Seymour Hersh On The One-Year Anniversary Of The Nord Stream Sabotage

I woke up in the middle of last night suddenly thinking I hadn't really looked into the whole Nord Seam Pipeline issue at all, and over breakfast this morning, I discovered that Seymour Hersh, who last February had published a controversial piece on Nord Stream, has just updated his views. The February piece is behihnd a paywall, but as of now, his update is available for free. This summary of Hersh's February story says,

In his online article “How America took out the Nord Stream Pipeline,” Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh sees the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea as a collaboration between Norway and the United States. Based on the testimony of a whistleblower, Hersh situates the planting of C4 explosive devices by U.S. Navy Divers under the cover of the BALTOPS 22 international naval exercise in June; according to Hersh, the explosive devices were triggered by a Norwegian Navy P8, which dropped sonar buoys for this purpose on September 26th, 2022.

The summary concludes,

At its core, Seymour Hersh’s theory is fundamentally conceivable. However, there is a lack of evidence to support his thesis. Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that there were numerous other ways to place the explosive devices. months before detonation or even shortly before. Also, no warship need have been involved. . . . Russia remains suspicious because not all pipelines were affected by the attack and Russia can continue to pledge natural gas supplies, perhaps to disengage Germany from Ukraine’s circle of supporters.

Another question about the original Hersh report would be why the US would do this. Germany's economy has been shrinking this year, and one reason given has been the cutback in Russian natural gas supplies due to the Ukraine war. Germany is a key NATO ally, and for the US to damage its economy would be a sensitive issue. In fact, Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Russian companies building Nord Stream 2, something Biden reversed after he was elected.

But another question I've already asked here, without finding a good answer, has been why Amos Hochstein, an energy expert on Ukraine, has been a close Biden adviser since Joe was vice president, flying with him on the 2015 visit to Kyiv when Joe demanded the firing of Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma. As of a year ago, he'd returned to his job with Biden:

Hochstein, a special presidential coordinator at the State Department, has long been known as an influential behind-the-scenes player on Biden’s energy team. He’s attended at least a dozen one-on-one meetings with the president this year [2022], White House records show. And he’s become increasingly visible lately as the war in Ukraine and soaring gas prices have escalated the importance of Hochstein’s international energy portfolio within the administration.

The map of Russian pipelines to the EU at the top of this post, which I've copied from Hersh's piece on Substack today, gives some idea of where US priorities lie. I count four (five if you count Nord Stream as two) pipeline routes crossing the border into the EU from Russia. Only Nord Stream runs directly into Germany. But there's also a crossing from Belarus into Poland, and in particular another from Ukraine into Slovakia. I've got to assume this is why an energy wonk talks to Joe Biden all the time, and given Burisma's size in the Ukrainian energy industry, why Burisma would be interested in Joe and Joe interested in Burisma.

So let's get to the meat of what Hersh has to say today:

It is important to understand that no Russian gas was flowing to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines when Joe Biden ordered them blown up last September 26. Nord Stream 1 had been supplying vast amounts of low-cost natural gas to Germany since 2011 and helped bolster Germany’s status as a manufacturing and industrial colossus. But it was shut down by Putin by the end of August 2022, as the Ukraine war was, at best, in a stalemate. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021 but was blocked from delivering gas by the German government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz two days prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Given Russia’s vast stores of natural gas and oil, American presidents since John F. Kennedy have been alert to the potential weaponization of these natural resources for political purposes. That view remains dominant among Biden and his hawkish foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, now the acting deputy to Blinken.

Sullivan convened a series of high-level national security meetings late in 2021, as Russia was building up its forces along the border of Ukraine, with an invasion seen as almost inevitable. The group, which included representatives from the CIA, was urged to come up with a proposal for action that could serve as a deterrent to Putin. The mission to destroy the pipelines was motivated by the White House’s determination to support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sullivan’s goal seemed clear. “The White House’s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,” the official told me. “The challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.”

. . . “The administration put Nord Stream on the table because it was the only one we could access and it would be totally deniable,” the [anonymous intelligence] official said. “We solved the problem within a few weeks—by early January [2022] —and told the White House. Our assumption was that the president would use the threat against Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid the war.”

In other words, the CIA had submitted a plan to blow up the pipelines even before Putin's February 2022 invasion, and the CIA had expected Biden/Blinken would use the threat to deter Putin from invading in the first place. And on February 7, 2022, two weeks before the invasion, Biden in a press conference with German Chancellor Scholz did publicly threaten to do something unspecific about the pipelines if Putin invaded:

“If Russia invades—that means tanks and troops crossing . . . the border of Ukraine again,” he said, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Asked how he could do so since the pipeline was under Germany’s control, he said: “We will, I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”

Scholz, asked the same question, said: “We are acting together. We are absolutely united, and we will not be taking different steps. We will do the same steps, and they will be very very hard to Russia, and they should understand.” The German leader was considered then—and now—by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.

But Putin invaded on February 24, and while the bombs were covertly planted that June, Joe never followed through on the threat. Hersh writes,

What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden’s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, with Scholz standing next to him, the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines, but the group should arrange to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them “on demand”—after the war began. “It was then that we”—the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project—“understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.”

But Biden did order the pipelines destroyed (at least by Hersh's account), except he waited until September 26, 2022, long after it would have been a deterrent, and only as the war transitioned into stalemate.

“So the president struck a blow against the economy of Germany and Western Europe,” the official told me. “He could have done it in June and told Putin: We told you what we would do.” The White House’s silence and denials were, he said, “a betrayal of what we were doing. If you are going to do it, do it when it would have made a difference.”

So why did Joe give the order to blow up the pipelines, if that's what he did, when he did it, after it would have made a difference in the war? Hersh concludes.

The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas—and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.

On one hand, this view is consistent with the analysis from Col Markus Reisner of the Austrian military academy that he made on YouTube at the time, that one aim of Russian strategy was to leverage withholding Russian gas from Germany and the EU to freeze their population out during the winter and reduce their support for Ukraine. As it happened, this threat turned out to be overrated, but once the winter settled in, the war had stalemated in any case.

On the other hand, sabotaging the pipelines removed the Russian ability to turn them back on as part of their leverage. Instead, for the foreseeable future, it puit Ukraine back in a position of controlling the delivery of Russian gas to the EU -- and if Ukraine, even a Ukraine reduced in size, was a US vassal, this would put the US in control of a good portion of Russian gas going to the EU. We shouldn't ignore that Burisma, until its dissolution early this year, was a major player in Ukraine's natural gas industry.

It isn't clear who has taken over Burisma's role in that industry, but it's hard not to surmise that US players are directly affected and are affecting US policy in the Biden administration.