CIA knew Russia wasn't behind Nord Stream attack - WSJ

RT
Wed, 14 Jun 2023 20:58 UTC

© AP / Carolyn Kaster

CIA Director William Burns testifies during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, March 9, 2023

US media is coalescing around the theory that Ukraine planned on blowing up the pipelines

The CIA has known since at least October that Russia did not blow up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. While the report claimed that the CIA had attempted to foil a Ukrainian-led plot to bomb the pipelines, a competing report alleges the agency actually carried out the demolition job.

The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines were destroyed in a series of near-simultaneous explosions off the Danish island of Bornholm in late September. The blasts severed a key conduit for Russian natural gas to Europe, effectively removing the possibility of European countries lifting their sanctions on Moscow and restarting gas purchases.

While US President Joe Biden refrained from blaming Russia for the blasts, US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told the BBC that "it seems" like Moscow was to blame, while Ukraine has publicly and repeatedly accused Russia of sabotaging its own gas lines.

However, CIA Director William Burns told "a European counterpart" in October that "available evidence didn't point to Russia," the Wall Street Journal reported, citing an official present at the meeting. When asked if Ukraine was to blame, Burns reportedly answered "I hope not."

According to the American newspaper, the CIA knew about a Ukrainian plot to bomb the pipelines earlier in 2022, but warned Kiev not to go through with the attack. The agency told its European counterparts in August that Ukraine had agreed and the threat had subsided, but both sets of Nord Stream lines were destroyed a month later.

The Wall Street Journal's report was published a day after Dutch outlet NOS and Germany's Die Zeit published similar articles claiming that American spies were tipped off by their Dutch colleagues about the alleged Ukrainian plot, and intervened to prevent it. According to earlier reporting by the New York Times and Der Spiegel, a "pro-Ukrainian group" actually managed to take out the gas lines, using a rented yacht to transport explosives to the blast site.

This entire sequence of events has been dismissed by American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who claimed in February that the Biden administration ordered the CIA to bomb Nord Stream with the help of the Norwegian Navy. Citing sources in US intelligence, Hersh claimed that the explosives were planted during NATO military drills in the Baltic Sea last June and triggered remotely three months later. The rented yacht story, Hersh said afterwards, was planted in the US and German media as a red herring by the CIA and its German counterpart, the BND.

Washington and Kiev have both denied that they played any part in the sabotage operation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in March that he "fully agrees" with Hersh's conclusions. The Russian president argued that the US in particular benefited from the attack due to its position as a competing gas supplier to Europe.

Comment: And then from CIA propaganda arm rferl.org - we get only those bits of the story that add to the confusion.

Notice that in the article below there's no mention of Seymour Hersh's investigations pointing to CIA/NATO involvement.

What's most interesting is how the Western media's coverage of the Nordstream sabotage is now being shifted to blame Kiev. Well they can try.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency reportedly warned Ukraine not to sabotage the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines last year after receiving a tip from the Netherlands' intelligence agency that a plot was under way.

The reports by several European and U.S. media outlets deepen the mystery of the Baltic Sea pipeline, which was mostly destroyed in September in explosions that remain under investigation.

In the aftermath of the blasts, Western officials blamed Russia for the September 26 incident, which all but destroyed the twin pipelines at a spot just east of a Danish island called Bornholm. The explosions were discovered as residual gas in the pipelines bubbled up to the surface.

The Ukrainian government has repeatedly denied responsibility for the attack.

The pipelines were built by Russia to deliver Russian gas directly to Germany and Europe while bypassing Ukraine, Poland, and other nations that had hostile ties with Moscow.

While the first pipeline was operational, the second had yet to receive final approval from German regulators. The United States had warned for years that the pipelines were a security risk for Germany and other European nations as they would make the countries beholden to Russian energy exports.

In the months that followed the blasts, the mystery over who was responsible deepened, with a spate of reports by European media organizations that focused on a yacht called the Andromeda that had been rented at a German port by a group of people, some of whom showed Bulgarian passports. German investigators reportedly found traces of explosives on the Andromeda, which had been reported in Bornholm prior to the explosions.

Other reports focused on the presence of a Greek-flagged tanker that had been seen drifting around the site of the blasts and later continued on to a Russian port.

Last month, the German newspaper Die Zeit and The Wall Street Journal reported that German police raided an apartment in the eastern German city of Frankfurt an der Oder, investigating a woman whose former boyfriend was a Ukrainian soldier. According to the reports, the soldier was among the crew members on the Andromeda prior to the blasts.

On June 13, Dutch public broadcaster NOS, along with German newspaper Die Ziet and public broadcaster ARD, reported that in June a year earlier, the main Dutch intelligence agency received a tip that a secret plot by Ukrainian operatives was under way to target the pipelines.

The Dutch agency forwarded the tip to the CIA, which then warned Ukrainian officials not to carry out the effort.

That reporting was later corroborated by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed U.S. officials. U.S. officials were reportedly told by Ukrainian counterparts that the plot had been aborted.

Then, in September, the explosions took place.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that German investigators were examining evidence that suggested the sabotage team had used Poland as a conduit or base for carrying out the attack.

A top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Mykhaylo Podolyak, called the latest reporting "endless anonymous sources [that are] artificially fueling the disinformation campaign about Ukraine's alleged involvement in the destruction of the Nord Stream."

It "should be viewed as a deliberate campaign to undermine Ukraine's credibility, reputation, and voice in the global arena," Podolyak said in a post on Twitter on June 13.

U.S. and European media have said the group that carried out of the attack may have done so without the knowledge of Zelenskiy or other top officials.