berliner-zeitung | In your article, you wrote that in early 2022, the CIA working group reported to Sullivan's "Interagency Group" and said, quote, "We have a way of blowing up the pipelines."
They had a way. There were people there who knew what we in America call "mine warfare." In the United States Navy there are units that deal with submarines, there is also a nuclear engineering command. And there is a mine squad. The area of underwater mines is very important and we have trained specialists in it. A central location for their education is a small vacation town called Panama City in the middle of nowhere in Florida. We train very good people there and employ them. Underwater miners are of great importance, for example to clear blocked entrances to harbors and blow up things that stand in the way. You can also blow up a specific country's underwater petroleum pipelines. It's not always good things they do
It was clear to the group in the White House that they could blow up the pipelines. There's an explosive called C4 that's incredibly powerful, especially at the level they use. You can control it remotely with underwater sonar devices. These sonars emit signals at low frequencies. So it was possible, and that was communicated to the White House in early January, because two or three weeks later, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said we could do it. I think that was January 20th. And then the President, when he held the press conference together with the German Chancellor on February 7, 2022 , also said that we could do it.
The German chancellor didn't say anything concrete at the time, he was very vague. One question I'd like to ask Scholz if I was chairing a parliamentary hearing is this: Has Joe Biden told you about this? Did he tell you then why he was so confident that he could destroy the pipeline? As Americans, we didn't have a plan in place then, but we knew we had the ability to do it.
You write that Norway played a role. To what extent was the country involved - and why should Norwegians do something like that?
Norway is a great seafaring nation and they have deep sources of energy. They are also very keen to increase their natural gas supplies to Western Europe and Germany. And that's what they did, they increased their exports. So why not join forces with the US for economic reasons? In addition, in Norway there is a pronounced hostility towards Russia.
In your article you write that the Norwegian secret service and the Navy were involved. They also say that Sweden and Denmark were informed to some extent, but did not know everything.
I was told: They did what they did and they knew what they were doing and they understood what was going on, but maybe no one ever said yes. I've done a lot of work on this subject with the people I've spoken to. Anyway, for this mission to go ahead, the Norwegians had to find the right place. The divers, who were trained in Panama City, could dive up to 100 meters deep without heavy equipment. The Norwegians found us a spot off the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea that was only 260 feet deep to operate there.
The divers had to return to the top slowly, there was a decompression chamber, and we used a Norwegian submarine hunter. Only two divers were used for the four pipelines. One problem was how to deal with the people monitoring the Baltic Sea. The Baltic Sea is monitored very closely, there is a lot of data freely available, so we took care of it, there were three or four different people on it. And what was then done is very simple. For 21 years, our Sixth Fleet, which controls the Mediterranean Sea and also the Baltic Sea, has been conducting an exercise for the NATO navies in the Baltic Sea every summer (BALTOPS, ed.). We're sending an aircraft carrier and other large ships to these exercises. And for the first time in history, the NATO operation in the Baltics had a new program. A 12-day mine dumping and mine detection exercise was to be conducted. A number of nations sent out mine teams, one group dropped a mine, and another mine group went in search and blew it up.
So there was a time when things blew up, and that was when the deep sea divers who put the mines on the pipelines were able to operate. The two pipelines are about a mile apart, they're a little under the seabed silt, but they're not difficult to get to and the divers had practiced. It only took a few hours to plant the bombs.
So that was in June 2022?
Yes, they did towards the end of the exercise. But at the last minute, the White House got nervous. The President said he was afraid to do it. He changed his mind and issued new orders, giving the ability to remotely detonate the bombs at any time. You do that with a regular sonar, a Raytheon product by the way, you fly over the spot and drop a cylinder. It sends a low-frequency signal, you can describe it as a flute sound, you can set different frequencies.
However, the fear was that the bombs would not work if they stayed in the water for too long, which in fact should be the case with two bombs. So there was concern within the group to find the right remedy, and we actually had to reach out to other intelligence agencies, which I intentionally didn't write about.
And then what happened? The explosives were in place and a way was found to control them remotely.
Joe Biden decided not to blow them up back in June, it was five months into the war. But in September he ordered it to be done . The operational staff, the people who do "kinetic" things for the United States, they do what the President says, and at first they thought that was a useful weapon that he could use in negotiations. But sometime after the Russians invaded and then when the operation was complete, the whole thing became increasingly repulsive to the people running it. These are people who work in top positions in the secret services and are well trained. They opposed the project, they thought it was crazy.
Shortly after the attack, after they did as they were told, there was a lot of anger at the operation and rejection from those involved. That's one of the reasons I learned so much. And I'll tell you one more thing. The people of America and Europe who are building pipelines know what happened. I'm telling you something important. The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story. I didn't hear the story from them, but I quickly learned that they knew.
Let's return to this situation in June of last year. President Joe Biden decided not to do it directly and postponed it.
Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said at a press conference a few days after the pipelines were blown up that an important factor in his power had been taken away from Putin. He said destroying the pipelines is a tremendous opportunity -- an opportunity to deprive Russia of the ability to use the pipelines as a weapon. The point was that Russia could no longer pressure Western Europe to end US support in the Ukraine war. The fear was that Western Europe would no longer participate.
I think the reason for this decision was that the war was not going well for the west and they were afraid of the approaching winter. Nord Stream 2 was put on hold by Germany itself, not international sanctions, and the US was afraid Germany would lift sanctions because of a cold winter.
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