"I think the record of Minsk was pretty horrible. If you know former [German] Chancellor [Angela] Merkel said literally in the words I am giving you: the West signed the Minsk accords in 2014 which called for a ceasefire in the areas of Ukraine that have a lot of Russian population and she said everybody knew it just gave NATO a chance to build up arms," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told RT.
On February 8, Hersh dropped a bombshell story about how the Biden administration and the CIA in collaboration with the Norwegian secret service and Navy destroyed Russia's Nord Stream pipeline network. The blasts occurred on September 26, 2022 at three of the four strings of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 underwater pipelines, which were built to carry a combined 110 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Europe annually.
Denmark, Sweden, and Germany – nations, which have been investigating the sabotage for five months – have yet to provide conclusions regarding the potential culprits, their motives, and the mechanisms of the attack. The only person who has outlined a detailed account of the events so far is Sy Hersh.
He refuted the possibility of Russia blasting the pipes itself:
"If I were a reporter looking at this story now at The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, I would try to find people, even Americans, who own or are on the board of companies that build pipelines underwater. Because I can tell you right now, I have empirical stuff I can't make public because I said I would not, but I can tell you right now that there is nobody in the pipeline business, nobody who was a consultant to the companies that worked for pipelines, and I talked to those people (…) The one thing that I’m convinced of is Russia didn’t do it because it’s absolutely insane for them to have done it."
Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden addresses attendees through video link at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Monday, Nov. 4, 2019
© AP Photo / Armando Franca
One Out of Many Thousands
Hersh never concealed that his story relies on a single anonymous source. Responding to his critics, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist referred to the case of Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who stepped forward to lift the veil of secrecy on the US intelligence community's spying on the world on and on Americans.
"The one thing about NSA that I knew from – I've been reporting in Washington for The New York Times, and before that for the AP, I covered the war, Vietnam War, in Washington and the Pentagon, and so I got to know some people who worked in the signals world, and the one thing I understood is that if you're in the signals world, you cannot intercept an American without a warrant," said Hersh.
"What Snowden discovered, was told and learned as a consultant, was that they had changed the law, they opened it up and everybody knew it. They opened it up so that now you could now listen [to Americans]. So Snowden, who was not a political person, [but] a technological person, recoiled at this. And at that time there were maybe 25,000 people working for the NSA (…) Probably 10% directly knew that the rules had changed (…) And out of those (…) many thousands, one spoke out about a direct violation of one of the most sensitive things in the American Constitution: the right of speech not to be monitored without a warrant," he continued.
There is something about this community which is bizarre, given that only one man stepped forward to protect freedom of speech, remarked Hersh. Nonetheless, there are people in the intelligence community and the military who remember that they swear an oath to the Constitution in the first place, not to the president, the investigative journalist highlighted.
11 February 2023, 15:39 GMT
US Sabotage Operatives Were Apparently Unaware of Biden's Real Nord Stream Plans
Commenting on his recent piece on Substack titled "From the Gulf of Tonkin to the Baltic Sea," the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist pointed out that US President Lyndon Johnson lied to the American people and made US spies change the intelligence on the Gulf of Tonkin incident to get congressional permission to expand the Vietnam War, which ultimately claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans and between one and three million Vietnamese.
Now the Americans have a president who does not tell the truth about what he authorized and what happened, Hersh continued, referring to the Nord Stream sabotage plot.
"People who did this thing who were assigned to do this in the intelligence community, the operators, they initially thought it was a great idea (...) to give the White House some options to maybe bluff or convince [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that the cost is going to be very high," the journalist said.
However, when Joe Biden talked publicly about halting Nord Stream on February 7, 2022 and told the press that the US "will be able to do it" within three weeks of the intelligence briefing, "guys in the group were upset because that was supposed to be a covert operation," the journalist noted.
Moreover, after the group did its job and planted the bombs in June 2022, they realized that Biden had done it for political purposes and that it wouldn't help the war against Russia, according to Hersh. In fact, the US president sought to prevent Germany and Western Europe from opening up the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was not subjected to sanctions, the journalist believes.
"That's the rationale for the mission: to make sure that Western Europe keeps on supporting NATO and keeps on funneling arms into what is clearly a proxy war against Russia that's being fought right now," Hersh underscored.
This presidency has been caught out, in a way, due to what they did to the pipelines, the journalist noted, presuming that the Biden administration would never recognize the wrongdoing.
Why Isn't Biden Tasking US Spooks to Inquire About Nord Stream Sabotage?
Despite being smeared and silenced, Sy Hersh's Nord Stream story made a splash, prompting a heated debate in Russia, Germany, and the UN Security Council. Earlier this week, Moscow called on the UN secretary-general to conduct an independent international investigation to verify the facts brought forward by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, a professor at Columbia University who testified at the UN Security Council meeting dedicated to the matter, highlighted that "a UN Security Council objective investigation of the Nord Stream terrorism, in which all countries contribute what they know, is important for the global confidence in this body and most importantly, for global peace and sustainable development."
Retired CIA officer and political activist Raymond McGovern, who also participated at the meeting, expressed his solidarity with Sachs.
Commenting on the UNSC summit, which was scarcely reported on in the Western press, Hersh noted that the US and its Nordic allies don't seem to be raising a finger to get to the bottom of the matter, which obviously looks suspicious.
"In America the president has something called an immense power on the intelligence community – he can give what they call a 'tasking order' to the community. He can say to (…) the supreme commander of all intelligence assets, including the military, and they have an intelligence office, he could ask them for a complete all-source, they have access to signals intelligence etc., he could also ask the CIA directly, because they have an intelligence division that does its own work; there is also a special black operation for the covert forces operations we have. There are three large intelligence organizations that have the capacity to get access to all. And he has not issued one order. He has not asked for any evaluations."
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the person who allegedly assembled the team to work out the Nord Stream sabotage plot, said at the news conference that the US has "allies" investigating the matter in the Baltic Sea. He did not talk about the US’ own investigation, Hersh pointed out.
"The Swedes and the Danes did do an investigation in September and October [2022]. They came out with this astonishing conclusion that indeed something had happened underwater and that it was an explosion," the investigative journalist remarked ironically.
Hersh is not discouraged by the mainstream media smears with regard to his expose: "I've gone through this," he said, recalling that many initially thought that his explosive story about the My Lai massacre was a lie.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has repeatedly teased the public that his Nord Stream story has not been told yet in its entirety, that there is more to be said about the mechanisms of the sabotage. So while the US’ Nordic allies continue to sit on evidence and keep their cards close to their chest, Hersh's bombshell story is likely to attract more and more attention.