Seymour Hersh
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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
Seymour
Hersh
15
hr ago
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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.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its
anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding
company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in
Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian
company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by
oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of
the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the
Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and
having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to
local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared
with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in
some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s
annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and
much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe
would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while
diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what
happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former
Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable
postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in
World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a
prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
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. 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.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared
completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration
waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department
official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had
“always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not
to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. 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. 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.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the
crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second
Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears
in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility
of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold
winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly
appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan,
Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a
more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly
suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously
building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than
100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was
growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop
numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
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.
PLANNING
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.
THE PLAYERS Left to
right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.
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.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former
ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama
Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc
members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of
the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of
the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would
use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence
community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the
Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of
Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command
to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
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.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the
security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without
encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and
the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a
forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent
in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to
prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the
operation, along with $35,000 for other
Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and
produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and
planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s
enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered
questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian
navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving
operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from
Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be
a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the 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.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to
Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. 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.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the
same message at a State Department briefing, with little press
coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to
a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
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.”
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 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.’”
“The Norwegian navy
was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off
Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .”
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THE OPERATION
Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.
In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly
expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles
along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia.
The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local
controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand
American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most
importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable
of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American
intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites
inside China.
A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under
construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were
now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and
spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola
Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air
base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet
of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon
patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.
In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in
its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation
Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would
have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers
accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or
suspected of interfering with the work at the base.
Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in
the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens
Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister
for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in
2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with
the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted
completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source
said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the
Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had
generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas
exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission
secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction
of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell
vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
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.
After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.
At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once
again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees
participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite
graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of
being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a
“Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there
is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least
glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies,
or on the cover of popular magazines.
“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and
only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to
be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there
was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm
might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report
it.
Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in
the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden
had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in
managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully
tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of
the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials
in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving
activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a
report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation.
“What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source
told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not
respond.)
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was
known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering,
underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a
way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural
background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the
water. The Norwegians had a fix.
The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the
operation should take place. 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. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic
Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be
the ideal cover to plant the mines.
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.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted
during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their
detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be
obvious that America had been involved.
Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come
up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the
President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced
planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in
Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to
issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.
Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA
was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over
the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.
The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam
War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War
sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred
it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine
whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.
The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear
just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper
revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s
spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign
leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in
the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard
Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to
do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you
almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders
from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that
you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than
any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that
he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and
not the Constitution.
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and
dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4
explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those
in Washington understood. 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?
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. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so
that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the
explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science,
technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the
science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue
facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The
longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a
random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a
seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread
underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few
hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the
four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of
methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on
the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken
place.
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media
treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a
likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever
establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple
retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had
been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as
“complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American
newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and
Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative
pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from
Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the
worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a
potentially good one:
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on
Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of
energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very
significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to
come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make
sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries
or, for that matter, around the world.”
More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the
newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee
hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like you, I am, and I
think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now,
as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage
more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said,
speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He
said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically,
“Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert
operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a
covert signal.
“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
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