NORD STREAM AND THE FAILURES OF THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATIONA president asleep at the wheel brought disasters to the world and Trump and back to the White House—this time with Elon Musk
We are now three weeks into the second presidency of Donald Trump, and he has virtually handed the Department of the Treasury and more than a dozen other Cabinet departments and agencies to Elon Musk and his team of young digital vultures. They are in the process of trampling over the Constitution while collecting economic data and intelligence on everything in their sights, presumably including the details on Musk’s extensive business dealings with Washington from inside the government. There is even talk from Trump, who is seventy-eight years old, about his seeking a third term. Yet many in America and even in Congress applaud the chaos. The key to Trump’s success, as we all know, was the demise of Joe Biden, whose failings physically and mentally were kept hidden from the American public for, as I now know, two years before his disastrous debate with Trump last June. Only then could the Democratic Party face up to reality and force Biden out of the campaign. Biden’s family and senior staff kept the truth hidden until it was too late to hold an open convention and select a new candidate. In the end, Kamala Harris was not the best choice, but the only one on offer. We in the American press also failed. I actually had my first glimpse of something wrong in the Biden White House in the fall of 2022, while researching and writing a story, from the inside, about the US role in the pipeline bombings—a story published here in February 2023. The piece focused in part on the president’s earlier decision to issue a public warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin not to attack Ukraine. Made during a televised news conference in the White House on February 7, 2022, the warning included a vow to destroy a newly completed pipeline known as Nord Stream 2 that was on the verge of ferrying huge amounts of cheap natural gas from Russia to Germany. Putin ignored the threat and invaded Ukraine on February 24. Seven months later, on September 26, Nord Stream 2 and an older pipeline known as Nord Stream 1 were destroyed by mines planted by two American Navy divers who were superbly trained to do their job in the Baltic Sea. Last February l published a follow-up story that took issue with the continuing denial by the White House of its role in the pipeline destruction. Germany and parts of Europe were struggling with the resulting lack of cheap gas, and the German government was paying hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies to households and businesses to warm homes and businesses. Some newspapers were dutifully following government leads—intelligence service leads—in Washington and Berlin about a 49-foot yacht, said to have been rented by Ukrainians with false passports, that was believed to have been involved in the pipeline sabotage. I realized only recently that I should have paid more attention to the last lines of that first article I wrote. “It was a beautiful cover story,” I quoted an involved intelligence official as saying. “The only flaw was the decision to do it.” By then the operation was successful in only one aspect: three of the mines that were planted underwater did work and the world was exposed to the unnerving sight of huge amounts of methane bubbling to the surface. The divers did not have enough time under water—staying down too long could be fatal—to set a planned fourth mine. I know today what I needed to know two years ago but did not. Biden was showing signs of deterioration—memory loss and occasional falls—well before Putin began his threats against Ukraine and the build-up of Russian forces along the Ukraine’s borders. The American intelligence community was ordered—the inside word is tasked—to have a plan in hand by February 1, 2022, for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. The Central Intelligence Agency did its job and, working closely and secretly with the Norwegian special forces community, had mines and a team in place, with the understanding that if Putin struck and the war was on, there would be an immediate order to destroy the pipelines. It was understood that Putin would know who did it. That order did not come. Instead, the White House—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was a contact point—asked that the unit develop a mechanism that could trigger the mines, once planted, via a low-frequency sonar. It took months of research and planning, but all was in place by September 2022, seven months after the Ukraine war began, and that was when the attack was ordered. The attack came then, I was told, out of fear that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, facing a winter without cheap Russian gas, would panic and order the opening of the pipelines. In recent weeks, I returned to the pipeline story and realized that I had learned, and ignored, a lot from my intelligence and other sources about Biden’s dysfunction going back to early 2022. I understood early on in my six decades of reporting on the United States in and out of wartime that American presidents invariably became fascinated and consumed by the abilities of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to get things done. I have learned in private conversation with those at or near the top that there is nothing most presidents like to do more, after a hard day of unsuccessfully begging members of the Senate and House to vote the way he wanted, than to take a walk in the White House Rose Garden with the head or the CIA and get something done—ranging from beating back a political opponent to doing away with a foreign enemy or threat. Barack Obama had his Tuesday kill meetings with senior CIA officials and would essentially give a thumbs up or down about the fate of a suspected terrorist far away. There were often collateral deaths, of course. Donald Trump publicly celebrated his decision in January 2020 to authorize the assassination of a Iranian Major General Qassim Soleimani after he arrived, via a commercial flight from Damascus, for a diplomatic visit to Baghdad. Nine others, many of them Iraqi officials or security guards, were killed in the two-car caravan that met the plane. Soleimani was the commander of Iran’s often brutal Quds force, designated a terrorist organization by the US and the EU. “The world is a safer place without these monsters,” Trump said. The buck, of course, when it came to such covert ops, always stopped with the president. But as one of the operatives told me, the rule did not apply when it came to Biden’s stopping Putin in the Ukraine operation. The president “out of the picture intellectually by the time the Russians invaded,” he said. Biden’s hostility toward the continuing flow of Russian gas to Germany was on the record when he handled some oil and gas issues as Obama’s vice president. As I wrote in 2023, Biden, Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland had been public and ardent opponents of Nord Stream 1 and 2. Worry about the political influence of cheap Russian gas and oil flowing to Western Europe has been a theme of American foreign policy since the John F. Kennedy administration. Sullivan, presumably with Biden’s approval, convened a series of secret meetings late in 2021 to find a way to stop the pipelines. Those meetings quickly found a solution: the pipelines could be destroyed by mines that would be laid by a highly skilled group of Navy-trained divers whose ability to clear debris from ports and undersea obstruction had been deemed essential for decades by Navy commands around the world. A hand-picked group of senior American intelligence officers and Navy divers, working closely with longtime allies in Norway—the Norwegian intelligence services and shipping community have worked with the CIA in covert operations for decades—found the right place in the Baltic Sea, the right mines, and the right divers to get the job done by early in 2022. American allies in Sweden and Denmark were made aware of the planned area of attack and the intense training and practice that were involved. On February 7, 2022, less than three weeks before Russia would invade Ukraine, Biden held a meeting in the White House with Scholz. When asked about Nord Stream 2, Biden said: “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” I was told that the Americans in the field took on the assignment in the belief that they were working to support a US president standing up to the Russian leader and assuring Putin that he meant what he said. “Our mission was set up as a deterrent to Russia going to war in Ukraine,” an involved US official told me, “and we had the capability to blow up the pipelines. That was to be the mission—to show Putin that we have a president who doesn’t fuck around. And look at what happened.” He was referring to the fact that Russia invaded and an order to trigger the mines that did not come until seven months later. The divers had come and gone, and come and gone—an alternative plan to blow up the pipeline during an early spring NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea was never authorized. At one point, the involved official said, “We got a message to do it when we wanted to do it.” In the end, the mines were deployed 260 feet down in the Baltic Sea capable of being triggered by a low-frequency signal known only to a few. At some point in late September, the order was given to trigger the mines via a Norwegian Navy aircraft flying a few hundred feet above the waves. The plane dropped the low-frequency-sonar device, and the connection worked—there had been much American angst about that—and the mines exploded, creating a menacing cloud of methane gas and much confusion. There was an insistent denial by the United States of any involvement. Whoever authorized the strike—that is not known—waited until late September to trigger the mines. Recently the involved official told me—perhaps saying now what he would not say to me when Biden was in office—that “there were meetings” between those in Norway and Sullivan and Blinken on the pipeline sabotage planning, but “never a sign that the president was into it.” Biden and his foreign policy team have now left office without admitting to any role in the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. The governments of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden responded to the Nord Stream destruction by promising full investigations that have gone nowhere. Nearly a year ago, Denmark and Sweden stated that they would close their investigations and send their findings to authorities in Germany, which has thus far issued a single arrest warrant for one unnamed Ukrainian. Four days after the pipeline bombings, Sullivan was asked about the explosions at a White House press briefing. The questioner noted that Biden had called the bombings “a deliberate act of sabotage” and said that the Russians were “pumping out lies and [mis]information.” Does that mean, Sullivan was asked, that Russia was “likely responsible for this act of sabotage?” Jake Sullivan’s disingenuous response, which I have quoted before, bears repeating, given his direct early role in the sabotage: “First, Russia has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something, which is to make accusations that it was really someone else who did it. We’ve seen that 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…So we will have to wait until a combination of physical inspection, intelligence gathering, and consultation with our allies to make a definitive determination. . . .and then we will make a determination about where we go from there.” After an examination of the record, I can attest that the US has gone nowhere from there. And I should have written then what I thought of doing: an exegesis of Biden’s inability to be president. I confess to have had other informants about the president’s days of impairment. That was in September 2022. But who knew then that Trump would return with his new sidekick Elon? Not the Democratic Party. And not me. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |