HOW TO STAGE A SABOTAGE: L'Affair Farewell, Fake History, Fake Science By Deep State Design
Attacks on oil pipelines over time...
Everyone is talking about the sabotage of Nord Stream 2 and floating their pet conspiracies. I like to look to the geopolitical facts and to history.
If you read Nicole Perlroth’s masterly This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2021), you know—just as I do—that the culprit of cyber attacks are often done with a degree of plausible deniability.
I’ve enjoyed the fantasy that France was capable of pulling off such an operation. They aren’t. Right? Right?
But gee, who would really benefit from the destruction of Nord Stream 2? Could it be another consumer of Russian gas? Like, I don’t know, China?
So qui bono from the pipeline attack? Xi bono. He’s now the only customer for Russian gas. From February 4, 2022, “Russia, China agree 30-year gas deal via new pipeline, to settle in euros,” Reuters:
Russia has agreed a 30-year contract to supply gas to China via a new pipeline and will settle the new gas sales in euros, bolstering an energy alliance with Beijing amid Moscow's strained ties with the West over Ukraine and other issues.
Gazprom, which has a monopoly on Russian gas exports by pipeline, agreed to supply Chinese state energy major CNPC with 10 billion cubic metres of gas a year, the Russian firm and a Beijing-based industry official said.
Just this past month China renegotiated the deal and this time agreed to pay for the Russian gas in roubles and yuan. Did you catch that? The currency moved from euros to roubles and yuan. The dream of the Duginist Eurasian sphere is at hand. The world’s largest energy supplier and the world’s largest energy consumer linking arm and arm.
Would Xi be so reckless as to do it with his people? Or could the sabotage be directed from that wonderfully peaceful nation known as Estonia which, as you know, has no reason whatsoever for reprisal on the Russian pipeline after recent events in the country?
Estonia also has no connections whatsoever to China. After all, they just left that group that China set up.
And as you well know, dear reader, the Estonian-born tech investor Steve Jurvetson has only ever been monitored by other nations because people are jealous of his considerable tech successes like his investments in SpaceX, Tesla, and Baidu — all of which have no connections whatsoever to China. Both Jurvetson and Jack Ma probably have very “strong eyes.” Jurvetson, at least, really, really loves drugs.
Anyway did I mention Rebekah Mercer, who is not at all a Chinese-Russian agent, financed a film about the Estonian Singing Revolution? To quote George W. Bush, “Well, that was some weird shit.”
Or perhaps it’s the U.S. and NATO, who long to put Europe under America’s energy security shield.
February 7th, 2022:
Biden: "There will no longer be a Nordstream 2."
Reporter: "How will you do that, exactly?"
Biden: *smirks* "I promise you, we will be able to do that."
Indeed the recent problems sabotage of Nord Stream 2 and their forecasted problems recall a similar effort roughly 40 years ago which allegedly paralyzed the Siberian Pipeline and caused havoc.
Here’s one description of the event:
Around Halloween 1982, an explosion occurred in the middle of Siberia, vaporizing a large segment of the newly-built trans-Siberian pipeline. The explosion –which was reported to be 1/7 the magnitude of the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan during WWII– severely damaged the pipeline, which was set to produce $8 Billion in petroleum revenue annually for the USSR. Only recently has this silently successful CIA operation been disclosed to the public.
You can almost imagine President Joe Biden sitting there, laughing, “Nice little pipeline. Would be a shame if anything happened to it.”
No, this isn’t your academic commander in chief, like Obama. This isn’t your television president, like Trump. This is the Irish presidency, willing to use power to get what he wants. As you know, dear reader, Anonymous is just a bunch of anarcholeftists with no ties whatsoever to any government employees or contractors. And this isn’t at all payback for the Colonial Pipeline or the Chinese infestation in the Texas grid.
What led to that 1982 explosion? Well, I recently watched a 2015 French documentary titled, L’affaire Farewell, which revealed to me a plot whereby the Americans were lying about a whole host of scientific and technological progress to the KGB spies they had in their midst.
I had a passing familiarity with the story though seeing it from the French perspective — Raymond Nart was interviewed! — really changed some of my views.
I had even reviewed the dramatic film, Farewell, for the National Review Online in 2010, “Farewell: A ‘True Story’ That Isn’t.” I summarized the story well enough then, so let me quote myself from twelve years ago. (Oh my misspent youth!)
“Farewell” gave French intelligence the complete list of all 250 KGB-affiliated industrial spies — “the X Line” — along with the locations of American nuclear submarines, communication codes, radar positions, and even space-shuttle plans. President Mitterrand, played by Philippe Magnan, passes all this information along to President Reagan in a gesture of good will. Mitterrand is the picture of the French statesman effortlessly rebuking Americans who, too conniving for their own good, don’t seem to have the requisite heightened moral sentiments. Seemingly every French movie that deals with international affairs has to have a naïve Frenchman come face to face with an American Machiavelli, and Farewell is no exception: In the final scene, Froment demands that a CIA official (Willem Dafoe) explain why “Farewell” can’t be rescued — only to hear that sometimes sacrifices must be made for the good of all.
In recent years I’ve become a lot more skeptical of Saint Reagan but let’s give the Devil his due. The genius of the Reagan-Bush Administration was that it bankrupted the Soviet Union by driving down the price of oil whilst making it impossible for them to catch up. In our own time, one wonders if President Joe Biden and his Inflation Reduction Act, might bankrupt many of the petrostates once more.
When Reagan-Bush was finished so was the Soviet Union. What will happen at the end of the Biden presidency?
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Still, this more recent documentary raises the prospect of what sorts of fake information was being fed to the Russians and whether or not similar efforts might be ongoing today against other adversaries of the United States or by such adversaries against us.
I’ve called these brainwashing campaigns intellectual cul de sacs. What if you could get the smartest people in your enemy’s society focused and even obsessed on problems which don’t matter? What would that be worth to you?
Perhaps the reason that the venture funds are so large isn’t to get a return on capital but to cause chaos and misdirection. Could it be that venture capital is a means of distorting markets? Could this be the real tech curse?
In the Farewell Affair, knowing full well that the Americans couldn’t stop the Soviet Union from stealing their technology, America decided to give them — or even sell them — fake material instead.
This meant that at the highest levels of the U.S. government many of the technologies people devoted their lives to technology which did not work.
How often does this happen?
Curiously enough still, the architect of that plan — a Mr. Gus Weiss — met with an unfortunate end in 2003 when he fell out of a window in the Watergate collapse to his death. (He was ahead of his time, apparently.)
Was Weiss pushed, was it suicide or was he playing both sides? Who did he really work for? Who tipped off the Soviets to Farewell?
And how real is Weiss’s story anyway? Wired Magazine’s Alex French suggests it’s all fake and opaque.
This story ends as it begins: On the cold sidewalk outside the Watergate, a November night, a body on the ground. Gus Weiss did not leave behind a suicide note. What he did leave is an unsolvable Cold War puzzle—one protected by layers of impenetrable government classification, cagey colleagues, aging friends with deteriorating memories and failing health. I’ve reported on Weiss’ life and exploits for more than two years, and his death feels to me not just like an act of abject despair but a mischievous taunt. I understand now that I could chase this story for decades, following a trail of clues from one rabbit hole to the next, each new, verifiable fact inevitably yielding three new questions requiring investigation. I understand that this story is made infinitely more complicated by Weiss’ affinity for misinformation, his tendency toward an asymmetrical grand strategy, his love of mischief. Gus Weiss—his life, his career—is an imperfect puzzle. One that I will never be able to solve.
One of the few accounts we have is that of a contemporary of Weiss’s — Thomas Reed, former Secretary of the Air Force (1976-77) and national defense advisor to the Reagan Administration, who recounts in his book, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (2005):
To automate the operation of valves, compressors, and storage facilities in such an immense undertaking, the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems… Russian pipeline authorities approached the US for the necessary software, [but] they were turned down. Undaunted, the Soviets looked elsewhere; a KGB operative was sent to penetrate a Canadian software supplier in an attempt to steal the needed codes. US intelligence, tipped by Farewell, responded and – in cooperation with some outraged Canadians – “improved” the software before sending it on… the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, 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. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere.
Is Reed telling the truth?
Who knows.
But one thing we do know — pipelines are too hard to protect and too easy to sabotage. Expect to see more of it.
The intelligence communities of the world are now all the Earth Liberation Front.
Brilliant! Excellent work explaining some players and possible motives.
Great info on the pipeline sabotage from the 80s. I had forgotten about that.