Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told. The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said.
An important reason for the failure of Russia is the assumption that the West is behind Ukraine’s success.
The reason for now reviving the story of the Famous Five Ukrainian yachtsmen is more likely that Our Betters have decided Zelensky has become an obstacle to their plans … and Zelensky must go. After all, their destruction of only 3 (Ooops!) of the 4 50% European-owned pipelines in the NordStream system has done a lot of harm to Germany, allowed US businesses to make out like bandits selling LNG, and done very little economic damage to Russia.
Anyone who has ever been out to sea in a small yacht far from land knows how difficult high-precision navigation is - especially on a sea surface which is anything but calm. Emplacing explosives in the dark on subsea pipelines under 300 feet of water is a tough challenge. It can be done – but requires specialized equipment too big to fit on the Famous Five’s little yacht … as well as very specialized training.
An indication of the difficulty faced even by the well-trained unlimited-budget operatives of the US/UK/Norway/etc was that even these best-in-class guys failed – they put two of their 4 bombs on the same pipeline, unnecessarily blowing it up twice while leaving one pipeline still able to send gas to Germany … if Germany’s Betters ever decide to look after the interests of the German people.
Really, the Wall Street Journal publishes some stories that can only be characterized as an insult to the intelligence of their (ever fewer) readers.
It is behind a paywall. Is the whole article like the introduction that is written like a novel or is there actually facts and information that substantiates the claim? If there are any facts can they be substantiated without simply trusting a governmental institution? I really don’t put any substance in any information leaked from any government one way or the other.
Thanks to George Gammon I was able to read most of the article on YouTube.
What they will have me believe is:
That some unofficial folks come up with a whacky idea. The idea/plan reaches Zelensky at the very top who approves, but then the CIA convinces the Zman to order it stopped. He does. It goes on anyway. The CIA with all this knowledge is helpless to prevent it. Zelensky never suspects that they went through with it anyway. He keeps the accused in place until May of this year when he moves him to be ambassador to the UK.
That the small group that rented a sailboat with 2 non-military trained divers who delivered the explosive at 90 meters. These hobby divers makes me wonder why the Navy Seals require training. Just hand them some explosives and point them in the direction of the target.
The WSJ article does not align with early reports that the explosions were equivalent to 1200 lbs (maybe even kg) of tnt. The WSJ reports a light amount of explosive was used. I suppose if they said a few guys planted 1200 lbs of explosive, it might not pass the smell test. According to earlier reports the explosions were so large they registered on seismic recorders. The amount of explosive was so large only a state actor could do it. That the speculation of using mini-subs was not realistic because of the amount of explosives used.
All these years I thought how clever it was for the allies to bamboozle the Germans with Operation Fortitude. Maybe the Germans are just highly gullible and fall for anything and everything.
Those are all key points. WSJ also want you to believe that locating a pipeline under 300 feet of water in the middle of a sea is so trivial a task that it was not even worth mentioning. Anyone with any experience would shake their head in disbelief.
First, a little yacht a rather unstable platform, especially in the treacherous Baltic where conditions have been known to sink ocean-going vessels. But let’s assume that these hypothetical Ukrainians managed to locate their little yacht above where the 4 pipelines were supposed to be. The moment the divers got into the water, tidal action and water flows would push them around – blind man’s buff in the dark. With no significant technology to guide them, those amateur divers would likely never have found the pipelines, even without considering the impossibility of their having got down to 300 feet with their limited equipment & training. Note that even with massive technology and extensive training, the actual professional divers who placed the explosives had a 25% error rate.
But 20-something journalists reprinting government propaganda don’t have any concept of the challenge of doing a difficult physical task in the real world.