Yeah, so this is a big deal.
The type of big deal that leads to WWIII.
If a sitting US Senator recognizes the severity of this situation, we'd best pay attention. I know a lot of people already assume the US played a hand in blowing up these pipelines from Russian to Europe, but the details in this report are mind-blowing.
Here's more info (get ready to read) from Pulitzer-prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who has more than 50 years of experience going back to the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War.
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 alleges that the US Navy recruited and trained top divers at its Diving and Salvage Center outside Panama City, Florida.
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.
There are three reasons this story caught my attention.
- First, everyone in Western media is repeating the line "Russia bad." Russia has literally been to blame for everything since Hillary Clinton's campaign paid a former British spy to lie about collusion between the Kremlin and Donald Trump. It's the great boogieman, and since it's a dystopian oligarchy run by a mafia boss who wants to recapture the glories of the Russian Empire.
- Second, it's written by a long-time, old-school journalist who didn't graduate with a minor in gender studies three years ago.
- Third, US senators are concerned enough about the report to make a public statement on it.
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."
When I was younger, the White House's word carried a bit more weight. Nowadays when it denies something, it generally translates like this in my head:
I don't think Hersh bought it either.
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.
Again, I'd be a bit more skeptical if this wasn't the exact type of foreign policy strategy that Tony Blinken has had throughout his career. Under the Obama administration, Blinken advocated for the 2011 Libyan invasion that ousted dictator Muammar Gaddafi and arguably enflamed the Arab Spring into a region-destabilizing nightmare that led to the rise of ISIS in the resulting power vacuum. At the time, Blinken was serving under then-VP Joe Biden, and actually went against his boss to push for military action.
Obama later called the Libyan intervention the worst mistake of his presidency.
But over here at Not The Bee, we warned you that this is what you were getting with Biden and Blinken – a return to the same disastrous foreign policy that ruled for several decades in DC.
Blinken was also the top staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden served as chairman in 2002. He supported the invasion of Iraq.
Sullivan and Nuland have also existed as players in some of the most disastrous policies over the last two decades. These are the people who believe that if you give a few hundred million dollars to a brutal, backward regime like Iran's, it will open up to the world and have a sudden realization of the benefits of woke humanistic progressivism and liberal democracy.
When you realize just how bad these people are at conducting foreign policy, the possibility of US involvement in destroying an international pipeline seems much more likely. We have given power to the most inept players on the field.
Hersh details how the Biden administration waived sanctions against Russia and allowed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to be completed, causing outrage from Americans (especially the GOP) and soaring Russian dominance over energy in Europe. To make up for the mistake, he argues the destruction of the pipeline was planned.
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.
Hersh lays out the planning in detail. If it's fiction, Tom Clancy would be proud.
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.
This last line is key.
Hersh argues that this was Biden's direct desire.
A desire that could very well trigger world war.
Man do I miss those mean tweets!
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."
Echoing Sen. Mike Lee there.
These guys knew what the consequences were, and they did it anyway.
Then-CIA Mike Burns reportedly coordinated what became the Panama City training plan. Divers were recruited. The plan was set in motion.
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.
I know this is a lot of text, but since our president may have started nuclear oblivion, you might as understand why.
This is key:
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."
The video:
Hersh says Biden's admission really upset the people involved in the covert planning.
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."
Bumbling Joe Biden, the old, rich career politician who led America into the end of days with his utter ineptitude and hubris.
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.'"
I can't detail all of the things that Hersh reports in the actual logistics of the mission – please go read his absolutely well-researched and reported analysis – but it apparently happened in coordination with Norway:
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 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.
The C4 was reportedly detonated using a sonar buoy dropped by a Norweigan plane:
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.
And on September 26th, 2022, the deed was done.
Back to Sen. Mike Lee:
We need answers. We need them fast. This is all a report by one man, so we have no choice but to take it with a grain of salt. Congress needs to investigate quickly.
The Ukraine war is continuing to heat up as Biden just authorized US Abrams tanks to be shipped there.
Now, we have some pretty damnable proof that he ordered a direct attack on critical Russian infrastructure.
Most people voted for Biden because they saw him as the kindly old grandpa who would tone down the divisiveness that surrounded Trump. They wanted a guy who says "folks" and eats chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream.
Some of us warned them that this was merely the facade, and that Joseph R. Biden is actually an old-school war hawk who isn't aware that his mental faculties have declined far below the ability to conduct affairs of state.
