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Journalism of Courage
A veteran American investigative journalist has claimed that the September 2022 bombing of the undersea Nord Stream gas pipelines was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a covert operation at the direction of the White House. President Joe Biden’s administration has denied the allegations and called the report “utterly false and complete fiction”.
Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has previously worked with The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, published the findings of his investigation on Substack. The report claimed that US Navy divers, operating under cover of a mid-summer 2022 NATO exercise, planted remotely triggered bombs to destroy three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.
Last September, a series of leaks were reported in the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, multi-billion dollar projects to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. After an examination, both Sweden and Denmark, in whose jurisdiction the leaks happened, said the leaks took place because someone deliberately bombed the pipelines. However, they did not reveal who was responsible for the attack.
Ever since it became operational in 2011, Nord Stream, the first of the two pipelines, had been one of the major sources of energy supplies for not just Germany but also other countries in Europe. Once the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, it became the centre of tensions as Russia sought to use the pipeline to negotiate its interests by restricting supplies.
With Ukraine and the US asking European countries to reduce their dependence on Russian energy, this led to a difficult and uncertain economic outlook for the continent with the cost of living and energy shooting up dramatically. With Germany having decided to halt the Nord Stream 2 project two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and following the bombing of the pipelines, virtually no gas from Russia to Europe now flows through this route.
What are the main findings of Seymour Hersh’s investigation?
According to the report, which quotes an anonymous source who had “direct knowledge of the operational planning”, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine becoming imminent in December 2021, President Biden began holding meeting with a newly formed task force, which included the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the State and Treasury Departments.
The US feared that as long as Germany and much of western Europe were dependent on the Nord Stream pipelines for a cheap supply of gas, they would be hesitant in providing aid and arms to Ukraine against a possible invasion by Russia.
The decision to sabotage the pipelines by President Biden 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”.
To execute the mission successfully, the US sought help from Norway and in March 2022, a hand-picked team of CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) operatives flew to the country to discuss the operation with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy, Hersh has written.
As per the report, it was the Norwegian Navy that chose the appropriate spot to target, “in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island”.
Around three months later, a team of deep-sea divers from the US Navy’s Diving and Salvage Centre in Panama City, Florida, the largest diving facility in the world, went to the selected spot and planted C4 explosives alongside the pipeline, which were later triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane on September 26, 2022, Hersh has written.
“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,” the report says.
What are the Nord Stream pipelines?
It is essentially a network of underwater gas pipelines in Europe to supply natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Baltic sea.
The 1,224 km-long Nord Stream pipeline runs from Vyborg in northwest Russia to Lubmin in northeastern Germany. The company behind the project is Nord Stream AG, which was established in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom — “ a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which are dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of (Russia’s President) Putin”, the report said.
Although most of the gas supplied by Nord Stream 1 went to Germany, a substantial quantity was also delivered to western and southern parts of Europe through onshore links to other countries and into storage caverns, according to Reuters.
In 2015, Gazprom and five other European firms announced plans to build Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion project that would run from Ust-Luga in Russia to Greifswald in Germany through the Baltic Sea and carry 55 billion cubic metres of gas per year. The construction of the 1,200 km-long pipelines was completed in 2021, but Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval for the project in November of that year, and the pipeline was finally scrapped on February 22, 2022.
How did the US and other countries react to the gas leaks?
According to Hersh’s report, in the aftermath of the incident, “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.”
The report also quoted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who in September 2022, discussed the bombing with the media and described it as an opportunity for the European countries to reduce their dependence on Russian energy.
“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”, he said.
“That’s very significant and that offers a 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,” Hersh recalled Blinken as having said.
NATO also released a statement after the incident and said the pipeline leaks were likely the “result of deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage” and pledged a “united and determined response” to any attacks against their allies’ critical infrastructure.
How is Europe dealing with the energy crisis?
It was widely predicted that Europe would face a severe energy crisis during the winter but the situation was largely salvaged. However, the energy shock from the war has caused massive disruption and contributed to Europe’s cost of living crisis.
With the energy supply from Russia at all-time low, European countries had been importing liquified natural gas, or LNG, from the US on a much bigger scale. LNG though is significantly more expensive than piped natural gas from Russia.
Apart from the US, Azerbaijan has also become a major supplier to these countries. Last year, the gas supply from Azerbaijan to the EU reached 12 billion cubic metres.
