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On Monday, the Russian Federation Engels airbase in the Saratov region, nearly 400 miles from Ukraine, was attacked for a second time since the beginning of Russia’s SMO.

“Russia’s Defense Ministry said the incident took place in the early hours of Monday, and three servicemen were killed by debris at the Engels airbase, which houses Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers that have been involved in launching strikes on Ukraine in the 10-month-old war,” reports the Associated Press.

There have been a number of attacks inside Russia—in Kursk, the city of Bryansk, the village of Staraya Nelidovka in the Belgorod region, and the military airfields at Dyagilevo in the Ryazan region, in addition to Engels.

A powerful explosion at a gas pipeline in Chuvashiya, Russia. pic.twitter.com/agZDANLBy9

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) December 20, 2022

Irkutsk region, Russia…
BAVOVNA 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

An installation at an oil and gas condensate field in the Irkutsk region caught fire, the fire covered an area of ​​1,000 square meters, said governor Kobzev. pic.twitter.com/2rKfxg8E3x

— MAKS 22🇺🇦 (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) December 18, 2022

The attacks on gas infrastructure occurred prior to Russia announcing it would resume deliveries to Azerbaijan via the Yamal-Europe pipeline.

The corporate war propaganda media has attributed the attacks to Ukraine. However,  according to the Daily Express, Jack Murphy, described as a former “US Army Special Operations operative,” said last week

that NATO and US intelligence agencies have been running agents inside Russia, directing them to target critical infrastructure in a bid to create “chaos.” Shopping centres, gas pipelines and fuel depots have all suffered damage across Russia in recent months with Mr Murphy pointing to a CIA-directed campaign of covert “sabotage.”

On his website, Murphy writes the “campaign involves long standing sleeper cells that the allied spy service has activated to hinder Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine by waging a secret war behind Russian lines.”

While no American personnel are involved on the ground in Russia in the execution of these missions, agency paramilitary officers are commanding and controlling the operations, according to two former intelligence officials and a former military official. The paramilitary officers are assigned to the CIA’s Special Activities Center but detailed to the agency’s European Mission Center, said the two former intelligence officials. Using an allied intelligence service to give the CIA an added layer of plausible deniability was an essential factor in U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the strikes, according to a former U.S. special operations official.

There is plenty of evidence the CIA has long been involved in precisely these kinds of sabotage operations. Prior to the establishment of the national security state and the CIA, the agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), produced a sabotage manual in 1944.

“Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform,” states the manual in its introduction.

Since that time, the CIA has honed its sabotage techniques. In “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,” Thomas C. Reed, a former U.S. Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, writes the CIA, under its notorious boss, William Casey, was responsible for a natural gas pipeline explosion that crippled the flagging Soviet economy in 1982.

“In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” Reed writes.

The National Security Archive has a large number of documents detailing CIA sabotage operations. From the introduction:

The covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency are one element of the forward edge of power in U.S. foreign policy. But the CIA is not a lone ranger, shooting up saloons on its own account. A senior interagency group within the United States government acts as the high command of the secret war.

As Murphy notes, any “covert action undertaken by U.S. agencies must be authorized by a presidential finding,” thus we can accurately assume President Biden signed off on sabotage operations inside Russia. Moreover, President Obama, well before Russia’s SMO, signed “a finding for covert action against Russia before he left office,” and the finding “included language about sabotage operations, according to a former CIA official.”

In other words, the USG had planned subversion operations inside Russia well before the SMO, basically a continuation of decades of sabotage and covert operations targeting the Soviet Union and, after its fall, the Russian Federation.

Following the USG-orchestrated coup in Kyiv, an “allied spy service” began running sleeper cells in Russia, an “extensive network” that included “front companies that were established as platforms to support such behind-the-lines operations,” many that go back at least 20 years, thus revealing the sabotage operations predate the Russian SMO by at least two decades.

The CIA had formed “stay behind armies,” ostensibly to resist an unlikely Soviet invasion of Europe, and these were involved in terrorist acts designed to frighten populations away from voting for socialist, communist, and other leftist political parties.

The covert branch of the CIA, the Office of Policy Coordination, under the direction of Frank Wisner, set up Europe’s stay-behind armies. Dubbed Operation Gladio, the CIA established paramilitaries in France (“Plan Bleu”), Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Germany (led by former SS officer Hans Otto), Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Turkey, all apparently trained by NATO in “unorthodox warfare” to be levied against Russia.

During the Cold War, the CIA worked closely with the neo-Nazis in Ukraine and emigre groups. Project AERODYNAMIC (formerly CARTEL, ANDROGEN, AECARTHAGE, between 1949 and 1970) concentrated on anti-Soviet operations, largely confined to propaganda. This entailed working closely with ultranationalists that have long had one goal in mind—the murder of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

The CIA had been instigating nazism in Ukraine since 1951 to destabilize the ussr. They were training even training nazis at least 2015 onwards. Great video on the why it continued. Document is from project aerodynamic, has been publicly released by the CIA, and is on their site. pic.twitter.com/ai129HnpdH

— Hopium of the masses (@HopiumOf_Masses) December 22, 2022

As early as 1949, the CIA used Ukraine—and Belarus, Poland, and the Baltics—as a base of operations to undermine the Soviet Union. The goal of Operation Red Sox was to provide “unprecedented insight into Moscow’s designs in Eastern Europe—and, if possible, to help crack apart the Soviet empire itself,” according to Politico. In addition, the CIA was “stoking nascent nationalist movements in Ukraine” and across the Balkans.

Elsewhere in Europe, the CIA recruited rightwing extremists to engage in various terrorist attacks, as revealed during the trial of Italian fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of Ordine Nuovo (“New Order”), a far-right cultural and extra-parliamentary political and paramilitary organization. It shared a motto with the Nazi Waffen SS.

The Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo staged terror attacks blamed on leftists. The attacks include the 1969 bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 16 people, and in 1970, the bombing of the Rome-Messina train, killing 6 and wounding 100. These terror attacks were called a “strategy of tension.”

The recent CIA-NATO sabotage operation, Murphy explains, is but one of many such efforts to undermine and take down Putin and the Russian Federation.

The NATO ally’s campaign overseen by the CIA is only one of several covert operations efforts being undertaken by Western nations in Russia, according to two former U.S. special operations officials. Alarmed by Russia’s February invasion, other European intelligence services have activated long-dormant resistance networks [Operation Gladio] in their own countries, who in turn have been running operatives into Russia to create chaos without CIA help, according to a former U.S. military official. In addition, as has been widely reported, Ukrainian intelligence and special operations forces are running their own operations behind Russian lines.

In short, there is a multi-nation concerted effort to attack Russia from within, an effort Russia undoubtedly considers a threat to its national security. Vladimir Putin has said on several occasions Russia will respond to existential threats with tactical nuclear weapons.

Putin and his generals will further escalate in Ukraine as the CIA and its saboteurs target civilian and military targets deep inside Russia. “President Putin is actually attempting to retain some semblance of stability in the increasingly destabilized world that’s been thrown into chaos by America’s apocalyptic plot to restore its declining unipolar hegemony,” writes Andrew Korybko for the Oriental Review.

Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine was commenced as a last resort to uphold the integrity of its national security red lines in that country in particular and in the region more broadly that were being crossed by the US-led West in pursuit of its grand strategic plot to restore its declining unipolar hegemony.

That plot, imperative for the USG and its so-called partners, will pull out all the stops in an effort to destroy Russia and China, two major competitors working to establish a multipolar world free of the coercive and often deadly politics of the neoliberal order and its enforcers, the USG national security state, the CIA, the Pentagon, and domestically with the FBI, DHS, and additional “partners,” including Silicon Valley’s social media behemoths excommunicating heretics and megaphoning the state’s forever war narrative.

The war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine—masterminded by the USG following its orchestrated coup against a democratically elected and Russian-friendly government in 2014—will continue until, like Afghanistan, stalemate and defeat present reality as stubbornly unavoidable and the decision is made to retreat (while calling it something else), leaving behind billions of dollars worth of military equipment, and forsaking the lives of abandoned collaborators.

For the indeterminate future, the CIA will attempt to raise an underground army of neo-Nazis and likeminded to fight a low-intensity guerrilla war in Russian “annexed” (by popular vote) Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, and soon Mariupol, Zaporizhia, Kryvyi Rih, and Odesa (the latter four also overwhelmingly voted to be “annexed” by Russia).

This will be the next phase of the war as it dawns on the panhandler Zelenskyy and his USG debt-straddled patron that defeating Russia on its own border is impossible short of lobbing a few thermonukes in the direction of Moscow.

Putin did not decide to use nuclear weapons when the war propaganda media declared triumphantly (and falsely) that he was painted into a corner. As for the USG, if and when it is painted into a corner as the world turns multipolar in rejection of poverty-inducing neoliberalism, there is no guarantee it will not lash out with nukes and begin the process of ending life on the planet.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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