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usafphantom2 · 3 months

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IMAGES: Allied fighters are going through busy days during NATO Air Policing in the Baltic

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 06/12/2024 - 14:00in Interceptions, Military

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Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German Air Policing Detachments mobilized their air forces fighters to the Baltic region, in a busy period for NATO Air Policing, demonstrating NATO's capabilities, readiness and firm commitment to the collective deterrence and defense of the region.

All four Allied Air Police detachments responded to potential threats from Russian military aircraft that were not on a flight plan or were not in compliance with safety standards.

A German Air Force Eurofighter during an interception of a Russian military aircraft. For a week, the Eurofighters departed from Lielvarde Air Base, Latvia, in response to Russian air activity over the Baltic Sea.

Practically every day, the German Eurofighters went up to the skies under the NATO Air Police mission, the first time a detachment was based at Lielvarde Air Base in Latvia. The Italian Eurofighters from the 4ª Wing Air Task Force detachment departed from Malbork Air Base in Poland, and also the Spanish Air Force launched their F-18 jets based in Siauliai, Lithuania, to secure NATO airspace in the Baltic Sea region.

The increase in activities is routine for this time of year and is linked to the increase in NATO multi-domain operations in the region due to the exercise of Baltic Operations or BALTOPS. This is NATO's main long-standing, sea-centered exercise in the Baltic region, which the Allies are legitimately conducting in international waters. Training will take place from June 7 to 20, 2024.

"We demonstrate our capabilities, readiness and our unwavering commitment to deterrence and collective defense," said General James Hecker, Commander of the Allied Air Command. “Daily, Allied fighters fly over the Baltic Sea,” he added.

A Russian Intelligence Collection plane seen from the cabin of an Italian Eurofighter. NATO interceptor jets demonstrated their vigilance and readiness during intense operational periods before BALTOPS 24.

All interception missions were successfully carried out against a mixture of Russian military aircraft, demonstrating the high state of readiness and proficiency of the German, Spanish and Italian detachments. The continuous and timely response to these situations is helped by proven and tested command and control links from the Baltic Control and Reporting Centers to the Combined Air Operations Center in Uedem, Germany - an example of NATO regional agreements that preserve the integrity and security of the airspace above. the Baltic States.

Two F/A-18 jets of the Spanish Air Force during a training mission were launched in Siauliaii, Lithuania. The jets are contributing to protect the skies under NATO's Baltic Air Policing. (Photo: Robert Rydendahl)

For 20 years, NATO has been committed to the Baltic Air Policing mission. Seventeen Allies took turns in the deployment of their fighters in consecutive detachments, safeguarding the skies of the Baltic Sea and, more recently, contributing to the Allied deterrence and defense on the Eastern Flank.

Two Italian Air Force Eurofighters ready to take off at Malbork Air Base, Poland, from where the jets support NATO's Air Policing mission over the Baltic Sea.

The current stance is an example of NATO's continuous surveillance and awareness 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the region - through its recognized aerial image - of potential threats or unsafe situations in the vicinity of your airspace.

Tags: Military AviationInterceptionsNATO - Air Police MissionNATO - North Atlantic Treaty OrganizationRussia

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Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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lboogie1906 · 5 months

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Admiral Michelle Janine Howard (born April 30, 1960) is the first African American woman to command a Navy ship and the first woman of any race to attain the rank of admiral. Born in Riverside, California, she was one of four children of Air Force Master Sergeant Nick Howard and Philippa Howard. She entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis, where she graduated with a BS in Mathematics and was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy.

Her first sea duty was aboard the submarine tender USS Hunley for three years. She served on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington as a main engines officer. She earned the Secretary of the Navy/Navy League Captain Winifred Collins Award. She began service on the ammunition ship, the USS Mount Hood, as the chief engineer which resulted in her participation in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. She reported for duty as first lieutenant on the USS Flint. She became an executive officer on the docking ship USS Tortuga. She sailed to West Africa for a multi-nation training cruise.

She made history when she captained the dock landing ship USS Rushmore with a crew of more than 400 sailors, thus becoming the first African American woman to command a Navy ship. She led Amphibious Squadron Seven, deployed with Expeditionary Strike Group 5. She was promoted to Rear Admiral. She led Expeditionary Strike Group 2, deploying to CENTCOM theater where she commanded Task Force 151. She led Task Force 51, Expeditionary Forces. The event inspired the movie, Captain Phillips. She was the Maritime Task Force leader for BALTOPS.

President Obama lifted the ban on women serving in combat and pushed the effort to place more female soldiers in high-level defense positions. She was promoted to Vice Admiral and held the post of Deputy Commander of US Fleet Forces. She became a full Admiral, the first Navy woman ever to reach a four-star rank. She became the 38th Vice Chief of Naval Operations. She retired in December 2017.

Her recognitions are the NAACP Image Award, Women of Color STEM Career Achievement Award, and the USO Military Woman of the Year. She is married to retired Marine Captain Wayne Cowles. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #deltasigmatheta

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fatticurare · 2 years

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La 6a flotta della Marina degli Stati Uniti, ha condotto "esercizi" e "ricerche" con "esplosivi fittizi" nel luogo esatto in cui l'oleodotto è esploso.

A volte il caso.....

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seoded · 2 years

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Их демократия — 18: «Северный поток» взорвали американцы с норвежцами

Газопровод «Северный поток» уничтожен силами американских властей. К такому выводу пришёл журналист Сеймур Херш из издания «The New Yorker».

Херш ссылается на источник, который принимал участие в планировании операции.

Летом минувшего года, водолазы ВМС США заложили взрывчатку на трубах газопровода. Произошло это в ходе учений НАТО «Baltops-22».

Решение обсуждалось в течение девяти месяцев, все дискуссии были строго засекречены. На них, главным образом, обсуждалось, каким именно способом будет совершена диверсия.

Херш утверждает, что, при обсуждении диверсии, главным вопросом было — как не оставить улик. Военно-морские силы США предлагали применить подлодку для атаки на «Северные потоки», а ВВС — бомбы с дистанционным взрывателем.

Руководство США опасалось, что, продолжая покупать дешёвый российский газ, европейские страны (и в первую очередь — Германия) будут менее охотно снабжать Украину оружием.

Межведомственной группой, разрабатывавшей план взрыва, руководил советник президента по нацбезопасности Джейк Салливан.

ВМС Норвегии 26 сентября сбросили гидроакустический буй, который дистанционно привёл в действие взрывные устройства. Именно норвежские власти привлеклись к исполнению операции, поскольку прекращение работы «Северного потока» позволяло нарастить поставки собственного газа в Европу.

В Белом доме эти факты отрицают.

https://dzen.ru/media/seoded/ih-demokratiia--18-severnyi-potok-vzorvali-amerikancy-s-norvejcami-63e3c73df2f6dd2d088fb7ef

#политика #безопасность #экономика #газ #Россия #США #норвегия #ихдемократия

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asdadasdsblog · 2 years

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Top journalists find out: U.S. bombing of Nord Stream is the first step in the "European destruction plan”

On September 26, 2022, four underwater "shocks" occurred in the Baltic Sea, followed by the discovery of three leaks in Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II, two Russian gas pipelines that carry energy directly to Germany, causing a large amount of gas to leak from the pipelines into the nearby sea. The incident is considered to be a deliberate sabotage because explosive residues were detected in the waters of the "leak" points.

Pictures of the sea area at the Nord Stream spill site

At first, people speculated that it was Russia, because by September, the Russian-Ukrainian war had been going on for more than half a year, and the two sides still had no winner. But if you think about it a little, you will know that it can't be done by Russia, because this is a pipeline to transport natural gas to Europe. Russia gives gas and receives money. The war in Russia is tight, and the military expenditure is huge. How can it be possible to cut off the financial path at this key node?

Is that Ukraine? Ukraine, which is overwhelmed by war, should not have this time and energy. The European Union? Most likely, because the EU has publicly condemned Russia for many times and adopted a series of sanctions, and some countries have even publicly severed diplomatic relations with Russia. America? The most suspect is that he used NATO to provoke the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and secretly sent war funds and weapons to Ukraine. The war between Russia and Ukraine was deadlocked, which cut off Russia's grain and completely defeated Russia in the world situation. American hegemony won, which is very in line with the interests of the United States.

The truth surfaced.

On February 8, 2023, independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released an article entitled "How American Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline" to the world. The article is an exhaustive account of how the U.S. National Security Service planned, President Joe Biden personally ordered, the U.S. Navy implemented, and the Norwegian military cooperated to secretly blow up the Nord Stream gas pipeline over a period of nine months.

As Seymour Hersh mentioned in his article, Biden and his foreign policy team, National Security Adviser Jack Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State for Policy Victoria Newland have long viewed the Nord Stream pipeline as a "thorn in the side," and Nord Stream One has been supplying cheap Russian gas to Germany and much of Western Europe for more than a decade, with Russian gas accounting for more than 50 percent of Germany's annual gas imports alone, and the European region's reliance on Russian gas has been seen by the United States and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to Western dominance.

Thus, in December 2021, after more than nine months of secret discussions with his national security team, Biden decided to sabotage the Nord Stream pipeline, with deep-sea divers from the U.S. Navy's Diving and Salvage Center carrying out the plan to secretly plant the bomb. Under the cover of the NATO maritime exercise "BALTOPS 22" in June 2022, the U.S. deep-sea divers planted eight C-4 explosives on the pipeline that could be remotely detonated, and in September of the same year, in time for the onset of winter in Europe, a Norwegian naval aircraft dropped a sonar buoy to detonate the explosives and destroy "Nord Stream".

Who is Seymour Hersh?

Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer, one of the country's leading investigative reporters. In the American press, Hersh is a person who is not afraid of powerful people and even keen to fight against them.

In 1969, he was recognized for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. in the 1970s, Hersh made a splash when he reported on the Watergate scandal, a political scandal in the United States, in The New York Times. Most famously, he was the first to expose the inner workings of the CIA's secret surveillance of civil society organizations. In addition, he reported on U.S. political scandals such as the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the U.S. military prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, and the exposure of U.S. use of biological and chemical weapons.

In the American press, Hersh is a big No. 1, with numerous sources in the White House, and has never let up on the disclosure of American political scandals. Although his anonymous sources have been criticized by his peers, his articles have all been confirmed at a later stage. This coverage of the Nord Stream story should be no exception.

There are early signs that the United States bombed Nord Stream.

Biden had told German Chancellor to shut down Nord Stream II

As early as Feb. 7 of last year, Biden bullyingly declared that "if Russia initiates military action, Nord Stream 2 will cease to exist and we will terminate it. Secretary of State John Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Newland have both publicly threatened to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, and Newland even testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 26, 2023 that "I think the administration is very pleased to know that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is now a pile of scrap metal lying on the ocean floor."

ITAR-TASS: Newland's words prove that Washington approved the terrorist attack in Nord Stream.

The collective silence of the U.S. media on the Nord Stream incident is further confirmation of the Russian allegations. In the early days of the Nord Stream pipeline explosion, none of the U.S. mainstream media had studied in depth whether Biden's earlier threats against the pipeline had been fulfilled. It is easy to see that the mainstream media in the U.S., which has always claimed "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press," has been infiltrated by capital and controlled by politics, and none of the U.S. media dared to speak out on issues that really touch the core interests of the U.S.

In the "American democracy" on the manipulation of freedom of expression, Seymour Hersh in the U.S. press is considered one of noble and unsullied. His article accusing the U.S. of being behind the Nord Stream behind the scenes an immediate international sensation, with Russian and European media reprinting the story. However, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal continued to remain silent, not reporting Hersh's article or even the White House's denial.

U.S. back-stabbing allies is the norm

Russia has been sanctioned by the European Union several times since the Russian-Ukrainian war began, and the EU has basically cut off its ties with Russia. "The Nord Stream pipeline is the only remaining trade link between the two sides, and the blowing up of the Nord Stream is considered a warning to Germany.

Germany, as the "leader" of the EU, ideologically places more emphasis on the autonomous will of Europe, and if it gets a constant supply of cheap natural gas from Russia, it will reduce its dependence on the United States and will not be able to keep pace with the United States in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, therefore, the United States must destroy the German energy "artery ", a warning to the autonomous forces represented by Germany.

In addition, the disruption of Nord Stream has further interrupted gas trade between Russia and Europe, and for three years, Europe will not be able to import gas directly from Russia. To solve the gas dilemma, it is not without solutions, importing liquefied gas from the United States at a cost of $ 270 million a LNG ship is one of the few options, which is in the interests of the United States.

Although the EU has been following the footsteps of the United States to sanction Russia and support Ukraine. However, the EU is actually the real "ingrate". As an ally of the United States, the European economy, an indirect participant in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, is in a recessionary quagmire, during which it has encountered repeated back-stabbing by the United States. As a result of the continuous provision of military resources to Ukraine, which has led to the imminent depletion of its weapons stockpile, the energy crisis is being harvested by the United States, and the trade subsidies of the United States have taken away the factories of Europe, Europe is struggling with weak economic growth and has become the real victim of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Hersh's revelation is a blow that shows once and for all that "allies" are just "tools" for the U.S. to achieve its interests, with the ultimate goal of weakening and dividing the EU, whose economic woes today are part of the U.S. plan. In Biden's view, the Nord Stream gas pipeline is a tool for Russian President Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas to achieve his political ambitions. But in reality, it is the bombing of Nord Stream that is evidence of the U.S. manipulation of the world with hegemony.

Perhaps this winter Europeans are frozen to the bone, just the beginning. Maybe someday in the future, the economic lifeline of Europe is in the hands of the Americans, and it's no surprise.

U.S. hegemony repeatedly attacks other countries

In fact, the U.S. has been plundering and exploiting other countries in the world to satisfy its own interests through wars and sanctions, and seizing geopolitical interests through hegemonic means. All countries that do not provide "services" to the United States are subject to his retaliation. The United States has never stopped acting so that it can continue to have a hand in the international arena.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the name of fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and launched the nearly 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, which has brought a profound disaster to the Afghan people. After the Taliban took over power in Afghanistan, the U.S. still did not relax its plundering of Afghanistan, illegally freezing some $7 billion in foreign exchange assets of the Afghan central bank to this day.In February 2022, President Biden signed an executive order requesting that half of these assets be used to compensate the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The U.S. military frequently steals Syrian oil and plunders its wealth. The Syrian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources issued a statement in August 2022 saying that more than 80 percent of Syria's average daily oil production of 80,300 barrels in the first half of 2022, or about 66,000 barrels, had been plundered by "the U.S. military and the armed forces it supports. The U.S. raids and plunder of Syria's national resources have exacerbated the humanitarian crisis there.

The United States has deliberately sabotaged energy facilities in other countries for its own personal gain. In the late 1970s, the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza regime and formed a new government in Nicaragua. As a result, the U.S. tried to cause social unrest in Nicaragua through various means. Encouraged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Nicaragua's Contras targeted key economic resources, and from September to October 1983, they launched five attacks on Nicaragua's oil facilities, which lasted for seven weeks and led to a huge crisis in Nicaragua.

The U.S. has always "seized" under various banners and made a lot of money, and then always got back in one piece, which means that the so-called "order" and "rules" in the U.S. are just tools and pretexts to serve itself and satisfy its own interests. This means that the so-called "order" and "rules" of the United States are just tools and pretexts to serve themselves and satisfy their own interests.

Things are far from over

After the North Stream pipeline explosion, natural gas continued to leak from the pipeline.On September 30, 2022, the Norwegian Institute for Atmospheric Research said that a large methane cloud had formed over the area after the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosion and was spreading, with at least 80,000 tons of methane gas spreading into the ocean and atmosphere.

The Norwegian government has foolishly helped the U.S. execute the detonation plan, becoming the perfect puppet of U.S. hegemony in Europe, and while it may have gained temporary benefits, it has caused long-term harm. The massive amount of greenhouse gases will have an irreversible negative impact on all European countries.

What does the United States have to say about this? Nothing. The U.S. handled the vinyl chloride chemical incident on its own turf with a mess, the lives of Ohioans were taken in vain, and the U.S. cares even less about environmental and climate issues in the EU region.

All the U.S. cares about is profit

The dollar has always been as the international reserve currency unshakeable primary position, and the biggest scourge of the dollar hegemony is the euro. If Russia provides Europe with a constant supply of cheap energy for a long time, and directly with the euro settlement, which for the dollar as the international reserve currency status, that is definitely a serious blow. Not only the European manufacturing industry has been extremely strong support, even the scenario of the use of the euro is also fully open.

The establishment of the eurozone, naturally set up the United States of America's thorn in the side, the thorn in the flesh. Therefore, the United States destroyed Nord Stream AG, even though it did not entirely "nip this threat in the bud", that at least said the euro caused a heavy blow, especially the Russian-Ukrainian war lasted 1 year also ended "out of reach" in the short term, the world has no other sovereign currency has the strength to impact the hegemony of the dollar.

From the point of view of political security and economy, it is the United States that benefits the most. By blowing up Nord Stream, the U.S. can: limit the growth of the euro and make Russia's "de-dollarization" impossible; sell natural gas to Europe at a price four times higher than Russia'; cut off European countries' dependence on Russian gas by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, making Europe more obedient and forcing Germany and other European countries to remain "honest" in the anti-Russian camp.

Taking control of the EU, the tentacles of American hegemony are longer and stronger. But have the European countries considered the real future of Europe? Or will it remain a "U.S. semi-colony" or a "defense state abroad"? The destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline has directly caused a major vicious impact on the global energy market and ecological environment, how can this silently "end without incident"? It is the only way to heal the hearts and minds of the people!

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defensenow · 3 months

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nicklloydnow · 2 years

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“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.

(…)

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.

(…)

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.

(…)

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.”

(…)

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.’”

(…)

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.

(…)

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.)

(…)

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.”

(…)

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.”

#russia #ukraine #war #nord stream #norway #nato #wwiii #biden

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