Blast from the past: Why the Nord Stream sabotage may yet have its day of reckoning

By Updates

August 29, 2024

Updates

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Economic hardship in Europe and military humiliation in Ukraine mean this pivotal event won’t stay on the figurative sea floor forever

As we approach the second anniversary of the Nord Stream pipeline bombing, nothing seems certain about one of the most significant acts of industrial sabotage in history. 

For nearly two years, a stream of constantly shifting narratives never fully fleshed out or reconciled with each other has given the whole affair the feel of a magiclantern show illuminated by flickering torchlight.

However, earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal ventured forth with a long article purporting to, for the first time, tell the “outlines of the real story” of what happened to the one-time conduit for 35% of the Russian gas consumed by Europe. 

What was clearly an attempt at a definitive semi-official version of the unsolved mystery will hardly need more than a new file name before being sent off to Hollywood as a script. We meet a quixotic group of Ukrainian military officers and businessmen who, “buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor,” concoct a scheme to destroy the pipeline on a shoestring budget. A small yacht is rented and a six-member crew assembled, one of whom was a woman, whose presence was intended to create the impression that the group was just a gathering of friends. 

Vladimir Zelensky allegedly approved the operation initially before trying to nix it on the advice of the the CIA, which had gotten wind of it. But, alas, the team had already gone incommunicado and the daring scheme was not to be stopped.  

The mix of cinematic detail, quotable lines, and careful narrative crafting gives the article the feel of what is called a ‘limited hangout’ – a view that I am not the first to suggest. This piece of spy jargon refers to a strategy of volunteering a self-contained and sensational, but relatively harmless, story, elements of which may be true, in order to conceal something more damaging. Such a technique is typically employed when it is no longer possible to sustain an entirely phony story.

Nevertheless, the piece has mostly landed with a dead thud. Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the first and only independent forensic investigation at the sites of the blasts, recently gave an interview to Italian journalist Roberto Vivaldelli in which he said: “This WSJ article, as well as all previous similar story-telling pieces from major American newspapers on the subject, has a clear mission to whitewash the US and other Western nations.”

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He goes on to say: “The more I look into this, the more I feel that the Nord Stream attack is just a part of a bigger scheme to cut off Russia from Europe,” adding that “the large number of institutions which participated in this scheme makes the ‘drunken Ukrainians’ story look embarrassing.”

It seems clear enough that when the truth does eventually come out, it will likely be as sordid as it is mundane, entirely unfit for Hollywood, deeply embarrassing to the West, and devoid of alcohol. And it’s extremely hard to imagine that the road to ultimate culpability doesn’t end in Washington. We may well end up not far from where veteran journalist Seymour Hersch pointed with his report claiming that the sabotage was a CIA operation carried out by US Navy divers.

But there’s another angle here that can be pursued. More interesting than ‘who did it’ is to ask ‘how did they know they could’? In other words, when a brazen crime is committed and the perpetrator gets off scot-free, the question isn’t necessary ‘how did he get away with it?’, but ‘how did he know he would get away with it?’ A crime is one thing, but the apparent confidence in advance that it will entail no consequences is a matter of a much larger magnitude. The latter points to deeper forces operating within a society or even a civilization.

To underscore just how brazen this act was, consider this. The pipeline was part-European-owned and terminates in Germany, and the attack occurred in Danish territorial waters. Therefore, what we have effectively amounts to aggression against two NATO countries and, as per Article 5 of the bloc’s treaty, an act of war against NATO as a whole. A German official even admitted as much, telling the WSJ that “an attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO.”

And consider this in light of how touchy we know NATO to be about the least aggression on its territory – real or imagined. When an errant Ukrainian air defense missile landed in a Polish village in November of 2022, the incident was treated with the utmost seriousness. Poland requested a NATO meeting the following day on the basis of Article 4 – the bloc’s consultation clause that precedes the vaunted Article 5. So anyone carrying out what is unambiguously classified under international law as an act of war against NATO certainly does so at his own very substantial risk.

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But in this case, there doesn’t seem to have been any risk, and the perpetrators seem to have known that. It is this sense of impunity that is more telling than the act itself. It means that it was well understood in the corridors of true Western power – not the beer-drenched bar stools of Ukraine – that a high level of discipline within the trans-Atlantic bloc could be maintained, and that the European countries affected would do exactly what they have done – go to any length not to implicate their powerful ally.

As a corollary to that, the ability to manage narratives in the media must have been seen as nearly absolute, not only in the US but across Europe. The perpetrators must have been confident that no major mainstream outlet would cut loose with a non-state-approved investigation. And indeed none have. This is as good evidence as any that the Western mainstream media, all pretentious claims to the contrary notwithstanding, has come to perform a role akin to a public-relations department for their various governments.

All of this may seem self-evident, and the perpetrators of the sabotage certainly calculated correctly that they could count on the type of discipline described above. But this begs a deeper question – what exactly is at the root of this capitulation to the American-supplied narrative across the myriad of European governments, institutions, think tanks, and media? Washington can perhaps count on a certain amount of domestic loyalty, but why Europe? This is a phenomenon that cannot be sufficiently explained by the standard appeals to American military power or economic might – or whatever threats or blackmail Washington can muster. This is particularly the case given that Europe has largely gone against its economic interests in confronting Russia.

In contemplating Europe’s inability to think critically about its own policies or carve out its own path separate from the US, the excellent Swedish analyst Malcom Kyeyune has identified a phenomenon that he calls “Europe’s mental deindustrialization.”

While physical deindustrialization – the shutting down of factories, laying off of workers, and decay of productive capacities – is still underway, Kyeyune sees this mental deindustrialization as a fait accompli. The result is “a growing intellectual and cultural dependence on a superpower that is itself in a state of decadence.”