{"id":244994,"date":"2023-10-02T12:01:25","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T11:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=244994"},"modified":"2024-07-01T08:20:10","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T07:20:10","slug":"a-year-of-u-s-lying-about-nord-stream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/10\/a-year-of-u-s-lying-about-nord-stream\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year of U.S. Lying about Nord Stream"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A screen grab from Danish Defense shows the gas leak from the exploded Nord Stream pipelines causing bubbles on the surface of the Baltic Sea on September 30, 2022.
Photo by Swedish Coast Guard Handout \/ Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Biden administration has acknowledged neither its responsibility for the pipeline bombing nor the purpose of the sabotage.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

26 Sep 2023<\/em> – I do not know much about covert CIA operations\u2014no outsider can\u2014but I do understand that the essential component of all successful missions is total deniability. The American men and women who moved, under cover, in and out of Norway in the months it took to plan and carry out the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea a year ago left no traces\u2014not a hint of the team\u2019s existence\u2014other than the success of their mission.<\/p>\n

Deniability, as an option for President Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers, was paramount. No significant information about the mission was put on a computer, but instead typed on a Royal or perhaps a Smith Corona typewriter with a carbon copy or two, as if the Internet and the rest of the online world had yet to be invented. The White House was isolated from the goings-on near Oslo; various reports and updates from the field were directly provided to CIA Director Bill Burns, who was the only link between the planners and the president who authorized the mission to take place on September 26, 2022. Once the mission was completed, the typed papers and carbons were destroyed, thus leaving no physical trace\u2014no evidence to be dug up later by a special prosecutor or a presidential historian. You could call it the perfect crime.<\/p>\n

There was a flaw\u2014a gap in understanding between those who carried out the mission and President Biden, as to why he ordered the destruction of the pipelines when he did. My initial 5,200-word report<\/a>, published in early February, ended cryptically by quoting an official with knowledge of the mission telling me: \u201cIt was a beautiful cover story.\u201d The official added: \u201cThe only flaw was the decision to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the first account of that flaw, on the one-year anniversary of the explosions, and it is one President Biden and his national security team will not like.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, my initial story caused a sensation, but the major media emphasized the White House denials and relied on an old canard\u2014my reliance on an unnamed source\u2014to join the administration in debunking the notion that Joe Biden could have had anything to do with such an attack. I must note here that I\u2019ve won literally scores of prizes in my career for stories in the New York Times<\/em> and the New Yorker<\/em> that relied on not a single named source. In the past year we\u2019ve seen a series of contrary newspaper stories, with no named first-hand sources, claiming that a dissident Ukrainian group carried out the technical diving operation attack in the Baltic Sea via a 49-foot rented yacht called the Andromeda<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I am now able to write about the unexplained flaw cited by the unnamed official. It goes once again to the classic issue of what the Central Intelligence Agency is all about: an issue raised by Richard Helms, who headed the agency during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and the CIA\u2019s secret spying on Americans, as ordered by President Lyndon Johnson and sustained by Richard Nixon. I published an expos\u00e9<\/a> in the Times<\/em> about that spying in December 1974 that led to unprecedented hearings by the Senate into the role of the agency in its unsuccessful attempts, authorized by President John F. Kennedy, to assassinate Cuba\u2019s Fidel Castro. Helms told the senators that the issue was whether he, as CIA director, worked for the Constitution or for the Crown, in the person of presidents Johnson and Nixon. The Church Committee left the issue unresolved, but Helms made it clear he and his agency worked for the top man in the White House.<\/p>\n

Back to the Nord Stream pipelines: It is important to understand that no Russian gas was flowing to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines when Joe Biden ordered them blown up last September 26. Nord Stream 1 had been supplying vast amounts of low-cost natural gas to Germany since 2011 and helped bolster Germany\u2019s status as a manufacturing and industrial colossus. But it was shut down by Putin by the end of August 2022, as the Ukraine war was, at best, in a stalemate. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021 but was blocked from delivering gas by the German government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz two days prior to Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Given Russia\u2019s vast stores of natural gas and oil, American presidents since John F. Kennedy have been alert to the potential weaponization of these natural resources for political purposes. That view remains dominant among Biden and his hawkish foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, now the acting deputy to Blinken.<\/p>\n

Sullivan convened a series of high-level national security meetings late in 2021, as Russia was building up its forces along the border of Ukraine, with an invasion seen as almost inevitable. The group, which included representatives from the CIA, was urged to come up with a proposal for action that could serve as a deterrent to Putin. The mission to destroy the pipelines was motivated by the White House\u2019s determination to support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sullivan\u2019s goal seemed clear. \u201cThe White House\u2019s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,\u201d the official told me. \u201cThe challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Major_russian_gas_pipelines_to_europe.png<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
The major gas pipelines from Russia to Europe. \/ Map by Samuel Bailey \/ Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

I now know what I did not know then: the real reason why the Biden administration \u201cbrought up taking out the Nord Stream pipeline.\u201d The official recently explained to me that at the time Russia was supplying gas and oil throughout the world via more than a dozen pipelines, but Nord Stream 1 and 2 ran directly from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. \u201cThe administration put Nord Stream on the table because it was the only one we could access and it would be totally deniable,\u201d the official said. \u201cWe solved the problem within a few weeks\u2014by early January\u2014and told the White House. Our assumption was that the president would use the threat against Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was no surprise to the agency\u2019s secret planning group when on January 27, 2022, the assured and confident Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, stridently warned Putin that if he invaded Ukraine, as he clearly was planning to, that \u201cone way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.\u201d The line attracted enormous attention, but the words preceding the threat did not. The official State Department transcript shows that she preceded her threat by saying that with regard to the pipeline: \u201cWe continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked by a reporter how she could say with certainty that the Germans would go along \u201cbecause what the Germans have said publicly doesn\u2019t match what you\u2019re saying,\u201d Nuland responded with an astonishing bit of doubletalk: \u201cI would say go back and read the document that we signed in July [of 2021] that made very clear about the consequences for the pipeline if there is further aggression on Ukraine by Russia.\u201d But that agreement, which was briefed to journalists, did not specify threats or consequences, according to reports in the Times<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, and Reuters. At the time of the agreement, on July 21, 2021, Biden told the press corps that since the pipeline was 99 percent finished, \u201cthe idea that anything was going to be said or done was going to stop it was not possible.\u201d At the time, Republicans, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, depicted Biden\u2019s decision to permit the Russian gas to flow as a \u201cgenerational geopolitical win\u201d for Putin and \u201ca catastrophe\u201d for the United States and its allies.<\/p>\n

But two weeks after Nuland\u2019s statement, on February 7, 2022, at a joint White House press conference with the visiting Scholz, Biden signaled that he had changed his mind and was joining Nuland and other equally hawkish foreign policy aides in talking about stopping the pipeline. \u201cIf Russia invades\u2014that means tanks and troops crossing . . . the border of Ukraine again,\u201d he said, \u201cthere will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.\u201d Asked how he could do so since the pipeline was under Germany\u2019s control, he said: \u201cWe will, I promise you, we\u2019ll be able to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scholz, asked the same question, said: \u201cWe are acting together. We are absolutely united, and we will not be taking different steps. We will do the same steps, and they will be very very hard to Russia, and they should understand.\u201d The German leader was considered then\u2014and now\u2014by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.<\/p>\n

By this point, the CIA team had made the necessary contacts in Norway, whose navy and special forces commands have a long history of sharing covert-operation duties with the agency. Norwegian sailors and Nasty-class patrol boats helped smuggle American sabotage operatives into North Vietnam in the early 1960s when America, in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was running an undeclared American war there. With Norway\u2019s help, the CIA did its job and found a way to do what the Biden White House wanted done to the pipelines.<\/p>\n

At the time, the challenge to the intelligence community was to come up with a plan that would be forceful enough to deter Putin from the attack on Ukraine. The official told me: \u201cWe did it. We found an extraordinary deterrent because of its economic impact on Russia. And Putin did it despite the threat.\u201d It took months of research and practice in the churning waters of the Baltic Sea by the two expert US Navy deep sea divers recruited for the mission before it was deemed a go. Norway\u2019s superb seamen found the right spot for planting the bombs that would blow up the pipelines. Senior officials in Sweden and Denmark, who still insist they had no idea what was going on in their shared territorial waters, turned a blind eye to the activities of the American and Norwegian operatives. The American team of divers and support staff on the mission\u2019s mother ship\u2014a Norwegian minesweeper\u2014would be hard to hide while the divers were doing their work. The team would not learn until after the bombing that Nord Stream 2 had been shut down with 750 miles of natural gas in it.<\/p>\n

What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden\u2019s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, with Scholz standing next to him, the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines, but the group should arrange to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them \u201con demand\u201d\u2014after the war began. \u201cIt was then that we\u201d\u2014the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project\u2014\u201cunderstood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Biden\u2019s order to trigger the explosives planted on the pipelines, it took only a short flight with a Norwegian fighter and the dropping of an altered off-the-shelf sonar device at the right spot in the Baltic Sea to get it done. By then the CIA group had long disbanded. By then, too, the official told me: \u201cWe realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war\u201d\u2014Putin was in the process of annexing the four Ukrainian oblasts he wanted\u2014\u201cbut was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up\u201d the shuttered Nord Stream 2. \u201cThe White House fear was that Putin would get Germany under his thumb and then he was going to get Poland.\u201d<\/p>\n

The White House said nothing as the world wondered who committed the sabotage. \u201cSo the president struck a blow against the economy of Germany and Western Europe,\u201d the official told me. \u201cHe could have done it in June and told Putin: We told you what we would do.\u201d The White House\u2019s silence and denials were, he said, \u201ca betrayal of what we were doing. If you are going to do it, do it when it would have made a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

The leadership of the CIA team viewed Biden\u2019s misleading guidance for its order to destroy the pipelines, the official told me, \u201cas taking a strategic step toward World War III. What if Russia had responded by saying: You blew up our pipelines and I\u2019m going to blow up your pipelines and your communication cables. Nord Stream was not a strategic issue for Putin\u2014it was an economic issue. He wanted to sell gas. He\u2019d already lost his pipelines\u201d when the Nord Stream I and 2 were shut down before the Ukraine war began.<\/p>\n

Within days of the bombing, officials in Denmark and Sweden announced they would conduct an investigation. They reported two months later that there had indeed been an explosion and said there would be further inquiries. None has emerged. The German government conducted an inquiry but announced that major parts of its findings would be classified. Last winter German authorities allocated $286 billion in subsidies to major corporations and homeowners who faced higher energy bills to run their business and warm their homes. The impact is still being felt today, with a colder winter expected in Europe.<\/p>\n

President Biden waited four days before calling the pipeline bombing \u201ca deliberate act of sabotage.\u201d He said: \u201cnow the Russians are pumping out disinformation about it.\u201d Sullivan, who chaired the meetings that led to the proposal to covertly destroy the pipelines, was asked at a later press conference whether the Biden administration \u201cnow believes that Russia was likely responsible for the act of sabotage?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sullivan\u2019s answer, undoubtedly practiced, was: \u201cWell, first, Russia has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something, which is make accusations that it was really someone else who did it. We\u2019ve seen this repeatedly over time.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the president was also clear today that there is more work to do on the investigation before the United States government is prepared to make an attribution in this case.\u201d He continued: \u201cWe will continue to work with our allies and partners to gather all of the facts, and then we will make a determination about where we go from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

I could find no instances when Sullivan was subsequently asked by someone in the American press about the results of his \u201cdetermination.\u201d Nor could I find any evidence that Sullivan, or the president, has been queried since then about the results of the \u201cdetermination\u201d about where to go.<\/p>\n

There is also no evidence that President Biden has required the American intelligence community to conduct a major all-source inquiry into the pipeline bombing. Such requests are known as \u201cTaskings\u201d and are taken seriously inside the government.<\/p>\n

All of this explains why a routine question I posed a month or so after the bombings to someone with many years in the American intelligence community led me to a truth that no one in America or Germany seems to want to pursue. My question was simple: \u201cWho did it?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas\u2014and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Seymour M. Hersh\u2019s investigative journalism and publishing awards include one Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. Hersh won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest for his 2003 articles <\/span><\/em>\u201cLunch with the Chairman,\u201d \u201cSelective Intelligence,\u201d and<\/span><\/em> \u201cThe Stovepipe.\u201d In 2004 he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces; in 2005, he again received a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, an Overseas Press Club award, the National Press Foundation\u2019s Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism award, and his fifth George Polk Award, making him that award\u2019s most honored laureate. He lives in Washington DC.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 seymourhersh.substack.com<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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