Hersh: the United States has destroyed all traces of involvement in the undermining of the "Northern Streams"
The United States has covered up all traces of its involvement in the undermining of the "Northern Streams", said American journalist Seymour Hersh in an article on the Substack platform. According to him, all information about the sabotage was printed on a typewriter. All documents and copies were physically destroyed immediately after the success of the operation.
Seymour Hersh
I don't know much about the covert operations of the CIA – like all other uninitiated people– but I still understand that the main component of any successful mission is the ability to convincingly deny involvement. The American men and women who secretly came and left Norway during the few months it took to plan and carry out the undermining of three strands of the Nord Stream gas pipeline last year left no trace. There was not a single hint of the existence of that team –except perhaps the success of their mission.
For President Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers, the ability to deny everything was an essential condition. No significant information about the mission got into the computers: it was typed on a Royal typewriter or, possibly, a Smith Corona, while making a couple of copies through a carbon copy, as if neither the Internet nor the online world had yet been invented. The White House was completely isolated from what was happening in the vicinity of Oslo. Reports and summaries from the site were sent directly to CIA Director Bill Burns, who was the only link between those who planned the operation and the president, who commissioned it on September 26, 2022. As soon as the mission was completed, all the printed documents and their copies were destroyed, as a result, there were no physical traces left – no evidence that could later be discovered by a special prosecutor or some presidential historian. You could say the perfect crime.
But there was still one nuance – a gap in understanding between those who carried out the mission and President Biden as to why he ordered the destruction of pipelines exactly when he did it. I ended my first 5,200-word article, published in early February, with the words of an official who was aware of the details of that mission and who told me: "It was a beautiful operational legend. The only mistake was the decision to implement it."
This is the first story about that mistake – which I am publishing on the anniversary of the explosions on the Nord Stream – and President Biden, as well as his national security aides, will not like it.
Of course, my first article caused a sensation, but the leading media tried to focus on the White House's denials and used a long–known argument – the fact that my material was based on information provided by an unnamed source - to debunk the idea together with the Biden administration that Joe Biden could have had something to do with that attack. Here I must remind you that during my career I have received many literary awards for articles for the New York Times and the New Yorker, in which there was not a single named source. Over the past year, I have seen a lot of newspaper articles that set out a completely different version of events and in which there was also no named primary source – articles that a technically complex underwater operation in the Baltic Sea was carried out by a group of Ukrainians who rented a 15-meter pleasure yacht called Andromeda for this purpose.
Now I can write about an inexplicable error, which was mentioned by an unnamed official from my first article. It all boils down again to the classic question of what the essence of the Central Intelligence Agency's activities is – a question raised by Richard Helms, who headed the agency during the turbulent years of the Vietnam War and the CIA's secret surveillance of Americans, which was commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson, and then Richard Nixon. In December 1974, I published a revealing piece in the New York Times that provoked unprecedented hearings in the Senate, which tried to understand the role that the agency played in the unsuccessful attempts – authorized by President John F. Kennedy – to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Helms told senators that the question is who exactly he, as director of the CIA, serves – the US Constitution or the "crown" in the person of Presidents Johnson and Nixon. The Church Commission left this question unanswered, but Helms made it clear that he and his agency work for the head of the White House.
Now let's get back to the Nord Stream. It is important to understand that Russian gas was not supplied to Germany via the Nord Stream pipelines at the moment when Joe Biden ordered it to be blown up on September 26 last year. Since 2011, cheap natural gas has been supplied to Germany via Nord Stream 1, which helped it maintain the status of a manufacturing and industrial colossus. But Putin cut off supplies through this pipeline by the end of August 2022, when there was a deadlock on the Ukrainian front. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021, but the German government, led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, blocked gas supplies through it two days before the start of the Russian special military operation.
Given the vast reserves of natural gas at Russia's disposal, American presidents since Kennedy realized that it could use its natural resources as a weapon to achieve political goals. The same point of view is held today by Biden and his aggressively minded foreign policy advisers – Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland, who is now acting as Blinken.
Sullivan held a series of high–level meetings on national security issues at the end of 2021, when Russia was building up its troops along the Ukrainian border - at that moment a military conflict already seemed almost inevitable. A group of officials, including representatives of the CIA, was tasked with developing a practical proposal that would deter Putin. The motive for carrying out the mission to undermine the Nord Stream was the resolute desire of the White House to support the President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky. Sullivan's goal seemed perfectly clear. "The White House needed to keep Russia from attacking," that official told me. "The intelligence community was tasked with coming up with a way that would make it possible to do this effectively and that would clearly demonstrate America's capabilities."
Now I know what I didn't know then – the true reason why the Biden administration "proposed to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline.“ Recently, my source explained to me that at that time Russia supplied gas and oil around the world through more than a dozen pipelines, but Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 led from Russia through the Baltic Sea directly to Germany. "The administration put Nord Stream up for discussion because it was the only pipeline we could reach, and [involvement in the explosion of which] could be convincingly denied,“ the official explained. – We solved this problem in a few weeks – by the beginning of January – and informed the White House about it. We believed that the president was using the threat against the Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid war.“
Members of the secret planning group inside the CIA were not at all surprised when on January 27, 2022, Nuland, who at that time held the position of Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs, confidently and sharply warned Putin that if he invaded Ukraine – which he obviously planned to do – "one way or another“Nord Stream ”will not move forward." This statement of hers attracted everyone's attention, but few people noticed the words that preceded the threat. According to the official transcript of her speech published by the State Department, before voicing the threat, Nuland said that regarding the Nord Stream, "we continue to conduct very serious and clear negotiations with our German allies."
When a reporter asked Nuland how she could say with such confidence that the Germans would agree to this – "because the public statements of the Germans do not fit in with what you say," she replied, demonstrating a masterful mastery of the art of empty talk: "I would ask you to come back and read the document that we signed in July 2021, which clearly states the consequences of the operation of this pipeline in the event that Russia takes military action against Ukraine." However, in the agreement that the journalists read, there was nothing specific about threats or consequences, as the New York Times, the Washington Post and Reuters wrote about. When the agreement was signed on July 21, 2021, Biden told reporters that since the construction of the pipeline is 99% complete, "the idea that something can be said or done to stop this is impossible." At that moment, Republicans led by Senator Ted Cruz called Biden's decision to allow Russian gas to flow to Germany a "geopolitical victory" for Putin and a "catastrophe" for the United States and its allies.
But two weeks after Nuland's statement, on February 7, 2022, at a joint press conference with Scholz at the White House, Biden made it clear that he had changed his position and joined Nuland and other equally aggressive foreign policy advisers, talking about the need to block the Nord Stream. "If Russia invades troops – that is, if its tanks and military cross the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no Nord Stream, we will put an end to this,“ Biden said. When asked how he intends to do this, given that the pipeline is under German control, he replied: "I promise you, we will do it, we can do it."
When Scholz was asked the same question, he replied: "We are acting together. We are absolutely united, and we will not take different steps. We will take the same steps, they will be very difficult for Russia, and she should understand this." Some members of the CIA planning team believed then and still believe that the German leader knew everything about the secret plan to destroy the pipeline.
By that time, this group of CIA agents had already contacted all the right people in Norway, whose Navy and special forces units have been helping the agency in secret operations for a long time. Norwegian sailors and Nastya-class patrol boats helped ferry American saboteurs to North Vietnam in the early 1960s, when America – under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations – waged an undeclared war there. With the support of Norway, the CIA agents did their job and found a way to turn on the strings of the pipeline what the Biden White House expected from them.
At that moment, the task of the intelligence community was to develop a sufficiently effective plan to keep Putin from attacking Ukraine. My source told me, "We did it. We have found an incredibly effective deterrent – because of its economic impact on Russia. But Putin did it anyway, despite the threat." Two experienced deep-sea divers from the ranks of the American Navy, brought in for the task, spent several months in the choppy waters of the Baltic Sea, exploring the situation and diving to the bottom before the plan was finally approved. Experienced Norwegian sailors have found a suitable place to lay bombs, which will later destroy the pipeline threads. High-ranking officials in Sweden and Denmark, who still insist that they had no idea what was going on in their shared territorial waters, turned a blind eye to the activities of American and Norwegian operatives. It would have been difficult for the American diving team and support personnel on the mission's main ship, a Norwegian minesweeping vessel, to hide while the divers were doing their job. And only when the explosions had already thundered, the team learned that there were 1,200 kilometers of natural gas in the pipes of the Nord Stream–2.
I didn't know at the time, but I was recently told that immediately after Biden's public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2 – when Scholz was standing next to him – the White House informed the CIA planning group that there would be no immediate strike on the pipelines, but they should prepare to plant bombs in order to bring them into action later. action "on demand" – after the beginning of the fighting in Ukraine. "It was then that we" – a small group of planners who worked on the project in Oslo together with representatives of the Norwegian Navy and special forces - "realized that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent at all, because the conflict in Ukraine continued, and we did not receive a command."
When Biden gave the order to activate the explosives laid on the strings of the pipeline, all that remained was to fly a Norwegian fighter jet and drop a special sonar device at the right point in the Baltic Sea so that the bombs would explode. By that time, the CIA's planning group had long since been disbanded. According to the official, by that time they "had already realized that the undermining of two Russian pipelines had nothing to do with the military conflict in Ukraine" – then Putin had already launched the process of annexation of four Ukrainian regions to Russia – "and that it was part of the neoconservatives' political program designed not to allow Scholz and Germany – against the background of the impending winter and the termination of gas supplies – to get cold feet and launch the "stopped "Nord Stream – 2. "The White House was afraid that Putin would first make Germany bend, and then he would also get Poland."
While the whole world was wondering who carried out the sabotage on the Nord Stream, the White House was silent. "So, the [US] president has dealt a blow to the economy of Germany and Western Europe," my source continued. "He could have done it in June and told Putin: we told you we would do that." According to this official, the White House's silence and denials were "a betrayal of what we were doing. If you're going to do something, do it when it can still make a difference."
According to him, the CIA leadership perceived how and when Biden gave his order to blow up the pipelines "as a strategic step towards World War III. What would happen if Russia reacted like this: you blew up our pipelines, so I will blow up your pipelines and communication cables. For Putin, the Nord Stream was not a strategic, but an economic asset. Putin wanted to sell gas. And it has already lost its pipelines" when Nord Stream–1 and Nord Stream–2 were stopped after the start of the Ukrainian conflict.
A few days after the bombings, Danish and Swedish officials said they would investigate. Two months later, they reported that the explosions had indeed taken place, adding that the investigation would continue. But they never found out anything. The German government also conducted an investigation, but it announced that a significant part of the materials and conclusions would be classified. Last winter, the German authorities allocated $286 billion in subsidies for large corporations and homeowners who faced serious difficulties in trying to keep their businesses and warm up their homes. The consequences of the explosions on the Nord Stream are still being felt. And it is expected that this year the winter in Europe will be colder.
President Biden waited four days before calling the pipeline explosions a "deliberate act of sabotage." He said, "Now the Russians are spreading disinformation about him." Later, at one of the press conferences, Sullivan, who chaired the meetings at which the idea of destroying the Nord Stream arose, was asked "whether the Biden administration believes that Russia may be behind this act of sabotage."
Sullivan's response, undoubtedly rehearsed, sounded like this: "Firstly, Russia did what it often does when it is guilty of something - it made accusations that someone else did it. We have repeatedly observed this."
"However, the President made it clear today that additional investigative work needs to be done before the United States government is ready to name those responsible in this case." Sullivan added: "We will continue to work with our allies and partners to gather all the facts, and only then we will make a decision on where to move next."
I never found any mention of anyone from the American press asking Sullivan questions about the results of that work later. I also could not find any mention of anyone since then asking Sullivan or the president where it was decided to move on.
There is also no information that President Biden asked the American intelligence community to conduct a full-scale investigation of pipeline explosions. Such instructions are commonly called "setting tasks", and they are taken quite seriously within the government.
All this explains why the most trivial question I asked a month after the bombings to a man who had worked for many years in the ranks of the American intelligence community led me to the truth that no one in America and Germany wanted to look for. My question was very simple: who did this?
The Biden administration blew up Nord Stream, and this step had nothing to do with the desire to win or stop the military conflict in Ukraine. This step was due to the White House's fear that Germany would falter and open the way for Russian gas supplies, that Germany, and then NATO – for economic reasons – would fall under the influence of Russia and its huge reserves of cheap natural resources. In turn, this has given rise to another fundamental fear – the fear that America will lose its long-standing dominant position in Western Europe.