The controversy over an investigation that attributes the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline to a complex secret operation

The pipeline North stream 1 which travels 1,200 kilometers under the Baltic sea between Vyborg In Russia there Lubmin In Germany was already considered by UNITED STATES a bad idea since construction began in 1997. They said the Russian “cheap gas” which would solve the problems of European industry and heat the houses of the north of the continent during the harsh winters, would end up being “very expensive”. Germany desperately needed it and the Chancellor Angela Merkel promoted the project until its inauguration in November 2011 with the then Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev French Prime Minister, Francois Fillon and the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Marc Rutte, at a ceremony in the grim port of Lubmin.

When the expansion started with another parallel pipeline, the North Flow 2A year later, the critics had died down. All of northern Europe was already enjoying low gas tariffs for its industries and heating bills. But the prediction that it would end up being very expensive started to come true in 2014 when Vladimir Poutine ordered the first invasion of Ukraine, annexed the peninsula of Crimea and opened two enclaves in the wealthy Donbass region, that of Donetsk And the one of Lugansk, while trying to advance through the rest of Ukrainian territory.

Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021. By then, Putin already had more than 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine and waited for the right moment to strike and invade its neighbour. When Russian troops finally launched the assault on February 24, 2022, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz could not proceed with the project. It never opened. He even had to shut down the one that was already running, Nord Stream 1. And it wasn’t just the pressure from Washington, the rest of Europe understood that Russian gas was too expensive. Pipelines allowed Putin to use natural gas as a weapon for his political and territorial ambitions.

Until then, President Joe Biden and his foreign policy team, including the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinkenthe national security adviser, JakeSullivan and the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Policy, Victoria Nuland had publicly expressed their satisfaction with the closure of the gas pipelines and reaffirmed that they should never have existed.

Today, the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, winner of several Pulitzer Prizes for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, has just published that the Biden administration had made the decision to destroy the gas pipelines. Which, indeed, happened on September 26, 2022.

From that moment, the explosion that ended with the two pipes in an area near the Danish island of Bornholm became “an unsolved mystery” which the Swedish and Danish police continued to investigate. The most popular theory was that he had been self-sabotage by Russia punish Germany and the rest of the European countries that were helping Ukraine repel the invasion. Hersh asserts rather that it was a very well planned and executed job between the US and Norwegian navies with the complicity of all informed Baltic and Scandinavian countries.

For work, deep sea tactical divers from Panama City Diving School, in North Florida. It was necessary to go to the depths of the Baltic Sea, where the pipelines separated by about a kilometer in distance pass. Expert Norwegian seafarers were consulted. They said that the ideal place to attack gas pipelines was the one that was the shallowest possible depth of 79.2 meters, located off the Danish island of Bornholm.

When the plan was presented to President Biden and his advisers, they said it was impossible to do. A frontal attack of this type would be considered by Russia as “a war attack”. The involvement of the United States and its allies had to be concealed at all costs. They involved the CIA, the intelligence center specializing in covert operations. From the headquarters of Langlay, they propose to set up C4 explosive charges in the tubes with timers that gave a margin of 48 hours from the action of the divers until the explosion occurred. And they found a perfect excuse to cover up the commandos’ activity. It could be conducted during the military exercises that NATO conducts each year in the Baltic in June. This time, the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet was to participate in the so-called Baltop 22.

During the exercises, maneuvers were carried out in which some units laid mines and others had to discover and destroy them. A perfect hedge, but too risky. The gas pipelines were going to explode two days after the end of the exercises. It didn’t take too much research to put the two facts together. According to Hersh, President Biden gave the go-ahead for the placement of the explosives on the condition that a way to detonate them would be found later, when he deemed it politically sound and without suspicion of American involvement.

It was the Norwegians who found the solution. Detonate the C4 charges with a sonar buoy dropped by an aircraft. Of course, extraordinary precision was required. The Russians have very well controlled movements in the Baltic, which in turn is one of the busiest navigable straits on the planet. The operation required the most advanced signal processing technology. Once installed, delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally activated by the complex mix of sounds from the bottom of the busy Baltic Sea, from ships near and far; underwater drilling; seismic phenomena, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonobuoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds – very similar to those emitted by a flute or a piano – which would be recognized by the timer and, after a pre-set delay of a few hours, would set off the explosives.

In this section, the gas pipeline has four parallel pipes separated by one kilometer. Concrete-lined pipes had to be blasted with explosives attached to highly sensitive timers in an environment where any sound can be confused. Once the explosives are placed, they could be detonated by similar sounds in situations that were impossible to predict.

By September, the Russian invasion had stalled, but Putin had given no sign that he was ready to back down. Completely the opposite. He launched a new appeal to mobilize half a million new recruits and allowed his friend Yevgeny Prigozhin What release convicted murderers from prisons with the promise of release if they fight in Ukraine in the ranks of his company of mercenaries from Wagner Group. This is when Biden gave the order to carry out the attack.

On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance aircraft performed a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal traveled underwater, first to Nord Stream 2 and then to Nord Stream 1. Within hours, high-powered C4 explosives were activated, knocking out three of the four pipelines. “Within minutes, puddles of methane gas left in the destroyed pipelines could be seen spreading to the surface of the water, and the world discovered that something irreversible had happened“, says Hersh in his note originally published in English in Sub-stack then in Spanish in CTXT.

This week, however, when the Hersch investigation was released, the White House was adamant in denial. “This is totally false, complete fiction“said Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the National Security Council, questioned by the press. The Pentagon too. Maybe at some point the whole truth will be known. Or never.