The evidence is incontrovertible: The Russians blew op the Kakhovka dam

Over the past week, much evidence has come to light which puts beyond reasonable doubt the conclusion that Russian forces occupying the Kakhovka Dam were responsible for its destruction on June 6th, between roughly 2.20–2.54am local time.

• Firstly, the dam was designed to withstand a nuclear attack – probably meaning a strike on the Dnipro River, creating a tsunami. As such, it is constructed of large and very thick steel-reinforced concrete piers (see above photo).

Each of these are independent – capable of standing on their even if a nearby pier is damaged or destroyed – a point demonstrated by the fact that many of these piers are still standing, despite roughly fourteen having been partially destroyed, with more destruction between the Hydro Power Plant buildings (as well as damage to the buildings themselves). We are not simply talking about a number of sluice gates being destroyed.

The extent of the damage to these piers will only become apparent when the water drains, but the amount of explosive that would have been required to destroy them is well beyond anything that could reasonably have been delivered on target by Ukraine.

The Antonovsky Bridge (also constructed of steel-reinforced concrete) survived many GMLRS attacks, and each 200lb high explosive (HE) warhead – perhaps with a time-delayed fuse – only created a neat little hole. Russians were at one point claiming that Ukraine had employed its Vilkha MLRS (with a maximum 550lb HE warhead) to attack the dam, but the biggest explosive ordnance possessed by Ukraine is the 2,000lb Mark 84 JDAM, and even with these, each pier would have to be hit multiple times in order to have any serious effect – let alone to destroy everything above the waterline (with no bits of steel and concrete still poking up, note!).

In the best case scenario, with GPS not being jammed, a modern JDAM can achieve a Circular Error Probable (CEP) of five metres. This means that, on average, 50% of bombs will hit within a circle of radius 5m (area: 78.5m2). The piers are roughly 2m wide, so if the very centre of the pier were targeted (rather than nearer the ends), a pier with an area of 10m2 (2×5m) inside the limits of that circle would encompass only ~12.7% of the CEP. Therefore, only ~6.4% of bombs would hit even a portion of the target. Taking a rather optimistic estimate of only three JDAMs needed per pier, it would take, on average, ~660 JDAMs to achieve the desired effect. This number would be reduced because a few of the off-target JDAMs would hit a neighbouring pier instead, but the overall attack would be much more difficult because the piers on the eastern (reservoir) end were underwater – greatly limiting the effect of any bombs on target (meaning, in reality, only the western end of the piers could be attacked).

Accuracy could be greatly improved if the JDAMs were fitted with a laser seeker. However, it’s highly questionable whether it would be feasible to laser-designate these targets for any length of time in such a contested environment very close to the line of control from, say, a drone – even assuming compatible laser designators have been fitted to suitable Ukrainian drones. And even with perfect accuracy, multiple JDAMs would still be required per pier.

For Ukraine, this would have taken a big air operation involving (conservatively) dozens of sorties over a period of days or weeks.

On average, Ukraine carries out about 26 combat sorties per day (sometimes a few more), but these are spread across the entire line of contact, and involve all types of aircraft – only some of which can carry JDAMs. Such an operation would be very predictable, and therefore incredibly dangerous and risky. In fact, it would be a field day for Russian air defence, since even with the ~72km glide range of the JDAM-ER (which can only be achieved at altitude), this would put Ukrainian aviation within range of Russian Buk, S-300 and S-400 systems.

• However, even if Ukraine could somehow have assembled enough air power to drop the massive amount of ordnance necessary within the known time-frame of about half-an-hour (an impossibility), and precisely co-ordinated everything so each target could be individually laser-designated without confusing the bombs (another impossibility), it would have been blatantly obvious to the RC-135 Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft operated by the U.S. and the U.K. which are in constant rotation near Ukraine, and to other nations via satellite reconnaissance, seismographs and the like – besides many observers on the ground, on both sides.

So far we’ve been considering HE warheads, but what about other types of munitions? Even large armour-piercing artillery shells have been found to be ineffective against reinforced concrete – thus requiring a lot of ordnance. Consider the attack on Fort Douaumont in WWI, in which Germany bombarded the fort with huge 420mm armour-piercing shells without result. As a boy, I visited the site and was very surprised by the lack of damage.

• This is where so-called ‘bunker buster’ bombs come along. These are gravity bombs that are dropped from altitude, reaching supersonic speeds on descent, with hard penetrator tips and smart fuses that can detonate the bomb when certain conditions are met (e.g., loss of rotational energy, time, etc.). This enables them to explode within a reinforced or buried structure – which gave Saddam Hussein such a nasty surprise during Operation Desert Storm.

But we don’t need to imagine Ukraine has been secretly developing bunker buster munitions, or been given some on the quiet by the U.S. or perfidious Albion. In fact, given bunker busters would have to be dropped from altitude and suicidally close to the target (~10 nautical miles), Ukraine has something much better: Storm Shadow. These are standoff weapons that can be air-launched from inside safe Ukrainian airspace. They’re equipped with BROACH warheads that can defeat hard targets, including those protected by reinforced concrete, with a shaped-charge penetrator followed by a variable-fuse 990lb warhead that detonates inside the target.

Given Storm Shadow’s reputedly first-rate guidance and targetting capabilities – and the apparent inability of Russia to shoot them down – I’m going to be generous and stipulate arguendo that pinpoint accuracy could be achieved with a horizontal head-on attack against the piers from the western (non-reservoir) side.

• This couldn’t be done from the reservoir side because those piers were under water – meaning the optical/IIR target recognition system wouldn’t work, and GPS guidance wouldn’t be nearly good enough.

This kind of attack would be limited to one Storm Shadow per pier, because absent a detailed bomb damage assessment in daylight, followed by programming in new target recognition parameters, the damage to the piers would almost certainly prevent a second Storm Shadow positively identifying and choosing to attack the target (rather than heading to its ‘safe’ crash site).

• It would also be very likely that the impact of a single Storm Shadow (and the resulting debris and floodwater pouring through) would so confuse the next Storm Shadow attacking a neighbouring pier that it would fail to recognise the target. So this is all highly implausible.

But even assuming all 14 missiles could achieve a perfect hit against each of the piers, given that the piers are at least 10m in length, it’s also highly questionable whether a single Storm Shadow – which could theoretically explode ~3.7m inside the target – would be able to completely destroy any given pier above the waterline.

• Then try that 14 times. And if it didn’t work perfectly, there’d be a lot of evidence left to point to Ukraine.

But there are other reasons why this didn’t happen. Even assuming Ukraine has modified enough Su-24s to carry Storm Shadow (they’d need seven, with two missiles per plane), nevertheless launching that number of Su-24s all at once would have been noticed – not just by the U.K. and U.S., but also by Russian ground-based radar as well as AWACS, and by other nations.

• The missiles themselves might also have been detected – even if Russian air defence isn’t sophisticated enough to shoot them down. Humans on the ground would have heard (and possibly seen) them coming in at perhaps as low as 30m above ground, and at roughly two-minute intervals. Of course, none of this was reported or claimed, either by civilians in the area or by Russia – who claimed it was rocket artillery.

This also doesn’t match the seismograph readings, which show a big explosion at 2.54am local time, with U.S. infra-red satellite imagery seeming to suggest the same.

However, the picture is rather unclear, and it seems likely there were actually two explosions, each one taking out roughly half of the 14 piers.

As for the claims made by some incautious commentators, who initially suggested that tubed artillery could have done this: an M107 155mm shell contains 15lbs of HE, and is not very accurate, so it would be like trying to cut down a tree with a blunt nail file.

• No, the dam could only have been blown in the way we saw using explosives pre-positioned inside the structure.

It was therefore fortunate for the Russians that the USSR built their dams with this in mind, providing sites for the placement of explosive charges in the event of a need to flood the downstream area for defensive purposes – as in this instance.

• Besides observations and the laws of physics being on Ukraine’s side, we have other evidence pointing to Russia. Zelenskyy claimed back on October 20th that Russia had mined the dam, but he also called for international observers to be sent to the dam (hardly suggesting evil intent). The next day, there was some chatter in the Telegram channel of some members of the 205th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade (believed to have been occupying the dam) discussing the fact that the dam had been mined, and also seeming to suggest they would be ordered to blow the dam in the event of an “uncontrolled advance of the enemy”.

In December, there were boasts that the dam was mined and would be blown up on New Year’s Day in order to wash Ukrainian forces away – the idea being uncontroversial, having been proposed at one point on Russian state TV and recommended by military expert Roman Svitan, as well as by the more extreme Vladlen Tatarsky (further details on Russian ‘chatter’ before and after June 6th can be found here).

When the dam was blown, it was at first denied by various Russians. RIA Novosti reported that “everywhere is quiet and peaceful” in the city, with Nova Kakhovka’s gauleiter, at 6am, calling reports of the breach “nonsense”. Not long after he claimed “a series of numerous strikes” had “destroyed the latches” – in line with Russia’s emerging narrative of rocket artillery strikes. But of course it wasn’t merely the sluice gates that were destroyed.

• Ukraine’s SBU released a signals intercept a few days later, supposedly between Russian soldiers discussing how their side blew the dam, and in which they said the scale of the destruction and flooding was unintentional – a not implausible statement, in my opinion. (Nonetheless, members of the 205th SMRB seem to have been given medals for their actions.)

Indeed, the scale of the flooding does seem to have taken Russia by surprise, with some units having to relocate; although it seems there were orders issued on June 4th to move some military equipment away from the area they thought would be flooded. However, I think it very unlikely that clear warnings were given, since the resultant signals traffic could have made it all the more obvious.

(The situation is reminiscent of Stalin’s destruction of the Dnipro Dam in 1941, which killed tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers.)

However, Russia did show some high-level skirt before their war crime.

As reported by The Insider, a week before the dam was blown, a decree was issued by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin forbidding the investigation of any accidents at “hydraulic structures”, whether as a result of military action or terrorist attacks, until 2028. This is of course very convenient, since Russia has also been blowing up other dams in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, notably between Tokmak and Berdyansk – directly in the path of Ukraine’s counter-offensive.

Besides having the means and opportunity to destroy the Kakhovka Dam, Russia had fairly obvious motives – to cause chaos, create a humanitarian crisis for Ukraine, and most importantly to prevent Ukrainian forces attempting a river crossing, or holding positions on the islands downstream.

This has enabled Russia to move forces from Kherson Oblast to other parts of the theatre in order to try to counter Ukraine’s advances – at least for a few weeks, until the flooded areas dry out again.

As for Ukraine possibly having a motive, given their adherence to the Geneva Conventions and the likely consequences (given the inevitability of being discovered), that seems most unlikely.

• At least, while they seem to have been willing to destroy one or more sluice gates in order to hamper the retreat of Russian forces from Kherson last year by increasing the flow rate of the water, that would have been legitimate under the laws of war – and of a different order of magnitude to what we’ve seen here. But in fact, it seems they only did minimal damage to the sluice gates.

Leaving aside military considerations, it would be completely mad for Ukraine to deliberately kill its own civilians by blowing the dam – citizens that they are in the process of liberating. Not only that, but (unless a cofferdam can be installed) this will destroy almost all agriculture in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts (not to mention parts of Dnipropetrovsk and as far east as Azov). Without irrigation from the Kakhovka Reservoir, those areas will revert to being an agricultural desert (having a global impact). And then there’s the effect on the flora and fauna of Ukraine.

The loss of agricultural irrigation both in these regions and in Crimea (which was, in any case, without irrigation between 2014–22) is of little significance to Russia – they have almost no regard for the lives of their troops, and none for Ukrainian civilians. This is simply part of their scorched earth policy, and any claim to the contrary is without foundation.

• My thanks to David Brookfield, formerly of the Royal Engineers and currently a co-host of MriyaReport, for his comments and suggestions throughout.

Source: Jan Rons – Daily Sceptic

How America took out the North Stream Pipeline

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

• 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.

The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

• Last June, the Navy divers, 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.
• 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 were 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.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

• 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.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight.

• The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
• 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. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.

• America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.

Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.

Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.

Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”

• A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.

There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”

The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.

• Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building 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 once again was focused on 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.

It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.

All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.

PLANNING

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?

• What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that 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.

Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. 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. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. 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.

Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.

A hand-picked 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. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.

• The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.

That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy’s intentions and planning.

Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.

Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “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.’”

• Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

What came next was stunning. 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.”

• Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.

“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”

The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “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 Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”

• The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”

THE OPERATION

Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.

In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.

• 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.

In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.

• Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War.

Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.

• Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)

Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.

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.

• The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.

After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.

At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.

“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.

• The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.

Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom.

• Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.

The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)

The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.

• The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.

The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program.

The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.

• It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.

The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.

And then: Washington had second thoughts. 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.

Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”

Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.

Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.

The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.

The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.

Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.

In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.

• The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order.

It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?

The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. 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 sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)

• On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy.

The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

FALLOUT

In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.

• While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.

Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:

• “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”

More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “​Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

• The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.

“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.

“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

Source: Seymour Hersh

 

EU opens probe into vaccine deals

The European Union prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into the bloc’s procurement of billions of COVID-19 vaccine doses, amid allegations of corruption and secret backroom dealings from several members of parliament.

EU officials announced the probe in a brief statement on Friday, confirming an “ongoing investigation into the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines in the European Union.”

They added that the case follows “extremely high public interest” around the issue, though declined to share any other details.

While prosecutors were tight-lipped about the exact nature of the probe, the announcement follows allegations from MEPs that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen conducted vaccine negotiations with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in secret.

Despite requests from journalists, lawmakers and an EU watchdog, von der Leyen’s office has failed to produce personal text messages sent to Bourla during talks for nearly 2 billion vaccine doses, prompting accusations of corruption.

The #EPPO confirms that it has an ongoing investigation into the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines in the European Union. This exceptional confirmation comes after the extremely high public interest. No further details will be made public at this stage. pic.twitter.com/4001sNZREN

— European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) (@EUProsecutor) October 14, 2022

Croatian MEP Mislav Kolakusic noted the new investigation later on Friday, saying the decision was made thanks to pressure from lawmakers.

• Though he was unable to shed additional light on the probe, Kolakusic has been highly critical of the EU’s vaccine procurement process, claiming deals for billions of doses were marred by “corruption” and secrecy.

The purchase of 4.5 billion doses of the covid-19 vaccine for 450 million EU 🇪🇺 residents is the biggest CORRUPTION SCANDAL in the history of mankind. pic.twitter.com/pCBWJMhwhr

— Mislav Kolakusic MEP 🇭🇷🇪🇺 (@mislavkolakusic) October 12, 2022

“Today, 10 of us MEPs asked [von der Leyen] the following question: when will she present to us… the communication she had with Pfizer during the procurement of 4.5 billion doses of vaccines at a time when there was absolutely no proof of the effectiveness, and especially not of the harmfulness, of that product?” he said in a tweet earlier this week, calling the issue the “biggest corruption scandal in the history of mankind.”

Last month, the European Court of Auditors said that it has asked the commission to provide information on “preliminary negotiations” for the EU’s largest Pfizer purchase – including “scientific experts consulted and advice received, timing of the talks, records of the discussions, and details of the agreed terms and conditions” – but added that “none was forthcoming.”

The European Commission still has yet to make the information public, fueling corruption allegations from MEPs.

Source: RT

Nord Stream was ruptured by two blasts – WSJ

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline leaks were caused by two powerful explosions, each with a force equivalent to 500 kg (1,100 pounds) of TNT, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday citing sources.

• Danish officials reportedly revealed the details at a NATO meeting on Wednesday.

In a statement published on Thursday, the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s decision-making body, did not assign blame for the leaks on any actor and only claimed that the pipelines were damaged in what appeared to be a “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage.”

• However, officials in some member countries “have already attributed the destruction to Russia, without providing evidence,” the report says.

The paper reported that during the Council meeting, member countries said Russia was ‘likely’ behind the Nord Stream ruptures. But apparently most of them did not want to publicly voice their speculations without “more evidence,” according to unnamed senior European diplomats cited by the outlet.

The diplomats noted that “there was little serious doubt” in capitals that Moscow orchestrated the Nord Stream leaks, but they wanted to be absolutely certain about it, given the implications such accusations may entail.

Moscow has repeatedly dismissed allegations that it had something to do with the sabotage. Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov described the incident as a probable “terrorist act” which is unlikely to have been possible “without the involvement of some state power.”

• On Thursday, Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, offered a reminder that this summer NATO was engaged in military activities close to the location where the leaks were found, hinting that it might have presented an interesting “opportunity” for the bloc.

Earlier, Sky News reported, citing a UK defense source, that the Nord Stream pipelines may have been sabotaged by a remotely detonated underwater explosive device, which could have been planted months or even years prior to the incident.

On Monday, Denmark reported leaks from the pipelines, which connect Germany and Russia under the Baltic Sea, after the operator reported a loss of pressure on both Nord Stream 1 and 2.

Danish and Swedish authorities later said there had been a series of undersea explosions near the island of Bornholm.

In total, there have been four gas leaks detected in the Nord Stream system.

Source: RT

COVID-19 case confirmed in Italy in September, 2019

• China first informed the WHO (World Health Organization) of the existence of a new virus, soon to be named SARS-CoV-2, in late December, 2019.
• According to the WHO, the first laboratory-confirmed case of the new virus beyond China’s borders was in January 13, 2020, confirmed by the Thailand Ministry of Public Health.

However, a new study published in late August of this year reveals that the novel coronavirus was already circulating beyond China as early as September 2019.

The researchers leading this study were investigating measles and rubella when they came across cases of illness and rash that were found not to be caused by these two diseases.

• They decided to test the samples and twelve of them, from dates prior to when a pandemic was first declared, were found to be positive for SARS-CoV-2.

The cases were all from Italy, but although later transmission from China to Italy was confirmed, none of the cases in this study had any relevant travel history that would have explained their contracting a virus that is commonly believed to have originated in Wuhan, China.

• Furthermore, four of the twelve people whose samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 had antibodies to the virus, with the earliest sample being that of an eight-month-old infant who was tested on 12 September 2019.

The researchers noted that the genetic sequences of the samples indicated that they derived from the original, Wuhan strain, suggesting that the virus was in circulation around the globe many months earlier than is widely believed.

Source: Y. Rabinovitz – Arutz Sheva

US finally admits Ukraine bombs Zaporizhzhias nuclear power plant

Zaporizhzhia is a city in Ukraine that is in Russian-controlled territory, and Ukraine’s strategy is to destroy the ability of the plant to function, so that areas controlled by Russia will no longer be able to benefit from that plant’s electrical-power output. The United States Government helped Ukraine’s Government to come up with this plan, according to the New York Times.

This information was buried by the Times, 85% of the way down a 1,600-word news-report they published on September 13th, titled “The Critical Moment Behind Ukraine’s Rapid Advance”, in which it stated that,

• “Eventually, Ukrainian officials believe their long-term success requires progress on the original goals in the discarded strategy, including recapturing the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, cutting off Russian forces in Mariupol and pushing Russian forces in Kherson back across the Dnipro River, American officials said.”
• When IAEA inspectors arrived at that plant on September 1st, after a lengthy period of trying to get there to inspect it but which was blocked by Ukraine’s Government, and the IAEA started delivering reports regarding what they were finding at the plant, no mention has, as-of yet, been made concerning which of the two warring sides has been firing those bombs into the plant.

Even when the IAEA headlined on September 9th “Director General’s Statement on Serious Situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant”, and reported that the plant’s ability to operate “has been destroyed by shelling of the switchyard at the city’s thermal power plant, leading to a complete power black-out in” the entire region, and that “This is completely unacceptable. It cannot stand.”, and closed by saying they “urgently call for the immediate cessation of all shelling in the entire area,” no mention was made as to which of the two sides was shooting into the plant in order to disable it, and which of the two sides was firing out from the plant in order to protect it against that incoming fire.

• Previously known was only that the city of Zaporizhzhia has been and is under Russian control ever since March 4th. Consequently, all news-media and reporters have known that (since Russia was inside and Ukraine was outside) Russia has been defending the plant and Ukraine has been attacking it, but until “American officials” let slip, in this news-report, the fact that this has indeed been the case there, no Western news-medium has previously published this fact — not even buried it in a news-report.
• So, although nothing in this regard may yet be considered to be official, or neutral, or free of fear or of actual intent to lie, there finally is, at the very least, buried in that news-report from the New York Times, a statement that is sourced to “American officials,” asserting that this is the case, and the Times also lets slip there that this “shelling” of that plant is an important part of the joint U.S.-Ukraine master-plan to defeat Russia in Ukraine.

It is part of the same master-plan, which the U.S. Government recommended to Ukraine’s Government, and which also included the recent successful retaking by Ukraine of Russian-controlled land near the major Ukrainian city of Kharkov, which city’s recapture by Ukraine is also included in the master-plan.

Both operations — the shelling of the nuclear power plant, and the recapture of that land near Kharkov — were parts of that master-plan, according to the New York Times.

The Times report asserts that

• Long reluctant to share details of their plans, the Ukrainian commanders started opening up more to American and British intelligence officials and seeking advice. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to Mr. Zelensky, spoke multiple times about the planning for the counteroffensive, according to a senior administration official. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior Ukrainian military leaders regularly discussed intelligence and military support.
• And in Kyiv, Ukrainian and British military officials continued working together while the new American defense attaché, Brig. Gen. Garrick Harmon, began having daily sessions with Ukraine’s top officers.

Source: Eric Zuess – SOUTHFRONT

Listen: Привет Сестрёнка – Hello Sister (Don’t tell mom I’m in Afghan)

Song by the group “Ребята с нашего двора” (“Guys from our yard”)

Песня группы “Ребята с нашего двора”

“Don’t tell mom I’m in Afghan” refers to the common practice that soldiers sent to Afghanistan would tell their mothers they were being stationed somewhere else so that they would not worry. In this song, a soldier writes a letter to her little sister saying he is in Afghanistan and to not tell their mother.