The White House had already made the decision to destroy the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline by early 2022, several weeks before the start of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, Seymour Hersh has reported in his latest expose story.
According to his report, based on comments from an American official “who is knowledgeable about the political use of energy,” by the time US President Joe Biden hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House on February 7, 2022, he had already given the order to a CIA-led team in Norway to find a way to destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a liquified natural gas line from Russia to Germany that was slated to soon open.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics on February 22, 2022, Scholz announced the termination of the Nord Stream 2 project - something he had been under pressure from Washington as well as some other European Union leaders, such as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, to do for years.
The month prior, Republicans in the US Congress attempted to pass a bill that would have sanctioned the Russian side of the pipeline project regardless of whether or not Russia sent troops into Ukraine, and Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, had repeatedly deferred implementation of other sanctions against the pipeline in order to keep Berlin in their good graces.
According to Hersh’s report, the CIA-led team had planted the explosives on three of the four Nord Stream 2 pipes along the seafloor of the North Sea by May of 2022, but Biden delayed their detonation for months without explanation until finally giving the order in late September of that year. The bombs were detonated using a “low frequency sonar device,” he reported.
Earlier this week, Germany’s Sefe and Norway’s Equinor, their state-owned gas firms, struck a massive $55 billion deal that would see Norway supply one-third of German gas needs for the next 10 years - essentially the same volume that Nord Stream 2 would have brought.
The US official with whom Hersh spoke quipped that the deal was “an amazing stroke of good luck for Scholz, just when his base was facing another gas-free winter.”
“Magically,” the source added, “the deal coincides with Russia’s earlier closure of gas and oil fields that - except for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines - would have been the source of gas for the two pipelines.”
It’s unclear to what exactly the official was referring; possibly the May 2022 closure of western traffic in the Yamal-Europe pipeline, which runs from the northwestern Siberian Yamal Peninsula westward into Europe via Poland.