Mission Accomplished: Seymour Hersh, Nordstream, and What’s Left on the Cutting Room Floor

Tom Luongo

On Wednesday, I turned 55 and I got one of the best birthday presents a guy like me could ever ask for, a major geopolitical bombshell.  Seymour Hersh published his first article in a long time on the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline bombing, directly implicating major players within the “Biden” administration.

Hersh’s story is noteworthy not just because of what it says, but for the timing of him hitting the publish button and to whom this story is directly aimed.

And, more importantly, who it is NOT aimed at.

To be clear, I don’t think for a second that Hersh is whitewashing anything here.  If he is, well, I’ll leave that to the reader.  I believe his story is incomplete and a little too Bourne Identity versus Mission Impossible for my tastes.

Regardless of your conclusions, I think we all can agree we need much better screenwriters than the current crop haunting the halls of SIS in London and at the CIA in Langley.

Their contempt for us is obvious in the shoddy stories their telling us now.

Mission Identity: Bourne Impossible

The Bourne story is pretty straightforward.  Agent Bourne is sent on an assassination mission. He has a moment of conscience and his latent humanity asserts itself as he regains his memory.  The mystery was in rebuilding his past which, in the end, is pretty straightforward.

It’s Phil Dick’s We Can Remember it For You, Wholesale, but done right, versus both versions of Total Recall.

Reading Hersh’s article gave me more of the impression of the first act of a Mission Impossible film rather than the whole movie. The missions Ethan Hunt chooses to accept are simple and straightforward, retrieve some Macguffin and stop the bad guys before the boom.

And then as the story unfolds we uncover layer upon layer of what’s really going on. If you’ve seen the last two films, written and directed by Chris Macquarrie, you can probably see where I’m going here.

In Macquarrie’s version of modern spy craft, there are overlapping and contradictory goals of the various intelligence agencies and governments these people work for. These all meet and clash in plot twists so thick and heavy it’s a miracle anyone watching can keep up, given the frenetic pace. {Tom’s note: It speaks to just how good the film-making craft on display is}

In fact, when you parse through the arch-plot of these films, Hunt is fighting The Syndicate — a rogue group of disaffected agents who cause celibre is to tear down the old order through the tragedy of a nuclear event. 

It hits a little too close to reality given the post-COVID world envisioned by The Davos Crowd. Cue the arguments about ‘predictive programming’ and all that (see my podcast with former screenwriter Mel K on this.)

These agents are the chaos unleashed by unscrupulous politicians and agency heads on an unsuspecting world. The Syndicate itself was the brainchild of the British government to give the Prime Minister a resource with which he could end-run Parliament to fight terrorism.

Does this not bear some resemblance to Hersh’s story of a “Biden” inner circle trying to do the same thing in keeping the act of war against Russia and Germany a secret from Congress.

In Macquarrie’s scripts, MI-6’s role in trying to cover their tracks over the creation of The Syndicate forms the backbone of the plot of both the aptly named MI:5 and MI:6 films. I’m not accusing Hersh of anything here, except maybe a little myopia. But, the omission of the Brits’ involvement in any part of his story, is, well, curious.

And this is exactly my problem with Hersh’s story, because it puts all the onus of the operation directly on this Gang of 4 in the “Biden” administration and Norway as patsy through NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, which neatly confirms the narrative we’ve been subjected to for nearly two years about an out-of-control US.

Stop me if you’ve heard this studio pitch before:

The US government, desperate to hold onto its global empire, feeling the heat of a failing dollar reserve standard, picked a fight in Ukraine kill two birds with one war: 1) keep Europe a vassal state, especially Germany, tied to the US and 2) destroy Russia with full spectrum multi-theatre warfare.

In this pursuit the “Biden” administration’s neoconservative Cold Warriors were given carte blanche to rain havoc over both its allies and its enemies, no act outside the operational bounds. Bombing the Nordstream pipelines is just another depraved act by a fading global hegemon.

It’s a neat story and Hersh fills the role, sadly in my mind, of useful idiot here advancing what is clearly only half the story. Again, I don’t doubt any of the facts Hersh provides the world to tell this story. The US and Norway have the technical expertise in diving to pull this thing off.

In no way do I think the US is “innocent” here for even very small values of that word.

Hersh paints a picture of people so focused on the logistics of the bombing none of them stopped for one moment to consider the consequences of what they were doing. This is the part that rings very true to me about the people involved, like Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken.

Once you are pot-committed to a course of action, considerations of the downstream effects of the act are only parsed through the lens which led you to that conclusion in the first place.

In their minds, getting the two-fer of taking Putin’s economic leverage away and stopping any possible rapprochement between Russia and Germany outweigh all of the other downstream effects. 

That said, however, putting these people with their personal flaws and biases into these positions meant that this was always going to be the outcome of the policy of instigating a war with Russia over Ukraine. And that speaks to something far more sinister. 

Deep Sea Vacuum Cleaning

Geopolitical events like the Nordstream bombings simply don’t happen in a vacuum, especially an operation over a year on the planning board.

That doesn’t speak to the US acting unilaterally in Ukraine and the Nordstream bombings served far larger, more grandiose goals than just ‘saving the Empire of Chaos’ or whatever.

Alex Krainer and I did a podcast on this very subject going over the incentives for the UK and Poland to be involved with this.

I remind you of the blog post I wrote a week before that, “The Curious Whodunit of Nordstreams 1 and 2,” wherein I laid out the argument that everyone is guilty here. 

I also remind everyone to go back over the immense Twitter thread I wrote just after the pipeline blew up, commentary for which is in the article I wrote linked above.

When I see the Daily Mail pick up the storywhile everyone conveniently forgets about the leaked tweet by former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss 1 minute after the explosion saying, “It’s done,” I literally have to roll my eyes.

Or did everyone forget about rabid Polish neocon and Former Foreign Minister Radislaw Sikorski’s tweet because he deleted it? Why did he delete it.

As Hersh points out in his article, why did Victoria Nuland and Joe Biden leak the script to the world with their public statements about ending Nordstream 2? If they were trying to keep this a secret from Congress while the operation was in the planning stages, why clue anyone in? 

Why paint the crosshairs on yourselves? 

To quote Ellen Ripley in Aliens, “Did IQs just drop suddenly?” or am I living in Rod Serling’s worst nightmare?

Anglo-Saxon/Reaction

While I’m not a huge fan of John Helmer over at Dances with Bears, he does a very good job reminding everyone today of all the inconvenient ‘facts’ that Hersh and his source left out of their tale.

These two grafs are particularly enlightening, as is President Putin’s and his mouthpiece Dmitri Peskov’s insistence on using the phrase “Anglo-Saxons”:

Peskov repeated that Moscow had information “on the involvement of the Anglo-Saxons in the organization of this act of sabotage.”  This isn’t news.

On September 30, four days after the Nord Stream attack, Putin was explicit at the Kremlin signing of the accession treaties which incorporated Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporozhye as new territories of the Russian federation. “The Anglo-Saxons,” Putin said, “believe sanctions are no longer enough and now they have turned to subversion. It seems incredible but it is a fact – by causing explosions on Nord Stream’s international gas pipelines passing along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, they have actually embarked on the destruction of Europe’s entire energy infrastructure. It is clear to everyone who stands to gain. Those who benefit are responsible, of course.”

That Hersh publishes this one-sided story at this moment in time, when President Biden is clearly under a lot of outside pressure, is what it interesting. This pathological need to absolve the UK of any involvement in the Nordstream bombings and setting the world on a course for total infrastructural war, like Russia is now doing in Ukraine, borders on creepy.

What’s obvious to me is that Hersh and his source are either working for someone else or pawns in a larger game (my inkling is the latter). What that game is hasn’t been fully revealed to us. This is Act II of this Whodunit, it’s not the end of the story. By any means.

I could spin out a host of possible Act IIIs here: 

• A quid pro quo between sovereigntist US forces and NATO to keep the UK and Poland out of the story to scapegoat “Biden” and begin cleaning up the State Department of the Nulandistas and British Intelligence influences to begin winding down the war in Ukraine This is my preferred story.
• Further put the US and Russia on a collision course by having a journalist of Sy Hersh’s reputation confirm what everyone wants to believe, the US is a rogue state. This further degrades the US’s reputation and hastening the collapse of the US (Soros’ openly stated goal) on the eve of the Munich Security Conference (next week).
• Leave Putin with even fewer domestically-palatable political options at home other than further escalation pushing the world closer to the brink of nuclear war to effect Davos’ Great Reset

To name a few.

But what’s really clear here is that there are no Ethan Hunts or even Jason Bournes out there to swoop in at the last second and stop this runaway train of evolution through catastrophe from going off the cliff and going boom. 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to really think through the implications of the facts as presented. This blog post will self-destruct in five seconds.

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