Nord Stream | Investigative reporter claims: US divers blew up gas pipelines with Norwegian help – White House denies

of the United States divers blew up Nord Stream gas pipelines at White House’s behest, US investigative reporter claims Seymour Hersh in his blog post.

Explosions were detected in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines running on the bottom of the Baltic Sea on September 26, 2022. In total, three of the four pipelines were damaged.

The Swedish security police Säpo and the prosecutor’s office, which investigated the damage to the gas pipes, concluded in November that the explosions were caused by “gross sabotage”. Secretary General of the Military Alliance NATO Jens Stoltenberg had already said at the end of September that the leak in the pipes was caused by sabotage.

However, who was responsible for the sabotage has remained in the dark. American newspaper The New York Times called the fate of the Nord Stream pipelines a “wartime mystery”.

On Wednesday Hersh published an article in which he says the United States is responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines. According to him, the president Joe Biden ordered the pipes to be destroyed.

US divers planted the explosives during NATO exercises, with the help of Norway.

Hersh bases his information on an anonymous source who has had first-hand knowledge of the planning of the operation. According to the source, Biden ordered his security adviser by Jake Sullivan to assemble an interagency team to plan the destruction of the gas pipelines.

In the final Norway helped in the plan, Hersh claims. According to him, the United States and Norway were afraid that Sweden and Denmark would notice unusual activity in the Baltic Sea.

But Norway came up with the perfect cover story.

US Navy deep divers training in Panama planted the explosives in June during the Baltops 22 international exercise. It was an annual exercise that aims to develop the interoperability of the United States, NATO and partner countries in combined air, sea and amphibious operations.

Led by the commander of the US 6th Fleet, 14 NATO countries, as well as Finland and Sweden, participated in the exercise.

According to Hersh, the original plan was to blow up the pipes 48 hours after the rehearsals. However, Biden feared that an explosion too soon after the exercises would raise suspicions about the United States.

So we ended up with explosives that Norway was able to set off on September 26 during an apparently routine flight.

White the house has denied accusations that the United States was behind the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosions. On Wednesday, it called Hersh’s writing “absolutely false and complete fiction,” according to Reuters.

According to the news agency, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also said that the accusations are “nonsense”.

The Kremlin, on the other hand, has demanded responsibility for those who blew up the gas pipelines. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Hersh’s writing deserves more attention.

According to Reuters, Peskov called for an international investigation on the subject, and stated that if someone has blown up gas pipelines once, he can commit the same thing again “anywhere in the world”.

Seymour Hersh is an 85-year-old American investigative journalist who has written for the AP news agency, The New York Times newspaper and the New Yorker magazine, among others.

He won a Pulitzer Prize in the 1970s for his coverage of the Mỹ Lai massacre, a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers in the late 1960s.

In his blog post, Hersh extensively presented the US’s negative attitude towards the Nord Stream pipelines. According to him, the US leadership was afraid that European countries such as Germany would not be willing enough to send economic and military support to Ukraine if they were dependent on cheap Russian gas.

The US’s tight-lipped attitude towards the Nord Stream project is widely known. For example Politico magazine wrote in 2021 that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is becoming “Biden’s problem number one”.

The negative attitude is not proof that the US is behind the bombings.