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
Why The Democrats Were Israel’s Perfect Partners In Genocide
October 30, 2024
Take Action NowBy masking support for Israel with hollow humanitarian gestures and empathy for Palestinians, Biden and Harris have diluted…
The Atlanta City Council Is Scared Of Direct Democracy
October 30, 2024
Take Action NowAtlanta residents want to vote directly on the proposed police training facility known as Cop City. But the campaign to…
Billionaires Want To Destroy Democracy
October 29, 2024
Take Action NowThe rich are trying to buy elections all over the world and consign democracy to the trash bin of history.By…
Is Climate Change Helping Authoritarians Seize Power?
October 29, 2024
Take Action NowThere’s evidence that global warming creates fertile ground for political strongmen to come to power.By…