Seymour Hersh, veteran investigative reporter who broke the stories of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the clandestine bombing of Cambodia, the secret recovery of a sunken Soviet submarine in 1974, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for publications such as the New York Times and New Yorker, has launched his independent Substack site with an article, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”.
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
“This is utterly false and complete fiction,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Spokespeople for the CIA and State Department said the same.
I’m shocked! Shocked to find that the Global American Empire (GAE) is up to no good.
Mumbly Joe explicitly threatened to destroy it before it happened. Also… Victoria Nuland: “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.”
The political class are pure evil.
VIctoria Nuland: “Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.” https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1618763049007198208
Wikipedia is your friend on this one; I haven’t paid much attention to assertions such as that the operation that killed Bin Laden was just one big fake from beginning to end. But in the case of his present claims there’s a good takedown here:
Hersh definitely had his day, but at this stage of his life he should be basking in his laurels, not trying to add fresh ones.
Oliver Alexander: “I would like to preface this post by stating that I will not be making any conclusions on who is responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline explosions in this piece.”
What a wimp! Mr. Alexander is typical of the Far Leftist who is happy to throw stones but is incapable of placing those stones on top of each other to build something.
Undoubtedly there are detailed errors in Hersh’s account of the destruction of the German/Russian pipelines. Hersh was clearly used as a conduit by some individuals with the Deep State, and he used the supplied information without much digging or checking. However, the fact remains that the pipelines were destroyed – benefitting the US and Norway while doing a lot of economic damage to German and lesser damage to Russia and the French & Swiss part-owners.
You can’t beat something with nothing. Until the wimp Alexander is prepared to lay out a more credible alternative scenario, Hersh’s explanation stands.
The truth - in contrast to the workings of the tactical details - as usual, is found in answering “Cui Bono?” No strategic gyrations or contortions are required to answer that. Indeed, our decerebrate dear puppet/leader tattled on his string-pullers weeks in advance. “That is all ye know…”
The Ukrainians had the most to gain here, and they’ve built robot naval drones that traveled long distances and entered harbors to attack Russian warships. The Nord Stream operation was a lot easier: perhaps two or three guys out in a fishing boat lowering explosive packages onto the pipelines (with magnets to hold them on until a timed detonation). No fancy deep divers needed, nor naval warships nor aircraft.
I guess you have never been out to sea. There are no directions like “Turn right on 4th Street”. Finding buried pipelines in several hundred feet of water (It is dark down there – totally dark!) is quite a feat. Garmin won’t help you. Just look at the effort the US is having to make to recover that weather balloon they shot down in the ocean – and they could see where it fell! Also, note that the US diving team mis-identified one of the pipelines, blowing up one pipeline twice and missing one altogether. Finding buried subsea pipelines is not something that can be done by a couple of Ukrainians in a rowboat.
The other flaw in that scenario is that blowing up the NordStream pipelines did nothing to help the Ukraine. It did little current damage to Russia, since the lines were already shut down. At the same time, it ran a huge risk of incurring the wrath of Germany, on whom the Ukrainians depend for support. Admittedly, doing something dumb would be quite in character for Zelensky’s crew – but that would have been exceptionally dumb. Especially since the Ukraine had the alternative of shutting down the gas pipelines from Russia to Europe that cross over the Ukraine – lines that are still today shipping Russian gas to Europe.
No, but underwater drones (one would use the “ROV” sort here, meaning tethered by a control cable) are widely-used and available off-the-shelf, for example:
Sure it will, if you’re in a fishing boat on top of the water. (A “rowboat”? Jeez. The Ukrainians are hardly internal-combustion-engine-phobic, and there are plenty of powered boats available in the Baltic.) The location of the pipeline is public information; just go to the GPS coordinates and you’ll be within a few meters of it. That’s likely actually close enough if you had a hundred kilos of explosive. But you would probably prefer to use less, which would mean finding the pipeline. No, it isn’t actually buried, at least not most of it. So you can try finding it with a magnet dropped on a rope (though that would have to be a rather large magnet since the steel is inside a concrete shell) or by dragging an anchor until you catch it. Perhaps add a video camera (yes, with a light) to the magnet or anchor to be sure that what you’ve caught is a pipeline. Then once that is done, take your explosives package and slide it down the rope.
Also, note that the US diving team mis-identified one of the pipelines, blowing up one pipeline twice and missing one altogether.
Missing one pipeline makes it less likely it was a professional US operation, and more likely some amateur-hour thing.
As for “the lines were already shut down” and the risk of “incurring the wrath of Germany”, those are objections to anyone doing it, yet someone did. Having a small team with a low budget minimizes the “wrath” risk: a guilty government can plausibly deny sending them out, as in the movie line “If you are caught, we will deny all knowledge of your mission”.
Source for above construction details of Nord Stream 2:
