International incidents rarely play out like Hollywood action films — and when they do, the public usually doesn’t get to hear about it. But every once in a while, some journalist goes out and digs up the kind of story that Steven King might conjure up.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy investigative piece on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage mystery. For those Americans who may have forgotten, in September 2022, an unknown someone set off an explosive that ruptured the twin pipelines usually used to pump natural gas from Russia to Europe. The result was that, on the eve of winter, Europe was faced with a potential energy crisis, and they weren’t happy about it. (READ MORE: Germany Halves 2025 Military Aid to Ukraine)
Putin blamed the CIA, the U.S. tried to stay out of the blame game, and Ukraine pointed fingers at the Kremlin. It was clear someone was lying, but it wasn’t obvious who. So Germany launched an investigation, and the Wall Street Journal’s Bojan Pancevski jumped right into the story. Two years later, it seems the explosion was a hair-brained scheme hatched on a late night in a Ukrainian bar. The story, as told by the Wall Street Journal, goes that President Volodymyr Zelensky knew of the plans and even approved them initially, but tried to call off the mission after the CIA caught wind of it. The operatives (some military, some private civilians) ignored him and went ahead with the scheme.
They boarded a borrowed 50-foot sailing yacht, the Andromeda, with a couple of professional divers and some explosives, and stopped over in Sandhamn, Sweden, briefly (where they were spotted by onlookers who noticed that the Andromeda was the only sailing ship sporting a Ukrainian flag). When the deed was done, the operatives rushed off the boat in Germany leaving behind DNA samples, fingerprints, and traces of explosives. (READ MORE: NATO Worried About Biden and Ukraine)
Pancevski asserts that he got his story from some of the operatives themselves and that it is corroborated by the results of the German investigation. It should be noted that Russia (which has publicly blamed the U.S. for the sabotage) has remained skeptical of that investigation. The trouble, for Kyiv, is that the German government is likely to believe its own investigation, and could pull some (or all) of its support for the beleaguered nation.
Tom Cruise could not have written a better script.
Saving the Pipeline in Tom Cruise Style
As you all know, this is a column about artificial intelligence, so you knew this was coming. I skipped asking ChatGPT anything. Any response from that quarter was going to be bland. Instead, I asked Elon Musk’s Grok to engage in some hypotheticals:
Prompt: If Tom Cruise wrote a screenplay based on the Nord Stream pipeline saga as reported by the Wall Street Journal, how would it end?
Grok: If Tom Cruise were to pen a screenplay based on the Nord Stream pipeline saga, with his penchant for high-octane action and a touch of Hollywood flair, here’s how it might end:
Title: The Pipeline ProtocolAct III: The Grand Finale
This is a weekly column at The American Spectator dedicated to exposing the left-wing bent of generative AI machines. If you enjoyed it and want to see what else ChatGPT or Grok comes up with, feel free to leave ideas for prompts in the comments section below!