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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone. I'm Paul Starabin and welcome to America and the New Books Network. My guest today is Bojan Panchevsky. He is the chief European political correspondent of the Wall Street Journal and he's written a book, the Nord Stream, the Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World. It's a real page turner. I read every page of it and sped along. And I highly recommend it to anyone with even the smallest interest in this subject and in the broader interest of Ukraine and Russia in this ongoing war. So welcome to America and beyond. Boljan.
- [00:49]
B
Hi, Paul, thanks for having me.
- [00:51]
A
It's a pleasure. Why don't you set the story up for us in terms of sort of a summary of what this book is about and what it shows.
- [01:07]
B
So the book at the core of the book is the operation to destroy the pipelines, the pipeline system known as Nord Stream. It was the world's biggest offshore pipeline system that carried natural gas from Russia to Germany directly under the Baltic Sea. And so I tell the story of the people who carried out that operation and their motives, as well as the detectives who are hunting them, the investigators from Germany who are kind of hunting them. And I tell the story of their work and their motives. And these are all obviously real people. And the story is very much an ongoing story. But beyond that, I think the story also, I mean, I tell the story of the geopolitics that led to the conflict in Ukraine and that led to the explosions of the pipeline. The background of the past maybe 20 years of the relationship between Moscow and Western capitals, Western European capitals in particular and the United States, the relationship between America and Russia, the misunderstandings and the kind of people talking past each other during these years and you know, the whole context that actually created, created the conditions for what is happening at the moment.
- [02:38]
A
And we're going to explore all of that, remind us when this explosion took place.
- [02:45]
B
So the Nord Stream system exploded on 26th September 2022. So it was shortly after the full scale invasion of Ukraine, which started in February that same year. And it was by all means a very violent event, both in terms of physics and in terms of geopolitics. So what happened was the pipelines blew up. There were six registered explosions. The event released the highest quantity of greenhouse gas released by human hands that has been reported in history, which is quite interesting. I mean, there was kind of quite an intense impact on the environment. The explosions were extremely powerful due to the nature of the pipelines. It was highly pressurized, gigantic Pipelines at the bottom of the sea. And then of course, when that happened, there was a huge geopolitical impact that reverberates until this very day. The full scale invasion ushered an era of energy scarcity in Europe because Europe was largely reliant on Russian energy imports. And in fact, a lot of them came through the Nord Stream pipelines. They were carrying natural gas. Germany needs natural gas for heating homes of people, but also for the industry, also for industrial processes, for generating energy as well. Because Germany in particular is a very special situation in Europe because it abandoned nuclear energy generation under Chancellor Angela Merkel. And then they, they basically replace some of the energy generated by nuclear power plants with gas plants. So gas is very essential for the running of, of Europe's biggest economy and industrial locomotive. So the pipelines being removed from, from the equation is an event that had a high impact to this day. And I think as, as we will probably discuss, there are efforts on going to reopen the pipeline. I don't think this is a, this isn't this. The story is not over of the pipelines and everything around them.
- [05:06]
A
So your first, your gut instinct, you write in the book, when you became aware of this explosion was that the Ukrainians were behind it. That's quite a gut instinct because a lot of people were thinking, you know, Americans, CIA, Russians, Moscow, for reasons that still kind of elude me, but never mind. Why Ukrainians?
- [05:36]
B
Well, for two reasons. First, I knew very well the American system and the Russian system. And I knew what the pipelines actually were, because the pipelines were a very sophisticated geopolitical project that Vladimir Putin had pursued for nearly 20 years prior to the explosions. I mean, it took 16 years to kind of plan and construct the pipeline system. It cost around $20 billion and it was like one of the main arteries for gas trade between Russia and Western Europe. And there was no way in hell Putin would blow up his own geopolitical achievement. Right? Because it was not only means of trading with Europe, it was also a means of bringing Europe and Germany, especially into the Russian embrace to a point where it became reliant on that gas. So when the pipelines blew up, or rather when the full scale invasion started, the European Union, I think took some 50%. Around half of its gas imports came from Russia. And in Germany that figure was even higher. It was around 55%. So they were essentially addicted to Russian gas. And that was a plan that Putin had pursued, according to many analysts and detractors of these pipelines. They always had said from the onset that this would lead to a certain addiction. And that is, in terms of geopolitics, is very important. It's not a commercial project. So that's one. And the other reason was I actually knew the Ukrainians very well because I had been reporting from and about Ukraine since 2014. I first went there in 2014 when the war started, or shortly before. Putin basically invaded the east of Ukraine. He took Crimea and then gradually he invaded the east of Ukraine. And I was there at the front lines reporting about what was going on. I spent a lot of time in the occupied territories as well as in Ukraine proper, where I had made a lot of contacts in the special services and the military service of Ukraine. And I knew how they operated and what they were capable of. Right, Because I kept in touch with these people over the years. And that was the reason why achievement. I got the access, I got to, to the actual perpetrators. So I knew that they were perfectly capable of doing something like this. And I knew that they were also highly motivated. Obviously, they were fighting for survival at that time. At that time, the war was at a stage where Ukraine was fighting for survival as a nation. And I knew also finally that they hated the pipeline. You know, everyone from Zelensky downwards and prior to him, Poroshenko, the previous president of Ukraine, they hated the pipeline. They thought the pipeline was actually, you know, one of the reasons why Putin decided to go to war. Because he felt he did not need Ukraine anymore as a transit country, because most of the pipelines ran through Ukraine prior to Nord Stream opening, and because he felt that his lucrative trade with Western Europe was guaranteed by the project of Nord Stream. And he had every reason to believe that, because when he first invaded Ukraine in 2014, energy trade was not sanctioned. There were pretty severe sanctions for the war to punish him for the war, but there was no sanction against exporting energy. And Nord Stream 2, which is Nord Stream, the system Nord Stream consists of two pipelines. Nord Stream 1, a bit older, came online 2011, and Nord Stream 2, the newer pipeline, which was completed in October 2021, but never really came online because of the war, because of the full scale invasion. Nonetheless, Nord Stream 2 was built entirely, conceived and built entirely after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine. So the lesson that Putin took from that was, I can do whatever I like in Ukraine. Gas will flow, oil will flow. And that, in essence was the only thing that mattered to him. Because at the time he launched the full scale invasion, I think a third of the Russian budget was fed by revenues Coming from the sale of hydrocarbons, oil and gas. It's a very fundamental thing for the Russian state.
- [09:57]
A
Mm. So what I really want to get into is what you call in the book the Cossack spirit, which I found fascinating. And just as a. By the by, I mean my own familiarity with Ukraine goes back some years. And when you started to write about this, this idea of the Cossack spirit, I think it's especially important to relay what you mean to an American and a Western audience, because particularly when the sort of full scale or large scale invasion took place In February of 2022, there's just an enormous amount written about Zelenskyy, and he was just sort of this kind of almost Churchillian paragon. And you undermine, I think, quite a bit of that in the book. You talk a lot about the power behind the throne, Yermak, who is sort of an interesting figure in Ukrainian life. And you describe this picture of really a kind of, in some ways, fragmentation or sort of states within the state. Just a very different, I think, kind of political and cultural picture and portrait of Ukraine that I think most people are familiar with, but which certainly strikes me as being very on point. So where exactly does this idea of the Cossack spirit come to you, and why is it such an important thing to understand about how this operation was able to get off the ground and proceed?
- [11:42]
B
Well, I think the Cossack spirit is kind of a. My word for that spirit of resilience, improvisation, sort of getting by despite the circumstances, which goes back a long way in those lands. Right. Ukraine was always between the borderlines of huge empires. And the nucleus of Ukrainian statehood goes back to these groups of people who wish to remain free of the influence and domination of these empires. The Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Tatar empires, the Mongol empires, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, now completely forgotten, but a huge empire at the time. It was the biggest state in Europe for a while. And so these people, these Cossacks at the Ukrainian end, they lived an independent life in a very fragmented way. It was like bands of groups of people banding together to face a common enemy, but otherwise fiercely independent and, in fact, quarreling with each other.
- [12:49]
A
Yeah, warlords, exactly.
- [12:53]
B
Sort of warlords, Tribal lords, et cetera. And I think that fragmentation persists to this very day. You know, I don't want to sort of now plunge into stereotypes, but the Ukrainian state is a relatively young state in European terms. It was set up shortly after the First World War for the first time, as it is now, or within similar boundaries. Then it was obviously defeated and absorbed by the Soviet empire. And then when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine became finally an independent nation in its current borders, minus the territory that was occupied or annexed by Russia. So, you know, after the fall of communism, Ukraine remained a kind of atomized polity, a fragmented polity in many ways. Corruption was rife, a lot of problems facing society, and people had to learn to get by without reliance on the state. You know, this would sound a little bit alien to an American or a British person or a French or a German person. Even more, where the state is even much stronger than in America and omnipresent. You have welfare, you have this, you have that. Where in Ukraine, it wasn't really like that. There was kind of in the 90s, in the early 90s, there was a period like in many other places, including Russia, in the post Soviet and post communist realm, there was something of a. ROBERT Baron Capitalism, the communism collapsed overnight, pretty much. And then there was a transition, a pretty violent and chaotic transition to capitalism and free market, where a lot of people became literal billionaires overnight. And it was tough times for everyone, and tough times never really ended for the Ukrainians. They're just. Just being one of these peoples in history that were exposed to the whims of empires, of wars, of upheavals, and so they had to learn to live with that. And even to this very day, the Ukrainian state is very fragmented and is very atomized in many ways. It's a very individualist spirit. Everything is a kind of private public partnership. Even the war is. Is prosecuted in that sort of way. You know, a lot of people who read my book and are not necessarily familiar with Ukraine are surprised when I write about units and sometimes even elite units of the armed forces receiving private funding, because that's what's happening. You know, if you go to downtown Kyiv nowadays, there are beautiful kind of boutiques and bars and all sorts of establishment businesses. And a lot of them, if not all of them, have stickers on their front doors denoting the battalion or the unit in the armed forces they support with parts of their revenue. And they do this voluntarily. So, you know, that. That's how. That's what's happening. It's kind of a crowdfunding. It's some. Some oligarchs support their own units. Rich business people put money together to send it to the front line. You know, the leading drone units are all run by former business people, you know, who were. Who don't hail from the army. Now they have army ranks, but they're not actually soldiers. They were. I profiled one of them in a documentary, in a short documentary. A business person who. The war started, he volunteered. He ended up in a unit where he told the command he saw on television and YouTube how agricultural drones operate, and he thought he can change that into a weapon. And that's exactly what happened. And fast forward three years, they're building their own drones, and they have the biggest drone power in the world, probably. And the only rival is Russia at the moment. So these drones were built largely by private cash, Right? This guy put his own cash into the unit, but he also gathered, kind of crowdfunded, gathered a lot of sponsors, etc. So even though they are part of the armed forces and they are fighting an organized sort of war of defense, a lot of it is individualized in a way. So when you zoom in, you see these things, which are very unusual. Ammunition is bought privately, you know, even. Even flak jackets, you know, the kind of the stuff that protects soldiers from being shot in the chest. Quite often these are. These are obtained through private channels. So that's the situation. And I think equally, there are a lot of political divisions within the government, within the armed forces, et cetera. And a lot of people form certain type of plans within the political system, within the polity of Ukraine. And even though ultimately they answer to their commanding general or to the president, they have their own ways of kind of grouping together, if you will, and they follow certain interests. There is perhaps an oligarch or a politician who takes care of a certain unit or a certain group of people. And they are not necessarily in some sort of friendly disposition towards the president or the army leadership. Quite often they're very critical. So that's the state of affairs. And when I kind of talk about the. That's a kind of a shorthand for this situation, this complex situation that a typical person from a Western country would struggle to get his head around because it's kind of unusual and to think that they are actually. I wouldn't say winning, but they're certainly extremely successful in this war of defense against a much greater, much more powerful aggressor. And nonetheless, they are atomized in that way. And I kind of posit that actually one of the reasons why they're so successful is this resilience, is this ability to act on their own. Motivation to act in small groups, to be efficient in ways, to take their own initiative, is a huge contrast with Russia. Although they're culturally quite close and similar linguistically and otherwise, the Russian armed forces are authoritarian, vertical. Basically Russia is now a militarized dictatorship pretty much. And nobody can do anything without getting sort of orders from above. And that actually makes them weaker and more vulnerable to this sort of dynamic and sort of innovative way Ukrainians are fighting the war.
- [19:38]
A
Right. And so the, your prime example of that in your book is what you call the startup, which relates to just everything you've been talking about. This is essentially the group that pulled it off, by your account. So talk about the startup. And also some of these personalities are pretty fascinating, even though we don't learn their full names, like the woman Fria, for example, this kind of collection of characters. But is it kind of microcosm of this Cossack spirit and how you've described this atomized situation in Ukraine?
- [20:28]
B
Yeah, well, basically that's when I decided I want or I have to write it book about this when I, when I met the characters behind the attack on Nordstrom and then I met also the detectives who were hunting them. So I had a parallel communication with both sides, which is pretty unique for, for a journalist in a situation like this. And I realized all of the characters on both sides, the Germans and the Ukrainians, are kind of larger than life, extraordinary people. Extremely interesting, I think, and therefore that, that made me kind of want to write the book in the first place. So the attack, the plot to destroy Nord Stream was conceived and executed by an elite unit in the armed forces of Ukraine. In the command of that unit were two people or several people. But I focus on two people in particular who had previously served in the intelligence community of Ukraine. They were veterans of the intelligence community. They served for a quarter century in various roles, senior roles, including top senior roles. And they are very well known and reputed in that world, also across the borders of Ukraine, because they had also been working with Western partners, including the CIA, prior to the outbreak of the full scale invasion. They were closely collaborating with the CIA, which supported them financially and, and with kind of technology and sometimes tactical training for some of their staff. So these people, when the war started, they became embedded in the military. They fought in the battle of Kiev. And after about a month, when Kyiv was successfully sort of defended, they fend off the attack. And then the Russians regrouped and then the war started, as it is now, as sort of grinding war from the east. They sat down one evening and they decided to go back. What they do best, which is special operations, hybrid warfare, asymmetric warfare, economic warfare. And the idea was to target, to hit, as in their words, Russia, where it hurts. The most, that is their revenues from hydrocarbons, from the sales of oil and gas. So they drafted a list of targets, including gas fields, critical infrastructure, the bridge that connects mainland Crimea, the occupied peninsula, the mainland of Russia and Crimea, the occupied peninsula and things like that. And North Stream was on that list. So they decided to go ahead with that operation, which was green lit by the general who commanded them. And that general obtained permission from the commander of the Armed forces of Ukraine, a man called General Valery Zaluzhny, who is now ambassador to Great Britain. And they just went ahead. Initially, they were seeking to find combat divers within their own special forces. But that proved to be very difficult because actually, as it turned out, combat divers don't really go that deep. Typically they don't. I mean, some of them may have the skill set, but typically someone like the Navy seals or the Special Boat Service in Britain, their job is not to go to the bottom of the Ocean, to go 80 to 100 meters below the surface. They typically just cross a body of water or plant mines onto ships and things like that or infrastructure. So they realized they had to use civilians, which somehow came easy to them because they had been using civilians in their prior operations, before the full scale invasions. When the Secret Service, when intelligence services or the military used civilians for operations, they are known as proxies. And that method of using proxies is actually becoming extremely popular with the war in Ukraine. But also prior to the war in Ukraine, it's a method that was pioneered by the Israelis in the Middle East. It's been used by the Russians now extensively. You will read a lot of newspaper reporting, including my own, about the Russians recruiting ordinary civilians via telegram or other social channels and paying them like thousand bucks in crypto to go somewhere and set a bus on fire, or throw a fire bomb at some target or do something like that. So it's a kind of well trodden path for special operations. And they eventually they recruited a group of deep sea divers, or technical divers as they're known, people who can go down that deep at the depth of below 40 meters. You have to start using a mixture of gases. So you have to be able to operate a sophisticated kind of kit that allows you to breathe a mixture of gases like helium and so on. So the group they recruited was all male. They decided to use two boats, two yachts, sailing yachts with a crew of six for each. And on one boat there were these three soldiers, three officers. One was skipper, the other one was an explosives expert, and the third one was the commander. The boat was known as Andromeda. They rented it in Germany and the task was to destroy the pipelines, the Nord Stream pipelines. And they had initially three divers, including a woman. She was the sole female member of the entire operation. There were around two dozen people involved in the operation, in the planning and the execution, and she was the only woman, the only woman on board, and the only woman in the group initially, that was kind of held against her in the recruitment process, because one of the commanders believed that having a woman, just single woman, in the whole male group might change the dynamics of how they operate and might actually be determinantal. But the guy who actually was the operational mastermind decided that she had leadership qualities. He. The civilian recruits underwent like a sort of a psychological profiling, according to the textbook of the Ukrainian Secret Service. And they found that the woman had a very strong, feisty character and that she was able to take leadership in crisis, which indeed she did.
- [27:14]
A
What was the name you assign her is?
- [27:18]
B
I call her Freya. So I don't use the real names. When I started kind of talking to these people, it was a very gradual process until they opened up. The reason why I even reached them was because I knew people in that community. I had actually met one of the masterminds before the war. He was a general of the Secret Service. I described that in the prologue of my book. And so when we started these discussions, they were very reluctant to talk to me. In the end, they opened up, I think, partly because of the professional pride they hold in the achievement they believe to have had. In their eyes, in their estimation, this was a successful mission. And also, I think they're quite bitter that in the end they became abandoned by the government. They feel the government hasn't really taken care of them. So that was sort of, I believe, partly the motivation to talk to me, but also I promise them in the process that I will anonymize them, that I will treat them. Journalists quite often do this. They make a kind of a sourcing agreement where you. You don't reveal the identity of the source. And I kind of stick to that promise, and I will continue to stick to that promise. I didn't name anyone. Nobody in the book is named except obviously, public figures like the chief of German police, the president, the president's advisors and people like that, or the head of the armed forces, Valeris Iluzhny. But when it comes to the actual team involved in the operation on the Ukrainian side and the actual team involved in the investigation on the German Side, I'm not naming anyone because I, I had this agreement with people and also, you know, to protect them. They are obviously, they are hunted, they are suspects in a crime. But worse than that, you know, it could, it is quite conceivable that Russia might take them out. It's quite conceivable that someone in Ukraine might decide that they are, they are a liability. So they, you know, in Germany they are. There is a suspect who is in custody in Germany and he's in a high security prison. He's treated as in danger from state actors. Right. Because the Germans know that the Russians could go after him, the Ukrainians could go after him, someone else might go after him. So, you know, I think that that is a real, actual danger for these people. So I decided for my part to always sort of anonymize them.
- [29:44]
A
But you, I mean, you met Maddie, them, I mean, did you, did you meet directly with.
- [29:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, I met, I met, I met pretty much all of them. Yeah. I don't want to say now because there's an ongoing trial and investigations. I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to talk too much about stuff that have legal. But I did meet a lot of them, some people who were on the boat and a lot of people who were involved in the planning and the execution of the, of the attack.
- [30:11]
A
What did you meet? I thought you said in the book, maybe I'm wrong, that you met, you met Freya, for example.
- [30:18]
B
I don't explicitly say, I don't think. But anyway, I would like not to talk about these details because of the trial at the moment.
- [30:28]
A
Yeah, you talk a lot though about their particular personalities and psychological traits, which including of the sort of two looting figures, the Colonel and the General. And there again, I think it might surprise some people, I don't know, readers, I mean, some of them seem kind of almost ascetic in their monkish in their habits and their commitments and they sort of stand out in some respects because again, not to stereotype, but there is a lot of sort of self dealing inside the sort of Ukraine security state, broadly speaking. I mean, people basically feathering their own nests, corruption, all this stuff. But this group somehow manages also to kind of, you know, the Startup as you call them, to navigate those waters and avoid a lot of those pitfalls. Although as you also mentioned, one of the characters who ends up dying in the battlefield later was kind of a career criminal.
- [31:50]
B
Yeah, it's an interesting bunch of people. So the people I call the Startup are people who hail from the security services, from the army. Some of them are civilians who support them financially and otherwise. You know, there's a prominent politician or a couple of prominent politicians, a prominent lawyer, et cetera, business people. I think corruption is ubiquitous across the board in Ukraine. There's no way you can escape it or not be touched by it or not somehow be part of it if you're going to work for the special services. I describe the difference between there are two main special services in Ukraine, the SPU and the. The WHOR is the military is much smaller. The SPU would be the equivalent of the CIA. Actually, it's bigger than the CIA. It's much more. It's modeled on the Soviet KGB and later fsb. The Russian serve overwhelmingly omnipresence service that kind of taps the phones of everyone. But at the same time, they have their own prisons, they have their own kind of law enforcement, almost act almost like as prosecutors. They investigate corruption, they do all sorts of things. It's not just a secret, it's not just espionage. And counter espionage is much more. Yeah, there's a lot of corruption. I mean, when you meet these guys, some of them will have a watch that costs more than the annual salary, the official annual salary they have. And I think the main difference, as one CIA agent once put it, when you are at the CIA, you know exactly at what stage of career someone is when you go to their house in Northern Virginia or whatever else, you know, near the headquarters, because you know what kind of money they make, and that's a given. You know, it's not going to be different for different people. Whereas in Ukraine, you can become a millionaire while you're in the service because you can help yourself to procurement money. You can, you can. There are all sorts of ways. There's racketeering, like blatant racketeering going on. They take cuts from various kind of deals and even sort of during the war, buying weapons or ammunition, they act as middlemen and then take their own cut. So, you know, in the west, when you are in a position like that, in a senior position in the intelligence world, you have to wait until you retire or resign and then you make money, right? You go into the private sector and on the back of your experience, career, credentials, you get lucrative positions, board, advisory, whatever. That's the other way around. In Ukraine, you can get rich while you're in office. In fact, you are in office and you're doing everything to get rich, typically speaking. So some of the people who are in the startup have trodden that path. I mean, one of them at least is fairly wealthy. And I describe how he made his money while he was in a position of authority. Others are quite the opposite. The guy I call the Colonel, he is indeed. He spent his lifetime fighting corruption both in his ranks and across society. He's never taken money. I visited him at home many, many times. He lives very modestly. He sleeps in the living room with his wife. They've got three kids. There are three rooms in the house and two of the kids, two of the girls live in one room. The boy has a room to his own and the parents live in this kind of living room with a kitchen. So it's kind of modest for Western standards. But although he's appalled by corruption and fights it and accuses the President and his people of corruption, by the way, he's not alone in accusing Zelensky of corruption because there are multiple ongoing investigations against top people around Zelenskyy, including his former chief of staff. But nonetheless, it doesn't stop him from working with people who had checkered past. One of the soldiers on the boat that destroyed the pipeline system was in fact a career criminal before he joined the army during the full scale invasion. And nobody held that against him. Even though the Colonel is a man who served in law enforcement, he doesn't seem to mind to deal with people he needs to deal with in the context of the war, even though some of them might. One of the backers of the startup, I call him the walking lawsuit. He is a man who's had many, many legal troubles, not just for corruption, but for all sorts of things. But that's, I guess, part of the Cossack spirit. When you're fighting a war of survival, you're not looking at a small print of people's convictions or investigations into their business dealings and stuff like that. So it has a whiff of the dirty dozen to it in a way. A little bit, yeah.
- [36:46]
A
Yeah. Well, it's not difficult to see the sort of Hollywood version of how this. I don't know if your book has been optioned yet, but one could see that. So I have to ask you, a lot of people on social media, for example, people I know who are sort of interested in Russian, in Ukrainian affairs, when Seymour Hersh, the famous American investigative journalist, you know, broke the My Lai massacre and others wrote on a substack post, this was some time ago, that basically this was a American, you know, Washington job signed off on by the president at the time, Joe Biden, and you know, that's the story here and kind of scoffs at this idea that the Ukrainians could have pulled it off. And I think, still, I mean, I don't haven't seen a poll, but there are probably a lot of people who just believe that the CIA must be behind everything. I made a note to myself whether the CIA in some sense, by your account, was involved, in the sense that there was at least a communication channel. As you mentioned, the CIA, these people had dealings in the startup with the CIA. So question one, on Hersh's account and question two, are you yourself confident that the CIA was not, let's say, more involved in this operation than, as you relay it in the book?
- [38:42]
B
Yes. Well, unlike Hirsch, I've actually spoken to the leadership of the CIA right from the top, you know, from William Burns downward, who was at the time head of the ca. I spoke to the person who was in charge of Europe, who was in charge of Eastern Europe, the people who worked in Kiev, the people at the National Security Council, who dealt with Ukraine and who dealt eventually with the intelligence about the plans to attack Nord Stream. So I've done pretty, pretty meticulous reporting inside the CIA, inside the, the US Government about this. And I've spoken to people who are on opposite sides of the political divide, who, who basically said the same thing, and there's no reason why they should be saying the same thing. The government changed since obviously President Trump is now in charge. He's, he's kind of done a lot to recalibrate the CIA and, and, and, you know, a lot of people have been laid off or pushed aside or, you know, there have been pretty significant reforms in the intelligence community or interventions, let's say, in the intelligence community. And, you know, if there were a story like that, it would have come out. You know, it's, I think it's pretty absurd to believe that President Biden would blow up a piece of European infrastructure for the simple reason. I'm not even going into the fact that he wouldn't have done it, structurally speaking. The point is he only needed to put sanctions on the pipeline and pipeline is dead and which is, by the way, what happened. The pipelines are dead now because they are under sanctions. Not just because they're blown up, because you can fix, you can actually fix the pipelines. The damage that is expensive and difficult, but it's doable. You know, you can lay new pipes and you can do all sorts of things. The problem is not the sabotage. The problem is there are sanctions on the pipeline. Nobody can touch the pipeline. Nobody can fix them, nobody can do nothing. So that's what American sanctions do to any given project. If the Americans put sanctions on Nord Stream, nobody will be able to buy gas from Nord Stream. Right, because the Russians will be able to send the gas, but there's no legal entity in Europe who will dare buy something that's sanctioned by the United States. So that's just a misunderstanding of what Biden needed to do to end the pipelines, the operation of the pipelines. Number two is the idea that Hirsch would write a blog post and nobody else in three years was able to stand up that story. Despite, like all of the investigative journalists of this world presumably have tried. And I know that they have, you know, outlets have tried, my outlet has tried. I have tried, I have tried and I've proven him wrong. But, you know, a lot of people would have been all over the story and there's no story that you can't sort of match. You know what I mean? So this is an unmatched story that Biden ordered the destruction of the pipelines. He went all the way up with the help of Norway, one of the most transparent countries, small Nordic countries, one of the most transparent countries in the world. It's just on the face of it is so implausible that alone, that is a bit strange. But anyway, I've spoken to a lot of people at the CIA. It is documented that the CIA tried to prevent the attack on Nord Stream. So quite the opposite of helping the attack on Nord Stream. As soon as the CIA found out that the Ukrainians are planning to blow up the pipelines, and originally the Ukrainians wanted to blow it up on the 19th of June. So some weeks or days before that, the CIA got wind that a plan was underfoot to blow up the pipelines. And the first thing they did, first of all, the news reached the top. William Burns, the head of the CIA at the time, and the National Security Council. And what they did is they warned the Germans that someone was trying to blow up the pipeline. They told them about what they had heard and they also then told the Ukrainians to stop. They literally went to the Ukrainians who were planning the attack and they spoke to a person, to the person. I called the general, who was one of the officers that behind the plan and asked him to commit in writing that he would cease and desist. So this is all documented. You know, the correspondence with the Germans is documented, the correspondence with the Ukrainians is documented, etc. So if anything, the opposite is the case. The CIA tried to prevent the attack on Nord Stream. This is what happened. And it's the. This is. There is a paper trail of this having happened. Right. So I think it's.
- [43:24]
A
You did talk to Hirsch too, right?
- [43:26]
B
Yeah, I spoke to Hirsch. I asked him, and he wouldn't reveal anything more than what he wrote. And he even told me that he was. The only thing he was unclear was whether the Chancellor of Germany at the time, Olaf Scholz, was in on the plot or not. Right. And that is also kind of an absurd assumption to think that Chancellor of Germany would be in on a plot to destroy a critical infrastructure. That was super. I mean, he was very much pro the pipelines, the Chancellor Scholz, the former Chancellor of Germany. So anyway, it's not a realistic. It's not a serious assumption, the whole thing, and it's not really worth discussing. But on the other hand, you're quite right. I think a lot of people believe in it. And the sheer fact that to this day there hasn't been official communication from any Western country about what actually had happened is, of course, forcing people to believe all sorts of theories. And I don't blame. I don't call them conspiracy theories. I call them theories because the footage that came out of the destruction of the pipeline, these giant kind of geysers in the Baltic Sea bubbling up, and they are quite iconic, and people just want to know what happened. So there are two main camps, people who subscribe to the Hearst theory that the CIA did it with the knowledge of Biden and the help of Norway. And then there is another group of people who believe that Russia did it. And the second group of people is mainly people who support Ukraine and they feel Russia is a rogue state. And of course, Russia did it, because who else? And that is equally implausible because this was one of the. It was perhaps the flagship geopolitical project of Vladimir Putin in Western Europe. And the idea that he would just blow it up is. Is, you know, it's not realistic. In fact, Vladimir Putin has since made a lot of efforts to repair and restart the pipelines. Right. So, I mean, they've, you know, they've told the negotiators on the US side, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and others, that Nord Stream is top of their priorities in terms of any kind of settlement with the United States and West over Ukraine, that what they want in an overarching kind of peace deal is also to fix and restart the pipelines. And I think Gergel Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Actually said that last year, following one round of negotiations in Saudi Arabia, I believe it was. He actually said that in public. You know, we're working on reopening the pipelines. So the idea that Russia would do it is just equally unrealistic. I mean, I understand why people blame the ca, because the CA has a good track record of having done stuff like that in Cuba, in Nicaragua, in other places. But you have to remember this was all in the 70s, 80s. It hasn't been happening recently, really. And it also hasn't happened against a friendly ally like Germany. It always was infrastructure of adversarial nations. So I think maybe CIA now, under President Trump, is changing. It's going tilting back towards that more aggressive posture. And sort of even the people who control the work of the signal services, like Tom Cotton, he said, I believe in one of the hearings that the CIA needs to get more robust and so on. So maybe they are now moving back, tilting back. But certainly at the time when President Biden was in charge, the CIA was not that kind of Nixonian monster that goes around. And that's crazy stuff. In that very period of history, it was very different. And I actually knew a lot of people in senior positions and across the board, you know, station chiefs, etc. I knew people in the paramount paramilitary wing of the CIA, which is the wing that deals with kinetic actions or, you know, shooting people and blowing things up. And they were quite incredulous when. When I was trying to figure out whether they. They had something to do with it. And the simple fact is Biden only need needed to sign the sanctions and that would have been the end of it. So which is in fact what happened eventually. The pipelines are under sanctions now and they're dead for all intents and purposes. It's not going to be an internal condition. I mean, there may come a time where the sanctions will be lifted, but that is again, the choice of the US Administration and the European Union, because the European Union now also has its own sanctions.
- [48:11]
A
Yeah. Another aspect in the book that we should talk about is we've talked about the startup, but basically who did it. Then we get to the investigators, and here again, I think there's an interesting kind of prism, maybe a cultural or political type prism. If we can step back, it was really the German investigators, and they constituted very much kind of their own unit within broader Germany. And your depiction of them in some ways, they had some similar types to these ascetic types in the startup is they were committed to the rule of law. Essentially, they viewed this as a kind of crime against the German state and they were determined to pursue it. Every last detail, painstaking investigation. Even though in a broader political context it might have been that the people at the top of the German state didn't really want this to fall on the Ukrainians for all kinds of reasons, including that Germany was supplying Ukraine with a lot of weaponry and so forth. And also states like Poland, who regarded this act of grand sabotage as essentially an exercise in heroism in warfare committed against the Russian state. So we had this kind of complex situation where these investigators were kind of working under these circumstances and I guess they could have given up, but they were really determined to get to the bottom of it.
- [50:09]
B
Yeah. So the German investigation is unlike any other investigation in the lifetime of German law enforcement today. And I think probably in Europe and perhaps worldwide, because nothing like this sabotage operation has been attempted in modern times. It's certainly a unique kind of criminal case. And I think the investigators knew right all the way up to the chief of the German Federal Police told me that they knew this would be a once in a lifetime type of case they're dealing with. And their motivation was in many ways not dissimilar to the motivations the Ukrainians had, because they are basically people who serve the constitutional order of the German Federal Republic. There are patriots. They are very sort of proud to be upholding the law. They're very strict about their legal and professional standards. And when they were signed the case by the federal prosecutor general, they decided that they wanted to solve the case and they were driven by ambition to do so. So there were times when the investigation was slowly, slowly kind of grinding on, despite all sorts of obstacles they were facing from their allies. And neighbor mentioned Poland. Poland certainly did not help the German investigation. Poland was used as a sort of a logistical base by the saboteurs. They were in Poland, they came to Germany via Poland, the boat stopped in Poland at some point, etc. But the Polish kind of refused to cooperate on numerous occasions. And at some point they even tried to sort of plant a false flag. They tried to derail investigation. The Germans also found that the United States wasn't all that cooperative, in some cases, other allies, Britain, they weren't helping and so on. So they were kind of on their own. And they were not deterred by that at all. They were just kind of proceeding meticulously, just grinding on. And when they started revealing evidence that Ukrainians might be behind the attack, it became relatively uncomfortable for their political masters, because by that time Germany had become the biggest backer of Ukraine in the world. I think now they are. Since President Trump rolled back the support for Ukraine, Germany has picked up the slack. And this year alone, I think Germany will pay something like 11.5 billion euros for Ukraine. And there are also other ways they're helping them indirectly through the European Union, etc. So it wasn't comfortable for the politicians that a story made come out that Ukrainians blew up the pipeline. But the politicians never really tried to obstruct the work of their police because the police is independent and Germany's a rule of law, liberal democracy. So the investigators were very, very motivated to solve the case, irrespective of who the suspect is and what the political sensitivities around it are. And in some strange ways, some characters from the investigation and among the perpetrators kind of mirror each other really. The guy called the colonel on the Ukrainian end, who is the mastermind of the operation is, I realized quite late into kind of writing my book, is very similar to the chief investigator in Germany. They have very similar background. They come from working class families. Both of them wanted to become engineers. So they have this kind of engineering minds, you know, this kind of meticulousness, kind of step by step. Then one of them joined the spu. He was recruited in his high school to join the spoo. This is the biggest security service to kind of served his country for patriotic reasons. The other guy saw a poster of the police advertising recruitment. So he told he'd go and see what happens. And then when he had the briefing of the police, he realized he wanted to become a lawman to protect the community, serve, you know, serve the community. And he became a cop and then he progressed through the ranks and is now in a very senior position. So in a weird way, they kind of mirror each other. It's very interesting. And I found they're both principled, driven, motivated, capable of extraordinary things, thinking outside the box, and motivated by patriotism, by love of country, by love of what they do in serving their respective communities. That's quite extraordinary to my mind. And you know, the German investigation has issued seven arrest warrants for people they claim were on the boat. It's an incredible success for them to even have found any kind of leads and then identified suspects and then issued arrest warrants because it's the high. The bar for issuing arrest warrants in cases like this is pretty high. So, you know, they've also achieved incredible success in that, that they got where they are. There will be a trial now of a man who is accused of having been the coordinator of the sabotage team on the boat. And I think during the trial a lot of the stuff I report in my book exclusively will come to light from official sources for the first time because as we discussed, there hasn't been any official communication so far from Germany because. Because simply because the investigation is confidential, because revealing details of it might jeopardize the course of the investigation, might warn some suspects, etc. So this will be the first time where something officially will be communicated about what evidence they have and why they think that Ukraine was behind this. So I think that will be an extremely interesting kind of coda to this whole story and we'll see what happens. But I think it's not comfortable for the German government. The previous German government wasn't comfortable. This government is even less comfortable because they've got a pro Russian opposition breathing down their neck. The biggest party in some of the polls now is a party called the Alternative for Germany, which is ostensibly a nationalist kind of right wing party. But in fact they, in recent months they've reinvented themselves slightly as a pro Putin, pro Russia party and they've seized on the subject of Nord Stream. They even quoted my book in parliament. They seeking to end the support of Ukraine on the back of the findings of the German investigators. And they're waiting eagerly for the trial. And if there is a conviction in the trial, they will use that politically. And so the government, you know, they can use this as a hole in the head. Right. So if they could stop it, they would, but they can't because, I mean, technically they could. The Chancellor has constitutional powers to stop an investigation. He could order the Ministry of Justice to order the prosecutor to order the police to stop the investigation. But no Chancellor would do that. It's just not something you do in Germany. It's not something that's seen as acceptable behavior. So it's not happened in a way it's like a slow train, slow moving train crash and you can see that the train is about to hit a wall. As a politician, but there's nothing you can do about it. Your own investigators are just grinding on.
- [58:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, no, that's fascinating and I guess the trial we think might be in September, so. Yeah, we'll see. I think we should. Yeah, we can close on that. That note again, I urge everyone to read the book. The subtitle is the Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World. And perhaps if there'd been more room, it would be. And how the perpetrators were tracked down and caught. So there's absolutely that element to it. So thank you very much, Bullyan, for this. I appreciate it. This is Paul Starabin for America and beyond.
- [58:48]
B
Thank you very much, Paul, for inviting me.