The Biden White House ordered the bombing of the Nord Stream underwater gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in September of 2022, and the covert operation was carried out by the CIA, according to a veteran investigative journalist.
In a lengthy, in depth Substack post on Wednesday, legendary reporter Seymour Hersh explained how U.S. deep-sea divers planted mines along the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in June of 2022, using a “widely publicized” NATO military exercise as a cover. The mines were later remotely detonated, causing the powerful explosions that destroyed the pipelines, according to Hersh.
Hersh reported that the deep-sea divers who planted the explosives came from the US Navy’s Diving and Salvage Centre in Panama City, Florida, the largest diving facility in the world.
Experts quickly determined that the destruction of both Nord Stream pipelines was caused by deliberate explosions, rather than a natural occurrence such as an earthquake.
While many in the international media pointed to Russia as the culprit, the Kremlin dismissed those claims, describing the idea that Russia was behind the attack on the gas pipelines as “quite predictable and also predictably stupid.”
The 85-year-old Hersh is a renowned expert on CIA and military dark ops, and has broken stories on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the Abu Ghraib prison torture in Iraq, and the Obama Regime’s weapons-funneling “rat line” to Jihadists in Syria.
Using an anonymous source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning,” Hersh reported that the Nord Stream Pipeline ‘black op’ was ordered by Joe Biden, and carried out by the CIA in co-operation with Norway. According to the source, Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of top-secret planning at the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. “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 wrote.
The meetings were allegedly convened by Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and began in December of 2021, two months before Russia rolled into Ukraine. A task force consisting of “men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments, was formed to discuss possible responses to the expected attack, according to Hersh.
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” Hersh’s source said, “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 and Sullivan’s interagency group decided to move forward on the plan to blow up the pipelines, according to Hersh.
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
According to Hersh’s source, several of the officials involved in planning the pipeline operation “were dismayed” by Biden and Nuland’s indiscretions.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
However frustrating the blabbing might have been to some of the planners, it also “created an opportunity,” Hersh noted.
According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
Asked for comment on the story, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, told Hersh in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, responded: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Hersh’s report follows a months-long German forensic investigation which found no evidence of Russian involvement in the blasts.
“According to investigators, the probe into the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea has thus far not yielded any evidence of Russia’s authorship,” the German newspaper Münchner Merkur reported Friday, citing the country’s top investigator.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said last week that the attack had been carried out by the U.S. in an attempt to ensure its global dominance.
Russia’s foreign ministry on Wednesday said that the United States has questions to answer over its role in the pipeline explosions.
According to Reuters, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on the White House to comment on the “facts” that were presented in Hersh’s report.
“The White House must now comment on all these facts,” Zakharova said in a post on her Telegram page, which summarized Hersh’s main points regarding the U.S.’s alleged involvement.
In response to Hersh’s story, the Biden White House on Wednesday called his allegations “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Update:
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote on Twitter that he is “troubled” that he can’t rule this story out. “If this turns out to be true,” he said, “we’ve got a huge problem.”
I’m troubled that I can’t immediately rule out the suggestion that the U.S. blew up Nord Stream. I checked with a bunch of Senate colleagues. Among those I’ve asked, none were ever briefed on this. If it turns out to be true, we’ve got a huge problem. https://t.co/DG0dYTByPI
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 8, 2023