In 2014 the BBC spoke with Pete Wilcox, captain of the Rainbow Warrior about the attack. Shortly after going to bed sometime after 11 p.m., he felt the boat shudder and his first thought was that another boat had collided with the Rainbow Warrior. But he quickly discovered that it had been a bomb that tore a hole six feet wide in the hull of the ship. After a second blast rent another hole in the boat, he gave the order to abandon ship.

Everybody made it off the ship except one. Photographer Fernando Pereira (pictured above) had gone to his cabin after the first bomb went off, hoping to save his cameras and other equipment. He was trapped in his cabin when the second bomb went off. New Zealand authorities initially suspected the Greenpeace members themselves of having staged the attack, but reversed course after they found that the bombs had been placed on the outside of the boat. “Here was a world super power and a bunch of hippies on an old British trawler had scared them so badly that they were quite happy to murder us,” Wilcox said, adding that no apologies had been proffered to the victims, their families, or Greenpeace at the time of the interview. The French government remains officially unrepentant about the attack, but as The Guardian reports, one of the agents involved did apologize personally in 2015.