©AP Photo/Paul Sakuma
US President Joe Biden could have decided to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in order to punish German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for not wanting to provide Ukraine with more weapons, US Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview with China Daily published on Friday.
"The President [Joe Biden] then decided in late September to trigger the mines. The war wasn’t going great in Ukraine. The American war that President Biden was so eager to support was not going well by late fall, at best a stalemate, two sides just standing there," he said.
"And so at that point, the only thing I can conject, can think and suppose, and those who were involved had the same thought, the President [Biden] was afraid that [German] Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz was not wanting to put more guns and more arms. That’s all, I do not know whether it was an anger or punishment, but the net effect is that it cut off a major power source through Western Europe."
"The purpose of the people involved in the intelligence community doing this mission with the Norwegians, as I wrote, was to give the President [Joe Biden] an option to say to [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin: ‘if you go to war, we’re going to destroy the pipelines,’ that it’s Russian gas that was in it, it was filled," Hersh said.
"Europe is in crisis now. So down the road this summer and fall it is going to be very difficult for Biden. He is going to get a lot of criticism for what he did. That’s for sure," the journalist added.
Hersh said that he was a journalist and had been doing his job for over 50 years, so he was not surprised by the stupidity of the US government.
"I was the one who wrote stories about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. I’m very used to the liabilities of my government. They can always do very stupid things, probably just as more often as they do very smart things," he said.
"So, surprised? But somebody had to have blown up the pipeline," he continued. "And it never made sense to me that it was the Russians, as everybody seemed to think in Washington."
Nord Stream sabotage
On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported "unprecedented damage," which had been inflicted on three lines of the Nord Stream pipelines the previous day. Swedish seismologists recorded two explosions along the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. On November 18, 2022, the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office said that the blasts along the pipelines were an act of sabotage. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office opened a criminal case on charges of international terrorism.
Hersh said in his article published on February 8 that explosives were planted under the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines by US Navy divers with assistance from Norwegian specialists under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 exercise last June.
The story cited an unidentified source as saying that US President Joe Biden personally authorized the operation after nine months of discussions with administration officials in charge of security matters.
Later, The New York Times reported, citing American officials, that a certain "pro-Ukrainian group" that acted without the knowledge of US authorities could have committed the sabotage on the gas pipelines. Germany’s Die Zeit weekly came out with an article stating that German investigators had identified the vessel ostensibly used by the saboteurs. The company that rented it allegedly belonged to Ukrainian citizens and was registered in Poland.
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