Operation Exodus: The Rainbow Warrior’s last Pacific mission

Forty years ago, on July 10, 1985, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents in Auckland Harbour. Fernando Pereira, a Dutch-Portuguese photojournalist, was killed.

Journalist David Robie was on board the Rainbow Warrior on its last voyage. In this edited extract from his new book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, he recalls the ship’s final Pacific mission in the Marshall Islands.

In May 1985, just weeks before the ship headed for Auckland, the Rainbow Warrior crew had helped 320 Rongelap Islanders relocate to another island, to escape the ravages of US nuclear testing. In 1954, after the US tested the Bravo hydrogen bomb on nearby Bikini Atoll, Rongelap Islanders were exposed to high-level radioactive fallout — and despite decades of denial from American officials, they had continued to suffer the devastating health effects of contamination.

As the late Senator Jeton Anjain, a Rongelap Islander, said at the time: “American scientists have been lying to us for 30 years about the radiation of our islands. The poison from the Bravo monster bomb is still being felt today.”

But the decision to leave their home wasn’t easy, as David Robie’s account makes clear.

 

Operation Exodus

When we decided to leave Rongelap Atoll, the old people cried to leave their homeland. But I said, “What about your grandchildren? Do you want them to die?” — Senator Jeton Anjain, of Rongelap Atoll.

A day after leaving Majuro, on May 16, 1985, the Rainbow Warrior passed close to the twin islands of Roi-Namur on the north-eastern tip of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

Joined together by a coral-filled airstrip two decades ago, the islands now bristled with a forest of antennae and radar domes. Dwarfing the coconut palms was the giant Altair radar, used for ballistic missile research since 1970 and once the cornerstone of the United States Air Force’s “Pacific barrier” anti-satellite detection system. The network had two other monitoring stations — at San Miguel in the Philippines and Guam.

The Altair at Roi-Namur was the most powerful of the three radars. It was capable of detecting and tracking objects at an altitude of 40,000 kilometres, higher than the orbits of many spacecraft. It was one of the only two air force radars capable of high-altitude tracking.

As the Rainbow Warrior passed, the big dish swung on its axis, seemingly pointing in our direction.

“The bastards are nervous,” chuckled first mate Martini Gotjé.

“The microwave emissions from the Altair are dangerous,” cautioned Steve Sawyer, the Greenpeace campaign coordinator. “It makes any protest risky if you’re close by in front of it. A couple of years ago a maintenance guy on Roi-Namur got caught like that. He got fried — lost his eyes!”

We now had 25 people on board. Besides the crew of 11 and Steve Sawyer, were Rongelap Islanders Senator Jeton Anjain and Julian Riklon, and four others: Tarinas Abon and his nine-year-old daughter, who was seasick all the way to Rongelap; Paul Kabua; and Kenja Tambo.

There were five journalists on board besides photojournalist Fernando Pereira, who was working for Greenpeace, and me.

A French pair, Philippe Chatenay and Walter Guerin, were making a documentary to be screened in France on Hiroshima Day. Filing for the Guardian and the Washington Post was the London newspaper’s staff writer, Paul Brown, a specialist in environmental affairs and well known among British Greenpeace campaigners. A Japanese freelance photojournalist, Kousei Shimada, and a television cameraman, John Perulis, filming for Greenpeace Productions, rounded off the team.

*

The Rainbow Warrior arrived at Rongelap on May 17, 1985.

It was a paradise which fulfilled any dream of how a Pacific atoll in the Tropic of Cancer should be. Turquoise-coloured lagoon, coconut palms, searing sunshine, fish teeming in the reef and the scent of hibiscus blooms wafting in the air. And it is huge. The third-largest atoll in the Marshall Islands, Rongelap is roughly 80 kilometres across.

A village dominated by a white-plastered church with blue and pink facings skirted the beach of the main motu, or island. Five outrigger canoes sat idly on the coral sand. A grass airstrip cut through the palm trees with a “Welcome to Rongelap” sign chipped into a trunk.

Did the islanders on this beautiful atoll really want to leave? The curse of Castle Bravo seemed remote, and the crew had uncertainties about their mission.

For months, Steve Sawyer had been thinking out the details of moving all the islanders. Now he could see the village, and it wasn’t just a couple of huts. It was a little township of about 320 people.

“Jesus, I don’t believe it!” he said. “People are leaving all this and going off to a place where there is nothing.”

It was disturbing to contemplate: the Rongelapese were prepared to disinherit themselves and face an uncertain future for the sake of their children.

This wasn’t a game, or the sort of publicity stunt that Greenpeace could do so successfully. It wasn’t even a campaign in the sense of campaigns as understood by the ecology movement over the previous 14 years. These were real people with real lives that the crew was now involved with.

Sawyer hoped they were up to it. He had plenty of confidence in the crew’s ability to do the job physically. But he hoped it could be accomplished with little trauma.

Senator Anjain stood on the main deck, gazing shorewards. Julian Riklon was at his side, filming the welcome for a video he was making of the evacuation.

A bum bum headed out from shore to greet the Rainbow Warrior. The small, rickety motorboat, one of two belonging to the islanders, was named from the Marshallese word mimicking the sound of its engine: boom boom!

As the boat got closer, and began circling the ship, we could see 11 women on board. Fluttering from the stern was a white cloth with words scrawled in red: “We love the future of our kids.” The Rainbow Warriorwith its big black “Nuclear-free Pacific” banner seemed huge beside this vulnerable little boat with its handkerchief-sized flag.

As the women sang, tears stung the eyes of crew members. The islanders had a haunting style of singing through their noses, which made their voices sound like bagpipes. Always with one singer sounding off-key. It couldn’t help but send shivers up our spines.

I love my home island, where I was born
I will never leave it.
This is my home, my only home
And it’s better that I die on it.

When the bum bum bumped alongside the Rainbow Warrior, several Rongelapese women climbed on board. Senator Anjain and the other islanders were treated to embraces and kisses. Pereira and I leapt on to the boat to be taken ashore for the welcome ritual.

An archway of coconut timber and plaited pandanus leaves, sheathed in hibiscus flowers, stood on the beach. Across the arch with a striking banner: “Ba eman kabjere — We Love the Future of Our Kids.”

About 20 minutes later, the first group from the crew arrived in a Zodiac inflatable speedboat. The Rainbow Warrior women were clad in skirts hastily thrown over their work shorts. The crew were garlanded with wu, floral crowns, and sweet-scented leis, and treated to drinking coconuts as the island women sang their nasal welcome songs. Curiously, the village men stayed aloof from the welcome. Did they have doubts about leaving?

A meeting was set for 2pm so the villagers could talk with Senator Anjain and the crew. Any lingering uncertainty we had about the people wanting to evacuate faded as we wandered around the island. Several houses already had their roofs and walls stripped off. Corrugated aluminium sheeting and plywood were stacked in neat, labelled piles.

Rongelap Elementary School was almost completely demolished, desks and chairs scattered around the coral sand playground. About 75 children — a quarter of the population — went to the school. They were to have been given a new building by the Marshalls Education Ministry, but now it would be at least a year or two before they got another school — if they got one at all.

“The school is already a wipeout,” said schoolteacher Aisen Tima, perched dejectedly on an old desk. “If the weather is good on Mejatto, it will be possible for me to have classes under the trees.” Tima, 32, was among the first Rongelap Islanders to be flown to the United States for thyroid tumour surgery after radiation-linked illnesses began to emerge among the islanders.

It was 2pm. Crew members Henk Haazen and Bunny McDiarmid, still operating on European time, arrived at the shade-house next to the church where the meeting was to be held, and sat down. Hardly anybody was there. An ominous sign, they thought.

But islanders began drifting in by twos and threes, and by three o’clock, almost the whole village was there. The women sat on bench seats in the shade-house; the men on gnarled roots of a giant breadfruit tree, or squatting on the coral sand.

Like many Marshallese meetings, it started off on a very sombre note. Everybody seemed depressed. Two brothers of former schoolteacher Billiet Edmond, who had written a vivid diary of the Castle Bravo hydrogen-bomb blast in 1954, sat grim-faced under the tree.

Senator Anjain began. He introduced the Rainbow Warrior crew, and he spelled out the atoll’s tragic legacy of deaths and illnesses from the Castle Bravo fallout.

“American scientists have been lying to us for 30 years about the radiation of our islands,” he said. “The poison from the Bravo monster bomb is still being felt today. Our people suffered then, and we are still suffering from radiation diseases such as thyroid tumours, cancer, leukaemia, birth defects, stillbirths and miscarriages.

“Now, as we all decided last year, the time has come for us to leave for Mejatto Island. For the sake of our children and for our grandchildren.”

Not a stir among the men. But an elderly woman asked: “How are we going to eat — there are few coconuts and no breadfruit growing on Mejatto. How are we going to get money?”

“It will be hard, but we’ll find a way to survive,” replied Anjain.

Now it was Julian Riklon’s turn. “We know it’s going to be tough, trying to make a new life, to become alienated from our land and our spiritual roots. But we also have no choice. The future of our children is most important — by staying here, they have no hope. They are bound to die from cancer.”

Riklon, 39, treasurer of the Kwajalein Atoll Corporation, had returned to his home atoll for the first time since 1960. He was one of a community of Rongelap Islanders living on Ebeye because they thought staying on the atoll was a potential death sentence. (Later, he told me he believed triggering the Castle Bravo bomb was murder.)

A fisherman asked what was going to happen to his outrigger canoe. He was assured it would be taken to Mejatto. Then somebody cracked a joke, and suddenly it was all over. A logistics meeting between Anjain, Riklon, mayor Randy Thomas and other island leaders was set for the next afternoon with Sawyer, skipper Peter Willcox and first mate Martini Gotjé to fine tune Operation Exodus.

“The people looked to me to find a way to save them, but they didn’t really believe a ship would come all the way from Britain,” said Anjain. “It wasn’t until they saw the Rainbow Warrior in their lagoon that they really believed me. They thought I might be bluffing.”

Some of the Warrior crew, particularly deckhand Grace O’Sullivan, were worried about the level of residual radiation on Rongelap. How harmful was it? O’Sullivan, a powerfully built swimming champion, went ashore rather gingerly.

Two years before, in a Greenpeace campaign at Britain’s nuclear reprocessing plant at Windscale, she had been contaminated. She had gone in a Zodiac inflatable to check an outflow pipe, spewing plutonium waste into the Irish Sea, to see if it could be plugged. The boat became surrounded by an oil-based detergent slick floating on the sea. The electronic radiation detector shot off the scale, and O’Sullivan headed back to the Cedarlea as fast as she could. On board, she asked an electrical technician whether the detector was working properly. BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP, it buzzed when held near her clothes. They nearly died of fright!

The ship returned to London, eight hours away. Next day, she, her companion and the Zodiac were taken to the National Radiation Protection Board centre at Harwell for monitoring. Technicians in decontamination suits immediately roped them off with radioactive signs. “Hot” readings were taken all over them, but the highest were on O’Sullivan’s scarf and a pair of gloves belonging to her crewmate. Still, they were scrubbed down, decontaminated and told they were safe.

This time, O’Sullivan wasn’t taking any chances. Sawyer had bought a radiation detector costing $200 from a solar electronics firm run by The Farm, a community near Summertown, Tennessee, to bring on the voyage. Called a “nuke buster”, it was the only sophisticated piece of electronic equipment on board apart from navigation and communications gear. It measured beta and gamma rays.

Andy Biedermann, the ship’s doctor, took the detector ashore, but didn’t find any risk readings. However, it wasn’t really expected as the islands with serious residual radiation levels were in the north of the atoll — the islanders’ traditional coconut crab larder.

On Sunday, May 19, the Rongelapese gathered in their church for the last service before bolting the doors and leaving the atoll. Decorations from the previous Christmas were still hanging inside the austere room.

“It is a sad moment,” said Pastor Jatai Mongkeya. “But remember what is happening to us is rather like the biblical deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt.”

The women’s choir sang a tearful eulogy about their homeland, finishing with the Marshall Islands national anthem, which says they would never leave their island.

Out of a church window, we could see the village cemetery, a huddle of whitewashed headstones including the victims of radiation illnesses. The grave of Lekoj Anjain, Senator Anjain’s nephew, was marked by a black plaque. Lekoj’s father, John Anjain, polished it as a parting gesture. The rest of the day was spent tearing down houses.

Loading the Rainbow Warrior began in earnest on Monday. About 20 tonnes of building materials, two of three generators from the island, wooden trunks, furniture, kerosene lamps, tools and sleeping mats were ferried out to the ship in the bum bums and two Zodiacs.

Shortly before dusk, the first nuclear refugees were taken on board ready for the trip. About 75 mainly elderly people, pregnant women and mothers with young children squeezed into whatever space they could. Crew members slung a tarpaulin shelter over the boat deck, and many of the islanders huddled there. Others spread their mats in the carpentry shop. Real sailing was out because there was no deck room.

My report that night for Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, as the ship headed for Mejatto, 160 kilometres south-west, said:

It’s hard to make a guesstimate of how many people are on board the Rainbow Warrior. As she travels towards Mejatto, the trawler seems packed with Rongelap islanders heading for a new home of hope. Most are sleeping on deck, but many have bunked down in the hold and some elderly people have found refuge in the mess room. It took two days to load the ship with building material from demolished houses, clothes, mats and trunks full of gear. Many of the trunks bear labels from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the clinic monitoring the islander’s health since the Bravo fallout 31 years ago.

By the time we reached Mejatto the next morning, after 14 hours at sea, the ship’s radio telephone was running hot with calls for “Golf Sierra Zulu Yankee,” our high seas code. Operator Lloyd Anderson had already moved his bunk to the radio room, and now he was working hard to keep Greenpeace offices in London and Washington, international news agencies and newspapers posted with details.

A telex-computer link between the Warrior and Greenpeace’s radio station in San Francisco was also used for communications. But it developed a terminal condensation “disease”, much to the annoyance of Paul Brown and me when the stories we filed vanished.

A banner headline in the Pacific Daily News said simply: ATOLL EVACUATION BEGINS. Senator Anjain and Julian Riklon were cited by the newspaper as appealing for help “to meet our basic needs”. Anjain condemned the United States for refusing assistance, and Riklon said: “We hope that people around the world will make the evacuation of Rongelap as painless as possible.”

The exodus became front-page news from the Guardian in London to De Volksrant in Amsterdam. Pereira’s photographs for Associated Press wire service were even splashed in papers such as Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Yet the drama went unnoticed by the New Zealand press, except in my reports to the New Zealand Times and my weekly diary in the New Zealand Herald.

*

Mejatto, previously uninhabited and handed over to the people of Rongelap by their close relatives on nearby Ebadon Island, was a lot different to their own island. It was beautiful, but it was only three kilometres long and a kilometre wide, with a dry side and a dense tropical side. A sandspit joined it to another small, uninhabited island. Although lush, Mejatto was uncultivated and already it was apparent there could be a food problem.

Out on the shallow reef, fish were plentiful. Shortly after the Warrior arrived, several of the men were out wading knee-deep on the coral spearing fish for lunch.

But even the shallowness of the reef caused a problem. It made it dangerous to bring the Warrior any closer than about three kilometres offshore, as two shipwrecks on the reef reminded us.

The cargo of building materials and belongings had to be laboriously unloaded onto a bum bum, which had also travelled overnight with no navigational aids apart from a Marshallese “wave map”, and the Zodiacs. It took two days to unload the ship with a swell making things difficult at times. An 18-year-old islander fell into the sea between the bum bum and the Warrior, almost being crushed but escaping with a jammed foot.

Returning to Rongelap, the Rainbow Warrior was confronted with a load which seemed double that taken on the first trip. Altogether, about 100 tonnes of building materials and other supplies were shipped to Mejatto. The crew packed as much as they could on deck and left for Mejatto, this time with 114 people on board. It was a rough voyage with almost everybody being seasick.

The journalists were roped in to clean up the ship before returning to Rongelap on the third journey.

By that time, we’d been joined by Dr Glenn Alcalay, who had just presented a report to the United Nations Trusteeship Council condemning Washington’s policies in Micronesia. He had originally been sceptical about the evacuation, but was now an enthusiastic advocate.

Dr Alcalay, who spoke Marshallese, was a great help to me interviewing some of the islanders. “It’s a hard time for us now because we don’t have a lot of food here on Mejatto — like breadfruit, taro and pandanus,” said Rose Keju, who wasn’t actually at Rongelap during the fallout. “Our people feel extremely depressed. They see no light, only darkness. They’ve been crying a lot.

“We’ve moved because of the poison and the health problems we face. If we have honest scientists to check Rongelap, we’ll know whether we can ever return, or we’ll have to stay on Mejatto.”

Kiosang Kios, 46, was 15 years old at the time of Castle Bravo when she was evacuated to “Kwaj”. “My hair fell out — about half the people’s hair fell out,” she said. “My feet ached and burned. I lost my appetite, had diarrhoea and vomited.”

In 1957, she had her first baby, and it was born without bones — “Like this paper, it was flimsy.” A so-called “jellyfish baby”, it lived for half a day. After that, Kios had several more miscarriages and stillbirths. In 1959, she had a daughter who had problems with her legs and feet, and thyroid trouble.

Out on the reef, with the bum bums, the islanders had a welcome addition — an unusual hardwood dugout canoe being used for fishing and transport. It travelled 13,000 kilometres on board the Rainbow Warrior and bore the Sandinista legend FSLN on its black-and-red hull. A gift from crew members Bunny McDiarmid and Henz Haazen, it had been bought for $30 from a Nicaraguan fisherman while they were crewing on the Fri.

“It has come from a small people struggling for their sovereignty against the United States, and it has gone to another small people doing the same,” said Haazen.

Before the 10-day evacuation ended, Haazen was given an outrigger canoe by the islanders. Winched on to the deck of the Rainbow Warrior, it didn’t quite make a sail-in protest at Moruroa, as Haazen planned, but it had since become a familiar sight on Auckland Harbour.

With the third load of 87 people shipped to Mejatto and one more to go, another problem emerged. What should be done about the scores of pigs and chickens on Rongelap? Pens could be built on the main deck to transport them to Mejatto, but was there any fodder left for them?

The islanders decided they weren’t going to run a risk, no matter how slight, of having contaminated animals with them. They were abandoned on Rongelap — along with three of the five outriggers.

The last voyage on May 28 was the most fun. A small group of about 40 islanders was transported, and there was plenty of time to get to know each other.

Four young men questioned cook Nathalie Mestre: Where did she live? Where was Switzerland? Out came an atlas. Then Mestre produced a scrapbook of Pereira’s photographs of the voyage. The questions were endless.

They asked for a scrap of paper and a pen and wrote in English:

We, the people of Rongelap, love our homeland. But how can our people live in a place which is dangerous and poisonous. I mean, why didn’t those American people test Bravo in a state capital? Why? Rainbow Warrior, thank you for being so nice to us. Keep up your good work.

Each one wrote down his name: Balleain Anjain, Ralet Anitak, Kiash Tima and Issac Edmond. They handed the paper to Mestre and she added her name. Anitak grabbed it and wrote as well: Nathalie Anitak. They laughed.

Thursday, May 30, was Fernando Pereira’s 35th birthday. The evacuation was over, and a one-day holiday was declared as we lay anchored off Mejatto.

Pereira was on the Pacific voyage almost by chance. Sawyer had been seeking a wire machine for transmitting pictures of the campaign. He phoned Fiona Davies, then heading the Greenpeace photo office in Paris. But he wanted a machine and a photographer separately.

“No, no . . . I’ll get you a wire machine,” replied Davies. “But you’ll have to take my photographer with it.” Agreed. The deal would save the campaign budget about $8,000.

Pereira had fled Portugal about 15 years before while he was serving as a pilot in the armed forces at a time when the country was fighting to retain colonies in Angola and Mozambique. He settled in the Netherlands, the only country that would grant him citizenship. After first working as a photographer for the Anefo press agency, he became concerned with environmental and social issues. Eventually, he joined the Amsterdam communist daily De Waarheid and was assigned to cover the activities of Greenpeace. Later, he joined Greenpeace.

Although he adopted Dutch ways, his charming Latin temperament and looks betrayed his Portuguese origins. He liked tight Italian-style clothes and fast sports cars. Pereira was always wide-eyed, happy and smiling. In Hawai`i, he and Sawyer hiked up to the crater at the top of Diamond Head one day. Sawyer took a snapshot of Pereira laughing — a photo later used on the front page of the New Zealand Times after his death.

While most of the crew were taking things quietly and the “press gang” caught up on stories, Sawyer led a mini expedition in a Zodiac to one of the shipwrecks, the Palauan Trader.

Clambering on board the hulk, Sawyer grabbed hold of a rust-caked railing, which collapsed. He plunged 10 metres into a hold. While he lay in pain with a dislocated shoulder and severely lacerated abdomen, his crewmates smashed a hole through the side of the ship. They dragged him through pounding surf into the Zodiac and headed back to the Warrior, three kilometres away. He took almost two weeks to recover.

But the accident failed to completely dampen celebrations for Pereira, who was presented with a hand-painted T-shirt labelled “Rainbow Warrior Removals Inc”.

Pereira’s birthday was the first of three, which strangely coincided with events casting a tragic shadow over the Rainbow Warrior’s last voyage.