Investigation urged over report that suggests Washington was behind pipeline explosions
Aerial photo provided by the Swedish Coast Guard on Sept 27 shows the gas leak from Nord Stream in the Baltic Sea. (PHOTO / XINHUA)
The procedural denial of the US government against the detailed revelation of its clandestine operation behind exploding Nord Stream pipelines last autumn by American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh failed to quench questions by people around the world, with Russia demanding formal investigations into the report.
Citing a source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning,” Hersh writes that planning for the mission began in December 2021.
According to the award-winning journalist, US Navy divers planted explosives in June last year, leaving them to be remotely exploded by Norway’s Navy by September on order of the White House.
“Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer 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,” wrote Hersh, a winner of multiple journalism awards including the Pulitzer Prize.
“(President Joe) Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. 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 said in the report published on his Substack blog on Feb 8.
The White House and the Norwegian government have since denied the claims.
Russian Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky said on Feb 15 that Russia has requested a Feb 22 meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the Nord Stream explosions.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also declared that US officials have, in fact, acknowledged that the United States plotted the Nord Stream attack. Russia’s Sputnik news reported Lavrov as saying that the US ordered the explosions to destroy what he called a powerful alliance of Russian energy and German technology.
“That began to threaten the monopoly position of many American corporations. Therefore, it was necessary to somehow ruin it, and do it literally,” the minister said.
In a speech to the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, Lavrov said Washington and its allies are waging “an all-out hybrid war against Russia that has been prepared for many years” to defeat Russia on the battlefield, destroy its economy, cordon off the country and turn it into an “outcast”.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Feb 9 that Hersh’s article on the Nord Stream gas pipeline leaks confirmed the need for an investigation and punishment of those responsible.
Russia has noticed attempts to silently curtail the investigation, Peskov said.
The defence ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization discussed the security of critical undersea infrastructure following the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Addressing journalists following a NATO defense ministers’ meeting, he announced the establishment of a Critical Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell within the NATO headquarters.
When the Nord Stream pipelines that carried critical energy supplies from Russia to Europe mysteriously blew up last September, evidence collected by several countries quickly and clearly pointed to an act of sabotage, although the perpetrator remained unclear — until last week.
According to Hersh, on Sept 26, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. A few hours later, high-powered C4 explosives which had been planted by US Navy divers months ago were triggered, and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.
The mainstream media of the US and its main allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada have maintained relative silence on the Hersh report, but a number of other media outlets and analysts have spoken out.
If Hersh’s report is accurate, this act of terrorism directed at the infrastructure of its own allies would have significant implications for the relationship between the US and Germany and could be a turning point in relations between US and Europe, Helsinki Times said in an online report on Feb 16.
Stephan Ossenkopp of the Schiller Institute, a Germany-based political and economic think tank, said: “If this was true, it means that the American government has committed a terrorist act against vital German infrastructure, it’s a scandal of the utmost seriousness.”
“It really commands the German government to stand up to the Americans and say ‘you don’t treat partners and allies like that’,” he was quoted as saying in a CGTN report.
The truth that the US Navy was involved in the Nord Stream pipeline explosions last year, as uncovered by Hersh, represents an “economic war” against its submissive allies in Europe, a Swedish expert has said.
“Nord Stream (was) of course blown up by the US and NATO allies,” Jan Oberg, director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.
“Seymour Hersh’s fine analysis tells how the destruction was planned and done, but the conclusion is unsurprising: the US, with very important Norwegian assistance, committed the crime against a friendly, allied country, Germany, and other European countries,” he said.
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, said in an emailed interview with Xinhua: “I have long hypothesized that the US Government carried out this action, and Hersh’s account adds to the likelihood of that hypothesis.”
The professor has listed 11 facts corresponding to Hersh’s report.
First and second are “the long-standing vociferous US opposition to Nord Stream and the extensive record of US covert operations against the infrastructure of other countries,” he said.
After his account was published on Substack on Feb 8, Hersh has been asked to comment about his source of the story who still remains anonymous. The investigative journalist said during an interview on the Radio War Nerd podcast that it was his job to protect his sources and take the heat when a story went live. Those within the media who criticize him for using anonymous sources should “understand the business a little better”, Hersh said.
He also noted that major news outlets are failing to report a lot of things about the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev. “The war I know about is not the war you are reading about,” Hersh observed.
“It is amazing to me how they fell in line, my colleagues,” he added, lamenting that many outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC have become a front for the White House and the Biden administration.
Hersh also spoke to “Democracy Now!” about his story that was titled “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”.
“The fear was Europe would walk away from the war,” he was quoted in a report on realclearpolitics.com.
Alfred de Zayas, a professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy, told CGTN that the Western mind is too conditioned to see the truth.
“Objectively speaking, we in the West, we do not occupy any moral high ground vis-a-vis Russia. The problem is that we in the United States, most Brits in England and Germans in Germany actually believe our own propaganda. We are indoctrinated into believing that we are the good guys by definition, and that we have a mission to bring democracy and human rights to the rest of the world.
“That is why a report that Seymour Hersh just issued on the bombing, blowing up of the Nord Stream is not likely to have much of an impact with the American public. It simply bounces off.”
He added: “As I’ve said it before in other interviews, we Americans are willing to fight this proxy war against Russia till the last Ukrainian.”
According to a global opinion poll recently launched by CGTN Think Tank, 75 percent of respondents believed the US was behind Nord Stream sabotage, based on the information and relevant evidence released so far.
About 71 percent of respondents considered that the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines has hindered Russia’s energy exports, harming its national interests. Seventy-two percent worried that plunging Russian gas supplies would threaten European energy security. Moreover, on a global scale, 85 percent of respondents predicted that the Nord Stream incident will exacerbate the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, according to the poll.
In the survey, 79 percent of respondents believed the US was the largest beneficiary of the incident.
Meanwhile, some 88 percent of respondents condemned the sabotage on civilian facilities with ulterior motives as an act of terrorism, and said that the perpetrators owe the world a sincere apology and a responsible explanation.
Nord Stream, an “energy lifeline” for Europe, was a critical network of pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe under the sea.
Two of the pipelines, which were collectively known as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. Construction of Nord Stream 2 was designed to double the volume of gas that Russia could send to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
Although its construction had been completed in September 2021, the infrastructure never went into operation after Berlin halted the project shortly before the start of the Russian-Ukraine conflict.
CGTN and Xinhua contributed to this report.
