The Baltic Job

The Wall Street Journal reveals (perhaps!) “The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage” (but perhaps not).

In the morning of September 26, 2022, three explosions on the bed of the Baltic Sea breached three of the four Nord Stream pipelines connecting Russia and Germany. What had been designed as the principal conduit for transporting natural gas to German homes and factories instantly became an inoperable wreck discharging millions of cubic feet of gas into the deep.

Almost everyone’s immediate assumption was that Nord Stream had been sabotaged. But by whom? Veteran anti-American fabulist Seymour Hersh unrolled a tale, professedly based on a single unnamed “whistle blower”, of a vast conspiracy plotted by Joe Biden himself, “How America took out the Nord Stream Pipeline”. Others speculated that Vladimir Putin had cut the pipelines to punish Germany for supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion that began the previous February. (The punishment was inflicted on Russia, too. It lost hundreds of millions of euros of future gas sales, but it’s easy to envision a masochistic streak in Tsar Vladimir.) The Ukrainians unsurprisingly came under suspicion, as did extremist environmental groups that abominate the use of natural gas to improve human lives.

Last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal purports to unravel the mystery, and the tale that it tells sounds much like a B grade movie scenario. It starts shortly after the Russian invasion.

Last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal purports to unravel the mystery, and the tale that it tells sounds much like a B grade movie scenario.¹ It starts shortly after the Russian invasion.

In May of 2022, a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen had gathered to toast their country’s remarkable success in halting the Russian invasion. Buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor, somebody suggested a radical next step: destroying Nord Stream.

After all, the twin natural-gas pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe were providing billions to the Kremlin war machine. What better way to make Vladimir Putin pay for his aggression?

Unlike most ideas conceived in taverns, this one didn’t vanish after the concocters slept off their inebriation.

Following the May 2022 pact between the businessmen and the military officers, it was agreed that the former would finance and help execute the project, because the army had no funds and was increasingly relying on foreign financing as it pushed back against the onslaught of its gargantuan neighbor. A sitting general with experience in special operations would oversee the mission, which one participant described as a “public-private partnership.” He would report directly to the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, the four-star Gen. Zaluzhniy.

President Zelensky approved the plan. “All arrangements were made verbally, leaving no paper trail.”

The general tasked with commanding the operation enlisted some of Ukraine’s top special-operations officers with experience in orchestrating high-risk clandestine missions against Russia to help coordinate the attack.

One of them was Roman Chervinsky, a decorated colonel who previously served in Ukraine’s main security and intelligence service, the SBU.²

The original plan was to carry out the operation in late June, but the Ukrainians somehow aroused the suspicions of Dutch military intelligence, which “told the CIA that a Ukrainian sabotage team was looking to rent a yacht on the Baltic coastline and use a team of divers to plant explosives along the four pipes of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines”. The CIA warned President Zelensky against the plan. He withdrew his approval.

The mission went ahead nonetheless, with some modifications in detail (a different military commander and a new port of departure). Later, after the pipelines were destroyed and the Ukrainian president demanded to know why his orders had been disobeyed, “Zaluzhniy told Zelensky that the sabotage team, once dispatched, went incommunicado and couldn't be called off because any contact with them could compromise the operation.”³

In September 2022, the plotters rented a 50-foot leisure yacht called Andromeda in Germany’s Baltic port town of Rostock. The boat was leased with the help of a Polish travel agency that was set up by Ukrainian intelligence as a cover for financial transactions nearly a decade ago.

One crew member, a military officer on active duty who was fighting in the war, was a seasoned skipper, and four were experienced deep-sea divers. The crew included civilians, one of whom was a woman in her 30s who had trained privately as a diver. She was handpicked for her skills⁴ but also to lend more plausibility to the crew’s disguise as friends on holiday.

The skipper took a short leave from his unit, which had been fighting on the front in the southeast of Ukraine, and his commander was kept in the dark.

On September 7th, Andromeda sailed from Rostock, Germany.

Inclement weather forced the crew to make an unplanned stop in the Swedish port of Sandhamn. One diver accidentally dropped an explosive device to the bottom of the sea. The crew briefly discussed whether to abort the operation due to the bad weather but the storm soon subsided.

Witnesses on other yachts moored in Sandhamn noted that the Andromeda was the only boat with a small Ukrainian flag hoisted on its mast.

After departing Sandhamn, Andromeda crossed the short distance to the location of the two older pipelines (“Nord Stream 1”), which had been operating for several years, though they were at that moment merely holding gas rather than pumping it. Germany had suspended purchases after the invasion of Ukraine.

The four divers worked in pairs. Operating in pitch-dark, icy waters, they handled a powerful explosive known as HMX that was wired to timer-controlled detonators. A small amount of the light explosive would be sufficient to rip open the high-pressure pipes.

Spending 20 minutes at that depth requires around three hours of decompression, and the person must then refrain from diving for at least 24 hours or risk serious injury.

Having laid the first explosives, set to go off on September 26th, Andromeda proceeded south to a Polish port. What it did there is mysterious but attracted unwelcome attention.

A port official suspicious of the yacht’s crew alerted police. Poland’s border guard checked the identification of the crew, who produced passports from European Union members. They were allowed to continue sailing north.

After that possibly close shave, the ship left Poland on September 19th. The crew planted explosives on one of the two newer “Nord Stream 2” pipelines (not both, because a mine had been lost in Sandhamn) and on the 23rd returned to Rostock. The crew evidently were in a hurry to get back home. German police found clues when they searched Andromeda in January 2023.

In rushing to leave Germany, the sabotage crew neglected to wash the Andromeda, allowing German detectives to find traces of explosives, fingerprints and DNA samples of the crew.

By then, however, the mission was accomplished.

A pretty good scenario, I would say: a daring mission undertaken from patriotic motives in defiance of timid authorities, setbacks along the way, difficult tasks accomplished in a dangerous environment, even a feminine interest.

But did it really happen? There are a few oddities in the story.

The mission was surprisingly simple to carry out. When intelligence agencies began to suspect Ukrainian involvement –

The CIA and other allies had questions over whether Ukraine had the capacity to carry out such an attack, which would require placing explosive charges deep beneath the Baltic Sea. Some European governments still struggle to believe that Ukraine, using a single 50-foot yacht, was able to do so.

If, indeed, only a single yacht and a crew of six were needed, one wonders why the plan drawn up earlier by the Ukrainian military was impractically complex and costly. It was not for lack of pertinent expertise:

Ukraine has a long history of training top civilian and military divers. A naval base on the Crimean Peninsula in the past trained deep-sea divers for the purposes of sabotage and demining. It also kept combat dolphins trained to attack enemy divers and blow up ships, according to two senior Ukrainian officers. The base was taken over by Russia after it occupied Crimea, and some of its staff moved elsewhere in Ukraine.

The explosives said to have been recovered by the German police also raise a question. I am no expert on underwater detonation, but wouldn’t the HMX have been encased in a waterproof container with the timer and detonator? How would traces of the explosive have leaked out of the mine and into the ship?

And, a small but perhaps noteworthy anomaly, is Andromeda’s Ukrainian flag. Flying it while on a sabotage mission on behalf of Ukraine sounds like rash bravado.

One must bear in mind, too, that we are seeing events through a glass very darkly. The Wall Street Journal describes its sources thus:

The Journal spoke to four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot. All of them said the pipelines were a legitimate target in Ukraine’s war of defense against Russia.

Portions of their account were corroborated by a nearly two-year German police investigation into the attack, which has obtained evidence including email, mobile and satellite phones communications, as well as fingerprints and DNA samples from the alleged sabotage team. The Germany inquiry hasn’t directly linked President Zelensky to the clandestine operation.

So far as I can tell, the German investigators have not yet made their findings public. It is doubtful, to say the least, that they handed over nonpublic material to an American newspaper. The entire account rests, then, on anonymous sources. The reader does not know –

• whether the sources were in a position to learn what they relate,

• whether their information is first hand, hearsay or inference,

• why they are making their disclosures, or

• whether they have motives for shading, concealing or falsifying pertinent facts.

The Wall Street Journal no doubt trusts its informants, but you and I have no way to evaluate them directly. We are called on to exercise prudent skepticism. An obvious question is, why would “four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials” disclose information that could redound disastrously against their country at a time when its survival is threatened? It would be one thing for a Ukrainian official to recall in his memoirs a couple of decades hence how he played a role in a daring wartime mission. It is another to blab about it when disclosure could severely damage relations with Germany, hitherto Ukraine’s most generous European benefactor, or even with its absolutely crucial ally, the United States.

Obscure as the Ukrainian tattletales’ motives may be, one might think that the German investigation buttresses their account. But does it? Aside from the fact that the WSJ may have only partial or inaccurate knowledge of what the investigators have found, there is a darker possibility.

The WSJ states that Poland has not cooperated with the Germans. It leaves the reasons dangling, but the Daily Scroll (a substack of the online magazine Tablet) offers a hint:

American authorities have aided the German probe, turning over the contents of one of the Ukrainian suspect’s Gmail accounts to German authorities, but the Poles have refused to cooperate, ignoring German arrest warrants and destroying CCTV footage of the port from which the saboteurs embarked on their mission. According to reporting in the German press, relayed in a Thursday article in Eurointelligence, “the Polish intelligence services mistrust the BND [German intelligence service],” which has a reputation for being penetrated by the Russians. [emphasis added]

Russia’s preferred hypothesis is that the United States sabotaged Nord Stream. I assume that Seymour Hersh’s claims to that effect derive from the SVR (the Russian counterpart to the CIA), if not from his own imagination. Hersh and other peddlers of that calumny have been widely disbelieved. Perhaps the Russians see Ukrainian guilt as a more believable fallback. If the SVR has agents in German intelligence, the evidence of Ukrainian involvement may have been manufactured in whole or in part.

What about the Ukrainian informants? Ukraine has shown remarkable resilience in the face of the Russian onslaught, yet the war has now dragged on for thirty months and counting. It would be astonishing if no one in the Ukrainian government longed for some kind of negotiated peace.

Here is an alternative cinematic scenario: Some senior Ukrainian defense and security officials have lost the will to fight on. They have concluded that Kiev must make peace on any terms and will be moved to do so only if its foreign backing collapses. Their disillusionment reaches the ears of the SVR. SVR agents in the BND ply them with “evidence” that the Nord Stream sabotage was carried out by fanatics among their countrymen. They point to “Roman Chervinsky, a decorated colonel who previously served in Ukraine’s main security and intelligence service” as a key conspirator. The colonel is now in legal jeopardy in Ukraine. Someone makes him an offer: Confirm to a foreign reporter the accuracy of the account that we have devised, and your troubles will vanish. The reporter will, naturally, deny that you told him anything. Quite coincidentally, Chervinsky is let out of prison not long before the article inculpating Ukraine is published.

That hypothesis fits the facts that are known at this point. Its weaknesses are, first, that many facts are not known and, second, that other hypotheses fit them just as snugly.

Let us turn finally to that always pertinent query, cui bono? Who benefits from linking Ukraine to the destruction of Nord Stream? Eurointelligence (no links available to individual items; scroll to 19 August) offers this assessment:

The Wall Street Journal story last week was the first cohesive, yet still incomplete, account of what has happened. It is already starting to play into German politics. Sahra Wagenknecht has elevated German policy on Ukraine to her main campaign theme in the three eastern German elections next month. She has also shifted her previous stance on the AfD. She no longer rules out the possibility of supporting AfD legislation, as she put it, should this situation arise in one of three state parliaments. At the same time, she erected a political firewall against all parties that support US missiles on German soil. She now accuses Ukraine of terrorism. If she gets the numbers that polls are currently suggesting, we would expect her message to have a profound effect on German politics. The polls are difficult to read. Her party is new. We should prepare for results that lie well outside the error margins of opinion polling. But she is on course to displace the Left Party as the main political force to the left of the SPD. As Germany approaches a federal election next year, we would expect Ukraine to become a major campaign theme.

Fraulein Wagenknecht heads the “Reason and Fairness Party” (German initials “BSW”), which broke away last January from Die Linke, the de facto continuation of the Communist Party, and now holds six seats in the European Parliament. Its platform combines socialism with nationalism, differing from a certain earlier national socialist party in its self-identification with the Left rather than the Right. Its abrupt rise to prominence, which will certainly be boosted by belief in the Wall Street Journal’s revelations, is a gift to Vladimir Putin. Already, Germany’s coalition government has reportedly decided to halt new military aid to Ukraine.

That may be a gift that Putin gave to himself.

1. The account below also draws on three earlier Wall Street Journal articles: “Who Blew Up Nord Stream? Investigators Focus on Six Mysterious Passengers on a Yacht” (March 16, 2023); “Nord Stream Sabotage Probe Turns to Clues Inside Poland” (June 10, 2023) and “U.S. Warned Ukraine Not to Attack Nord Stream” (June 14, 2023). For the sake of narrative flow, quotations in this post mostly omit repetitious “according to such and such a source” insertions.

2. Colonel Chervinsky is the only participant in the alleged operation identified by name. We are also told that he “is currently on trial in Ukraine for unrelated charges. In July, he was released on bail after over a year in detention.” The reporters state that he is not one of their sources. One senses something peculiar here, though it is hard to pin down what it is. Later in this post, I offer a (very speculative) hypothesis.

3. This detail is patently inconsistent with the rest of the story. The saboteurs are said to have started their voyage on September 7, 2022. President Zelensky’s order to cancel it must have been issued no later than the original late June target date.

4. In other words, not a DEI hire.