Revealed: Amazing Tales from Inside the Nord Stream Sabotage Plot
Our interview with Bojan Pancevski, author of "The Nord Stream Conspiracy."
In September, 2022, powerful underwater explosions blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that had been built to provide Russian gas to Germany in what’s been called the most massive act of industrial sabotage in history. But for years its origins were a mystery, spurring multiple conspiracy theories about who might have been responsible – from the CIA to the Russians themselves. In 2023, Bojan Pancevski , chief European correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, began breaking stories about the affair, and now he’s pulled them—and much more—together in a riveting new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, that identifies the culprits as a shadowy group of Ukrainian operatives which he dubs The Start Up, with loose ties to their embattled country’s military and intelligence services. In this week’s SpyTalk podcast, he talked to Jeff Stein and Michael Isikoff about what he discovered, what the CIA actually knew in advance about the operation, and what’s going on in an ongoing German police investigation that has charged a key perpetrator with war crimes. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Stein: Bojan Pancevski, welcome to Spy Talk. A reviewer for the New York Times called your book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, “a spectacular feat of investigative journalism built on your intimate access to the senior Ukrainian intelligence chiefs who say they hatched the idea.” Tell us all about this group of Ukrainian chiefs who you dubbed The Startup.
Pancevski: So the people I call The Startup are veterans of intelligence and counterintelligence work. Some of them have been around for 25 years. And others are soldiers and military officers who’ve been fighting against Russia since 2014, when Vladimir Putin first invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. And as soon as the full scale invasion was launched on their country in February 2022, they all joined the armed forces. They were fighting in the Battle of Kyiv for a month, the capital. So they were integrated into this elite unit of the Ukrainian special forces. And with that unit, they kind of carved up their fiefdom.
Stein: They were rogues, really.
Pancevski: Essentially, within the intelligence community, which is vast, you have groups of people and officials at a very senior level who are being sponsored or patronized by oligarchs, by business interests, by politicians, by political parties. These people are beneath the surface. And they form networks. So it’s not very unusual to have a group of people who are operating under the central command of the military but only to a certain point. There are moments when they do their own thing. And perhaps they don’t report everything they do. It’s a very difficult thing to explain to an American or a British person or a German person for that matter, where things are much more regulated.
Stein: I want to clear out some underbrush right away. The CIA was blamed for carrying out this operation. The Russians were blamed for carrying it out. There was a cast of characters blamed. You make an airtight case—and the Germans are prosecuting a case—that it was this group of Ukrainians, right? No question whatsoever.
Pancevski: That’s exactly right. I spent three years investigating the case. My investigation is corroborated by the findings of the German investigation. The Germans have found evidence they say implicates people connected to this group. They have found traces of explosives, they have found DNA, they have found fingerprints.
