The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership-the so-called Gang of Eight. There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City.
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For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.Īsked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”īiden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea. The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good-using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordnance-as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals.
A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location-a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name-down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border.
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