New Questions Arise After Exposé On U.S. Involvement In Nord Stream Blast Published
Angela Merkel and Dmitry Medvedev, among others, celebrate the opening of Nord Stream 1 in 2011. (Wikimedia Commons)
Award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh published a blog post alleging that the United States caused leaks in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The blog post sparked outrage shortly after the post’s publication of February 8, with Russia demanding that the United Nations investigate the incident.
Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author best known for his journalistic work exposing the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq.
Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 are natural gas pipelines that run through the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, bypassing Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The pipelines were completed in 2012 and 2021, respectively. As of 2021, the Nord Stream pipelines supply 45% of natural gas imports to the European Union.
On September 26, 2022, Swedish authorities detected unnatural seismic disturbances within their economic zone. Later, leakages were discovered in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines. Russia first alleged that the United Kingdom was behind the detonations, later blaming the United States for the damage.
Meanwhile, the United States suggested that Russia self-sabotaged its pipelines, which are majority-owned by the state-owned natural gas company Gazprom.
Hersh’s bombshell exposé on the supposed U.S. role in the Nord Stream explosions revived debate on a significant issue in NATO-Russia relations.
Citing an anonymous source with “direct knowledge of the operational planning,” Hersh claimed that the United States had planned to sabotage the pipelines since December 2021. This source charged that a team of Navy divers, under CIA orders, planted C4 explosives along the pipelines during the BALTOPS 22 NATO naval war games in June 2022.
According to the unnamed source, these explosives were detonated in September 2022 with direct orders from President Biden when a Norwegian surveillance plane dropped a sonar buoy that activated the detonator.
Allegedly, the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged to prevent Germany from remaining neutral in the Russo-Ukraine War due to their dependence on Russian natural gas. The source suggested that Norway cooperated with the United States because sabotaging Russia’s pipelines would create more demand for Norwegian fossil fuels.
Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, demanded that the “White House must comment on all these facts.” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told reporters, "The world must find out the truth about who carried out this act of sabotage.”
Despite the Russian government and Hersh’s accusations, American officials have firmly denied that the United States was behind the bombing. The spokeswoman for the U.S. National Security Council, Adrienne Watson said, “This is utterly false and complete fiction.”
Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, declared, “It is pure disinformation that the United States was behind what transpired.”
Meanwhile, foreign news media outlets such as Reuters, Al-Jazeera, RT, Sputnik News, and Democracy Now! have reported extensively on the new Hersh revelations, while mainstream U.S. media such as The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times has not yet covered the story.
However, it is important to note that on February 7, 2022, three weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden declared, “If Russia invades… there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2.”
This controversy thrusts the United States’s commitment to its allies in a state of uncertainty and could reduce the country’s ability to corral support for the war in the near future.