Aircraft and Vessels in Seymour Hersh's Nord Stream Story

May 22, 2023

(This text was originally posted by me on May 3 2023. I removed it a week later due to an offer to get a version published in a newspaper. Sorry for caving to such bad advice. It’s never OK to change history, even if everything I wrote here turns out to be wrong or irrelevant)

In the original article “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”, Seymour Hersh mentions one boat and one aircraft. The boat was used to carry divers and place the bombs on the pipelines and the airplane was used to trigger the explosions. In a later article called "The Nord Stream Ghost Ship" Hersh writes about yet another ship:

“an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials”.

A summary of the information given below is that Seymour Hersh’s story survives scrutiny based on “open source” information about ship and aircraft movements. Of course it can’t be “proven” (using open source only), that the Alta mine hunter was used to place the bombs, or the P8-A “Poseidon” aircraft was used to trigger them or that USS Paul Ignatius was involved in cleaning the site from unexploded bombs. But we do see in the open sources that all of these vessel types were actually in the right place and the right time to carry out the roles ascribed to them by Seymour Hersh. His story stands this test, and reports of his story being “debunked” by open source information are greatly exaggerated.

The Boat

“The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers”

The Vessel pictured above, KNM Hinnøy M343 is the very ship that best fits Seymour’s description above, and it also happens to be the ship that participated in the BALTOPS exercise. There has been some discussion about Hersh’s “Alta class mine hunter” designation. The “Alta Class” name is supposed to be used only for the “sweeper” version of this ship, and the “hunter” which Hersh is referring to, is supposed to be called “Oksoy class” . The two ships have identical hulls and engines, but the “hunter” has divers on board and is obviously the one that’s more appropriate for the task of sabotaging Nord Stream. But using the “Alta” name rather than “Oksoy” is more informative in Hersh’s context. The combat role of the ship is already expressed in the “hunter” designation, and Alta has a history with greater meaning in Seymour’s longer story of the US-Norwegian military relationship.

So what did the Alta mine hunter KNM Hinnøy do around the BALTOPS exercise early June 2022? The short answer is it did a lot of things.

It arrived in the Baltic Sea already on May 4, it visited Lienaya, Latvia and Klaipeda, Lithuania and performed exercises in their waters. Then visited Gdansk in Poland before going slowly over the pipeline in a convoy with Latvian, Estonian and Belgian ships to Stockholm. Then joining an even larger convoy of minesweeper/hunter ships back to Bornholm on June 8 for the actual BALTOPS. The first days of the exercise, June 8 to 13 were intense 24/7 work. Every minute of Hinnøy’s movements are recorded and it looks very busy. Only the two last nights it spends anchored near Bornholm’s coast. The 15:th of June she leaves Bornholm and pays a visit to Kiel, Germany before finally going home to Norway on the 22:nd of June. Having investigated several dozens of military ships moving around the Baltic Sea around this time, I can confidently say that KNM Hinnøy M343 is by far the most transparent. Every moment of its 49 day visit in the Baltic sea was recorded in a constant stream of AIS messages. If the ship was truthful about its identity and position (unlike all other military ships I’ve looked at) it almost has an alibi exonerating it from being the prime sabotage suspect. “Almost”, because the divers operate from smaller speed boats which don’t need to broadcast their positions.

The purpose of AIS-position reporting for ships, just like the “ADSB” for aircraft, is safety. Position messages are sent by VHF so surrounding civilian ships can see them and collisions can be avoided. The military only uses AIS to coexist with civilian traffic. They don’t use the system to keep track of each other. Of course they don’t, since anyone with a VHF radio, and now the internet, could then see where they are. IF Hersh is right and KNM Hinnøy was the culprit, the one thing they would NOT do is to broadcast their position while waiting for the divers to finish the sabotage. The military has many ways to manipulate the signal. For instance, it could have done the job in the night after the 13:th or 14:th of June, while continuing to broadcast the anchored position near Bornholm. Another trick would be to manipulate the speed while traveling in a convoy like here when Hinnøy passes over the crime scene in company with three other mine hunters in the middle of the night on May 31.

The Estonian mine hunter M314 sails alongside with Hinnøy for most of the exercise, but Hinnøy is a fast catamaran capable of 30 knots, so why not keep broadcasting a position in the middle of the convoy while staying a few hours to rig the bombs and then catch up? Having your Baltic country buddies cover for you is cool. They’ll never say a word about a mission they support and are complicit in.

These are admittedly conspiracy theories, unlikely and without evidence but that’s not my point. My point is that Hinnøy was within striking distance on many occasions the early summer 2022, with plenty of opportunity to carry out the mission while leaving a seemingly exonerating track in the worldwide AIS databases. That’s what I would have done if I were “tasked” with this mission. Simply turning off the AIS or spoof it wouldn't be good enough for the crime of the century.

Aircraft:

“On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission”

The P8-A is based on the civilian 737-800 and had a good excuse to fly over the Baltic to keep track of Russian submarines.

It does so by flying slowly at low altitude and dropping so-called sono buoys in the water. The buoy can transmit and receive sonar signals and listen to submarines.

One or several of those buoys could have transmitted the magic code that set off the timers of the bombs that would later explode.

Several P8-A aircraft, posing as or being US Navy aircraft were present at mission altitude over the pipeline three of the nights leading up to the explosions. You can spot them on the popular website FL24 (“FlightRadar24”) when replaying the days in question. You see planes with “no callsign” descending at high vertical speed right above the Baltic. Although FL24 sometimes honor requests to remove flights from the interface, the US Navy P8-flights prior to the Nord Stream sabotage are still there for everyone to see. They are also present in other places like

https://www.adsbexchange.com/

and a slightly different selection is found in

https://www.radarbox.com/

In FL24 you can follow the high altitude portions before and after the mission itself:

The particular flight pictured above came from and returned to Germany ,

and spent four hours near the surface of the Baltic in the early morning hours of September 25. A perfect time to trigger the bombs to explode on September 26. I tweeted about it in February since another P8-flight arriving in the morning of September 26 turned out to be a few hours late. This much more famous P8 flight posed with Hex code AE6851, a US Navy designation, and arrived a few hours too late to be able to trigger the first explosion.

The fleet of P8 Poseidon aircraft can be followed around the world in the ADSB databases. When doing so, it’s obvious at a glance that they employ multiple tricks to conceal their origins, identity or the complete track all together. A “hex code”, supposed to be unique for an individual plane, can land in Japan, then pop up soon after in the USA. On several occasions, P8-A planes have used identifiers of civilian commercial aircraft to hide. But just like in the case of Hinnøy, the P8-A aircraft were unusually transparent in the Baltic missions September 23-26.

Saying exactly which individual P8 it was is a wild guess at best. The same hex code, AE6851 was recorded on the Sigonella air base on September 23, departed from there in the evening on September 27.

The other P8 aircraft doing missions September 23-25 out of Germany, had hex code AE6893 and that plane also returned to the same air-base in Sicily. But who knows, AE6851 was also reported in Reykjavik, Iceland before the September 26 flight and before that it was seen on the Norwegian P8-base in Evenes

We can’t trust the identities of these planes, but they were definitely P8-A Poseidon aircraft and the flights definitely took place. I happen to know a bit about the P8 since my job a few years ago was to develop aircraft performance models and trajectory optimization for a flight planning system. The military is not known to care much about fuel savings but in March 2014 there was suddenly a priority to get a very accurate performance model to extend the range of the P8 when searching for the missing MH3700 in the southern Indian Ocean. I was working from Sweden and we weren’t approved to learn any military secrets, but the P8 was based on the civilian 737-800 and it was a simple matter to extend our civilian system to military mission planning with peculiarities like changing weight and drag inflight (after dropping torpedoes) , air refueling and most relevant here, “dark portions”, of the missions. When you “file” a flight plan, you only present the parts of your path that pass through controlled airspace. The actual mission for AE6893 for four hours near the surface of the Baltic sea was below controlled airspace and there is no requirement to report this part of the route to civilian air traffic control. Civilian authorities also don’t have any means to track the whereabouts of the P8 aircraft without getting positions on radio. Only the military could have seen the planes with its radars. The dark portions of military flights were dark also for us managing the mission planning software. We had to know about speed, flap settings, altitude and any planned payload dumps, but the coordinates between entering and leaving the low altitude airspace were not important and were not stored in the system. I can testify that the vertical profiles of the flights recorded in FL24 and described here are fully consistent with the P8-A performance characteristics. That part isn’t fake.

USS Paul Ignatius

Danish media reported on October 7 that USS Paul Ignatius in company with support ship USNS William McLean operated near the explosion sites from October 6. It was photographed later and “OSINT Analyst” Oliver Alexander noted in the linked substack post that the ship appeared on the MarineTraffic website at the Northern explosion site on October 8. It was a moment of dense traffic and, I guess, reluctantly Ignatius or McLean had to turn their AIS on, but when doing so, it masqueraded as the Greek container ship “Elona”.

Looking at the adventures of “Elona” in Marine traffic over the period since June last year reveals it’s been extensively used as a cover for US warships.

The first Baltic sighting of Elona in the MarineTraffic database is on October 8, and it’s only visible when turning on satellite tracking. MarineTraffic has revealed to me that they have contracts with a few of the providers of satellite tracking information. The same VHF signals sent out to neighboring ships for safety are picked up by satellite and MarineTraffic must pay for that information and in return they charge their customers. I find it a bit strange that Elona shows up only on satellite but wasn’t picked up by MarineTraffic’s network of terrestrial stations. All the other ships close to it were seen in the terrestrial data as well. What has been going on here?

Parts of the answer came in late April 2023 as I found comprehensive AIS data collected and archived by the Danish Maritime Authority . DMA picks up AIS signals from antennas on Bornholm, and its archive is therefore the best terrestrial source for the Nord Stream explosion sites. When looking for the same MMSI identifier as was matched to “Elona” in MarineTraffic, it turns out this (most certainly) American warship (or ships) arrived not on October 6 or 8 but as early as in the morning the 2:d of October. Since they are “dark” much of the time between October 8 and 12 and only visible from time to time, they most likely arrived even earlier to the crime scene in dark mode. Possibly consistent with Seymour Hersh reporting:

“an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials”.

The mine which Hersh is referring to was intended for the fourth pipeline. In "The Nord Stream Ghost Ship" article, Sy writes explicitly that all four pipelines were supposed to be blown up but one “mine” failed and had to be picked up. Here’s a plot of the positions of US warships a few days after the explosion.

The Wikipedia article on USS Paul Ignatius also mentions the visit but not how early it started. Wikipedia writes:

“In the autumn of 2022, Paul Ignatius conducted a routine patrol in the Baltic Sea, where she was accompanied by the support ship William McLean.^[13] The ship also passed the area in the Baltic Sea where Nord Stream gas pipelines have been sabotaged. According to Danish media, the destroyer assisted in "guarding the crime scene of the gas leaks".^[14]^[15]

Maybe she wasn’t just “patrolling”, who knows? I wasn’t writing this to make specific claims of what the ships and aircraft in Seymour Hersh reporting actually did in detail. My point is they COULD have done exactly what Sy Hersh reports they did. There is nothing in the open source record so far that "debunks" Seymour Hersh’s story as some commentators seem very eager to do.

2 Likes

13 Comments

guest

May 4·edited May 4Liked by Andersson Erik

Segueing a little. Some general, scattered (no clear thesis), thoughts.

1. If the bombs were laid months before they were detonated, it gives the US administration a lot of power to push past people concerned about the legality of the act. For the first op, all you're doing is giving a future option (like a back door). So people in DOD or even CIA, concerned on the legality wouldn't make a squawk like if it it was all done at once. But, of course, this then put a loaded gun in the hands. And very easy to just give the order for the sonobuoy drop.

1.5. For that matter, why the two different sites? Redundancy in case of discovery or execution fault? Some that were laid years ago and new ones more recently? Like this: https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/explosive-laden-drone-found-near-nord-stream-pipeline Efforts to be in both SWE and DAN EEZes?

2. I remain intrigued by the report by a YTer who said he got a report of scruffy specops looking guys doing extended duration diving (sans regular mine search gear) during Baltops. It was really interesting in that it came prior to the Hersch story. Wish someone would push on it more. Hersh dismisses this...but I remain intrigued.

3. It is interesting how flat and confident the denials of US action are by the administration. No equivocation. And laughing at the Hersch report. Makes me wonder if Hersch was wrong.

4. But WRT (3), I wish someone would ask them if they knew more about it than they were saying. Even if the US didn't do it or use an agent to do it...I get the impression they know what went down. But nobody has asked them this question.

5. It's interesting that the administration seemed MORE upset about Hersch claims that they didn't inform Congress than that they did the op. Makes me wonder if they did the op, but informed top Congresscritters. (Here it would even be possible to just inform of the placement, with the whole "camel's nose in the tent" point 1.)

6. There's gotta be a story with the 17 hour delay between the explosions. Perhaps signal didn't work at the further site and they needed a new signal? Perhaps they screwed up the signal reciever code and needed a new buoy drop? Perhaps they wanted to make sure shipping was clear (and it wasn't at one site) and so they had to redrop with a new flight later. Perhaps the second location was "backup bombs") and they noticed failure on one of the strings. Then triggered the backup bombs (to no effect since only an already blown string got severed). Or even Oliver's idea of the accident followed by a deliberate blowup, of waiting bombs.

7. It is impressive how the operation has been kept secret.

8. It's strange how the sailboat story came out. And how now the "photos of Russian ships" story came out. Definitely feels like they are being put out deliberately to distract. And they're not even mutually consistent!

9. Who is Oliver? Occam's razor says he's just a young dude who likes messing around with OSINT with standard neoliberal political leanings. But it's strange, no profile prior to the war, no LinkedIn page, no biography, etc. It's not like I want a date with him or to affect his personal life in any adverse way. He's probably just a nice kid. But still...kinda cryptic. Does he have a job? What is his academic training? Is that the real name? Etc. [And yes, I'm pseudonymous myself! But I really am just an Internet commenter!]

10. It's distressing (and intriguing) that so little information is/has been shared about the explosion investigations. We don't have good diagrams/maps/photos of all the different sites, showing pipes, debris, craters, etc. I wonder if this is because it would make amateur analysis easier. Some dots could be connected. At this point, it even becomes difficult to reconstruct it as the bottom will have been disturbed, debris picked up, etc. in terms of innocent changes (or even more significant alterations if we posit more nefarious deception). It sure doesn't seem like they want the public's help in figuring out this operation...more the opposite.

Expand full comment

LIKED (1)

1 reply by Andersson Erik