THE RECURRING FEAR OF RUSSIAN GAS DEPENDENCY
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's recent criticism of Russia
for using natural gas as a political weapon is by no means new.
Similar charges leveled 24 years ago during the Cold War resulted in
an embargo on the sale of gas-extracting equipment to the Soviet
Union and to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) purported
destruction of a Soviet gas pipeline.
In 1982, as the Soviet Union was beginning construction of a
$22 billion, 4,650-kilometer gas pipeline from Urengoi in northwest
Siberia to Uzhhorod in Ukraine with the intention of supplying
Western Europe, the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
titled "The Soviet Gas Pipeline in Perspective."
The NIE, regarded as the definitive product of the U.S.
intelligence community, reached several conclusions, among them that
the Soviet Union "calculates that the increased future dependence of
the West Europeans on Soviet gas deliveries will make them more
vulnerable to Soviet coercion and will become a permanent factor in
their decision making on East-West issues."
In addition, according to the NIE, the Soviets "have used the
pipeline issue to create and exploit divisions between Western Europe
and the United States. In the past, the Soviets have used West
European interest in expanding East-West commerce to undercut U.S.
sanctions, and they believe successful pipeline deals will reduce
European willingness to support future U.S. economic actions against
the USSR."
The Urengoi gas field, located in northwest Siberia's
Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, was one of the largest Soviet gas
fields. The main customers for Urengoi gas were West Germany, France,
and Italy.
The initial volume of the pipeline was to be 40 billion cubic
meters per year, which would mean that Soviet gas could account for
30 percent of German and French gas imports, and 40 percent of
Italy's. Such figures were approaching a dependency level too great
for the White House to accept.
Washington apparently dealt with these concerns in a direct
manner initially. In January 1982, U.S. President Ronald Reagan
purportedly approved a CIA plan to sabotage a second, unidentified
gas pipeline in Siberia by turning the Soviet Union's desire for
Western technology against it. The operation was first disclosed in
the memoirs of Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was
serving in the National Security Council at the time. In "At the
Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War," Reed wrote:
"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.
"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and
fire ever seen from space," he recalled, adding that U.S. satellites
picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast
occurred in the summer of 1982.
The sabotage operation, however, did not halt the
construction of the Urengoi pipeline. The CIA was forced to revise
its tactics.
Responding to the Soviet leadership's support for the 1981
crackdown on Poland's Solidarity movement, Reagan announced a program
of sanctions on companies selling gas-drilling equipment and turbines
for gas-compressor stations to the Soviet Union while urging European
states not to buy Soviet gas.
Officially it was declared that this was in retaliation for
Soviet support for martial law in Poland. But it is also plausible
that the strategy was meant to ease U.S. concerns about the
construction of the Urengoi-Uzhhorod gas pipeline.
The embargo, however, was easier to declare than to
implement. Norwegian scholar Ole Gunnar Austvik wrote in an article
titled "The U.S. Embargo of Soviet Gas in 1982" that a delegation
under the auspices of the U.S. State Department sought to induce the
Western Europeans not to buy Soviet gas and to choose alternative
sources of energy.
"The arguments in favor of such diversion were close to our
notion of economic warfare, even though the whole range of arguments
was actually used. An economically strong Soviet Union is more
dangerous than a weak one," Austvik wrote. "The U.S. compensation
package contained two main components; American coal and Norwegian
gas were presented as alternatives to Soviet gas."
Neither alternative, however, existed. The United States did
not produce enough coal to meet Europe's needs and even if it did,
the logistics of transporting it there were overwhelming.
Furthermore, at the time Norway's gas production was not sufficient
to replace Soviet gas. By November 1982, after the United States
increased its grain sales to the USSR, the gas sanctions were
terminated.
Originally, the Urengoi pipeline was projected to go through
East Germany, but the West German government protested and it was
rerouted through Ukraine. The West Germans were concerned that in the
event of a crisis, the East Germans could turn off the valves and
stop supplies. Ukraine was seen as the more reliable transit route.
The 1982 NIE states that the West Europeans' prime energy
goal at the time was to "reduce their dependence on OPEC," at the
time a significant Western concern arising from the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil boycott of 1973. The oil
crisis that ensued from that boycott may have fueled U.S. concerns
regarding Soviet gas, lest the Soviet Union someday copy OPEC's
tactic.
In November 1983, the CIA issued another NIE, titled "Soviet
Energy Prospects Into the 1990s," which, in many ways, foresaw the
current predicament.
"If Moscow lands contracts to supply even half of the West
European gas-demand gap now foreseen for the 1990s, an additional
pipeline...would be required...and dependence on Soviet gas could
approach 50 percent of gas consumption for major West European
countries, far in excess of the 30 percent share that we and some
West European governments regard as a critical threshold for
political risk" the NIE stated.
