Germany in WWI ran a sabotage campaign against American factories and shipping while America was still officially neutral. Franz von Papen infamously organized it out of the embassy from 1914. Wilson expelled him in December 1915 and leaked the Albert papers to the press that August, but he pointed the domestic investigative apparatus at labor and “left wing” political targets.
Berlin by January 1915 had instructed the Secret War Council in New York to stop munitions reaching the Entente by any available means. Incendiaries went into ship holds to explode at sea. Plants were burned. One 1937 accounting said 43 American factories had explosions or fires of unexplained origin between early 1915 and spring 1917, alongside sabotage devices on roughly four dozen munitions ships. It was called a “holocaust” where German assets roamed.
Wilson knew, as he leveraged it for the false pretense to investigate left-wing leaders instead and target his political opposition, cynically enabling foreign enemies of the state as his personal allies.
The cover is the part worth studying. Franz von Rintelen spent half a million dollars standing up Labor’s National Peace Council, a false flag front built to generate strikes and slowdowns at munitions plants. He went after the actual labor organizer Samuel Gompers.
The design of the operation made German strategic sabotage read as American labor grievance, because a neutral country arguing with itself about wages and war profiteering looks nothing like a foreign operation against a supply line. The charge that eventually stuck to Rintelen at his trial was a conspiracy to restrain trade by inducing dockworkers to strike.
The evidence was never hidden. The Albert briefcase ran on the front page of the New York World. The Providence Journal published German sabotage exposures through 1915. Black Tom shook windows across Manhattan. Americans could read all of it and still filed foreign sabotage as a domestic radical problem, which is the part worth carrying forward.
Labor and anarchism were the available flags in 1915. The history is useful today because the Dutch farmer protest movement is the flag already being offered, with climate and anti-militarism in reserve. They supply a real domestic constituency with real grievances about exactly the thing that a Russian operation wants stopped, and both hand investigators a “local politics” file to open instead of the more relevant counterintelligence one.
Germany has been running that mistake for fifteen years with zero convictions, if you wonder how well it’s been going.
The Netherlands and Poland agreed in December 2025 to deepen military mobility and logistics, moving troops through the Netherlands and Germany toward Poland. That builds on the January 2024 declaration among the Netherlands, Germany and Poland to run a corridor from the North Sea ports to the eastern flank, including priority for military trains over civilian traffic. On 11 September Dutch Defence moved 16 NS ICRmh carriages to the Vlasakkers military rail facility at Amersfoort, routed Arnhem to Deventer to Amersfoort. Those carriages become casualty evacuation trains. Medical evacuation capacity running west out of Poland not the kind of component in the corridor attracting public notice, while it is the one that Russia monitors as what NATO expects to need on the front.
Four days later pipes were fastened to the rails at Barneveld, Twello, Brummen, Putten, Lunteren, Ermelo, Veenendaal, Olst and Steenwijk. Barneveld sits on Amersfoort to Apeldoorn. Twello sits on Apeldoorn to Deventer. Brummen sits on the Arnhem to Zutphen approach to Deventer. Three points on the 11 September path. NOS mapped Amersfoort to Deventer as the one segment classified as probable sabotage rather than knock-on disruption.
The pipes bridge the rails and short the track circuit. Relay de-energised therefore train present is an inference the system cannot verify, and a shunt satisfies it. The section reports occupied and signals hold at danger. Integrity of the input fails and availability of the corridor goes down with it. ProRail knew which baanvak was reporting and not where the object sat, which put crews on foot across kilometres of track for hours.
Large metal pipes cost almost nothing to source and drop, which is why material alone identifies nobody. Nine of those sites are named. Placements in one night across four provinces takes planning and more than one pair of hands. What the method establishes is that the Dutch signalling layer carries no integrity check on its own input channel. Anyone working a classic target of intelligence operations (because it’s so hard to prevent) can hold the corridor closed.
German federal security services published the template in September 2025. Foreign intelligence, mostly Russian, recruits Wegwerf-Agenten through social media and messenger apps for small sums, and the BKA target list names transport and rail.
Within hours, the Farmers Defence Force secretary Sieta van Keimpema told WNL that farmers being behind it cannot be ruled out, that the national group coordinates nothing, and that regional groups prepare regional actions. Agractie chairman Erik Luiten said he does not know and is waiting for the investigation. It’s a claim of motive coupled with the denial of coordinated methods, which sows political points yet leaves responsibility unclaimed.
With no claim of responsibility, the Netherlands has been here before. Some thirty rail cables burned as the NATO summit opened at The Hague in June 2025, cutting train services to the country’s main airport, with pro-Russian denial of service against summit municipalities the day before, and no claim of responsibility then either.
Caretaker Justice Minister David van Weel told the NATO Public Forum:
It could be an activist group. It could be another state. It could be anything.
The absence itself is notable. A domestic group is motivated to have its grievance heard. That was the point of Labor’s National Peace Council: a front publishes their cover. Silence fits a different operation, where the outage itself is the message, for the people who scheduled military trains to reach the front lines of war with Russia.
