This article appears in the February 17, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Hersh Exposé on U.S. Plot To Blow Up Nord Stream Pipelines
[Print version of this article]
Feb. 8—Seymour Hersh, the most senior and most moral American investigative journalist since the Vietnam War, has issued a shocking exposé, depicting with precision who and how the Biden administration rallied to plan and carry out the blowing up of the Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines. The sabotage project, according to Hersh, traces back to early 2021.
In his article titled “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline,” Hersh begins by saying outright that the command headquarters selected to run the physical assault on the pipelines was the highly secretive “U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center” in Panama City, Florida. He writes:
Last June the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a … midsummer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
White House spokesperson Adrienne Watson, asked for a comment on the story before its publication, answered in an email: “This is false and complete fiction.”
Per Hersh’s account, the choice of the Panama City facility was based on its “obscure” status. Staffed by Navy personnel, it is not required to report to, or brief in advance, the leadership of the Senate and House on its covert operations. Navy divers are also famed for their “successful” espionage infiltration into a high-level Soviet-era communications system used by the submarine division of the Soviet Navy.
Whatever the covert operation formalities, however, Hersh makes clear that leading Republicans, most notably Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), was involved as soon as Biden was to be inaugurated, to demand that aggressive action be taken against the pipelines. Hersh provides a detailed description of how the pipelines were a pivotal benefit for the German economy, and an exemplification of the Willy Brandt-era, “realist” Ostpolitik policy, which, though Hersh doesn’t say so, gave Germany a margin of sovereignty, which now the Anglo-Americans are demanding be erased.
Hersh writes: “Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz … repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken….” By then, Hersh continues, the Senate “had successfully passed a law that … ‘halted [the pipeline] in its tracks’ ” according to Cruz. When Biden, in communication with Zelenskyy in Ukraine, flinched in moving against the pipelines, Senate Republicans retaliated, blocking all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delaying passage of the annual defense bill until deep into the fall. “It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood,” Hersh notes.
He reports:
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
Several more meetings occurred. There was skepticism in reaction to “the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack.” Hersh writes:
Some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.” Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
Soon after, Biden met in Washington, D.C. with Scholz, who was pushed into support of the U.S. team. That was the press conference where Biden sputtered, “If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2.” Biden was merely repeating, Hersh notes, what Victoria Nuland had said 20 days earlier, at a State Department briefing: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” (Note: Hersh makes it clear that the warhawks desperately wanted Russia to attack Ukraine—ed.)
Further intelligence leads introduced by the article will be evaluated by the EIR staff, which pertain to the close ties of Norway and its former Prime Minister, long-term NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, with U.S. intelligence, and other NATO elements relevant to the BALTOPS maneuvers.
