普利策奖得主发文一石激起千层浪
前文已述，拜登本人是华盛顿政坛的资深战犯，在他从政的50年中，尤其爬上参院高位后，美国发动的任何一场战争、点燃的任何一场区域冲突都有他的影子。他和其他政客的区别是：只要是战争，哪怕是敌对党派主导的他也积极支持，还拉拢、说服本党议员支持。所以，当波罗的海泛起异样的涟漪，欧洲四国控股的北溪项目被炸毁，许多美国媒体人首先怀疑的就是拜登。但他们当时拿不出实锤……
各大媒体的编辑和记者，在等一个大咖放料，这个人果然站出来了，且没让大家失望，他叫西摩·赫什，生于1937年4月8日，今年86岁。亲手放料并参与更换白宫主人，尼克松总统辞职的推手之一。
西摩·赫什是美国在世最著名调查记者和政论作家。1969年赫什首次因揭露越战期间美莱大屠杀及美军的掩盖而获得新闻界认可，并因此获得1970年普利策国际报道奖。70年代，赫什为《纽约时报》报道了水门事件，成功将尼克松拉下马。赫什还揭露了美军对柬埔寨的秘密轰炸，导致时任总统叫停行动。2004年，他报道了美军虐待阿布格莱布监狱战俘的事件。他因此获得了两项国家杂志奖和五项乔治·波尔克奖。除了普利策奖，他还获得了乔治·奥威尔新闻奖。
在川普时代，赫什最具挑战性的两项调查，是发现奥巴马政府在奥萨马·本·拉登死亡事件中撒了谎，以及在叙利亚使用化学武器问题上也撒了谎。引发过媒体地震。那么他站出来揭露奥巴马的副手拜登，显然也是有备而来了。
美东时间2月8日（北京时间2月9日），享誉美国的普利策奖得主、资深调查记者西摩·赫什经过持久的深挖，发布了一篇名为《拜登如何摧毁北溪管道》的文章，该文称拜登总统是俄乌争端以及欧洲能源危机一系列变故的幕后黑手。有读者问到信息源，我在这儿查一下：
消息最早是西摩·赫什本人在自己的专属网站上放出来的。但由于他是全美知名的调查记者、普利策奖得主、大媒体的主笔，所以，不能将其视为“自媒体”，因为3小时内就有很多大媒体转载或回应了。
大媒体中最先全文转载的是《纽约邮报》，那毕竟，跟瞌睡乔家族有仇嘛。还记得吗？当年纽约邮报放出了关于拜登儿子丢失笔记本中的罪证时，被推特等平台无故封号。那么这次就不劳烦平台了，它在自己官网放出这篇（安全）
首先正面回应并放出白宫解释的，是美国《新闻周刊》。毕竟，它的董事会看上去要活命…
首先转载西摩·赫什的内容和白宫回应文的外国媒体，是英国《路透社》。看上去犹太家族路透确实非常关心美国的政局呢。
好了，让咱们看下正反两边陈述的内容，先放记者先生的：
The U.S. 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. 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. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
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 ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. 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.
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.
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. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. 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.
Asked 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.”
Biden’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. 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.
美国海军的潜水和打捞中心坐落于巴拿马城乡村的一条乡村小路上，这个地方与它的名字一样晦涩难懂。巴拿马城现在是佛罗里达州西南狭长地带的一个蓬勃发展的度假城市，距离阿拉巴马州边界以南70英里。该中心的建筑群和它的位置一样不伦不类——一座二战后单调的混凝土结构建筑，看起来好似芝加哥西侧的职业高中校舍。一家投币式自助洗衣店和一所舞蹈学校就在四车道马路的对面。
几十年来，该中心一直在训练高技能的深水潜水员，这些潜水员一旦被分配到世界各地的美国军事部队，就能熟练使用C4炸药进行技术潜水，以清除港口和海滩上的碎片和未爆炸的弹药，以及其他“不好”的东西，比如炸毁外国石油钻井平台、污染海底发电厂的进水阀、摧毁重要航运运河的船闸。巴拿马市中心拥有全美第二大室内游泳池，是招募潜水学校最优秀、最沉默寡言的毕业生的最佳场所。去年夏天，他们成功地完成了在波罗的海水面下260英尺的潜水任务。
2022年6月，据一位直接参与作战计划的内部人士透露，美国海军潜水员在广为宣传的北约夏季中期演习“BALTOPS 22”的掩护下，埋设了可远程引爆的爆炸物，三个月后，他们摧毁了四条北溪管道中的三条。
其中两条管道统称为北溪1号，十多年来一直为德国和西欧大部分地区提供廉价的俄罗斯天然气。第二对管道，称为北溪2号，已经建成，但尚未投入运营。现在，随着俄罗斯军队在乌克兰边境集结，以及1945年以来欧洲最血腥的战争即将到来，约瑟夫·拜登总统将这些管道视为弗拉基米尔·普京为实现其政治和领土野心而将天然气武器化的工具。
在被问及置评时，白宫发言人阿德里安·沃森（Adrienne Watson）在一封电子邮件中表示，“这是完全错误的虚构。”中央情报局（Central Intelligence Agency）发言人塔米·索普（Tammy Thorp）也写道：“这一说法完全错误。”
但拜登依然决定破坏输油管道，他在华盛顿国家安全界就如何最好地实现这一目标进行了长达9个多月的高度秘密的反复辩论之后做出的。在那段时间的大部分时间里，问题不在于是否执行任务，而是如何在没有明确的责任人线索的情况下秘密完成任务。
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving schoo
l in Panama City. 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. 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.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
依赖该中心位于巴拿马城的核心潜水学校的毕业生，有一个至关重要的官僚原因。潜水员只从属于海军，而不是美国特种作战司令部的成员，因特种兵秘密行动必须向国会报告，并事先向参议院和众议院领导层通报，即向所谓的“八人集团”报审。而拜登政府要绕开这个流程，他尽一切可能避免泄密，因为计划是在2021晚些时候和2022年前几个月由总统亲自领导推进的。
拜登总统及其外交政策团队国家安全顾问杰克·沙利文（Jake Sullivan）、国务卿托尼·布林肯（Tony Blinken）和负责政策的副国务卿维多利亚·纽兰（Victoria Nuland）对这两条管道的敌意一直是直言不讳的、一以贯之的，他们筹谋的计划经过丹麦博恩霍尔姆岛附近，最后抵达德国北部。
这项目的直接路线绕过了过境乌克兰的任何需求，对德国经济来说是一个福音。德国收购着大量廉价的俄罗斯天然气，足以运行大规模工业生产和为家庭供暖，同时德国分销商可以在整个西欧以盈利的方式销售过剩的天然气。这计划可以追溯到奥巴马政府的行动，将违背美国的公开承诺，即尽量减少与俄罗斯的直接冲突。所以对内保密是必不可少的。
从制定计划的时候起，北溪1号就被华盛顿及其反俄北约伙伴视为对西方主导地位的威胁。其背后的控股公司Nord Stream AG于2005年在瑞士与俄罗斯天然气工业股份公司（Gazprom）合作成立，该公司是一家公开上市交易的俄罗斯公司，为股东提供巨额利润，而该公司由众所周知受普京控制的寡头所控制。俄罗斯天然气工业股份公司（Gazprom）控制着该公司51%的股份，四家欧洲能源公司（一家在法国，一家在荷兰，两家在德国）共享剩余49%的股份，并有权控制向德国和西欧当地分销商的廉价天然气下游销售。俄罗斯天然气工业股份公司（Gazprom）的利润与俄罗斯政府分享，据估计，在某些年份，国家天然气和石油收入高达俄罗斯年度预算的45%。
拜登的政治担忧是真实的：普京现在将有一个额外的、急需的主要收入来源，德国和西欧其他国家将对俄罗斯供应的低成本天然气上瘾，同时减少欧洲对美国的依赖。事实上，这正是发生的事情。许多德国人将北溪1号视为前总理威利·勃兰特著名的亲和东方政治理论的一部分，该理论将使战后的德国能够通过利用廉价的俄罗斯能源为繁荣的西欧市场和贸易经济续航等举措，恢复自身和其他在二战中被摧毁的欧洲国家的实力。这是美国不愿意看到的。
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
北约和华盛顿认为，北溪1号已经足够危险，但北溪2号的建设方于2021年9月完工，如果得到德国监管机构的批准，将使德国和西欧可获得的廉价天然气数量增加一倍。第二条管道还将为德国年消费量的50%以上提供足够的天然气。在拜登政府咄咄逼人的外交政策下，俄罗斯与北约之间的紧张局势不断升级。
2021年1月拜登宣誓就职前夕，以德克萨斯州特德·克鲁斯为首的参议院共和党人在布林肯担任国务卿的确认听证会上一再提出廉价俄罗斯天然气的政治威胁，从而引发了对Nord Stream 2的普遍反对。到那时，一个统一的参议院已经成功通过了一项法律，正如克鲁兹告诉布林肯的那样：“要终止（管道）的运行”。当时由安格拉·默克尔领导的德国政府将面临巨大的政治和经济压力，要求第二条管道尽早上线。
拜登准备惩罚德国人了吗？布林肯表示同意，但补充说，他没有讨论当选总统观点上的细节。“我知道他坚信（容忍）这（玩意儿）是一个坏主意，北溪2号，”他说。“我很清楚，他会让我们使用一切可行的工具，‘说服’我们的朋友和合作伙伴，包括德国，不要继续用（北溪管道）。”
几个月后，当第二条管道的建设接近完工时，拜登开会时瞪了下眼睛。那年5月，在一次令人震惊的转变中，美国政府却放弃了对Nord Stream AG的制裁，一名国务院官员承认，试图通过制裁和外交手段阻止德国人的管道“一直是一件很难的事”。据当时的白宫记者报道，在幕后，政府官员敦促乌克兰总统沃洛季米尔·泽连斯基，不要批评（拜登的）此举。
这是直接的后果。以克鲁兹为首的参议院共和党人宣布立即封锁拜登的所有外交政策提名人，并将年度国防法案的通过推迟数月，直到秋季。Politico《政治学人》专刊后来将拜登在第二条俄罗斯管道上的转变描述为“危及拜登议程的一个决定，可以说比混乱的从阿富汗撤军更可怕。”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
尽管，在11月中旬，德国能源监管机构暂停了对第二条北溪管道的批准，这场危机得到了缓解，但政府仍举步维艰。天然气价格几天内飙升8%，德国和欧洲越来越担心管道暂停以及俄罗斯和乌克兰之间爆发战争的可能性越来越大，这将导致一个非常不必要的寒冬。拜登团队并不清楚德国新任命的总理奥拉夫·朔尔茨（Olaf Scholz）的立场。几个月前，阿富汗陷落后，朔尔茨在布拉格的一次演讲中公开支持法国总统马克龙（Emmanuel Macron）的欧洲外交政策更加自主的呼吁，明确表示要减少对华盛顿及其反复无常的行动的依赖。
在所有这一切中，俄罗斯军队一直在乌克兰边境上稳步而不祥地集结，到12月底，超过10万名士兵已准备好从白罗斯和克里米亚采取行动。华盛顿的警报声越来越大，包括布林肯的一项评估，即这些部队人数可能会“在短时间内再次翻倍”。
拜登政府的注意力再次集中在北溪。只要欧洲仍然依赖廉价天然气管道，白宫就担心像德国这样的国家不愿向乌克兰提供击败俄罗斯所需的资金和武器。
正是在这个不确定的时刻，拜登授权杰克·沙利文召集一个跨部门特别行动小组来制定破坏计划。
所有选项都将摆在桌面上。但只有一个可能性会出现。
PLANNING
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
制定爆破计划
2021年12月，也就是俄罗斯第一辆坦克开进乌克兰的前两个月，杰克·沙利文召集了一个新成立的特别工作组，由美军参谋长联席会议、中央情报局、国安和财政部的男女官员们组成，被要求就如何应对普京即将到来的行动提出建议。
这将是一系列绝密会议中的第一次，会议地点位于白宫旁的旧行政办公楼顶层的一间隔音房，也是总统外交情报咨询委员会（PFIAB）的所在地。通过冗长的反复交谈，最终导致了一个关键的初步结论：该小组向总统提出的建议是可逆的，比如另一层制裁和货币限制，还是不可逆转的，即无法撤销的（破坏）行动？
据直接了解这一过程的消息人士透露，与会者清楚的是，沙利文打算让该小组提出一项摧毁两条北溪管道的计划，他是在满足总统的愿望。
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
在接下来的几次会议中，与会者讨论了发动袭击的选项。海军提议使用一艘新服役的潜艇直接攻击管道。空军讨论了使用可远程引爆的延迟炸弹投掷的问题。中央情报局辩称，无论做了什么，都必须是秘密的。所有参与的人都明白其中的利害关系。“这可不是小孩子的事，”……“如果这次袭击可以被追溯到美国，将导致一场战争。”
当时，中央情报局由威廉·伯恩斯（William Burns）领导，伯恩斯是一位举止温和的前驻俄罗斯大使，曾在奥巴马政府担任副国务卿。伯恩斯很快授权了一个机构工作组，该工作组的临时成员偶然包括一位熟悉巴拿马城海军深海潜水员能力的官员。在接下来的几周里，中央情报局工作组成员开始制定一项秘密行动计划，利用深海潜水员在管道沿线引发爆炸。
以前，美国中情局也做过类似的事情。美国情报界的消息人士证实，1971年，俄罗斯海军的两个重要单位正在通过埋在俄罗斯远东海岸鄂霍次克海的海底电缆进行通信。电报将一个地区海军司令部与海参崴的大陆总部联系起来。他们引来了一支由中央情报局和美国国安特工组成的精挑细选团队在华盛顿地区秘密集结，利用海军潜水员、改装潜艇和一辆深潜艇救援车协同运作，经过多次尝试和失败，成功地找到了俄罗斯的海底电缆。潜水员在电缆上安装了一个精密的监听装置，并成功拦截了俄国人的通讯，并将其记录在美军的录音系统上。至此，苏联的军事情报源源不断输送到五角大楼，莫斯科甚至十年间从未察觉。
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
美国情报界从中获悉，俄海军高级军官确信他们的通信链路安全，在没有加密的情况下与同行们聊天。海底录音设备及其磁带须每月更换一次，该项目愉快地进行了十年，直到被一位名叫罗纳德·佩尔顿（Ronald Pelton）的44岁的美国安全局文职技术人员破坏。佩尔顿精通俄语。1985年，佩尔顿被一名俄罗斯假叛逃者出卖，并被判入狱。他承认是他透露了此次行动的秘密从而被捕，俄罗斯人只支付了他5000美元，他便出卖了美国最顶级机密。而他提供的其他从未公开的俄罗斯行动数据则支付了35000美元。
这项代号为Ivy Bells的水下成功具有创新性和风险性，为美军钻研俄罗斯海军的意图和计划提供了宝贵的情报。
尽管如此，该机构间小组最初对中情局对秘密深海袭击的热情持怀疑态度。有太多未回答的问题。波罗的海海域由俄罗斯海军严密巡逻，没有石油钻井平台可以作为潜水行动的掩护。潜水员是否必须前往与俄罗斯天然气装卸码头接壤的爱沙尼亚进行训练？“这将是一个山羊操，”该机构被告知。
消息人士称，在“所有这些阴谋”中，“中央情报局和国务院的一些工作人员都在说，‘不要这样做。这是愚蠢的，如果结果出来，将是一场政治噩梦。’”
尽管如此，2022年初，中央情报局工作组向沙利文的跨部门小组报告：“我们有办法炸毁管道。”（达到篇幅限制，翻译暂时终止）
再让我们看看白宫是如何回应顶级调查记者的揭露的：
这是英国路透社原文转述。白宫只用了“纯属捏造”几个字，白宫国家安全委员会发言人阿德里安·沃森说：“这完全是虚构的。”而中情局也回应了完全相同的说法。但他们都未能针对长篇报道中的任何史实细节进行说明。
如果，还有许多读者不理解为何最近几天拜登拼命炒作关于流浪气球的事，那么你不得不了解下他所面临的更严峻形势。其中北溪爆破秘密行动，被情报界内部人士透露给了著名调查记者，而这位记者可是将尼克松拉下马的人之一。千万不要以为炸了北溪是让俄罗斯蒙受损失，因为这管道的股东还有荷兰、德国、法国……拜登这么做，等于是在没有宣战的情况下，在欧盟的海域，直接炸毁欧盟国家以及其他国家所属的财产，而这些国家要么是盟友要么是美国未宣战的和平国家。无论拜登的动机是什么，他绕开美国国会这样做就是恐怖主义行为。更糟的是，目前国会控制在共和党人手里。而拜登本周遭遇的危机，恰恰还不止于此。另文详述。
作者：才女郑好
