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nord stream pipeline
Denmark Finds 'Deliberate Sabotage' of Nord Stream—But Ends Probe With No Charges
The country is the second U.S. ally in the past month to end an investigation into the pipeline explosions.
Feb 26, 2024
Denmark became the latest country to close its investigation into the underwater explosions that caused leaks in two pipelines that were built to carry gas from Russia to Germany, with authorities saying they had found that "there was deliberate sabotage" of the infrastructure but would not go further in their probe to confirm who was behind the blasts.
"The assessment is that there are not sufficient grounds to pursue a criminal case," said the Danish police, prompting criticism from Russian officials and other critics.
Since the gas leaks were discovered in September 2022, seven months after Russia invaded Ukraine, various observers have accused the two countries as well as the United States of being at fault.
The leaks—which experts said led to the single largest release of methane gas due to human activity—were discovered beneath the Baltic Sea, off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm. Seismic institutes found that two explosions had occurred underwater just before the leaks were recorded.
Russian energy giant Gazprom owns a majority stake in the pipelines, with German, Dutch, and French companies also owning interests. Weeks before the leaks were discovered, Russia had intensified tensions in Europe by cutting gas supplies in suspected retaliation for sanctions against Moscow.
The U.S. was a longtime critic of the Nord Stream pipelines, arguing they would increase European dependence on Russia for energy.
Just before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that a Russia offensive would push the U.S. to "bring an end to" the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
But the U.S. has denied involvement in the explosions, saying in February 2023 that one report alleging U.S. sabotage published by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh was "false and complete fiction."
Hersh reported, based on a single anonymous source who had "direct knowledge of the operational planning," that Biden had authorized U.S. Navy divers to plant remotely triggered explosives that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, enlisting the help of the Norwegian Navy and secret service.
In March 2023, weeks after Hersh's report was released, the U.S. and several Western allies opposed a United Nations Security Council resolution that aimed to launch an international probe into the Nord Stream explosions.
Earlier this month, Sweden concluded its own investigation, saying the case did not fall under its jurisdiction and noting that they had given "material that can be used as evidence" to German authorities for their probe. Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said that the "primary assumption is that a state is behind it."
The German federal prosecutor's investigation is ongoing.
Journalist Thomas Fazi suggested U.S. allies have dropped their probes because they are "terrified of actually finding the culprit."
The question of who caused the Nord Stream gas leaks, said author Tony Norfield, "has troubled Swedish and Danish investigators so much, they have closed their inquiries. Just in case they uncover something embarrassing."
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How the CIA Destabilizes the World
If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be.
Feb 12, 2024
There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability. Its operational objectives are whatever the CIA or the President of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law. Its methods are secretive and duplicitous. Its unaccountability means that the CIA and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress is a doormat, a sideshow.
As a recent CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, said of his time at the CIA: "I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment."
The CIA was established in 1947 as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS had performed two distinct roles in World War II, intelligence and subversion. The CIA took over both roles. On the one hand, the CIA was to provide intelligence to the US Government. On the other, the CIA was to subvert the “enemy,” that is, whomever the president or CIA defined as the enemy, using a wide range of measures: assassinations, coups, staged unrest, arming of insurgents, and other means.
It is the latter role that has proved devastating to global stability and the U.S. rule of law. It is a role that the CIA continues to pursue today. In effect, the CIA is a secret army of the U.S., capable of creating mayhem across the world with no accountability whatsoever.
When President Dwight Eisenhower decided that Africa’s rising political star, democratically elected Patrice Lumumba of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), was the “enemy,” the CIA conspired in his 1961 assassination, thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. He would hardly be the last African president brought down by the CIA.
The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding.
In its 77-year history, the CIA has been held to serious public account just once, in 1975. In that year, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a Senate investigation that exposed the CIA’s shocking rampage of assassinations, coups, destabilization, surveillance, and Mengele-style torture and medical “experiments.”
The expose by the Church Committee of the CIA’s shocking malfeasance has recently been chronicled in a superb book by the investigative reporter James Risen, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy.
That single episode of oversight occurred because of a rare confluence of events.
In the year before the Church Committee, the Watergate scandal had toppled Richard Nixon and weakened the White House. As successor to Nixon, Gerald Ford was unelected, a former Congressman, and reluctant to oppose the oversight prerogatives of the Congress. The Watergate scandal, investigated by the Senate Ervin Committee, had also empowered the Senate and demonstrated the value of Senate oversight of Executive Branch abuses of power. Crucially, the CIA was newly led by Director William Colby, who wanted to clean up the CIA operations. Also, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, author of pervasive illegalities also exposed by the Church committee, had died in 1972.
In December 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, then as now a great reporter with sources inside the CIA, published an account of illegal CIA intelligence operations against the U.S. antiwar movement. The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, a leader of character, then appointed Church to investigate the CIA. Church himself was a brave, honest, intelligent, independent-minded, and intrepid Senator, characteristics chronically in short supply in U.S. politics.
If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be. The CIA has had the last laugh —or better said, has brought the world to tears—by maintaining its preeminent role in U.S. foreign policy, including overseas subversion.
Since 1975, the CIA has run secretive operations backing Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan that utterly wrecked Afghanistan while giving rise to al-Qaeda. The CIA has likely run secretive operations in the Balkans against Serbia, in the Caucuses against Russia, and in Central Asia targeting China, all deploying CIA-backed jihadists. In the 2010s, the CIA ran deadly operations to topple Syria’s Bashir al-Assad, again with Islamic jihadists. For at least 20 years, the CIA has been deeply involved in fomenting the growing catastrophe in Ukraine, including the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 that triggered the devastating war now engulfing Ukraine.
What do we know of these operations? Only the parts that whistleblowers, a few intrepid investigative reporters, a handful of brave scholars, and some foreign governments have been willing or able to tell us, with all of these potential witnesses knowing that they might face severe retribution from the U.S. government. There has been little to no accountability by the U.S. government itself, or meaningful oversight or restraint imposed by Congress. On the contrary, the government has become ever-more obsessively secretive, pursuing aggressive legal actions against disclosures of classified information, even when, or especially when, that information describes the illegal actions by the government itself.
Once in a while, a former U.S. official spills the beans, such as when Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed that he had induced Jimmy Carter to assign the CIA to train Islamic jihadists to destabilize the government of Afghanistan, with the aim of inducing the Soviet Union to invade that country.
In the case of Syria, we learned from a few stories in the New York Times in 2016 and 2017 of the CIA’s subversive operations to destabilize Syria and overthrow Assad, as ordered by President Barack Obama. Here is the case of a dreadfully misguided CIA operation, blatantly in violation of international law, that has led to a decade of mayhem, an escalating regional war, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of displaced people, and yet there has not been a single honest acknowledgment of this CIA-led disaster by the White House or Congress.
In the case of Ukraine, we know that the U.S. played a major covert role in the violent coup that brought down Yanukovych and that swept Ukraine into a decade of bloodshed but to this day, we don’t know the details. Russia offered the world a window into the coup by intercepting and then posting a call between Victoria Nuland, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State (now Under-Secretary of State) and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now Assistant Secretary of State), in which they plot the post-coup government. Following the coup, the CIA covertly trained special operations forces of the post-coup regime the U.S. had helped bring to power. The U.S. government has been mum about the CIA’s covert operations in Ukraine.
We have good reason to believe that CIA operatives carried out the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, as per Seymour Hersh, who is now an independent reporter. Unlike in 1975, when Hersh was with the New York Times at a time when the paper still tried to hold the government to account, the Times does not even deign to look into Hersh’s account.
Holding the CIA to public account is of course a steep uphill struggle. Presidents and the Congress don’t even try. The mainstream media don’t investigate the CIA, preferring instead to quote “senior unnamed officials” and the official cover-up. Are the mainstream media outlets lazy, suborned, afraid of advertising revenues from the military-industrial complex, threatened,
ignorant, or all of the above? Who knows.
There is a tiny glimmer of hope. Back in 1975, the CIA was led by a reformer. Today, the CIA is led by William Burns, one of America’s long-standing leading diplomats. Burns knows the truth about Ukraine, since he served as Ambassador to Russia in 2008 and cabled Washington about the grave error of pushing NATO enlargement to Ukraine. Given Burns’ stature and diplomatic accomplishments, perhaps he would support the urgently needed accountability.
The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths, instability, and destruction unleashed by CIA subversion continues to this day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the release of documents to enable democratic accountability.
Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee hearings. Fifty years on, with the precedent, inspiration, and guidance of the Church Committee itself, it’s urgently time to open the blinds, expose the truth about the U.S.-led mayhem, and begin a new era in which U.S. foreign policy becomes transparent, accountable, subject to the rule of law both domestic and international, and directed towards global peace rather than subversion of supposed enemies.
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It's Been a Year and We Still Don't Know Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline
Increasingly it seems that those in many Western governments and mainstream media outlets would rather not solve this ongoing mystery.
Sep 26, 2023
After news of the reported explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines broke a year ago today, the media was ablaze with speculation, mostly in the direction of the Russian government.
“Everything is pointing to Russia,” blared a POLITICO headline two days after the explosions. Quoted in the piece were a number of foreign commentators including the former president of the German Federal Intelligence Service, saying that only Russia had the means and motives to do it.
“We still don’t know 100 percent that Russia was responsible,” said Olga Khakova, deputy director for European energy security at the Atlantic Council. “But everything is pointing to Russia being behind this.” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told BBC on Sept. 30 that it "seems" Russia was was behind the sabotage.
Most recently, an exhaustive investigation by 19 Der Spiegel writers reported that all roads were indeed leading to Ukraine.
By October the Washington Post Editorial Board was raising the alarms about more attacks against “the West.”
"This is the kind of capability usually wielded by a state actor, though NATO did not say officially what everyone suspects unofficially: The author of this strike against Europe’s stability and security was Russia. Now, the United States and its allies must meet a new challenge: threats to critical infrastructure, just as they are about to try to get through winter without Russian oil and gas."
Aside from a Twitter-impulsive former Polish foreign minister gleefully suggesting the U.S. did it, the mainstream media commentariat had no inhibitions about openly blaming Russia through the fall of 2022.
A year later, however, the world still does not know “who done it.” Some critics suggest the probes may be getting into politically uncomfortable territory, with recent German reports pointing to a Ukrainian military connection to the blasts.
“Whether it’s instinctive or by direction, there is a clear attempt to simply bury this story completely,” said Anatol Lieven, the director of the Quincy Institute’s Eurasia Program, comparing the seeming lack of U.S. media interest to George Orwell’s “memory hole” in the novel “1984.”
“Obviously that is because the main theories that have been advanced for the responsibility of the sabotage, if true, would be imminently embarrassing for Western governments.”
Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have been conducting separate investigations. In a joint statement on Sept. 30, Denmark and Sweden told the United Nations Security Council in a letter that the leaks were caused by at least two detonations with "several hundred kilos" of explosives. By late last year, however, European sources were quietly dismissing Russia’s role in what was being deemed as a sabotage, saying there was “no conclusive evidence” that would lead to Moscow.
Since then there has been reporting by Sy Hersh that the United States coordinated the attacks, using a secret expert U.S. Navy diving team. This was largely ignored, refuted and scoffed at by the mainstream media and officials in the West. Soon after, it was revealed that German investigators were pursuing a second theory: that it was the work of a pro-Ukrainian outfit, either rogue or Ukrainian government-connected. Swedish investigators believe, by the way, that the attack could only be the work of a state actor.
Leaked CIA documents earlier this year show that the U.S. had intelligence that the “Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces,” at least three months before the actual explosions. What we don’t know is if the Ukrainians actually went through with it, though at least one unnamed U.S. official said the CIA “warned” Ukraine not to.
Most recently, an exhaustive investigation by 19 Der Spiegel writers reported that all roads were indeed leading to Ukraine. At least that is what German investigators are telling them. From their report Aug. 28:
Investigators from the BKA (Federal Criminal Police Office), the Federal Police and the Office of the Federal Prosecutor have few remaining doubts that a Ukrainian commando was responsible for blowing up the pipelines. A striking number of clues point to Ukraine, they say.
And the possible motives also seem clear to international security circles: The aim, they say, was to deprive Moscow of an important source of revenue for financing the war against Ukraine. And at the same time to deprive Putin once and for all of his most important instrument of blackmail against the German government.
How far up the chain it goes nobody yet knows, or if other state actors were involved. After the story of the CIA leaks, Zelensky vehemently denied the charges.
"I am president and I give orders accordingly," he said. "Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine.”
But the mystery continues and there seems to be no urgency—save for Der Spiegel’s intensive reporting—to push the issue further, at least in the U.S. press. That’s likely because, as Lieven and others contend, there is no political gain, only embarrassment if the U.S. is behind the attack, as Hersh alleges, or Ukraine is, as the German inquiry seems to be unraveling. For his part, Russian President Putin believes the U.S, not Ukraine, is the culprit. Others, including the German defense minister have suggested the Kyiv theory is a “false flag” to blame Ukraine.
“It seems very strange” that NATO governments, with their massive intelligence capabilities—particularly Washington’s global reach—“seem unable to get to the bottom of this,” Jacobin reporter Branko Marcetic tells RS.
“But even stranger still is the seeming lack of Interest and discussion from these countries’ various media establishments and politicians, about an attack that destroyed a major piece of a NATO ally’s infrastructure.”
To be fair, as Der Spiegel notes, the German investigators “cannot conduct investigations in Ukraine, and it isn't expected that Kyiv will provide much support. The German authorities have also shied away from submitting a request to Ukraine for legal assistance because doing so would require that they reveal what they know.”
Meanwhile, who has benefited from the permanent shutdown of Nord Stream 1 (the EU was importing 35 percent of its natural gas from this pipeline until it was shut off after the invasion) and Nord Stream 2 never going online (which the U.S. had swore would never happen)?
“The United States without a question (has benefited),” asserts Lieven. “It made it much more difficult for Germany to ever move back into an intensive energy relationship with Russia and made German and other European countries even more permanently dependent on imports of liquified natural gas from the United States.”
"Stranger still is the seeming lack of Interest and discussion from these countries’ various media establishments and politicians, about an attack that destroyed a major piece of a NATO ally’s infrastructure.”
Nord Stream pipelines, which run from Russia to Germany, are majority owned (51 percent) by Russian Gazprom, along with German, Dutch and French stakeholders. In 2022, Europe became the primary destination for U.S. LNG exports in 2022, according to the Energy Information Association, accounting for 64 percent of total exports. Four countries — France, the U.K., Spain, and the Netherlands — accounted for a combined 74 percent of those exports.
Aside from the U.S, Germany is also getting gas supplies from Norway and the Gulf States. Meanwhile the West’s break from Russian energy beyond the Nord Stream rupture has done serious damage to the German economy.
But the torrent of responses after the Sept. 26 attack blamed Russia because, as was the line, Moscow wanted to strike fear into the West. President Putin did it because Moscow was “weaponizing energy” and that it was “desperate.” None of that has been walked back and without any real attention to what really happened, no one truly feels the need to.
In fact, in its own anniversary recollections, the Washington Postbarely mentions that this narrative was repeated for another month after the explosions.
“Whether or not that's the full story is hard to say at this point,” Marcetic said, pointing to the Ukrainian connection, “but the fact that a state that is receiving unprecedented levels of military and financial support from NATO has been accused of carrying out an attack on a NATO ally is obviously significant. Yet this is another data point in this war that many clearly would rather not discuss or acknowledge even as it pertains directly to burning issues like Ukraine's possible entry into the alliance.”
The mystery, as they say, remains unsolved.
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