February 19, 2023 • 52 mins
JON RETURNS! AGAIN!!
We take a look at Sy Hersh’s controversial bombshell article that details how and why a secret military action (that circumvented congress) was taken against Russia… and if true, it’ll be pushing the hands of Doomsday Clock past the 12. We muse about who is really in charge of these decisions, how this shit has gotten so crazy, so fast and we ask; has the Abracast prepared us for whatever the fuck is going on in the world right now?
Featured Article: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
***Credits***
We take a look at Sy Hersh’s controversial bombshell article that details how and why a secret military action (that circumvented congress) was taken against Russia… and if true, it’ll be pushing the hands of Doomsday Clock past the 12. We muse about who is really in charge of these decisions, how this shit has gotten so crazy, so fast and we ask; has the Abracast prepared us for whatever the fuck is going on in the world right now?
Featured Article: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
***Credits***
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- Written / Produced / researched / Performed – Jon Towers www.abracast.com
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:25):
In the dark shadows, in thewhite cold. Fearlessly we search for knowledge
new and old. We drink thestrong spirits and read the ancient tones.
The order of the broadcast. Weare the brave and the board, the
(00:56):
court history Conspiracy. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Uppercast. I'm your
(01:42):
host, John Towers, Doctor JohnTowers. If you want to be more
formal about it, um, hey, I want to apologize for taking all
the time off and those of youwho reached out to me on various methods
and mean to ask if I wasdoing okay, give me some words of
(02:02):
encouragement. Like I said, ifyou listen to the show long enough,
I'm as open as I can beabout my kind of depression issues and some
personal things that I have to dealwith in my everyday life. So,
uh, you know, everybody's okay, I'm okay, violets are right,
(02:24):
everybody's everybody's doing okay. And Ijust, um, I figure, as
long as I have you know thisplatform here, and as long as the
world is ending, I might aswell try to document it in some fashion
and let you guys know kind ofwhat I think about some of this stuff.
(02:45):
It's interesting looking around though, uh, you know, people are talking,
you know, about the wider pictureof sort of the battle that's being
fought, and I'm hearing people talkabout it in terms of spiritual warfare,
and I'm like, hey, that'sgood. That's good. We have like
a whole kind of like one onone course on spiritual warfare. Of course,
it's not a giant globe spanning Cosmoslevel battle of spiritual warfare. It's
(03:10):
more of like the one on onekind of spiritual warfare, the dealing with
the demons and dark forces in everydaylife. So I'm like, yeah,
we got that. And then it'slike, well, you know, it's
actually it's a problem with the media, and I'm like, hey, I
cover that too. You know.We talk a lot about like the media
(03:30):
and you know, conspiracy factoids nowor whatever they're calling them. You know,
it's like, oh, kind ofgot that covered. And I feel
like we do conspiracy here in aresponsible way. And usually that boils down
to dipping our toes in sort ofthe political landscape, how media skews coverage,
(03:59):
how big tech you know, skewsyour thoughts. Like, so,
if you're interested in all of thosesort of aspects um, you know,
the website is still up. Ihaven't done a steady show since November,
I think, so, you know, the website's still up. All the
(04:20):
feature topic link should still be working, whether the shows are archived or not,
or if they're on the regular feed. So hit up that feature topic
link and we're we've kind of beendoing one oh one, two oh one,
three oh one stuff on a lotof the things they're happening in the
world, you know, right now, even sort of like metaphorically, like
(04:45):
you know, we're chipping away throughExodus still, and a lot of times
in Exodus, the Hebrews are like, let's just go back and let Farah
rule us. Like there's an innatething with um, maybe all of human
y. You know, there's alittle, there's a little it's easier just
to bend the knee kind of stuff. And you know, I feel like
(05:10):
some of us are kind of downwith that and like rushing towards that nowadays.
You know, if ever, andI heard this statistic about the Revolutionary
War where actually only thirty percent ofAmericans were in favor of the Revolutionary War,
and those those thirty percent were thego getters. They're the ones that
(05:30):
change the fucking world so interested inall of that stuff. We've touched on
a lot of that stuff. However, you perceive the sort of state of
the world that we're in now.Um, you know, the abercast has
done a lot of groundwork for Iguess what's coming right, Like what's coming
(05:53):
so um talking about sort of politicsand talking about the media and this sort
of stuff. I want to talkabout this Seymour Hirsh Nord stream pipeline thing.
And it's amazing to me that thisisn't everywhere. It's actually not amazing
to me that this isn't everywhere,you know, like the it's interesting.
(06:17):
Here's another interesting thing that's kind ofleading me towards this path for the show
tonight is the derailment in Ohio tookplace like on the eighth, and no
one in the media started talking aboutit until like this week. And I
mean, it's an environmental disaster,it's a transportation disaster, and it's a
(06:44):
should be what would normally be constituted, like THEEMA would be there and the
news would be all over this,and it's just nothing. Nothing happened until
like this week, and when itdid, everyone's just like everything's cool,
let's just go back, just goback. Well, I am right on
the Ohio River here in the steelbuckle of the rust Belt, and um,
(07:08):
you know, people are already kindof talking about, like, well,
what happens when this ship hits thewater table and just flows south right
down this Ohio River. And I'mlike, well, I don't know about
you guys, but I have awhole compartment full of water filters. I
got stored water up I mean everywhere. So um, anyhow so I want
(07:30):
to talk about this Seymour Hirsh thing. Um you'll hear. I'll probably slip
and call him Si Hirsh every nowand again, because that's what his friends
call him. Anyhow, Um,he's he's not like a Fox News guy.
He's not Blaze dude. He's notlike a with Ben Shapiro or whatever.
He's an icon of the left.You might have read his work about
(07:57):
the Myli massacre. He did alot of work about Watergate for the New
York Times. Um. He alsotalks a lot about those stories, saying
when he was breaking them, especiallythe Mylive massacre, people didn't want the
story because it was too it wastoo crazy, even though they were all
anti war. They were still theydidn't they didn't want the story because of
(08:20):
the political implications. Um So,you know, mister Hirsch got h he
has a sub stack and he publishedthis massive article um on his on his
sub stack, and uh virtually nobodyis talking about it. And it's amazing.
(08:41):
Probably if I remember correctly, theum when the Nordstream pipeline got bombed,
I was on I believe I don'tremember what episode or whatever it was,
but I remember being like, Ithink that we fucking did this.
Like I'm pretty sure that we did. It's kind of the only thing that
may any kind of sense in here. Uh. Mister Hirsch goes, this
(09:05):
is a very long article. I'mnot exactly sure how I'm gonna tackle it.
Um uh So, I guess we'lljust I'll just take off. We'll
just start here and figure it out. And um I uh the the article
is on substack and it's on hisfree side. He published it on the
(09:26):
on the free side. UM soyou can get the whole thing. It's
like twenty it's like thirty pages.Um so uh yeah, So here we
go. First, there's a littlebit of background that we kind of need
to kind of need to talk aboutto set this up, you know,
working about context here and um.One of the things that I needed I
(09:48):
wanted to bring up is so thelast guy, orange Man Orange Man,
had effectively closed down the nord Streampipeline. He was like, look,
Germany and Europe are their allied.They're like preferred allied. I can't remember
how it goes, but you knowthey should be buying their oil from US
and not from Russia. And sohe had effectively shut down the nord Stream
(10:13):
pipeline. Well and once uh umuh. Once President Biden took office,
one of the first things he didwas he was like, nope, we're
gonna allow the nord Stream to becompleted. It's a u It wound up
being a smack in the face toall the NATO allies. Uh. It
(10:33):
basically was a giant win for Russia. It was a slap in the face
to all of um, domestically ourenergy producing companies and industries. So the
only thing, the only reason thisthing was operating in the first place is
because Joe said, yes, hesaid, let's let's let's do it.
(10:56):
Let's let them do it, becausewho knows who knows? So M So
here's to sy Hirsch's substack. HowAmerica took out the nord Stream pipeline UM
the US or the New York Timescalled it a mystery, but the United
States executed a covert c operations thatwas kept secret until now. So Hirsch
(11:26):
talks a little bit here about theUS Navy's Diving Salvage Center. And the
reason this is important is because ifhe were to use um jasat guys or
Joint Operations and special Forces, anybodythat fell under that tier of operator,
(11:46):
he would have He couldn't have keptthat off the books. And this Hirsch
gets rail twisted up about the factthat this obviously didn't go through Congress,
or at least not the normal channelsof Congress to get this operation approved.
So he spends a little bit oftime explaining why he's using these guys,
and we're gonna be we'll talk aboutthis year. The center has been training
(12:09):
highly skilled deep water divers for decades. Once assigned to American military units worldwide.
They're capable of technical diving to dogood using Sea four explosives to clear
harbors and the breach and breaches ofdebris unexploded Ordinance as well as the bad
like blowing up four and oil rigsand fouling intake valves for undersea power plants,
(12:33):
and destroying lots on crucial shipping canals. This the Panama City Center,
which boasts the second largest indoor pollin America. Sorry, I gotta put
my food down. The second largestindoor pool in America was the perfect place
(12:56):
to recruit the best, the mosttaciturn graduates of the diving school, who
successfully did last summer what they hadbeen authorized to do two hundred and sixty
feet under the surface of the BalticSea. Last June, the Navy divers,
operating under the cover of a widelypublicized Midsummer NATO exercise known as Baal
(13:16):
Troops twenty two, planted the remotelytriggered explosive that three months later destroyed three
of the four nord Stream pipelines.According to a source with direct knowledge of
the operational planning, two the pipelines, which were collectively known as nord Stream
one, had been providing Germany withmuch of the Western European countries with cheap
(13:43):
Russian natural gas for more than adecade. The second pair of pipelines,
called the Nordstream two had been built, but they were not yet operational.
Now, with Russian troops massing onthe Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in
Europe since nineteen forty five looming,Joe Biden saw the pipeline as a vehicle
(14:03):
for both Vladimir Putin to weaponize naturalgas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrianne Watson,the White House spokesperson, said in an
email, this is false and completelyfiction. Tammy Thorpe, a spokesperson for
the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote, this claim is completely an utterly false.
(14:26):
Biden's decision to sabotage the pipelines cameafter more than nine months of highly
secret back and forth debate inside Washington'snationalist security community about how best to achieve
that goal. For much of thattime, the issue was not whether to
do the mission, but how toget it done. With no overt clue
(14:48):
as to who was responsible. Therewas a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on
the graduates of the Center's hard coredive school in Panama City. The divers
were Navy only, but not membersof America's Special Operations Command, whose covert
operations must be reported to Congress andbriefed in advanced to the Senate and House
(15:13):
leadership, the so called Gang ofEight. The Biden administration was doing everything
possible to avoid leaks as the planningtook place in twenty twenty one into the
first months of twenty twenty two.Joe Biden and his foreign policy team,
the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan,Secretary of State Tony Blincoln, and Victoria
(15:33):
Newland, the Under Secretary of Statefor Policy, had been vocal and consistent
in their hostilities to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for seven
hundred and fifty miles under the BalticSea from two different ports in the northeastern
Russia near the Estonian border, passingclose to the Danish island of Bornholm,
(15:58):
before ending in northern Germany. Thedirect route, which bypassed and he needed
to transit Ukraine, had been aboon for the German economy, which enjoyed
an abundance of cheap Russian natural gasenough to run its factories and heat its
homes, while enabling enabling German distributorsto sell excess gas at a profit throughout
(16:21):
Western Europe. Actions that could betraced to the administration would violate US promises
to minimalize direct conflict with Russia.The secrecy was essential. From its earliest
days. Nordstream one was seen byWashington and its anti Russian NATO partners as
a threat to Western dominance. Theholding company behind it Nordstream AG, which
(16:45):
incorporated incorporated in Switzerland and twenty fivethe partnership with Gazprom, publicly traded Russian
company producing enormous profits for shareholders,which is dominated by oligarchs known to be
in the thrall of Putin. GasProm control fifty one percent of the company,
(17:07):
with four European energy firms, onein France, one in Netherlands,
and two in Germany sharing the remainingforty nine percent stock and having the right
to control downstream sales of inexpensive naturalgas to local distributors in Germany and Western
Europe. Gas Proms profits were sharedwith the Russian government and the state.
(17:27):
Gas and oil revenues were estimated insome years to them out as much as
forty five percent of Russia's annual budget. So America's political fears were real.
Putin would now have an additional andmuch needed major source of income in Germany
(17:48):
and the rest of Eastern Europe wouldbecome addicted to low cost natural gas supplied
by Russia, while diminishing European relianceon America. In fact, that's exactly
what happened Many Germany. Many Germanssaw nord Stream One as part of the
deliverance of former Chancellor Willie Brandt's famedas politic theory, which would enable postwar
(18:08):
Germany to rehabilitate itself and other EuropeanNatians destroyed in World War Two by,
among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russiangas to fuel the prosperous Western European markets
and trading economy. I'm skipping ahead. Like I said, this is very
long. Let's see here. Throughoutall of this, Russian troops had been
(18:38):
steadily and ominously building up the bordersof Ukraine, and by the end of
December, more than one hundred thousandsoldiers were in positions to strike from Belarus
and CRIMEA alarm was growing in Washington, including the assessment from B. Lincoln
that those troops could be doubled inshort order. The administration's attention once again
(18:59):
was forcused on Nordstream. As longas Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for
cheap natural gas, Washington was afraidthat countries like Germany would be reluctant to
supply Ukraine with the money and theweapons it needed to defeat Russia. It
was at this unsettled moment that Bidenauthorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency
(19:22):
group to come up with a plan. All options were put on the table,
but only one would emerge. Allright, it's trying to take a
break here. If you have yourfavorite weapon of mass distraction like I have,
my favorite weapon of mass distraction shouldbe a jin jihad, you can
(19:45):
go to abercast dot com. Thestorefront is there and you can find the
vessel of the art. You canorder right from the website. Check out
the t shirts and the tarot cardsand the graphic novels and comic books that
are provided. Thank you very much, evercast dot com. In December of
(20:15):
twenty twenty one, two months beforethe first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine,
Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of newlyformed task force men and women from the
Joint chiefs of Staff the CIA andthe State and Treasury departments and asked for
recommendations about how to respond to Putin'simpending invasion. It would be the first
(20:36):
in a series of top secret meetingsand secure room on the top floor of
the old Executive Office building adjacent tothe White House that was also the home
of President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,and there is usual back and forth chatter
that eventually led to crucial preliminary questionwith the recommendation forwarded by the group to
(20:57):
be the to the President be reversiblesuch as another layer of sanctions and currency
restrictions, or irreversible is that iskinetic action which could not be undone.
What became clear to the participants,according to the source with direct knowledge of
(21:18):
the process, is that Sullivan intendedfor the group to come up with a
plan for the destruction of the twoNordstream pipelines, and that he was delivering
on the desires of the President.Over the next several meetings, with the
participants debated options for an attack.The Navy proposed using a new league commissioned
(21:41):
submarine to assault the pipeline directly.The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed
fuses that they could set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done
would have to be covert. Everyoneinvolved understood the stakes. This is not
kiddy stuff. Quote unquote, thesource said, if the attack were traceable
(22:03):
of the United States, this isan act of war. Yeah, yeah,
it is an act of war,just like arming the Ukrainians with Abraham's
tanks seems like an act of war. At the time, the CIA was
directed by William Burns, a mildmanner former ambassador to Russia who had served
(22:25):
as a deputy Deputy Secretary of Statein the Obama administration. Burns quickly authorized
an agency working group, whose adhoc members included, by chance, some
one who was very familiar with thecapabilities of the Navy's deep sea diverse in
Panama City. Over the next weeks, members of the working group began to
(22:48):
craft a plan for covert operation thatwould use deep sea diverse to trigger an
explosion along the pipeline. Something likethis had been done before in nineteen seventy
one, the American intelligence community lurefrom still undisclosed sources, the two important
units of the Russian Navy were communicatingvia an undersea cable buried in the Sea
of akoshk The Russian Far East coast. The cable linked the Navy command to
(23:18):
the mainland headquarters in Vladsdevak. Thehandpicked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National
Security Agency operatives were assembled somewhere inthe Washington area deep undercover and worked out
a plan using Navy divers, modifiedsubmarines, and deep submarine rescue vehicles that
(23:38):
succeeded after much trial and error.It located the Russian cable. The divers
planted a sophisticated listening device on thecable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and
recorded it on a taping system.The NSA learned the senior Russian Navy officers,
convinced of the security of their communicationslink, chattered away with their peers
(24:00):
without encryption and recording device in itstape had to be replaced monthly, and
the project rolled on merrily for adecade until it was compromised by a forty
year old civilian NSA technician named RonaldPelton, who was fluent in Russian and
Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defectorin nineteen eighty five and sentenced to prison.
He was paid just five thousand dollarsby the Russians for his revelations about
(24:23):
the operation, along with thirty fivethousand dollars for other Russian operational data he
provided that was never made public.That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells,
(24:45):
was innovative and risky and produced invaluableintelligence about the Russian Navy's intention and planning.
So this just speaks to the playbookright like there, it's adding context
to the situation. They've done somethinglike this four back in the day.
Dust this playbook off, and let'stake a look at it. Let's take
a look at how we can usethis as a jumping off point. The
(25:10):
inter agency group was initially skeptical ofthe CIA's enthusiasm for a covert deep sea
attack. There are too many unansweredquestions. The waters of the Baltic Seas
were heavily patrolled by the Russian Navy, and there were no oil rigs that
could be used as cover for divingoperations. Would the divers have to go
to Estonia, right across the borderfrom Russia's natural gas loading docks to train
(25:33):
for the mission. It would bea goat fuck, the agency was told.
Throughout all of this scheming, thesource said, some working guys in
the CIA and the State Department weresaying, don't do this. It's stupid
and it'll be a political nightmare ifit comes out. Let's jump ahead here.
On February seventh, less than threeweeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion
(25:57):
of Ukraine, Biden met with hisWhite House Office in his White House off
in his White House Office with GermanChancellor Olof Shoals, who, after some
wobbling, was now firmly on theAmerican team. At the press briefing that
followed, Biden defiantly said, quote, if Russia invades, there will no
(26:18):
longer be a Nordstream two. Wewill bring an end to it unquote.
Twenty days earlier, Under Secretary Newlandhad delivered essentially the same message at a
State Department briefing with little with littlepress coverage. Quote I want to be
very clear to you today, shesaid, in response to a question.
Quote If Russia invades Ukraine one wayor another, Nordstream two will not move
(26:44):
forward unquote. Several of those involvedin the planning of the pipeline missions were
dismayed by what they viewed as anindirect reference to the attack. It was
like putting an atomic bomb on theground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that
we are going to detonate it.One source said the plan was for the
options to be executed post invasion andnot advertised publicly. Biden simply didn't get
(27:11):
it or ignored it. So newsflash, Biden has a track record of
not keeping things in the bag.He has a track record of telling everyone
exactly what he is gonna do beforehe does it. I mean, we've
(27:32):
tracked multiple times about how he's aplagiarist. I would venture to say he's
a racist, and we and he'snot very smart. He wasn't very smart
before whatever happened to him happened tohim, be an age or whatever happened
(27:55):
to him. He wasn't smart whenhe was a young man, and arguably
a lot less smart now. Buthe's never been able to keep a secret.
See the episode on extortion one sevenall of it. Though. I
have a whole section in the topiclink about Joe Biden, Like just go
listen to it here to this point, to this point Biden, back to
(28:21):
the article Biden and new Land's indiscretions, if that is what it was,
might have frustrated some of the planners, but it also created an opportunity.
According to the source, some ofthe senior officials of CIA determined that blowing
up the pipeline would no longer beconsidered a covert operation because the President just
announced that we knew how to doit. But here's an unattended consequence or
(28:52):
three dimensional chess move. I don'tknow however you feel about it, but
the plan to blow up the nordStream one to two was suddenly downgraded from
a covert operation requiring that Congress beinformed, to one that was deemed as
a highly classified intelligence operation with USmilitary support and under the law. The
source explained, there was no longerlegal requirement to report that operation to Congress.
(29:18):
All they had to do now isjust do it, but it still
had to be secret. The Russianshad superlative surveillance in the Baltic Sea,
Norway was a perfect place to basethe mission. In the past few years
of the East and West Crisis,the US military has vastly expanded its presence
(29:41):
inside Norway, whose western borders runone four hundred miles along the Northern Atlantic
Ocean and manages and merges above theArctic Circle in Russia. The Pentagon has
created high paying jobs and contracts amidsome local controversy by investing hundreds of millions
(30:02):
of dollars to upgrade and expand AmericansNavy and Air Force facilities in Norway.
The new works included, but mostimportantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far
up north that was capable of penetratingdeep into Russia and came online just as
the American intelligence community lost access toa series of long range listening sites inside
(30:26):
China. The newly refurbished American submarinebase, which had been under construction for
years, had become operational, andthe more American submarines were now able to
work closely with their Norwegian colleagues tomonitor and spy on major Russian nuclear readouts
two hundred and fifty miles to theeast on the Kola Peninsula. America also
(30:52):
had vastly expanded a Norwegian air baseand the north and delivered to the Norwegian
airs a fleet of Boeing built Peight Poseidon patrol planes to bolster it's long
range spying on all things Russia andreturn. The Norwegian government angered liberals and
some moderates in its parliament last Novemberby passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement.
(31:18):
Under the new deal, the USlegal system would have had jurisdiction in certain
agreed areas in the North over Americasoldiers accused of crimes off base, as
well as over those Norwegian citizens accusedof suspected interfering with the work at the
base. So look we're getting they'regetting their ducks in a row. They're
(31:42):
getting ready. They want to makesure no one's going to be able to
get prosecuted. So 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 ofexperience and highly profitable deep sea oil and
gas exploration. It could also betrusted to keep the mission secret. The
(32:15):
Norwegians may have had other interests aswell. 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. Sometime in March, a few members
of the team flew to Norway tomeet with the Norwegian secret Service and Navy.
One of the key questions was whereexactly in the Baltic Sea was the
(32:38):
best place to plant these explosives.The nord Streams one and two, each
with two sets of pipelines, wereseparated much of the way by little more
than a mile as they made theirrun to the port of Griefswald in the
far Northern In the far northeast ofGermany, the Norwegian Navy would was quick
(33:00):
to find the right spot in theshallow waters of the Baltic Sea a few
miles often marked Borneolm Island. Thepipeline ran for more than a mile apart
along the seafloor and was only twohundred and sixty feet deep. That would
be well within the range of thedivers, who operating from a Norwegian Alto
class mine hunter, would dive witha mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium
(33:23):
streaming from their tanks and plant shapedsea four charges on the four pipelines with
concrete protective covers. Would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but
the waters off borne Home had anotheradvantage. There were no major tidal currents,
which would have made the task ofdiving much more difficult. After a
(33:45):
bit of research, the Americans wereall in. At this point, the
Navy's obscure deep diving group in PanamaCity once again came into play. The
Deep Sea School at Panama City,whose trainees trainees participated in Ivy Bell,
are seen as an unwanted backwater bythe elite graduates of the Navy Academy in
(34:08):
Annapolis, who typically seek the gloryof being assigned as a seal, a
fighter pilot, or a sub mariner. If one must become a black shoe,
that is, a member of aless desirable surface ship command, there
is always at least duty on adestroyer, a cruiser, amphibious ship at
(34:28):
least glamorous of all is mine warfare. It's divers never appear in Hollywood movies
or on the cover of popular magazines. The best divers with deep diving qualifications
are a tight community, and onlythe very best are recruited for the operational
the operation and told to be preparedto be summoned to the CIA in Washington.
(34:51):
The source said, So we goon for a little bit here about
the Swedish and Danish navies. Youknow, when you're doing something this,
I guess you want to keep yourcircle tiny. And so the fear is
that the Swedish or Danish navies,if they detect something fishy going on,
(35:12):
would sort of report it as fishyactivity. And then there were some sort
of political games being played with theNorwegian chain of command and figuring that someone
in the chain of command needs tobe briefed on it so they could massage
it and pull it out of anykind of reporting if something were to go
(35:37):
go bad with the mission. Therewere some tactical issues too. They were
afraid that the Russian Navy, whoapparently has some pretty good technology about detecting
and spotting minds underwater minds. Sothey did some creative problem solving and they
(36:00):
figured out how to camouflage the minesto make them look like it's just sort
of the background. And the othertactical problem that they had is when would
they go and put the mines in. And what they decided to do was
they decided to use this ball topswhich is Baltic Operations twenty two as a
(36:23):
giant military exercise. So like whenI was in Germany, they did this
thing called Reforger where all of theall of them, all of the armor
would roll through these German towns andscare the shit out of everybody. And
it was just a way of youknow, while practicing moving, you know,
(36:46):
like these large units where where theywant them to go and all that
stuff. But it's also a wayof just being like, look, we're
still here. We still have allthese guns. We got guns, knives,
grenades, pointy sticks, tanks.Um. So Uh, they decided
to use this um uh exercise asa cover to deploy this team to set
(37:13):
these set these these minds up.So in order to do that, they
had to convince the the sixth Fleetplanners, these guys that were planning the
the this exercise to add research anddevelopment into the exercise. Uh. And
this research and development would allow themto you know, have uh, this
(37:36):
cover that they needed to to sendyou know, these these divers in back
the article. Back to the article. The exercise is made public by the
Navy, involved the sixth Fleet incollaboration with the Navy's Research and Warfare Centers.
UH. The at sea event wouldbe held off the coast of Borneome
Island and involved NATO teams of diversplanting mines and competing teams using the latest
(38:01):
underwater technology to find and destroy them. It was both useful exercise and ingenious
cover. The Panama City Boys woulddo their thing, and the sea for
explosives would be in place by theend of Ball Tops twenty two with a
forty eight hour timer attached. Allof the Americans and the Norwegians would be
long gone by the first explosions.And then someone was like, hey,
(38:27):
wouldn't it look kind of fishy ifthe pipeline exploded two days after Balltops was
done? Wouldn't that be wouldn't thatlook kind of weird to everybody else?
(38:50):
So they issued a request to theteam that's on the ground. They were
like, hey, can the PanamaCity Boys figure out a way to command
and control the debt nations instead ofsetting these timers, so they wanted something
put in place to where whenever thepresident chose or let's not be funny,
like Joe Biden's not making any ofthese decisions, Like whoever's telling Joe Biden
(39:15):
what to do? Was like,okay, well, what they should do
is they should put some kind oftimer or put some kind of command of
control det nation on it so wheneverI who is definitely not Joe Biden decides
is the best time to bulle thepipeline up. I could just let someone
know and then and then it canhappen. So the boys, the Panama
(39:36):
City boys on the ground, we'relike, look, we've been training for
this, Like why can't you justthrow this bullshit at us at the last
minute. But the CIA was like, no, no, bro, we
got this. We're used to this. This shit, this kind of shit
happens all the time to us,Like we'll figure it out. You'll see
this sort of action with Bill Clintonand m the beginnings of like the War
(40:02):
on Terror. You'll see the sortof action with Barack Obama having you know,
Osama bin Laden or whoever you know, not Osama bin Ladden, but
like whatever, having people in assights and like refusing to have them have
(40:22):
the sniper's pull triggers and all thisother kind of stuff. And back to
the article here. Cyhirst's article lastminute change was something the CIA was accustomed
to managing, but it also renewedthe concerns that some shared over the necessity
and legality of the entire operation.The President's secret orders also evoked CIA's dilemma
(40:43):
in the Vietnam War days, whenJohnson, confronted by growing anti Vietnam War
sentiment, ordered the agency to violateits charter, which specifically barred it from
operating inside America by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being
controlled by Conant Russia and like,let's just forget what never mind. The
(41:07):
agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout theseventies became clear just how far it had
been willing to go. There wassubsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of Watergate
scandals about the agency spighting on Americancitizens, its involvement in the assassination of
foreign leaders, and it's undermining ofthe socialist government of Salvador Allende. Those
(41:31):
revelations led to a dramatic series ofhearings in the mid seventies in the Senate,
led by Frank Church of Idaho,made it clear that Richard Helms,
the agency director at the time,accepted that he had an obligation to do
what the President wanted, even ifit meant violating law at wrong. That's
(41:52):
wrong, mister Helms, an unpublishedclosed door I don't know why everybody like
I guess when I was a kid, you know I heard this enough times
where I believed it, where they'relike, um, the FBI is the
premiere crime fighting blah blah blah ofour time. It's un you know,
(42:12):
corruptible, you know, men ofhonor and like all this stuff. And
then you just look at it andyou're like, um, wait what they
were sending They were sending blackmail tapesto Martin Luther King's wife. That doesn't
seem uncorruptible, That doesn't seem honorable. Oh wait, what did they do?
(42:38):
They were lying on um uh,surveillance requests for a tape about hookers
peeing on someone. What that doesn'tseem honorable? It's so I mean I
(42:59):
believe Oh wait what Jagger Hoover uhwas being blackmailed by the mob. That's
why he refused to admit that theyexisted for decades. That doesn't seem very
honorable. What Like, once youget context in a little bit of history,
you know, I'm I'll probably alittle bit older than you guys.
(43:20):
Um Once once you once you're beardstarts turning gray, a lot of stuff,
Uh, you start connecting some dots, you know, you're like,
oh, the movies don't make anyfucking sense. Anyhow, an unpublished closed
(43:40):
door testimony, Helms ruefully explained thatyou almost have an immaculate conception when you
uh when you do something under secretorders from our president, whether it's right
and that you should have or it'swrong and you shall have it. The
CIA works under different rules and groundrules than any other part of the government.
(44:01):
He was essentially telling the Senators thathe, as head of the CIA,
understood that he had been working forthe crown and not the Constitution.
Wrong. That's a red fucking flag, sir. The Americans at work in
Norway operated under the same dynamic anddutifully began work on the new problem,
(44:21):
how to remotely detonate the sea fourexplosives on whoever controls Biden's orders, who
is much more demanding assignment than thosein Washington understood. There was no way
for the team in Norway to knowwhen the President might push the button,
or whoever is controlling a president mightpush the button. It would be in
a few weeks or months, orhalf a year or longer. The problem
(44:44):
is the Baltic Sea. It's obviouslyit's saltwater. Things corrode very very quickly.
There's problems with how radio signals work, also problems with other radios on
boats out there. When I wasin the service, I was a combat
(45:07):
engineer, so I'm handling explosive isnot a totally alien concept to me.
And I do know that with radiocontrolled detonation, like you're supposed to turn
every other radio like in the fuckingsquare mile off, like everything's got to
go off because apparently there is apossibility that spare wattage out there or something
(45:34):
presses these these radio waves could compromise, you know, your detonation. So
you got boats flying around on thisthing, You have submarines using sonar to
detect minds and all this ship.You have all these radio signals bouncing around
from all these listening posts spying onRussia. So it seems like it might
(45:59):
be a tall a tall order.So they came up with a way to
detonate the thing. To detonate theC four by triggering or dropping and triggering
a sonar buoy Roquel Welsh and thePope and a life raft those aren't buoy's
(46:22):
dropped by a plane on short notice. This procedure involved the most advanced signal
processing technology. Once in place,a delayed timing device attached to any of
the four pipelines could be accidentally triggeredby a complex mix of ocean background noises
throughout the heavy traffic bulk and seato near or distant shifts underwater drilling,
(46:44):
seismic events, waves, and evensea creatures. To avoid this, the
sonar buoy, once in place,would emit a sequence of unique low frequency
tonal sounds, much like those emittedby a flute or a piano. This
would be recognized by the timing devices, and after preset hours of delay,
(47:04):
triggered the explosives. You want tosignal that's robust enough that no other signal
could accidentally send a pulse that detonatedthe explosives. I was told by doctor
Theodore Postal, Professor emeritus of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at m
I. T. Postle, whohas served as a science advisor to the
(47:30):
Pentagon's Chief and Naval Operations, saidin the issue facing the group in Norway
because of Biden's delay was one ofchants. The longer the explosives were in
the water, the greater the riskthat there was a random signal that would
launch the bombs. So on Septembertwenty six, twenty twenty two, a
Norwegian Navy P eight surveillance plane whichwe had just given them, remember the
(47:53):
sort of towards the middle of theepisode, made a seemingly routine flight and
dropped a sonar buoy. The signalspread underwater, initially to nord Stream two
and the new Nordstream one, anda few hours later the high powered C
four explosives were triggered and three ofthe four pipelines were put out of commission.
Within a few minutes, poles ofmethane gas that remained in the shutter
(48:17):
pipelines could be seen spreading to thewater the surface of the world. The
water surface in the world learned thatsomething irreversible had taken place. So I
here her Biden talk about the environment. You know, he's like shutting down
coal and gasoline and everything because he'sgonna have some kind of magic new electricity.
(48:38):
We're all gonna be driving electric carshere in two years or something like
this. This is a guy whospeaks out on one side of his mouth
about the environment all the time,the Green New Deal, and we need
to lower the missions and our footprintsand cows farming and we need to eat
bugs to blast in this pipeline,just shoving all this all this natural gas
(49:02):
out. Not only that, buthe's gonna like put our European allies at
risk for starving during the winter.Um So, when this move came out
like this, if if it werebeginning more pressed or more people talking about
it, which I'm sure I thinkthey will be. I think they will
(49:22):
be soon. But when more andmore of these news outlets and stuff start
talking about this, the europe isgonna be fucking pissed at us, Like
they're gonna be going fucking crazy thatwe did this shit. And my and
my estimation, I mean, Ican't see how they wouldn't be bad,
(49:47):
you know what I mean? AllRight, let's wrap this up. The
source had a much more streetwise viewof Biden's decision to sabotage more than one
thousand and five five hundred miles ofgas prom pipeline. As Winner approached Well,
he said, speaking for the presidentor speaking of the president, I
gotta I gotta admit, the guy'sgot a pair of balls. He said.
(50:10):
He said he was gonna do it, and he did it. Okay,
he said he was gonna do it, and someone told him. He
said he was gonna do it,and someone did it. But like,
come on, the guy doesn't evenknow what the fucking room he's in.
He doesn't understand how to get offthe stage. You know, he doesn't
know he's standing next to him.He doesn't know that the people that in
(50:31):
the room that he's talking to,who's dead. And he tries to talk
to them. Like the guy doesn'tThe guys doesn't have a pair of balls.
Like he's not impressive, He's notan impresive. Person asked what he
thought of the Russians. Uh,why he thought the Russians failed to respond,
(50:52):
and he said, cynically, maybethey want the capability to do the
same thing the US did. Itwas a beautiful cover story, he went
on behind It was a covert operationthat placed experts in the field and equipment
that operated on a covert signal.The only flaw was the decision to do
it. So there you have it. I'm John Towers and this is Apocaste
(51:24):
Soon. Thank you for listening,and we hope that you enjoyed the show.
Please send an email or find uson social media and let us know
what you think about the show.We would appreciate it if you would give
(51:45):
us a five star rate and review. Wherever you find your favorite podcasts,
you can find Stigmata's studios, graphicnovels, and comic books. As approcast
dot com Welcome to the Red Archive. Get access to over fifty hours of
(52:06):
archived episodes, more bonus audio,additional exclusive content, all this for only
one dollar a month. Find thelink to the Red Archive at abercast dot com
In the dark shadows, in thewhite cold. Fearlessly we search for knowledge
new and old. We drink thestrong spirits and read the ancient tones.
The order of the broadcast. Weare the brave and the board, the
(00:56):
court history Conspiracy. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Uppercast. I'm your
(01:42):
host, John Towers, Doctor JohnTowers. If you want to be more
formal about it, um, hey, I want to apologize for taking all
the time off and those of youwho reached out to me on various methods
and mean to ask if I wasdoing okay, give me some words of
(02:02):
encouragement. Like I said, ifyou listen to the show long enough,
I'm as open as I can beabout my kind of depression issues and some
personal things that I have to dealwith in my everyday life. So,
uh, you know, everybody's okay, I'm okay, violets are right,
(02:24):
everybody's everybody's doing okay. And Ijust, um, I figure, as
long as I have you know thisplatform here, and as long as the
world is ending, I might aswell try to document it in some fashion
and let you guys know kind ofwhat I think about some of this stuff.
(02:45):
It's interesting looking around though, uh, you know, people are talking,
you know, about the wider pictureof sort of the battle that's being
fought, and I'm hearing people talkabout it in terms of spiritual warfare,
and I'm like, hey, that'sgood. That's good. We have like
a whole kind of like one onone course on spiritual warfare. Of course,
it's not a giant globe spanning Cosmoslevel battle of spiritual warfare. It's
(03:10):
more of like the one on onekind of spiritual warfare, the dealing with
the demons and dark forces in everydaylife. So I'm like, yeah,
we got that. And then it'slike, well, you know, it's
actually it's a problem with the media, and I'm like, hey, I
cover that too. You know.We talk a lot about like the media
(03:30):
and you know, conspiracy factoids nowor whatever they're calling them. You know,
it's like, oh, kind ofgot that covered. And I feel
like we do conspiracy here in aresponsible way. And usually that boils down
to dipping our toes in sort ofthe political landscape, how media skews coverage,
(03:59):
how big tech you know, skewsyour thoughts. Like, so,
if you're interested in all of thosesort of aspects um, you know,
the website is still up. Ihaven't done a steady show since November,
I think, so, you know, the website's still up. All the
(04:20):
feature topic link should still be working, whether the shows are archived or not,
or if they're on the regular feed. So hit up that feature topic
link and we're we've kind of beendoing one oh one, two oh one,
three oh one stuff on a lotof the things they're happening in the
world, you know, right now, even sort of like metaphorically, like
(04:45):
you know, we're chipping away throughExodus still, and a lot of times
in Exodus, the Hebrews are like, let's just go back and let Farah
rule us. Like there's an innatething with um, maybe all of human
y. You know, there's alittle, there's a little it's easier just
to bend the knee kind of stuff. And you know, I feel like
(05:10):
some of us are kind of downwith that and like rushing towards that nowadays.
You know, if ever, andI heard this statistic about the Revolutionary
War where actually only thirty percent ofAmericans were in favor of the Revolutionary War,
and those those thirty percent were thego getters. They're the ones that
(05:30):
change the fucking world so interested inall of that stuff. We've touched on
a lot of that stuff. However, you perceive the sort of state of
the world that we're in now.Um, you know, the abercast has
done a lot of groundwork for Iguess what's coming right, Like what's coming
(05:53):
so um talking about sort of politicsand talking about the media and this sort
of stuff. I want to talkabout this Seymour Hirsh Nord stream pipeline thing.
And it's amazing to me that thisisn't everywhere. It's actually not amazing
to me that this isn't everywhere,you know, like the it's interesting.
(06:17):
Here's another interesting thing that's kind ofleading me towards this path for the show
tonight is the derailment in Ohio tookplace like on the eighth, and no
one in the media started talking aboutit until like this week. And I
mean, it's an environmental disaster,it's a transportation disaster, and it's a
(06:44):
should be what would normally be constituted, like THEEMA would be there and the
news would be all over this,and it's just nothing. Nothing happened until
like this week, and when itdid, everyone's just like everything's cool,
let's just go back, just goback. Well, I am right on
the Ohio River here in the steelbuckle of the rust Belt, and um,
(07:08):
you know, people are already kindof talking about, like, well,
what happens when this ship hits thewater table and just flows south right
down this Ohio River. And I'mlike, well, I don't know about
you guys, but I have awhole compartment full of water filters. I
got stored water up I mean everywhere. So um, anyhow so I want
(07:30):
to talk about this Seymour Hirsh thing. Um you'll hear. I'll probably slip
and call him Si Hirsh every nowand again, because that's what his friends
call him. Anyhow, Um,he's he's not like a Fox News guy.
He's not Blaze dude. He's notlike a with Ben Shapiro or whatever.
He's an icon of the left.You might have read his work about
(07:57):
the Myli massacre. He did alot of work about Watergate for the New
York Times. Um. He alsotalks a lot about those stories, saying
when he was breaking them, especiallythe Mylive massacre, people didn't want the
story because it was too it wastoo crazy, even though they were all
anti war. They were still theydidn't they didn't want the story because of
(08:20):
the political implications. Um So,you know, mister Hirsch got h he
has a sub stack and he publishedthis massive article um on his on his
sub stack, and uh virtually nobodyis talking about it. And it's amazing.
(08:41):
Probably if I remember correctly, theum when the Nordstream pipeline got bombed,
I was on I believe I don'tremember what episode or whatever it was,
but I remember being like, Ithink that we fucking did this.
Like I'm pretty sure that we did. It's kind of the only thing that
may any kind of sense in here. Uh. Mister Hirsch goes, this
(09:05):
is a very long article. I'mnot exactly sure how I'm gonna tackle it.
Um uh So, I guess we'lljust I'll just take off. We'll
just start here and figure it out. And um I uh the the article
is on substack and it's on hisfree side. He published it on the
(09:26):
on the free side. UM soyou can get the whole thing. It's
like twenty it's like thirty pages.Um so uh yeah, So here we
go. First, there's a littlebit of background that we kind of need
to kind of need to talk aboutto set this up, you know,
working about context here and um.One of the things that I needed I
(09:48):
wanted to bring up is so thelast guy, orange Man Orange Man,
had effectively closed down the nord Streampipeline. He was like, look,
Germany and Europe are their allied.They're like preferred allied. I can't remember
how it goes, but you knowthey should be buying their oil from US
and not from Russia. And sohe had effectively shut down the nord Stream
(10:13):
pipeline. Well and once uh umuh. Once President Biden took office,
one of the first things he didwas he was like, nope, we're
gonna allow the nord Stream to becompleted. It's a u It wound up
being a smack in the face toall the NATO allies. Uh. It
(10:33):
basically was a giant win for Russia. It was a slap in the face
to all of um, domestically ourenergy producing companies and industries. So the
only thing, the only reason thisthing was operating in the first place is
because Joe said, yes, hesaid, let's let's let's do it.
(10:56):
Let's let them do it, becausewho knows who knows? So M So
here's to sy Hirsch's substack. HowAmerica took out the nord Stream pipeline UM
the US or the New York Timescalled it a mystery, but the United
States executed a covert c operations thatwas kept secret until now. So Hirsch
(11:26):
talks a little bit here about theUS Navy's Diving Salvage Center. And the
reason this is important is because ifhe were to use um jasat guys or
Joint Operations and special Forces, anybodythat fell under that tier of operator,
(11:46):
he would have He couldn't have keptthat off the books. And this Hirsch
gets rail twisted up about the factthat this obviously didn't go through Congress,
or at least not the normal channelsof Congress to get this operation approved.
So he spends a little bit oftime explaining why he's using these guys,
and we're gonna be we'll talk aboutthis year. The center has been training
(12:09):
highly skilled deep water divers for decades. Once assigned to American military units worldwide.
They're capable of technical diving to dogood using Sea four explosives to clear
harbors and the breach and breaches ofdebris unexploded Ordinance as well as the bad
like blowing up four and oil rigsand fouling intake valves for undersea power plants,
(12:33):
and destroying lots on crucial shipping canals. This the Panama City Center,
which boasts the second largest indoor pollin America. Sorry, I gotta put
my food down. The second largestindoor pool in America was the perfect place
(12:56):
to recruit the best, the mosttaciturn graduates of the diving school, who
successfully did last summer what they hadbeen authorized to do two hundred and sixty
feet under the surface of the BalticSea. Last June, the Navy divers,
operating under the cover of a widelypublicized Midsummer NATO exercise known as Baal
(13:16):
Troops twenty two, planted the remotelytriggered explosive that three months later destroyed three
of the four nord Stream pipelines.According to a source with direct knowledge of
the operational planning, two the pipelines, which were collectively known as nord Stream
one, had been providing Germany withmuch of the Western European countries with cheap
(13:43):
Russian natural gas for more than adecade. The second pair of pipelines,
called the Nordstream two had been built, but they were not yet operational.
Now, with Russian troops massing onthe Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in
Europe since nineteen forty five looming,Joe Biden saw the pipeline as a vehicle
(14:03):
for both Vladimir Putin to weaponize naturalgas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrianne Watson,the White House spokesperson, said in an
email, this is false and completelyfiction. Tammy Thorpe, a spokesperson for
the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote, this claim is completely an utterly false.
(14:26):
Biden's decision to sabotage the pipelines cameafter more than nine months of highly
secret back and forth debate inside Washington'snationalist security community about how best to achieve
that goal. For much of thattime, the issue was not whether to
do the mission, but how toget it done. With no overt clue
(14:48):
as to who was responsible. Therewas a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on
the graduates of the Center's hard coredive school in Panama City. The divers
were Navy only, but not membersof America's Special Operations Command, whose covert
operations must be reported to Congress andbriefed in advanced to the Senate and House
(15:13):
leadership, the so called Gang ofEight. The Biden administration was doing everything
possible to avoid leaks as the planningtook place in twenty twenty one into the
first months of twenty twenty two.Joe Biden and his foreign policy team,
the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan,Secretary of State Tony Blincoln, and Victoria
(15:33):
Newland, the Under Secretary of Statefor Policy, had been vocal and consistent
in their hostilities to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for seven
hundred and fifty miles under the BalticSea from two different ports in the northeastern
Russia near the Estonian border, passingclose to the Danish island of Bornholm,
(15:58):
before ending in northern Germany. Thedirect route, which bypassed and he needed
to transit Ukraine, had been aboon for the German economy, which enjoyed
an abundance of cheap Russian natural gasenough to run its factories and heat its
homes, while enabling enabling German distributorsto sell excess gas at a profit throughout
(16:21):
Western Europe. Actions that could betraced to the administration would violate US promises
to minimalize direct conflict with Russia.The secrecy was essential. From its earliest
days. Nordstream one was seen byWashington and its anti Russian NATO partners as
a threat to Western dominance. Theholding company behind it Nordstream AG, which
(16:45):
incorporated incorporated in Switzerland and twenty fivethe partnership with Gazprom, publicly traded Russian
company producing enormous profits for shareholders,which is dominated by oligarchs known to be
in the thrall of Putin. GasProm control fifty one percent of the company,
(17:07):
with four European energy firms, onein France, one in Netherlands,
and two in Germany sharing the remainingforty nine percent stock and having the right
to control downstream sales of inexpensive naturalgas to local distributors in Germany and Western
Europe. Gas Proms profits were sharedwith the Russian government and the state.
(17:27):
Gas and oil revenues were estimated insome years to them out as much as
forty five percent of Russia's annual budget. So America's political fears were real.
Putin would now have an additional andmuch needed major source of income in Germany
(17:48):
and the rest of Eastern Europe wouldbecome addicted to low cost natural gas supplied
by Russia, while diminishing European relianceon America. In fact, that's exactly
what happened Many Germany. Many Germanssaw nord Stream One as part of the
deliverance of former Chancellor Willie Brandt's famedas politic theory, which would enable postwar
(18:08):
Germany to rehabilitate itself and other EuropeanNatians destroyed in World War Two by,
among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russiangas to fuel the prosperous Western European markets
and trading economy. I'm skipping ahead. Like I said, this is very
long. Let's see here. Throughoutall of this, Russian troops had been
(18:38):
steadily and ominously building up the bordersof Ukraine, and by the end of
December, more than one hundred thousandsoldiers were in positions to strike from Belarus
and CRIMEA alarm was growing in Washington, including the assessment from B. Lincoln
that those troops could be doubled inshort order. The administration's attention once again
(18:59):
was forcused on Nordstream. As longas Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for
cheap natural gas, Washington was afraidthat countries like Germany would be reluctant to
supply Ukraine with the money and theweapons it needed to defeat Russia. It
was at this unsettled moment that Bidenauthorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency
(19:22):
group to come up with a plan. All options were put on the table,
but only one would emerge. Allright, it's trying to take a
break here. If you have yourfavorite weapon of mass distraction like I have,
my favorite weapon of mass distraction shouldbe a jin jihad, you can
(19:45):
go to abercast dot com. Thestorefront is there and you can find the
vessel of the art. You canorder right from the website. Check out
the t shirts and the tarot cardsand the graphic novels and comic books that
are provided. Thank you very much, evercast dot com. In December of
(20:15):
twenty twenty one, two months beforethe first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine,
Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of newlyformed task force men and women from the
Joint chiefs of Staff the CIA andthe State and Treasury departments and asked for
recommendations about how to respond to Putin'simpending invasion. It would be the first
(20:36):
in a series of top secret meetingsand secure room on the top floor of
the old Executive Office building adjacent tothe White House that was also the home
of President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,and there is usual back and forth chatter
that eventually led to crucial preliminary questionwith the recommendation forwarded by the group to
(20:57):
be the to the President be reversiblesuch as another layer of sanctions and currency
restrictions, or irreversible is that iskinetic action which could not be undone.
What became clear to the participants,according to the source with direct knowledge of
(21:18):
the process, is that Sullivan intendedfor the group to come up with a
plan for the destruction of the twoNordstream pipelines, and that he was delivering
on the desires of the President.Over the next several meetings, with the
participants debated options for an attack.The Navy proposed using a new league commissioned
(21:41):
submarine to assault the pipeline directly.The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed
fuses that they could set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done
would have to be covert. Everyoneinvolved understood the stakes. This is not
kiddy stuff. Quote unquote, thesource said, if the attack were traceable
(22:03):
of the United States, this isan act of war. Yeah, yeah,
it is an act of war,just like arming the Ukrainians with Abraham's
tanks seems like an act of war. At the time, the CIA was
directed by William Burns, a mildmanner former ambassador to Russia who had served
(22:25):
as a deputy Deputy Secretary of Statein the Obama administration. Burns quickly authorized
an agency working group, whose adhoc members included, by chance, some
one who was very familiar with thecapabilities of the Navy's deep sea diverse in
Panama City. Over the next weeks, members of the working group began to
(22:48):
craft a plan for covert operation thatwould use deep sea diverse to trigger an
explosion along the pipeline. Something likethis had been done before in nineteen seventy
one, the American intelligence community lurefrom still undisclosed sources, the two important
units of the Russian Navy were communicatingvia an undersea cable buried in the Sea
of akoshk The Russian Far East coast. The cable linked the Navy command to
(23:18):
the mainland headquarters in Vladsdevak. Thehandpicked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National
Security Agency operatives were assembled somewhere inthe Washington area deep undercover and worked out
a plan using Navy divers, modifiedsubmarines, and deep submarine rescue vehicles that
(23:38):
succeeded after much trial and error.It located the Russian cable. The divers
planted a sophisticated listening device on thecable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and
recorded it on a taping system.The NSA learned the senior Russian Navy officers,
convinced of the security of their communicationslink, chattered away with their peers
(24:00):
without encryption and recording device in itstape had to be replaced monthly, and
the project rolled on merrily for adecade until it was compromised by a forty
year old civilian NSA technician named RonaldPelton, who was fluent in Russian and
Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defectorin nineteen eighty five and sentenced to prison.
He was paid just five thousand dollarsby the Russians for his revelations about
(24:23):
the operation, along with thirty fivethousand dollars for other Russian operational data he
provided that was never made public.That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells,
(24:45):
was innovative and risky and produced invaluableintelligence about the Russian Navy's intention and planning.
So this just speaks to the playbookright like there, it's adding context
to the situation. They've done somethinglike this four back in the day.
Dust this playbook off, and let'stake a look at it. Let's take
a look at how we can usethis as a jumping off point. The
(25:10):
inter agency group was initially skeptical ofthe CIA's enthusiasm for a covert deep sea
attack. There are too many unansweredquestions. The waters of the Baltic Seas
were heavily patrolled by the Russian Navy, and there were no oil rigs that
could be used as cover for divingoperations. Would the divers have to go
to Estonia, right across the borderfrom Russia's natural gas loading docks to train
(25:33):
for the mission. It would bea goat fuck, the agency was told.
Throughout all of this scheming, thesource said, some working guys in
the CIA and the State Department weresaying, don't do this. It's stupid
and it'll be a political nightmare ifit comes out. Let's jump ahead here.
On February seventh, less than threeweeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion
(25:57):
of Ukraine, Biden met with hisWhite House Office in his White House off
in his White House Office with GermanChancellor Olof Shoals, who, after some
wobbling, was now firmly on theAmerican team. At the press briefing that
followed, Biden defiantly said, quote, if Russia invades, there will no
(26:18):
longer be a Nordstream two. Wewill bring an end to it unquote.
Twenty days earlier, Under Secretary Newlandhad delivered essentially the same message at a
State Department briefing with little with littlepress coverage. Quote I want to be
very clear to you today, shesaid, in response to a question.
Quote If Russia invades Ukraine one wayor another, Nordstream two will not move
(26:44):
forward unquote. Several of those involvedin the planning of the pipeline missions were
dismayed by what they viewed as anindirect reference to the attack. It was
like putting an atomic bomb on theground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that
we are going to detonate it.One source said the plan was for the
options to be executed post invasion andnot advertised publicly. Biden simply didn't get
(27:11):
it or ignored it. So newsflash, Biden has a track record of
not keeping things in the bag.He has a track record of telling everyone
exactly what he is gonna do beforehe does it. I mean, we've
(27:32):
tracked multiple times about how he's aplagiarist. I would venture to say he's
a racist, and we and he'snot very smart. He wasn't very smart
before whatever happened to him happened tohim, be an age or whatever happened
(27:55):
to him. He wasn't smart whenhe was a young man, and arguably
a lot less smart now. Buthe's never been able to keep a secret.
See the episode on extortion one sevenall of it. Though. I
have a whole section in the topiclink about Joe Biden, Like just go
listen to it here to this point, to this point Biden, back to
(28:21):
the article Biden and new Land's indiscretions, if that is what it was,
might have frustrated some of the planners, but it also created an opportunity.
According to the source, some ofthe senior officials of CIA determined that blowing
up the pipeline would no longer beconsidered a covert operation because the President just
announced that we knew how to doit. But here's an unattended consequence or
(28:52):
three dimensional chess move. I don'tknow however you feel about it, but
the plan to blow up the nordStream one to two was suddenly downgraded from
a covert operation requiring that Congress beinformed, to one that was deemed as
a highly classified intelligence operation with USmilitary support and under the law. The
source explained, there was no longerlegal requirement to report that operation to Congress.
(29:18):
All they had to do now isjust do it, but it still
had to be secret. The Russianshad superlative surveillance in the Baltic Sea,
Norway was a perfect place to basethe mission. In the past few years
of the East and West Crisis,the US military has vastly expanded its presence
(29:41):
inside Norway, whose western borders runone four hundred miles along the Northern Atlantic
Ocean and manages and merges above theArctic Circle in Russia. The Pentagon has
created high paying jobs and contracts amidsome local controversy by investing hundreds of millions
(30:02):
of dollars to upgrade and expand AmericansNavy and Air Force facilities in Norway.
The new works included, but mostimportantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far
up north that was capable of penetratingdeep into Russia and came online just as
the American intelligence community lost access toa series of long range listening sites inside
(30:26):
China. The newly refurbished American submarinebase, which had been under construction for
years, had become operational, andthe more American submarines were now able to
work closely with their Norwegian colleagues tomonitor and spy on major Russian nuclear readouts
two hundred and fifty miles to theeast on the Kola Peninsula. America also
(30:52):
had vastly expanded a Norwegian air baseand the north and delivered to the Norwegian
airs a fleet of Boeing built Peight Poseidon patrol planes to bolster it's long
range spying on all things Russia andreturn. The Norwegian government angered liberals and
some moderates in its parliament last Novemberby passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement.
(31:18):
Under the new deal, the USlegal system would have had jurisdiction in certain
agreed areas in the North over Americasoldiers accused of crimes off base, as
well as over those Norwegian citizens accusedof suspected interfering with the work at the
base. So look we're getting they'regetting their ducks in a row. They're
(31:42):
getting ready. They want to makesure no one's going to be able to
get prosecuted. So 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 ofexperience and highly profitable deep sea oil and
gas exploration. It could also betrusted to keep the mission secret. The
(32:15):
Norwegians may have had other interests aswell. 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. Sometime in March, a few members
of the team flew to Norway tomeet with the Norwegian secret Service and Navy.
One of the key questions was whereexactly in the Baltic Sea was the
(32:38):
best place to plant these explosives.The nord Streams one and two, each
with two sets of pipelines, wereseparated much of the way by little more
than a mile as they made theirrun to the port of Griefswald in the
far Northern In the far northeast ofGermany, the Norwegian Navy would was quick
(33:00):
to find the right spot in theshallow waters of the Baltic Sea a few
miles often marked Borneolm Island. Thepipeline ran for more than a mile apart
along the seafloor and was only twohundred and sixty feet deep. That would
be well within the range of thedivers, who operating from a Norwegian Alto
class mine hunter, would dive witha mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium
(33:23):
streaming from their tanks and plant shapedsea four charges on the four pipelines with
concrete protective covers. Would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but
the waters off borne Home had anotheradvantage. There were no major tidal currents,
which would have made the task ofdiving much more difficult. After a
(33:45):
bit of research, the Americans wereall in. At this point, the
Navy's obscure deep diving group in PanamaCity once again came into play. The
Deep Sea School at Panama City,whose trainees trainees participated in Ivy Bell,
are seen as an unwanted backwater bythe elite graduates of the Navy Academy in
(34:08):
Annapolis, who typically seek the gloryof being assigned as a seal, a
fighter pilot, or a sub mariner. If one must become a black shoe,
that is, a member of aless desirable surface ship command, there
is always at least duty on adestroyer, a cruiser, amphibious ship at
(34:28):
least glamorous of all is mine warfare. It's divers never appear in Hollywood movies
or on the cover of popular magazines. The best divers with deep diving qualifications
are a tight community, and onlythe very best are recruited for the operational
the operation and told to be preparedto be summoned to the CIA in Washington.
(34:51):
The source said, So we goon for a little bit here about
the Swedish and Danish navies. Youknow, when you're doing something this,
I guess you want to keep yourcircle tiny. And so the fear is
that the Swedish or Danish navies,if they detect something fishy going on,
(35:12):
would sort of report it as fishyactivity. And then there were some sort
of political games being played with theNorwegian chain of command and figuring that someone
in the chain of command needs tobe briefed on it so they could massage
it and pull it out of anykind of reporting if something were to go
(35:37):
go bad with the mission. Therewere some tactical issues too. They were
afraid that the Russian Navy, whoapparently has some pretty good technology about detecting
and spotting minds underwater minds. Sothey did some creative problem solving and they
(36:00):
figured out how to camouflage the minesto make them look like it's just sort
of the background. And the othertactical problem that they had is when would
they go and put the mines in. And what they decided to do was
they decided to use this ball topswhich is Baltic Operations twenty two as a
(36:23):
giant military exercise. So like whenI was in Germany, they did this
thing called Reforger where all of theall of them, all of the armor
would roll through these German towns andscare the shit out of everybody. And
it was just a way of youknow, while practicing moving, you know,
(36:46):
like these large units where where theywant them to go and all that
stuff. But it's also a wayof just being like, look, we're
still here. We still have allthese guns. We got guns, knives,
grenades, pointy sticks, tanks.Um. So Uh, they decided
to use this um uh exercise asa cover to deploy this team to set
(37:13):
these set these these minds up.So in order to do that, they
had to convince the the sixth Fleetplanners, these guys that were planning the
the this exercise to add research anddevelopment into the exercise. Uh. And
this research and development would allow themto you know, have uh, this
(37:36):
cover that they needed to to sendyou know, these these divers in back
the article. Back to the article. The exercise is made public by the
Navy, involved the sixth Fleet incollaboration with the Navy's Research and Warfare Centers.
UH. The at sea event wouldbe held off the coast of Borneome
Island and involved NATO teams of diversplanting mines and competing teams using the latest
(38:01):
underwater technology to find and destroy them. It was both useful exercise and ingenious
cover. The Panama City Boys woulddo their thing, and the sea for
explosives would be in place by theend of Ball Tops twenty two with a
forty eight hour timer attached. Allof the Americans and the Norwegians would be
long gone by the first explosions.And then someone was like, hey,
(38:27):
wouldn't it look kind of fishy ifthe pipeline exploded two days after Balltops was
done? Wouldn't that be wouldn't thatlook kind of weird to everybody else?
(38:50):
So they issued a request to theteam that's on the ground. They were
like, hey, can the PanamaCity Boys figure out a way to command
and control the debt nations instead ofsetting these timers, so they wanted something
put in place to where whenever thepresident chose or let's not be funny,
like Joe Biden's not making any ofthese decisions, Like whoever's telling Joe Biden
(39:15):
what to do? Was like,okay, well, what they should do
is they should put some kind oftimer or put some kind of command of
control det nation on it so wheneverI who is definitely not Joe Biden decides
is the best time to bulle thepipeline up. I could just let someone
know and then and then it canhappen. So the boys, the Panama
(39:36):
City boys on the ground, we'relike, look, we've been training for
this, Like why can't you justthrow this bullshit at us at the last
minute. But the CIA was like, no, no, bro, we
got this. We're used to this. This shit, this kind of shit
happens all the time to us,Like we'll figure it out. You'll see
this sort of action with Bill Clintonand m the beginnings of like the War
(40:02):
on Terror. You'll see the sortof action with Barack Obama having you know,
Osama bin Laden or whoever you know, not Osama bin Ladden, but
like whatever, having people in assights and like refusing to have them have
(40:22):
the sniper's pull triggers and all thisother kind of stuff. And back to
the article here. Cyhirst's article lastminute change was something the CIA was accustomed
to managing, but it also renewedthe concerns that some shared over the necessity
and legality of the entire operation.The President's secret orders also evoked CIA's dilemma
(40:43):
in the Vietnam War days, whenJohnson, confronted by growing anti Vietnam War
sentiment, ordered the agency to violateits charter, which specifically barred it from
operating inside America by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being
controlled by Conant Russia and like,let's just forget what never mind. The
(41:07):
agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout theseventies became clear just how far it had
been willing to go. There wassubsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of Watergate
scandals about the agency spighting on Americancitizens, its involvement in the assassination of
foreign leaders, and it's undermining ofthe socialist government of Salvador Allende. Those
(41:31):
revelations led to a dramatic series ofhearings in the mid seventies in the Senate,
led by Frank Church of Idaho,made it clear that Richard Helms,
the agency director at the time,accepted that he had an obligation to do
what the President wanted, even ifit meant violating law at wrong. That's
(41:52):
wrong, mister Helms, an unpublishedclosed door I don't know why everybody like
I guess when I was a kid, you know I heard this enough times
where I believed it, where they'relike, um, the FBI is the
premiere crime fighting blah blah blah ofour time. It's un you know,
(42:12):
corruptible, you know, men ofhonor and like all this stuff. And
then you just look at it andyou're like, um, wait what they
were sending They were sending blackmail tapesto Martin Luther King's wife. That doesn't
seem uncorruptible, That doesn't seem honorable. Oh wait, what did they do?
(42:38):
They were lying on um uh,surveillance requests for a tape about hookers
peeing on someone. What that doesn'tseem honorable? It's so I mean I
(42:59):
believe Oh wait what Jagger Hoover uhwas being blackmailed by the mob. That's
why he refused to admit that theyexisted for decades. That doesn't seem very
honorable. What Like, once youget context in a little bit of history,
you know, I'm I'll probably alittle bit older than you guys.
(43:20):
Um Once once you once you're beardstarts turning gray, a lot of stuff,
Uh, you start connecting some dots, you know, you're like,
oh, the movies don't make anyfucking sense. Anyhow, an unpublished closed
(43:40):
door testimony, Helms ruefully explained thatyou almost have an immaculate conception when you
uh when you do something under secretorders from our president, whether it's right
and that you should have or it'swrong and you shall have it. The
CIA works under different rules and groundrules than any other part of the government.
(44:01):
He was essentially telling the Senators thathe, as head of the CIA,
understood that he had been working forthe crown and not the Constitution.
Wrong. That's a red fucking flag, sir. The Americans at work in
Norway operated under the same dynamic anddutifully began work on the new problem,
(44:21):
how to remotely detonate the sea fourexplosives on whoever controls Biden's orders, who
is much more demanding assignment than thosein Washington understood. There was no way
for the team in Norway to knowwhen the President might push the button,
or whoever is controlling a president mightpush the button. It would be in
a few weeks or months, orhalf a year or longer. The problem
(44:44):
is the Baltic Sea. It's obviouslyit's saltwater. Things corrode very very quickly.
There's problems with how radio signals work, also problems with other radios on
boats out there. When I wasin the service, I was a combat
(45:07):
engineer, so I'm handling explosive isnot a totally alien concept to me.
And I do know that with radiocontrolled detonation, like you're supposed to turn
every other radio like in the fuckingsquare mile off, like everything's got to
go off because apparently there is apossibility that spare wattage out there or something
(45:34):
presses these these radio waves could compromise, you know, your detonation. So
you got boats flying around on thisthing, You have submarines using sonar to
detect minds and all this ship.You have all these radio signals bouncing around
from all these listening posts spying onRussia. So it seems like it might
(45:59):
be a tall a tall order.So they came up with a way to
detonate the thing. To detonate theC four by triggering or dropping and triggering
a sonar buoy Roquel Welsh and thePope and a life raft those aren't buoy's
(46:22):
dropped by a plane on short notice. This procedure involved the most advanced signal
processing technology. Once in place,a delayed timing device attached to any of
the four pipelines could be accidentally triggeredby a complex mix of ocean background noises
throughout the heavy traffic bulk and seato near or distant shifts underwater drilling,
(46:44):
seismic events, waves, and evensea creatures. To avoid this, the
sonar buoy, once in place,would emit a sequence of unique low frequency
tonal sounds, much like those emittedby a flute or a piano. This
would be recognized by the timing devices, and after preset hours of delay,
(47:04):
triggered the explosives. You want tosignal that's robust enough that no other signal
could accidentally send a pulse that detonatedthe explosives. I was told by doctor
Theodore Postal, Professor emeritus of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at m
I. T. Postle, whohas served as a science advisor to the
(47:30):
Pentagon's Chief and Naval Operations, saidin the issue facing the group in Norway
because of Biden's delay was one ofchants. The longer the explosives were in
the water, the greater the riskthat there was a random signal that would
launch the bombs. So on Septembertwenty six, twenty twenty two, a
Norwegian Navy P eight surveillance plane whichwe had just given them, remember the
(47:53):
sort of towards the middle of theepisode, made a seemingly routine flight and
dropped a sonar buoy. The signalspread underwater, initially to nord Stream two
and the new Nordstream one, anda few hours later the high powered C
four explosives were triggered and three ofthe four pipelines were put out of commission.
Within a few minutes, poles ofmethane gas that remained in the shutter
(48:17):
pipelines could be seen spreading to thewater the surface of the world. The
water surface in the world learned thatsomething irreversible had taken place. So I
here her Biden talk about the environment. You know, he's like shutting down
coal and gasoline and everything because he'sgonna have some kind of magic new electricity.
(48:38):
We're all gonna be driving electric carshere in two years or something like
this. This is a guy whospeaks out on one side of his mouth
about the environment all the time,the Green New Deal, and we need
to lower the missions and our footprintsand cows farming and we need to eat
bugs to blast in this pipeline,just shoving all this all this natural gas
(49:02):
out. Not only that, buthe's gonna like put our European allies at
risk for starving during the winter.Um So, when this move came out
like this, if if it werebeginning more pressed or more people talking about
it, which I'm sure I thinkthey will be. I think they will
(49:22):
be soon. But when more andmore of these news outlets and stuff start
talking about this, the europe isgonna be fucking pissed at us, Like
they're gonna be going fucking crazy thatwe did this shit. And my and
my estimation, I mean, Ican't see how they wouldn't be bad,
(49:47):
you know what I mean? AllRight, let's wrap this up. The
source had a much more streetwise viewof Biden's decision to sabotage more than one
thousand and five five hundred miles ofgas prom pipeline. As Winner approached Well,
he said, speaking for the presidentor speaking of the president, I
gotta I gotta admit, the guy'sgot a pair of balls. He said.
(50:10):
He said he was gonna do it, and he did it. Okay,
he said he was gonna do it, and someone told him. He
said he was gonna do it,and someone did it. But like,
come on, the guy doesn't evenknow what the fucking room he's in.
He doesn't understand how to get offthe stage. You know, he doesn't
know he's standing next to him.He doesn't know that the people that in
(50:31):
the room that he's talking to,who's dead. And he tries to talk
to them. Like the guy doesn'tThe guys doesn't have a pair of balls.
Like he's not impressive, He's notan impresive. Person asked what he
thought of the Russians. Uh,why he thought the Russians failed to respond,
(50:52):
and he said, cynically, maybethey want the capability to do the
same thing the US did. Itwas a beautiful cover story, he went
on behind It was a covert operationthat placed experts in the field and equipment
that operated on a covert signal.The only flaw was the decision to do
it. So there you have it. I'm John Towers and this is Apocaste
(51:24):
Soon. Thank you for listening,and we hope that you enjoyed the show.
Please send an email or find uson social media and let us know
what you think about the show.We would appreciate it if you would give
(51:45):
us a five star rate and review. Wherever you find your favorite podcasts,
you can find Stigmata's studios, graphicnovels, and comic books. As approcast
dot com Welcome to the Red Archive. Get access to over fifty hours of
(52:06):
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