Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that US Navy divers planted bombs that destroyed the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea last September, prompting a denial from the Pentagon on Wednesday, February 15, 2023.
Hersh, who won journalism's top prize more than five decades ago for exposing the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai by U.S. troops in 1968, cited an anonymous source in reporting on Substack that the Americans planted remotely activated explosives that destroyed three of the four pipelines built to transport natural gas from Russia to Europe.
Hersh, 85, went on to claim that the Navy conducted the operation under the cover of a NATO maritime exercise, BALTOPS 22.
In a brief statement, Pentagon spokesman Marine Corps Lt. Col. Garron J. Garn told The Post that "the United States was not involved in the Nord Stream explosion," reiterating the Defense Department's response to the same question in October.
Swedish authorities suspected the explosions were the result of "serious sabotage," and some Western officials were quick to blame the attacks on Moscow when it blocked gas supplies to Europe in response to sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine last year.
"These are deliberate actions, not an accident," Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at the time. "The situation is as serious as it gets."
Seymour Hersh
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh believes U.S. Navy divers planted bombs that destroyed Nord Stream 2, but the Defense Department denies the allegations.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in response to Hersh's report that Moscow has "repeatedly expressed" its belief that the United States and NATO were involved in the explosions.
Before the invasion, President Biden had threatened that the Nord Stream 2 project connecting Russia and Germany would not move forward if there was an attack, making some suspicious of U.S. involvement when the pipelines exploded seven months later.
"If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2," Biden said on February 7, 2022. "We will put an end to it."
While Germany initially resisted canceling the project, it halted the pipeline's certification two days before the Russian invasion in a last-ditch effort to avoid war.
Hersh's report suggested that Biden ordered the explosions to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from "arming natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions," since Germany, and the rest of Europe, relied heavily on Russia for natural gas.
Without the pipelines, Europe would be forced to end its dependence on Moscow, depriving Russia of billions of dollars that could have contributed to its war effort, the report said.
Hersh, a former Associated Press and New York Times reporter as well as a longtime contributor to the New Yorker, quoted White House spokeswoman Adrienne Watson as calling his report "complete and false fiction." Hersh also quoted CIA spokeswoman Tammy Thorp, who wrote in an email, "This claim is completely and absolutely false."
Nord Stream
The Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline was destroyed under the Baltic Sea last September.
Hersh previously drew the ire of the U.S. government when he claimed in a 2013 interview that the official story of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was "a big lie."
Two years later, Hersh published an account in the London Review of Books that claimed that the al Qaeda kingpin was a prisoner of the Pakistani authorities at the time he was killed and that the CIA was informed of his whereabouts by a member of the country's powerful intelligence service, rather than bin Laden's courier, as claimed by the Obama administration.
Then-White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Hersh's report was "riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods," while former CIA deputy director Michael Morell told CBS News at the time that he "got a third of the way through [the article] and I stopped because every sentence I was reading was wrong."
Alejandro O. Asharabed Trucido
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