A week after a German investigation apparently absolved Russia of any involvement in blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, an investigative report has accused the Biden White House and the CIA of conducting the sabotage.
On Wednesday, a Substack article by veteran U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that the Biden White House ordered the CIA to blow up the Russian undersea pipelines. In late September, multiple explosions severely damaged the Nord Stream 1 and undersea pipelines that ran from Russia to Germany and were a significant source of natural gas to western Europe.
In a 5000-word report titled “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline,” Hersh claims that the covert operation was carried out after months of military and intelligence planning. According to the article, the undersea operation was conducted “under the cover” of the NATO naval exercise known as Baltic Operations 22 or BALTOPS 22, which was held last June near the coast of Germany.
“Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal,” Hersh claims.
Basing his report on an unnamed source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning,” Hersh alleges that deep-sea divers planted the explosives from the US Navy’s Diving and Salvage Centre in Panama City, Florida.
On September 26, 2022 — nearly three months later, the C4 explosives were detonated by a sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian Navy surveillance plane.
Describing the impact of the blasts, Hersh notes:
A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
The incident dislodged Russia as Europe’s top gas supplier and plunged Germany into an energy crisis ahead of the winter. “Russia has spent about $20 billion building the pipelines. Nord Stream 2, which was completed in 2021, was not yet operational at the time of the sabotage,” The Times of London reported Thursday.
The Biden White House and the U.S. intelligence establishment rejected Hersh’s accusations. The New York Post reported:
Then-White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Hersh’s report was “riddled with inaccuracy 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.”
Several regional newspapers and news websites in Germany picked up Hersh’s report. But major news outlets like the widely-read newspapers Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, or the weekly Der Siegel didn’t report the story as of early Thursday.
The southern German newspaper Badener Tagblatt complained about Washington’s inaction following the bombshell article. “It’s actually surprising: in a sensational article, a well-known journalist accuses the U.S. government’s hand behind the hitherto unsolved attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines, and nothing happens in Washington,” the daily lamented.
But the same charge can be leveled against the German mainstream media. Nothing the silence by Germany’s big media outlets, the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche wrote early Thursday: “The revelations by U.S. reporter Hersh are a journalistic bombshell. But the German media are hiding them.”
Bolstered by the alleged revelations, Russia renewed demands for an international probe into the blasts. “Russia wants to use a U.S. journalist’s report as the basis for international probe into the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 Baltic gas pipelines,” German public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk reported.
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