Decades after the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, more details have emerged about how a French spy “crucial” to the attack fled from New Zealand police.

Christine Cabon fled Interpol while amidst a long-running archaeological dig in Israel, after apparently being tipped off by two shadowy Israeli figures.

The new information contradicts the former spy’s assertions that she learned police were after her, while coincidentally already en route back to France. And it raises further questions about the identity of two mysterious men who appeared to warn her Interpol was searching for her before she fled.

Cabon infiltrated the Auckland Greenpeace movement in April 1985. Aged 33, she was ostensibly a geomorphologist called Frederique Bonlieu, but in reality was acquiring details of Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear testing projects for the French.

She left New Zealand six weeks before the Rainbow Warrior blast that killed Fernando Pereira. Police learned Cabon had fled to Israel, but she disappeared before detectives reached her. Her whereabouts were unknown for 32 years until, in 2017 a Stuff investigation traced Cabon to the south of France, where she was a councillor.

An unrepentant Cabon at the time told Stuff her job “was what it was”.

“I think all military people who serve their countries can find themselves in situations they hadn’t wished for ... it’s too late to go back in time.”

Professor Ilan Sharon, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology, contacted Stuff from the decades-long excavation project at Tel Dor, Israel, where he encountered Cabon in mid 1985.

He is now the project’s lead and was there when Cabon joined the team as a junior staff member on a group directed by the late Professor David Stronach, of the University of California, Berkeley, who was leading a training excavation. Sharon believed Cabon had been introduced to Stronach by a friend.

“Frederique was an unremarkable archaeologist,” Sharon recalled.

“One thing I noticed were what seemed like strange lacunae in her education – like she would not know some basic terminology. Of course, these might have been typical blunders for a super-intelligent spy who is weaving her cover as she goes, but it might just be me, trying in retrospect, to spot her as a fraud.”

Sharon says the team got wind of her true identity the night before she disappeared from the team, after two “incongruous” Hebrew-speaking men looking for her showed up in suits and briefcases, among the tide of archaeologists in shorts and T-shirts.

“We sent someone to her quarters, but she was not there. Her roommates said she has gone into town with her friends ... After waiting a while in vain, they asked where she and her friends might have gone, and left.”

Sharon believes they were Israeli, rather than French intelligence or New Zealand police.

“One suggestion was that they were Israeli intelligence, and they were the ones who warned her off.”

The next morning, Sharon says, Cabon went to Stronach and told him she had a family emergency and had to leave the dig immediately.

“She did not go to work that day, but boarded an Air France flight back to Paris.”

While police have previously said they believed Cabon had been tipped off that police were en route to Israel, Cabon said she had already boarded a plane home by that stage.

Sharon dismissed that: “(That’s) patently untrue. She left the excavation in the middle, and left Stronach and ourselves in the lurch, since we now had an excavation unit without a supervisor.”

As Sharon tells it, all was quiet for three weeks until mid-August, when a police car arrived with flashing lights while he was at a celebration at a restaurant in Caesarea. The police asked to speak to one of the Greek students on the dig – a friend of Cabon’s – and after much negotiation she agreed to talk, with Sharon accompanying her to the police station.

Speaking over the phone, Sharon told Stuff he was at the station all night while police with cups of coffee went in and out of the interrogation room. Eventually they told Sharon why they were searching for Cabon, saying they’d received a request from Interpol to investigate ‘Frederique’.

Sharon says police told him records showed Cabon had gone through passport control at Ben Gurion Airport​, but never made it to France.

“Being an accomplished James Bond, I suppose she must have parachuted on the way.”

The story of the spy in Dor had been repeated for 30 years, Sharon says with amusement, but they hadn’t known the full story until they recently discovered the Stuff investigation.

How Cabon was tipped off to police’s interest in her has long been theorised. Retired detective superintendent Allan Galbraith, who led the charge to find Cabon, has previously described Cabon’s role in the terror attack as “crucial”.

At the time they “certainly believed” Cabon had been tipped off that Interpol was on her tail. Galbraith says Professor Sharon’s recollection was “interesting stuff – how he recounts people turning up looking for her”.

“Who they were will be of considerable interest to us.”

About the Dor dig

The site of Dor (Tel Dor National Park) was a major port town on the eastern Mediterranean shore (between modern-day Tel Aviv and Haifa) that was active from the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000 BCE) to the mid-Roman period (250 CE). It is the most extensively excavated and published site of the Phoenician homeland.

The site has been excavated since 1980 (the longest-ever continuing excavation by the same team on the same site in Israel) and is now run as a national park by the Israel Nature and Park authority.