16.02.2023

Lawless mafia capo

It was always obvious who was responsible for the Nord Stream 1 and 2 explosions. But why did the US do it? Daniel Lazare says it is about asserting control over energy

US imperialism is a modern Damocles with a sword dangling perilously over its head. The military situation in Ukraine is increasingly grim, as Russia gears up for its long-awaited spring offensive. Back in Washington, the Biden administration finds itself hemmed in at every turn by a Republican-controlled House and an equally rightwing Supreme Court determined to drop more political bombs like last June’s repeal of abortion rights. The US airforce is so rattled that it has begun taking pot-shots at a growing number of UFOs that may or may not be of Chinese origin.

Then there is Nord Stream - the greatest danger of all. The question of who blew up the Russian gas pipeline is not a whodunnit, because just about everybody knows by now who the real perpetrator is. Rather, it is a ‘who dares say it’, because no-one wants to be the first to speak the name out loud.

Why? Because, of course, it is the US. The idea that the United States would sabotage an energy facility partly owned by some of its closest allies, Germany among them, is so extraordinary, so aggressive, so contrary to international norms, that admitting the truth would reduce not just the pipeline to “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”, to quote US undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland, but Nato as well. Silence is therefore the order of the day. “You are radicalising yourself more and more as Moscow’s agent here in Germany,” a member of the Free Democrats warned the far-right Alternativ für Deutschland in the Bundestag last week after the AfD suggested that the US might be responsible.¹ Loyalty to the western alliance means keeping your mouth shut.

Hersh’s exposé

But that is now increasingly difficult, thanks to Seymour Hersh’s self-published February 8 exposé entitled simply: “How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”.² In it, America’s most famous investigative reporter describes a sequence of events beginning in December 2021, more than two months before Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security advisor, got the ball rolling by “conven[ing] a meeting of a newly formed task force - men and women from the joint chiefs of staff, the CIA and the state and treasury departments - and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion”. Since Nord Stream was a major Russian revenue source, participants batted about ideas on how to take it out: a submarine attack, aerial bombardment, and so on. Then “members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline”. The game was on.

Hersh quotes an anonymous source as saying that the planners turned to fellow Nato member Norway, because the Norwegians “hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers, who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration”. Norway suggested a spot a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island, where Nord Stream 1 and 2 ran a mile or so apart in waters only 80 metres deep. To disguise the operation, they decided to stage it during annual Nato exercises known as Baltic Operations 22, or ‘Baltops 22’. They asked Danish and Swedish officials to look the other way and then sent divers to attach C4 explosives to both pairs of double pipelines.

That was in June 2022. Two months later, the White House gave the go-ahead. According to Hersh:

On September 26 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

Radosław Sikorski - member of the European parliament, former Polish foreign minister and husband of influential US neocon Anne Applebaum - tweeted: “Thank you, USA.” The tweet went viral because it confirmed what everyone already suspected - that the explosion had ‘Made in America’ all over it.

Now Hersh’s article is going viral as well, because it provides additional evidence that initial suspicions were correct. After all, Hersh is not just any reporter. Instead, he is the top person in his field, the journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre in 1970, uncovered Henry Kissinger’s role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, took the lead in the Watergate investigation (along with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post), and then went on to expose US torture at Abu Ghraib. His words have weight. Although the White House and CIA have blasted his latest findings as “false and complete fiction” (to quote the former), the Chinese foreign ministry is calling on Washington to come clean. “If Hersh is telling the truth, what he revealed is clearly unacceptable and must be answered for,” spokesman Mao Ning said on February 10. If other countries follow suit, the ice in Washington may finally break.

If so, the meaning will be clear: rather than an ally, the United States is a mafia capo meting out punishment to anyone it likes - Russia, Germany, whomever. Nato’s famous article 5, in which “[t]he parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”, will be invoked, despite the US being the alliance’s prime mover and de facto chief. Nato will have to change its name to SAS - Society of American Supplicants - or something similar, while the European Union will have to concede that implementing US diktat is its sole raison d’être.

Unfortunately, that moment is not yet upon us due to a certain journalistic shortcoming. As one fact-checking website points out, Hersh depends on a single anonymous source, whom he describes in the article as someone with “direct knowledge of the operational process”. Since no-one knows who the source is, no-one has any idea whether he or she is telling the truth.³ We have to take Hersh’s word for it.

Yet that is not easy either, considering that he has made more than a few missteps in recent years. In 2015, he published a 10,000-word article in the London Review of Books charging that the US raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound four years earlier was staged with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Pakistani government, which was hoping for stepped-up military aid and a “freer hand in Afghanistan” in return.⁴ But the article flunked the most elementary smell test, since US-Pakistan relations in fact plunged, once Washington determined that Islamabad had been hiding the perpetrator of 9/11 all along. A 1997 tell-all biography of John F Kennedy alleging that he had had a close working relationship with mafia boss Sam Giancana went up in smoke when one of Hersh’s sources was found to be passing along phony documents and was convicted of forgery and fraud.⁵

Equally unhelpful is an embarrassing blooper in which Hersh refers to Nato general secretary Jens Stoltenberg as a “hardliner”, who has “cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War” - no easy feat, considering that Stoltenberg was born in 1959 and was therefore in his mid-teens when the war ended in 1975. A blogger who is well informed on military affairs points out that it is unlikely that a Norwegian P8 dropped a sonar buoy last September, since the P8s that Norway purchased from Boeing were not yet certified as operational (a US navy P8 was in the vicinity, but only after the explosion).⁶

All of which has enabled critics to pounce on Hersh as a “discredited” has-been, giving aid and comfort to the Kremlin.⁷ But even if he gets a few details wrong, is there any doubt that he is in the right ballpark? Immediately after the explosion, TV and print media were filled with the usual suspects blaming Russia, Russia, Russia. “I think this is clearly an act of sabotage of some sort and Russia is certainly the most likely suspect,” former CIA director John Brennan told CNN.⁸ “This has to be subs, likely Russian subs,” Timothy Garton Ash told CNBC.⁹ “Russia saying ‘it wasn’t us’ is like saying ‘I’m not the thief,’” added Robert Habeck, the German economics minister.

Who then?

Now they are saying the opposite. The Washington Post declared in December that “after months of investigation, numerous officials privately say that Russia may not be to blame after all for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines”.¹⁰ This was echoed by The New York Times a few days later: “… the theory that Russia carried out the blasts, repeated often by western officials, has only gotten more complicated.”¹¹ The new official line, according to the Post, is that “the explosions may never be definitively attributed” to anyone, which is certainly convenient for western officials wishing that the whole affair would go away.

But if Russia didn’t do it, who did? No-one had the motivation, the means or the technical know-how other than the US and its closest allies, and no-one else had been broadcasting its hostility to Nord Stream for years. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream will not move forward,” Victoria Nuland warned in January 2022. “If Russia invades … then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Biden added on February 7. “We will bring an end to it.” Nuland’s crack last month about “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea” provides further confirmation. Formerly, the administration was beside itself with outrage over the pipeline’s destruction, but now it is filled with glee. Does that mean that the White House is thankful that Russia blew it up? Is it pleased that someone else has stepped into the breach? Or is it patting itself on the back for a job well done?

The answer is the last. By supplying vast quantities of low-cost natural gas, the White House complained under both Trump and Biden that the Kremlin was trying to hook Germany on cheap Russian energy, so that the Kremlin could later subject it to political blackmail and manipulation. Yet, when Russia cut off supplies in early September 2022 in response to western sanctions, EU leaders complained that it was “weaponising” energy exports.¹² Russia was guilty, whether it turned the spigot on or off.

The key issue for the US has never been Russian gas per se, but control. The Carter Doctrine - declared in January 1980 in response to the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan - has morphed over the years. Initially, the purpose was to safeguard US energy supplies by imposing an American monopoly over Persian Gulf oil. But the rationale shifted once the fracking revolution took off around 2005, turning the United States into a net energy exporter. With the gulf no longer necessary in terms of US national security, Washington could conceivably have abandoned its string of expensive military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and walked away. Instead, it did the reverse, doubling down, on the grounds that “preserving access to Gulf oil will remain one of the pillars of US predominance - even if the United States never consumes a single drop of oil from the region,” as an influential website put it in 2019.¹³ With roughly half the world’s proven oil supplies, the Gulf is a glittering prize that the US is determined to hold onto, if only to prevent anyone else from getting its hands on it instead - China first and foremost.