A few days ago, the New York Times (NYT) carried a news report, quoting unnamed American intelligence officials, that a “pro-Ukrainian group” had been behind the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September. Simultaneously, the German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that a team of six—five men and a woman—had hired a yacht from the Polish coast and carried out the operation.
The Nord Streams are giant pipelines that pass under the Baltic Sea to carry Russian gas to Western Europe. Nord Stream 1 was the principal source of gas for Germany. Nord Stream 2 was never commissioned due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The explosions crippled the lines, perhaps forever, since there has been no talk of repairing and reviving them, and Western Europe has been dramatically reducing its dependence on Russian gas.
The bombings were followed by accusations and counter-accusations. Washington alleged that they were the work of Moscow. Moscow pointed its finger at Britain and the United States. Germany, Denmark and Sweden set up a joint investigation, but refused to allow Russia to participate. Nothing has been revealed about what the investigators found, if anything. Russia has repeatedly demanded a neutral probe supervised by the United Nations.
The allegation that Russia would have bombed its own pipelines, in which it had invested billions of dollars, makes no logical sense. In fact, Vladimir Putin had switched off gas supplies through Nord Stream 1 and the new pipeline hadn't carried any yet. Why would he then destroy them? After all, resumption of gas supplies was the biggest bargaining chip Putin held for pressuring Europe to in turn convince Ukraine to come to the negotiating table.
Interestingly, exactly a month before the NYT and Die Zeit stories, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh had published a very detailed investigative report in his Substack blog on the bombings. He says that the attacks were ordered by US President Joe Biden and carried out by an elite team of US Navy divers based in Panama City, Florida. And the planning had begun months before Russia’s invasion.
This seems to be the most plausible explanation. From almost his first day in the White House, Biden had been asking Germany to back off from Nord Stream 2. The reasons for this were deeply strategic. Washington feared that the commissioning of the new pipeline would inevitably increase Moscow’s influence on Europe, particularly Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, which was also a major investor in Nord Stream 2. It could pull Germany closer to Russia and away from the US.
“(Nord Stream 1),” writes Hersh, “had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe… Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption.” This, Hersh writes, the Biden administration decided could not be allowed.
The plan was hatched in late 2021, as Russia began amassing troops on the Ukraine border. In fact, Biden and his undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland, were quite open about their intentions. In the weeks leading up to the war, both publicly stated that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the US would make sure that there would be no Nord Stream 2.
According to Hersh, the American team now contacted their counterparts in Norway, where the US has large military bases. Working closely with the Norwegian Navy, a spot was identified in the Baltic Sea for laying the explosive charges on the thick concrete shells of the pipelines, 260 feet below sea level.
In June 2022, the divers from Panama City did the needful, under the cover of an annual NATO joint military exercise. The charges were, however, not set off since Biden surmised that if the explosions occurred too close to the NATO event, fingers of suspicion could point towards Washington.
On September 26, he gave the go-ahead. A Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, triggering the high-powered C4 explosives and the pipelines were ruined. Speaking before a senate committee, Nuland said that the Biden administration was “very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now…a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”.
Hersh’s story got scant coverage in the western mainstream media and no follow-up. The White House called it “utterly false and complete fiction”. And now a month later come the “pro-Ukrainian group” stories, simultaneously in the two largest newspapers in the US and Germany.
Hersh dismisses the stories with contempt. “The only thing I can say is that its story is crazy that…just what…a group of Ukrainians?” he told an interviewer. “Do you know what it takes to use the seafloor to blow up a pipeline that is covered by a concrete shield? You know that much power, the skill you have to have…The idea that Ukrainians could do it is silly stuff.”
“Biden basically told Germany ‘I will go ahead and blow up Nord Stream because I want my war and I don’t care if you don’t have gas’,” says Hersh. “He took away Germany’s option of not giving arms to Ukraine. The President of the United States took their gas away because he was worried that they weren’t putting enough money into a war he is not going to win. And God knows what’s going to happen, when it gets clearer that he is not going to win.”
Sadly, it is unlikely that the full facts about the sabotage of Nord Stream will ever emerge. That is not in the interest of either US or European governments.
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