The Sept. 2020 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline was so powerful it initially registered as an earthquake, released nearly 500,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere and killed marine life for miles around, Pancevski writes.
In September, 2022, powerful underwater explosions blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that had been built to provide Russian gas to Germany in what’s been called the most massive act of industrial sabotage in history. But for years its origins were a mystery, spurring multiple conspiracy theories about who might have been responsible – from the CIA to the Russians themselves. In 2023, Bojan Pancevski , chief European correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, began breaking stories about the affair, and now he’s pulled them—and much more—together in a riveting new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, that identifies the culprits as a shadowy group of Ukrainian operatives which he dubs The Start Up, with loose ties to their embattled country’s military and intelligence services. In this week’s SpyTalk podcast, he talked to Jeff Stein and Michael Isikoff about what he discovered, what the CIA actually knew in advance about the operation, and what’s going on in an ongoing German police investigation that has charged a key perpetrator with war crimes. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Stein: Bojan Pancevski, welcome to Spy Talk. A reviewer for the New York Times called your book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, “a spectacular feat of investigative journalism built on your intimate access to the senior Ukrainian intelligence chiefs who say they hatched the idea.” Tell us all about this group of Ukrainian chiefs who you dubbed The Startup.
Pancevski: So the people I call The Startup are veterans of intelligence and counterintelligence work. Some of them have been around for 25 years. And others are soldiers and military officers who’ve been fighting against Russia since 2014, when Vladimir Putin first invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. And as soon as the full scale invasion was launched on their country in February 2022, they all joined the armed forces. They were fighting in the Battle of Kyiv for a month, the capital. So they were integrated into this elite unit of the Ukrainian special forces. And with that unit, they kind of carved up their fiefdom.
Stein: They were rogues, really.
Pancevski: Essentially, within the intelligence community, which is vast, you have groups of people and officials at a very senior level who are being sponsored or patronized by oligarchs, by business interests, by politicians, by political parties. These people are beneath the surface. And they form networks. So it’s not very unusual to have a group of people who are operating under the central command of the military but only to a certain point. There are moments when they do their own thing. And perhaps they don’t report everything they do. It’s a very difficult thing to explain to an American or a British person or a German person for that matter, where things are much more regulated.
Stein: I want to clear out some underbrush right away. The CIA was blamed for carrying out this operation. The Russians were blamed for carrying it out. There was a cast of characters blamed. You make an airtight case—and the Germans are prosecuting a case—that it was this group of Ukrainians, right? No question whatsoever.
Pancevski: That’s exactly right. I spent three years investigating the case. My investigation is corroborated by the findings of the German investigation. The Germans have found evidence they say implicates people connected to this group. They have found traces of explosives, they have found DNA, they have found fingerprints.
Unfortunately, there was a lot of reporting which is entirely wrong about the CIA involvement, but it’s sort of caught on. And there’s a pretty big group of people who are willing to believe in it because it’s quite convenient to blame the CIA for everything if you come from a certain political perspective.
Isikoff: It seemed to me that the people you’re writing about fall into this gray zone of, not quite official, but not quite entirely rogue either. Walk us through the story of how this came about to begin with. And who came up with the idea for such an audacious operation such as this?
Pancevski: As soon as the Battle of Kyiv was done, around a month into the full scale invasion, they kind of sat down one night in the office of one of the backers, financial backers of this group—I failed to mention earlier a lot of units in the Ukrainian Armed Forces are privately funded.
Isikoff: And could you say who that financial backer was?
Pancevski: No. I don’t name anyone by their actual name. In the book I call him “the walking lawsuit” because he’s had encounters with the law in various shapes and forms, although he himself served in government in a very senior position.
So they drafted a list of targets, which they thought would be relevant for cutting the revenues that Vladimir Putin was deriving from Europe for his war machine that was kind of grinding down their country. And pretty much all of them had to do with the export or the exploitation of hydrocarbons, oil and gas, because that’s one of the main sources of revenues for the state budget of Russia.
Bojan Pancevski (Teleschau screengrab)
Stein: Germany was supplying them with billions of dollars, buying Russian oil and gas.
Pancevski: That’s right. They were sending literally billions to Vladimir Putin, which is extraordinary. Germany and the EU were sending money and weapons to Ukraine to basically kill the Russian invaders. At the same time, they were sending billions to Russia, which Russia used to equip its army and kill Ukrainians. So the Ukrainians who were planning this decided they need to put an end to that. They had a list of about a dozen targets, and one of them was the Nord Stream pipeline system, which they had known and hated for a very long time.
It was an extremely controversial project in Europe. Nord Stream is the biggest offshore pipeline system in the world. It took around 15 years to build. It cost around 20 billion dollars. For Germany and its western European sort of neighbors, it was a source of cheap gas—and what’s not to like? For countries like the United States, Great Britain, Poland, and Ukraine, it was a dangerous geopolitical instrument devised by Vladimir Putin to kind of bind Europe closer to himself and make Europe reliant, if not addicted to, Russian energy exports.
Stein: I want to talk about a couple of the colorful characters in your book who were part of the sabotage team. Tell us about one who was called “the mysterious woman behind the Nord Stream explosion,” a civilian diving instructor from Ukraine.
Pancevski: So the plan was conceived and carried out by a group of intelligence and military operatives, but they couldn’t find deep sea divers who could go to the bottom of the ocean, which is around eighty meters below the surface. They couldn’t find combat divers in their special forces with that skill set. So they decided to recruit civilians because Ukraine had a pretty significant community of deep sea divers. And among these people who ended up being recruited for the operation was the sole woman who was part of the sabotage team. And she too, like the rest of them, was an internationally certified deep sea diver instructor. She had at that point, almost 20 years experience in deep sea diving.
Stein: Her background did not exactly cut her out to be involved in this kind of military operation, right?
Bojan Pancevski: Well, like all of them, she’s an extremely interesting figure. When she was young—I don’t want to reduce her to that, but when she was around 20, she posed for erotic magazine covers and stuff like that. That was around the time when she discovered diving, actually. That was a long time ago. It’s just something she did in her youth. She was an erotic model.
These people are larger than life. So she was part of the crew that was selected to blow up the pipelines, and they used a sailing yacht as a cover, a small sailing yacht called Andromeda, which they rented out in Germany. So they set sail from German shores and they had initially a crew of six—three military officers and three deep sea divers, including the woman. Later on, three days before the end of the operation, another diver joined them.
Stein: And she was first into the water.
Pancevski: Right. She turned out to be the most motivated and she kind of showed leadership in difficult situations. They were diving towards the end of September, which can be a stormy period in the Baltic region and they ran out into a pretty serious gale storm. They had to take shelter in Sweden unexpectedly and without having planned that in advance. They were kind of washed upwards towards South Sweden, where they spent four days in ports sheltering, and the storm just wouldn’t subside. And it was the woman who motivated the all-male crew to go ahead because they were not quite sure they were already risking their lives in what they were doing.
First into the stormy Baltic waters was a former erotic model named Freya (Bild)
Isikoff: I do want to just point out the magnitude of what was done here. And one passage in your book leapt out at me. When the pipeline was blown up, it unleashed “nearly 500,000 metric tons of methane, the largest ever human-caused gas release into the atmosphere, matching the annual carbon footprint of a small industrial nation. The power of the blast equaled the thermal output of a major nuclear reactor. Marine life perished for miles.” I’m just trying to contemplate the amount of explosives that were needed to pull this off.
Pancevski: That’s the interesting bit. A lot of experts made an initial error to estimate that five hundred kilograms of TNT would have been required to cause that level of damage because the explosion was incredibly violent. I mean, it was first registered by the early warning system for earthquakes as an earthquake. But the truth is, it was an ingenious device constructed by a retired professor of engineering in Ukraine, whom the people who planned the attack tapped. And he came up with this idea. He studied how pipelines work, and he said essentially the pipeline is highly pressurized. You’ve got the pressure of the water on top of the pipeline. You only need a tiny amount of explosion to kind of cut a slice into the pipeline. One explosive device was around thirty, forty kilograms. It’s not much. It’s something you can carry on your back. They were concealed in sort of canisters, in kind of divers bottles. But the event was incredibly violent. Gas kept pouring out for over a week.
Listen to the entire fascinating conversation with Bojan Pancevski here, or wherever your preferred platform. And do leave us your comments.
Stein: How deep was the CIA’s knowledge and monitoring of this operation?
Pancevski: So this is what happened. The people who planned the operation were very seasoned intelligence operatives from Ukraine, and they had worked closely with the CIA since around 2014 [when] the pro Russian government was swept away, and it kind of opened the doors to Western agencies, including the CIA, to help them defend themselves from the Russians. So these guys were very closely working with the CIA to the point that they even visited Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the agency. That’s I think in 2018. They also had been doing the same with Polish, with Swedish, with other Western intelligence services. So when they sat down to plan the technicalities of the operation and figure out the tradecraft, they realized they had never worked at the bottom of the sea. So they sought advice and guidance from friendly field agents from these agencies, including the CIA. So they approached a guy with whom they had friendly relations who worked for the CIA and asked them how to do something like this. The guy gave them a couple of pointers and a couple of guidelines. And they were entirely useless because what he had proposed would have cost them millions of dollars involving undersea drones and ships and things like that. That’s the way the Americans would do it, right? With high tech, etc.
Stein: Lots of money. We’re good at that.
Pancevski: And Ukrainians were—thank you very much. We don’t have these resources. How about we just use a small yacht and a bunch of civilians? And that’s what they did in the end. But in the midst of their planning, shortly before they were about to execute the operation—it was initially planned to be executed on the 19th of June 2022—the Dutch Military Intelligence Service got wind of the project. The Dutch Military Intelligence Service is an extremely capable outfit.
They got human intelligence about the project and they notified the CIA in an encrypted memo where they outlined the plan and even named some of the personalities involved. And as soon as that happened, it went all the way up to the top to William Burns, who was head of the agency at the time.
And he personally and others ordered that this be stopped and that the Germans be warned about what was happening because they thought this was a terrible idea.
Stein: Why did they think it was a terrible idea?
Pancevski: Well, because at the time Burns was tasked by President Biden to get the German chancellor, who at the time was Olaf Scholz, to actually unleash a kind of a much more substantial help for Ukraine. It had the so-called Leopard tanks. There was a big debate about Leopard tanks because at that stage of the war before the drones came, tanks were important, armor was important for the front line. And Biden was trying to get them to send these tanks. And he specifically tasked William Burns, who was a frequent visitor to Berlin, and he even had meetings with the chancellor to kind of lobby him to do this. So when they found out that someone’s trying to blow up the pipeline, they realized if this happens and word gets around, the chancellor will be under pressure politically to not help Ukraine. And therefore they thought it’s not worth paying that price. It’s absolutely not worth it. It’s much more important to get Germany on board as a reliable ally to shoulder the burden financially and in terms of material rather than blow up the pipeline. That was the decision made. And immediately they did warn the Germans. This is documented. They warned the external intelligence agency, the BND, and they also warned the internal security agency. Both of them are communicating with the CIA. And then they went to the Ukrainians and warned them not to do it.
They even went as far as to target specifically a senior officer who was involved in the plot, a four-star general who was personally approached by the CIA and told to commit in writing that he will not do this, that this operation will not go ahead and which he promptly did. He committed in writing. But then they went ahead and did it anyway. So that was the involvement of the CIA.
Stein: And then afterwards they put out a lot of lies about or encouraged lies that the Russians had done it.
Pancevski: Well that’s the other chapter of the story. There was a lot of so- called disinformation and misinformation. Germany, America and other Western allies were very quick off the bat to point the finger at Russia, although they knew it wasn’t Russia.
Isikoff: So if this went to such senior levels that the director of the CIA is personally trying to put a stop to this and the United States government is warning the Ukrainians, don’t do it, it’s hard to believe President Zelenskyy himself would not have been aware of this.
Pancevski: So Zelenskyy denies any knowledge of the operation. He says he was never notified by the military or by the Americans or by anyone. His advisors tell the same. I spoke to one of his advisors who’s in charge of the Nord Stream portfolio now. He said they maybe contacted our services, maybe they called at a technical level, but it never reached the presidential office.
Isikoff: Does that strike you as credible? If the director of the CIA himself is personally involved in trying to put a stop to this, how could it not have gone to the president?
Pancevski: Hey, look, anything’s possible. Zelenskyy is on the record hating the pipeline, like pretty much all Ukrainian officials. The then-head of the armed forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, is now ambassador to Great Britain. People around Zeluzhni, senior military officers, say that he had at one point notified President Zelenskyy about what was happening, that he briefed him on a series of operations, including the Nord Stream operation. Zelenskyy denies that, and his people deny that in very strong terms. So, you know, we’ll see.
Isikoff: So the idea that the CIA was behind this seems to me comes in part from Biden himself. He was president at the time, when the question of the Nordstrom pipeline came up, he said, you know, that’s not gonna happen, we will bring an end to it. So that seemed to give motivation to the U.S. government. It was committed to stopping this pipeline.
Pancevski: Yeah, Biden was the president of the United States in January 2022 He had a joint press conference with the then-chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, in the Oval. And he was asked about Nord Stream 2 because Nord Stream 2 was about to get certified and come online just before the full scale invasion. And he said if Putin marches into Ukraine, we’ll put an end to it. And then there was a follow-up question: how will you do that? And he said, Don’t worry, we’ll do it, we’ll put an end to it. What he meant was sanctions. He didn’t mean to blow it up. There’s no need to blow up a pipeline if you’re the United States of America. The pipeline at this very moment is dead as dodo, not because it’s blown up. It’s because it’s sanctioned by the United States and by the European Union. Ever since the incident, Putin has been trying to repair the pipelines and to bring them back online. But that’s not possible because they are under sanctions. Repairing them is absolutely impossible.
So it’s kind of lunacy to think that Biden would go on television and say we’ll blow up the pipelines. You know, why would he do that, right?
Isikoff: One of the legendary investigative reporters of all time, Seymour Hersh wrote a lengthy article claiming to have inside sources saying that this was all approved at the White House by the National Security Council. and that obviously fueled a lot of the thinking the CIA was behind this.
Pancevski: We had a very, very long phone call…that was a bit of a disappointment. Obviously he’s a legendary figure and much respected. But he seems to have one source. He made claims which are entirely outlandish. He named certain ships and vessels and assets in his reporting, and open source investigators found that these ships were elsewhere at the time. They were not even there where they were meant to be. So that’s rather disappointing. I don’t know, maybe he was misled by a source. Maybe it was a rogue source, potentially. I mean, who knows?
Isikoff: Tell us about the German police investigation, where that stands, who’s in custody, who’s not in custody, and how high up the chain can this go? If there were senior people in the Ukrainian government who signed off on this, had knowledge of it, it would seem that they would be within the orbit of this investigation.
Pancevski: What’s happened so far is that the German prosecutor issued international arrest warrants for the seven people they claim were on the sabotage boat who were part of the sabotage crew. For some of them, they have fingerprints, they have DNA samples, they have pictures taken by speed cameras. They have witness testimonies in some cases. So that’s hard evidence. They have arrested a man in Italy who was there on holiday with his family, and he was transferred to Germany and he’s awaiting trial. He’s been charged for having been the leader of the sabotage group, and he’s been charged with several counts, Including war crimes. Now that’s interesting. It’s a very severe charge. Why war crimes? It’s because I think the prosecutors of Germany are trying to preempt the defense, saying this was a military operation, and therefore this individual cannot be tried in a civilian court of law because he has what is known as combatant immunity. The German prosecutor jumps over that argument and says, okay, this was war. It was an illegitimate target. This is a pipeline that was servicing us. It’s not a Russian pipeline. It’s away from the frontline, etc. And therefore, this is a war crime. I don’t think these arguments have ever been tested in a court of law
Former General Valerii Zaluzhnyi: Fall guy? (Chatham House photo)
But what is now interestingly happening is that prosecutors in Ukraine have also opened the case. And this is a very political issue. Nobody quite understands what they want to do with this, but there is a theory that President Zelenskyy would be keen on General Zaluzhnyi being fingered as part of this operation if Zeluzhny becomes a candidate who would challenge him in the presidential elections. So there is a theory that the investigation on the Ukrainian side might be designed to kind of roll up people under Zaluzhnyi and prevent him from running for president. What I do know is when I put this to Zoluzhnyi’s people, they said, ‘Bring it on, let them do it, and if they do it, we’ll put it on billboards before the election, because whoever blew up the pipeline will be a hero to the voters in Ukraine.”
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