The Speaker of the Russian parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, labeled U.S. President Joe Biden a “terrorist” following a report by U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that implicated Washington in the alleged sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines last year.
In response, Russia is advocating for a special session of the UN Security Council, while the German AfD party is pushing for a parliamentary investigation.
Volodin referred to the alleged U.S. Nord Stream sabotage as “an act of intimidation of its vassals, who decided to develop their economy in the interests of their own citizens.” He called for an international investigation to “bring Biden and his accomplices to justice” and to make sure that the nations affected by this “terrorist attack” are paid compensation.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has summoned a special session of the German Bundestag for Friday to address the charges and is advocating for a parliamentary investigation.
“Last June, Navy divers (from the U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center), operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning”, Hersh says.
“Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but was not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions,” Hersh added.
However, White House officials have denied these claims.
Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, dismissed the claims as “false and complete fiction” in a statement to Hersh.
The Central Intelligence Agency also dismissed the claims as “completely and utterly false” through spokesperson Tammy Thorp.
“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” Hersh writes.
“This is not kiddie stuff,” Hersh quotes his anonymous source. “If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
“Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.”
During “all of this scheming,” Hersh’s source stated, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’” In early 2022, the CIA working group reported 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. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it,” Hersh says.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” Hersh’s source reported. “The plan was for the options to be executed post-invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
However, Biden’s misspeaking caused the CIA to no longer consider the purported act of sabotage as a “covert operation “because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to explode Nord Stream was brought down from being a covert operation, meaning that Congress had to be informed about it, to a “highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support,” Hersh documents.
“There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now was just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea,” his unnamed source said: “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
This is a developing story.
