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The Telegraph claimed in 2004 that the CIA blew up a Russian gas pipeline in Siberia, by tricking the operator into installing booby-trapped software.

Thomas Reed, a former US Air Force secretary who was in Ronald Reagan's National Security Council, discloses what he called just one example of the CIA's "cold-eyed economic warfare" against Moscow in a memoir to be published next month.

Leaked extracts in yesterday's Washington Post describe how the operation caused "the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space" in the summer of 1982.

Mr Reed writes that the software "was programmed to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds".

They quote a "Thomas Reed" and the Washington Post as a source, but that site is behind some kind of paywall or geoblock so I can't actually access it.

Did this actually happen?

That seems not likely.

One source from the espionage community of secrecy and desinformation as the base source for the claim, widely copied. No confirmation from other sources.

The source being Thomas Reed: "Into the Abyss" (archive.org)
A review that compares the book's content with known and established history concludes:

Sometimes, Reed distorts history by simple omission. His criticism of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for overestimating the robustness of the Soviet economy conveniently ignores the fact that hardline Cold Warriors on Team B (many of whom later took posts in the Reagan administration) were vigorously pushing the CIA in that direction. Similarly, Reed’s claim that the supposed “disintegration” of U.S. strategic forces, beginning in 1961, led to the Cuban missile crisis turns reality on its head. A much better case can be (and has been) made that U.S. strategic superiority in the early 1960s was one of the main factors that prompted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to resort to what he hoped would be a quick and easy way to redress that imbalance. Finally, near the end of the book, in an ominous sign of Cold War redux, Reed claims—without offering any substantiating evidence—that post- Soviet Russia may have secretly resumed nuclear testing.

Nonetheless, despite all the book’s faults—editorial, historical, and geopolitical—At the Abyss remains a fascinating and remarkably forthright tour d’horizon of two generations of the Cold War.
_{–– Thomas C. Reed, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. 368 pp. $25.95.
Reviewed by Gregg Herken, University of California, Merced. Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 144–185 (DOI)}

Concerning the pipeline story, Wikipedia reports severe criticism light heatedly, but refers to Russian/Ukrainian scientist called V.D. Zakhmatov, quoted below.

Western historians of the situation see mainly suspicion for the truthfulness to verify, however unlikely that may be now:

I have not been able to find independent confirmation of Reed’s story. Although the CIA apparently had a program to corrupt software stolen by the Soviets, and there was an explosion on a Soviet natural gas pipeline in Siberia in 1982, it is not clear that they were related. Reed has an unsure grasp on how natural gas pipelines operate and of Soviet geography, and there are alternative accounts. One, in the Moscow Times in 2004, confirms that there was an explosion along the pipeline in 1982, but claims it was due to operator error, not sabotage. An account by a Soviet scientist who worked on pipeline safety in the 1980s states that Soviet natural gas pipelines in the 1980s did not have computer controls and that Reed’s claim about the size of the explosion is inaccurate.
_{–– David Painter, Georgetown University, "Query: 1982 Siberian Pipeline Explosion", 2017}

Western security and strategy analysts classify that as myth:

In June 1982, the rigged valves probably resulted in a ‘monumental’ explosion and fire that could be seen from space. The US Air Force allegedly rated the explosion at three kilotons, equivalent to a small nuclear device.

But when Reed's book came out in 2004, Vasily Pchelintsev, a former KGB head of the Tyumen region where the alleged explosion was supposed to have taken place, denied the story. He surmised that Reed could have referred to an explosion that happened not in June but on a warm April day that year, 50 kilometers from the city of Tobolsk, caused by shifting pipes in the tundra's melting ground. No one was hurt in that explosion.

There are no media reports from 1982 that would confirm Reed's alleged explosion, although regular accidents and pipeline explosions in the USSR were reported in the early 1980s. Even after the CIA declassified the so-called Farewell Dossier, which described the effort to provide the Soviet Union with defective technology, the agency did not confirm that such an explosion took place. If it happened, it is unclear if the explosion resulted in casualties. The available evidence on the event is so thin and questionable that it cannot be counted as a proven case of a successful logic bomb. This means that there is no known cyber attack that unequivocally meets Clausewitz's first criterion: violence. No cyber offense has ever caused the loss of human life. No cyber offense has ever injured a person. No cyber attack has ever damaged a building.

_{–– Thomas Rid: "Cyber War Will Not Take Place", Journal of Strategic Studies
Volume 35, 1, 2012. DOI}

Above average journalism calls it a myth: Western TV documentaries reach the same conclusion, although constructing a possible explanation of orders given, and post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc reasoning of pattern recognition within the US administration:

Therefore, when the explosion was discovered through satellite imagery, Reagan, along with other CIA officials, was led to believe that it was their doctored data which single-handedly brought down what was considered to be the biggest natural gas pipeline discovered at the time. However, after all these years, historians have finally figured out the lie that CIA agents, along with Reagan, had been living with all this time.

According to an informed source from one of the three-letter agencies mentioned above, the pipeline explosion had nothing to do with CIA sabotage. It was a Russian engineer who, when discovering a leak in the pipeline, simply kept increasing pressure to maintain the flow of natural gas. When the gas leak kept building up following the engineer's efforts, a passing Russian train sparked the gas cloud, causing a massive explosion in the middle of Siberia. According to multiple reports, despite the explosion’s visibility from space, it resulted in no known physical casualties whatsoever.
_{–– Vidisha Joshi: "America's Hidden Stories' tackles CIA's alleged involvement in the Trans-Siberian Pipeline explosion of 1982", meaww, Apr 8, 2019}

The Soviet/Russian side is less generous when after denying the veracity fundamentally to come to conclusions for what happened when in the minds of Westerners forming opinions about Soviet/Russian technology:

However, let's return to the main question - was there an explosion on the gas pipeline in Siberia in 1982?

Let's quote Expert Opinion :

"During the period 1980-1982 I worked annually for 250 days annually as a member of the team of the Institute of Electro-welding for them EO Paton of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine on gas pipelines from Ufa to Tyumen. We worked on the technology of blasting the damaged, emergency sections of the gas pipelines, blasting the taps and welding new pipes to the place of the damaged. We took part in the elimination of all major accidents on gas pipelines, oil pipelines in those years, but I did not hear anything about this mythical grandiose explosion. I do not argue - there were a lot of accidents, but no more than in similar latitudes of America and Canada. These were accidents mainly due to violations of safety and technology of laying pipelines in difficult geological conditions of marshes. I was responsible for the fire and explosion safety of explosive technologies during the repair of pipelines and introduced a compact device there that reliably prevents fires and explosions on gas pipelines.

Judging by quotations from Thomas Reed's book "Above the Abyss." The story of the Cold War, narrated by its participant ", presented on the Internet, approved the CIA's diversionary plan for the transfer of technology from the Soviet Union to a latent defect, a computer program for the automation of the gas pipeline.
Here I would like to emphasize especially that at that time pipelines were controlled mainly in manual mode with minimal automation. Computerization of pipeline management appeared at the end of the 90s, and then the dispatcher always remained the main one, checking all the automatic signals before they were put into operation. I believe that this is the main confirmation that the "explosion-82" of the gas pipeline in Siberia is a common invention of the Cold War.

Further, let's say, in the same article of Wikipedia, foreign authors tell about the creation of a special unit of the KGB intended to steal technology abroad. Perhaps the people who described this "fact" and worked at high positions, but did not understand the specifics of intelligence - any intelligence in any country, including the United States, was always involved in the theft of new technologies. However, in the USSR in this direction, the GRU of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR worked more successfully than the KGB, whose main task was counterintelligence within the USSR. Everyone knows that the purpose of the intelligence, especially during the Cold War, was to obtain information on what might come into the hands of a likely enemy in the near future as well as in the distant future. In contrast to the USSR, it did not primitively copy the existing in the West, but used its technologies, trying to get ahead, to make it better and more powerful than what became known through intelligence.

Stories about explosions similar to the described mythical explosion of the gas pipeline in 1982 were many in the 70's and 80's. But a lot of them appeared in the 90s, when any legend began to be perceived in the post-Soviet countries under the brand of "declassified information", pouring out tons of dirt during the times of perestroika and the first years of choosing a new way of development of the countries of the former USSR.

I would like to pay special attention to some amateurish remarks of those who created the legend about the explosion.

The code, which supposedly changed the settings of the speed of pumps and valves, which led to an increase in pressure in the gas pipeline to such indicators that could not withstand the seams and joints of the gas pipeline - this is the statement of the absolute amateur. In the gas pipeline, the pressure can vary for a number of reasons, so in cases of pressure jumps, pressure relief valves have always existed throughout the length of the pipeline, which operate independently of the main control systems, especially the operation mode of the pumps.

It is also noted that the power of the explosion was three kilotons. I dare to notice that there can not be an air-gas explosion with a capacity of three kilotons, because voluminous explosions, including volumetric detonating weapons, are limited in terms of power, especially in open space. This limitation is due to the fact that this kind of explosion strongly depends on the weather conditions, first of all - from the wind 8. With large gas leaks, complex systems of buildings and structures of the refinery are needed to create explosive local clouds, as was the case in Flipsboro (England).
_{–– Zakhmatov V.D., Glushkova V.V., Kryagich O.A.: "EXPLOSION, which ... WAS NOT!", OGAS, Kiev, 25 June 2011}