On the one-year anniversary of the September 26, 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage bombings under the Baltic Sea, legendary journalist Seymour Hersh has provided more context and color based on his intelligence sources.
Hersh’s original bombshell reporting in his How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline said that it was a highly secret CIA operation with assistance from an elite US Navy dive team as well as Norwegian intelligence.
Given Hersh’s significant charge that Washington conducted a ‘false flag’ – at a moment many Western officials were quick to blame Moscow for destroying its own pipelines, Russia had in the wake of Hersh’s reporting called for an urgent United Nations investigation into the sabotage.
Instead of answering questions, for example when in March The Intercept approached the White House for answers, the Biden administration merely said it was supporting the separate investigations of individual countries like Sweden, Germany, and Denmark.
The heart of Hersh’s new article this week, which is entitled A Year of Lying About Nord Stream, deals with motive. What was the United States’ motive? – he asks, and his sources tell… The answer is somewhat surprising (or not), and relates to the all-important question of energy dependence.
Below are key sections from the new Hersh investigative report, broken up by our own subheadings…
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Completely ‘offline planning’ & plausible deniability
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–no evidence to be dug up later by a special prosecutor or a presidential historian. You could call it the perfect crime.
The Germans possibly had foreknowledge
It was no surprise to the agency’s 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 “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” 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: “We continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies.”
…The German leader was considered then–and now–by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.
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Biden’s extraordinary public threat
What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden’s 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 “on demand”–after the war began. “It was then that we”–the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project–“understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.”
After Biden’s 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: “We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war”–Putin was in the process of annexing the four Ukrainian oblasts he wanted–“but 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” the shuttered Nord Stream 2. “The White House fear was that Putin would get Germany under his thumb and then he was going to get Poland.”
Motive
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: “Who did it?”
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–and 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.
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