Friday March 23 10:07 PM ET
Greenpeace Co-Founder Dies in Car Crash

By Gideon Long

ROME (Reuters) - David McTaggart, the Canadian co-founder of the environmental pressure group Greenpeace, died in a car crash in Italy on Friday.

McTaggart, 69, died after his car was involved in a collision with another vehicle in Castiglione del Lago, near the central Italian city of Perugia.

``We don't have many details at the moment. All we know is he was in a car accident and he's dead. We're all very shocked at the moment,'' a Greenpeace worker in Rome told Reuters.

McTaggart helped found Greenpeace in the early 1970s and was its chairman for over a decade until 1991.

He led the group through what many consider to be its vintage years, spearheading protests against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.

He continued to be Greenpeace's honorary chairman in the 1990s, but with his health failing, he retired to Umbria to live on a farm producing olive oil.

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He bought a boat, the Vega, and sailed the South Pacific islands until 1972, when a chance sighting of a Canadian newspaper advertisement changed his life.

The ad, placed by the tiny ``Don't Make a Wave'' committee, later renamed Greenpeace, called for volunteers to sail to the Polynesian atoll of Mururoa in a bid to stop French atmospheric tests of nuclear warheads.

McTaggart, outraged by the French government's decision to close off vast areas of the Pacific, responded to the appeal, renamed his boat Greenpeace III, and sailed to Mururoa.

He anchored his boat downwind from the planned test, forcing the French to halt the first test and prompting the French navy to ram his vessel.

After repairing his boat, McTaggart returned to the atoll a year later only to be captured and beaten up by French military officers, an assault that permanently damaged his right eye.

McTaggart was also at the helm of Greenpeace in 1985 when French agents blew up the group's Rainbow Warrior ship in Auckland harbor, killing a photographer.

The attack backfired for the French, drawing widespread condemnation and boosting Greenpeace's popularity and presence.

McTaggart stepped down in September 1991, but remained active in the organization for years afterward.

He was expelled from France in 1995 for trying to disrupt nuclear tests again, and a year later was one of a group of Greenpeace veterans who launched a scathing attack on the group's new leaders, saying Greenpeace had lost its way and needed to rediscover its radical agenda.

Renowned for his short temper, McTaggart was a private man who seldom gave interviews.

He shied away from the publicity that Greenpeace, under his leadership, courted so brilliantly at environmental flash points around the world.

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