Seymour Hersh just published a new piece about the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.
When the pipelines were blown up on September 27 2022 I had asked:
Whodunnit? – Facts Related to The Sabotage Attack On The Nord Stream Pipelines
I had collected the various known facts around the incident and they in sum suggested that it had been the U.S. of A.
Seymour Hersh put the same question to some of his intelligence contacts. He was given the same answer.
He now reports on further facts and final motives to trigger the incident.
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
(archived version)
At the core of Hersh's report is this:
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.”
…
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.
…
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.”
…
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.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will now have to answer some serious questions …
Added:
This is of course related:
Stephen Stapczynski @SStapczynski – 22:47 UTC · Sep 25, 2023
Europe must rely on LNG from the US for decades, said EU’s top energy official 🇪🇺🤝🇺🇸
🚢 “There will be a need for American energy,” said Jørgensen, energy director-general
⚡️ This is one of the strongest signals that the EU needs US LNG well past 2030
ft.com – Top EU energy official says US gas will be needed for decades