The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now.
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Recent Posts
Tragedy and Potential: The Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference
May 29, 2026
Take Action Now The U.S.’s short, very general, poorly proofread statement on the conference outcome reflected a lack of interest in or familiarity…
California Democrats Keep Selling “Medicare for All” — While Protecting the System That Profits From Sickness
May 29, 2026
Take Action Now Gov. Gavin Newsom embodies that contradiction more than anyone.By Joshua Scheer, ScheerPost For nearly a decade, California…
Congress Quietly Moves to Integrate U.S. and Israeli Militaries
May 29, 2026
Take Action Now In the first step towards shifting aid further into the shadows, the House’s 2027 NDAA would all but fuse the two…
Company Behind California Chemical Leak Was Building F-35 Parts Amid Rush of Orders From U.S. and Israel
May 28, 2026
Take Action Now The military contractor whose leak displaced 50,000 people makes millions aiding fighter jet production for Lockheed Martin.By…




