The ways the secret world speaks when it talks to reporters
Sept. 4th 2025 paid
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As some readers may have heard by now, Cover-Up, a documentary about my career in journalism more than two years in the making, had a successful world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival last Friday. The directors and producers, Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, are serial prize winners in the business and of course they quizzed me on film about my exposé about the role of the Biden White House in the September 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, one set of which had been providing Russian gas to Germany—and fueling Germany’s economic recovery—since 2011.
The 5,200-word report I published here in February 2023 generated an enormous response, including questions from the media here and abroad about my reliance on a single unnamed source. That reliance made it easier for the major media—including the New York Times—to ignore or cast doubt on the story and focus instead on the on-the-record categorical denials by senior press officials in the White House and a CIA spokesperson. Just two weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Joe Biden had warned President Vladimir Putin during a televised White House news conference that if he attacked, as he was then threatening to do, the United States would “bring an end to” the pipelines and deprive Russia of billions of annual income.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who played a major role in the American cover-up, told a White House press conference a few days after the raid that of course the administration had nothing to do with the destruction of the pipelines. He said that Russia, which had posed questions about possible American involvement in the explosions, “has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something, which is make accusations that it was really someone else who did it.” He promised a full White House inquiry to get at the culprit. Nothing more on the subject came from that administration, though in the months that followed reports came from Europe suggesting that a team of Ukrainians had committed the attack.
That allegation surfaced again last month when German investigators publicly announced that they arrested a Ukrainian man in Italy as a suspect in the Nord Stream bombing. A year earlier the German authorities announced that they had issued warrants for five suspects, also from Ukraine, alleged to be involved in the bombing. The suspects in both cases also were said to have used a 49-foot rented racing yacht known as the Andromeda to execute attacks some 250 feet below the Baltic Sea. Diving at that depth in the constantly churning waters of the Baltic Sea is known as technical diving and requires the vessel involved to have the on-board ability to swiftly pull divers in trouble up via a power-driven winch as well as an on-board decompression chamber capable of helping rescued divers to recover from the build-up of nitrogen in their blood at great depths. The notion that such essential life-saving gear could fit on a 49-foot yacht is laughable, but is not a fact I’ve seen cited by the major media.
Let me tell you about an earlier experience of mine with the issue of unnamed sources that’s also detailed in Cover-Up. In 1969 I exposed the My Lai massacre in a series of freelance reports for a small anti-Vietnam War Saigon-based writers’ cooperative known as Dispatch News Service. Earlier I had covered the war as a Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press, and—despite that experience and my writing for the New York Times Magazine about secret US work on chemical and biological weapons as well as a book on the topic—I could interest no major media outlets in what I had uncovered about the massacre at My Lai. I had obtained access to an Army charge sheet accusing a young Army 2nd lieutenant named William Calley of being the “bad apple” who engineered the crime. My work for Dispatch won me many prizes, including a Pulitzer, and a front-page story in the New York Times about the award for foreign reporting going to a freelance writer. Then, as now, the Times was the place to be a reporter.
I became a correspondent for the New Yorker, then the best place for an aspiring writer, and my work there won me a job offer as a correspondent in the Washington bureau of the Times from Abe Rosenthal, then the paper’s managing editor who was concerned about the coverage of the war from Washington.
No reporter in his right mind would leave the luxury of the brilliant editing and high pay of the New Yorker but William Shawn, its wonderful editor, urged me to go, saying that I could not pass up the chance to make daily hay in the Washington bureau of the Times, as Abe assured me he wanted me to do.
So I ended up at the Times for less pay but more opportunities to tell readers about a war I believed could not be won and would kill many more Vietnamese and young Americans. I was assigned to sit across from Bernard Gwertzman, the Times foreign policy correspondent who was writing the lead story of the paper, invariably about the war, day after day. Gwertzman was a marvel. Every afternoon he would be told by a secretary that Max Frankel, the Times Washington bureau chief who would win a Pulitzer in 1973, was finishing up his 5 pm call with “Henry” and that then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger would soon be calling Bernie. Sure enough, in my early weeks at the paper, I watched in amazement as Kissinger would indeed telephone Bernie, and there would be a chat of fifteen minutes or so, with Gwertzman scribbling notes away.
By this point, the deadline for the first edition of the Times was nearing and Bernie’s 1500-word report would be splashed all the front page of the paper—often as the A1 story—and it would repeat what Kissinger had told Frankel and then him, most accurately, but never citing Kissinger as the source. The story would simply report that senior US officials believed this and that about the secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese delegation then going on in Paris: it was the summer of 1972, when the talks were intense. Kissinger would of course be mentioned, but never cited as the main source of the report.
After a week or two of watching this go on at America’s preeminent newspaper, I asked Bernie whether he had ever checked Henry’s account with Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense, or with William Rogers, the secretary of state.
“Oh no,” Gwertzman told me. “If I did that, Henry would never again talk to me.”
So the anonymous Henry Kissinger was running—there was no other way to describe it—the daily coverage of the Vietnam War peace talks in America’s newspaper of record.
It should be noted that Kissinger was manipulating the media for his own, often selfish, needs, whereas my account of the Nord Stream sabotage comes from someone deep inside the American intelligence community whose stated motive in talking to me was simply to tell the truth when he thought it needed to be heard. I was reminded of all this as I was either getting pummeled or ignored by the media for basing my reporting on a single source about the Biden administration’s ordering the destruction of the pipelines. The understanding of those in the American intelligence community who undertook the difficult assignment of finding a way to blow up pipelines under the Baltic Sea without leaving a trace was that it was all about showing Putin that he was up against a president who meant what he said.
Biden blinked, in their view, by not immediately authorizing the destruction, via a remote sonar signal; he instead waited for seven months after the invasion, until late September, when Ukraine was in the midst of a successful counteroffensive. By then the intelligence team had been disbanded for months.
The CIA operators knew that they could meet Joe Biden’s demand for a serious threat to Putin because the agency had conducted at least two other covert operations in prior years against pipelines from Russia to the West. In 1978 a Soviet pipeline into Germany and other nations in Western Europe was disrupted by repeated failures of the turbines, causing severe back-ups. The turbine failures were never traced to the US operators who did the damage. In 1982 another Soviet pipeline was mysteriously blown up. It, too, was never tracked to the agency operators who conducted the sabotage.
I was told while researching the Nord Stream attacks that some of those who knew of the Biden operation were amazed at the US media’s inability to see through what was considered a rushed and clumsy cover up. “The whole story, as depicted in the press,” one official told me, “did not make sense. One obvious query—how did those who blew up the pipelines know where to look for the most effective place to plant an underwater bomb? And why wasn’t there more damage?”
The planners and operators understood the motives of the president and his advisers had changed between their initial planning and the execution of the bombing. Whereas at first the idea was to allow Biden to follow through on the threat he had made to Putin just before the invasion, the administration now wanted the pipelines destroyed—“to prevent a settlement between Russia and Western Europe before winter comes. . . . With the pipeline gone it would force the Europeans to give in to our policy of supporting Ukraine” in its war with Russia.
The official expressed disdain for the new rationale for the sabotage. “The thought was with the pipeline gone it would force the Europeans to give into our policy of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.” In other words, cutting off Russian gas to Western Europe—long a dream of American policy makers—would make continued European support for the war with Russia inevitable.
“It was as if some group in Michigan decided to blow up the natural gas pipeline from Canada to Detroit,” the official told me. In other words, it was not being done to back up Biden’s threat. “It was for all of those in the administration who wanted the war.” The chance to do away with the pipeline “was a gift from God” to America’s Russia hawks, the official added.
The official said there was no fear of the media throughout the process: “Those who did the planning believed no one would come up with the real story. No one would find the truth, and, if they did, the US bureaucracy would lie, and the truth would never be known.
“We gambled,” the official said, “that the story would not leak from Norway,” where the staging and training for the pipeline mission took place.
The official was wrong, in a sense, about that. Earlier this year, a Norwegian official I’d known for years, who had denied any Norwegian involvement when I tracked him down before writing my initial report on the bombing of the pipelines, told me I had the account of his country’s involvement right. I had relied on him two decades ago, while sharing what I had been learning while reporting on the Iraq War.
We had a drink and agreed that the folly of American leadership continues today.
I hope to see some of you at movie houses over the coming months.
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