By Diego Ramos / Original to ScheerPost
This is a breaking story and will be updated periodically.
The Biden administration knew about the plot to sabotage the Nord Stream pipeline three months before the attack occurred, reports The Washington Post. The details come from a report given to the CIA by a European intelligence service in June 2022, which placed a team of six divers under the leadership of Gen. Valery Zaluzhny—Ukraine’s highest ranking military officer—at the center of the plan devised to destroy the natural gas pipeline. One of the divers has also been suspected of serving in the Ukrainian military.
The Post obtained the intelligence report through a friend of Discord leaker and Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. The document given to the Post was verified by officials in multiple countries. An individual source in Ukraine notified the European intelligence service, which the Post refused to disclose the name of, and provided key details including, “numbers of operatives and methods of attack…”
“[T]he CIA shared the report with Germany and other European countries last June,” reads the report, adding that “German intelligence personnel briefed lawmakers in Berlin… before they left for their summer break…” German law enforcement had also been investigating the bombing and had recently uncovered evidence that resembles the intelligence report, the Post says.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
The intelligence also claims that despite the saboteurs reporting directly to Ukraine’s top general Zaluzhny, President Volodymyr Zelensky was purposefully left out in the name of retaining Western support:
Keeping Zelensky out of the loop would have given the Ukrainian leader a plausible way to deny involvement in an audacious attack on civilian infrastructure that could ignite public outrage and jeopardize Western support for Ukraine — particularly in Germany, which before the war got half its natural gas from Russia and had long championed the Nord Stream project in the face of opposition from other European allies.
According to the Post report, “European officials in several countries have quietly suggested that Ukraine was behind the attack but have resisted publicly saying so over fears that blaming Kyiv could fracture the alliance against Russia.”
Even officials in the Biden administration itself, privately admit that there is no evidence that points to Russia as responsible for the bombing. Almost two weeks ago, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the ambassadors of Germany, Sweden and Denmark over the “complete lack of results” of the investigation into the sabotage.
Despite having this prior knowledge on the bombing, officials in the Biden administration and mainstream media outlets immediately casted blame on Russia. Matt Orfalea of Racket News created a seven minute compilation of Western media pundits and US politicians naming Russia as a culprit:
Orfalea also includes statements from Biden himself, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, Senator Ted Cruz, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others threatening the pipeline project.
The German government, despite being told by the CIA about the plot, did nothing to prepare its citizenry for a winter without cheaper Russian gas. Seymour Hersh, in a follow up report to his original piece on the sabotage, spoke with energy expert Sarah Miller who explained the impact of the Nord Stream’s demise:
“The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September led to a further surge of natural gas prices that were already six or more times pre-crisis levels,” she said. “Nord Stream was blown up in late September. German gas imports peaked a month later, in October, at 10 times pre-crisis levels. Electricity prices across Europe were pulled up, and governments spent as much as 800 billion euros, by some estimates, shielding households and businesses from the impact.
The U.S. has funded Ukraine with almost $40 billion in security assistance yet does not reveal to the public how that money is used to support an army with a general willing to engage in acts of terrorism and destroy critical civilian infrastructure.
Diego Ramos
Diego Ramos, ScheerPost managing editor and New York bureau chief, is a journalist from Queens, NY. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and was managing editor of Annenberg News at USC. He’s covered and researched myriad topics including war, politics, psychedelic research and sports.
ScheerPost.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. CC-BY-NC-ND only applies to ORIGINAL ScheerPost content.