The explosion that rocked capitals across the globe. On September 26, 2022, unnamed saboteurs bombed three of Russia’s four Nord Stream pipelines. Overnight, Europe lost 45% of its natural gas imported from the Eastern giant. Western politicians and media shrugged.

More than four months after the catastrophe, veteran journalist Seymour “Sy” Hersh published his stunning exposé, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.”  In it, Hersh alleges that the U.S. Navy, at the direction of President Joe Biden, planned the attacks.

The White House response was swift. A spokesperson for the National Security Council, backed by the CIA and State Department, slammed Hersh’s sensational report as “utterly false and complete fiction.”

According to Hersh, the American president ordered the attack before Putin began his invasion of Ukraine. “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secretive debates within Washington’s national security community,” Hersh writes, leading some to speculate that militarized aggression against the Russian bear was a foregone conclusion; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine merely provided the White House a convenient pretext.

Hersh, however, is vague on this point. He writes, “In December 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, (National Security Adviser) Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force — men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, State Department and Treasury Department — and asked for recommendations on how to respond to Putin's impending invasion.”

Die Weltwoche spoke firsthand with the Pulitzer Prize winner who New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick declares “the greatest investigative journalist of his era.”

 

Weltwoche: Was the attack on Nord Stream planned as one option in case Putin would actually invade Ukraine? Or was the plan to be executed regardless of what Putin would do?

Seymour Hersh: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s in the president’s mind. I will tell you that the United States, since the Kennedy era in the early 1960s, has been publicly very concerned about the fact that Russia has vast fields of not only oil but natural gas.

The issue is we’ve always disliked the Nord Stream pipelines from the outset. We’ve always disliked the fact that Russia and Germany had a very strong bond over cheap Russian gas. In 2011, the first Nord Stream pipeline was owned jointly by four companies. The German industrial base thrived on it. There was so much oil that the German government even set up an office that began to sell some of the excess oil or gas they had, downstream, to other companies, providing gas to the rest of Europe. We didn’t like the fact that [former German Chancellor Angela] Merkel was friendly with Russia. Then, North Stream 2 was about to open. Both pipelines were always problematic for us.

Weltwoche: You point out that, early last year, President Biden, after meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany at the White House, warned that Mr. Putin’s decision about whether to attack Ukraine would determine the fate of Nord Stream 2. “If Russia invades — that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine again — then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Mr. Biden said. “We will bring an end to it.” When asked exactly how that would be accomplished, Mr. Biden said, “I promise you we’ll be able to do it.”

Hersh: The bottom line is that the dislike of the Nord Stream pipelines wasn’t something new. Biden, himself, in a speech in Turkey at a conference when he was vice president to Obama, talked about the dangers of what we always called “weaponizing the gas.”

Weltwoche: It was in December 2021 when plan of attack against Nord Stream first emerged, correct?

Hersh: It was before Christmas. I think the date was the 20th or 21st.

Weltwoche: As you wrote, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who convened that meeting in December 2021, was clearly one of the key players. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was another one. So was Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who has been involved in Ukraine for many years, namely, in the support of the Maidan protests in 2014.

Hersh: Let’s just say it. We basically helped overthrow a pretty weak government. It [the Viktor Yanukovych-led government] was pro-Russian. There’s no question we were involved.

Weltwoche: Besides Sullivan, Blinken, and Nuland, who were other players involved in hatching the plan of attack?

Hersh: You’re asking a question I can’t answer. The answer to the question would suggest there were certain skills certain people had that may have been involved in the planning. I hope you don’t think my government likes my story and hasn’t tried its best to find out who was talking to me. I have to be very careful not to mention specifics.

Weltwoche: I am asking because some critics of your theory say that the operation you describe would have involved a considerable number of people. Therefore, it would have been almost impossible to keep secret.

Hersh: The number of people involved who knew the story from A to Z had to be very few. Extremely few.

Weltwoche: The Norwegians were involved. According to your report, they dropped the device that helped detonate the explosives. In interviews, you mention that Sweden and Denmark were partially briefed about the sabotage in advance. A considerable number of people in the administration were on board. How many people involved in the operation did you count?

Hersh: I just said all I can say. The trouble with you reporters is you keep on asking good questions which I don't want to answer. But I respect that. I can’t answer because I can’t give away anything that’s going to indicate somebody. There were only two divers involved. They happen to come from one of the more skilled training places in Florida that most people in America don’t know about.

Weltwoche: Let's talk about these divers.

Hersh: You see, you can’t do that to me. I can’t tell you anything beyond what I wrote.

Weltwoche: My question is a technical one. You have written that specialized divers placed the explosives on the pipeline at great depth. Experts have calculated that hundreds of kilograms of explosives were needed to cause such severe explosions. How was this done? Did the divers have the help of a submarine to place the explosives correctly on the seabed?

Hersh: No. It was C4 that was used. You don’t have to have hundreds of pounds. C4 is a plastic explosive substance. A very small amount can blow off a man’s head at one hundred feet.

Weltwoche: Is it possible for two divers to carry it down and attach it?

Hersh: I’ll say it’s possible, absolutely. The problem is there are four pipelines. They’re sealed. They’re protected by a concrete pipeline around them, a cover. The pipeline is as tall as a man, altogether six feet high, and it’s concrete the outside.

Weltwoche: A tall task for only two divers.

Hersh: The Navy divers train to go three hundred feet down. These guys are very professional. Their joke about the Navy Seals, the Special Forces Seals, is they go on television every time they do something and talk about it or write books. You don’t see the Navy divers doing this. They are trained in Panama City in the southwestern panhandle of Florida. It’s at the bottom of the world. There’s deep sea fishing, and some tourism, but it’s seventy miles from Alabama. It's not a great place to be. All you can do is work.

Weltwoche: What you are saying is those divers are talented and secretive and up to such a job.

Hersh: Yes, but you can’t just have a bunch of guys suddenly diving in the middle of the Baltic Sea, which is heavily monitored. The Russians are there, too. They have unmanned underwater vehicles that monitor things. The whole question of how you can hide a diving operation is very complicated.

Weltwoche: According your report, the explosives were planted during the annual NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea, known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22, last June. To detonate the explosives, you write, “On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy.” The signal allegedly triggered the explosives a few hours later. As critics point out, the Norwegian Air Force P-8, a maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, was at the time of the explosion only in a test phase and, therefore, not operational. Moreover…

Hersh: Save your breath. I know what you’re going to say, and I’m not going to give you the answer.

Weltwoche: Let me rephrase the question. At the time of the explosion, no such aircraft was detected in the vicinity of the crime scene. How do you explain this contradiction?

Hersh: I want you to go and research what happened when Biden went to visit Zelenskyy (February 20th). Remember, he flew in on Air Force One. It is fitted out with extra equipment. When they got into Poland, what they did was they turned off their transponder. It’s a signal every airplane has to have. It beeps an IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) signal so that every other airplane and the air controllers in America and in the world know where you are. It was reported that the president’s plane, for safety reasons, turned off its transponder so it could not be seen.

The critics, who claim that there was no ship detected directly at the spot of the explosions on September 26th, refer to “open-source intelligence” (OSINT). They use electronic signals to monitor. They’re very competent. But if you have a plane that could turn off its transponder, it can’t be seen.

The Norwegians have bought five P-8s, and there are newspaper stories about the delivery of the first in early 2022. The Norwegians are the best in the world for navigation and have been with us on covert actions for decades, as I wrote in my blog post on February 22nd. But, without sending signals, you could do anything you want with any of those planes.

Weltwoche: Even in the U.S., where your stories used to hit like bombs, your report was not picked up. Why do you think the media has downplayed it?

Hersh: [laughs] There are always a million different answers.

Weltwoche: Instead of reporting on your findings, there were attempts made to portray you as untrustworthy. A popular critique is that your report fails to provide any evidence.

Hersh: I’ve been doing this since my “My Lai” story in 1969.

[Editor’s note: With the exposure of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War by U.S. soldiers, Hersh established his career as one of the world’s premier investigative journalists. For decades, Hersh has uncovered numerous scandals of the U.S. government.]

In all those years, most of the stories I wrote had unnamed sources because how could I possibly talk about a source? If I named somebody, they’d be fired or, worse, jailed. The luxury in a journalist’s life is to have somebody who’s inside with a lot of personal integrity, who takes the oath of office. You have to in America, in the State Department or the Government or the CIA, take the oath of office. It’s not to your boss, or to the colonel, or the general, or even to the president. It’s to the Constitution. Those are the people who talk to me. It’s very unusual to have that kind of a source inside. Most reporters don’t have that. I’ve had, over the years, many. Some even had four stars. They are people loyal to the Constitution and are upset, sometimes, when things are done that shouldn’t be done.

Weltwoche: But your story is based on one single “source with direct knowledge” of the operation. Is this enough to convict a world power, the United States, as a perpetrator, as you do?

Hersh: Don’t make assumptions. You don’t know, and I’m not talking about it. The only thing I will tell you about the first story: if you look at it carefully, there’s never a point in that story with full detail. There isn’t one meeting mentioned where that person, or persons, who talk to me is at, because there is not a large group of people involved in those meetings. They had the CIA and the National Security Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, the Treasury Department. They had specialists. The whole purpose of being very oblique about who’s talking to me is to protect my primary source. I’ve had fifty years of doing this. Nobody’s going to jail. Nobody’s been named. Nobody’s been cited. I just don’t discuss it.

Weltwoche: After you published your story, the New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit both published stories on March 7th that challenge your central narrative. The Times story claims “a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack.” How do you assess the research of the New York Times?

Hersh: The New York Times ran it as a front page story. I can’t believe how incompetent it was. One of the three reporters — Julian Barnes — gave an interview on The New York Times podcast in which he described the reporting. I don’t know what word I can use for this guy. I worked at The New York Times for seven or eight years, but I worked on very sensitive stories that won a lot of prizes. First of all, they used all unnamed sources.

Weltwoche: That’s what they say about you, that you use unnamed sources.

Hersh: My source has direct knowledge of the operation. There was no evidence they ever talked to anybody in intelligence.

Weltwoche: In the Times story, they use phrases like, “Officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.”

Hersh: “Do you really know what happened?”, the journalist was asked in the end. He said, “Well, we’re not sure.” At best, it’s what I would call “a tip.”

Weltwoche: According Die Zeit’s investigation, conducted with public broadcasters ARD and SWR, the boat that was allegedly used in the operation was identified. “It is said to be a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, apparently owned by two Ukrainians.” What do you make of this story?

Hersh: They write about a yacht that was found abandoned and that there were traces of dynamite found on the yacht. You had to use a very explosive stuff, not dynamite, to do a charge strong enough. As discussed, the divers in the actual operation used C4. I think our CIA might have asked to push this story, but it was really the German Intelligence Service, the BND, who was responsible for that. It was really clumsy. As you know, it didn’t spark a new wave of thinking.

Weltwoche: Since you published your report, have you gathered more information from your original source, or other sources, that add detail on the planning of the attack and how the pipelines were blown up?

Hersh: I have an answer, but I cannot share it with it you because my main objective, now, is protecting those who talk to me.

I know something, but I’m stuck because things have gotten very tense inside Washington. People who, normally, might tell me the whole story over a beer or a Chinese lunch tell me, “Please, please, just lay off a little.”

Weltwoche: You're not going to, I would guess.

Hersh: Oh, no. I’m going to keep on writing about it. I’m writing again, next week. I can tell you I know more about it, and it’s really like bad farce. I think it’s a Shakespearian farce. The problem is my president has been lying to his people and the world since I wrote my story, since it happened, claiming no knowledge.