On September 26, 2022, a massive explosion ripped through the
Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on the Baltic seabed, severing a
major natural gas connection and releasing colossal amounts of
methane. The US had long objected to the line, which runs from
Russia to Germany, urging Europe to buy more expensive US gas
instead.
A new report by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh lays
blame at the feet of US and German intelligence for a New York
Times article claiming it was Ukrainian terrorists, not US
Navy divers, who bombed the Nord Stream pipeline last September.
Hersh said it was part of a coordinated blackout of his expose of
Washingtons role in the attack.
There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to
ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any
serious leader would do: formally task the American intelligence
community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets,
and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea, Hersh
wrote on Wednesday.
According to a source within the intelligence community, the
president has not done so, nor will he, the journalist asserted.
Why not? Because he knows the answer.
Hersh pointed to a curious meeting in Washington earlier this
month between Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in which both
media and aides were almost totally absent.
There have been no statements or written understandings made
public since then by either government, but I was told by someone
with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion
of the pipeline expos and, as a result, certain elements in the
Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in
collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the
American and German press with an alternative version for the
destruction of Nord Stream 2, Hersh wrote.
In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was to
pulse the system in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had
ordered the pipelines destruction, he explained.
Indeed, The New York Times, which was one of two
newspapers that ran the story, has admitted in the past to letting
the CIA proofread certain stories before publishing them.
Along with the NYT, which published an article on March 7
claiming a pro-Ukrainian group might have been behind the pipeline
explosion, the German weekly Der Zeit published a
companion piece that same day claiming German investigative
officials had found a luxury yacht chartered by a group of
Ukrainians under false pretenses in the area of the explosions just
a few wee...