Were the U.S. Navy deep divers at the BALTOPS-22 exercise? Part I

A revised section 3 of my first Substack article. Part I

USS Kearsarge (LHD-3) was the largest vessel during the BALTOPS exercise (5-17 June 2022). It is able to carry some six attack or fighter aircraft and some 20-25 helicopters. Kearsarge returned to the Baltic Sea on 2 August and left 22 September after having passed over the northern site for the upcoming explosions the day before.

[After some research on the air activity during the BALTOPS-22 exercise, I have added some material to section 3 of my Substack article from 21 March 2023 (“After Seymour Hersh’s article”). Hersh argues (8 February 2023) that during this exercise, the U.S. had used special deep-sea divers from Panama City Florida to prepare for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. I said in my original article that a “coordinator for the divers” had confirmed Hersh’s claims. This is brought up in Part I of this article below. In Part II and Part III, I will present additional support for Hersh’s story. Journalists who argue that his claims are just fiction have to explain why two U.S. military flights that left the BALTOPS airbase Ronneby (Sweden) at the end of the exercise continued via U.S. Naval Base Rota (Spain) to Panama City Florida, which is the center for the U.S. Navy deep-sea divers.]

On 8 February 2023, after months investigation, Seymour Hersh published a detailed article on the planning of the attack as well as about its execution. He wrote that President Biden, in December 2021 – months before the Russian invasion – had appointed National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to chair an interagency group with participants “from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments” to solve the problem with the pipelines. They had a series of meetings on the “top floor of the Old Executive Office Building” at the White House. In early 2022, the CIA came up with a credible plan “to blow up the pipelines” with the use of special Navy deep-sea divers from the diving center in Panama City Florida, which “just happens to be the location of the CIA Maritime branch in the Directorate of Operations”, to quote former CIA officer Larry Johnson. Everyone understood that it was serious. If it is traceable to the US, “it’s an act of war,” one of Hersh’s sources said. In order to handle local problems in Europe, the group had turned to Norway, he said.

They had selected eight divers from the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Training Center, Panama City, Florida, to plant C-4 explosives on the pipeline, but it was also important to have local Scandinavian support. According to Sy Hersh, a “very competent American team went to Norway”, “sometime in March” 2022, “to meet with Norwegian Secret Service and Navy” to prepare for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. The team approached the Norwegians, who were “quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic Sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island”. The Norwegians were also supposed to support the operation with a ship and with a Poseidon aircraft, Hersh argued. He actually once said that he had gathered information from the U.S. team that went to Norway (he clearly also had other sources). We know that the divers planted the bombs in the relatively deep waters of the Bornholm Basin (80 meters; see main article 21 March 2023). As a cover they prepared to use the NATO BALTOPS-22 exercise (5-17 June 2022), which was scheduled to take place just east of Bornholm. The exercise was to be held in exactly the right area, but it was not supposed to engage in deep-sea diving. It was supposed to train NATO forces in “mine-warfare”, where divers would locate simulated mines just below the surface. Only deep-sea divers would be able to plant the explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines.

However, BALTOPS-22 was ideal as a cover to justify any diving operation. If you use a single boat above the pipeline, you will become a suspect. You have to have a cover. I wrote two articles already in late 2022 in the Norwegian magazine Ny Tid saying that one most likely had used BALTOPS as a cover. It was, however, too obvious that the explosives could have been planted during the exercise, and one had to have a mechanism to delay the explosions for a couple of weeks or rather months. One had to separate the deployment from the triggering of the explosives. Seymour Hersh says that one solved this problem by preparing the use of a Poseidon aircraft that would drop a sonar buoy sending a coded signal to a receiver that triggered the timers and later the bombs.

BALTOPS-22 was supposed to train mine warfare with divers and with the use of a UUV (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) carried by US ships like USS Kearsarge (257 meters), which was also capable of carrying small midget submarines that could have been used by the divers. There is a photo from the exercise showing the Norwegian mine hunter KNM Hinnøy (55 meters) carrying a UUV (Hugin). Hinnøy is almost identical to the Alta class Hersh was briefed about, but Hinnøy, different from the Alta class, carries a decompression chamber, which would be used in any professional operation to facilitate deepsea diving. Hinnøy also carries two rigid inflatable rubber boats to be used by the divers. Another Norwegian alternative is the logistic vessel KNM Magnus Lagabøte, which functioned as a platform for the Mine Diver Command. U.S. Navy writes that divers assigned to Explosive Ordinance Disposal Mobile Unit (EODMU) 8 located at U.S. Navy Base Rota (Spain) operated with Magnus Lagabøte during the BALTOPS exercise. She had a decompression chamber, because divers conducted decompression drills onboard Magnus Lagabøte.

Baltic Sea (June 8, 2022) U.S. Navy service members assigned to Explosive Ordinance Disposal Mobile Unit (EODMU) 8 approach the Norwegian Reine-Class patrol vessel Magnus Lagabøte (A 537) (Photo: U.S. Navy). The container onboard is possibly a mobile decompression chamber to facilitate deep-sea diving.

By the end of the exercise, the U.S. special Navy divers planted the explosives, Hersh writes. They had used very special equipment for deep-sea diving with a mixture of helium in the tanks. These divers had nothing to do with the exercise itself. The very presence of such divers was confirmed by a BALTOPS “diver coordinator”, German journalist Thomas Röper writes. The coordinator had “a leading administration role during” the exercise, and Röper quotes his letter:

“A U.S. military helicopter arrived carrying a group of men who were supposed to be U.S. Navy anti-mine personnel. […] I found it rather strange that they were from the US Navy. My first thought was that they looked like a group of terrorists, not anyone from the US Navy. The other groups we had from many of the military branches had some sort of standards, haircuts, for example. [… and none of them] wore identification tags around their neck. The other thing I found odd was that they claimed to be there to search for underwater mines. However, they lacked the equipment for such exercises. Their equipment consisted of the latest Navy issue deep-diving underwater rebreathers and some small hard case boxes; we call them pelicans. Their job was to take a rubber boat to a pre-determined location, search for anti-ship mines and return with their findings. Usually in such an endeavor, they have long metal detection equipment, but that was absent from their collection of gear. A detail I found to be very strange here was that while the other minesweeping teams wore traditional SCUBA gear with tanks and such, this group was wearing state-of-the-art helium rebreather helmets and dive suits.”

MK29 Mixed Gas Rebreather System, Panama City Florida (Photo: US Navy Research)

They brought deep-sea diving equipment with them, which the coordinator believed to be MK29 system, a rebreather system with a mixture of helium (that Hersh mentioned). It had been developed at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Naval Support Activity Panama City, Florida (where the Navy divers, Hersh spoke about, had come from). Such equipment was neither necessary nor useful for divers in a mine warfare exercise like the BALTOPS-22, and their use of such equipment had surprised the coordinator. My country would not be able afford this system, he said. When the divers arrived, they also met with the US Admiral and “a group of American men in plain clothes that had arrived a few hours earlier. We all suspected them to be some sort of intelligence officers,” and the coordinator continues:

“[The divers went out in their rubber boat]. Not to the area where the simulated mines were placed, but to an entirely different location [… and] they exited their boat wearing their rebreathers and they disappeared under the water for over six hours. There is no self-contained underwater gear that I know of that could keep a diver under for six hours. With the newest military systems, three or four max is possible if the diver isn’t exerting himself. After a few hours, we began to get concerned and we contacted the coordinator for the US 6th Fleet, which assured us that everything was fine, they were in contact and [we should ignore it] and not to make any report about it. After the exercise was over and they returned, almost all of their pelicans were missing. They did not stay for any pleasantry. They had short conversations with the civilian people from the U.S., got on a waiting helicopter, and left. The civilians they were talking to also left, but in a different helicopter. Their mission was later marked as ‘completed successfully’, even though they were never near their intended target location. In retrospect, [this creates] suspicion. The divers met with a small, waiting submersible that showed them to the area of the pipeline. […]”

Let say that the “coordinator’s” story is correct, then the divers must have participated in a very significant covert operation, because otherwise there would have been no reason for them to meet the Admiral, nor to meet the “men in plain clothes”. This was not an ordinary training mission. The coordinator did for obvious reasons not tell which ship the divers had operated from, but one can easily get the impression that he speaks about a larger ship like the USS Kearsarge or USS Gunstone Hall (190 meters) or perhaps the U.S. Sixth Fleet flagship USS Mount Whitney (189 meters) with Commander Sixth Fleet Vice Admiral Gene Black. The fact that Chief Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday was on Mount Whitney at the end of the exercise 15-18 June indicate the significance of the event.

On the other hand, the divers wouldn’t necessarily have met the Admiral on the same ship as they were diving from, and Hinnøy and Magnus Lagabøte could definitely receive divers and others from a helicopter. On the other hand, how the planning of the operation was carried out in real life may have changed after Seymour Hersh’s sources were directly involved in the preparations; for example, which ship they used may also have changed. Norwegian journalist Alf R. Jacobsen said that an Alta class vessel KNM Otra (that Hersh spoke about) actually had run some training in the area of a major Norwegian pipeline at Mongstad close to Bergen on 31 May to 3 June, in the days preceding the BALTOPS exercise and this also fits with U.S. Falcon and Hercules flights from Bergen to Ronneby (over Ramstein; see Flightradar24). The US Navy divers could possibly have been training in Scandinavian waters to prepare for the upcoming operation in the Baltic Sea. Planning for such additional training may have been done at a later stage. Hersh sources may not have been informed about it.

There are too many things that fit with Sy Hersh story. It is almost impossible to believe that all this would be a coincidence: U.S. Navy divers using state-of-the-art deep sea diving equipment from Panama City Florida during the BALTOPS exercise would support Hersh’s claim that these very divers were coming from the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City, Florida. They turned up at the end of the exercise and they clearly did deep sea dives that had nothing to do with the exercise. The “diving coordinator” became very suspicious. His letter appears as a confirmation of several essential points in Hersh’s article. Röper wrote about it immediately after Sy Hersh’s article. Some people may have been hesitant to believe in it, since Röper presented the letter of the “diving coordinator” after Hersh’s article had been published. However, the “coordinator’s” letter was actually brought up in a video already in October 2022 by Röper’s colleague John Mark Dougan without many people knowing about it. Dougan was reading from the letter he received the same day, 4 October 2022, only ten days after the destruction of the pipeline.