How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

 The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center

• It is located in rural Panama City, Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border.
• The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good-using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance-as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals.

Bottom Line

• Biden's decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington's national security community about how to best achieve that goal.
• For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance.

• President Biden and his foreign policy team-National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy-had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
• The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas-enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe.

Russian troops began to build up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea.

• Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be "doubled in short order."
• The administration's attention shifted back to Nord Stream, as long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia

Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan

• All options were on the table, but only one would emerge
• Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible or irreversible
• The answer to this question would determine the course of action

Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines-and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.

• In 1971, a team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable.

Ivy Bells

• The CIA working group reported back to Sullivan's interagency group: "We have a way to blow up the pipelines."
• On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team.

The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly

• Biden's and Nuland's indiscretion might have frustrated some planners, but it also created an opportunity
• Under the law, there was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress
• All they had to do now is just do it-but it still had to be secret

The operation

• The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark's Bornholm Island.
• There were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult
• A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula.
• America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.

The days were counting down.

• The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved
• Biden had a new request: "Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?"

The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic

• The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice.
• Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea-from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures.
• To avoid this, the buoy would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives.

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