Seymour Hersh claims US Navy divers bombed Nord Stream pipelines

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has reported that US Navy divers, operating under cover of a mid-summer NATO exercise, planted remotely triggered bombs to destroy three of the four pipelines

A veteran American investigative journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970, self-published a story alleging has claimed that the September 2022 bombing of the undersea Nord Stream gas pipelines was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a covert operation at the direction of the White House. President Joe Biden’s administration has denied the allegations and called the report “utterly false and complete fiction”.

Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has previously worked with The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, published the findings of his investigation on Substack. The report claimed that US Navy divers, operating under cover of a mid-summer 2022 NATO exercise, planted remotely triggered bombs to destroy three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.

The White House on Wednesday dismissed accusations that the United States is responsible for the explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September.

Hersh, who scooped journalism’s top award more than five decades ago for exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in 1968, cited an unnamed source in reporting on Substack that Americans planted remotely triggered explosives that wrecked three of the four pipelines built to carry 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 short statement, Pentagon spokesman Marine Corps Lt. Col. Garron J. Garn told The Post “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 blasts were the result of “gross sabotage,” and some Western officials were quick to blame the attacks on Moscow as it blocked gas supplies to Europe in response to sanctions over last year’s invasion of Ukraine.

“These are deliberate actions, not an accident,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at the time. “The situation is as serious as it gets.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in response to Hersh’s report that Moscow has “repeatedly expressed” its belief that the US and NATO were involved in the explosions.

Prior to the invasion, President Biden had threatened that the Nord Stream 2 project connecting Russia and Germany would not move forward if an attack took place, causing some to suspect US 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 be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Biden said on Feb. 7, 2022. “We will bring 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 prevent the war.

Hersh’s report suggested Biden ordered the explosions to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin from “weaponiz[ing] natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions,” as Germany — and the rest of Europe — relied heavily on Russia for natural gas.

Ever since it became operational in 2011, Nord Stream, the first of the two pipelines, had been one of the major sources of energy supplies for not just Germany but also other countries in Europe. Once the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, it became the centre of tensions as Russia sought to used the pipeline to negotiate its interests by restricting supplies.

With Ukraine and the US asking European countries to reduce their dependence on Russian energy, this led to a difficult and uncertain economic outlook for the continent with the cost of living and energy shooting up dramatically. With Germany having decided to halt the Nord Stream 2 project two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and following the bombing of the pipelines, virtually no gas from Russia to Europe now flows through this route.

What are the main findings of Seymour Hersh’s investigation?

According to the report, which quotes an anonymous source who had “direct knowledge of the operational planning”, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine becoming imminent in December 2021, President Biden began holding meeting with a newly formed task force, which included the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the State and Treasury Departments.

The US feared that as long as Germany and much of western Europe were dependent on the Nord Stream pipelines for a cheap supply of gas, they would be hesitant in providing aid and arms to Ukraine against a possible invasion by Russia.

The decision to sabotage the pipelines by President Biden 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”.

To execute the mission successfully, the US sought help from Norway and in March 2022, a hand-picked team of CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) operatives flew to the country to discuss the operation with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy, Hersh has written.

As per the report, it was the Norwegian Navy that chose the appropriate spot to target, “in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island”.

Around three months later, a team of deep-sea divers from the US Navy’s Diving and Salvage Centre in Panama City, Florida, the largest diving facility in the world, went to the selected spot and planted C4 explosives alongside the pipeline, which were later triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane on September 26, 2022, Hersh has written.