The United States destroyed Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea in September last year after a covert operation to plant explosives that President Joe Biden could detonate when he wanted, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed yesterday.
A source with deep knowledge of the covert operation disclosed the details for the former New York Times reporter. Hersh did not name his source.
“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,” Hersh reported.
So Biden wasn’t kidding when he and a top diplomat threatened to destroy the pipelines. And frighteningly, if Hersh is right, Biden committed an act of war against a nuclear power.
Planning
To pull off the operation, Biden and his team of warmongering advisors had to keep the plan a secret — from Congress. Thus, Biden didn’t use the U.S. Special Operations Command. Instead, expert divers from the Navy’s divers school in Panama City, Florida, planted the explosives.
“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,” Hersh reported:
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.
Biden wanted to destroy the pipelines for a simple reason: They threatened Western “dominance” by providing cheap natural gas to Germany. As well, the two pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, lined Russia’s pockets with a steady and reliable source of “much-needed” income, Hersh observed. Germany and the West “would become addicted” to the cheap gas.
“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,” Hersh continued:
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.”
When Biden waived sanctions on the Nord Stream company anyway, “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,” Hersh explained. “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.’”
Russia’s anticipated invasion of Ukraine gave Biden the chance to reverse himself.
In December, just before Russia invaded, a top-secret team of advisors led by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan began meeting to conceive a plan to destroy the pipelines. Throughout “all of this scheming,” Hersh’s 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.’”
No matter. The plan went ahead, and in January last year, Nuland warned about the destruction ahead: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
On February 7, 2022, speaking publicly with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Biden repeated the warning: “We will bring an end to it. I promise you. We will be able to do 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 Operation
Planners chose Norway as the base for the attack. In March, they met with Norwegian Navy and Secret Service personnel to discuss “the best place to plant the explosives,” Hersh explained:
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 seafloor 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.
The Norwegians advised using the annual American naval operation in the Baltic as a cover to plant the explosives.
“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,” Hersh noted. The operation was BALTOPS 22.
Planting the explosives would occur behind a face of “research and development,” Hersh continued:
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.
But detonating the explosives so close to the end of BALTOPS would arouse suspicions, the White House worried, so they had to be modified so Biden could order the explosion when he wanted.
“It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood,” Hersh reported. “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?”
It would be in September. A Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane dropped a sonar buoy that sent the signals to trigger the explosives.
Media Ignore It
At this writing, major leftist media are ignoring the story, although Reuters has reported that Russia is considering legal action against the Biden administration.
A White House spokesman told Hersh the story “is false and complete fiction,” while the CIA called it “completely and utterly false.”
Yet one minute after the explosion, British Prime Minister Liz Truss texted Secretary of State Antony Blinken with two words: “It’s done.”
