Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh claims US Navy behind Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosion

WASHINGTON — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has alleged US Navy divers laid bombs that destroyed the Nord Stream 2 pure gas pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea last September, drawing a denial from the Pentagon Wednesday.

Hersh, who scooped journalism’s prime award higher than 5 a very long time prior to now for exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in 1968, cited an unnamed provide in reporting on Substack that Americans planted remotely triggered explosives that wrecked three of the 4 pipelines constructed to carry pure gas from Russia to Europe.

Hersh, 85, went on to say that the Navy carried out the operation beneath the quilt of a NATO maritime practice, BALTOPS 22.

In a short assertion, Pentagon spokesman Marine Corps Lt. Col. Garron J. Garn suggested The Post “the United States was not involved in the Nord Stream explosion,” reiterating the Defense Department’s response to the similar question in October.

Swedish officers suspected the blasts had been the outcomes of “gross sabotage,” and some Western officers had been quick accountable the assaults on Moscow as a result of it blocked gas offers to Europe in response to sanctions over last 12 months’s invasion of Ukraine.

“These are deliberate actions, not an accident,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on the time. “The situation is as serious as it gets.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in response to Hersh’s report that Moscow has “repeatedly expressed” its notion that the US and NATO had been involved inside the explosions.

Prior to the invasion, President Biden had threatened that the Nord Stream 2 problem connecting Russia and Germany wouldn’t switch forward if an assault handed off, inflicting some to suspect US involvement when the pipelines exploded seven months later.

“If Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again — then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Biden said on Feb. 7, 2022. “We will bring an end to it.”

While Germany initially resisted canceling the problem, it halted the pipeline’s certification two days sooner than the Russian invasion in a last-ditch effort to forestall the wrestle.

Hersh’s report instructed Biden ordered the explosions to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin from “weaponiz[ing] natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions,” as Germany — and the rest of Europe — relied carefully on Russia for pure gas.

Without the pipelines, Europe may very well be compelled to complete its reliance on Moscow, ravenous Russia of billions of {{dollars}} that may have been contributed to its wrestle effort, the report alleged.

Hersh, a former reporter for the Associated Press and New York Times along with a longtime contributor to the New Yorker, quoted White House spokesperson Adrienne Watson as calling his report “false and complete fiction.” Hersh moreover quoted CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp, who wrote in an e mail: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Hersh beforehand drew the wrath of the US authorities when he claimed in a 2013 interview that the official story of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was “one big lie.”

Two years later, Hersh printed an account inside the London Review of Books that claimed the Al Qaeda kingpin was a prisoner of Pakistani authorities on the time he was killed and that the CIA was tipped off to his whereabouts by a member of the nation’s extremely efficient intelligence service — pretty than bin Laden’s courier, as a result of the Obama administration claimed.

Then-White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Hersh’s report was “riddled with inaccuracy and outright falsehoods,” whereas former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell suggested CBS News on the time that he “got a third of the way through [the article] and I stopped because every sentence I was reading was wrong.”