How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline, by Sy Hersch

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When The Intelligence is Inconvenient: What goes wrong when politics suppresses the truth
by Seymour Hersh
September 13, 2023

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba enjoy a happy meal last week in Kiev. / Photo by Brendan Smialowski / POOL / AFP.

On Sunday Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Jonathan Karl of ABC’s This Week that he remained “very confident in Ukraine’s ultimate success” in the ongoing war with Russia. He depicted Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to escalate its attacks inside Russia as “their decision, not ours.”

Blinken’s wrong-headed confidence and his acceptance of a significant escalation in the Ukraine war defies belief, given the reality on the ground today in the war. But it also could be based on insanely optimistic assessments supplied by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The DIA’s assessments, as I have reported, are now the intelligence of choice inside the White House.

As a journalist who has written about national security matters for many decades, how can I explain a process that is clearly contrary to the best interests of the people of the United States and its leadership?

One answer is that it is now an accepted reality that presidents in the post-9/11 era do not hesitate to manipulate and lie about even the most competent of intelligence reports if they do not fit into their political agenda. What began in the Bush/Cheney years—remember the lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—continued during the presidency of the much beloved, much misunderstood Barack Obama. Ten years ago, amid calls for the US to intervene in the Syrian civil war against the reviled Bashar al-Assad, the White House did not receive crucial intelligence because it was politically inconvenient. The case involved a five page all-source report prepared for the Defense Intelligence Agency about a strategic weapon—the nerve gas sarin—that was known to be in the hands of the Islamist opposition to the Syrian government led by Assad. The detailed report, which included vital information gleaned from intercepts by the National Security Agency, did not reach the White House because—so I came to understand—it revealed the kind of truth that presidents then and now viewed as political poison. Passing such information would also raise questions about the political savvy and dependability of those running the agency involved. Intelligence to please in these days of quick fixes and double talk always trumps intelligence that raises difficult questions.

I cited a few lines from the DIA study in a report I wrote at the time for the London Review of Books about the 2013 sarin attack in Syria, but I chose to limit my reporting in order to protect the ability of the NSA to penetrate the most secret doings of America’s Islamist enemies. The document, with my handwritten notes, is posted at the bottom of this report. I am doing this because what happened then is happening today inside the American intelligence community and, if not curtailed, could lead the short-sighted White House into an expanded war with Russia that no one wants.

The issue began in 2013 when there were allegations of Syrian use of chemical weapons in its war against a merged group of Jihadist forces, known as al-Nusra, whose goal was to overthrow the Baathist Assad government and establish an Islamic state in Syria. Al-Nusra had been designated by the State Department late in 2012 as a “foreign terrorist organization” and identified as an affiliate of Al Qaeda.

There were some in the Obama administration who cynically argued that al-Nusra should be aided in its war against the Assad government, and dealt with after Assad’s ouster. The most complete history of the administration’s concern about the Syrian chemical warfare arsenal can be found in The World As It Is, the 2018 memoir by Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s national security advisers. (The first volume of Obama’s memoirs of his years in the White House, A Promised Land, published in 2020, ended with the end of his first term in office in early 2013.)

In Rhodes’s account, Syria’s possession and potential use of sarin had been an issue in Washington for a year before the Syrian government was accused in late August of 2013 of carrying out a nerve gas attack on Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, the Syrian capital, killing as many as 1,500, according to the initial reports. There also was a fear that the Assad government would provide sarin to Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon backed by Iran and avowed enemy of Israel. In August 2012 Obama publicly stated that “We have been very clear to the Assad regime . . . that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

While on vacation in August 2013, Rhodes learned there was a “high confidence assessment” that a nerve agent had killed more than a thousand people and that “the Assad regime was responsible.” At this point, Rhodes writes, “One after another, officials advised Obama to order a military strike.”

All of this was being conveyed to the American press and public by the administration. Rhodes writes: “I started to plan a public campaign to ramp up to a military intervention. John Kerry could make a statement . . . making the case for action. The intelligence community would have to make its assessment public. It felt energizing, as though we were finally going to do something to shape events in Syria.”

Rhodes does not report that over the next few weeks doubts about who did what in Syria were being conveyed directly to Obama. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, who Rhodes says had initially supported an immediate military response, changed his mind and, I was told by a senior intelligence official, warned the president that the nerve used in the attack did not match that known to exist in the Syrian army arsenal. And as Obama himself told a journalist before leaving office, he was advised by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that the case that the Assad regime carried out the gas attack was not a “slam dunk.” Obama eventually canceled plans for a major strike on military and industrial sites throughout Syria.

Rhodes clearly had not been told anything about the DIA’s two-month-old all-source intelligence assessment, which included some specific data from the National Security Agency, making clear that there were two possible suspects for any nerve gas attack—Syria and al-Nusra. The document emphasizes the threat of al-Nusra’s chemical arsenal. The opening sentences reek of urgency:

“The al-Nusrah Front associated sarin production cell is the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre 9/11 effort. Arrests in Iraq and Turkey have disrupted the cell’s operations; however we assess the intent to produce advanced chemical weapon (CW) remains. Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW stockpiles; now we see ANF [al-Nusra Front] attempting to make its own CW. In this brief we will discuss the network, its capabilities, and future indications of CW related activity.”

The DIA analysis, captioned as Talking Points, goes on to warn that al-Nusra’s “relative freedom of operations within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.” One factor contributing to its freedom of operation was that America and its allies were not targeting it.

The five-page document—I deleted its classified markings—was described as a “Brief to DD Shedd” and dated 20 June. It depicted al Nusra chemical warfare actions up to that date. “Shedd” referred to David Shedd, a longtime CIA official who was named deputy director of the DIA by Obama in 2010 and served there until 2015, with the last year as acting director.

The copy I obtained of the Talking Points did not originate in the Pentagon or in Washington, but was considered to be important enough to have been distributed in secret to highly classified black sites and similar units outside of Washington. There is no evidence that the analysis or the information it contained reached the White House or Ben Rhodes himself, despite the role Obama assigned him to manage the response to the attack in Ghouta.

At the time I obtained the document, I was reporting on the attack and the US response for the London Review of Books. I learned then from a senior DIA official that such a document existed but cited only a few lines of the five-page paper largely because I worried about compromising the source of what obviously was excellent intelligence work. I wrote at the time that General Dempsey had directly warned Obama that the nerve agent used in the attack did not match equally lethal materials known to be in the Syrian chemical warfare arsenal. The Syrian CW installations—which at one time totaled 26 separate depots—had been closely monitored for two decades by a joint collection program run by US and Israeli intelligence.

So the question remains: why did the DIA intelligence not get to the White House? I put that to a senior intelligence official, after sharing the paper with him. His answer was that it was an obvious hot potato that was ignored “for political expediency”—just as much of the CIA’s current reporting on the failed Ukraine offensive has been ignored by Blinken and other foreign policy officials in the Biden administration.

The intelligence official said the designation of the document as “Talking Points” meant that it was “never intended for the president, but only to alert the DIA that there was hard evidence beginning to appear from a multitude of sources that there was another explanation of sarin use which should balance any accusation of Assad. Like any good summary it is: ‘Wait and see. It is a complex issue.’”

He said that the document was “credible because it is all-source and balanced. It draws no conclusions—just cautions” that the issue cannot be packaged in a final assessment because many of the known al-Nusra players involved in the production of nerve gas were still under surveillance. Thus, he said, only an overview was in order.

My reporting at the time made the point that there were two possible suspects for the sarin attack but only one publicly cited by White House. I spent many hours going back and forth with a White House press aide trying to get a response about the material I had. I was initially told that the Obama White House would not comment on the record about my report. I persisted and provided more specifics to the aide and eventually received a note, unilaterally designated as “Off the Record” (to make comments “off the record” requires both sides to agree to it), that said: “[N]o one is saying the memo is not a physical thing that exists. What we are saying is that it is not an official memo and the facts that you alleged that it contains are almost 100 per cent incorrect—which is probably why almost no one has seen it. It likely did not go forward because it was wrong.” A later note from the spokesperson, also marked “off the record,” added that the memo “is not something that his [Shedd’s] office received. Since neither the WH [White House] nor the DNI [director of national intelligence Clapper] have seen the alleged memo…it’s unclear whether it’s a fake or a draft that was never sent forward because it contained information that was incorrect.”

This kind of dissembling did not begin with the Biden Administration.

The Shedd Memo
Below is the full text of the five-page DIA assessment of al-Nusra’s chemical warfare capability from June 20, 2013. The markings on the pages are mine and mostly aimed at spelling out acronyms and unit names. It is a superior piece of analysis.


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Zelensky's 'Bad Moment': The Ukrainian leader resorts to lies and threats at the tail end of a failing counteroffensive
by Seymour Hersh
September 21, 2023

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BAND OF BROTHERS: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba, US Climate Envoy John Kerry, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken listen as President Joe Biden addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York City on Tuesday. / Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images.

Next Tuesday will be the anniversary of the Biden administration’s destruction of three of the four pipelines of Nord Stream 1 and 2. There is more I have to say about it, but it will have to wait. Why? Because the war between Russia and Ukraine, with the White House continuing to reject any talk of a ceasefire, is at a turning point.

There are significant elements in the American intelligence community, relying on field reports and technical intelligence, who believe that the demoralized Ukraine army has given up on the possibility of overcoming the heavily mined three-tier Russian defense lines and taking the war to Crimea and the four oblasts seized and annexed by Russia. The reality is that Volodymyr Zelensky’s battered army no longer has any chance of a victory.

The war continues, I have been told by an official with access to current intelligence, because Zelensky insists that it must. There is no discussion in his headquarters or in the Biden White House of a ceasefire and no interest in talks that could lead to an end to the slaughter. “It’s all lies,” the official said, speaking of the Ukrainian claims of incremental progress in the offensive that has suffered staggering losses, while gaining ground in a few scattered areas that the Ukrainian military measures in meters per week.

“Let’s be clear,” the official said. “Putin did a stupid and self-destructive act in starting the war. He thought he had a magical power and that all that he wanted was going to work out.” Russia’s initial attack, the official added, was poorly planned, understaffed, and led to unnecessary losses. “He was lied to by his generals and began the war with no logistics—no way of resupplying his troops.” Many of the offending generals were summarily dismissed.

“Yes,” the official said, “Putin did something stupid, no matter how provoked, by violating the UN charter and so did we”—meaning President Biden’s decision to wage a proxy war with Russia by funding Zelensky and his military. “And so now we have to paint him black, with the help of the media, in order to justify our mistake.” He was referring to a secret disinformation operation that was aimed at diminishing Putin, undertaken by the CIA in coordination with elements of British intelligence. The successful operation led major media outlets here and in London to report that the Russian president was suffering from varied illnesses that included blood disorders and a serious cancer. One oft-quoted story had Putin being treated by heavy doses of steroids. Not all were fooled. The Guardian skeptically reported in May of 2022 that the rumors “spanned the gamut: Vladimir Putin is suffering from cancer or Parkinson’s disease, say unconfirmed and unverified reports.” But many major news organizations took the bait. In June 2022, Newsweek splashed what it billed a major scoop, citing unnamed sources saying that Putin had undergone treatment two months earlier for advanced cancer: “Putin’s grip is strong but no longer absolute. The jockeying inside the Kremlin has never been more intense. . . . everyone sensing that the end is near.”

“There were some early Ukrainian penetrations in the opening days of the June offensive,” the official said, “at or near” the heavily trapped first of Russia’s three formidable concrete barriers of defense, “and the Russians retreated to sucker them in. And they all got killed.” After weeks of high casualties and little progress, along with horrific losses to tanks and armored vehicles, he said, major elements of the Ukrainian army, without declaring so, virtually canceled the offensive. The two villages that the Ukrainian army recently claimed as captured “are so tiny that they couldn’t fit between two Burma-Shave signs”—referring to billboards that seemed to be on every American highway after World War II.

A byproduct of the Biden administration’s neocon hostility to Russia and China—exemplified by the remarks of Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who has repeatedly stated that he will not currently countenance a ceasefire in Ukraine—has been a significant split in the intelligence community. One casualty are the secret National Intelligence Estimates that have delineated the parameters of American foreign policy for decades. Some key offices in the CIA have refused, in many cases, to participate in the NIE process because of profound political disagreement with the administration’s aggressive foreign policy. One recent failure involved a planned NIE that dealt with the outcome of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

I have reported for many weeks on the longstanding disagreement between the CIA and other elements of the intelligence community on the prognosis of the current war in the Ukraine. CIA analysts have consistently been far more skeptical than their counterparts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) on the prospect for a Ukraine success. The American media has ignored the dispute, but the London-headquartered Economist, whose well-informed reporters do not get bylines, has not. One sign of the internal tension inside the American community emerged in the magazine’s September 9 edition when Trent Maul, the DIA’s director of analysis, gave an extraordinary on-the-record interview to the Economist in which he defended his agency’s optimistic reporting on the Ukraine war and its troubled counteroffensive. It was, as the Economist observed in a headline, “A rare interview.” It also passed unnoticed by America’s premiere newspapers.

Maul acknowledged that the DIA “got it wrong” in its reporting on the “will to fight” of America’s allies when the US-trained and -financed armies in Iraq and Afghanistan “crumbled almost overnight.” Maul took issue with CIA complaints—though the agency was not cited by name—about the Ukrainian military leadership’s lack of skill and their tactics in the current counteroffensive. He told the Economist that Ukraine’s recent military successes were “significant” and gave its forces a 40 to 50 percent probability of breaking through Russia’s three-tiered defense lines by the end of this year. He warned, however, the Economist reported, that “limited ammunition and worsening weather will make this ‘very difficult.’”

Zelensky, in an interview with the Economist published a week later, acknowledged that he had detected—how could he not?—what the magazine quoted him as saying was “a change of mood among some of his partners.” Zelensky also acknowledged that what he called his nation’s “recent difficulties” on the battlefield were seen by some as a reason to begin serious end-of-war negotiations with Russia. He called this “a bad moment” because Russia “sees the same.” But he again made clear that peace talks are not on the table, and he issued a new threat to those leaders in the region, whose countries are hosting Ukrainian refugees and who want, as the CIA has reported to Washington, an end to the war. Zelensky warned in the interview, as the Economist wrote: “There is no way of predicting how the millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries would react to their country being abandoned.” Zelensky said the Ukrainian refugees have “behaved well . . . and are grateful” to those who have sheltered them, but it would not be a “good story” for Europe if a Ukrainian defeat “were to drive the people into a corner.” It was nothing less than a threat of internal insurrection.

Zelensky’s message this week to the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York offered little new and, the Washington Post reported, he received the obligatory “warm welcome” from those in attendance. But, the Post noted, “he delivered his address to a half-full house, with many delegations declining to appear and listen to what he had to say.” Leaders of some developing nations, the report added, were “frustrated” that the multiple billions being spent without serious accountability by the Biden administration to finance the Ukraine war was diminishing support for their own struggles to deal with “a warming world, confronting poverty and ensuring a more secure life for their citizens.”

President Biden, in his earlier speech to the General Assembly, did not deal with Ukraine’s perilous position in the war with Russia but renewed his resounding support for Ukraine and insisted that “Russia alone bears responsibility for this war”—ignoring, as the leaders of many developing nations do not, three decades of NATO expansion to the east after and the Obama administration’s covert involvement in the overthrow of a pro-Russian government in Ukraine in 2014.

The president may be right on the merits but the rest of the world remembers, as this White House seems not to, that it was America that chose to make war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with little regard for the merits of its justification for doing so.

There was no talk from the president of the need for an immediate ceasefire in a war that cannot be won by Ukraine and is adding to the pollution that has caused the current climate crisis engulfing the planet. Biden, with the support of Secretary Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan—but diminishing support elsewhere in America—has turned his unrelenting financial and moral support for the Ukraine war into a do-or-die issue for his re-election.

Meanwhile, a relentless Zelensky, in an interview last week with a fawning correspondent of 60 Minutes, once the pinnacle of aggressive American journalism, depicted Putin as another Hitler and falsely insisted that Ukraine had the initiative in its current faltering war with Russia.

Asked by the CBS correspondent, Scott Pelley, if he thought “the threat of nuclear war is behind us,” Zelensky responded: “I think he’s going to continue threatening. He is waiting for the United States to become less stable. He thinks that’s going to happen during the US election. He will be looking for instability in Europe and the United States of America. He will use the risk of using nuclear weapons to fuel that. He will keep on threatening.”

The American intelligence official I spoke with spent the early years of his career working against Soviet aggression and spying has respect for Putin’s intellect but contempt for his decision to go to war with Ukraine and to initiate the death and destruction that war brings. But, as he told me, “The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going.

“The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die any more, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House.”

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A Year of Lying About Nord Stream: The Biden administration has acknowledged neither its responsibility for the pipeline bombing nor the purpose of the sabotage
by Seymour Hersh
September 26, 2023

I do not know much about covert CIA operations—no outsider can—but I do understand that the essential component of all successful missions is total deniability. The American men and women who moved, under cover, in and out of Norway in the months it took to plan and carry out the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea a year ago left no traces—not a hint of the team’s existence—other than the success of their mission.

Deniability, as an option for President Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers, was paramount. No significant information about the mission was put on a computer, but instead typed on a Royal or perhaps a Smith Corona typewriter with a carbon copy or two, as if the Internet and the rest of the online world had yet to be invented. The White House was isolated from the goings-on near Oslo; various reports and updates from the field were directly provided to CIA Director Bill Burns, who was the only link between the planners and the president who authorized the mission to take place on September 26, 2022. Once the mission was completed, the typed papers and carbons were destroyed, thus leaving no physical trace—no evidence to be dug up later by a special prosecutor or a presidential historian. You could call it the perfect crime.

There was a flaw—a gap in understanding between those who carried out the mission and President Biden, as to why he ordered the destruction of the pipelines when he did. My initial 5,200-word report, published in early February, ended cryptically by quoting an official with knowledge of the mission telling me: “It was a beautiful cover story.” The official added: “The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

This is the first account of that flaw, on the one-year anniversary of the explosions, and it is one President Biden and his national security team will not like.

Inevitably, my initial story caused a sensation, but the major media emphasized the White House denials and relied on an old canard—my reliance on an unnamed source—to join the administration in debunking the notion that Joe Biden could have had anything to do with such an attack. I must note here that I’ve won literally scores of prizes in my career for stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker that relied on not a single named source. In the past year we’ve seen a series of contrary newspaper stories, with no named first-hand sources, claiming that a dissident Ukrainian group carried out the technical diving operation attack in the Baltic Sea via a 49-foot rented yacht called the Andromeda.

I am now able to write about the unexplained flaw cited by the unnamed official. It goes once again to the classic issue of what the Central Intelligence Agency is all about: an issue raised by Richard Helms, who headed the agency during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and the CIA’s secret spying on Americans, as ordered by President Lyndon Johnson and sustained by Richard Nixon. I published an exposé in the Times about that spying in December 1974 that led to unprecedented hearings by the Senate into the role of the agency in its unsuccessful attempts, authorized by President John F. Kennedy, to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Helms told the senators that the issue was whether he, as CIA director, worked for the Constitution or for the Crown, in the person of presidents Johnson and Nixon. The Church Committee left the issue unresolved, but Helms made it clear he and his agency worked for the top man in the White House.

Back to the Nord Stream pipelines: It is important to understand that no Russian gas was flowing to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines when Joe Biden ordered them blown up last September 26. Nord Stream 1 had been supplying vast amounts of low-cost natural gas to Germany since 2011 and helped bolster Germany’s status as a manufacturing and industrial colossus. But it was shut down by Putin by the end of August 2022, as the Ukraine war was, at best, in a stalemate. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021 but was blocked from delivering gas by the German government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz two days prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Given Russia’s vast stores of natural gas and oil, American presidents since John F. Kennedy have been alert to the potential weaponization of these natural resources for political purposes. That view remains dominant among Biden and his hawkish foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, now the acting deputy to Blinken.

Sullivan convened a series of high-level national security meetings late in 2021, as Russia was building up its forces along the border of Ukraine, with an invasion seen as almost inevitable. The group, which included representatives from the CIA, was urged to come up with a proposal for action that could serve as a deterrent to Putin. The mission to destroy the pipelines was motivated by the White House’s determination to support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sullivan’s goal seemed clear. “The White House’s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,” the official told me. “The challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.”


The major gas pipelines from Russia to Europe. / Map by Samuel Bailey / Wikimedia Commons.

I now know what I did not know then: the real reason why the Biden administration “brought up taking out the Nord Stream pipeline.” The official recently explained to me that at the time Russia was supplying gas and oil throughout the world via more than a dozen pipelines, but Nord Stream 1 and 2 ran directly from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. “The administration put Nord Stream on the table because it was the only one we could access and it would be totally deniable,” the official said. “We solved the problem within a few weeks—by early January—and told the White House. Our assumption was that the president would use the threat against Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid the war.”

It was no surprise to the agency’s secret planning group when on January 27, 2022, the assured and confident Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, stridently warned Putin that if he invaded Ukraine, as he clearly was planning to, that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The line attracted enormous attention, but the words preceding the threat did not. The official State Department transcript shows that she preceded her threat by saying that with regard to the pipeline: “We continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies.”

Asked by a reporter how she could say with certainty that the Germans would go along “because what the Germans have said publicly doesn’t match what you’re saying,” Nuland responded with an astonishing bit of doubletalk: “I would say go back and read the document that we signed in July [of 2021] that made very clear about the consequences for the pipeline if there is further aggression on Ukraine by Russia.” But that agreement, which was briefed to journalists, did not specify threats or consequences, according to reports in the Times, the Washington Post, and Reuters. At the time of the agreement, on July 21, 2021, Biden told the press corps that since the pipeline was 99 percent finished, “the idea that anything was going to be said or done was going to stop it was not possible.” At the time, Republicans, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, depicted Biden’s decision to permit the Russian gas to flow as a “generational geopolitical win” for Putin and “a catastrophe” for the United States and its allies.

But two weeks after Nuland’s statement, on February 7, 2022, at a joint White House press conference with the visiting Scholz, Biden signaled that he had changed his mind and was joining Nuland and other equally hawkish foreign policy aides in talking about stopping the pipeline. “If Russia invades—that means tanks and troops crossing . . . the border of Ukraine again,” he said, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Asked how he could do so since the pipeline was under Germany’s control, he said: “We will, I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”

Scholz, asked the same question, said: “We are acting together. We are absolutely united, and we will not be taking different steps. We will do the same steps, and they will be very very hard to Russia, and they should understand.” The German leader was considered then—and now—by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.

By this point, the CIA team had made the necessary contacts in Norway, whose navy and special forces commands have a long history of sharing covert-operation duties with the agency. Norwegian sailors and Nasty-class patrol boats helped smuggle American sabotage operatives into North Vietnam in the early 1960s when America, in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was running an undeclared American war there. With Norway’s help, the CIA did its job and found a way to do what the Biden White House wanted done to the pipelines.

At the time, the challenge to the intelligence community was to come up with a plan that would be forceful enough to deter Putin from the attack on Ukraine. The official told me: “We did it. We found an extraordinary deterrent because of its economic impact on Russia. And Putin did it despite the threat.” It took months of research and practice in the churning waters of the Baltic Sea by the two expert US Navy deep sea divers recruited for the mission before it was deemed a go. Norway’s superb seamen found the right spot for planting the bombs that would blow up the pipelines. Senior officials in Sweden and Denmark, who still insist they had no idea what was going on in their shared territorial waters, turned a blind eye to the activities of the American and Norwegian operatives. The American team of divers and support staff on the mission’s mother ship—a Norwegian minesweeper—would be hard to hide while the divers were doing their work. The team would not learn until after the bombing that Nord Stream 2 had been shut down with 750 miles of natural gas in it.

What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden’s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, with Scholz standing next to him, the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines, but the group should arrange to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them “on demand”—after the war began. “It was then that we”—the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project—“understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.”

After Biden’s order to trigger the explosives planted on the pipelines, it took only a short flight with a Norwegian fighter and the dropping of an altered off-the-shelf sonar device at the right spot in the Baltic Sea to get it done. By then the CIA group had long disbanded. By then, too, the official told me: “We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war”—Putin was in the process of annexing the four Ukrainian oblasts he wanted—“but was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up” the shuttered Nord Stream 2. “The White House fear was that Putin would get Germany under his thumb and then he was going to get Poland.”

The White House said nothing as the world wondered who committed the sabotage. “So the president struck a blow against the economy of Germany and Western Europe,” the official told me. “He could have done it in June and told Putin: We told you what we would do.” The White House’s silence and denials were, he said, “a betrayal of what we were doing. If you are going to do it, do it when it would have made a difference.”

The leadership of the CIA team viewed Biden’s misleading guidance for its order to destroy the pipelines, the official told me, “as taking a strategic step toward World War III. What if Russia had responded by saying: You blew up our pipelines and I’m going to blow up your pipelines and your communication cables. Nord Stream was not a strategic issue for Putin—it was an economic issue. He wanted to sell gas. He’d already lost his pipelines” when the Nord Stream I and 2 were shut down before the Ukraine war began.

Within days of the bombing, officials in Denmark and Sweden announced they would conduct an investigation. They reported two months later that there had indeed been an explosion and said there would be further inquiries. None has emerged. The German government conducted an inquiry but announced that major parts of its findings would be classified. Last winter German authorities allocated $286 billion in subsidies to major corporations and homeowners who faced higher energy bills to run their business and warm their homes. The impact is still being felt today, with a colder winter expected in Europe.

President Biden waited four days before calling the pipeline bombing “a deliberate act of sabotage.” He said: “now the Russians are pumping out disinformation about it.” Sullivan, who chaired the meetings that led to the proposal to covertly destroy the pipelines, was asked at a later press conference whether the Biden administration “now believes that Russia was likely responsible for the act of sabotage?”

Sullivan’s answer, undoubtedly practiced, was: “Well, first, Russia has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something, which is make accusations that it was really someone else who did it. We’ve seen this repeatedly over time.

“But the president was also clear today that there is more work to do on the investigation before the United States government is prepared to make an attribution in this case.” He continued: “We will continue to work with our allies and partners to gather all of the facts, and then we will make a determination about where we go from there.”

I could find no instances when Sullivan was subsequently asked by someone in the American press about the results of his “determination.” Nor could I find any evidence that Sullivan, or the president, has been queried since then about the results of the “determination” about where to go.

There is also no evidence that President Biden has required the American intelligence community to conduct a major all-source inquiry into the pipeline bombing. Such requests are known as “Taskings” and are taken seriously inside the government.

All of this explains why a routine question I posed a month or so after the bombings to someone with many years in the American intelligence community led me to a truth that no one in America or Germany seems to want to pursue. My question was simple: “Who did it?”

The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas—and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.