US investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh has dropped a bombshell this week when he named the United States as the party responsible for the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines that used to supply Russian natural gas to Germany.
While the United States feigned ignorance in the wake of the pipeline’s destruction in September last year, Hersh claimed that it was US Navy divers who planted explosive charges on the Nord Stream during a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea last summer.
The explosives were triggered remotely weeks after they were planted, the journalist wrote, citing a source familiar with the planning of this operation.
And though the White House officially denied the United States’ involvement, the US government and secret services have a long history of advancing Washington’s interests through espionage and sabotage, all the while claiming that they didn’t do it.
Ivy Bells
Hersh himself points out that it would not be the first time the US has conducted a covert operation deep below the sea surface. In the 1970s, US specialists managed to install a wiretap on a Soviet Navy underwater communications cable in the Sea of Okhotsk.
Unlike the attack on Nord Stream, however, this action was aimed at an element of military, not civilian, infrastructure. It also helped the US obtain valuable intelligence and did not deal a blow to the economy of an allied country, whereas the Nord Stream explosion essentially deprived Germany, an ally of the United States, of its primary source of cheap natural gas.
That Was Not US
Aside from eavesdropping and blowing things up, the US has conducted plenty of covert actions across the world, trying to keep things hush-hush and denying responsibility unless caught red-handed.
In the 1950s, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, with the effort involving false flag terror attacks that were blamed on local communists who supported Mossadegh’s government.
The US government’s efforts to overthrow communist Cuban leader Fidel Castro who dared to steer his country without bowing to Uncle Sam, involved dozens of assassination attempts and even a full-blown invasion by a group of Cuban exiles funded and directed by the United States.
The US government even mulled conducting acts of terror against targets in the United States, both civilian and military, in order to blame these attacks on Cuba and thus obtain a pretext for declaring war against the island nation. These proposals, known as Operation Northwoods, were never implemented thanks to then-US President John F. Kennedy who torpedoed them.
And in the 1980s, the US secretly peddled weapons to Iran, Washington’s hated enemy since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in order to use the money from these sales to covertly fund the Contras rebel groups in Nicaragua who were fighting the Marxist Sandinista government there.
Details of such clandestine US shenanigans usually became available to the public thanks to CIA secret documents being declassified decades after those actions had taken place, or became exposed due to investigations by the US Congress.
No Place Like Home
The clandestine activities of the US government were not limited to foreign territories, with US intelligence displaying its willingness to commit rather questionable acts against the people of the United States.
Under the auspices of the so-called Project MKUltra, the CIA conducted illegal human experimentation aimed at developing new brainwashing and torture methods to be used in interrogation, essentially using US citizens as guinea pigs.
The project involved, among other things, the studying of the effects of psychoactive drugs such as LSD on people.
In the 1960s and 1970s the CIA also ran a domestic espionage program called Operation CHAOS, targeting political dissidents and anti-war groups that sprang up amid the widely unpopular Vietnam War.
Ironically, Operation CHAOS was eventually exposed by none other than Seymour Hersh, the man who shed light on the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai village by US troops, and who would later identify the culprit behind the destruction of the Nord Stream.
And in 2013, former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden helped expose a vast global surveillance program the agency both at home and abroad in cooperation with certain western intelligence agencies (such as the British GCHQ and the German BND) and prominent tech companies (such as Microsoft and Google).