Dutch spies knew about a Ukrainian plot to destroy the Nord Stream gas pipelines and passed the warning to Washington, according to a new report by Dutch and German media outlets.
The Netherlands’ military intelligence agency, the MIVD, learned from a source in Ukraine last year that Kiev was plotting to destroy the pipelines, Dutch state broadcaster NOS reported on Tuesday. The MIVD then tipped off the CIA, which convinced the Ukrainian operatives to abort the plan, the report continued.
These claims were first published last week by the Washington Post, citing leaked Pentagon documents. The Post did not, however, name the MIVD as the “close ally” that tipped off the CIA.
Both the Post and NOS identified the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, as the leader of the operation. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has insisted that he had no knowledge of the bomb plot, and Zaluzhny has not been seen alive in public since a Russian missile strike hit a Ukrainian “decision-making center” last month, and therefore has not responded to the allegations.
The CIA notified a number of its partner agencies in Europe about the plan, which according to Die Zeit involved six commandos. These elite troops would rent a boat and scuba equipment under false identities and plant explosives on the Nord Stream 1 lines, around 80 meters below the Baltic Sea. The operation would take place just after NATO’s BALTOPS exercises in June 2022, Die Zeit claimed.
The report specifically mentions the Nord Stream 1 lines as the target, while the actual saboteurs took out both the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 lines.
These details build on earlier reporting by the New York Times, which claimed in March that a “pro-Ukrainian group” took out the gas lines, and by Germany’s Der Spiegel, which claimed that the group used a rented yacht to transport explosives to the blast site. According to the latest update by the Wall Street Journal, German investigators suspect that the group may have operated out of Poland.
All of these theories have been contradicted by American reporter Seymour Hersh, who claimed in February that the Biden administration ordered the CIA to bomb the conduits with the help of the Norwegian Navy, using the BALTOPS drills as cover. The rented yacht story, Hersh said afterwards, was planted in the US and German media as a red herring by the CIA and its German counterpart, the BND.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in March that he “fully agrees” with Hersh’s conclusions. The Russian president argued that the US in particular benefited from the attack due to its position as a competing gas supplier to Europe.