Back in September, when the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were blown up, I saw, in my corner of Twitter, many explanations that the US was behind it. Now, Seymour Hersh — the 85-year-old investigative journalist who made his name in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up — has written his own unaffiliated piece explaining how America took out the Nord Stream pipeline:
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership — the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team — National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy — had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
[…]
As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
[…]
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades…there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
[…]
Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it — but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said — that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
Navy Divers better get lawyers and say nothing.
The Navy Divers are in the first paragraph to pin the tail on the Jackasses who trusted their leadership. They all but named them, mine warfare is a small community, this doesn’t make sense if you aren’t or weren’t in the military the last generation: the lowest ranking people take the hit.
IF you take the hit THEN punishment mild, limited jail, get to finish your 20. IF you speak and say truthfully you were following orders THEN you get 20 years. See Abu Gharib, Corey Claggart, et al.
This is the real world, the real military.
Although not stated in the article, the other reason the SOF community wasn’t used and Navy Divers were is the SOF community has been burned enough to know better. In other words, the SEALS, etc. would have told the CIA, and especially the State Department, go away.
This is the real world, the real US military, and the real US police. This is Uvalde, this is why no one would shoot down the Balloon until it was over the water. It’s called Liability.
And this is why, America, you are now less defended than before by exactly the Navy Divers.
So build your own Navy Divers.
Take the focus off the US for a moment.
What does Germany do to its NATO “ally” Norway that blew up the pipeline from Russia and benefitted from getting a much higher price for its own gas?
What do German people do to their government, which clearly stood back and allowed this destruction to impoverish Germany?
Actions have consequences!
Blowing up a pipeline to deny Germany gas? And this will make the Germans more likely to help Ukraine fight Russia? If our leadership thinks like this, we are screwed worse than I thought.
Are you people fucking stupid? Sy Hersh? The congenital liar, whose fabulations have always, always been to the detriment of the US, and which have never, conveniently, ever been in the US interest?
This latest crap is mind-bogglingly FUBAR on the face of it, describing an overly complex and entirely delusional narrative. The Norwegians cooperated with the US? WTF? Their as-yet-to-attain operational status P-8s playing a key role?
Christ on a crutch, but the stupid has just gone exponential around this site. The technical details Hersh relates about the whole thing are remarkably fantastic; saline levels in the water affecting the fusing? WTF is that supposed to mean?
A fast pass through his bullshit should set off anyone’s bullshit detectors. This isn’t even a credible attempt at a thing, other than to demonstrate that anyone taking Hersh seriously in this regard is as delusional as he is. If anything, this smacks of someone in the FSB reaching out to an old contact and feeding him a line of half-ass bullshit that anyone with a passing familiarity with anything related would be able to see as bullshit.
I’ve no idea what actually happened to the Nordstream pipelines, but I’ll lay a month’s paycheck that it wasn’t this, not as Hersh relates it. Norwegians? Schoolhouse divers? LOL… Dude… Just stop. This is not how this would have been done, if the US had any responsibility for it. Trust me on this one; this convoluted and unnecessarily complex story straight out of the slush pile at a pulp publishing house has zero credibility.
For one thing, why on earth would the Norwegians be involved in something going on in Danish/German territorial waters? Are we to presume that this represents some Machiavellian Norwegian attempt to ensure the economic success of their own pipeline? That the Norwegian government or their military would be on-board for something like this? As politically-correct as that crew has been?
Yeah; no. Believe this bullshit, and you’ll believe anything. Like the vast Jewish conspiracy out there, running the world. Shit like this is why I quit coming here, and I see that the low intellectual standards have, somehow, gotten even lower.
We missed you, Kirk.
Thanks, Kirk.
Nice to see Kirk here again. We won’t have to go to Samizdata to get our regular dose of Kirkiosity.
Of course Hersh’s tale is incomplete and likely inaccurate in some details. It was fed to him by players in our Deep State (maybe the Pentagon?) for reasons about which we can only speculate.
What we peons are allowed to know is that:
(a) 3 of the 4 pipelines in the NordStream system were blown up, one of them twice (oops!);
(b) Denmark, Sweden, Germany are all very close-lipped about whatever “investigation” they have done;
(c) the big loser from this Act of War (by someone) was Germany — losing their major investment in NordStream and losing the potential source of cheap energy.
The pipelines did not spontaneously combust. Someone went to great expensive pains to blow them up. Common sense says it was some part of the Biden MalAdministration. Hersh does not have the whole story, but he at least has put this dangerous act back in the news. Now maybe we US peons will learn the truth.
The story is now the narrative, the Navy Divers are the fall guys, and so its truth is official.
Welcome, Kirk.
All the details might not be be accurate, but it is almost certain that the pipes were blown up by the said actors. Had the motives and the means…
When the pipes blew up, it was around the time when Russia was restricting gas flow to Europe, so MSM played it like the Russians did it themselves…
Usual gang of anti-Western idiots in the comments and suddenly a lonely voice of reason, quelle surprise
There is no political entity on the planet that is more anti-Western than USG/NATO itself.