Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said US Navy divers planted bombs that destroyed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea last September, prompting a Pentagon denial Wednesday.
Hersh, who won journalism’s top honor more than five decades ago for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops, quoted an unnamed source in reporting on Substack that the Americans planted activated explosives remotely shredding three of the four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe.
Hersh, 85, went on to say the Navy carried out the operation under the cover of a NATO maritime exercise, BALTOPS 22.
In a brief statement, the Pentagon spokesman, the lieutenant colonel of the Marine Corps. 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 officials suspected the explosions were the result of “serious sabotage” and some Western officials were quick to blame Moscow for the attacks, as it had cut off gas supplies to Europe in response to sanctions over Ukraine’s invasion of the country last year.
“These are deliberate actions, not an accident,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at the time. “The situation is as dire as it seems.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in response to Hersh’s report that Moscow had “repeatedly expressed” her belief that the United States and NATO were involved in the blasts.
Before the invasion, President Biden had threatened that the Nord Stream 2 project linking Russia and Germany would not go ahead if there was an attack, leading some to suspect US involvement when the pipelines exploded seven months later.
“If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops cross the border into Ukraine again, then there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2,” Biden said on Feb. 7, 2022. “We will put an end to this.”
Although Germany initially resisted canceling the project, it halted certification of the pipeline 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 “weaponizing natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions” as Germany and the rest of Europe relied heavily on Russia for natural gas.
Without the pipelines, Europe would be forced to reduce its dependence on Moscow, depriving Russia of billions of dollars that could have contributed to its war effort, the report argues.
Hersh, a former Associated Press and New York Times reporter and a longtime New Yorker contributor, quoted White House spokeswoman Adrienne Watson as calling her report “false and complete fiction.” Hersh also quoted CIA spokeswoman Tammy Thorp, who wrote in an email, “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Hersh previously drew the ire of the US 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 claiming that the al Qaeda boss was a prisoner of Pakistani authorities at the time of his death and that a member of the country’s powerful intelligence had tipped off his whereabouts to the CIA. service, rather than bin Laden’s courier, as advocated by the Obama administration.
Then-White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Hersh’s report was “full of inaccuracies and outright falsehoods,” while former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told CBS News at the time that “He got to read a third [of the article] and stopped because every sentence I was reading was wrong.
