XPost: or.politics, ca.politics, soc.history.war.misc

On 2/9/23 10:33, John Dillinger wrote:

seymourhersh.substack.com
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
Seymour Hersh

The U.S. Navy's Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location
as obscure as its name-down what was once a country lane in rural
Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle
of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center's complex
is as nondescript as its location-a drab concrete post-World War II
structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west
side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are
across what is now a four-lane road.

The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for
decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are
capable of technical diving to do the good-using C4 explosives to
clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance-as well
as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves
for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping
canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor
pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last
summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface
of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely
publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the
remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed
three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with
direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1,
had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap
Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of
pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet
operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border
and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph
Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize
natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said
in an email, "This is false and complete fiction." Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote:
"This claim is completely and utterly false."

Biden's decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine
months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington's
national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For
much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but
how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

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.

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, 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. Action that could be traced to the
administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict
with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The
holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in
Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded
Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom
controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy
firms-one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany-sharing
the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control
downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors
in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom's profits were shared with the
Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in
some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia's annual
budget.

America's political fears were real: Putin would now have an
additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the
rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas
supplied by Russia-while diminishing European reliance on America. In
fact, that's exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as
part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt's famed
Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate
itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among
other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous
Western European market and trading economy.

Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and
Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in
September of 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. Tensions were
constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the
aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.

Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden
inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz
of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian
natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of
State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as
Cruz told Blinken, "halted [the pipeline] in its tracks." There would
be enormous political and economic pressure from the German
government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline
online.

Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that
he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President's views.
"I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream
2," he said. "I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool
that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany,
not to move forward with it."

A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had "always been a long shot." Behind the
scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not
to criticize the move.

There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz,
announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden's foreign policy
nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months,
deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden's turnabout on the
second Russian pipeline as "the one decision, arguably more than the
chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled
Biden's agenda."

The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the
crisis in mid-November, when Germany's energy regulators suspended
approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged
8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the
pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between
Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It
was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany's newly
appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of
Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel
Macron's call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a
speech in Prague-clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and
its mercurial actions.

Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more
than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and
Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from
Blinken that those troop numbers could be "doubled in short order."

The administration's attention once again was focused on Nord Stream.
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.

It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to
bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.

All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.

PLANNING

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled
into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force-men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the
State and Treasury Departments-and asked for recommendations about how
to respond to Putin's impending invasion.

It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure
room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to
the White House, that was also the home of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and
forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question:
Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible-such as another layer of sanctions and currency
restrictions-or irreversible-that is, kinetic actions, which could not
be undone?

What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to
come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream
pipelines-and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.

Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for
an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to
assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs
with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved
understood the stakes. "This is not kiddie stuff," the source said. If
the attack were traceable to the United States, "It's an act of war."

At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered
former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of
state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency
working group whose ad hoc members included-by chance-someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy's deep-sea divers in Panama
City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA's working group
began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea
divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.

Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American
intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea
cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia's Far East Coast. The
cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.

A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National
Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington
area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers,
modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that
succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable.
The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a
taping system.

The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the
security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers
without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be
replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until
it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician
named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by
a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just
$5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along
with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was
never made public.

That underwater success, code named Ivy Bells, was innovative and
risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.

Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA's
enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many
unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily
patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could
be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go
to Estonia, right across the border from Russia's natural gas loading
docks, to train for the mission? "It would be a goat fuck," the Agency
was told.

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.'"
"The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow
water a few miles off Denmark's Bornholm Island . . ."

THE OPERATION

Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.

In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has
vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs
1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic
Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and
contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of
millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an
advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening
sites inside China.

A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American
submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian
colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250
miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly
expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the
Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes
to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.

In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some
moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S.
legal system would have jurisdiction in certain "agreed areas" in the
North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as
over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with
the work at the base.

Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949,
in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of
NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as
Norway's prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO
post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things
Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence
community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since.
"He is the glove that fits the American hand," the source said.

Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. "They
hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors
and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable
deep-sea oil and gas exploration," the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream-if the Americans
could pull it off-would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own
natural gas to Europe.)

Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet
with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions
was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made
their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.

The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow
waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark's Bornholm Island.
The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a sea floor that was
only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers,
who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive
with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their
tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous
work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no
major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much
more difficult.

After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.

At this point, the Navy's obscure deep-diving group in Panama City
once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater
by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who
typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot,
or submariner. If one must become a "Black Shoe"-that is, a member of
the less desirable surface ship command-there is always at least duty
on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all
is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on
the cover of popular magazines.

"The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight
community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and
told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington," the
source said.

The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but
there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the
waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish
navies, which could report it.

Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was
known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had
demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and
magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines
that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish
archipelago and be forced to the surface.

The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior
officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms
about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone
higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of
command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. "What they were told
and what they knew were purposely different," the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)

The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was
known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and
triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to
be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian
system as part of the natural background-something that required
adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a
fix.

The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the
American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south
of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea
involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current
exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or
BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to
plant the mines.

The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth
Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the
program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth
Fleet in collaboration with the Navy's "research and warfare centers."
The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and
involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams
using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.

It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City
boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by
the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the
Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.

The days were counting down. "The clock was ticking, and we were
nearing mission accomplished," the source said.

And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be
planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day
window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the
exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.

Instead, the White House had a new request: "Can the guys in the field
come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?"

Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President's seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS,
but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden
what he wanted-the ability to issue a successful execution order at a
time of his choosing.

Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the
CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some
shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.

The President's secret orders also evoked the CIA's dilemma in the
Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing
anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its
charter-which specifically barred it from operating inside America-by
spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being
controlled by Communist Russia.

The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became
clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent
newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about
the Agency's spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.

Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the
mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it
clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted
that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it
meant violating the law.

In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that
"you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something" under
secret orders from a President. "Whether it's right that you should
have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under
different rules and ground rules than any other part of the
government." He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head
of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not
the Constitution.

The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem-how to remotely detonate
the C4 explosives on Biden's order. It was a much more demanding
assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for
the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button.
Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or
longer?

The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy
dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the
most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed
timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be
accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea-from near and distant
ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea
creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds-much like those emitted
by a flute or a piano-that would be recognized by the timing device
and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. ("You
want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives," I was told
by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon's Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue
facing the group in Norway because of Biden's delay was one of chance:
"The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there
would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.")

On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A
few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and
three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few
minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines
could be seen spreading on the water's surface and the world learned
that something irreversible had taken place.

FALLOUT

In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a
likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White
House-but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it
emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates
for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the
news as "complicating theories about who was behind" the attack. No
major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines
made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.

While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own
lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President's
action came from Secretary of State Blinken.

Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of
the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the
moment as a potentially good one:

"It's a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the
dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin
the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial
designs. That's very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we're determined to
do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of
this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter,
around the world."

More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of
the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, "?Like
you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know

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