VIENTIANE, May 23. /TASS/. The United States should pay Russia for undermining the Nord Stream pipeline explosion as well as for the cities it is responsible for destroying in new regions, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said.
Medvedev responded positively to a question about whether the US should compensate Russia for the damage caused by the Nord Stream pipeline’s sabotage in an interview with the RT TV channel broadcast on Tuesday. “And not only this damage. Let them repay or at least give them the means to restore Artyomovsk, Mariupol and a host of other places that were ruined with their help and support. Using their money,” the official noted.
He reiterated that the US should reimburse Russia for undermining the [Nord Stream] pipeline. “Let them compensate here also, though there is still room to talk with respect to the evidence,” Medvedev said. “This process is not over yet and this page has not been turned,” he noted. “In any case, they deny it [their involvement – TASS] but their arguments do not appear to be very sound,” the official added.
Washington hasn’t responded to Moscow’s demand for an explanation of what happened to the Nord Stream pipelines after veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report blaming the US for destroying the key gas route, high-ranking Russian diplomat Konstantin Gavrilov has said.
“We haven’t received any clarification yet and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get any,” he told Izvestia newspaper on Monday. “There’ll be nothing new [from the US],” added the official, who heads Russia’s delegation at the Vienna talks on military security and arms control.
Gavrilov said he was surprised by the behavior of the EU nations that were most affected by the sabotage of crucial energy infrastructure, which was built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany.
Germany, Sweden and Denmark, which have been carrying out probes into the explosions on Nord Stream 1 and 2 last fall, have so far been reluctant to open up about their findings. They also rejected offers from Russia to assist with the investigations.
“The stance of Europe, which is being openly humiliated, is something that I can’t fully understand,” Gavrilov said.
In early February, Hersh authored a report claiming that US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives that were detonated last September had been planted at the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise.
Hersh later suggested that Biden had chosen that very moment to blow up the infrastructure because the conflict between Russia and Ukraine “wasn’t going great” for Kiev and its backers in Washington.
US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson denied the report, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
In late March, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he “fully agreed” with Hersh’s findings that the Nord Stream sabotage had been organized by the American Special Forces.
Other Russian officials have also noted that the only party to benefit from the destruction of Nord Stream was the US, which has seen supplies of its more expensive liquefied natural gas to Europe increase massively since the blasts.
This is yet another example of how the ‘fact-checker industrial complex’ serves to censor legitimate information at the behest of governments by posing as an independent, non-bias actor when in reality it is merely a front for state control.
Facebook is censoring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s story about US involvement in the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines using a ‘fact checker’ with links to the Norwegian government in what represents a clear conflict of interest.
Earlier this year, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation which was organized with the aid of the Norwegian government, Norwegian Secret Service and Navy.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger first noticed the issue when he tried to post Hersh’s article to Facebook, but saw the social media giant had slapped a warning label on the link stating, “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.”
Except the ‘fact-checkers’ in question aren’t independent at all.
There is a big debate over who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Instead of allowing the debate, Facebook has decided to take a side. It is censoring Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. And instead of explaining, Facebook sends readers to an article in Norwegian. Watch pic.twitter.com/nN18HovBPR
As Shellenberger notes, “Hersh is infinitely more independent than Facebook’s Norwegian fact-checker. The fact-checking organization is a partnership with a Norwegian government-owned media company, NRK, which has a direct self-interest in censoring the story.”
By censoring the article with a dubious ‘fact check’, Facebook is preventing it from reaching a much wider audience, relegating it in the algorithm.
This is yet another example of how the ‘fact-checker industrial complex’ serves to censor legitimate information at the behest of governments by posing as an independent, non-bias actor when in reality it is merely a front for state control.
Facebook’s claim, made a few years ago, that it cannot act as “the arbiter of the truth” for any contentious issue, has been proven dishonest once again.
“Whether Hersh is wrong or right, his reporting should be debated publicly, not censored. Facebook’s actions are antithetical to America’s tradition of free and open debate and its rejection of secretive, authoritarian censorship,” writes Shellenberger.
“The American people have given Facebook broad liability protections under Section 230 that other media companies don’t get. And yet Facebook is acting like a media company, not a platform. As such, Facebook is putting its Section 230 protection at risk. And censoring Hersh may only attract more attention to it.”
The moment in which the UN exposed itself again and refused to pass a resolution for the investigation of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks pic.twitter.com/JPNMZ5qxEo
Russia Foreign Minister LAVROV: "Watching the Western countries twist and turn during the UN Security Council meeting with the sole goal of not approving an instruction to the Secretary-General to organize an impartial, objective and transparent investigation into what clearly… pic.twitter.com/uYHJkXj2so
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who revealed the discovery of the object earlier this month, said experts believe that the object could be a signal antenna to activate an explosive in that part of the pipeline.
Russia says it is supporting efforts to recover forensic evidence from the underwater site of the Nord Stream sabotage blasts, which may provide clues as to the culprit behind it. Images of a new mystery object have emerged, with Moscow saying it is vitally important that it be carefully examined.
The Kremlin in a Friday briefing called the recovery and examination of the object “critically important” as it has been discovered lying next to one of the damaged Nord Stream pipelines.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a daily briefing: “It is critically important to determine what kind of object it is, whether it is related to this terrorist act – apparently it is – and to continue this investigation. And this investigation must be transparent.”
The Danish Energy Agency has invited the Russia’s Gazprom (owner of Nord Stream 2 AG) to assist in salvaging the mystery object. It was actually Putin who was the first to publicly reference the object and ongoing investigative efforts to ascertain what it is, per the AFP:
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who revealed the discovery of the object earlier this month, said experts believe that the object could be a signal antenna to activate an explosive in that part of the pipeline.
…The Danish energy agency released a photo late Thursday of the cylindrical object standing near the Nord Stream 2 pipeline at the bottom of the sea.
The agency said it is “possible” that the object is a maritime smoke buoy, 40 centimeters tall and 10 centimeters wide, and that it “does not pose an immediate safety risk.”
Peskov meanwhile said regarding the ongoing German, Swedish and Danish investigation that it is “certainly positive news” that Copenhagen invited Nord Stream 2 AG to take an active role in the investigation.
Since the September 26 clandestine bombings which permanently disabled the Russia to Germany natural gas pipelines running under the Baltic Sea, the prevailing narrative has shifted dramatically. Initially, Western officials and media pointed the finger at Moscow, but then in February legendary journalist Seymour Hersh issued an investigative report detailing that it was a CIA and US Navy covert operation.
Denmark is salvaging an unidentified object found next to the Nord Stream 2 undersea gas pipeline that was damaged in a blast last September
After the Hersh report, allegations that Russia bombed its own pipeline have largely died down (given also it would obviously run counter to Russia’s self-interests), and instead, a new theory has been advanced by mainstream media – that a small group of rogue Ukrainian operatives did it. However, the Kremlin has blasted this as ludicrous, pointing out that only a state and military would have the resources to carry out such a difficult and complex operation. Hersh has since alleged based on his sources that the CIA itself planted the “Ukrainian partisans” narrative in friendly media outlets in order to shield the White House.
Dmitry Birichevsky says Moscow intends to insist on a comprehensive and open international probe.
March 27, 2023
Pipes at the landfall facilities of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline are pictured in Lubmin, Germany [File: Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters]
Published On 27 Mar 202327 Mar 2023
Moscow may seek compensation over damage from last year’s explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines, according to news agency RIA Novosti which cited a Russian diplomat.
The pipelines, which connect Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, were hit by unexplained blasts last September in what Moscow called an act of “international terrorism”.
“We do not rule out later the raising of the issue of compensation for damage as a result of the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines,” Dmitry Birichevsky, the head of Russia’s Foreign Ministry department for economic cooperation, said in an interview with the news agency.
He added that Western countries were opposing a Russia-prepared draft UN Security Council resolution urging an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream blasts.
“Despite this, we intend to continue to insist on a comprehensive and open international investigation with the mandatory participation of Russian representatives,” Birichevsky said.
The Nord Stream pipelines were intended to bring Russian gas to Germany, though since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago, Berlin has taken steps to reduce its reliance on Russian hydrocarbons.
A gas leak at Nord Stream 2 as seen from the air on Bornholm, Denmark September 27, 2022 [Reuters]
Putin’s comments
In mid-March, President Vladimir Putin dismissed as “sheer nonsense” allegations that Ukrainians could be behind the explosions that crippled the Nord Stream gas pipelines, suggesting the United States may have been responsible.
The Russian leader insisted the US had a motive to carry out the attack in the Baltic Sea last year, saying it wanted to halt supplies of cheap Russian natural gas to Europe and provide the continent with more expensive liquefied natural gas.
September’s explosions that hit the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines rendered them inoperable and caused significant leaks of methane gas.
The leaks in the Baltic Sea led to what is likely the biggest single release of climate-damaging methane ever recorded, the United Nations Environment Programme said.
Western countries, including Germany, have said they believe the blasts were a deliberate act but declined to say who they think was responsible.
US President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines because he was unhappy with the level of support provided by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed.
Hersh first accused Washington of destroying the key European energy route in an article released in February, and made more allegations in an interview with the China Daily newspaper published on Friday.
“The [US] president was afraid of Chancellor Scholz not wanting to put more guns and more arms [forward for Kiev]. That’s all. I don’t know whether that it was anger or punishment, but the net effect is that it cut off a major power source through Western Europe,” Hersh claimed.
Despite attempts by the US to deny its involvement in the Nord Stream attack, “Europe is in crisis now” and Biden will receive “a lot of criticism for what he did” in the coming months, the journalist argued.
The Pulitzer Prize winner alleged that “the people that were initially asked to do the job” of destroying the pipelines were contacted by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan towards the end of 2021.
The initial purpose of mining Nord Stream 1 and 2, built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany, was “to give the [US] president an option to say to [Russian] President Putin, ‘If you go to war [in Ukraine], we’re going to destroy the pipelines,’” Hersh claimed.
Biden himself publicly confirmed that stance but “unfortunately, those people in the Western press seemed to have forgotten,” the journalist stated.
Just under three weeks before the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, Biden warned during a press conference on February 7 that “if Russia invades… there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
According to Hersh, the US leader decided to order the detonation of mines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea last September because the conflict “wasn’t going great in Ukraine” from a US perspective. There was “at best a stalemate” during that period, in what Hersh described as “the American war that President Biden was so eager to support.”
MOSCOW, March 25. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin agrees with the conclusions drawn by American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that US special services were involved in the Nord Stream pipeline explosions.
“The American journalist, who has become rather famous now worldwide, carried out such an investigation and as we know, drew a conclusion that blast on the gas pipelines was organized by the US special services. I fully agree with such conclusions,” Putin said.
Putin is confident that the truth about the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines will eventually be uncovered.
“I believe that it will be hard to attain this (the truth about the Nord Stream incident – TASS), but someday it will probably come out for sure what was done and how,” Putin said.
On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported “unprecedented damage,” which had been inflicted on three lines of the Nord Stream pipelines the previous day. Swedish seismologists recorded two explosions along the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. On November 18, 2022, the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office said that the blasts along the pipelines were an act of sabotage. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office opened a criminal case on charges of international terrorism.
Hersh said in his article published on February 8 that explosives were planted under the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines by US Navy divers with assistance from Norwegian specialists under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 exercise last June. The story cited an unidentified source as saying that US President Joe Biden personally authorized the operation after nine months of discussions with administration officials in charge of security matters.
The initial purpose of mining Nord Stream 1 and 2, built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany, was “to give the [US] president an option to say to [Russian] President Putin, ‘If you go to war [in Ukraine], we’re going to destroy the pipelines,’” Hersh claimed.
US President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines because he was unhappy with the level of support provided by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed.
Hersh first accused Washington of destroying the key European energy route in an article released in February, and made more allegations in an interview with the China Daily newspaper published on Friday.
“The [US] president was afraid of Chancellor Scholz not wanting to put more guns and more arms [forward for Kiev]. That’s all. I don’t know whether that it was anger or punishment, but the net effect is that it cut off a major power source through Western Europe,” Hersh claimed.
Despite attempts by the US to deny its involvement in the Nord Stream attack, “Europe is in crisis now” and Biden will receive “a lot of criticism for what he did” in the coming months, the journalist argued.
The Pulitzer Prize winner alleged that “the people that were initially asked to do the job” of destroying the pipelines were contacted by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan towards the end of 2021.
The initial purpose of mining Nord Stream 1 and 2, built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany, was “to give the [US] president an option to say to [Russian] President Putin, ‘If you go to war [in Ukraine], we’re going to destroy the pipelines,’” Hersh claimed.
Biden himself publicly confirmed that stance but “unfortunately, those people in the Western press seemed to have forgotten,” the journalist stated.
Just under three weeks before the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, Biden warned during a press conference on February 7 that “if Russia invades… there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
According to Hersh, the US leader decided to order the detonation of mines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea last September because the conflict “wasn’t going great in Ukraine” from a US perspective. There was “at best a stalemate” during that period, in what Hersh described as “the American war that President Biden was so eager to support.”
Washington is where securing political power means never having to say you’re sorry – regardless of how many thousands or millions of people you might have gotten killed. Tribalism is what keeps the perpetrators from ever being held accountable.
Consider, for example, this month’s Axios/Ipsos poll showing that more than six in ten US adults believe that George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake. While it might seem encouraging that most Americans have come to realize that the Iraq debacle was a bad move – sort of like recognizing that the sun comes up in the East – a glance beneath the headline number reveals that voters haven’t really learned anything.
You see, two decades on from a war that was started on false pretenses and was illegal under the UN Charter, 58% of Republicans still believe that the Bush administration was right to launch the invasion (compared to 26% of Democrats). They still feel this way despite a bevy of troubling truths that should be clear to everyone by now, including the fact that the whole basis for the invasion – the hype that Saddam Hussein had obtained weapons of mass destruction – was a sham.
It was a sham that cost US taxpayers over $2 trillion, helped give rise to ISIS and killed or maimed tens of thousands of American troops. Along the way, this bogus war also killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left the country shattered, even to the present day. The cherry on top is that it also strengthened Washington’s arch-enemy, Iran.
It’s almost incomprehensible that any Americans, other than the war criminals themselves, would still defend such a fiasco – unless one factors in the level of tribalism that currently pervades the US political system. Rank-and-file members of the red team and the blue team can see no evil nor hear no evil when it comes to their tribe. Their “leaders” are all on the same team, the one that keeps the masses warring with each other rather than turning their pitchforks and torches against the ruling class.
As the late, great US comedian George Carlin famously said, America’s “real owners” count on the people remaining “willfully ignorant” of what’s being done to them and devoid of critical thinking skills. “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe.”
The big club has been spectacularly successful in dumbing down and dividing the US populace to the point that the masters are essentially immune from ever having to answer for their blunders and crimes. Principled thinking is extinct. If wrongdoing by one of the tribal chiefs gets exposed, his or her followers shrug off the truth and point to allegedly worse sins by the rival tribe. In a pinch, they can even blame the rival tribe for their chief’s transgression.
Case in point: President Joe Biden’s administration botched the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan so badly that the Taliban was able to seize control of Kabul even before Washington’s chaotic exit was completed. Thousands of Afghan collaborators and US citizens were left behind. Thirteen US troops were brought home in body bags.
Hundreds of Afghans also died during the chaotic evacuation, including seven children and three other civilians who were killed in a drone strike after US forces mistook an aid worker for an ISIS-K terrorist. Pentagon officials lied and concealed what they knew about the strike. Days later, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley insisted that the attack was “righteous” and that an ISIS facilitator had been killed. A US military investigation showed that senior officers were told within three hours of the attack that children had been killed.
Nevertheless, supporters of the blue team dismissed criticism of how the US withdrawal was handled and blamed Biden’s predecessor, former president Donald Trump, for essentially everything that went wrong. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited Trump’s agreement with the Taliban to end the 20-year conflict, saying, “We inherited a deadline. We did not inherit a plan.” Congressman Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, helpfully replied, “It’s amazing that it wasn’t much, much worse.”
No one was punished for the Afghan debacle. Biden, Blinken and the Pentagon brass still refuse to admit to any mistakes. The only person fired over the withdrawal was Stuart Scheller, the Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who dared to publicly criticize the evacuation and call for senior officials to be held accountable. He was court-martialed for his temerity.
Meanwhile, the so-called experts in Washington continue advancing their careers, regardless of how many lives they destroy. It’s a town where Victoria Nuland can play a key advisory role in the Bush administration’s Iraq debacle, help engineer the Obama-Biden administration’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 – setting the table for the current crisis in Eastern Europe – then land a job as the Biden administration’s undersecretary of state. It’s also where former secretary of state Madeleine Albright can say in a television interview that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children resulting from US sanctions were “worth it” – then be eulogized by three presidents upon her death last year and praised by Biden for her “humanity.”
As Albright’s case shows, there’s no statement too ghastly, no policy too abhorrent for an American leader to be excused from accountability. Some of the same people who brought about the illegal invasion of Syria and the failed regime-change campaign against President Bashar al-Assad get to be taken seriously today as they moralize about Russia’s attack on sovereign Ukrainian territory. And to this day, the illegal US occupation of Syria’s most oil-rich region continues, ostensibly to contain ISIS, the group born out of America’s illegal war in Iraq.
Just last week, Trump’s former national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, said in an interview that the US would destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor factories, if necessary, to prevent them from falling into China’s hands. No one even blinked. It wasn’t big news. Never mind that the US is supposedly trying to protect Taiwan. Never mind that China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, meaning it would merely be seizing its own territory in an invasion, and that neither the UN nor the US recognizes the self-governing island as a separate nation. Talking openly about blowing up somebody else’s world-leading chip industry is so humdrum – so par for the course in Washington – that hardly an eyebrow is raised.
Biden made a similarly brazen statement in February 2022, assuring a reporter that if Russian military forces crossed into Ukraine, the US would ensure that the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Western Europe would be stopped: “We will bring it to an end.” Standing alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he openly promised to eliminate his supposed ally’s critical energy infrastructure.
The Nord Stream pipelines were blown up seven months later in one of the worst acts of industrial sabotage in world history. US officials suggested that Russia must have destroyed its own gas conduits. Legendary Washington journalist Seymour Hersh reported last month that Biden secretly ordered the attack. The White House responded by dismissing Hersh’s story as “utterly false” and later floated a new theory on the culprit, suggesting that a “pro-Ukrainian group” carried out the undersea bombing.
Nuland, meanwhile, could hardly contain her glee, saying in January that the Biden administration was “very gratified to know” that Nord Stream 2 had become “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
Will justice be done over Nord Stream? History suggests that the perpetrators won’t be punished. It’s even more certain that Americans won’t come together to rebuke their leaders or demand change.
The most we can expect is that the Republicans will use the controversy to score political points. If and when the red team takes back the White House, its figurehead will pick up where Biden left off with policies that make America’s commoners poorer, less safe and less free. Blue team tribesmen will howl about the new leader’s evildoing, while their counterparts in the red camp will deflect any criticism by arguing that the former administration was worse.
It’s been six weeks since I published a report, based on anonymous sourcing, naming President Joe Biden as the official who ordered the mysterious destruction last September of Nord Stream 2, a new $11-billion pipeline that was scheduled to double the volume of natural gas delivered from Russia to Germany. The story gained traction in Germany and Western Europe but was subject to a near media blackout in the US. Two weeks ago, after a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington, US and German intelligence agencies attempted to add to the blackout by feeding the New York Times and the German weekly Die Zeitfalse cover stories to counter the report that Biden and US operatives were responsible for the pipelines’ destruction.
Press aides for the White House and Central Intelligence Agency have consistently denied that America was responsible for exploding the pipelines, and those pro forma denials were more than enough for the White House press corps. There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any serious leader would do: formally “task” the American intelligence community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets, and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea. According to a source within the intelligence community, the president has not done so, nor will he. Why not?Because he knows the answer.
Sarah Miller — an energy expert and an editor at Energy Intelligence, which publishes leading trade journals — explained to me in an interview why the pipeline story has been big news in Germany and Western Europe. Miller who writes a blog on Medium said:
“The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September led to a further surge of natural gas prices that were already six or more times pre-crisis levels. Nord Stream was blown up in late September. German gas imports peaked a month later, in October, at 10 times pre-crisis levels. Electricity prices across Europe were pulled up, and governments spent as much as 800 billion euros, by some estimates, shielding households and businesses from the impact. Gas prices, reflecting the mild winter in Europe, have now fallen back to roughly a quarter of the October peak, but they are still between two and three times pre-crisis levels and are more than three times current US rates.
“Over the last year, German and other European manufacturers closed their most energy-intensive operations, such as fertilizer and glass production, and it’s unclear when, if ever, those plants will reopen. Europe is scrambling to get solar and wind capacity in place, but it may not come soon enough to save large chunks of German industry.”
In early March, President Biden hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington. The trip included only two public events — a brief pro forma exchange of compliments between Biden and Scholz before the White House press corps, with no questions allowed; and a CNN interview with Scholz by Fareed Zakaria, who did not touch on the pipeline allegations. The chancellor had flown to Washington with no members of the German press on board, no formal dinner scheduled, and the two world leaders were not slated to conduct a press conference, as routinely happens at such high-profile meetings. Instead, it was later reported that Biden and Scholz had an 80-minute meeting, with no aides present for much of the time. There have been no statements or written understandings made public since then by either government, but I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2. In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was “to pulse the system” in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had ordered the pipelines’ destruction.
At this point, it must be noted that Chancellor Scholz, whether or not he was alerted of the destruction of the pipeline in advance — still an open question — has clearly been complicit since last fall in support of the Biden Administration’s cover-up of its operation in the Baltic Sea.
The agency did its job and, with the help of German intelligence, concocted and planted stories about an ad hoc “off the books” operation that had led to the destruction of the pipelines. The scam had two elements: a March 7 report in the New York Times citing an anonymous American official claiming that “[n]ew intelligence…suggests” that “a pro-Ukrainian group” may have been involved in the pipeline’s destruction; and a report the same day in Der Zeit, Germany’s most widely read weekly newspaper, stating that German investigative officials had tracked down a chartered luxury sailing yacht that was known to have set off on September 6 from the German port at Rostock past Bornholm island off the coast of Denmark. The island is a few miles from the area where the pipelines were destroyed on September 26. The yacht had been rented from Ukrainian owners and manned by a party of six: a captain, two divers, two divers’ assistants, and a doctor. Five were men, and one a woman. False passports were involved.
The two publications included cautions in their stories noting that, as the Times put it, “there was much they did not know.” The new information was, however, also said to have given officials “increased . . . optimism” that a firm conclusion about the perpetrators would be reached. But it would take a long time, according to various senior officials in Washington and Germany. The message was that the press and the public should stop asking questions and let the investigators unravel the truth. Which, of course, would never come. Holger Stark, the author of the report in Die Zeit, went a step further and noted that there were some “in international security services” who had not excluded the possibility that the yacht story “was a false flag operation.” Indeed, it was.
“It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story,” I was told by a source within the American intelligence community. The disinformation professionals inside the CIA understand that a propaganda gambit can only work if those on receiving are desperate for a story that can diminish or displace an unwanted truth.And the truth in question is that President Joe Biden authorized the destruction of the pipelines and will have a difficult time explaining away his action as Germany and its Western European neighbors suffer as businesses are shuttered amid high day-to-day energy costs.
Ironically, the most telling evidence about the weakness of theNew York Timesreport came from one of threeTimesreporters whose bylines were on the story. A few days after publication of the story, the reporter, Julian Barnes, was interviewed on the popular Times podcast The Daily by host Michael Barbaro. Here’s the transcript:
HOST: Who exactly was responsible for this attack? And how did you and our colleagues go about figuring that out?
REPORTER: Well, I think what happened was for much of the investigation, we weren’t asking exactly the right questions.
HOST: Hmm. And what were the right questions?
REPORTER: Well, we had logically been focused on countries.
HOST: Mm-hmm.
REPORTER: All those states that we just went through, did Russia do it? Did the Ukraine state do it? And that was just hitting dead end after dead end. We weren’t finding officials who were telling us that there was credible evidence pointing at a government. So my colleagues Adam Entous, Adam Goldman, and I started asking a different question. Could this have been done by non-state actors?
HOST: Hmm.
REPORTER: Could this have been done by a group of individuals who were not working for a government?
HOST: Kind of like freelance saboteurs. So where did you take this new question?
REPORTER: Well, we started asking, who might these saboteurs be? Or if we couldn’t answer that, who might they be aligned with? Could they be pro-Russian saboteurs? Could they be other saboteurs? And the more we talk to officials who had access to intelligence, the more we saw this theory gaining traction.
HOST: Mm-hmm.
REPORTER: And my initial thought that this could be pro-Russian saboteurs turned out to be wrong. And we learned that it was most likely a pro-Ukrainian group.
HOST: Hmm. So in other words, a group of people who did this on behalf of Ukraine. What do you learn that makes you think that’s what happened?
REPORTER: Michael, I should be very clear that we know really very little, right? This group remains mysterious. And it remains mysterious not just to us, but also to the US government officials that we have spoken to. They know that the people involved were either Ukrainian, or Russian, or a mix. They know that they are not affiliated with the Ukrainian government. But they know they’re also anti-Putin and pro-Ukraine.
HOST: So after all this investigative reporting, what you find is that the culprit here is a group of people who want the same thing as Ukraine, but aren’t officially tied to the government of Ukraine. But I’m curious how certain you are that these individuals are not connected to the Ukrainian government?
REPORTER: Well, the intelligence right now says they’re not. And while officials are telling us that the president of Ukraine and his key advisors did not know, we can’t be certain that that’s true or that somebody else didn’t know.
TheTimes reporters in Washington were at the mercy of White House officials “who had access to intelligence.” But the information they received originated with a group of CIA experts in deception and propaganda whose mission was to feed the newspaper a cover story — and to protect a president who made an unwise decision and is now lying about it.
This story is a follow up to Seymour Hersh’s original report on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. To read the full report, subscribe to Hersh’s Substack here
About the author
Seymour M. Hersh’s fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines, a staggering collection of awards, and no small amount of controversy. His story is one of fierce independence. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times and established himself at the forefront of investigative journalism in 1970 when he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize (as a freelancer) for his exposé of the massacre in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. Since then he has received the George Polk Award five times, the National Magazine Award for Public Interest twice, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Orwell Award, and dozens of other accolades. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Hersh said the information The New York Times received “originated with a group of CIA experts in deception and propaganda whose mission was to feed the newspaper a cover story—and to protect a president who made an unwise decision and is now lying about it.”
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on Substack on Wednesday that said the CIA was instructed to come up with a cover story for the Nord Stream bombings that was fed to The New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit.
The cover-up story was created to shift blame from the US after Hersh’s bombshell report published on February 8 that said President Biden ordered the attack on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, which connect Russia to Germany. “It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story,” Hersh was told by a source within the American intelligence community.
Hersh said that the CIA was ordered to come up with a cover story after President Biden met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington on March 3. Scholz’s visit was very brief and did not include the routine joint press briefing that usually follows a meeting between the president and another world leader. Hersh was told that his report detailing how the US took out Nord Stream was discussed by Biden and Scholz.
Hersh writes: “I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2.”
The result of the CIA’s work was published in The New York Times and Die Zeit on March 7. The New York Times report was very vague and said US officials are now claiming the Nord Stream bombings might have been carried out by a “pro-Ukrainian group.”
The Die Zeit report claimed German investigators believe it was carried out by six people using a yacht rented in Poland that was owned by two Ukrainians. Other Western media outlets published similar articles reinforcing the cover story in the following days.
Hersh said the information The New York Times received “originated with a group of CIA experts in deception and propaganda whose mission was to feed the newspaper a cover story—and to protect a president who made an unwise decision and is now lying about it.”
The cover story offers a radically different narrative than what Hersh’s February 8 report alleges. Using anonymous sourcing, Hersh reported that the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed by explosives planted by US Navy divers in June 2022 under the cover of NATO drills in the Baltic Sea. The operation was done in coordination with Norway, and a Norwegian spy plane detonated the explosives by dropping a sonar buoy on September 26, 2022.
The last time Scholz visited Washington was on February 7, 2022. Biden vowed during a press conference that day that if Russia invaded Ukraine, he would “bring an end” to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. According to Hersh, the plot to destroy the pipelines was already underway at that time, and the plotters took Biden’s comment as a blatant threat.
Biden in Feb 2022: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
Q: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"
On Scholz’s possible complicity in the operation, Hersh said in his new article: “At this point, it must be noted that Chancellor Scholz, whether or not he was alerted of the destruction of the pipeline in advance—still an open question—has clearly been complicit since last fall in support of the Biden Administration’s cover-up of its operation in the Baltic Sea.”
Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc / Contributor via Getty Images
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that Joe Biden made the decision to blow up Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines because he saw being a war president as giving him a better chance at re-election.
Last month, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation.
According to Hersh’s sources, the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy.
One source told Hersh that the plotters knew the covert operation was an “act of war,” with some in the CIA and State Department warning, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”
Last week, the New York Times reported that a “pro-Ukrainian group” had sabotaged the pipelines, using a team with as few as six people involved in the mission, contradicting previous assumptions that only a state would have had the resources to carry out the operation.
According to Hersh, referring to Biden, “He did it. He did it, I’m telling you, he did it, adding, The Biden game is to wait it out and never say yes.”
The journalist claimed that Biden wanted to escalate the conflict in order to position himself as a war president.
“I think Biden also saw beating up Russia as a ticket. Jack Kennedy is a classic example – presidents always did well politically in wars,” he said.
Hersh claimed that Biden made the decision in January 2022 to “see if we can find a way to blow… those pipelines, and put [the Russians] back in the dark ages.”
The Pulitzer-Prize winner went on to savage the legacy media for completely failing to follow up on his report that the U.S. was responsible for the attack, which took out three of the four pipelines.
Meanwhile, China has reacted with skepticism towards the explanation that a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible for the blasts.
During a press briefing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called for “an objective, impartial and professional investigation” into the bombing.
“We have noted that some Western media have been mysteriously quiet after Hersh reported that the US was behind the Nord Stream blast. But now these media are unusually simultaneous in making their voice heard. How would the US account for such abnormality? Is there anything hidden behind the scene?” Wang asked.
New reports also reveal that a German spy ship was in the area where the attack occurred at the time of the blasts on September 26.
According to a report by German magazine Der Spiegel, the CIA warned Berlin about a potential attack on gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea weeks before it happened.
As we highlighted yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin branded claims that the Nord Stream pipeline attack was the work of pro-Ukrainian activists “nonsense,” arguing the blasts must have been carried out by a state power.
The leader of France’s Eurosceptic party The Patriots responded to continuing controversy over the Nord Stream pipeline attack by asserting, “It was obvious that the Americans were behind the bombing.”
Florian Philippot made the comments during an interview with RIA Novosti.
Philippot referenced the report published by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, which claimed the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy.
“Even before the theory put forward by Hersh, who is a very reputable journalist, it was obvious that the Americans were behind the bombing,” Philippot said. “Even before the war in Ukraine, the US had been fighting the Nord Stream pipelines for years, it had become a permanent element of their policy.”
The politician also highlighted comments by President Biden, who confidently asserted that the pipelines would not be allowed to remain operational.
“Moreover, in early February 2022, Biden publicly said that the Americans were capable of making the pipeline go away. And it happened. After all, it was in the interests of America,” said Philippot.
“And there is nothing absurd about this because Norway is Russia’s gas competitor, and Russian gas has been replaced by Norwegian gas in many countries. So they also had their own interests and enriched themselves at this expense,” Philippot added.
According to Hersh’s sources, the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy were instrumental in locating the right position to plant the explosives.
As we highlighted yesterday, Hersh said during a National Press Club event that Biden gave the green light for the attack because he thought being a war president would give him the best chance of re-election.
“I think Biden also saw beating up Russia as a ticket. Jack Kennedy is a classic example – presidents always did well politically in wars,” he said.
Meanwhile, in a related development, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed attempts by Denmark to deny Moscow access to the investigation into the attack.
“This is such a fraud, a total scam, not even a con but a threepenny game, which in my opinion no one has been buying for a very long time,” Zakharova said in an interview with Rossiya-1.
“They are playing this for themselves, but the story with Nord Stream will not end the same way as many other stories they have buried or covered up, I think, for the simple reason that there’s a lot of money at stake,” she added.
On March 6, Seymour “Sy” Hersh spoke about the Nord Stream explosion on September 26, 2022. He reveals in his substack how it was the result of Washington Administration authorizing C4 explosives be planted on the pipelines in June under the cover of a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea, and then setting them off using a signal from a sonar buoy dropped on the surface. Hersh discusses the discussion of the sabotage at the UN, the decline of his brand of journalism in mainstream media and more!
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 