TOPLINE
Here is an overview of three interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has done regarding his reporting on the U.S. government’s involvement in the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines. In the interviews, Hersh describes President Biden and leaders of the Intelligence Community as those responsible for the bombings, and calls it “one of the dumbest things the American government has done in years… .” Hersh also says there is “wild” corruption in Ukraine amongst top political leaders, including President Zelenskyy, and that Putin has no desire to take over Europe.
Although non-U.S. news outlets—including Germany’s Der Spiegel—reported that the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines that occurred in September 2022, the mainstream media largely ignored the idea America could be the culprit and instead focused on Russia. With his bombshell report posted to Substack on February 8 of this year, however, former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh made a seemingly irrefutable case that the U.S. government was responsible. More specifically, President Biden, his foreign policy advisors, and top CIA leadership.
In the interviews below, Hersh expounds on his report—which was largely based on the claims of a single anonymous source—describing the decision by President Biden and CIA Director William Burns to bomb the pipelines as “One of the dumbest things the American government has done in years… .” Hersh also quotes a friend’s summary of his reporting on the U.S. government’s involvement with the Nord Stream pipeline attacks, saying it’s a way to “deconstruct the obvious.”
“I wouldn’t even think of taking a story like this to the New York Times,” Hersh tells Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! in the interview above. “They decided that the Ukraine war is gonna be won by Ukraine and that’s what its readers get and so be it. That’s their call,” he adds. Hersh notes that the Times still has good reporters, but says he “[doesn’t] believe everything they say about Ukraine.”
Hersh explains to Goodman, as well as her co-host Juan González, that the U.S. placed bombs on the pipelines “under the cover of a NATO exercise.” Apparently Navy divers put the bombs (specifically C4 explosives) in place during BALTOPS 22, an annual “Baltic Operations” military exercise that’s been held and sponsored by the U.S. military since 1971. During BALTOPS 22, which took place in June 2022, Hersh says participants conducted exercises to “go and chase mines,” which they had never done before. (Indeed, according to a NATO Page for BALTOPS 22, “Exercise scenarios include[d] amphibious operations, gunnery, anti-submarine, air defense, mine clearance operations, explosive ordnance disposal, unmanned underwater vehicles, and medical response.”
Also in support of Hersh’s claim the bomb-planting was done under the cover of BALTOPS is a tweet from AZGeopoltics posted on February 11 of this year that notes aircraft belonging to the U.S. and Germany “regularly circled over the sites of future explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines… .” (See tweet immediately above.)
Hersh goes on to tell Goodman and González that the bombs divers placed on the pipelines were so powerful they could level cities, offering perspective by saying they could “blow up most buildings in Washington.”
In regard to why he refers to his article as a deconstruction of the obvious, Hersh points to ample evidence straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. In February 2022, for example, President Biden told a reporter during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (immediately above) that “If Germany… if, uh, Russia invades, uh, if Russia invades, uh, that means tanks or troops crossing the, uh, the, the border of Ukraine. Again then, uh, there will be uh, we, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Likewise, in January 2022—prior to Biden’s remarks at the joint news conference—Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of state for political affairs, told the press that “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” (See press conference excerpt immediately below.)
“Victoria Nuland’s statement came before the President’s actually, it came in late January of last year,” Hersh tells Goodman and González. “And that statement came… [at a time when] the committee involved—a lot of sophisticated people in the intelligence and operation community—concluded you could do it and the White House was told it was possible. I think that led to the comment [by Nuland].”
Hersh adds in the Democracy Now! interview that he thinks Nuland’s statement “made the people on the inside go half-crazy because it was supposed to be completely covert.”
As for the war between Russia and Ukraine itself, Hersh says the stories he’s been hearing from the region, particularly in the Fall of 2022, “have been pretty dire.” He notes that “Right now it’s a question of how many more people Zelenskyy wants to kill of his own people. [But] it’s gonna be over.” Hersh also says that “[he doesn’t] think there’s any chance Putin wants to take over Europe,” but says, rather, that the Russian president only “wants Ukraine tamed.”
Hersh even speculates on Biden, et al.’s reasoning for blowing up the pipelines, saying that
“What he did is he said ‘I’m in a big war with Ukraine, it’s not looking good. I want to be sure I get German and West European support and I know winter’s coming and it’s gonna be bad, I don’t want the Germans to say we’re gonna check out because we’ll be massacred with no cheap fuel and our economy will go bonkers, we’re gonna check out and we’re gonna open up the gas line,’ which they could do. So he [Biden] took away that option.”
In his interview with actor and interviewer Russell Brand (immediately above) Hersh offers up more of his thoughts on the Nord Stream bombings, as well as more context.
“I’m really troubled by my president and his immediate foreign national security team Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, whose husband is one of the leading neocons who… helped convince Dick Cheney… that the solution to 9/11 and Al-Qaeda was to attack Iraq,” Hersh tells Brand. “I call ’em Wynken, Blynken, and Nod… .”
Hersh also tells Brand that the initial decision to plan for the pipeline bombings “was an option for leverage for the president against Putin.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist adds that the idea was to ask the intelligence community (IC) if it thought “kinetic” or “non-kinetic” means of combating Russia were favorable, with the consensus landing on kinetic. When the IC decided kinetic was the way to go, the pipelines were an obvious choice, as Washington had apparently been “complaining about [them] for a dozen years… .”
Hersh goes on to tell Brand:
“When the president told the intelligence community ‘I want to see if I have an option,’ I think the thought… of the community was ‘We do what the presidents want, that’s the whole idea of having a CIA.’ I mean, if you’re the president of the United States right now, this guy can’t get a thing through Congress, but tomorrow if he wants to he can take a walk through the Rose Garden with the CIA Director and somebody can get hurt the next day.”
Echoing his remarks on Democracy Now!, Hersh also tells Brand that “By September [of 2022] it was clear there was real trouble. Among other things the corruption [in Ukraine] was so wild, among the top, even among Zelenskyy, they were all fighting for what percentage of the money they’re going to steal.”
In the interview immediately below with author and Kontext TV Co-Founder Fabian Scheidler, Hersh says that this was “just was a story that was begging to be told.” He notes that “[he doesn’t] know how much longer [the mainstream media] can pretend that the story just doesn’t exist, because it’s irrational to do so.”
“The people in America and Europe who build pipelines know what happened,” Hersh tells Scheidler. “The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story.” The veteran reporter appears to note this fact as a way of highlighting just how blatantly obvious the truth of the matter is for anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention.
Hersh also puts a finer point on Biden’s involvement in the crime, saying that “The President of the United States would rather see Germany cold than Germany possibly not support him in… Ukraine.” He adds “that to me is going to be the devastating thing for this White House… It’s appalling that he chose to keep Europe cold in support of a war that he’s not going to win.”
As for the White House’s response to Hersh’s story, the reporter says in his Substack post that Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email to him that his story “is false and complete fiction.” He adds in his article that Tammy Thorp, a CIA spokesperson, told him in an email that “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
When independent journalist Sam Husseini questioned Ned Price—a political advisor and former intelligence officer serving as spokesman for the Department of State—about Hersh’s reporting, Price was adamant that Hersh’s story was false.
Hersh’s story is “utter and complete nonsense and… should be rejected out of hand by anyone who is looking at it through an objective lens,” Price told Husseini. Price later added, in response to another question from Husseini, that “Beyond getting his [Hersh’s] facts entirely wrong, as he has before in very high-profile ways, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to suggest that our intelligence community is not subject to oversight. Anyone who writes that… who writes anything like that should not be believed… .”
Feature image: Official U.S. Navy Page
Related News
