American journalist Hersh revealed details of the US sabotage on the "Northern Streams"The explosives under the "Northern Streams" were laid by American divers, says investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in an article on Substack.
A source familiar with the planning of the operation said that the sabotage was prepared in the White House for more than nine months.
Seymour HershThe New York Times called the incident a "mystery," but it was a secret U.S. underwater operation that was kept secret—until today.
Nord Stream
The US Navy Diving and Rescue Center is located in a place as obscure as its name - by a country road in Panama City, which has become a thriving resort town in southwest Florida, 110 kilometers from the Alabama border. The center itself is as nondescript as the place where it is located. It's a pretty old gray concrete building that looks like a technical school somewhere on the west side of Chicago. There is a self-service laundry and a dance school across the two-lane road from it.
The center has been training highly qualified combat scuba divers for decades, who after training serve in American military units around the world. They can dive into the water to a great depth in order to do both good deeds — for example, using explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordnance — and bad ones, for example, to blow up foreign oil platforms, spoil the intake valves of underwater power plants, destroy the locks of shipping channels. The center in Panama City, where the second largest indoor swimming pool in America is located, was the ideal place to select the best and most unwilling graduates of the diving school, who last summer successfully completed the task in the Baltic Sea at a depth of 80 meters.
In June last year, Navy combat swimmers, acting under the cover of the widely advertised NATO BALTOPS 22 exercises, installed remote-controlled explosive devices, and three months later blew up three of the four pipes of the Nord Stream. This was told by a source directly familiar with the details of the planning and preparation of the operation.
Germany and some Western European countries have been receiving cheap Russian gas through two Nord Stream–1 pipes for more than ten years. The second pair of pipes called "Nord Stream – 2" was laid, but not put into operation. When Russian troops began to accumulate on the Ukrainian border, and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 loomed on the horizon, President Joseph Biden believed that Vladimir Putin was using these pipelines to satisfy his political and territorial ambitions.
White House Press Secretary Adrienne Watson wrote in response to a request for comment on the situation: "This is a lie and a complete fabrication." CIA spokeswoman Tammy Thorp did the same, saying, "These allegations are complete and utter lies."
Biden made the decision to sabotage the pipelines after more than nine months of top secret debates on the sidelines of American national security agencies. Their participants discussed how best to achieve their goal. The question was not whether to carry out the operation or not. The parties were thinking how to complete the task without leaving any traces to guess who was responsible for the sabotage.
There were important bureaucratic reasons to choose the graduates of the diving center in Panama City. These were people from the Navy, not from the command of special forces, whose special operations must be reported to Congress and informed in advance of the leadership of the Senate and the House of Representatives, or the so-called "gang of eight". The Biden administration did its best to avoid information leaks during the planning and preparation of the operation in 2021 and early 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team, consisting of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his deputy Victoria Nuland, have been consistent in their hostility to these pipelines, which are laid parallel to each other along the bottom of the Baltic Sea along a length of 1,200 kilometers. They come from two different ports in the north-east of Russia (so in the text — approx. transl.) near the Estonian border, pass near the Danish island of Bornholm, and end in northern Germany.
This direct route, bypassing Ukraine, became a real gift for the German economy, which received cheap gas from Russia in abundance. It was enough for the operation of factories and for heating houses, and German distributors were able to sell excess gas throughout Western Europe to their advantage. Any actions that put the administration on the trail would be a violation of its promise to minimize the possibility of a direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was the most important thing in this case.
Washington and its anti–Russian NATO partners from the very beginning of the operation of the Nord Stream-1 saw it as a threat to Western domination. His holding company Nord Stream AG was registered in 2005 in Switzerland in partnership with Gazprom. The Russian company brought huge profits to shareholders, among whom oligarchs dominated, completely subordinate to Putin. Gazprom owned 51 percent of the company's shares, and the remaining 49 percent was divided among four European energy firms — French, Dutch and two German. They also had the right to sell inexpensive gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom shared its revenues with the Russian state. In some years, its revenues from the sale of oil and gas accounted for 45% of the Russian annual budget.
America's political fears had every reason to be. Now Putin was receiving an additional, very serious and urgently needed source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe were becoming dependent on cheap gas from Russia. And Europe's dependence on America has decreased. In fact, that's how it turned out. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as the embodiment of the famous "Eastern policy" Willy Brandt, who allowed Germany to rebuild itself and other European countries destroyed during World War II. Among other things, Germany was able to supply cheap Russian gas to the thriving Western European market and its foreign trade-oriented economy.
According to NATO and Washington, Nord Stream 1 was very dangerous. But Nord Stream–2, the construction of which was completed in September 2021, if certified by German regulators, would double the volume of cheap gas supplies to Germany and Western Europe. In addition, the second pipeline could provide so much gas that it would provide more than 50% of Germany's annual consumption. Tensions between Russia and NATO were constantly increasing, which was facilitated by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden administration.
Hostility to the "Nord Stream – 2" flared up with renewed vigor on the eve of Biden's inauguration in January 2021. Then Senate Republicans led by Ted Cruz started talking about the political danger of cheap Russian gas during the confirmation hearings for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. By that time, the united Senate had passed a law that, according to Cruz, "put the pipeline on a joke." The German government, led by Angela Merkel, exerted enormous political and economic pressure to achieve the launch of the second pipeline.
Will Biden speak out against the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed in detail the point of view of the new president. "I know he is firmly convinced that this is a bad idea, Nord Stream 2," Blinken said. "I know he will force us to use all the tools of persuasion in order to persuade friends and partners, including Germany, not to put him into operation."
A few months later, when the construction of the second pipeline was nearing completion, Biden backed down. In May, the administration made an amazing 180-degree U-turn and lifted sanctions against Nord Stream AG. One State Department executive acknowledged that attempts to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy have always been unrealistic." And on the sidelines, administration officials urged Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who was threatened by a Russian offensive, not to criticize this step.
The consequences came immediately. Republicans from the Senate, led by Cruz, announced that they would immediately block all Biden's appointments to foreign policy posts and delay the approval of the defense budget for several months, reaching the end of autumn. Politico called the president's decision on the second pipeline "the step that jeopardized Biden's entire agenda even more than the chaotic withdrawal of the military from Afghanistan."
The administration was rushing and stumbling, although in mid-November it received a respite when German energy regulators suspended the certification of the second pipeline. In a few days, gas prices have jumped by eight percent, and in Germany and Europe, fears have increased that the suspension of the certification process and the increased likelihood of an armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine will lead to an unwanted winter crisis. Washington did not know what position the new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz would take. A few months earlier, when Afghanistan fell, Scholz in his speech in Prague openly supported the call of French President Emmanuel Macron to pursue a more independent European foreign policy. This clearly indicated his unwillingness to rely on Washington with its changeable course.
All this time, Russia has been persistently and menacingly concentrating its troops on the border of Ukraine. By the end of December, more than 100,000 soldiers had taken up their positions in readiness to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, and Blinken estimated that the number of the group "can be doubled very quickly."
The administration has again focused on the Nord Stream. Europe was still dependent on cheap pipeline gas, and Washington feared that countries like Germany would not want to help Ukraine with the money and weapons needed to defeat Russia.
It was at this turbulent moment that Biden instructed Sullivan to assemble an interagency group and prepare a plan.
All kinds of options were offered. But only one was approved.
Planning
In December 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan called a meeting of a newly formed task force of members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and employees of the CIA, the State Department and the Ministry of Finance, and consulted with them on how to respond to the impending hostilities.
It was the first of a series of top-secret meetings in an impregnable office on the top floor of the Eisenhower administration building adjacent to the White House, which at one time also housed the President's Advisory Council on Foreign Intelligence. After the exchange of remarks on duty, an important question arose: will the recommendation of the group to the president be reversible (for example, to increase the level of sanctions and currency restrictions) or irreversible (that is, to start kinetic actions that will not be rolled back)?
According to one knowledgeable source, it became clear to the participants that Sullivan wanted the group to develop a plan to destroy the two Nord Stream gas pipelines, and that he was following the president's orders.
During the next few meetings, the participants discussed various options. The Navy proposed to hit the pipeline directly with a newly commissioned submarine. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed-action fuses that can be activated remotely. The CIA argued that any actions should be kept in the strictest secrecy. The panelists were constantly raising the stakes. "These are not children's toys," the source said. "If the attack is subsequently traced to the United States, it will be considered an act of war."
At that time, the CIA was headed by the suave William Burns, a former ambassador to Russia and deputy Secretary of State in the Obama administration. Burns quickly approved a working group at the office, and it accidentally included people familiar with the capabilities of Navy submariners in Panama City. Over the following weeks, members of the CIA working group worked out the details of a covert operation during which divers were to arrange an explosion along the route of the gas pipeline.
Something similar has been done before. In 1971, American intelligence learned from unidentified sources that two important units of the Soviet Navy were exchanging data via an underwater cable along the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk on the Far Eastern coast. The cable connected the regional command of the Navy with the mainland headquarters in Vladivostok.
Somewhere in the Washington area, a group of CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) operatives was carefully selected under deep cover. They developed a plan involving U.S. Navy divers, specially modified submarines and a deep-sea rescue vehicle. By trial and error, it was possible to establish an accurate cable trace. Divers installed a sophisticated listening device on it, successfully intercepted Russian negotiations and recorded them on tape.
The NSA found out that high-ranking officers of the Soviet Navy did not even doubt the security of their communication line and chatted with each other without any encryption. The recording device and the cassette had to be changed monthly, and the project successfully lasted for a whole decade until it was issued by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton, who spoke fluent Russian. Pelton was extradited by a Soviet defector in 1985, after which he received a prison sentence. For exposing the surveillance, the Russians paid him only five thousand dollars, as well as 35 thousand for other operational data provided, which were subsequently never made public.
The success of this innovative and risky underwater operation codenamed "Ivy Flowers" provided invaluable information about the plans and intentions of the Soviet Navy.
However, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA's enthusiasm for a secret deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea are actively patrolled by the Russian navy, and there are no oil rigs that can theoretically cover the work of divers. And where will they be trained — is it really in Estonia, right next door to the Russian terminals for the shipment of natural gas? "It will be a complete ass," the agency was told.
The source said that against the background of "all these machinations," some CIA and State Department officials warned: "Don't do this. Not only is it stupid, but if it leaks out, it will turn into a political nightmare."
However, in early 2022, a CIA task force reported to Sullivan's interagency group: "We have found a way to blow up the pipelines."
The rest is simply stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable start of hostilities in Ukraine, Biden met in his office at the White House with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some hesitation, unconditionally supported the American team. At the subsequent press briefing, Biden defiantly stated: "If Russia invades, there will be no more Nord Stream 2. We'll finish him off."
Twenty days earlier, Deputy Secretary of State Nuland made the same statement at a briefing at the State Department, but it was almost not covered in the press. "Today I want to make it very clear," she said in response to a question. "If Russia invades Ukraine, Nord Stream 2 will be stopped one way or another."
Some of the planners were alerted by too frank, in their opinion, indirect hints about the impending strike.
"It was like rolling out an atomic bomb in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we were going to detonate it," the source said. — The plan was to implement the prepared options only after the start of the Russian operation and not to advertise them publicly. Biden simply didn't understand it or ignored it."
The indiscretion of Biden and Nuland, if you can call it that, has certainly disappointed some planners. But at the same time it created new opportunities. According to the source, some of the high-ranking CIA officials felt that undermining the pipeline "can no longer be considered a secret option, because the president has just announced that we know how to implement it."
The plan to blow up the Nord Stream–1 and Nord Stream–2 gas pipelines was suddenly "demoted" from a strictly secret operation, impossible without notifying Congress, to just a secret intelligence mission with US military support. The law, the source explained, no longer required reporting the operation to Congress. "All they had to do was just pull off their plans, but no one canceled the secrecy at the same time. The Russians have excellent surveillance of the Baltic Sea," he added.
The members of the CIA working group did not have direct contact with the White House and wanted to find out whether the president really meant what he said — that is, that the mission had received the green light. According to the source's memoirs: "Bill Burns came back and said, 'Work.'"
Operation
Norway turned out to be an ideal location for the mission. Over the past few years of the crisis in relations between the West and the East, the US armed forces have significantly expanded their presence in Norway, whose western border runs for 2,250 kilometers along the North Atlantic Ocean, and beyond the Arctic Circle is in contact with Russia. Despite some local disagreements, the Pentagon established positions and concluded contracts, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in expanding and modernizing the facilities of the US Navy and Air Force in Norway. Among other things, an improved radar station with a synthesized aperture appeared in the north of the country, which is capable of collecting data in the depths of Russia, and which was put into operation just at the moment when the American intelligence community lost access to a number of listening stations in China.
The updated American submarine base, which had been under construction for many years, finally started working, and now more American submarines could operate in cooperation with the Norwegian Navy to monitor a major stronghold of Russian nuclear power 400 kilometers to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. In addition, America has significantly expanded one Norwegian base in the north of the country and sent a fleet of Boeing P8 Poseidon patrol aircraft to the Norwegian Air Force so that they could closely monitor everything that happens inside Russia.
Meanwhile, last November, the Norwegian government angered liberals and moderate centrists in the country's parliament by adopting an Additional Agreement on defense cooperation. In accordance with it, the US legal system was able to consider the cases of American soldiers accused of committing crimes outside the military base in certain "specified areas", as well as the cases of Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of obstructing work at this base.
Norway was one of the first countries to sign the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, that is, at the very beginning of the Cold War. Today, the Secretary General of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a staunch anti—communist who served as Prime Minister of Norway for eight years before taking up his current post in NATO - with the support of the United States — in 2014. He was a hard-liner on any issues concerning Putin and Russia, and he had been cooperating with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. Since then, the United States has trusted him completely. "He is the glove that fits perfectly on the American hand," said the source mentioned above.
The planners in Washington knew they would have to go to Norway. "They hated the Russians, and there were a lot of excellent sailors and scuba divers in the Norwegian Navy who had accumulated experience in deep-sea oil and gas exploration over several generations," the source explained. In addition, these people were also willing to keep information about the mission secret. (Probably, the Norwegians pursued other interests: the destruction of the Nord Stream — if the Americans were able to pull off this operation — would allow Norway to sell much more of its own natural gas to Europe).
In March, several members of the planning team flew to Norway to meet with representatives of the Norwegian secret services and the Navy there. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea the explosives should be planted. In many sections, the distance between the Nord Stream and Nord Stream — 2 gas pipelines, each of which has two lines and which run to the German port city of Greifswald, is only about one and a half kilometers.
The Norwegian Navy quickly found a suitable place — in the shallow waters of the Baltic Sea a few kilometers from the Danish island of Bornholm. There the pipelines ran at a distance of more than one and a half kilometers from each other on the seabed at a depth of only 80 meters. This depth was perfect for divers who, having plunged into the water from a Norwegian Alta-type minesweeper with scuba tanks filled with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium, could fix C-4 shaped charges on four strands of pipelines covered with protective concrete shells. It's hard, long and dangerous work, but the waters near the Bornholm Ferry had another advantage: there are no strong tidal currents that would significantly complicate the work of scuba divers.
After doing a little research, the Americans agreed.
At that moment, the above-mentioned mysterious group of deep-sea divers from the ranks of the US Navy, based in Panama, re-entered the game. Elite graduates of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, who usually dream of joining the ranks of navy seals, fighter pilots or submariners, look at schools for deep-sea divers in Panama, whose coaches took part in the secret operation Ivy Bells, as an unnecessary backwater. Even if someone has to join the ranks of a less "prestigious" command of a surface vessel, there will always be a place for him on some destroyer, cruiser or landing ship. The least attractive specialty is mine demolition. Such scuba divers never appear in Hollywood movies and on the covers of popular magazines.
"The best divers qualified as deep-sea divers are a close-knit community. Only the best are called to conduct operations, and they should be ready to arrive at the CIA in Washington at the first call," the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans chose the place and people, but another disturbing circumstance was discovered: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm could attract the attention of the Swedish or Danish fleets, who were supposed to report it.
Denmark is also one of the original members of NATO, and its special ties with the United Kingdom are widely known in the intelligence community. Sweden applied to join NATO and demonstrated great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems, which successfully monitored Russian submarines, which from time to time appeared in the distant waters of the Swedish archipelago and sometimes surfaced. The Norwegians supported the Americans' suggestion that some high-ranking officials of Denmark and Sweden needed to be informed in general terms about the possible activities of scuba divers in the area. In this case, one of the high-ranking officials could have intervened in time and intercepted the data at the time of their transfer up the chain of command, preventing the leakage of information about the operation on the pipelines. "What they were told and what they knew were deliberately different things," a source told me. (The Norwegian Embassy, which I contacted for comment, did not respond to my requests).
The Norwegians had to remove other obstacles. It was known that the Russian navy had at its disposal technologies capable of detecting and activating underwater mines. American explosive devices had to be disguised in such a way that they seemed to be part of the natural background to Russian systems. To do this, it was necessary to adapt them to the salinity of the water in this area. And the Norwegians found a solution.
The Norwegians also managed to answer another important question — the question of when exactly the operation should take place. Every June for 21 years, the Sixth Fleet of the US Navy, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, organizes large-scale NATO exercises in the Baltic Sea, in which many allied ships take part. The exercises in June 2022 will be called Baltic Operations 22 or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians decided that these exercises would be the perfect cover for laying explosives.
The Americans added one key element: they convinced the strategists of the Sixth Fleet to include experimental design exercises in the program. Within their framework, as officially reported by the US Navy, the Sixth Fleet cooperates with "research and military centers". The event at sea will take place off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm, and according to its program, one group of NATO divers will set mines, and rival teams will use the latest underwater technologies to detect and destroy them.
It was both a useful teaching and an ingenious cover. The guys from Panama City will do their job, and by the end of the BALTOPS22 exercise, the C4 explosive with a 48-hour timer attached will be in place. And by the time of the first explosion, the Americans and Norwegians will already be gone.
The days passed one after another. "The clock was ticking and we were getting closer to completing the mission," the source said.
But then Washington suddenly changed his mind. The bombs will be planted during the BALTOPS as planned, but the White House is worried that a two-day window for detonation at the end of the exercise could compromise America.
Then the White House had a new request: "Maybe the guys on the ground will come up with another way to blow up the pipelines — so that later and on command?".
Some planners were outraged and disappointed by the president's apparent indecision. Divers from Panama City practiced installing C4 on pipelines, as planned during BALTOPS, but the team in Norway had to come up with a new way to satisfy Biden and give him the opportunity to give an order when he sees fit.
The CIA is used to arbitrary last-minute changes. However, this time they reinforced the already existing concerns about the expediency and legality of the entire operation.
Previously, the secret orders of the president became a dilemma for the CIA during the Vietnam War, when in the midst of anti-war sentiment, President Johnson ordered the CIA to violate its own charter and establish surveillance of pacifist leaders to make sure that communist Russia was not behind them.
In the end, the agency gave up, and during the 1970s it became finally clear how far it was ready to go. After the Watergate scandal, newspaper revelations about spying on American citizens, involvement in the murders of foreign leaders and a coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende poured in.
In the mid-1970s, these scandals led to a series of dramatic Senate hearings led by Frank Church of Idaho. The then director of the CIA, Richard Helms, admitted that he was obliged to fulfill the will of the president, even breaking the law.
In unpublished testimony behind closed doors, Helms regretfully explained that "when you carry out a secret order of the president, a practically immaculate conception comes out." "It doesn't matter whether it's fair or not, the rules and principles of the CIA are different from any other part of the government," he said. In fact, he admitted to the senators that, being the head of the CIA, he understands perfectly well that he works for the "Crown", and not for the "Constitution".
The Americans in Norway acted with the same approach and began to solve a new problem in good faith — how to remotely detonate the C4 device on Biden's orders. The task turned out to be much more responsible than Washington imagined: the team in Norway did not know and could not know when the president would want to press the button. In a few weeks, in a few months, in six months, or even later?
The C4 explosive attached to the pipeline was supposed to be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by an airplane in the shortest possible time, and this required the most advanced signal processing technology. However, after installation, the delayed activation timer on any of the four pipelines could be triggered by a bizarre combination of ocean background noises throughout the busy Baltic Sea, including tips from near and far ships, underwater drilling, seismic phenomena, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the hydroacoustic buoy will emit a unique sequence of low-frequency tonal sounds similar to the sounds of a flute or piano. The timer will recognize it, and after the specified time, the explosives will go off. ("The signal needs to be reliable enough that no other impulse could detonate explosives," Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained to me. Postol, a former scientific adviser to the head of naval operations at the Pentagon, said that the problem facing the group in Norway due to Biden's delays was down to chance: "The longer the explosives are in the water, the higher the risk that the bombs will detonate some random signal").
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 reconnaissance aircraft made a seemingly ordinary flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater — first to Nord Stream –2, and then to Nord Stream-1. A few hours later, a powerful C4 explosive went off, and three of the four pipelines were disabled. After a few minutes, huge pools of methane accumulated from the damaged pipes on the surface of the water, and the world realized that something irreversible had happened.
Effects
Immediately after the pipeline explosion, the American media presented the incident as an unsolved mystery. Russia has been repeatedly mentioned as the likely culprit. This version was fueled by deliberate leaks from the White House, but it was never supported by any clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage.
A few months later, when it became clear that the Russian authorities were quietly assessing the costs of repairing pipelines, the New York Times called this news "complicating the version of who is behind the explosion." No major American newspaper began to cite in its texts earlier threats to pipelines voiced by Biden and Deputy Secretary of State Nuland.
Although it never became clear why Russia would destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more eloquent justification for the actions of the president [Biden] came from the mouth of Secretary of State Blinken.
Answering a question at a press conference at the end of September last year about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described this moment as potentially favorable:
"This is an amazing opportunity to eliminate dependence on Russian energy once and for all and thereby deprive Vladimir Putin of the opportunity to use energy as a weapon and a means of promoting his imperial plans. This is very important, and it opens up huge strategic opportunities for the coming years, but for now we are determined to do everything possible so that the consequences of the crisis do not fall on the shoulders of the citizens of our countries, and indeed the whole world," Blinken said.
Later, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction with the elimination of the newest of the pipelines. Speaking at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late January, she told Senator Ted Cruz: "I believe the entire administration, like you, is quite satisfied that the Nord Stream has turned into a pile of metal at the bottom of the sea."
The source has a more "street-level" view of Biden's decision to sabotage. "Well," he said, speaking of the president, "I have to admit, this guy has balls. He said he would, and he did."
When asked why, in his opinion, the Russians could not answer, he cynically stated: "Maybe they want to learn how to do the same thing as the United States."
"The legend was great," the source continued. "There was a secret operation behind it, in which experts participated and equipment operating on a hidden signal was used."
"Its only flaw was the decision to implement it."
