PARIS - A former head of France's spy agency claimed that the late President Francois Mitterrand approved the sinking of a Greenpeace ship in a New Zealand harbor 20 years ago, according to a French newspaper report. A man was killed and the case turned into an embarrassment for Paris.

Top officials in France were fired in the aftermath, but Mitterrand's exact role has been unclear.

Greenpeace supporters form a peace symbol in Paris, Sunday, July 10, 2005, twenty years after Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior was sank by French saboteurs in New Zealand's Matauri Bay. In July 1985, two mines planted by French secret service frogmen tore apart Rainbow Warrior's hull as the ship was readying to sail to France's South Pacific nuclear test site at Muroroa Atoll as part of a campaign for a 'Nuclear Free Pacific'. A Greenpeace photographer, Fernando Pereira, died in the attack. (AP Photo/str)

In its Sunday-Monday edition, daily Le Monde published extracts of a 23-page, handwritten account by Adm. Pierre Lacoste, the former head of DGSE spy agency, in which he says that Mitterrand authorized the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's port.

The ship was preparing for a protest at sea against French nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific when the explosion ripped open its hull and the vessel sank. Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira died.

The account was published for Sunday's 20-year anniversary of the July 10, 1985, sinking of the ship. Hundreds of people gathered across France to commemorate the sinking and pay tribute to Pereira.

In Paris, demonstrators dressed in rainbow colors gathered behind a banner that read "You can't sink a Rainbow," and formed a peace symbol on a square overlooking the Eiffel Tower.

The newspaper said Lacoste prepared the report a year after the bombing and that it had remained secret since.

"I asked the president if he gave me permission to put into action the neutralization plan that I had studied on the request of Monsieur (Charles) Hernu," the defense minister at the time, Lacoste wrote.

"He gave me his agreement while stressing the importance he placed on the nuclear tests," Lacoste said. Hernu and Lacoste were fired.

Two DSGE agents, Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, were convicted of willful damage and manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years in prison. After less than a year in prison in New Zealand, they returned to Paris as heroes. The New Zealand government called the bombing the country's first terror attack.

Lacoste wrote that the spy agency had concluded that "sabotage" against the Rainbow Warrior was the only way to "effectively hinder" any action by Greenpeace against the nuclear tests.

"I would not have carried out such an operation without the personal authorization of the president of the republic," Lacoste wrote.

In a 1989 book, "Inquiry Into Three State Secrets," French journalists Jacques Derogy and Jean-Marie Pontaut alleged that Mitterrand had known of the plans to sink the ship.

A French government report in 1985 said Gen. Jean Saulnier - then Mitterrand's personal military adviser - had authorized funding for the operation.

Shortly after the bombing, Mitterrand called the attack on the Rainbow Warrior "a criminal and absurd act."

Lacoste said the cover-up was intentional and Mitterrand "knew but chose to feign ignorance, and take up the game of 'searching for the truth' - mixed with a vigorous condemnation of the 'criminals.'"

© Copyright 2005 Associated Press

###