By Jeff Childers, Substack, 8/15/24

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal dished up a steaming pile of deep-state horse hockey, an ‘exclusive’ with the wild and (literally) unbelievable headline, “A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage. But wait, it immediately got even better. The sub-headline claimed, “Private businessmen funded the shoestring operation, which was overseen by a top general; President Zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off.”

Let’s check and see how well you guys have been following along. Take a quick test to predict where this article is going. Choose one of the following forecasts:

A. [_] The article was sourced from credible, verifiable individuals known to exist who were in positions to have personal knowledge about what happened; OR…

B. [_] The article was sourced only from loosely-identified, anonymous informants.

If you didn’t pick ‘B’, stay after class for a remedial reading assignment.

Now let’s use this piece of high fantasy as a guide for how to spot articles pre-written for media by the Operation Mockingbird department of some squiddly organization bearing an obscure three-letter acronym. This story might be the most obvious example to date; it’s like they aren’t even really trying anymore.

Ready? Let’s crack some cephalopods.

The Journal’s tall tale began with a tell: it described the story to follow as an “outlandish” —unbelievable— scheme, concocted in a bar using alcohol-muddied thinking. How relatable! Who among us hasn’t concocted wildly dangerous sabotage schemes after throwing back a few? In other words, it knew the story was a whopper and would be hard to swallow.

Prepare to throw the old canard, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” right out the window. Who needs evidence?

Here’s the Journal’s generic description of the highly-technical operation, with one key sentence highlighted. Think about that sentence while you’re reading the rest:

Haha, they couldn’t resist smuggling a little diversity into their fabulous fiction (“one was a woman”). Women can blow up pipelines too. And they even added a laugh track! But let’s focus back on that leading sentence: “Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told.”

Can be told. That sentence was a mistake made in haste. It wasn’t written by any independent WSJ journalist. The line implied some outside force or authority always stopped the story from being told before. But now, it has granted permission. The article never explained who or what that authority was. It raises murky questions that linger like octopus ink:

Who stopped the story from being told?

Why did they stop the story about ‘private businessmen’ being told?

Why did this invisible authority decide now the story could be told?

I’ll suggest we weren’t meant to know about the outside authority. It slipped into the article by accident, as the writer struggled to explain the story’s timing. That was an unintended gift, but it wasn’t necessary to understand the game.

The article continued by claiming that President Zelensky initially approved Operation Vodka, but the CIA “found out about it,” asked the former comedian to stand down, and Zelensky complied, ordering the saboteurs to stop. But former commander-in-chief Zaluzhniy —since fired and given a sweet, immunity-laden ambassadorship— went ahead anyway.

How exactly did CIC Zaluzhniy get involved with these ‘private businessmen?’ How did the CIA find out about the plot (the article says Dutch intelligence told them, but how did the Dutch know)? Why was Zelensky involved in the first place? Was it an official military op or not?

Both Zelensky and Zaluzhniy denied the story. So our belief must rest only on the Journal’s anonymous sources, composed of “four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot.” The WSJ never sourced any of the alleged “private businessmen” (and woman!). It sounds like Operation Vodka included a lot more than “private businessmen,” but the article never stretched to connect that dot.

Think critically. How did these ‘senior officials’ learn of the supposedly private operation? Even more importantly, why would they would disclose it? Why would they disclose it to a newspaper? Why now? The Journal never said.

In whom do we readers place our trust? The named sources who denied the story? Or the Journal’s inky anonymous informants, who don’t even match the profile of the inebriated private businesspeople it claims planned the attack? Is this story just a massive appeal to the Journal’s credibility? You can trust us, because.

Enter the German connection. Based on “no evidence” (see for yourself) they issued a warrant for a Ukrainian dive instructor in June:

No admissible evidence? Is this the same Journal that for years stubbornly insisted there was “no evidence” Ivermectin successfully treated covid infections? Now, apparently, “no evidence” is just fine when assigning blame for one of the most geopolitically significant stories in our lifetimes.

Arrest warrants are usually public information. Knowing who is supposed to be arrested is generally helpful for catching them. Pose for the mugshot! But the story never disclosed the alleged “Ukrainian dive instructor’s” identity. He could be any old octopus, for all we know.

Not only were the Journal’s claims completely unverifiable by actual humans, but the Journal even insisted verification would be impossible:

Uh-huh. So … how does the WSJ know there is no paper trail? Is it plausible every junior bureaucrat would meekly accept a verbal approval for a massive war crime, without even wanting an email for the file? Did the conspirators never ever discuss the plan and its complicated logistics in any text messages, emails, DMs, Word documents, or even a spreadsheet?

The remainder of Journal’s article was packed with convoluted, mind-numbing details and speculations that would be inadmissible in county court. But there was an even bigger hole in the story. Again, think critically.

If the Journal just broke an explosive exclusive resulting from terrific, Pulitzer-level investigative reporting, where are those details? Where is the Journal’s triumphant narrative about how it broke the story of a lifetime and solved a war crime that the World’s governments have been unable to crack?

As to how the Journal pulled off this exclusive, there was nothing but radio silence. No paper trail. Just the inky water left behind.

Here’s what the Journal’s “Exclusive Investigation” amounted to: Anonymous informants, implausibly precise and highly technical operations (by civilians!), unnamed perps, critical internal contradictions, vague and convenient claims that evidence does not exist, denials by named sources, lack of source transparency, unexplained timing, and an invisible investigation.

Great work, Wall Street Journal. By “great “work,” I mean deplorable hackery. So this article could only have been yet another spectral fairy tale planted by the subterranean security state. But why? And why now? What we’ve learned in the past about these kinds of fantastic one-off stories, which quickly sink into the Baltic without a geopolitical ripple, is that they were intended to discipline Ukraine, by showing the deep state’s whip hand.

What are they trying to force a recalcitrant Zelensky to do now?

Oh well. A least now the story “can be told.” Thanks for letting us know, I guess. We live in a time of media malfeasance and control beyond any nightmarish, tentacular villain Orwell could possibly have dreamed up following a drunken oyster-eating contest. Stay frosty.