October Surprise
© John Helmer Org
The official Russian reaction to the Nord Stream attack is to identify it as a US military operation, and to wait for an investigation to produce the evidence. That means wait, delay. No retaliation.

"How will we respond?" Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday in the most detailed briefing so far from Moscow. "We will respond with an investigation. This is a must, and our law-enforcement bodies have already launched it. This [the gas pipelines] is our property, resources, and infrastructure."

"I would like to believe that the international investigation of what happened on the gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea will be objective... We will seek to conduct an honest and objective investigation... I hope that someone in the United States, or maybe someone in Europe — although, unfortunately, Europe in this case can no longer be counted on — someone from the independent investigators will have the desire to clarify the involvement of the United States, the special services and all other bodies in what happened on 25-27 September of this year in the Baltic Sea."

This means that the Russian Government is waiting, delaying. There will be no retaliation for the time being.

The reason is that Russian officials suspect the Biden Administration of preparing an October Surprise just ahead of Election Day, November 8: an attack on domestic US infrastructure - the electricity grids, for example - which will be reported as the Russian retaliation that won't be.

The Nord Stream attacks were a military operation of the US, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden, with additional NATO air surveillance support from bases in Italy. Politically, they were an attack on Germany, but the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has yet to say publicly what he knew in advance, what he knows now.

Who then knows what will come next except that there is now war in Europe, outside the Ukraine. Will the October Surprise begin war inside the United States?

President Vladimir Putin has been accused of threatening escalation to nuclear weapons. Zakharova addressed this with the record of who threatened nuclear war first.

"They are the ones who raised the issue of nuclear weapons. Take [President Vladimir] Zelensky's statement in February 2022, which was promoted by Washington; the statements made by then Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, and other statements by Zelensky and [former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia] Tymoshenko, who said that nuclear weapons must be used against Russia. Many Ukrainian officials and Western politicians made such statements. They keep talking about it, and they are doing this openly. I wonder if they understand what they are talking about. I don't think all of them do. Washington never stopped them; on the contrary, it encouraged them."

Read Truss's nuclear war threat at the Conservative Party convention in August. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves De Drian issued his threat on February 24.

Truss, Drian Wallace
© John Helmer Org
Left: Elizabeth Truss; centre, Jean-Yves Drian. Right: in March the then-British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace endorsed British assistance for nuclear arms in defence of Ukraine in a conversation he thought he was having with the Ukrainian prime minister. A month later Wallace added his nuclear arms threat to "outgun" Russia.

"There are more horrible things," Zakharova continued. "Ordinary people think that nuclear weapons are bombs or missiles. What do we see now? We see that the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant has been shelled every day for several months even though they know that this can have irreversible consequences comparable to the use of nuclear weapons. Who is shelling the plant? We said who, it's the Kiev regime. But the pro-Western international officials remain silent or say that it is unclear who is shelling the plant. Somebody has even said that it is Russia that is shelling itself. They stopped saying that. Is this [the shelling of a nuclear power plant] any better than the use of nuclear weapons? Radiation doesn't care how it was unleashed, by using 'official' or 'dirty' nuclear weapons, or as the result of a disaster at a nuclear facility. The consequences for people and humanity as a whole will be the same. Why hasn't anybody in Washington called on Zelensky or his handlers to stop shelling the plant? No statements have been made to this effect. This means that they are benefiting from this situation. This is the answer to the question about who is using what to threaten others, and who is saying what."

The intervention of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the Kiev side in the Zaporozhye attacks can be followed here. Listen to the discussion of the evidence.
Pic of IAEA
© John Helmer NetSource
The final Russian break with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres over this issue, and several others, occurred last Friday, when the Foreign Ministry in Moscow declared him to be "an instrument of propaganda and pressure on member states".

Preparation for an October Surprise in the US is being flagged by US officials and floated by official think tanks in Washington. "Everybody should be on high alert," US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told an IAEA meeting in Vienna on Wednesday. "Asked whether US LNG shipments to Europe also need to take more precautions, Granholm said: 'Of course. We have to be on heightened alert.'"
Garnholm & Kerry
© John Helmer Org
Left: US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaking at the IAEA on September 26. Right, John Kerry speaking on NBC morning television on September 28. Asked if he believes Putin is threatening to use nuclear weapons, Kerry said: "Frankly, I doubt that he does." Kerry then went further: "There is going to have to be a negotiation at some point."

About the Nord Stream pipeline attacks, "we're waiting to get the facts", John Kerry declared for the Biden Administration, hinting that European and American allegations of sabotage are premature. "Our European friends have been more forward leaning on labeling it as sabotage." Kerry also proposed "repairing it as fast as possible, which is an underwater operation but that's going to have to happen." Kerry is currently the Biden Administration's special envoy for climate policy. Formerly the Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, Kerry fabricated US satellite evidence to support the allegation of the Russian role in shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014; Kerry then refused to substantiate his claim through years of investigation and the Dutch court proceeding in the case.

Read the Kerry fabrication and lie file here . Eight years older, this time Kerry is leaning towards the truth; not so far in the anti-war direction Kerry took when he started his political career at the head of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW); read the book on that one.

"Everyone is assessing the situation and taking it from the angle of, 'If Russia was behind this, why?'" Olga Khakova, deputy director for European energy security at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said in an interview with the German-owned Politico. She added: 'Is this a threat to other infrastructure in Europe? And then, what's next?' The U.S. and Europe must continue coordination and ready sanctions against Russia in case it is found responsible, she said. The threat of a cyberattack on U.S. and European infrastructure that could disrupt water flows and treatment, gas delivery and electricity remains high, she said."

Khakova is Ukrainian with a university education in Kansas. Before going to work for the Atlantic Council in Washington as deputy director for "European Energy Security", Khakova was a lobbyist for the US power utilities and energy companies first in line to profit from the exclusion of Russia in the European energy supply market. They also pay for the Atlantic Council staff, as this list of donors reveals. Money from Europe, not war in Europe is the benefit they aim to get from the Nord Stream attack.

Lobbying in Berlin and Washington by bombing in the Baltic - Zakharova made this point explicitly.

"It is interesting that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines would be 'in no-one's interest.' Really? It wouldn't be in the interest of Western and Central Europe, the European regions that are part of the Eurasian link between Europe and Asia. No, it wouldn't be in the interest of that group of countries. Neither would it be in the interest of the world as a whole, because it demonstrates total disregard for morality and the law in many Western countries. Washington is the clear beneficiary of this situation. I suggest that Mr Blinken reread his own words and what US presidents said on this issue. He may not see Donald Trump as his president, but what about Joe Biden and Mr Blinken's predecessors? They said a great deal about destroying, shutting down and removing Nord Stream from the agenda and why this would be in the US's interest... Read those statements again, and you will see who will benefit from the explosions on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines."

"To summarise what US officials have said over the past years, disabling the pipelines would allow the United States to increase LNG deliveries to the EU. This is not my assessment. It is the essence of the slogans, calls and theses of US officials, both Republicans and Democrats, which they have been working for the past years to implement. The United States never made it a secret that its main goal was to cut Europe off from Russian energy resources....Until September 25, 26 and 27, 2022, Washington didn't succeed. Its threats, blackmail and promises all failed, possibly because the EU has learned to separate lies from the truth. They didn't believe Washington. They decided to implement the project despite the provocations and the bloodbath Washington initiated in the region. They repaired the turbines and did everything else necessary to ensure gas supplies to Europe. The attempts to suspend the project to destroy it economically and politically have failed. And then a series of explosions took place on the pipelines on September 25, 26 and 27, 2022."
MH17  Book
© John Helmer Org
Opening the war in Europe, outside the Ukraine, is a cost-benefit risk which the US energy lobbies have already calculated, and persuaded some Biden Administration officials to run, so long as they are confident that the German leadership will accept the blame-Russia cover story. German Chancellor Scholz's predecessor Angela Merkel refused to accept it following the attack on MH17; Germany then vetoed the US-NATO plan to send a Dutch and Australian force into the eastern Ukraine. Read that story in Chapter 18 of the book (right).

It's unclear whether the Ukrainian Jewish faction in Washington - Blinken, Victoria Nuland - and the Irish Catholic faction - Biden, Kerry, William Burns of the CIA, General Mark Milley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - count by the same reckoning. But what is their cost-benefit calculation in the last days before Election Day when it is customary for White House officials losing their grip on power to contemplate desperate measures?

Biden's approval rating is improving modestly, but not so obviously across the country as to change the outcome of Senate and House elections on November 8.
Biden Job Approval
© Real Clear PoliticsSource
More ominous for Biden's campaign staff is the voters' answer to the question, Is the country going in the right or wrong direction? In mid-July those who said wrong outnumbered those who said right by 57 points. This gap, measured on September 30, has now shrunk to 37 points.

That's still a very large disapproval margin though the positive gain, in the White House and Democratic National Committee calculation, has been 20 points over two months. That's the feel-better factor - it would evaporate if the war in Europe comes home to the US in the coming four weeks.
US Poll
© Real Clear PoliticsSource
The polls which the Biden Administration are reading suggest that on November 8, voters want to feel reassured that Biden and the Democrats will continue to keep the US out of the war in the Ukraine. The negative margin for Biden - that is, the gap between those who approve his performance and those who disapprove - is significantly smaller for his conduct of the Ukraine war than in voter assessments of his performance on inflation, the economy in general, immigration and crime.
Brandon Ratings
© Real Clear PoliticsSource
In Washington, if not in Kiev, Ukrainian Jews and Irish Catholics count votes in the same way. The count reveals that US voters do not want to risk the direction of their country if the Biden Administration and the Kremlin open war on US territory. A false-flag operation, to be approved in secret by the National Security Council, for sabotage of US gas pipelines, power grids, or nuclear reactors, portrayed to voters as a Russian retaliatory strike, would run a bigger risk than any October Surprise in American election history.

It would be the biggest risk since President Franklin Roosevelt was reviewing the intelligence on Japanese intentions, between August 1, 1941, when the US imposed its oil export embargo, and December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour; and since President John Kennedy interpreted the intelligence on Soviet intentions in Cuba in October 1962.

"Let me remind you," Zakharova concluded her briefing last week, "that this concerns not just one country but the entire planet."