"Bombshell: The U.S. Did It!"
by Brian Maher
Annapolis, Maryland - "Is he correct? Did the United States execute the caper? Veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh issued the “bombshell” report yesterday morning…In extravagant detail he claimed that President Joseph Biden and his understrappers hatched the idea to wreck the Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline, plotted its wrecking and ordered its actual wrecking — with active assistance from the Scandinavian nation of Norway.
Hersh: "In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, [Biden’s national security adviser] 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.
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.” What was the purpose behind this war act? The answer is clear as gin.
Cutting the Russian-German Umbilical Cord: The pipeline was constructed to conduct beneficial Russian natural gas to Germany. But this umbilical cord afforded Russia great leverage over these Germans. The American administration feared the Teutonic louts might cry down the anti-Russia sanctions if Russia threatened to kink the hose… and choke off the flows to Germany. And Washington’s entire sanctions regime could die aborning, strangled and murdered in the crib.
United States officials therefore chose to close off the source of Russian temptation. They would dynamite the pipeline. Russia would then be unable to dangle its natural gas before the Germans, carrotlike, to steer them in the Russian direction. More: 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”... “It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” [Hersh’s] source said.
The Plan: Mr. Hersh’s investigations reveal a fantastically detailed and thorough plot. Frogmen of the United States Navy would affix explosive devices to the pipeline under the cover of a planned naval exercise in the area. Thus it would not attract notice. These explosives would subsequently serve as time bombs. They would be detonated remotely at a later date - sufficiently later in order to skirt suspicions that they were connected to the frogmen’s prior skunkwork.
Hersh: "A handpicked 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…"
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.’” But do not forget - these are officials of the United States government at their customary tricks. They are invariably given to “stupid” activities - in the case at bar, of conducting a war act against great power Russia and sabotaging the economy of its alleged German ally - an additional act of war, incidentally.
The Plotters Wanted to Avoid Oversight: But these are crafty and slippery fellows. They devised clever legal strategies to shoo away oversight: According to [Hersh’s] 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.”
To repeat: these are crafty and slippery fellows. But to proceed… Why did these shadow-slinkers choose to cooperate so tightly with 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,” [Hersh’s] 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.)
And so: "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…"
Hurdles to Overcome: Hersh continues: "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 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."
But as the fatal day neared, cold sensations began permeating the American president’s feet: "Washington had second thoughts… Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision… 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. But the president’s men seized him by the feet and positioned them firmly in front of a crackling fire. He rediscovered his resolve. In late September of last year, the order went out… and explosions rocked the Baltic floor."
Only Allegations: Yet we must remind you: we deal here with allegations. Or if you’ll forgive the term in light of the present discussion… charges. We cannot chronicle them as fact. And we have it on reliable authority - a colleague who happens to be a very devoted partisan of the president - Hersh is merely taking us for a sleigh ride. The United States emphatically did not perform the vandalism, this colleague assures us: “The White House says False. The CIA says False. Norway says FALSE. Common sense shows that they would not risk putting out such a strong statement with a chance that it's true.”
And so there you have it. The defendants in this trial are their very own judges. And they have pronounced themselves innocent… by unanimous verdict. Yet by our lights this Hersh tells a highly compelling tale. It is chock-a-block with detail after detail after detail. And then some more detail after that."
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