters, located next to a public swimming pool in the 20th arrondissement. Opposition Gaullists in the DGSE were eager to blame François Mitterrand's Socialist government; Mitterrand's appointees scrambled to avoid the fallout; La Piscine sprang leak after leak. New Zealand police in Paris, stonewalled by French officials, found themselves translating the local newspapers and sending that information straight back to Auckland. On Aug. 8, Mitterrand, demanding 'justice at the highest level,' asked Bernard Tricot, once one of Charles de Gaulle's most trusted aides, to lead an inquiry into 'l'affaire Greenpeace.' Tricot interviewed DGSE officials and even met the Ouvéa crew in a secret location. One crew member later said he feared they were about to be killed. Yet Tricot's report, issued Aug. 20, was a farce. It contained numerous inaccuracies and concluded that the French government had not conspired to blow up the Rainbow Warrior, that DGSE agents were in New Zealand only for reconnaissance, and that there was no cover-up. Asked by journalists if he viewed the report as a whitewash, Lange, the voluble New Zealand prime minister, scoffed. 'No, it's not a whitewash, because it's so transparent,' he said. 'There's no chalk in the whitewash!' So outraged was the French public about the report that Tricot's daughter killed herself in early September, saying she had been 'badly affected' by her father's dishonor. A second investigation was ordered. On Sept. 19, Le Monde ran a front-page story asserting that Minister of Defense Charles Hernu had authorized the operation himself. The next day, Hernu resigned and the head of the DGSE was fired. On Sept. 22, Prime Minister Laurent Fabius stood in front of the assembled press and confirmed that DGSE agents had sunk the Rainbow Warrior. 'La vérité sur cette affaire est cruelle,' he said—'the truth is cruel.' No evidence ever appeared linking Mitterrand himself to Opération Satanique. Perhaps he didn't know, or perhaps no one was foolish enough to put it in writing. And despite Fabius' assurances to Lange that 'the guilty, whoever they may be, have to pay for this crime,' the French government showed no interest in producing any of its agents for trial. As journalist Michael King recounted, New Zealand's commissioner of police even tried a personal appeal to his French counterpart at that year's annual Interpol conference in Washington. The Frenchman would not even speak to him. All those agents are now presumably retired from the service or dead. Louis-Pierre Dillais spent many years as the president of arms manufacturer FNH, living comfortably in a wealthy D.C. suburb despite appeals from Greenpeace to extradite him. (Calls to his last known phone number went unanswered.) At the time, though, the case of the two agents New Zealand was able to capture, Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, was a sensation. Eighty press accreditations were awarded to foreign news outlets, including the New York Times, Reuters, Paris Match, Le Figaro, and Le Monde. An instructional press conference meant to explain the New Zealand legal system to out-of-towners began with a member of the Auckland Law Society asking if anyone in the audience didn't speak English. After a long pause, several voices said, 'Oui.' The French government was desperate to avoid the wall-to-wall coverage the trial promised and, through attorneys, was pressuring Mafart and Prieur to make a deal. Galbraith, for his part, was convinced the murder charge would stick when put in front of a New Zealand jury. 'Such was the mood in New Zealand at the time,' he said. But then the solicitor general, the senior nonpolitical law officer in the country, got involved, Galbraith said: 'There was a big toing and froing and meetings between the two parties over time, and he finally agreed that manslaughter was a more appropriate charge.' The head of the investigation feels differently about that now than he did at the time. 'It was a disappointment on one hand, but understandable on the other, because I do think in retrospect that they had a case,' Galbraith said. 'I don't think Mafart and Prieur were in a position to actually influence how the sabotage actually took place.' On Nov. 4, the defendants were transported by truck into the Auckland's old Supreme Court building and then brought into the courtroom from underground. Outside, TV crews stood at the ready and a comedian dressed as a gendarme sold 'genuine fake Swiss passports.' A group of Greenpeace supporters demonstrated in silence. To everyone's shock, the hearing was over in minutes. A deal had been struck. Mafart and Prieur pleaded guilty to manslaughter. At the sentencing hearing, Mafart's lawyer described him as an environmentalist who enjoyed swimming with, and photographing, whales. Greenpeace observers in the courtroom loudly scoffed at the assertion. Mafart and Prieur had confided in their attorneys that they hoped they might simply be deported; instead, they were sentenced to 10 years. The plea bargain satisfied no one. In New Zealand, the public was outraged that these spies had escaped trial, and murder charges. In France, public opinion was on the side of the agents, who had only, after all, been following orders. Mafart and Prieur reported to prison but would in the end serve less than a year, after France instituted export limits on New Zealand agricultural products at the beginning of 1986. 'As a tiny economy that depends entirely on its international trade, we were hostage to Europe,' recalled Fran Wilde, then one of the MPs who had visited the Rainbow Warrior before its sinking. Soon diplomats from both sides were secretly negotiating a deal. 'The French government were just putting so much pressure on New Zealand government,' Whitham recalled. 'I think that it was inevitable that the New Zealand government would fold.' France paid New Zealand $7 million, and New Zealand agreed to deport the spies to Hao Atoll in French Polynesia, where they were to spend three years on a military base. (France also paid Greenpeace $8 million, which they used to buy a new Rainbow Warrior, and paid reparations to Fernando Pererira's family in the Netherlands.) Their movements were restricted, but Prieur's husband, for example, could join her there. In her memoir, Prieur recalled a visit to Hao by France's new president, Jacques Chirac. When she asked if she might leave early, she wrote, Chirac, 'with a mischievous twinkle in his eye,' replied: 'Madame, there would need to be a serious reason, an event, to return you to France. A happy event, for example.' In May 1988, Prieur, pregnant, was flown back to Paris. Mafart's return preceded hers by six months; he suffered 'a serious stomach ailment.' Both agents were decorated and promoted within a few years of their return. Alain Mafart eventually became a wildlife photographer; years later, an unwitting Greenpeace staffer licensed one of his photos, and someone noticed the name just in time—but the organization had to pulp 40,000 calendars. 'They thought they could do whatever they liked and get away with it,' said Bunny McDiarmid. 'And actually, they did. There was no justice for Fernando.' In their memoirs, both Mafart and Prieur insisted that the point of the first bomb was to give the crew a warning, a chance to abandon ship before it sank. 'The entire operation had been planned down to the smallest detail so that there would be no casualties,' Mafart wrote. Peter Willcox doesn't buy it. 'They used massively more explosives than they needed to,' he told me. 'They blew a hole big enough to drive a car through in the side of the ship. I think they just didn't care.' At least one of the bombers now agrees that the attack was far out of scale with the actual threat. 'It was just like using boxing gloves in order to crush a mosquito,' Jean-Luc Kister told TVNZ. Four decades after the attack, those boxing gloves would come out again. On March 19, 2025, a North Dakota jury awarded Energy Transfer a judgment of more than $660 million in a lawsuit the oil pipeline company filed against Greenpeace. Energy Transfer had claimed damages of more than $300 million from what it said was Greenpeace's role in supporting protests against the company's Dakota Access Pipeline, an amount that the organization said would likely end its operations in the United States. The jury additionally awarded a quarter-million dollars for what it decided was defamation on Greenpeace's part, a judgment that 'will send a chill down the spine of any nonprofit who wants to get involved in any political protest,' one law professor said. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of this verdict, which Greenpeace says it intends to appeal: Greenpeace's seemingly limited involvement in the protests; the fact that the enormous trial was not moved to a venue better able to handle it; the jury members themselves, many of whom reportedly had ties to the oil industry. But what struck me in reading about the lawsuit were its resonances with 1985, and the French attack on the Rainbow Warrior. Of course, filing a lawsuit is not the same as planting a bomb on a ship. It's less stupid, for starters, and more diabolical. But both actions share a fundamental ruthlessness. In both cases, powerful entities, faced with protest and dissent, pursued the total destruction of their adversary—waging asymmetric war, their methods totally disproportionate to any actual danger posed to their interests. Forty years ago, a combination of anxiety and arrogance led to France's overreaction to the Rainbow Warrior. Willcox still sounds bewildered when asked why France feared him and his organization, which at the time boasted more than a million members but a paid staff of only 150. 'What could possibly be so intimidating that they would send a nuclear submarine, mind you, to pick up the people that scuttled the sailboat?' he asked. 'Why were they so scared?' As reporting at the time suggested, the Mitterrand administration feared that the nuclear issue might inflame the independence movement then kindling in its territories, particularly in New Caledonia, where violence was brewing between the Melanesian Kanaks and their French rulers. But France also still viewed itself as a superpower, and the South Pacific was the one place in the world where this remained true. The country's force de frappe, its nuclear strike force, was crucial to its political self-image, and those weapons required, France claimed, the South Seas testing. While even Greenpeace leaders acknowledged the 1985 protest would never seriously threaten nuclear tests on Moruroa, the government, it seemed, resented that anyone thought they knew better than La France how she should treat her possessions. Defense Minister Charles Hernu in particular held a grudge against David McTaggart and Greenpeace. Reports at the time suggested he was enraged by the idea that the protest flotilla might include Indigenous people in canoes landing on Moruroa—though Greenpeace had never seriously pursued that plan. The 1973 fiasco with the smuggled film had contributed to France's decision to move its nuclear testing underground. This time, it seemed, France was determined to not only to stop the Rainbow Warrior but to sink it with 'heat and light.' That would not only avert the upcoming protest but frighten off other organizations and individuals who might wish to oppose its goals. You can see similar anxiety, and similar arrogance, at play in the Energy Transfer lawsuit. The protests, led by Indigenous activists, were tremendously disruptive to the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the pipeline blockade and the law enforcement response to it were major news stories for nearly a year. The lawsuit seems like a commitment to a policy of not merely debating protesters in the court of public opinion, but of going nuclear—utilizing force de frappe to scorch the earth and make an example of them. In an interview this month, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, Sushma Raman, also drew a parallel between the Warrior's sabotage and the lawsuit. 'Powerful actors, within government as well as corporations, are trying to silence not just civil society activists but also, for example, journalists,' she said. Lawsuits like this one, she said, 'are really meant not to just silence the individual entity, but also to send a message to other organizations that there are repercussions if you are trying to hold power to account.' Indeed, recent years have seen many powerful interests—corporations, billionaires, even the governments of Western democracies—try to criminalize dissent and punish it accordingly. 'People in power don't like to have the truth uncovered,' Peter Willcox said. Greenpeace's goal has always been, in many ways, to drive those who threaten the environment to distraction—to goad them through agitation and protest into overreaction, in hopes that that overreaction might be the next beat in the story Greenpeace wants to tell about what is happening to the Earth. Both the Rainbow Warrior and Energy Transfer demonstrate the risks of such tactics, what can happen if you antagonize an entity with enough power and money to work inside or outside the system and to act with impunity. Yet the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior had the unexpected effect of legitimizing Greenpeace in the eyes of many people around the world. Donations and memberships increased substantially. A Greenpeace album was released in the U.S. just a month after the sinking, featuring artists like Queen, Peter Gabriel, and George Harrison; Neil Young played a benefit in Auckland for the Rainbow Warrior. The organization opened offices in South America and began focusing more heavily on lobbying and messaging rather than protest actions. And the bombing had a galvanizing effect on the nuclear issue in New Zealand and the South Pacific. 'People were outraged,' said Fran Wilde, who was then an MP for Wellington. 'Even those who may not have been strong supporters of the anti-nuke policy were really angry that the French government would do something like this.' In a 2015 panel, international law expert Penelope Ridings agreed that New Zealanders' continued opposition to nuclear testing stems from the incident. 'It was the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior that really solidified that anti-nuclear stance as part of our national identity,' she said. Indeed, the flotilla in 1985 went on as planned, without the Rainbow Warrior but with much greater press coverage. In August of that year, nine Pacific nations, including New Zealand, signed a Nuclear Free Zone Treaty at Rarotonga. By 1992, France had agreed to stop its nuclear testing entirely. The last French nuclear test took place in 1996—a major victory for Greenpeace, the people of the South Pacific, and the environmental movement. It remains to be seen whether the Energy Transfer lawsuit will focus the world's attention on Greenpeace in the same way. The pipeline company was clever to attack the organization using the American court system, rather than with something as blunt as a bomb. They seem to have realized that the last thing they needed was heat and light. Greenpeace has filed a novel countersuit in the Netherlands, using new European Union law as its basis. Ironically, the legal environment that makes this suit possible came about, in part, because of the Rainbow Warrior affair, said Gary Born, an international litigator who then represented Greenpeace in its negotiations with France. That agreement marked one of the first times a sovereign state accepted the notion that international law might apply not only to them but to organizations and indeed individuals. 'That action has particular relevance in today's international environment,' he said, 'and laid the foundation for present-day judicial proceedings brought by private parties against governments and government-owned enterprises for violations of international law.' The Rainbow Warrior was eventually raised from the bottom of Auckland Harbour. Its contents were dumped out on the pier; that's where Bunny McDiarmid found her waterlogged saxophone. The ship was towed to Matauri Bay in Northland and sunk to the seabed, where it still resides as a natural reef. The ship's propeller forms part of a commemorative arch on a hilltop overlooking the bay. The ship's masts still stand at the Dargaville Museum, just a few hours down the road. And near Marsden Wharf, a sidewalk mosaic memorializes the ship and Fernando Pereira. It reads: 'You can't sink a rainbow.'
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If You Forget To Water Your Plants, This Pot Can Help
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