Direct accusation

Seymour Hersh claims US Navy behind Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosion

Photo: www.topcor.ru

The bombing of the Nord Stream underwater gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea was a covert operation ordered by the White House and carried out by the CIA, a report by a veteran investigative journalist claims.
Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has claimed that US deep-sea divers, using a NATO military exercise as a cover, planted mines along the pipelines that were later detonated remotely. In September, a series of powerful explosions destroyed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines that run through the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany and provide cheap gas to mainland Europe. The attack was soon revealed to have been a deliberate act but no culprit has yet been identified.
Hersh, 85, who broke stories such as the mass murder of 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam and the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, says that the ‘Black Op’ was ordered by President Biden, and that the attack was carried out by the CIA in co-operation with Norway.
In a 5,000-word report published on the online publishing platform Substack, Hersh writes that the operation was disguised ‘under the cover of a widely publicised mid-summer NATO exercise known as Baltic Operations 22 or BALTOPS 22’, which was conducted in June off the coast of Germany.
He says that Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of top-secret planning within the American national security community. “For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible,” Hersh has written.
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.  

Based on the materials of www.thetimes.co.uk