The United States government blew up the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline connecting Russian suppliers to our allies Germany last year, according to a bombshell report from Seymour Hersh.
“The New York Times called it a ‘mystery,'” wrote Hersh, “but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret — until now.”
Hersh cites an anonymous source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning” who claimed that Navy divers, operating under the cover of NATO’s annual BALTOPS exercise last June, planted remotely-operated explosives that were detonated months later, last September.
White House spokeswoman Adrienne Watson told Hersh in an email that “This is false and complete fiction.”
“This claim is completely and utterly false,” a CIA spokeswoman wrote.
German authorities claimed last week Berlin’s investigators “currently have no evidence that Russia is behind the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines.” The Kremlin denied any involvement, although the CIA claimed that Russian submarines were detected in the area where the explosions occurred just one day before the leaks were detected.
Swedish investigators called the leaks “gross sabotage” in November due to “explosive residue [that] was identified on a number of the seized and analyzed foreign items.”
It never made much sense for Moscow to sabotage its own natural gas sales to Germany when it can choose to switch off the gas at the source, any time it pleases. In fact, the Russians have done just that on occasion to wrangle concessions out of Berlin. To this day, Germany remains one of the slowest and most recalcitrant suppliers of western arms to Ukraine.
ASIDE: German leadership has for most of this century been complicit in reducing German energy production and increasing dependence on Russia. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, after leaving office, became chairman of Nord Stream and is about to become a highly paid member of GAZPROM’s board — the Russian company behind the pipeline.
So the purely hypothetical thinking (wink, wink) went, if someone could do something drastic enough to wean Germany off Russian energy supplies, Germany wouldn’t be so easy for Moscow to push around.
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Enter the Biden Administration.
Hersh claims that “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” stop Russian strongman Vladimir Putin from weaponizing “natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.”
The U.S. Navy’s innocuously named Diving and Salvage Center on the Florida panhandle is home to “highly skilled deep-water divers” who 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,” according to Hersh.
They’re the ones who reportedly planted the bombs that went off in September.
Bombs that, if they really were planted by the U.S. Navy, shut off natural gas to a NATO ally in the weeks before winter weather descended on Europe.
In the reader comments a while ago, I responded to one reader with something like, “This is exactly the kind of stupid move the kids in the White House might think is really clever.”
Hersh is not always the most reliable source, but between Nord Stream and Keystone XL, it’s fair to ask: What does this administration have against energy pipelines, anyway?
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