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

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Prigozhin's Folly: The Russian ‘revolt’ that wasn’t strengthens Putin’s hand
by Seymour Hersh
June 29, 2023

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Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group, in a video he released last weekend.

The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the “revolt,” as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.

The focus slipped from Ukraine’s failing counter-offensive to Prigozhin’s threat to Putin’s control. As one headline in the Times put it, “Revolt Raises Searing Question: Could Putin Lose Power?” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius posed this assessment: “Putin looked into the abyss Saturday—and blinked.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the administration’s go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine—appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with his own version of reality: “Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over the weekend they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. . . . It shows real cracks.”

Blinken, unchallenged by his interviewer, Margaret Brennan, as he knew he would not be—why else would he appear on the show?—went on to suggest that the defection of the crazed Wagner leader would be a boon for Ukraine’s forces, whose slaughter by Russian troops was ongoing as he spoke. “To the extent that it presents a real distraction for Putin, and for Russian authorities, that they have to look at—sort of mind their rear as they’re trying to deal with the counter offensive in Ukraine, I think that creates even greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground.”

At this point was Blinken speaking for Joe Biden? Are we to understand that this is what the man in charge believes?

We now know that the chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army. There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule.

Pity the Washington columnists and national security correspondents who seem to rely heavily on official backgrounders with White House and State Department officials. Given the published results of such briefings, those officials seem unable to look at the reality of the past few weeks, or the total disaster that has befallen the Ukraine military’s counter-offensive.

So, below is a look at what is really going that was provided to me by a knowledgeable source in the American intelligence community:

“I thought I might clear some of the smoke. First and most importantly, Putin is now in a much stronger position. We realized as early as January of 2023 that a showdown between the generals, backed by Putin, and Prigo, backed by anti-Russian extremists, was inevitable. The age-old conflict between the ‘special’ war fighters and a large, slow, clumsy, unimaginative regular army. The army always wins because they own the peripheral assets that make victory, either offensive or defensive, possible. Most importantly, they control logistics. special forces see themselves as the premier offensive asset. When the overall strategy is offensive, big army tolerates their hubris and public chest thumping because SF are willing to take high risk and pay a high price. Successful offense requires a large expenditure of men and equipment. Successful defense, on the other hand, requires husbanding these assets.

“Wagner members were the spearhead of the original Russian Ukraine offensive. They were the ‘little green men’. When the offensive grew into an all-out attack by the regular army, Wagner continued to assist but reluctantly had to take a back seat in the period of instability and readjustment that followed. Prigo, no shy violet, took the initiative to grow his forces and stabilize his sector.

“The regular army welcomed the help. Prigo and Wagner, as is the wont of special forces, took the limelight and took the credit for stopping the hated Ukrainians. The press gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the big army and Putin slowly changed their strategy from offensive conquest of greater Ukraine to defense of what they already had. Prigo refused to accept the change and continued on the offensive against Bakhmut. Therein lies the rub. Rather than create a public crisis and court-martial the asshole [Prigozhin], Moscow simply withheld the resources and let Prigo use up his manpower and firepower reserves, dooming him to a stand-down. He is, after all, no matter how cunning financially, an ex-hot dog cart owner with no political or military accomplishments.

“What we never heard is three months ago Wagner was cycled out of the Bakhmut front and sent to an abandoned barracks north of Rostov-on-Don [in southern Russia] for demobilization. The heavy equipment was mostly redistributed, and the force was reduced to about 8,000, 2,000 of which left for Rostov escorted by local police.

“Putin fully backed the army who let Prigo make a fool of himself and now disappear into ignominy. All without raising a sweat militarily or causing Putin to face a political standoff with the fundamentalists, who were ardent Prigo admirers. Pretty shrewd.”

There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.

The current battlefield statistics that were shared with me suggest that the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy may be at risk in Ukraine. They also raise questions about the involvement of the NATO alliance, which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with training and weapons for the current lagging counter-offensive. I learned that in the first two weeks of the operation, the Ukraine military seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. I have been told that in the past ten days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way. They have recovered only two more square miles of Russian-seized territory. At that pace, one informed official said, waggishly, it would take Zelensky’s military 117 years to rid the country of Russian occupation.

The Washington press in recent days seems to be slowly coming to grips with the enormity of the disaster, but there is no public evidence that President Biden and his senior aides in the White House and State Department aides understand the situation.

Putin now has within his grasp total control, or close to it, of the four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Lubansk, Zaporizhzhia—that he publicly annexed on September 30, 2022, seven months after he began the war. The next step, assuming there is no miracle on the battlefield, will be up to Putin. He could simply stop where he is, and see if the military reality will be accepted by the White House and whether a ceasefire will be sought, with formal end-of-war talks initiated. There will be a presidential election next April in Ukraine, and the Russian leader may stay put and wait for that—if it takes place. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said there will be no elections while the country is under martial law.

Biden’s political problems, in terms of next year’s presidential election, are acute—and obvious. On June 20 the Washington Post published an article based on a Gallup poll under the headline “Biden Shouldn’t Be as Unpopular as Trump—but He Is.” The article accompanying the poll by Perry Bacon, Jr., said that Biden has “almost universal support within his own party, virtually none from the opposition party and terrible numbers among independents.” Biden, like previous Democratic presidents, Bacon wrote, struggles “to connect with younger and less engaged voters.” Bacon had nothing to say about Biden’s support for the Ukraine war because the poll apparently asked no questions about the administration’s foreign policy.

The looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call for those Democratic members of Congress who support the president but disagree with his willingness to throw many billions of good money after bad in Ukraine in the hope of a miracle that will not arrive. Democratic support for the war is another example of the party’s growing disengagement from the working class. It’s their children who have been fighting the wars of the recent past and may be fighting in any future war. These voters have turned away in increasing numbers as the Democrats move closer to the intellectual and moneyed classes.

If there is any doubt about the continuing seismic shift in current politics, I recommend a good dose of Thomas Frank, the acclaimed author of the 2004 best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that explained why the voters of that state turned away from the Democratic party and voted against their economic interests. Frank did it again in 2016 in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? In an afterword to the paperback edition he depicted how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party repeated—make that amplified—the mistakes made in Kansas en route to losing a sure-thing election to Donald Trump.

It may be prudent for Joe Biden to talk straight about the war, and its various problems for America—and to explain why the estimated more than $150 billion that his administration has put up thus far turned out to be a very bad investment.

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Fear and Loathing on Air Force One: Biden’s anxieties over the Ukraine War and the election in 2024 come into view
by Seymour Hersh
July 13, 2023

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shakes hands with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, next to, from left to right, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, US President Joe Biden, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the NATO Summit on July 12 in Vilnius, Lithuania. / Photo by Paul Ellis, Pool/Getty Images.

Let’s start with a silly fear but one that does signal the Democratic Party’s growing sense of panic about the 2024 Presidential election. It was expressed to me by someone with excellent party credentials: that Trump could be the Republican nominee and will select Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate. The strange duo will then sweep to a huge victory over a stumbling Joe Biden, and also take down many of the party’s House and Senate candidates.

As for real signs of acute Democratic anxiety: Joe Biden got what he needed before the NATO summit this week by somehow turning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inside out and getting him to rebuff Vladimir Putin by announcing that he would support NATO membership for Sweden. The public story for Biden’s face-saving coup was talk about agreeing to sell American F-16 fighter bombers to Turkey.

I have been told a different, secret story about Erdogan’s turnabout: Biden promised that a much-needed $11-13 billion line of credit would be extended to Turkey by the International Monetary Fund. “Biden had to have a victory and Turkey is in acute financial stress,” an official with direct knowledge of the transaction told me. Turkey lost 100,000 people in the earthquake last February, and has four million buildings to rebuild. “What could be better than Erdogan”—under Biden's tutelage, the official asked, “finally having seen the light and realizing he is better off with NATO and Western Europe?” Reporters were told, according to the New York Times, that Biden called Erdogan while flying to Europe on Sunday. Biden’s coup, the Times reported, would enable him to say that Putin got “exactly what he did not want: an expanded, more direct NATO alliance.” There was no mention of bribery.

A June analysis by Brad W. Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations, “Turkey’s Increasing Balance Sheet Risks,” said it all in the first two sentences—Erdogan won re-election and “now has to find a way to avoid what appears to be an imminent financial crisis.” The critical fact, Setser writes, is that Turkey “is on the edge of truly running out of usable foreign exchange reserves—and facing a choice between selling its gold, an avoidable default, or swallowing the bitter pill of a complete policy reversal and possibly an IMF program.”

Another key element of the complicated economic issues facing Turkey is that Turkey’s banks have lent so much money to the nation’s central bank that “they cannot honor their domestic dollar deposits, should Turks ever ask for the funds back.” The irony for Russia, and a reason for much anger in the Kremlin, Setser notes, is the rumor that Putin has been providing Russian gas to Erdogan on credit, and not demanding that the state gas importer pay up. Putin’s largesse has been flowing as Ergodan has been selling drones to Ukraine for use in its war against Russia. Turkey has also permitted Ukraine to ship its crops through the Black Sea.

All of this European political and economic double dealing was done openly and in plain sight. Duplicity comes much differently in the United States.

Careful readers of the Washington Post and the New York Times can sense that the current Ukraine counter-offensive is going badly because stories about its progress, or lack thereof, have mostly disappeared from their front pages in recent weeks.

Last week Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, called in a few journalists to insist that Putin’s squabble with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner militia, was an armed mutiny that showed weakness in the Russian’s leader command and control of his military. There’s simply no evidence for such assertions. If anything, I was later told by those with access to current intelligence, that Putin emerged stronger than ever after the Prigozhin implosion, which led to the absorption of many of his mercenaries into the Russian army.

Sullivan also took issue with the notion—he apparently did not say where it originated—that the Biden administration was paralyzed by the threat of a Russian nuclear attack and so would not fully support Ukraine. Such views were “nonsense,” he said, and cited Biden’s recent controversial decision to provide cluster bombs to the Ukraine military. He suggested that the anti-personnel weapons—each bomb can spread hundreds of bomblets—could give Ukraine an edge in the war and prompt Putin to deploy nuclear weapons. “It is a real threat,” Sullivan said, of a nuclear bomb. “And it’s one that does evolve with changing conditions on the ground.”

The only good news about such primitive and circular thinking, I have been told, is the impossibility at this point of any significant Ukraine success. “Biden’s principal issue in the war is that he’s screwed,” the informed official told me. “We didn’t give Ukraine cluster bombs earlier in the war, but we’re giving them cluster bombs now because that’s all we got left in the cupboard. Aren’t these the bombs that are banned all over the world because they kill kids? But the Ukrainians tell us they are not planning to drop them on civilians. And then the administration claims that the Russians have used them first in the war, which is just a lie.

“In any case,” the official said, “cluster bombs have zero chance of changing the course of the war.” He said the real worry will come later this summer, perhaps as early as August, when the Russians, having easily weathered the Ukraine assault, will counter-strike with a major offensive. “What happens then? The US has painted itself in a corner by calling for NATO to do something. “Will NATO respond by sending the brigades now training in Poland and Romania on an airborne assault?” We knew more about the German army in Normandy in World War II than we know about the Russian army in Ukraine.”

I have been told of other signs of internal stress inside the Biden administration. Undersecretary of State for Policy Victoria Nuland has been “blocked” —a word used by one Democratic Party insider—from being promoted to replace the much respected Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Nuland’s anti-Russian politics and rhetoric matches the tone and point of view of Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken. And a newcomer to the upper reaches of the American intelligence community—CIA director Bill Burns—trumpeted his love for Biden and his intense dislike of all things Russian, including Putin, in a speech on July 1 in England.

Burns, a long-time diplomat who served as ambassador to Russia under George W. Bush as well as deputy secretary of state under Obama, had won the respect of a hard core of CIA officers and agents for his discrete handling of the nine-month planning and execution of the covert operation, approved by Biden, to destroy the Nord Steam I and II pipelines running from Russia to Germany. He was the liaison between the intelligence team operating out of Norway and the Oval Office. When he asked how much he needed to know, he accepted the CIA’s answer of “very little” with aplomb.

Burns was also known for his warning, published in a memoir after his retirement as ambassador, that continued expansion of NATO to the east—NATO now is on the verge of totally covering Russia’s western border—would inevitably lead to conflict.

It was this nuance—the notion that Putin could be pushed only so far—that Burns recounted in the UK. “One thing I have learned,” he said, “is that it is always a mistake to underestimate Putin’s fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices, without which he believes it is impossible for Russia to be a major power or him to be a great Russian leader. … Putin’s war already has been a strategic failure for Russia—its military weaknesses laid bare; its economy badly damaged for years to come; its future as a junior partner and economic colony of China being shaped by Putin’s mistakes; its revanchist ambitions blunted by a NATO which has only grown bigger and stronger.”

Biden, who is not revered throughout the CIA, as many presidents have not been, was cited repeatedly during his speech. The highly respected intelligence official explained Burns’s glowing words by telling me, cryptically, that all was in flux throughout the Biden national security bureaucracy. “Yes. Yes,” he said in a message. “Big shuffle. Big power struggle. Biden oblivious. All the ants fighting for the crumbs of a dying administration. Advised all the professionals inside to shelter in place. Wait and see the color of the smoke from the Vatican Chancellery. Explain Burns’ Kool-Aid remarks in the UK.”

I was told that Burns’s speech was essentially a job application in a future government, or perhaps in the one at hand, for secretary of state. “He was showing his competence and his experience,” the official said, “He realized that he was going down the drain, professionally, while at the Agency. He was awful”—that is, inexperienced—“but he realized it was not going down well with the boys, and then he did right.” The key issue for Burns, I was told, as some in the CIA saw it, was ambition. “Once you are a secretary of state, the world is your oyster.”

The official remarked that “running the CIA is not that much.” He cited the example of Stansfield Turner, a retired Navy admiral who was appointed CIA director in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. Turner and Carter had been midshipmen together at the US Naval Academy. After his retirement Turner ended up giving speeches on ocean cruises.

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Opera Buffa in Ukraine: As the war drags on, delusions mount, with no end, or victory, in sight
by Seymour Hersh
July 27, 2023

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Russian President Vladimir Putin drives a construction truck across the road-and-rail bridge over the Kerch Strait linking mainland Russia to Crimea during its opening ceremony on May 15, 2018. On July 17 the bridge was attacked for the second time by the Ukrainian military, using a pair of submersible drones. / ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images.

Let’s take a look at recent events in the Ukraine war from the point of view of those in the American intelligence community who don’t feel they have the ear of President Joe Biden but should.

On July 17 Ukraine attacked for a second time one of Russian President Vladimir’s proudest achievements: the 11.25-mile Kerch Bridge linking Crimea to Russia. The 3.7 billion dollar bridge, with separate spans for auto and train traffic, was opened for auto traffic in May of 2018 and for trucks five months later, with Putin himself driving the first one to make the crossing.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made it clear before the Russian invasion early last year that he considered the bridge a legitimate military target. Ukraine initially attacked the bridge last October, using a submersible drone, but it was fully repaired within seven months. The most recent attack, by a pair of submersible drones, killed a couple who were driving across when the explosion occurred and injured their child. Damage to one of the auto spans was severe.

The Biden administration’s role in both attacks was vital. “Of course it was our technology,” one American official told me. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged—like a torpedo.” I asked if there was any thought before the bridge attack about the possibility of retaliation. “What will Putin do? We don’t think that far,” the official said. “Our national strategy is that Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision.”

Putin responded to the second attack on the bridge by ending an agreement that enabled Ukrainian wheat and other vital food crops, stymied by the ongoing war, to be shipped from blocked ports on the Black Sea. (Before the war Ukraine exported more grain than the entire European Union and nearly half of the world’s sunflower seeds.) And Russia began steadily intensifying missile and rocket attacks in Odessa, whose initial target list has expanded from port areas to inner city sites.

The official said there was a lot more than grain and sunflower seeds flowing into Europe from Odessa and other Black Sea ports: “Odessa’s exports included illegal stuff like drugs and the oil that Ukraine was getting from Russia.”

At this point, with the Ukraine counteroffensive against Russia thwarted, the official said, “Zelensky has no plan, except to hang on. It’s as if he’s an orphan—a poor waif in his underwear—and we have no real idea of what Zelensky and his crowd are thinking. Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.”

There are some in the American intelligence community, the official said, who worry about Putin’s response to the recent Ukrainian drone attacks in central Moscow. “Will Kiev be next?”

The official depicted the American position on the war in Ukraine as confounding and unrealistic. “The president and [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken keep on saying, ‘We are going to do what it takes for as long as it takes’ to win the war.” He added that the administration has been negotiating for months for the purchase of what may amount to as much as a ten-year supply of 155-mm artillery shells from the Pakistani army that could, ironically, extend the life of a losing war effort.

“More people are going to die in this war, and what for?” the official asked. “The American and Ukrainian military are no longer making any predictions” about future success in the current counteroffensive. “The Ukrainian army has not gotten past the first of three Russian defense lines. Every mine the Ukrainians dig up is replenished at night by the Russians.

“The reality,” the official said, “is that the balance of power in the war is settled. Putin has what he wants”: access to Crimea and the four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia—that were annexed by Russia last September 30. “Ukraine does not have them and cannot get them back.” Meanwhile, Putin’s end game in Odessa, if there is one, is not known.

Despite all the unknowns, the official said, President Biden “should have told Zelensky that he was on his own when it came to the counteroffensive. The balance of power”—against the out-gunned, out-trained, and out-manned Ukrainian forces—“was a settled issue.”

Last week at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, Secretary Blinken, who publicly dismissed any talk of ceasefire negotiations before the current counteroffensive, accused Russia, according to a New York Times report, of “weaponizing food supplies.” He similarly accused Russia of “weaponizing” its vast supply of natural gas before President Biden authorized the destruction last fall of Russia’s two Nord Stream gas pipelines to Germany.

On Sunday during a televised interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Blinken turned recent history on its head, declaring that in terms of what Putin “sought to achieve” in the war with Ukraine, he had “already lost.” “The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago. Now Ukraine is in a battle to get back more of the land that Russia seized from it. . . . It is tough. The Russians have put in place strong defenses. . . . The Ukrainians are fighting for their land, for their future, for their country, for their freedom. I think that is the decisive element and that’s going to play out.” In fact, any future settlement with Russia, if one is negotiated, will almost certainly include new leadership in Kiev and also acknowledge Russian control over the four annexed oblasts. Zelensky, if he survives, is known to own a house in Forte di Marmi, a beach town in Tuscany, which he purchased for $4.2 million in 2015, four years before he became president.

The noisy public split in late June between Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the paramilitary Wagner Group, and Putin captured the hearts and minds of many American newspaper editors and reporters who viewed it as a serious challenge to Putin’s leadership. I have not been able to learn whether there was a formal CIA assessment of the event, but there are serious intelligence experts on Russia who concluded that it was much more than the undoing of a difficult leader who seemed to be at odds with Putin.

“Putin is a Russian fundamentalist but he was aware that the Wagner Group was full of potential dissidents who did not consider him to be enough of a fundamentalist for them,” the official said. “They wanted him to take Ukraine and Western Europe and drive all the way to the English Channel. Putin was not into it.

“How would President Biden react if China had established a base in Tijuana, Mexico, and met there with all the left-leaning governments of South America? That’s how Putin would be expected to react to the meeting earlier this month of all the NATO chiefs in Vilnius, close to the Russian border.”

The official added: “Don’t think it”—Putin’s exposure and entrapment of the failed Wagner Group counter-terrorists—“wasn’t planned. Not a chance.”

Russian history teems with such entrapments. Just ask Leon Trotsky.

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Harold Pinter Had It Right: Lessons in Western self-sabotage from the Ukraine War
by Seymour Hersh
August 11, 2023

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Harold Pinter in 1970. / Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter was an early critic of the Bush administration’s decision, endorsed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to declare a worldwide war on Islamist terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. In the fall of 2002, Pinter was invited to make his case against the war before the House of Commons. He began his talk with a bit of embellished British history about an earlier wave of terror in Ireland:

“There’s an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his Lieutenants: ‘Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men.’ One of his aides said: ‘Excuse me General. Isn’t it the other way around?’ A voice from the crowd called out: ‘Mr. Cromwell knows what he’s doing!’”

The voice in the crowd in Pinter’s telling was Blair’s, but today it could be German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has kept his silence about when and what he knew about President Biden’s decision to mangle Germany’s economy by destroying the Nord Stream pipelines last September.

There were two sets of pipelines, both partially financed by Russian oligarchs who were beholden to President Vladimir Putin. Nord Stream 1 went into operation in 2011, and within ten years Russia was providing Germany more than half of its overall energy needs, with most of the inexpensive gas targeted for industrial use. Nord Stream 2 was completed by the summer of 2021, but never brought into use. By February 2022, at the start of the war, Scholz halted the pipeline’s certification process. Nord Stream 2 was loaded with gas meant for delivery to Germany, but its huge payload was blocked on arrival by Scholz, obviously at the request of the Biden administration.

Last September 26, the two pipelines were destroyed by underwater bombs. It was not known at the time who was responsible for the sabotage, amid the usual Western accusations against Russia and Russian denials. In February, I published a detailed account of the White House’s role in the attack, including an assertion that a major goal of Biden’s was to prevent Scholz from reversing his decision to stop the flow of Russian gas to Germany. My account was denied by the White House and as of today no government has accepted responsibility.

Germany muddled through last year’s preternaturally warm winter, as the government provided generous energy subsidies for homes and businesses. But since then, the lack of Russian gas has been the major factor in rising energy costs that have led to a slowdown in the German economy, the fourth largest in the world. The economic crunch resulted in a rise of political opposition to the political coalition Scholz leads. Another divisive issue is the steady rise in immigration applications from the Middle East and Africa and the more than one million Ukrainians who have fled to Germany since the war in Ukraine began.

Polling in Germany has consistently shown enormous discontent with the economic crisis it faces. One survey analyzed by Bloomberg last month found that only 39 percent of German voters believe the country will be a leading industrial nation in the next decade. The dispatch specifically cited internal political infighting over the nation’s home and business heating subsidy policies but did not mention a major cause of the crisis—Biden’s decision to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines.

A review of recent reporting on the German economic crisis in German, American, and international business publications—much of it excellent—yielded not a single citation of the pipeline’s destruction as a major reason for national pessimism. I couldn’t help wondering what Pinter would have said about the self-censorship.

In July Politico reported that Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and economic minister, a member of the Green Party, warned that the country was certain to face a shrinking economy and a transition to green energy that “will put a burden” on the population. In May, the German government announced that the country had entered a recession. Some of the nation’s companies, according to Politico, “have begun to ditch the Fatherland, triggering fears of deindustrialization.”

Habeck said the economic downturn could be explained by high energy prices, which Germany felt more intensely than other countries “because it relied on cheap Russian gas.” The article did not state why there is no longer Russian gas flowing to Germany.

The refusal of the White House or any of the Scandinavian nations—Norway, Sweden, and Denmark—who provided support for the covert American sabotage of the pipelines to accept responsibility for their actions turned out be an important asset for Scholz, who met with Biden at the White House in February of 2022 when Biden directly threatened to destroy Nord Stream 2. Asked how he would respond if Russia invaded, Biden said, “If Russia invades . . . there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Scholz said nothing in public and returned to the White House last winter for a private two-day visit—his plane carried no members of the German media with him—that included a long one-on-one session with Biden. There was no state dinner nor a press conference, other than a brief exchange of platitudes with the president in front of the White House press corps, who were not permitted to ask questions.

It is impossible not to ask once again whether Biden had briefed the chancellor about the pending operation last February and also warned him in advance of the pipeline destruction last September. Scholz’s continued silence about an act of violence against his state can only be described as mystifying, especially as the energy crisis intensified in recent months to the point where the German people were suffering. The end of the pipelines also removed a potential disastrous political dilemma for the chancellor: if the pipelines were still intact but shut down at his command, pressure would have been high for him to open the valves and let the gas flow from those who believed keeping the German people warm and prosperous was more important than supporting the White House, NATO, and Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in a war that need not have been fought.

It just may be that the White House, by keeping him in the loop, saved him from a career-ending conundrum: to support NATO and America in war or protect his people and German industry.

Last October, Lisa Hänel, reporting for Deutche Welle, a state-owned television network, pointed to one immediate social cost of the lack of Russian gas for the German middle class: regional German welfare workers told her that “more people are worried that they can no longer cope with rising prices and energy costs.” Discussing the impact of the lack of cheap Russian gas on those in the lower and middle income scales, which includes 18 million people in Germany who are struggling to stay warm and well fed, she wrote that they “could be hit hard by inflation and the energy crisis.”

Adam Button, a Canadian economic analyst who writes for ForexLive.com, published an essay last month under the title “The pillars of Germany’s economy are crumbling. Three reasons for worry.” His three reasons: industrial production is declining; deficits are increasing; and energy costs are rising.

Auto production and exports “are at the heart of the German economy,” Button writes. “Their machines,” he writes, “have powered Europe and been a worthy competitor to the US and Japan. But there is a new rival: China. The burgeoning automotive manufacturing sector in China is coming for everyone but Germany’s export-sensitive model may be most at risk from China’s EVs. At best, it’s a formidable wave of competition that hurts margins and weakens Germany. At worst, it hollows Germany’s key high-wage industry.”

The supply of cheap energy, which Nord Stream I produced, comes into play in Button’s analysis:

Germany’s economic model is exporting manufactured goods, with China as a target market. Competition from China is already a major obstacle but it's compounded by rising energy costs. Germany survived the winter of 2023 better than I expected but that was with heavy subsidies and good weather. That’s not a formula for the long term and aside from pie-in-the-sky hydrogen talk, I don’t see a way for Germany to get away from expensive imported LNG [liquefied natural gas].

Last week German economy minister Robert Habeck offered up a harsh truth. He said Germany faces five difficult years of deindustrialization from high energy prices. He called for more subsidies for energy as a bridge to around 2030 when he estimates that green energy will take over.

The problem for that is budgetary. Eurozone countries are bound to deficits of less than 3%. Germany is currently running at 4.25%, up from 2.6% a year ago. Finance ministry estimates see the deficit falling to 0.75% in 2026 but that assumes that all energy subsidies are ended. Therein lies the rub: Either they cut the subsidies and lose industry or subsidize and break deficit rules.

For years, Germany was the policeman of the deficit system and periphery countries may wish to give it back some of its own medicine and the German public is also famously austere. The problem is that even if high subsidies stay in place, German industry is under heavy pressure. If anything, the subsidies need to be stepped up. . . .

There is a window for large subsidies but the government must decide if that fiscal ammunition should be spent on subsidizing industry, the green transition or some combination of both. Ideally, the taps would be fully opened but I fear that old instincts around spending will win out, dooming Germany’s economy.

The loss of inexpensive Russian gas has also affected the German multinational chemical producer BASF, which employs more than 50,000 people in its home country. The company has announced a series of cutbacks since the pipelines were demolished. Thousands of workers have been laid off, and the firm shut down one of its major facilities. An industry news account of its cutbacks explain that the war in Ukraine "has sharply reduced natural gas supplies in Europe and boosted BASF's energy bill on the continent by $2.9 billion in 2022."

Button’s article, like of all those reviewed for this report, did not mention the main cause of the reduced supply of natural gas. Nor did it say that it was the destruction of the pipelines that forced BASF to make a change in its plans for a $11 billion investment in a state-of-the-art complex that it hailed as the gold standard for sustainable production. The project will be built in China.

“We are increasingly worried about our home market,” chief executive Martin Brudermüller explained to shareholders last April. “Profitability is no longer anywhere near where it should be.” He added that the firm lost close to $143 million in Germany last year, after many decades of constant profit.

Pinter, who died in 2008, would have relished the irony that the Biden administration, in its attempt to protect its political and economic investment in the Ukrainian war effort against Russia, may have given China, another nemesis of the White House, a helping hand.

The author wishes to thank Mohamed Elmaazi of London for his superb research.

[admin]

Summer of the Hawks: Wishful thinking is still the rule among Biden's foreign policy team, as the slaughter in Ukraine continues
by Seymour Hersh
August 17, 2023

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National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the Oval Office at the White House on June 22. / Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

It’s been weeks since we looked into the adventures of the Biden administration’s foreign policy cluster, led by Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland. How has the trio of war hawks spent the summer?

Sullivan, the national security adviser, recently brought an American delegation to the second international peace summit earlier this month at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. The summit was led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, who in June announced a merger between his state-backed golf tour and the PGA. Four years earlier MBS was accused of ordering the assassination and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, for perceived disloyalty to the state.

As unlikely as it sounds, there was such a peace summit and its stars did include MBS, Sullivan, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. What was missing was a representative of Russia, which was not invited to the summit. It included just a handful of heads of state from the fewer than fifty nations that sent delegates. The conference lasted two days, and attracted what could only be described as little international attention.

Reuters reported that Zelensky’s goal was to get international support for “the principles” that that he will consider as a basis for the settlement of the war, including “the withdrawal of all Russian troops and the return of all Ukrainian territory.” Russia’s formal response to the non-event came not from President Vladimir Putin but from Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Ryabkov. He called the summit “a reflection of the West’s attempt to continue futile, doomed efforts” to mobilize the Global South behind Zelensky.

India and China both sent delegations to the session, perhaps drawn to Saudi Arabia for its immense oil reserves. One Indian academic observer dismissed the event as achieving little more than “good advertising for MBS’s convening power within the Global South; the kingdom’s positioning in the same; and perhaps more narrowly, aiding American efforts to build consensus by making sure China attends the meeting with . . . Jake Sullivan in the same room.”

Meanwhile, far away on the battlefield in Ukraine, Russia continued to thwart Zelensky’s ongoing counteroffensive. I asked an American intelligence official why it was Sullivan who emerged from the Biden administration’s foreign policy circle to preside over the inconsequential conference in Saudi Arabia.

“Jeddah was Sullivan’s baby,” the official said. “He planned it to be Biden’s equivalent of [President Woodrow] Wilson’s Versailles. The grand alliance of the free world meeting in a victory celebration after the humiliating defeat of the hated foe to determine the shape of nations for the next generation. Fame and Glory. Promotion and re-election. The jewel in the crown was to be Zelensky’s achievement of Putin’s unconditional surrender after the lightning spring offensive. They were even planning a Nuremberg type trial at the world court, with Jake as our representative. Just one more fuck-up, but who is counting? Forty nations showed up, all but six looking for free food after the Odessa shutdown”—a reference to Putin’s curtailing of Ukrainian wheat shipments in response to Zelensky’s renewed attacks on the bridge linking Crimea to the Russian mainland.


Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, pictured on a visit to Colombo, Sri Lanka, in February, a few months before her recent promotion. / NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Enough about Sullivan. Let us now turn to Victoria Nuland, an architect of the 2014 overthrow of the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, one of the American moves that led us to where we are, though it was Putin who initiated the horrid current war. The ultra-hawkish Nuland was promoted early this summer by Biden, over the heated objections of many in the State Department, to be the acting deputy secretary of state. She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate.

It was Nuland who was sent last week to see what could be salvaged after a coup led to the overthrow of a pro-Western government in Niger, one of a group of former French colonies in West Africa that have remained in the French sphere of influence. President Mohamed Bazoum, who was democratically elected, was tossed out of office by a junta led by the head of his presidential guard, General Abdourahmane Tchiani. The general suspended the constitution and jailed potential political opponents. Five other military officers were named to his cabinet. All of this generated enormous public support on the streets in Niamey, Niger’s capital—enough support to discourage outside Western intervention.

There were grim reports in the Western press that initially viewed the upheaval in East-West terms: some of the supporters of the coup were carrying Russian flags as they marched in the streets. The New York Times saw the coup as a blow to the main US ally in the region, Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who controls vast oil and gas reserves. Tinubu threatened the new government in Niger with military action unless they returned power to Bazoum. He set a deadline that passed without any outside intervention. The revolution in Niger was not seen by those living in the region in east-west terms but as a long needed rejection of long-standing French economic and political control. It is a scenario that may be repeated again and again throughout the French-dominated Sahel nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are distinctions that do not bode well for the new government in Niger. The nation is blessed, or perhaps cursed, by having a significant amount of the remaining natural uranium deposits in the world. As the world warms up, a return to nuclear generated power is seen as inevitable, with obvious implications for the value of the stuff underground in Niger. The raw uranium ore, when separated, filtered and processed is known worldwide as yellowcake.

The corruption so often “talked about in Niger is not about petty bribes by government officials, but about an entire structure—developed during French colonial rule—that prevents Niger from establishing sovereignty over its raw materials and over its development,” according to a recent analysis published by Baltimore’s Real News Network. Three out of four laptops in France are powered by nuclear energy, much of which is derived from uranium mines in Niger effectively controlled by its former colonial overlord.

Niger is also the home of three American drone bases targeting Islamic radicals throughout the region. There are also undeclared Special Forces outposts in the region, whose soldiers receive double pay while on their risky combat assignments. The American official told me that “the 1,500 US troops now in Niger are exactly the number of American troops who were in South Vietnam at the time John F. Kennedy took over the presidency in 1961.”

Most important, and little noted in Western reporting in recent weeks, Niger is directly in the path of the new Trans-Saharan pipeline being constructed to deliver the Nigerian gas to Western Europe. The pipeline’s importance to Europe’s economy was heightened last September by the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

Into this scene came Victoria Nuland, who must have drawn the short straw inside the Biden Administration. She was sent to negotiate with the new regime and to arrange a meeting with the ousted President Bazoum, whose life remains under constant threat from the governing junta. The New York Times reported that she got nowhere after talks she described as “extremely frank and at times quite difficult.” The intelligence official put her remarks to the Times in American military lingo: “Victoria set out to save the Niger uranium owners from the barbaric Russians and got a huge single-finger salute.”

Quieter in recent weeks than Sullivan and Nuland has been Secretary of State Tony Blinken. Where was he? I asked that question of the official, who said that Blinken “has figured out that the United States”—that is, our ally Ukraine—“will not win the war” against Russia. “The word was getting to him through the Agency [CIA] that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work. It was a show by Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bullshit.

“Blinken wanted to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine as Kissinger did in Paris to end the Vietnam war.” Instead, the official said, “it was going to be a big lose and Blinken found himself way over his skis. But he does not want to go down as the court jester.”

It was at this moment of doubt, the official said, that Bill Burns, the CIA director, “made his move to join the sinking ship.” He was referring to Burns’s speech earlier this summer at the annual Ditchley conference near London. He appeared to put aside his earlier doubts about expanding NATO to the east and affirmed his support at least five times for Biden’s program.

“Burns does not lack self-confidence and ambition,” the intelligence official said, especially when Blinken, the ardent war hawk, was suddenly having doubts. Burns served in a prior administration as deputy secretary of state and running the CIA was hardly a just reward.

Burns would not replace a disillusioned Blinken, but only get a token promotion: an appointment to Biden’s cabinet. The cabinet meets no more than once a month and, as recorded by C-SPAN, the meetings tend to be tightly scripted affairs and to begin with the president reading from a prepared text.

Tony Blinken, who publicly vowed just a few months ago that there would be no immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, is still in office and, if asked, would certainly dispute any notion of discontent with Zelensky or the administration’s murderous and failing war policy in Ukraine.

So the White House’s wishful approach to the war, when it comes to realistic talk to the American people, will continue apace. But the end is nearing, even if the assessments supplied by Biden to the public are out of a comic strip.

[admin]

Blinken's Battle Hymn: Biden’s favorite hawk calls for no end to the bloodshed in Ukraine
by Seymour Hersh
June 7, 2023

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US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken speaking at Helsinki City Hall in Finland, on June 2. (Photo by EMMI KORHONEN/Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty Images)

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in a June 2 speech in Helsinki welcomed Finland as NATO’s newest member state. A career hawk when it comes to Russia, he outdid himself in the fierceness of his commitment to the Ukraine war. Once again he was dismissive of any talk of a ceasefire—something desperately needed by an increasingly besieged Ukrainian army and citizenry.

“Now, over the coming weeks and months,” Blinken explained, “some countries will call for a ceasefire. And on the surface, that sounds sensible—attractive, even. After all, who doesn’t want warring parties to lay down their arms? Who doesn’t want the killing to stop? But a ceasefire that simply freezes current lines in place and enables Putin to consolidate control over the territory he’s seized, and then rest, re-arm, and re-attack—that is not a just and lasting peace. It’s a Potemkin peace. It would legitimize Russia’s land grab. It would reward the aggressor and punish the victim.”

Does America’s secretary of State not know—or want to know—the historical importance and success of international peace-keeping forces? Is he not aware of the work done by the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, controversial as he may have been? In 1995 he negotiated an end to the murderous ethnic violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Their hatred for each other was as intense as the feelings now simmering among the citizenry and military in Ukraine for their Russian adversaries.

Blinken concluded his speech: “when a free people like the Ukrainians have at their backs the support of free nations around the world—nations who recognize their fates and freedom—their rights and security are inextricably bound together, the force they possess is not merely immense. It is unstoppable.”

His real message might be put more bluntly: I hate the Russians and let the blood flow.

Blinken once again told the tale of how in February, 2022, he warned the United Nations Security Council—long an American political instrument, if one hampered by the veto power of Russia and China—that a Russian invasion was imminent and that when it took place America would move with its NATO allies to help Ukraine defend its territory.

More than fifteen months later, Blinken told the Finnish crowd that there’s a bright side to the continuing carnage: “There is no question: Russia is significantly worse off today than it was before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine—militarily, economically, geopolitically.” The European Union is more united than ever, he asserted, and has supplied more than $75 billion in military, economic, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. It has also absorbed more than 8 million Ukrainian refugees. (I have written of the growing costs and anxieties of the regional refugee crisis due to the war. Many of Ukraine’s neighbors, while hostile to Russia and to Putin, have been secretly urging the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to seek a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter.)

Russia’s economic growth has diminished due to the cost of the war, but Russia is far from isolated. The Economist’s Intelligence Unit reported in March, one year after Russia attacked Ukraine, that “an increasing number of countries are siding with Russia. . . . Many countries who saw themselves as neutral or non-aligned have since changed their stance since the start of the invasion.” The report said that “there has been a large shift in stance among countries that lean toward Russia, whose number has increased from 29 to 35. China remains the most significant country in this category, but other developing countries”—the report cited South Africa, Mali, and Burkina Faso—“also have moved into this grouping, which accounts for 33% of the world’s population. These trends highlight Russia’s growing influence in Africa.”

The report also cited a decline in nations who are actively condemning the Russian war in Ukraine, “as some emerging economies have shifted to a neutral position.” The bloc of nations now strongly supporting Ukraine only represents about 36% of the world’s population.

One would imagine that an American secretary of State, with his international influence, would have an obligation not to diminish American credibility by misrepresenting the state of the world. Another explanation is that the world that backs American power is the world only he sees.

Blinken said, for example, that Europe “made a swift and decisive turn away from Russian energy,” when Berlin “immediately canceled Nord Stream 2”—a newly completed pipeline to Germany that originated in Russia. If permitted to run, it could have doubled the capacity to flow cheap Russian gas directly to German homes and businesses. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor under pressure from the West, never tapped the flow of gas from the new pipelines. (The American intelligence operatives assigned to the Biden-authorized mission to blow up the pipeline, about whom I have reported, did not know that the 767-mile pipelines they were ordered to destroy contained Russian natural gas.)

It’s possible that the secret American mission had poor intelligence, but it’s also possible that Scholz had ordered the pipeline to be filled with gas, which would have given him more options in case the war did not go well. It would also have made the American covert mission potentially more dangerous. President Biden took away that choice—if that is what Scholz was seeking—by ordering the pipeline destroyed last September 26. Whether Scholz had any say about the pipeline’s demise is unclear. But Biden's reckless move left Scholz at a dead end. He could no longer back away from support of the Ukraine war and still have the gas needed to keep his factories humming and his people warm. The gas would be cut off whether Germany liked it or not.

Scholz and Germany survived the lack of Russian gas last winter because of adequate stockpiles, a warmer winter than usual, and billions in government subsidies for German households and corporations. In May Politico published a dreary forecast, headlined: “Germany’s slipped into recession and everybody should be worried.” The dispatch by Johanna Treeck said the most recent data showed that Germany, the Eurozone’s largest economy, battered by its high energy prices, among other costs, has been contracting. Experts are convinced, Treeck wrote: “This isn’t a blip.”

I asked Sarah Miller, an energy expert who has edited America’s most influential privately distributed energy trade journals, for her opinion about the state of the German and European economies. “My surprise,” she told me, “is that the German recession isn’t worse than it is and it didn’t show up sooner in the data. And yes, loss of Russian gas and resulting high energy prices are the major factors in the German recession. Don’t think there is much dispute about that. The German/European decision last fall [after the Nord Stream explosion] to pay whatever it took to buy higher priced LNG [liquefied natural gas] basically did in gas as a worldwide growth industry.”

Samuel Charap, a Russia scholar, just published an essay in Foreign Affairs about Washington’s strategy in Ukraine. Charap served in the Obama administration and is now at the RAND Corporation. He is no fan of Russia or what he termed America’s “nebulous” notions about an endgame to the war, or lack thereof. He has a lot of ideas about intermediate steps that could lead to serious peace talks or, as he puts it, “facilitating an endgame.” These include an armistice agreement, demilitarized zones, joint commissions for dispute resolution, and third-party guarantees—feel-good moves aimed at allowing bitter enemies to achieve peace without resolving their fundamental differences.

It’s not much but it could be a start. Too bad that the name Antony Blinken never appears in Charap’s article.

[admin]

Why Putin Killed Prigozhin: Russia ducks direct confrontation with NATO as it tightens its hold on eastern Ukraine
by Seymour Hersh
September 7, 2023

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A view of the site after a private jet carrying Wagner paramilitary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin crashed near the village of Kuzhenkino on August 23. / Photo by Investigative Committee of Russia/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

Over the past two late summer weeks we’ve looked back at past American military disasters, so time now to bring you up to date on the continuing madness in Ukraine.

Let’s start with the fallout from the death last month of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group. The mercenary made a fortune renting out his forces as guns for hire, largely in Central Africa, and the group took enormous losses in brutal and successful house-to-house combat earlier this year in the city of Bakhmut against an equally courageous Ukraine army. Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in late June that the Kremlin had paid Prigozhin’s army, many recruited from the country’s prisons, nearly $1 billion dollars between May of 2022 and May of 2023. I have reported in previous columns that the rebellion Prigozhin launched in June was far from the threat to Putin's standing that the Western media consistently reported it to be. It was instead a historically Russian way of sidelining an often troublesome mercenary leader.

Prigozhin and his reduced Wagner force were left in limbo after the aborted revolt, and many Wagner members were absorbed into the Russian military. Putin arranged for Prigozhin and what was left of his mercenary force to be driven into exile in Belarus.

But Prigozhin did not stop there. By early August there were reports of border tensions as the remnant of the Wagner Group made a series of intrusions into the airspace of Poland, and troublesome threats at the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. For Putin, triggering complaints from NATO countries was an unforgivable breach. “That was it,” a knowledgeable US intelligence official told me.

Viktor Orbán, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary who is close to Putin, was one of the few Western leaders to publicly dismiss the importance of Prigozhin’s brief rebellion. In an interview with the Bild, the conservative Germany daily, Orbán said, “When [the rebellion] is managed in 24 hours, it’s a signal of being strong. . . . Putin is president of Russia so if somebody speculates that he could fail or be replaced they don’t understand the Russian people and the Russian power structure”

“Prigozhin was provoking NATO and he had to go,” the US intelligence official said. “The last thing Putin wanted to do was to give NATO further cause to shelve its growing doubts about the endless financing of [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelensky.”

So, the official said, “Putin did it.” Prigozhin had become too dangerous.

The Wagner Group plane carrying Prigozhin was blown apart shortly after takeoff from Moscow on August 23. Along with Prigozhin, six subordinates and three crew members were allegedly killed. The plane had been abruptly pulled off its flight line and serviced the day before. It was then, the intelligence official said, that bombs with delayed fuses bombs were placed in the wheelbase. The bombs were set to explode after the wheels were retracted.

The official also took sharp exception to recent waves of American and European reporting that the Ukrainian counteroffensive that was launched in early June, has begun to make significant progress in penetrating Russia’s three layers of defenses in the past few weeks. “Where are the reporters getting this stuff?” he asked. “There are stories talking about drunk Russian commanders while the Ukrainians are penetrating the three lines of Russian defense and will be able to work back to Mariupol.” The port city of Mariupol, on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov, was besieged by Russian forces in the spring of 2022 and fell after three months of bitter fighting. Once a city of 450,000, it is being rebuilt as a model Russian city and was visited by Putin and Russian TV crews last March. It is in Donetsk Oblast, one of four provinces in Ukraine that Russia annexed last September. He has since tightened Russian political and military control of the region.

“The goal of Russia’s first line of defense was not to stop the Ukrainian offense,” the official told me, “but to slow it down so if there was a Ukrainian advance, Russian commanders could bring in reserves to fortify the line. There is no evidence that Ukrainian forces have gotten past the first line. The American press is doing anything but honest reporting on the failure thus far of the offense.

“What happened to the use of cluster bombs by Ukraine? Weren’t they supposed to open the door? And Zelensky is now claiming Ukraine had hypersonic bombs. He’s been bullshitting us like this as he always does. Where are the engineers and scientists manufacturing them? In a bunker somewhere? Or in Kiev? He’s pretending—stalling as long as he can?

“Here is the key issue,” the official told me. “This kind of reporting from the military intelligence community is going to the White House. There are other views,” he said, obviously referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, that do not reach the Oval Office. “What is going to happen? Will we be supporting Ukraine as long as it takes? It’s not like we are fighting the Führer in Germany or the Emperor of Japan. The other day former vice president [Mike] Pence said that if we don’t defend Zelensky in Ukraine, Russia will come after Poland next. Is that the White House’s policy?”

If so, the official said, it will not be a winning one. “Zelensky will never get his land back.” The Ukrainian leader recently fired Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov amid repeated accusations of corruption. He replaced him with Rustem Umyerov, an opposition party member who, as a Crimean Tatar, will be Ukraine’s first Muslim to serve as a senior government minister.

In a front page story this week, the Washington Post framed the move as a significant step in combating corruption. For the past year, Umyerov served as head of Ukraine’s privatization agency and “gained praise for instituting massive audits and weeding out alleged corruption and misappropriation of funds.”

The intelligence official had a much different view of the new defense minister. “The new guy,” he told me, “is even more corrupt. He ran the sale of government property and made a fortune. Has a huge villa in Majorca.” Umyerov was not on the list of thirty-five corrupt Ukrainian officials that CIA Director William Burns presented to Zelensky during a secret meeting in January. “He was not on Burns’s list,” the official said. “The list was not a telephone book of crooks; just the ones receiving US military and economic financing.” (I wrote about Burns’s meeting with Zelensky in an April column.)

There is no talk today in Washington of the need for a ceasefire and peace talks. As President Biden seeks $40 billion in further aid for Ukraine from an increasingly dubious Congress, what we hear from the Pentagon and the White House is that we are in this war for as long as it takes.

Meanwhile, Putin, the official said, has not been mobilizing his forces based on “our political objectives. He is running a ‘Great Patriotic War’ and does not care if public opinion polls in America see him as another Adolf Hitler.”

[admin]

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.


Page 1


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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.