Remember back when some of us, based on the cui bono standard if nothing else, postulated that Russia’s Nordstream I pipeline had been intentionally, actively sabotaged, almost certainly by the US and/or other cat’s-paw nations acting at its behest, and some folks—up to and including various Biden junta hacks, rumpswabs, and flunkies—puffed up indignantly over the patent “impossibility” of pulling off such an operation clandestinely?
Yeah, about all that.
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, 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, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. 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.
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.
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.”
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.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
Imagine my surprise at being proven right yet again. Ahem.
Literally so, at that.
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Waitwaitwait…
totally and categorically denied, but the NYSlimes disagrees, because reasons, so “true”???
The same people that assured you earnestly that Trump sabotaged Shrillary, because of the Russian dossier??
This passes what smell test in any sane world?
I think we’re seeing the rumblings of the “Dump Senile Joe” bandwagon pre-2024 beginning to form up. Not biting on that hook, no matter how much the bait is jiggled.
You’ll be sorry if you do.
And the entire story is backstopped by pure “Because I said so”, without a shred of any actual corroboration, and pure circumstantial evidence that was examined by twenty nations at the time, and discounted.
This is bad Tom Clancy fiction, ghostwritten after he’s dead, by lesser lights.
Not news.
But that’s the NYSlimes’ m.o., since ever.
Not buying the bullshit, and unless there’s substantial corroboration, never will, and wild unfounded speculation like this are exactly the reason I discounted the possibility of anything this monumentally stupid going forward at the time.
One can accept that Emperor Stumblefuck Poopypants and his political minions are dumbass lackwits of a monumental order, but to try and cobble this together on the theory that the entire government of Norway, and everyone in the Navy down to the divers that would have had to sign off on this, are too, is a bridge too wide to wish into existence.
Video confessions, or it never happened.
Gee, let’s see links to the findings of those 20 nations, in other words corroboration. Otherwise, not bullshit, especially given Biden himself said Nordstream’s days were numbered one way or another.
You’re always full of shit, might as well display it some more, henryKaren.
Sir Cuck the Witless is such a twit that he/she can’t come up with a more original insult. That one is so stale it reeks of the rot that continues to infect your peewee brain.
You insult yourself nearly every time you make a comment.
I have no need to make “original” insults.
Right, we’re supposed to believe what the slimes has to say now.
I wouldn’t doubt for a minute we blew the pipelines up, but this is nothing more than pure bullshit. No evidence, no proof, nothing. You can tell that is what the offering will be by all the typing to increase the word count done.
The USA has the capability. No shit.
By the way Barry, Aesop, the NY Times has nothing to do with what Seymour Hersh laid out in his Substack expose. Did you even click on the link that Mike provided?
IIRC Hersh was associated with the slimes at least at one time. So perhaps a mistake referencing the slimes.
I read it before. Unnamed “sources”, and nothing, no new evidence, not one damn thing that wasn’t already known. Is it true? Could be, but then again if you’re not willing to put your name out there I see no reason to believe it. Hersh is not always correct and not above suspicion.
But as I said, to don’t have any reason to doubt we blew the pipelines or were a part of it along with other countries.
OTOH, any oil rig diver and many others could place the charges. It’s not that damn difficult for anyone with the resources. The pipelines were already shut down by the russians. Blowing them did what?
Prevented them from being repaired and brought back on stream quickly enough to save floundering Euro economies. The US (via the deep state) is at war not only with Russia but any country that doesn’t submit to its will.
Hell, it’s at war with its own patriots.
And cleverly supposedly did this while a US naval task force was practically parked in the vicinity.
Nothing suspicious there, no one would ever suspect a thing…
Anything like this – exactly as I told you at the time – would split NATO, and give Russia casus belli for a war.
Lemme think, who would benefit from that…?
Who could it be? Who could it be??
NATO doesn’t count for much so who cares, not the deep state at any rate. As for the casus belli for war, it’s what the deep state wants. Putin so far hasn’t taken the bait.
“Putin so far hasn’t taken the bait.”
That’s rich! I thought all you fuckers were claiming that the biden cabal suckered Putin into invading Ukraine.
Maybe you’re an exception, apologies if so.
Maybe you believe Russian propaganda. The russians disabled the damn pipeline. Nothing was passing through it when it was destroyed.
Frankly, while I’m opposed to the US involvement because the biden cabal is corrupt and corrupting Ukraine, I don’t give a damn who blew up the pipeline.
And for the record I hope the russians all die in the battle. One year later, a real cakewalk for a puppet regime in russia. They can’t even handle the Ukraine, a country about 1/4th their size.
Clicked on, and read beginning to end.
My mistake, after reading the citation from the Slimes in the teaser line, for thinking they were pimping this festering pile of bullshit.
It’s nonetheless pure unsubstantiated speculation based on “Trust me! Would I lie to you?” levels of uncorroborated fairytales. A biography of Bigfoot, as told by the Easter Bunny.
The last time someone tried selling a story like this, he got the family cow in exchange for “Magic Beans”.
And not one thing new in the entire piece, except for an “unnamed source”.
As I’ve said and have to keep repeating, we could have done it, but no need, the russians theirselves had disabled it already.
But this Hersh piece is a mountain of shit.