Patrick Lawrence: Germany in Crisis Part 2: A Short History of Exploding Gas Pipelines
This is the second of four reports on Germany’s various crises, the history that produced them and how Germans, other than the neoliberal elites who now hold power, think about their way forward. Part 1 of this series is here.
POTSDAM—A single, brief phrase always comes to mind when I think of Germany. Whatever may be the specific matter to hand, sooner or later my thoughts go to three words that seem to me — and to many others, given they have survived so long in the discourse — to capture some essence of the nation and its place in the world.
“Germany is Hamlet.” For a long time I attributed this pithy observation to Gordon Craig, among Germany’s great 20th century historians. Craig (Germany, 1866–1945; The Germans) was noted for succinct observations of this kind. He saw Germany as a nation divided in history between its humanist achievements (Goethe et al., Kant et al., Thomas Mann et al.) and its regrettable givenness to varieties of absolute power.
Over time I discovered the true author of this exquisite mot was Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876), a poet and a political radical who dedicated himself and his work to the democracy movement that led to the (failed) Revolution of 1848. Freiligrath compared Germany with Shakespeare’s famously divided character in 1844—this out of frustration with a native conservatism that held Germany back from the great change he saw as the pressing need of his time.
I don’t see that what Freiligrath meant cancels out what Craig meant more than a century later. And I don’t think either characterization of Germany as… what?… as a profoundly ambivalent nation cancels out the meaning the notion acquired, almost inevitably, in the second half of the last century.
Geography proves destiny in Germany’s case, as it does in various others. It faces Westward to the Atlantic world but also Eastward to the Eurasian landmass. Ambiguity has consequently marked the history of its relations in both directions. Otto von Bismarck cultivated sound relations with Russia during his years as chancellor, 1871 to 1890. That was when Germany first became Germany and the celebrated prince was showing the world what Realpolitik was all about. Then came the two world wars and Germany’s disastrous military campaigns, Eastward and Westward alike.
In the postwar era this ambiguity, this state of “in between,” is best understood not as Germany’s burden but its great gift, and it is with this gift it could have given another to the rest of us—the gift of a bridge between East and West. How different would our world be had post–1945 Germany been left to its fate and, by being truly itself, offered the world what it was singularly able to give.
It is in this context we should understand the arrival of the postwar order in Germany and what befalls the Federal Republic as we speak. Germans were not made for the Cold War and its West–East binaries, destructive as these were to the remarkable release of human aspiration that followed the 1945 victories. Defeated Germany was among Washington’s pivotal clients as it turned against Moscow, so recently its ally, and set out to establish America’s global primacy. This has served Germany and Germans very badly.
The Germany of the immediate postwar years, Konrad Adenauer’s Germany, was a reconstruction project. The new Federal Republic’s first chancellor counted restoring the German economy among his highest priorities. Germany under Adenauer—an anti–Communist, a Europeanist, an early supporter of NATO—was a well-behaved American dependency. But by the early 1960s, the Kennedy years, there was renewed concern in Washington as to West Germany’s eventual place in the Cold War order. And where Germany went the Continent was likely to follow, as the reasoning of the time had it.
This anxiety was not unfounded. A decade after the Iron Curtain divided Germany, in 1949, the Federal Republic was beginning to prosper by way of its Wirtschaftswunder, its “economic miracle” (which was no more a miracle than the postwar Japanese “miracle”). Germans began to look outward. In due course they would gaze eastward to the Soviet Union: It was a nation of manufacturers with a resource economy next door. Europe was looking in the same direction. This was precisely what Washington’s policy cliques had begun to worry about. By this time it was a given among these people that America’s national security interests and the global supply-and-demand of energy were more or less inseparable. We can take the case of Enrico Mattei as a measure of America’s concern.
Mattei was a senior bureaucrat in Rome who, after the defeat in 1945, reorganized the Fascist regime’s petroleum holdings into Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, the oil company commonly known as ENI. Mattei was ambitious for ENI. And going by the many agreements he negotiated, he seems to have had interesting politics. Among other things, ENI’s contracts awarded three-quarters of profits to the nations that owned reserves—an unprecedented percentage at the time. In 1960 Mattei concluded a large, very significant oil accord with the Soviet Union—again, on terms well beyond the exploitative contracts common among Western oil companies.
This was a daring move, as Mattei plainly understood. He thereupon declared that he had broken, or helped to break, the petroleum monopoly the U.S. had long enjoyed via the famous “Seven Sisters.” Eisenhower’s National Security Council had been attacking Mattei as antithetical to American interests since the late 1950s. And the Soviet agreement appears to have landed as an especially hard blow. Two years after signing it Mattei was killed when his plane crashed during a flight from Sicily to Milan. Subsequent investigations, of which there have been many, have continued for decades. In 1997 La Stampa, the Turin daily, reported that judicial authorities in Rome had concluded that a bomb planted onboard had exploded Mattei’s plane in midair.
Although the Mattei case remains officially unresolved, there is now a plentitude of evidence that he was the victim of an assassination conducted by the CIA in its not-unfamiliar collaboration with the Mafia, possibly with the connivance of French intelligence. “Common knowledge among Europeans,” a German friend told me recently. “We know what happened to Mattei the way you Americans know what happened to Kennedy.”
Stopping just short of absolute certainties, as we must, we can read the Mattei affair as a measure of how sensitive energy ties between Europe and the Soviets were by the mid–Cold War years. The point of trans–Atlantic conflict was clear from the first: Europeans viewed contracts with the Soviet Union simply as business—sound, logical economics; for the Americans they were instruments bearing dangerous geopolitical consequences. And it is on this question the Germans and the Americans have found themselves repeatedly at odds for many decades.
Soviet and post–Soviet Russia as a market for German products and services was until recently important, certainly. Russia’s imports of German manufactured goods—a vast range of them—kept the trade balance in Germany’s favor for many years. But the main event for the Germans came to run in the other direction, as the trade account eventually indicated. Russia needed German manufactures because it was weak on the industrial side; Germany needed Russian resources more pressingly because it is not well-endowed by way of raw materials.
Volumes of inexpensive energy imported from Russia, oil and natural gas, and exports of high-end, excellently engineered manufactured goods sold into world markets: Germans often speak of this as the economic model that drove their nation’s success for so many years—speaking wistfully, I should add, because this model was in ruins by the time I traveled in Germany a few months ago.
And so we come to the infrastructure of interdependence, as we may as well call it. We come to the matter of gas pipelines.
This is a story that runs from the 1980s through to Sept. 26, 2022, when the Biden regime destroyed, in broad daylight, the natural gas pipeline that, just completed, ran under the Baltic Sea between Russian and German ports. The explosions of Nord Stream I and II have a long history. Were I an investigator or an attorney working on this case, this history would figure prominently in my files of evidence. Let us consider it briefly.
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In early 1982, state-operated Russian companies began work on the Trans–Siberia pipeline, one of the grand projects of the late Soviet period. This was a 3,700–mile pipeline—a network of pipelines, actually—that would carry natural gas westward via various routes from Siberia all the way to European markets. Trans–Siberia was not the first pipeline serving this purpose, but, as the most ambitious, it would go some way to consolidating Soviet–European relations.
The European powers had a vital interest in this undertaking, naturally, but this was only partly because of the imminent availability of inexpensive energy supplies. The Soviets had signed contracts with dozens of European companies for the components and equipment needed to build and operate the pipeline. These contracts were worth roughly $15 billion, just short of $50 billion today. There were other agreements covering financing and what we used to call technology transfers.
Go back to 1982, just briefly. Europe was in a severe recession. Remember “stagflation,” sluggish growth, high inflation? Western Europe had a critical case. Unemployment among the major European powers—Germany, France, Britain, Italy—was running at nearly 9%. The Europeans needed jobs; their corporations needed profitable work. Contracts with the Soviets for steel pipe, turbines, and other such gear—and the Sovs honored their contracts, as the Europeans knew—stood to get Europe out of its malaise; cheap energy would then drive it forward.
President Reagan, arch–Cold Warrior, was all talk of the “evil empire” by the spring of 1982. The previous December, less than a year in office, Reagan had barred American companies from supplying pipeline equipment to the Soviets. Six months later, the Sovs having begun construction, he expanded this ban to include any Western producer of steel pipelines that operated under a license granted by a U.S. company.
Do you hear history’s echo in this, as I do? Sanctions and atop them secondary sanctions, then as now.
There was a moment during this fraught time when Helmut Schmidt had a private encounter with Reagan in Bonn. The American president, already resentful of what he took to be the German chancellor’s contempt, gave Schmidt—a Social Democrat, an Ostpolitik man—the sort of dressing down one would expect from a not-very-smart man prone to Manichean simplicities. It has to stop, Reagan ordered Schmidt in so many words. You’ll add to the Russians G.D.P. and then they can build more weapons. You’ll help the Soviets while we’re trying to destroy them.
Schmidt said nothing as Reagan spoke. Instead, he retreated to a window and gazed out of it, concluding he would mollify the American Cold Warrior by offering to allow the U.S. to station Pershing II missiles (mobile, intermediate-range, ballistic) on German soil. The first Pershing II’s were in place in Germany by the end of 1983; the full deployment was completed two years later.
I have this account from Dirk Pohlmann, a prominent journalist, author, and documentarian and a dedicated student of Germany’s postwar history. He related this and various historical incidents like it during a long morning we spent talking at my Potsdam hotel and later during various telephone calls and email exchanges. And as Pohlmann told me, there was a lot more to the Reagan administration’s resistance to the Siberia-to–Europe project than informal encounters with European leaders. There were the exertions the public could not see. Reagan’s people put immense pressure on German banks, for instance—Deutsche Bank, Dresdner, Commerzbank—to refuse the Soviets the financing to which they, the banks, had committed.
Reagan eventually relented, griping all the way. He lifted the two layers of sanctions by the end of 1982, apparently recognizing, amid concerted, at this point embarrassing European pressure, he simply could not enforce them. Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister and already a soulmate of sorts to Reagan, had a considerable influence on this policy reversal. There was also the risk of a trans–Atlantic rift just when Reagan wanted everyone on side as he took his run at the evil empire. In November 1982 NATO members reached an informal understanding on the pipeline’s fate, and the first gas deliveries from it arrived, in France, on New Year’s Day 1984.
The Trans–Siberia pipeline, as a curious aside, continued operating until the end of last year, when Kiev declined to renew the pass-through contracts covering the line that transited gas through Ukraine on the way to European markets.
There is one addendum to this tale that must not be missed. By the time of the Trans–Siberia kerfuffle, the Central Intelligence Agency was running a covert sabotage program through which it arranged for American companies to send the Soviets shipments of faulty computer chips. These were engineered to function properly for a brief time and then fail. A consequential quantity of these arrived at some point in 1982—during the period Reagan’s sanctions were in effect and as construction of Trans–Siberia was well along.
The result appears to have been as the agency expected: Turbines installed at the pipeline’s pumping stations blew up in something apparently close to unison. Pohlmann told me it was equivalent to a three-kiloton detonation—an explosion large enough for satellites to detect. Trans–Siberia went operational on schedule, as noted, but—more echoes here, the past and the present in resonance—this stands today as a dress rehearsal for events with which we are now more familiar.
Records of the CIA’s sabotage operation against the Trans–Siberia project are extremely rare. Pohlmann, a close student of this affair, told me references to it have been “almost completely expunged from the internet,” and my experience while researching this report bears this out. But some of those involved in the operation provided contemporaneous testimonies. One of these was Thomas Reed, who was a senior member of Reagan’s National Security Council at the time. His account was published in 2004 as At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (Presidio Press). Here is a brief passage from the book:
The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.
While there have been various efforts to discredit Reed’s account—all predictable, none more than unpersuasive obfuscation—his case seems to me incontrovertible. By the time he published At the Abyss, indeed, the CIA had already acknowledged the Trans–Siberia operation in a passing reference in The Farewell Dossier, a gathering of documents concerning other agency matters. After Reed published, Dirk Pohlmann, ever diligent, traveled to Washington to interview Reed and others, including Herb Meyer, who served under William Casey as vice-chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council during the Reagan years. Pohlmann reviewed those interviews when we met here and subsequently for a second time; they all confirm the 1982 operation.
Reagan’s stated concern, above all his others—and this will be familiar—is that Europeans risked the vulnerability attaching to a structural, long-term dependence on Russian energy supplies. As I hope this pencil-sketch of the 1982 incident makes clear, the Americans cynically leave out two syllables when they say such things. Their true fear, then as now, was not dependence but the natural interdependence between Germany (and by extension the rest of Europe) and the great Eurasian landmass of which it effectively forms the westernmost flank.
A couple of years after the Siberian pipeline went into operation, a scholar named Patrick DeSouza published an essay in the Yale Journal of International Law titled, a mouthful here, “The Soviet Gas Pipeline Incident: Extension of Collective Security Responsibilities to Peacetime Commercial Trade.” Among DeSouza’s interesting observations is this one:
Some analysts have concluded that attempts by the United States to wield economic power through trade restrictions have had limited success in the postwar period. Efforts by the United States to get its allies to act in concert for the purpose of denying political adversaries economic power have met with even less success. In fact, attempts to restrict economic activity with such adversaries as the Soviet Union have often resulted in heavy costs, including foregone gains from trade, intra-alliance friction, increased solidarity within the opposing alliance …
There are some true things in this passage, as readers are likely to agree. I read in it the inevitable tension in trans–Atlantic relations once America began to assert its post–1945 hegemonic power. While this tension ebbed and flowed, one period to the next, it was always there and remains so. But DeSouza’s essay is also to be read as a period piece: There are things in it that, true once, no longer obtain. The Europeans successfully resisted the American imperium’s impositions during the late–Cold War years. They would not dream of any such effort now. Forty years separate the events of 1982 from the Nord Stream explosions. How times have changed, and how they have remained the same.
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And how very handy history so often proves to be.
Readers will surely recall with me the shock when the news came three years ago this coming September that the Nord Stream pipelines — both, I and II — had been sabotaged. But where, with a little history in mind, lay the cause for shock? Dramatic as the Nord Stream explosions seemed, were they anything more than a quite unimaginative continuation of Washington’s trans–Atlantic foreign and security policies down through the decades? The shock of the nothing-new, we can call it.
It was just as shocking to me to go back, soon after the news broke, and watch the video footage of President Biden stating, with that stunning indiscretion for which he was known the whole of his political career, that the U.S. would never allow Nord Stream II to go operational and was perfectly prepared to destroy it. This was not long before the event. And another shock: Biden offered these diabolic assurances while Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor at the time, stood like a quiescent schoolboy next to him. The two had just finished private talks in the Oval Office. In hindsight it is not hard to imagine what was said.
With a history running back nearly 30 years—from planning to construction to operation to destruction—the Nord Stream pipelines were at least as significant as the earlier Siberia-to–Europe project, and I am being cautious: While the Trans–Siberia network advanced Russian–European relations, Nord Stream I and II would have consolidated Germany’s economic ties with the Russian Federation, and by extension Europe’s, beyond the point these could be easily disrupted. The first feasibility study for NS I was contracted in 1997. As with NS II later on, the route under the Baltic Sea was to lead from Siberian gas fields to Lubmin, a port on Germany’s northern coast. Berlin and Moscow signed a joint declaration of intent in 2005; NS I went operational six years later.
It was with the planning of NS II—and German companies were again Gazprom’s lead European partners—that matters between Germany and the United States once again got heavy. Gazprom and the Europeans signed contracts in 2015. This was a year after Washington cultivated the coup in Ukraine, a year after Moscow re-annexed Crimea, a year after the Obama administration began to impose the sanctions regime that never seems to cease elaborating. Immediately, it was a straight rerun of the 1982 story.
The Germans understood Nord Stream just as they had Trans–Siberia—an economic project, sensible and valuable. European investments ran to €9.5 billion. NS II would double Nord Stream I’s capacity. Together, the four pipes (two lines each, NS I and II) would deliver 110 billion cubic meters (1.9 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas annually to Germany and European markets—enough to meet, by the estimates I have seen, 40% to 50% of Germany’s yearly needs and not much less of Europe’s. Angela Merkel, chancellor at this time, was unyielding in her defense of the project’s advantages, even while the Americans grew ever shriller (and more threatening) in their attacks on Nord Stream II as a mistake with grave geopolitical consequences.
Merkel was a dedicated Atlanticist but she persisted. Remember, by this time (post–Fukushima) she had committed Germany to decommissioning all its nuclear power plants. The Americans persisted, too. During Donald Trump’s first term they tried every which way to stop NS II’s progress, not least via the usual threats of sanctions and secondary sanctions against European industrial suppliers and participating banks. Richard Grenell, by 2019 Trump’s all-elbows ambassador to Berlin, at one point sent menacing letters to German companies involved in the pipeline. I recall well how some European banks and industrial firms began to balk; rattled nerves were easily detected in the Bundestag.
To her credit Merkel gave no ground and appeared to prevail. Construction on NS II, which had begun in 2018, was completed by the summer of 2021. But by this time Trump and his people were out of power and the Biden regime was in. This marked the beginning of the end of the Nord Stream project—all of it.
As soon as Joe Biden assumed office in January 2021, he and his national-security people began floundering. This was predictable: U.S. foreign policy during the Biden years was one flub after another across both oceans. In May 2021, a couple of months before NS II was finished, Washington lifted all the sanctions Trump had imposed on Nord Stream AG, which comprises Gazprom and four European companies.
This appeared to be a stunning repudiation of the years of pressure — decades, depending on how you count—Washington had exerted on the Germans. At last the Americans seemed to have concluded that trying to prevent the interdependence of Europe and its eastward neighbor was like trying to keep water from running downhill. So it seemed to me. A victory for the Germans, I remember thinking — a triumph for Germany, for Europe, for the cause of constructive engagement with the Russian Federation.
But in short order it was evident that those Biden had drawn around him were in fact obsessed with preventing NS II from bonding Russia and Western Europe in a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Prominent among these officials were Jake Sullivan, Biden’s freakishly ideological national security adviser, and Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state.
Blinken, indeed, had devoted his graduate thesis years earlier to a study of the contentious Siberian project of the Reagan years. This was later published as Ally Versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis, wherein Blinken argued vigorously that preventing Germany and Russia from building any more pipelines like the Trans–Siberia network was a geopolitical imperative. Blinken’s publisher, it is worth a brief note, was Frederick A. Praeger, which, if it was no longer a CIA front by 1987, when Blinken’s book came out, had long served as one during the earlier Cold War decades.
So it was that the Biden regime, stumbling with every step, soon found its way to doing what Americans can be relied upon to do when they prove unable to project power in a fashion that gives the appearance of civility and respectable statecraft —when all the legal or marginally legal or actually illegal but apparently legal coercions fail: With NS II ready to begin pumping, they began to plan an altogether illegal covert operation.
December 2021 was a fraught month in matters to do with the Atlantic alliance’s relations with Russia. As readers will recall, Moscow sent two draft treaties Westward, one to Washington and the other to NATO headquarters in Brussels, as the proposed basis of talks to lead to a mutually beneficial new security framework in Europe. While instantly dismissing these draft documents as frivolous, the Biden White House was, via heavy arms shipments to the Kiev regime, purposely pushing Moscow to the point it would have no choice but to move militarily into Ukraine. Farcically enough, Biden later credited the CIA with a grand intelligence coup when, on cue, it predicted the inevitable Russian operation.
Something else occurred that month. As Biden’s people were confident they were about to provoke Russia’s military advance into Ukraine, they knew they would create an opportunity for themselves: They would be licensed to respond in newly adventurous terms once Moscow made its move. To this end, Jake Sullivan gathered a range of reliably hawkish officials from across the government for a series of top secret meetings in a secure room on a high floor of the Old Executive Office Building, the EOB, a late–19th century edifice in wedding-cake style set next to the White House.
There is no need to go long on what arose from the Sullivan meetings: Seymour Hersh’s account of those sessions and all that followed is properly long, persuasive in its extensive detail, and unassailably authoritative. Hersh published his 5,300–word account of the planning, preparation, training, and execution of the sabotage operation that destroyed the Nord Stream I and II pipelines in his Substack newsletter on Feb. 8, 2023, under the headline, “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline.” I rank it among the two or three most accomplished pieces of reportage American journalism has produced in my lifetime.
All manner of silliness followed the Nord Stream explosions and, some months later, the publication of Hersh’s piece. The New York Times called the explosions “a mystery.” The Germans, Danes and Swedes purported to conduct official investigations but swiftly closed them, claiming either they found no evidence assigning responsibility or they could not release their findings. Biden regime officials suggested the Russians may have destroyed their own industrial asset—the ne plus ultra, this would be, of false-flag operations.
The American disinformation brigades later reported that their investigations led to rogue Ukrainians — the six-people-in-a-rented-sailboat thesis. Last August the Germans, taking the cake somewhat, issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian identified only as Volodymyr Z., on suspicions he was involved in the explosions. Be not suspenseful: We will never hear another word of Volodymyr Z.
There is no need to bother with any of this. None of it makes the slightest dent in Hersh’s work. Effectively hiding the truth in plain sight, various Biden officials expressed, with remarkable candor, their satisfaction for a job well done. Among these was Antony Blinken. When we bear in mind the secretary’s previously cited thesis, his remarks after the events of Sept. 26, 2022, take on a weight and resonance we might not otherwise find in them:
It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant, and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…
Again, history’s wonderful habit of explaining our present to us.
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In the early 1980s the European powers repelled the Reagan administration’s forceful insistence that they abandon the Trans–Siberia project, and the conflict developed into what historians count one of the most serious political crises among the Western powers during the whole of the Cold War. There was a suggestion in those events that Europe still knew how to act in its own interests as it understood them. It had stood for the cause of interdependence and had been heard. I think of Helmut Schmidt standing at a window in Bonn. He spoke of this, I have no trouble imagining, in his silence—the cause of interdependence amid an attenuated independence within the trans–Atlantic alliance.
Europe’s capacity to think for itself had shown signs of fading soon after the 1945 victories. The generations of leaders that came up after Churchill’s and de Gaulle’s had little experience of independence; they had lived and come of age politically in the shelter of the U.S. security umbrella and, knowing no other condition, were unpracticed in matters to do with sovereignty. There was a restlessness within the Cold War’s confines by the 1960s and 1970s—the Trans–Siberia affair was an expression of this—but in the course of time this faded, too. The difference was evident by the time German citizens dismantled the Berlin Wall in November 1989, if not sooner.
It was when our conversation turned to the events of 1989 that Dirk Pohlmann and I began to speak of Germany as “a land of lost opportunity.” That was my phrase. Pohlmann’s was “the tragedy of lost opportunity.” As Dirk put it, “Germany, Europe, could have had a new influence in the world after 1989.” He meant the Germans had a chance then to serve as that “in-between” nation that bridged West and East. Havel thought precisely of these things during the early post–Cold War years, and he had Europe as well as Germany in mind. “A new task now presents itself,” he said in a speech delivered in Aachen in May 1996, “and with it a new meaning to Europe’s very existence.”
Dirk Pohlmann saw another lost opportunity for the Germans, very like the first, at the start of Russian military intervention in Ukraine three years ago. Germany was in a position to prevent the conflict or mediate it once it began, he suggested, instead of signing on for the Biden regime’s proxy war. “Why are we so obedient? Why do we have our Scholz?” he exclaimed more than asked. “Another world was possible even a few years ago, just as it was after 1989.”
The destruction of Nord Stream stands now as a major break for the Germans. The old model — Russian energy in, sophisticated German products out — seems decisively asunder, and many Germans tell me this will prove beyond repair. But to take the long view, I question whether Germany’s natural givenness to the cause of interdependence can ever be fully extinguished. Talking to Germans gives the strong impression this story is not over. Hamlet, it seems to me, still lurks among them.
