In extravagant detail he claimed that President Joseph Biden and his understrappers hatched the idea to wreck the Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline, plotted its wrecking and ordered its actual wrecking — with active assistance from the Scandinavian nation of Norway.
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, [Biden’s national security adviser] Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force — men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the State and Treasury departments — and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back-and-forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the president be reversible — such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions — or irreversible — that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines — and that he was delivering on the desires of the president.
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
What was the purpose behind this war act? The answer is clear as gin.
Cutting the Russian-German Umbilical Cord
The pipeline was constructed to conduct beneficial Russian natural gas to Germany. But this umbilical cord afforded Russia great leverage over these Germans.
The American administration feared the Teutonic louts might cry down the anti-Russia sanctions if Russia threatened to kink the hose… and choke off the flows to Germany.
And Washington’s entire sanctions regime could die aborning, strangled and murdered in the crib.
United States officials therefore chose to close off the source of Russian temptation. They would dynamite the pipeline. Russia would then be unable to dangle its natural gas before the Germans, carrotlike, to steer them in the Russian direction. More:
Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward”…
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” [Hersh’s] source said.
Mr. Hersh’s investigations reveal a fantastically detailed and thorough plot.
Frogmen of the United States Navy would affix explosive devices to the pipeline under the cover of a planned naval exercise in the area. Thus it would not attract notice.
These explosives would subsequently serve as time bombs. They would be detonated remotely at a later date — sufficiently later in order to skirt suspicions that they were connected to the frogmen’s prior skunkwork.
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