Seymour Hersh is a former New York Times and New Yorker reporter who won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including a 1970 Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. In his first post to Substack, Hersh details the covert operation the United States conducted last year to blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
“In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery,” writes Hersh. “Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House — but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution.” We covered the news last October from an environmental standpoint as it led to what became the biggest single release of climate-damaging methane ever recorded.
In a lengthy and detailed post, citing a source with direct knowledge of the operation, Hersh describes the planning involved, operation itself, and fallout. Slashdot reader r1348 shares an excerpt from Hersh’s report: Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Speaking about Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipeline as winter approached, the source said: “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.” Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did. It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.”
In response to the report, White House spokesperson Adrienne Watson said: “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the CIA, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
