If you want to start a myth, make it a good one. Look at Odysseus. Imagine if the old liar had come home stony broke, a decade late, and told his wife: “Sorry, Penny, I got drunk, the ship was repossessed and the crew deserted, I gambled away all my money and I’ve spent the last ten years working in bars to pay my passage home.” The tale would not have endured. Penelope would probably have kicked him out and married one of the suitors.
It’s more or less the same with the unmysterious sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. There’s a perfectly good, prosaic, obvious explanation. The giant undersea tube was able to supply cheap Russian gas to Germany, something the US government has disliked for decades. As long as it was there, Germany might get tired of the New Cold War and nurse its bruised economy instead. The US, using its superb, unique and expensive war technology, blew the pipeline up to prevent this.
A world hungry for adventure wants to believe that the job was done by a sexy young woman
Boringly, President Joe Biden specifically promised to do this, in February 2022. He proclaimed, at a White House press conference, “If Russia invades – that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again – then there will be no longer a Nord Stream Two. We will bring an end to it.” One amazed reporter asked how President Biden would do this. With a tiny glint in his eye, Sleepy Joe replied, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” Duller still, the era’s greatest reporter of US government secrets, from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib prison disgrace, Seymour Hersh, has lengthily and credibly explained how the US did indeed plant and detonate the enormous bombs needed. But it’s no use. It’s too tedious and ordinary.
A world hungry for adventure wants to believe that the job was done by a sexy young woman sharing a cramped yacht with a bunch of ultra-masculine romantic Ukrainian boozers, in the middle of a storm. This woman “looks like a model,” is “young, strikingly beautiful and sometimes clad in glittering dresses,” except when she is clad in nothing at all and posing alluringly on the cover of what is politely described as an “erotic magazine.”
This version of the Nord Stream saga has so far been enthusiastically accepted by the estimable Owen Matthews, writing in these pages, by the distinguished historian Michael Burleigh, writing in the Literary Review, by the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Sunday Times and the Wall Street Journal. That is a pretty sparkling hardcover debut for its author, the North Macedonian WSJ journalist Bojan Pancevski. Mr. Pancevski is himself gorgeously mysterious, and has an amazing journalistic pedigree. His career took off when he reported the case of the Austrian monster Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned and obscenely abused his daughter. Mr. Pancevski later moved on, via the 2015 FIFA corruption scandal, to more political stuff. He plainly has excellent sources in Ukraine (the book is surprisingly acerbic about President Volodymyr Zelensky).
I love the fact that German Wikipedia isn’t even sure whether Mr. Pancevski was born in 1977 or 1978. What fun to have your date of birth lost in the mists of the time before you are 50. When I laughed at his Nord Stream theory on Twitter, he popped up there cheerfully to urge me to read his book The Nord Stream Conspiracy. This is (allegedly) “The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World.” So I did read it. Gosh. My copy is scrawled with exclamation marks. Much of it reminded me of the adventures of Tintin, the Boy Reporter. I kept wishing that Captain Haddock would turn up, perhaps fresh from a meeting of the Society for Sober Sailors. I could scarcely refrain from crying out “billions of blue blistering barnacles!” as I turned the pages.
It would make a great comic strip, with its rock-fisted, brave, terse, incorruptible, principled characters – except that none of these people appears under his or her real name. Nor does the erotic magazine in which the nude model, whose alias is “Freya,” had once appeared. Nor does the mysterious institute which employs the ancient expert (Professor Calculus, perhaps?) who explained to our heroes how to blow up a pipeline built of steel more than an inch thick, jacketed in more than four inches of concrete, lying 260 feet below the surface of the chilly, murky and current-infested Baltic. This, by the way, is roughly twice as deep as the supermen of Britain’s SBS and the US Navy Seals are normally prepared to dive. As Michael Burleigh says of the pseudonymous diving team, they were “incredibly brave,” which is perhaps true in more ways than one. Mr. Pancevski himself notes that when a German flotilla sent submarine drones to the aftermath of the explosion, “the currents were so strong that the drone operators struggled to reach the seabed around the blast sites.”
The top secret task force made many basic blunders – pointlessly caught on a speed camera, using insecure phones and emails, drawing attention to themselves in harbor through slobbish behavior, using crude fake identities and above all leaving their boat so full of clues (a strand of Freya’s hair, some fingerprints, DNA by the ton, even a bloodstain, and some explosive traces). You might almost think they were trying to establish an alibi. But for whom?
Well, it is not for me to say. All my diving has been done in swimming pools, and my experience of erotic models is slender. But I suspect that the Berlin and Washington governments are increasingly worried about German voters, disenchanted with the Ukraine crisis, with their country’s growing decrepitude and with the high price of energy. If Nord Stream was blown up by sexy, sassy Freya, rather than by dreary old Uncle Sam, then good relations may last a little longer. Believe what you like. So will I.
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