Seymour Hersh on the American "covert sea operation" to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines

The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist has the story from a single high-level anonymous source, and it's not without problems.

For months, the Nord Stream story has lain dormant; investigations have yielded no news, except to confirm the obvious sabotage. Only the occasional delighted remarks by American officials have made headlines in the meantime. All of that changed seven hours ago, when Seymour Hersh posted a lengthy Substack article on How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.

Hersh has a high-level anonymous source, who alleges that the attack was conceived by the Biden administration in late 2021, and carried out by U.S. Navy divers from their Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City in collaboration with Norway. Explosive charges were allegedly attached to the pipelines during the June BALTOPS 22 naval exercises in the region. The plan was originally to use timed explosives, but the administration opted at the last minute instead for a trigger mechanism that could be set off with a sonar buoy. This buoy, according to Hersh, was dropped by a Norwegian navy plane on 26 September 2022, triggering the explosions.

The story appears poised to make it into major media; as I type this, it’s already been picked up by the Times and Reuters.

As always, you should read Hersh’s piece and make up your own mind. I confess to some substantial reservations. As written, the account is broadly plausible, particularly in light of the open and blunt statements of American officials, but it also seems, at the very least, incomplete.

I’m having particular problems with this part of Hersh’s reporting:

The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers …

The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. …

On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. …

Remember that there were actually two distinct explosions – the first one to the south, on Pipe A of Nord Stream 2 alone, at 2:03 in the morning; and the second on both Nord Stream 1 pipes and again on Pipe A of Nord Stream 2, at a separate location miles to the north and exactly seventeen hours later, at 19:03:

Hersh’s article, describing explosives laid at a location where both Nord Stream pipes ran parallel, seems to be only about the second, more northerly attack. This is a fairly glaring omission in a piece full of very precise details on other matters, including other operational specifics.

I also wonder about the source’s claim that Biden and Nuland, via early statements that the US would block Nord Stream 2 in the event of a Russian invasion, effectively “downgraded” the action from a covert operation requiring Congressional oversight to a lower-level merely classified action that dispensed planners of having to seek such approval. Perhaps that’s totally believable, but I need more persuading here. The avoidance of Congressional oversight is a recurrent theme in the piece; it’s also allegedly why US Navy divers, rather than special forces, were chosen to carry out the operation. One could argue that, with these claims, Hersh’s source is simply trying to make his story robust to falsification by the House and Senate leadership.

UPDATE: The story is now making its way into the German press. This t-online article gives a hint of how they’ll try to downplay it:

The Russian propaganda outlet Russia Today was one of the first to pick up the literally and politically explosive story. On Twitter, the Kremlin loyalists claimed: “American investigative journalist and former NYT writer Seymour Hersh has published an explosive article on who is behind the mysterious explosion that destroyed the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline.”

The ex-DDR tabloid Berliner Kurier meanwhile leads with Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting credentials, and Sahra Wagenknecht’s essential endorsement of his reporting.