The bombing of the Nord Stream underwater gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 was a secret operation ordered by the White House and carried out by the CIA from Norway, a US investigative journalist has claimed.
Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has claimed that US deep-sea divers planted mines along the pipelines that were remotely detonated.
The journalist, in his self-published article on Wednesday, claimed that US Navy divers planted explosive devices beneath Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in June 2022 and three months later in September, the explosives destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.
Hersh further claimed that the decision on the operation was made by US President Joe Biden after nine months of discussions with senior officials dealing with national security.
“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,” Hersh’s article stated.
He added that Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Undersecretary of State for Policy Victoria Nuland, vocal and consistent in their hostility to the pipelines, were familiar with the matter.
However, the White House has dismissed Hersh’s blog post as “utterly false and complete fiction.” A Central Intelligence Agency spokesperson also called the report “completely and utterly false.”
In September last year, a series of undersea explosions in the Baltic ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines that run from Russia to Germany and provided cheap gas to mainland Europe.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas and enabled German distributors to sell excess gas throughout Western Europe at a profit, the report said. The Nord Stream 1 was seen by the US and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance, the report said.
It has also been at the center of an energy clash between Europe and Russia since the invasion of Ukraine in late February. The attack was found to be a deliberate act but Russia was blamed for the explosion.
Seymour Hersh said that the planning regarding the pipelines started since December 2021, where the participants debated options for an attack.
The US Navy proposed using a submarine to attack the pipeline, while the Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. However, the CIA said that whatever needs to be done would have to be covert, without leaving evidence, Hersh said citing an unnamed source familiar with the planning.
He further added that an American submarine base in Norway was chose as the “perfect place to base the mission.”
“They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the report said quoting an anonymous source.
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy surveillance plane dropped a sonar buoy and few hours later a high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission and pools of methane gas was seen spreading on the water’s surface.
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