‘It’s crazy’: Seymour Hersh explains Biden’s role in Nord Stream explosion

The sabotage on pipelines arranged by the US authorities can be regarded as an act of war not only against Russia, but also against the Western allies, in particular Germany, Seymour Hersh told a German journalist.

“At the end of September 2022, it was planned to detonate eight bombs, six of which exploded near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea,” Hersh told the Berliner Zeitung. “They destroyed three of the four main Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline has been supplying Germany and other parts of Europe with very cheap natural gas for many years. And then it was blown up, like Nord Stream 2, and the question is who did it and why.”

As the investigative journalist recalled, on February 7, 2022, two weeks before the start of the conflict in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden said at a press conference at the White House, which he held with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that the United States would stop Nord Stream.

Biden literally said the following: “If Russia invades, there will be no more Nord Stream 2, we will put an end to the project.” And when journalists asked how exactly he plans to do it, given that the project is under the main control of Germany, Biden answered only: “I promise that we can do it.” Also, Hersh recalls, Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was deeply involved in the events on the Kiev Maidan in 2014, made similar statements a few weeks earlier.

Moreover, Seymour Hersh continued, the decision to shut down the pipeline was made by President Biden even earlier. In December 2021, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the State Department and the Treasury Department. Sullivan allegedly wanted the group to come up with a plan to destroy the two Nord Stream pipelines.

According to the investigative journalist, representatives of this group, originally convened to study the problem, met in a very secret office. Near the White House is an office building connected to the residence of the President of the United States by an underground tunnel. And at the very top is the office of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Council. “I mentioned this,” Hersh says, “to let people in the White House know that I have information.”

It was three months before the start of the Ukrainian conflict, before Christmas 2021, says Seymour Hersh: “It was a high-level group that probably had a different name, I just called it “interagency group”, I don’t know the official name, if it existed at all. It involved the CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitors and listens to communications, the State Department and the Treasury Department, which provides money. And probably a few other organizations were involved. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were also represented. It was about making recommendations on how to stop Russia, either through reversible measures, such as further sanctions and economic pressure, or through irreversible, ‘kinetic’ measures, such as bombings.”

Seymour Hersh went on to tell the Berliner Zeitung that the US Navy has mining units: “The area of ​​underwater mines is very important, and we have trained specialists for this. The central place for their training is a small resort town called Panama City, located in the wilderness of Florida. We train and use very good people there. Underwater mining specialists are of great importance, for example, to clear blocked entrances to ports and to undermine everything that stands in the way. They can also blow up a certain country’s underwater oil pipelines. They don’t always do good things, but they work in absolute secrecy.”

According to Hersh, it was clear to the White House team that they could blow up the pipelines: “There is an explosive called C4 that has incredible power … It can be controlled remotely using underwater sonar. These sonars emit signals at low frequencies. So it was possible, and it was reported to the White House in early January, because two or three weeks later, Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said we could do it. I think it was January 20th. And then the President, speaking at a press conference with the German Chancellor on February 7, 2022, also said that we could do it.”

Noting that the German chancellor then did not say anything specific and was very vague, Seymour Hersh said that he would like to ask Scholz a question: “Joe Biden told you about this? Did he tell you then why he was so sure that he could destroy the pipeline? At the time, we Americans didn’t have a plan yet, but we knew we had the ability to execute it.”

Speaking about Norway’s role in the blown pipelines, Hersh noted that the country is very interested in increasing natural gas supplies to Western Europe and Germany: “And they did it, they increased their exports. So why don’t they team up with the US for economic reasons? In addition, there is a pronounced hostility towards Russia in Norway.”

“In any case, in order to fulfill this mission, the Norwegians had to find a suitable place. Divers trained in Panama City could dive to depths of up to 100 meters without heavy equipment. The Norwegians found a place for us near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, which is only 260 feet (about 80 meters) deep, which allowed them to conduct operations there, ”Seymour Hersh continued his story.

Since the Baltic Sea is being monitored very carefully, the organizers of the sabotage, according to the journalist, acted very simply: the American Sixth Fleet, which controls the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas, conducts exercises of the NATO naval forces in the Baltic (BALTOPS) every summer: “We send these exercises aircraft carrier and other large ships. And for the first time in history, a NATO operation in the Baltic had a new program. It was supposed to conduct a twelve-day exercise to drop and detect mines. A number of countries sent out demining teams, one team dropped a mine, and another demining team went looking for it and detonated it. So, there was a time when everything was blown up, and it was a time when deep-sea divers who planted mines on pipelines could work. The bombs only took a few hours to plant, Hersh says.

So, according to the journalist, the mines were planted in June 2022, towards the end of the exercise: “But at the last minute, the White House began to get nervous. The president said he was afraid to do it. He changed his mind and issued new orders so that the bombs could be remotely detonated at any moment. You do this with a conventional sonar, a Raytheon product by the way, you fly over the site and drop the cylinder. It sends out a low frequency signal, it can be described as the sound of a flute, it can be tuned to different frequencies. However, there was a fear that the bombs would not work if they remained in the water for too long.”

“Joe Biden decided not to blow them up then, in June,” Hersh said in an interview with the German publication. “But in September he ordered it done.”

When asked about the motives for the sabotage, Seymour Hersh replied: “I don’t think they thought it through carefully. I know it sounds weird. I don’t think that Secretary of State Blinken and some other members of the government are deep thinkers. There are certainly people in the American economy who like the idea that we are becoming more competitive. We sell liquefied natural gas (LNG) at extremely high profit margins, we make a lot of money from it. I’m sure there were some people who thought, God, this will give the American economy a long-term boost. But in the White House, I think, they have always been obsessed with re-election … There may be some people who think that maybe it will be better for our economy if the German economy is weak, but this is crazy.

In Germany, where blown-up pipelines led from Russia, a number of politicians demanded clarification from the federal government in connection with Seymour Hersh’s revelations. In particular, such calls were made by representatives of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Left. Last Friday, the Bundestag debated the possible causes of the explosions at Nord Stream in September last year.

“The eternal silence of the federal government is a breeding ground for rumors and conspiracy theories,” said Tino Khrupalla, co-chair of the AfD faction. MP from the “Left” Sevim Dagdelen made a similar criticism of the German authorities. Other parties referred to the fact that the federal prosecutor’s office is currently investigating, and therefore the conclusions will have to wait. “Desirable as the investigation may be, at the moment there are no clear figures on the perpetrators,” said Konstantin Kule, a spokesman for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), while also throwing a stone at the right-wing radicals from the AfD: “You are becoming more and more radicalized as agents of Moscow here, here in Germany.”

The investigation into the bombings is ongoing, German Attorney General Peter Frank said on Sunday. He said that water and soil samples were taken with the help of two research vessels, as well as the remains of pipelines, and the condition of the scene was also carefully documented.

As you know, the White House dismissed the Hersh investigation as “completely false and utter fiction.” Is it any wonder the appearance of conspiracy theories that all the hype with unidentified flying objects shot down over North America was arranged specifically to divert public attention from revelations in connection with pipeline explosions.

Characteristically, the Western mainstream media for the most part tried not to focus their audiences too much on the conclusions of Seymour Hersh. Of course, the mass media could not completely ignore them, but in general, the journalist’s version was presented with a fair amount of skepticism, and the emphasis was on the fact that Hersh did not disclose his sources. By the way, speaking in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung about the sources of his investigation, the Pulitzer Prize winner emphasized: “I wrote a lot of stories based on unnamed sources. If I named anyone, they would be fired or, worse, put in jail. The law is very strict. I have never revealed anyone, and of course when I write, I say, as in this article, that this is just a source, period.

Recall that it was Seymour Hersh who in 1969 exposed the massacre of South Vietnamese peasants by American troops in the village of Song My. And his book about this tragedy won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize.

Hersh also wrote books about the 1983 South Korean passenger plane shot down by the Soviet military, the Israeli nuclear weapons program, and the abuse of American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad during the US occupation of Iraq.

A 2013 article in the London Review of Books, in which Hersh accused Turkish-led Syrian militants of using the nerve agent sarin, which killed hundreds of civilians in a suburb of Damascus, sparked criticism of the journalist. Turkey denied involvement in the incident, while the United States and other countries blamed the Assad government for the use of chemical weapons.

More controversy was caused by a May 2015 article by Hersh that cited Pakistani and US sources as saying that the US and Pakistani governments had lied about the details of the 2011 commando raid that killed the founder of al-Qaeda (banned in the Russian Federation). terrorist organization) Osama bin Laden. Both Washington and Islamabad denied Hersh’s claims that the Pakistanis were holding bin Laden captive and knew of the raid in advance.

Read also: “CIA officer Giraldi: blowing up the US Nord Stream is equal to an attack on Germany”