22nd March 2023: Since writing this piece Seymour Hersh has responded to the ludicrous story spun by the USA and Germany (apparently cooked up at the Olaf Scholz/Joe Biden White House meeting) that “Ukrainian elements” and 5 men and a woman blew up the pipeline from a yacht in the Baltic! Hersh was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version of the destruction of Nord Stream 2.
Having asserted at the time on Freenations that the USA was responsible for blowing up the Nordstream pipelines, I am pleased that the veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has confirmed (with enormous detail from insiders) what I wrote then. A Pullitzer prize winner cannot be easily dismissed.
If you say you are going to do something (as Biden and Nuland had said about the pipelines) then it happens and then you rejoice at your success – then you did it. As I wrote at the time (October 2022):
There is no serious doubt about the fact that it was the USA which sabotaged the two pipelines Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 bringing gas from Russia to Germany not least because President Joe Biden, Russophobic State Department official Victoria Nuland and Republican Senator Ron Johnson are all on the record demanding the Nord Stream pipelines be taken out.
As Sea Power Magazine reported on June 14th, the US Navy’s 6th Fleet Task Force 68 was running underwater explosives removal drills in the exact area where these sabotage explosions took place.
Sputnik has analyzed Flightradar24 data showing that US and German navy aircraft regularly circled over the sites of future explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines during the NATO Baltops 22 exercise last summer.
And indeed – according to Hersh – it was precisely under cover of such naval exercises that the USA and apparently Norway organised the attack.
THIS PROFITABLE ATTACK ON EUROPE
We must bear in mind that these pipelines were jointly owned by Russia’s Gazprom and French, German and Dutch companies and the gas passing through Nordstream 1 and potentially through Nordstream 2 was critical to the entire European energy and therefore industrial market.
Not only did a small clique of US politicians (acting without Congressional authority) blow up the pipelines but they then profited by replacing those supplies with LNG shipped from the USA. Equally the enormous profits accruing to US Defence contractors from the Ukraine war are mimicked at a lower level by British Defence industries which may now contract Ukraine to produce British defence products in Ukraine! (Sunday Telegraph 12th February). Biden profits from much lower US gas prices together with subsidies designed to tempt European corporations to re- locate to the USA.
Russia has not yet retaliated for the pipeline destruction. For the moment they have other fish to fry. But they can afford to wait to see:
- the build up of German anger,
- the continued massive losses in Ukraine,
- the denuding of western weapons stocks,
- the blatant American profiteering from the sale of their LNG resulting from their criminality,
- the alienation of the global south who have either stayed neutral or condemned western attacks on Russia through Ukraine and
- the rising revulsion by European electorates at this totally unnecessary war and the tragi-farce of the devastating effect on Europe of sanctions designed to harm Russia.
And all this rather than make peace on the basis of devolution in Eastern Ukraine, a neutral Ukraine and the recognition of Crimea as the historical, military (since 1783) and cultural territory of Russia. Crimea and its naval base there is far more legitimately Russian than Guantanamo Bay is a military base for the USA in Cuba! https://freenations.net/annexation-russias-sebastopol-and-americas-guantanamo-bay-compared/
The question now is the extent of the international response to a blatant international crime and act of war and the domestic US consequences of acting illegally without congressional approval. But since Republicans were equally gung ho about removing Russian gas from Europe, their neocon ideology might “trump” (appropriately given his stance) their willingness to attack Biden on this illegal act of war. The USA has become a very dangerous place.
THE HERSH REPORT
Hersh writes: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
The Biden administration planned the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines well in advance of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine knowing that if it were traceable to the USA Government it would be an act of war.
Biden had already said he would shut down the pipeline if Russia dared to defend Russians in Ukraine (as US armed and trained Ukrainians, mainly Nazi units, shelled them) The unit selected to carry out the destruction was the U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center in rural Panama City which had expertise and a track record of “blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals.”
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,
“SPOKESPERSONS” for the White House and the CIA said that Hersh’s report was false and fiction! They were bound to. But it is significant that no high office holder denied the report – only functionaries! Hersh writes significantly:
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 planning and implementation of the attack was carried out by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—who together in different roles at the time worked on the Maidan coup in Ukraine. Also involved was of course the CIA’s William Burns according to Hersh.
USA PREVIOUSLY ATTACKING AND SURROUNDING RUSSIA
I have previously on Freenations detailed the extent of NATO and American military bases surrounding Russia (https://freenations.net/russia-surrounded-unleashes-geopolitical-costs-of-western-aggression/) and contrasted them with the lack of any equivalent proximate Russian threat to the USA.
When there was such a threat in the Cuba missile crisis in 1963 it was of course the USA which threatened nuclear war rather than see Russian missiles in Cuba. Those missiles would have been some 1100 miles from Washington whereas a nuclear armed NATO member Ukraine would have been about 300 miles from Moscow.
Other examples of the extent to which the modern USA and NATO have been threatening, surrounding and even attacking Russia has been revealed by Hersh.
Apparently the naval unit involved in the Nordstream destruction had some years ago carried out a successful operation to tap a Russian undersea cable in the Sea of Okhotsk. It worked for a decade until betrayed by a Russian speaking US National Security Agency technician Ronald Pelton.
Equally significant and demonstrative of the recent anti Russian aggression by NATO/EU has been the greatly expanded US military presence in Norway. Hersh writes:
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
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.
PIPELINE DESTRUCTION DOWNGRADED TO BYPASS CONGRESS
Hersh ASSERTS THAT following the public remarks by leading US politicians including Biden about the aim of stopping the Nordstream pipelines, the plans to destroy them were in effect no longer covert – so:
“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”
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.
For decades the USA has spied on (even European allies) undermined and “changed regime” all over the world but never has it so blatantly attacked NATO allies as in the case of the destruction of these gas pipelines. The West in general and the USA in particular have lost allies and sympathy all over the world with its 20 year attack on Russia through Ukraine and its exploitation and distortion of the international banking and payment systems to attack other nations.
The Nordstream pipeline affair could be the straw that breaks the back of what little international sympathy remained. As one of the insiders in this affair remarked to Hersh:
“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
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