A few days ago, Polish and world media reported the statement of former BND chief August Hanning about the Polish-Ukrainian sabotage of the Northern Gas Pipeline.
Behind the tabloid headlines, it was not necessarily possible to see the deeper meaning of this media operation.
The first layer is the figure of August Hanning himself, who served as head of German intelligence until 2005. This is impressive, but the problem is that Henning is deeply compromised. After his work for the German state, he performed various services for shady contractors – including: for the United Arab Emirates, which, with his help, tried to acquire spy planes under the pretext of buying private jets for wealthy Arabs, or helped Azerbaijani companies enter European markets. His biggest scandal, however, was his participation in the supervisory board of the Russian bank in Latvia – PNB Banka. The contacts made by Hanning violated all security procedures to such an extent that even the German press wondered about the reasons for their employee’s involvement in contacts with the Russians. Among the Russian names included in the German employee’s business card, two are worth recognising – Mikhail Gutseryev and Grigory Guselnikov. The first is a Russian oligarch still associated with the Soviet services, who, as an “independent” businessman, bought shares in the Russian Spierbank when it closed its operations in Ukraine. The latter was the de facto owner of the bank on whose supervisory board Hanning sat. Both Russian oligarchs financed several business ventures in Latvia, including PNB Bank. However, in 2019, the bank declared bankruptcy and the Latvian administrator estimated the amounts owed to the members of the supervisory board – including our German hero – at more than 31 million euros. Just a grim addition is the fact that former NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen was on the same supervisory board. In February 2022, German media reported on a humiliating meeting Hanning had with Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the eve of the latter’s visit to Latvia. The former BND chief reportedly asked the Latvian authorities to intercede on his behalf. Huge debts, financing by Russian oligarchs and, finally, compromising services that Hanning has rendered to suspect principals disqualify him as an objective commentator on Russian affairs – and yet Die Welt invited him as an expert, and media outlets in various parts of the world have quoted the ex-official’s substantially useless opinion.. It was more of a report than a statement of facts. Hanning was outraged that Ukrainians and Poles were “raping our infrastructure”, that “Ukraine took advantage of [na uszkodzeniu Nord Stream] and that Germany’s support for Ukraine is not compatible with what Ukrainians have done to poor Germans.
However, the talk about the Ukrainians blowing up the pipeline did not come out of nowhere – so it’s time to talk about the second layer of intrigue. Hanning and the journalists only discussed the text of the Wall Street Journal, which wrote about a team of six Ukrainian volunteers with diving certificates who committed sabotage under the pretext of a tourist getaway in the Baltic Sea. Poland should at least have known about the conspiracy and perhaps also cooperated at the intelligence level. But we should also have some questions about this text. Firstly, the author does not provide a single name of a person who would confirm the described scenario of damage to the pipeline. “Senior Ukrainian officials”, “senior German officials”, all these informants could well have been invented by Jules Verne.the combined text does not contain a single piece of evidence, document or even opinion signed with a name that confirms the story – unless such evidence is the photo of a small boat stopped on the coast and signed as a yacht from which divers lowered to the bottom of the sea. It doesn’t take much irony to find a yacht in your own photo collections and publish it as the vehicle of a modern James Bond.
The Polish media correctly cited the WSJ article as an “American newspaper.” However, there is a problem even with this basic fact, which we can call the third layer of the media operation. The author of the famous text is Bojan Pancevski, himself Macedonian, who works in Berlin as a correspondent for a German newspaper.. The author, a relatively young man of about forty, dealt with Ukraine, but previously at the level of Polish YouTubers and bloggers who crossed the Bug River to produce material from the war-torn country. Without questioning Pancevski’s success, there are qualitative leaps in his career, but it can be assumed that the author’s informants – as is usually the case with sad gentlemen from the secret services – were, to put it mildly, not entirely honest with him. It is difficult not to suspect that Pancevski’s interlocutors are conducting a separate operational game with an international scope – hence the choice of an American newspaper and a journalist with not very impressive achievements.
So here we have a Balkan author producing materials in cooperation with Germans for an American newspaper, which are then discussed by the former head of the BND, who is involved in business with Russian oligarchs. This story is as archetypally obvious as that of Donald Tusk’s Ukrainian aide or a Spanish journalist recruiting supporters of Putin’s narrative in Warsaw.
