The truth bubbles to the surface
In the days and weeks after the Nord Stream attack, newspaper columns were abuzz with speculation that Russia was guilty of the clandestine sabotage operation that had destroyed the pipelines. Yet the only publicly available evidence at the time was that the nature of the explosions precluded an accident, and the complexity of successfully executing such an attack suggested a state actor. Despite the Baltic Sea being one of the most surveilled and militarised bodies of water in the world, neither the United States nor any of its Nato allies produced any further evidence in the months after, and the media fell silent on the matter.
In fact, national investigations into the Nord Stream sabotage were shrouded in unusual secrecy. Sweden refused to cooperate with even close allies such as Germany and Denmark on its investigation, citing national security. When a member of the Bundestag asked the German Government for information on its investigation, the Government gave the breathtakingly authoritarian answer that “the right of members of the Bundestag to ask questions is necessarily second to the confidentiality interests of the Federal Government”. Meanwhile, the US offered nothing either, despite its possession of a myriad of surveillance platforms covering the area, including satellites (visual and radar), undersea listening devices and naval assets, as well as its unparalleled signals intelligence capabilities.
Apparently unable to do its own investigative work, and absent spoon-fed information from the intelligence community or confidential government briefings, the Western media, as aforementioned, largely stopped reporting on the matter.
Then, on 8th February this year, Seymour Hersh, the legendary investigative reporter, reopened the increasingly cold case. In an extraordinarily detailed 5,000-word report, Mr Hersh alleged that the United States had carried out the attack. He claimed that a small group of senior Biden Administration officials, including the President, had decided to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, and that their orders were carried out by US Navy divers, who, collaborating with Norway, had laid the explosive charges under cover of the Baltops 2022 naval exercise between 5th and 17th June 2022. The explosives, per Mr Hersh, were then detonated remotely by an aircraft flying over the site some hours before the explosions on 26th September.
During his storied career, Mr Hersh exposed the Mai Lai massacre in which US soldiers had murdered over 300 unarmed civilians during the Vietnam war; played an important role in uncovering the Watergate scandal; contributed to revelations surrounding the US bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1970; uncovered evidence of CIA domestic wiretapping; exposed CIA links with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, leader of Libya; broke the story of the US mistreating and torturing detainees at the now notorious Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq; called into question the claim that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad had used chemical weapons; and claimed that the official US version of Osama bin Laden’s death was false. For this body of work, Hersh had won four George Polk Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.
Given Mr Hersh’s record, given the US had the means to destroy the pipelines, given it had promised to do so in the event of a Russian attack on Ukraine, given the detail of Mr Hersh’s accusations, and given he was accusing the United States of perpetrating the most damaging attack on European infrastructure since the Second World War, it would seem natural for his story to have garnered significant media attention.
Instead, the UK and US press hardly covered the bombshell report at all, and the silence on Nord Stream continued. But not in Germany. There, not only did the newspapers cover the Hersh story, but politicians became increasingly involved. By March, three political parties, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union, the left wing Die Linke (literally, ‘The Left’), and the right-wing populist party Alternative fur Deutschland, had submitted formal requests to the Government for information. Even Ralf Stegner, a member of the Bundestag representing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD, questioned the shroud of secrecy enveloping the German investigation. In an interview with the American investigative website In These Times, Mr Stegner said: “The public has a right to know in a democracy, and the parliament has a right to know.”
Then, on 7th March, a month after the publication of the Hersh report, and just days after the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited President Biden at the White House, The New York Times published its own version of events. It claimed that new intelligence reviewed by US officials suggested “that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year”. The article also highlighted that US officials “had no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian Government officials”.
The New York Times report added that the US officials privy to the intelligence knew next to nothing about this group of pro-Ukrainians beyond that “they were opponents of President Vladimir V Putin of Russia”. Further, they had no information about the members of the group, or about who directed the operation, and declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained, or the strength of evidence it contained.
Just hours later, Die Zeit filled in the gaps. It, too, claimed that a group of pro-Ukrainians had carried out the attacks, and it, too, said that there was no evidence linking them to the Ukrainian Government. Just as The New York Times claimed its report had been based on “new intelligence”, so Die Zeit claimed its report was based on a “breakthrough” by investigative authorities [Readers should note here that quotations from the Die Zeit article are based on a Google Translation of the original German].
However, unlike The New York Times – and, apparently, the US officials from whom it garnered the information – the Germans had details. The Die Zeit reporters knew that the attack had been carried out using a yacht owned by two Ukrainians (revealed in later reports to have been the Andromeda, a 50-foot boat), where it had been rented, the route it had taken, and the composition of the team (a captain, two divers, two diving assistants, and a doctor, five of whom were men and one of whom was a woman). It also knew that the team had used “professionally forged passports”.
The correlation between the reports – and their obviously coordinated timing – leaves little doubt that the intelligence for both came from the same source. Indeed, the Die Zeit report explicitly stated that its information had come from a German state investigation run by the German Attorney General with the involvement of “security authorities in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and the USA”. Given US involvement, therefore, why did The New York Times write that US officials knew next to nothing about the group – except that they “were opponents of President Vladimir V Putin” – while Die Zeit was able to reveal their composition, their means of transport, their route, and even the fact they had used professionally forged passports?
In fact, if the German security services were able to ascertain that these passports were not only fake, but professionally forged, where were the passports? Or at least where were the serial numbers, photographs and aliases? If they didn’t have this, how did they know they were professionally forged? Who was in the team? What names were they travelling under? And, given there are a limited number of people in the world able to carry out such an attack, could photographs and aliases not identify the perpetrators? Even the OSINT community – enthusiastic amateurs working with publicly available information – had managed this before, so why couldn’t the combined might of the German, Danish, Swedish, Dutch and US intelligence agencies?
Worse than that, the whole story was fantastical. In the aftermath of the Nord Stream explosions, the media had written en masse that a clandestine operation of such complexity could only have been carried out by state actors. Mark Ames, an investigative journalist, collected some of this reporting. The New York Times unquestioningly conveyed that the Swedish authorities had concluded that “a state actor was most likely responsible”. The Washington Post reported – again without question – that the Finnish authorities had reached the same conclusion: “We know that this amount of explosives has to be a state-level actor.” Der Spiegel wrote that the German police saw a “state actor role” in the Nord Stream blasts.
Now they were all unquestioningly reporting that a small group of have-a-go-heroes had carried out the attacks. Where could they have found the special shape charges for the job? There cannot be too many places from which they could be bought, so why have the investigators not identified the seller? How did they load more than a thousand pounds of explosives onto a 50-foot yacht? How did they get them from the yacht into the water? How did six people, all the diving gear, including special breathing gear for the depth, medical equipment and probably a decompression chamber, fit onto such a small yacht? Where did these divers train for such a difficult job?
None of it passed the sniff test. Indeed, Die Zeit shared the delicious detail that the Andromeda was returned in an uncleaned state, allowing the authorities to find traces of explosives in the cabin. This suggests that a team able to ascertain and pass off forged passports, plan a mission involving transit through several theoretically hostile nations, successfully place large shape charges 49 fathoms down, struggling against currents as they went, return to port and escape entirely unnoticed by the authorities – all without state assistance! – were not professional enough to give their getaway yacht a thorough rub down.
A day later, Maxim Tucker, the Assistant Foreign News Editor for The Times, reported crucial details of the story, some of which seemed to contradict what had been written in The New York Times and Die Zeit. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr Tucker had been for years based in Ukraine, and had previously been employed as the Kiev Correspondent for The Independent, Newsweek, and The Times. He had then taken a four-year break from journalism to work for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and still holds the office of Senior Program Manager for Europe and Eurasia for the Foundation in parallel with his latest position at The Times.
Mr Tucker wrote that just a week after the explosions that destroyed Nord Stream, “a Scandinavian delegation in Brussels walked out of their embassy intelligence briefing, impressed by the level of detail they had received so soon after the attack”. They were told, according to Mr Tucker, that the sabotage had been carried out by a “private venture operating in Ukraine”, that the name of the suspected Ukrainian private sponsor was known, and that “this would not be made public and to deflect any questions about why the official investigation into the destruction of the Russo-German pipeline was moving so slowly”. Apparently, the reason for this subterfuge was that Nato officials wanted to protect Ukraine from “a public spat with Germany”.
First, if Mr Tucker was correct, the intelligence that formed the basis of The New York Times and Die Zeit articles was not “new”, as The New York Times had written in the very first word of its article, or a “breakthrough”, as Die Zeit wrote in the first paragraph of its. In fact, it dated back to the very week after the incident. This seems to have been corroborated by Julian E Barnes, one of the three authors of the original New York Times piece. In an interview for a NYT podcast, The Daily, Mr Barnes claimed that he and his colleagues had got the scoop after they started to “ask the right questions” – after which, one is left to believe, US officials gave them the ‘right answers’, which they had known all along.
Was it new intelligence, as Mr Barnes wrote, or old intelligence elicited from US officials after asking the right questions, as Mr Barnes said? One version of Mr Barnes is wrong. Of course, the whole idea that the intelligence beat reporter for the US paper of record had been working hard on the Nord Stream story for months, but only got his big break when he stumbled upon the right question to ask of his contacts is preposterous. It is far more likely that he was fed the intelligence by one of his sources than he was forced to play a five month-long game of Twenty Questions with the CIA. This is surely why he wrote that the intelligence was “new”.
But this not the end of the self-serving nonsense Mr Barnes expected his readers to swallow. He had written in his initial report that “Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines”. As we have seen, this is literally the opposite of what The New York Times and the rest of the legacy news media had reported almost from the moment the explosions were detected. Yet now Mr Barnes was claiming they and the other the insiders had suspected all along that it was Ukrainians (even as they maintained the pretence that it was probably Russia.)
The final insult to citizens of Western nations came from Maxim Tucker’s claim that western intelligence agencies had indeed known since the beginning that Ukrainians had carried out the attack, but chose to hide it from electorates for fear it would cause problems for Ukraine. We must think very hard about what Mr Tucker is claiming here. The Nord Stream attacks involved the largest destruction of European infrastructure since the Second World War. They did billions of dollars of damage, and significantly impaired Europe’s ability to secure energy at an economically rational price in the future, undermining the entire economic model of Germany and much of the EU.
Yet, according to Mr Tucker, governments hid from their electorates that Ukrainians had committed this crime because it was more important to maintain support for a war with Russia that has already cost trillions of dollars in higher energy costs, inflation and deindustrialisation, and which could still escalate to a nuclear war that destroys all civilisation – even as unnamed government officials told credulous journalists that it had probably been Russia.
Further, if Mr Tucker is correct, we must swallow that while the Swedish authorities were telling The New York Times that “a state actor was most likely responsible”, and the German investigators were telling Der Spiegel that they saw “state actor role” in the Nord Stream blasts, they all knew that it had been freelance, non-state affiliated divers. And, even as Nato had “warned Russia”, said that “any further attack on energy infrastructure in Europe would be met with a unified and determined response”, it was protecting the identity of the culprits to avoid being forced to respond in exactly that unified and determined manner.
Given this alternative, it would probably be more comforting to discover that Mr Tucker’s claim was another self-serving tale planted to make the story work. Nevertheless, the reporting of the destruction of Nord Stream is perhaps a more important story than the sabotage itself. In the next part of this series, we will explain why.
Read more from The Nord Stream Files:
Part one: A brief history of Nord Stream
Part two: An explosion of misinformation
Part four: Why this matters
