Six months after undersea explosions ripped through three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany I wrote a 2,500-word story for The Spectator entitled ‘Were Ukrainians behind the Nord Stream bombings?’ Citing senior European security sources, the piece revealed a conspiracy of silence – for fear of an anti-Ukraine backlash – by western intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities and government to cover up what they all knew to be the truth. Forensic evidence and a German police investigation had disclosed that pipelines carrying the Russian gas on which the economies of Germany and many other European countries depended had been blown up by a tiny team of Ukrainian saboteurs. The piece concluded:
Expect more details to come out soon, not from anonymous spooks and much less from Vladimir Putin, but from old-school gumshoe investigation by police and journalists.
Now with the publication of The Nord Stream Conspiracy, the Wall Street Journal’s Berlin correspondent Bojan Pancevski has produced the definitive account of the most impactful special operation in the history of warfare. He has interviewed not only the German detectives who unravelled the plot but also, jaw-droppingly, the Ukrainian spymaster, intelligence officers and soldiers who planned and executed the operation. The result of this extraordinary access is not just investigative journalism of the highest order but a gripping thriller. ‘Like a spectator at a high-stakes poker game, I’ve had the extraordinary privilege to glance over the shoulders of both sets of players and see their hands before they laid down their cards,’ Pancevski writes.
