Big old meeting planned at The Hague for all the NATO mucky mucks got off to a late start for them and an embarrassing one for their European counterparts.
Everyone was landing at Schiphol, the airport in Amsterdam. The airport is feeling its oats about the incoming bigwigs. They sure seemed stoked to have this guy touch down.
Stars, stripes and a presidential touchdown at Schiphol: Trump has landed 🇺🇸 #NATOsummit pic.twitter.com/iRDIVzCMH8
— Schiphol (@Schiphol) June 24, 2025
And his entourage. That’s fun.
Not your average visitor on the runway… U.S. Air Force at Schiphol!#NATOsummit pic.twitter.com/EUIy3yT69n
— Schiphol (@Schiphol) June 23, 2025
I guess a fair number of participants and staff had planned on taking on of the many available mass transit trains for the forty-minute or so ride to The Hague.
Welp.
That didn’t happen.
Breaking: En route to The Hague and a power outage has meant there are no trains to NATO summit from Amsterdam airport. Authorities investigating a possible sabotage against the rail network pic.twitter.com/lD1Y5TmSPp
— Larisa Brown (@larisamlbrown) June 24, 2025
At first, it was reported as a ‘power outage.’ Okay. These things happen, especially nowadays in Europe.
Train cable outage near NATO summit sparks fears of sabotage https://t.co/6DIpWSQkA5
— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) June 24, 2025
Ominously, it turns out it was a fire that did some pretty hefty damage to 30 cables on the line. Dutch authorities were using the ‘sabotage’ word almost immediately.
Reports are that the Dutch have been the focus of low-level cyber attacks in the previous weeks, which have stretched local infrastructure to its limits at times while dealing with the complexity of the multiple attacks. Were bad actors testing the limits as a precursor to something bigger?
Perhaps.
Combined with the heightened security surrounding the NATO summit, Dutch cyber authorities anticipated there would be an increase in both the number and ferocity of attacks, with suspicion falling mainly on Chinese and Russian threat operatives.
…Temporary barricades and metal mesh fences surrounding the World Forum summit venue are just a fraction of the major military and police operation called Orange Shield set up to ensure the safety of the alliance’s 32 leaders.
In what they are calling the biggest security operation ever staged in the Netherlands, authorities are locking down parts of the city, closing off roads and shutting down airspace.
This older transit map of the trains available at Schiphol in 2021 gives you an idea of the chaos caused by this fire.
It’s 7:45pm at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport and in the next 30 minutes there are 21 trains (10 local, 11 intercity) you can catch by taking an escalator down one level from baggage claim.
But sure in Chicago we have the Blue Line or whatever. pic.twitter.com/g1PUG6In70
— Steven Lucy (@slucy) December 7, 2021
They’re hoping to have the 30 damaged track cables repaired by tonight.
Which would be a blessing, as they have lots of bodies to move, even when you’re only counting the Dutch support.
…More than 45 world leaders and delegations are expected to attend the summit, and the Netherlands has commissioned more than 27,000 police officers for the event. At a public forum on Tuesday, Dutch Justice and Security Minister David van Weel, who formerly worked at NATO, said those in charge are looking into the possibility of sabotage.
Lighting tracks or their electrical cable connections on fire is a well-known European terrorist tactic.
I wrote about how vigilant the French were during the Paris Olympics last year, and, even with that, there were still successful attacks in outlying areas that disrupted service for tens of thousands. It’s the nature of the beast when a large population is dependent on a single mode of transportation with no ‘off-ramp’ or deviation. A train track goes where it goes, not like a car on a roadway, which could pull off, park, or reverse at any point.
NEW: 🇫🇷 French rail company SNCF confirms its diagnostics teams have found “incendiary devices” in several locations along the country’s high-speed rail network including in Eure-et-Loir, Meurthe-et-Moselle, Meuse, Pas-de-Calais, and Yonne.
The arson attacks have brought France… pic.twitter.com/ZQHv1xuKFc
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 26, 2024
So even without some of the devices being found before causing damage, the fear they created was almost as rewarding for the perps.
These current incidents sound very similar.
God willing, that’s all there is to them, and the NATO summit goes off smoothly for everyone.
