Amazing tales from inside Nord Stream sabotage plot

Michael Isikoff and Jeff Stein: n 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…