Investigative Journalists

"The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums, and every day it runs the labor of hundreds of men is withdrawn from the production of helpful things for humanity."

"Monopoly is business at the end of its journey."

"Probably millions of men read or heard Mr. Lloyd's ideas without being aware of the real authorship. But I judge that with this condition he was well content. No man ever entered such a fight with a smaller share of personal vanity to gratify. He desired that his countrymen should be informed of existing conditions, but not that he himself should gain fame or rewards."

"Nature is rich; but everywhere man, the heir of nature, is poor."

"The bottom truth is that Governor Altgeld is of that type whose brains and character alike do not make it possible for their personal success to suffocate their love of justice. He is a man whom the trusts, corporations, and concentrated millionairism of the country have found it impossible to bend, break, or seduce. If such men as Altgeld the Democrat and Pingree the Republican survive, monopoly will perish and monopoly by a sure instinct of self-preservation has set itself to destroy them by ridicule, slander, and by every means of financial and political assault. One of the most regrettable features of public opinion in this campaign is that so many of the American people have allowed themselves to be played upon by these sinister interests who are catering to every prejudice and using every ingenuity of misrepresentation to destroy public confidence in the few public men who are standing like giants on guard for the public."

"Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty."

"I spend every morning at my desk working on a book about the Trusts but my progress seems lamentably slow. However, it "do move." The worst of it is the work is really so distasteful. It keeps me poking about and scavengering in piles of filthy human greed and cruelty almost too nauseous to handle. Nothing but the sternest sense of duty and the conviction that men must understand the vices of our present system before they will be able to rise to a better, drives me back to my desk every day."

"The methods by which the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Fields, Rockefellers, Mackays, Floods, O'Briens, and the coal and iron and salt Pashas are heaping up enormous fortunes are methods, not of creation of wealth, but of the redistribution of the wealth of the masses into the pockets of monopolists."

"If our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will not be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above. Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know."

"The operational staff, the people who do "kinetic" things for the United States, they do what the president says, and they initially thought this was a useful weapon he could use in negotiations. But at some point, after the Russians invaded and then when the operation was completed, the whole thing became increasingly repugnant to the people who were doing it. These were people who worked in top positions in the intelligence services and were well trained. They turned against the project, they thought it was crazy.Shortly after the attack, after they had done what they were ordered to do, there was a lot of anger about the operation and repudiation among those involved. That’s one of the reasons I learned so much."

"It was a frightening time for me, in terms of my faith in the profession I had chosen.... I was more than a little rattled—make that terrified—by the failure of senior editors at prominent magazines to jump at a story that would get international attention, especially when those editors professed to deplore the war and want it to end."

"I don't think they've thought this through thoroughly. I know that sounds strange. I don't think Secretary of State Blinken and some others in the government are deep thinkers..."

"There is a pattern to the response by the mainstream media."

"First, many thanks for your interest in what the pipeline story was all about: a very dangerous Presidential decision. You are careful readers."

"It dates back to my breakthrough story: the My Lai massacre revelation... Editors... wanted nothing to do with a story about a massacre committed by American soldiers."

"I'm sure there were some people who thought, Boy, is this going to give the American economy a long-term boost..."

"On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place."

"The source recalled, “Bill Burns [CIA Director]comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”..."

"In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution."

"What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, "If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. "I want to be very clear to you today," she said in response to a question. "If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward." ..."

"If the attack were traceable to the United States, "It’s an act of war."..."

"Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack. “It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”..."

"No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland."

"I think they've always been obsessed with re-election, and they wanted to win the war, they wanted to win a victory, they wanted Ukraine to somehow magically win. There might be some people who think that maybe it's better for our economy if the German economy is weak, but that's crazy."

"There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school... The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership — the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022."

"The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name... The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades... to do the good—using C4 explosives... as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals..."

"President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines... Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential...."

"The crime was covered up at the top of the military chain of command for eighteen months—until I uncovered it... but getting it before the American public was no easy task... [It was] initially rejected by the editors at Life and Look magazines. When the Washington Post finally published it, they littered it with Pentagon denials and the unthinking skepticism of the rewrite man..."

"I’ve never been interested in socializing with pols or cozying up to money types at the self-important cocktail get togethers—the star-fu----- parties, I always liked to call them."

"I want the American people to stop believing everything they hear and to ask more questions, to become more skeptical. I think it's the one reason a guy like Donald Trump ran. They understood where he was coming from. That Trump is just a blowhard. They laughed at him. They knew Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. But Trump wasn't the same old big smile and a lot of good words. The Democrats have been going around saying, "We're for the people, we're for the little guy." And all they do is run to Wall Street for money. And the one guy that didn't, [[Bernie Sanders|[Bernie] Sanders]], was sabotaged by the Democratic National Committee. ... What did these hacked messages from the DNC say, anyway? It was about cutting off money for Sanders. Everything that was leaked showed that the Democratic Party was working against the one guy who wasn't running on campaign funds from the big corporations."

"I gave a talk at a journalism school recently and I told them they must read before they write. It's amazing. Even with Wikipedia, people don't know obvious things. In terms of journalism just get the hell out of the way of the story. Do the work. There is a dispute between two people about an issue. That is not the story. The story is which one of the two people is right. But reporters and journalists are apparently just happy to say, "So-and-so said this today." That's how it goes now.... I worry about people who still think the world is flat when in reality the world is round. If I want to tell them it's round and they don't want to hear it, what do I care? I can't worry about it."

"I’ve been a freelancer for much of my career. In 1969, I broke the story of a unit of American soldiers in Vietnam who... were ordered to attack an ordinary peasant village.. and told to kill on sight. The boys murdered, raped and mutilated for hours, with no enemy to be found."

"I’m at my best when I swig cheap bourbon with the servicemen, work over the first-year law firm associates for intel, or swap stories with the junior minister from a country most people can’t name."

"Here [at Substack], I have the kind of freedom I’ve always fought for. I’ve watched writer after writer on this platform as they’ve freed themselves from their publishers’ economic interests, run deep with stories without fear of word counts or column inches, and—most importantly—spoken directly to their readers. And that last point, for me, is the clincher."

"What you’ll find here is, I hope, a reflection of that freedom. The story you will read today is the truth as I worked for three months to find, with no pressure from a publisher, editors or peers to make it hew to certain lines of thought—or pare it back to assuage their fears. Substack simply means reporting is back . . . unfiltered and unprogrammed—just the way I like it."

"The New York Times called it a "mystery," but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now"

"Last June, the Navy divers... 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.... Two of the pipelines... had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade..."

"Asked for comment... a White House spokesperson, said in an email, "This is false and complete fiction."... a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: "This claim is completely and utterly false." Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible."

"Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration. Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, "halted [the pipeline] in its tracks." There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online. Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. "I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2," he said. "I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.""

"Planning In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion, the first of a series of top-secret meetings... what became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.. the participants debated options for an attack... CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert..."

"Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline...."

"Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack... Throughout "all of this scheming," the source said, "some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, 'Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.'"..."

"According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”.."

"The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret..."

"“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .” Norway was the perfect place to base the mission... In the past few years.. the Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway..."

"Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said...."

"Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one: “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”"

"More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."

"I’m an old hand at dropping bombshell stories that are based on the disclosures of sources I do not, and cannot, name."

"America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America."