Sy Hersh Swings and Misses Big

Careless claims that the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipelines cover for the real scandals of the Biden administration

by Lee Smith 

The most astounding claim in the blockbuster new article from Seymour Hersh alleging that the U.S. is responsible for sabotaging two of Russia’s natural gas pipelines is that the Biden administration is led by a no-nonsense crew of highly capable tacticians. Forget what you’ve heard about secret classified documents turning up in various Biden residences; in Hersh’s telling the Biden White House practices exceptional operational security.

And it would need to, because according to the single anonymous source on whom Hersh bases his piece, the Russians have “superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.” Pulling off a plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines between Germany and Russia would require not only vision and leadership, but sophisticated cover. So what kind of highly advanced stealth technology did the Biden team employ to cloak the underwater operation? In fact, they did just the opposite. They hid the plot to start World War III in plain sight.

According to the source, who had “direct knowledge of the operational planning,” writes Hersh, a team of U.S. Navy divers planted the explosives in June 2022 during an annual NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea while tens of thousands of naval personnel from allied countries on site and hundreds of thousands more were monitoring the exercise remotely. That is, according to Hersh’s source, Team Biden thwarted the Russians’ “superb surveillance” by planting explosives before the eyes of an audience of military and intelligence officials from European countries that depend on the Russian gas carried through the pipelines.

It was a brilliant plan, to be sure, but according to Hersh’s source, Biden was still worried: If the pipelines blew up just 48 hours after NATO had conducted an enormous joint exercise in exactly the same place, the Russians might get suspicious. So the President asked for a mechanism that would allow him to detonate the explosives at a later date. According to Hersh’s source, it was something of a chore for a military with limitless resources to devise a way to blow something up later from somewhere else. But it was precisely that innovation that would keep Putin from suspecting U.S. involvement when the pipelines blew up four months after NATO had conducted a massive exercise in exactly the same place where the pipelines were sabotaged.

The White House has called Hersh’s story an “utterly false and complete fiction” while a Russian spokesperson said in response to the piece that Moscow has “repeatedly expressed” its conviction that the U.S. and NATO were responsible. Maybe the U.S. really did sabotage Russian pipelines, but it sure didn’t happen the way Hersh describes it. Maybe it was the Russians who did it to themselves, or perhaps it was those with seemingly the strongest motive for hitting Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainians. There is not enough evidence yet to know. But we do know enough about Biden’s public record to judge the story’s premise, never mind its absurd details, as questionable.

As Vice President, Biden warned against killing Osama bin Laden, even with an elite Navy SEAL team tasked for the mission. But as president he ordered Navy regulars to blow up the piggy bank of a state with a large nuclear arsenal? Biden let a Chinese spy balloon tour the American homeland, crossing over several sensitive sites, but he sucker-punched Putin in Russia’s backyard? Hard as it may be to believe, the big takeaway from the piece is just that: Joe Biden is one tough hombre. To conclude, Hersh writes:

The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls.He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

Hersh’s source wanted readers to believe that despite seeming like a pensioner in steep cognitive decline, Biden is such a hard-charging defender of democracy that he bested even Putin in the black arts. Americans, thank your lucky stars that your security is in the rough-hewn hands of Dark Brandon.

One former senior intelligence official I spoke with described the Hersh piece as “Steele Dossier-quality garbage.” Journalists say the Hersh story was rejected by several publications before he decided to publish it on his own Substack. The issue was apparently that the story was single-sourced, but the real problem seems to be something else.

Hersh has enjoyed an impressive journalistic career that includes a Pulitzer Prize for his 1968 reporting on the My Lai massacre, when U.S. soldiers slaughtered Vietnamese civilians. He is also notorious for getting spun up by his sources. Most notably, he fell for forged documents claiming that John Kennedy bought Marilyn Monroe’s silence about their alleged affair. Hersh was planning to use them for his book The Dark Side of Camelot but luckily for him questions about the documents’ authenticity surfaced before publication and he had time to withdraw the sections based on them.

His most charitable colleagues like to distinguish between the hard-working veteran reporter and the man who seems incapable of stopping himself from making sensational claims unsupported by evidence. For instance, shortly after The New Yorker published his deeply reported expose about U.S. military personnel torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib, Hersh mesmerized an ACLU audience saying he’d only told half the story — the Pentagon had videotapes of American soldiers sodomizing young boys at the prison. He never followed up with a written report to corroborate those charges. And so according to this interpretation of his two modes, Hersh unplugged is a freewheeling and sometimes parodic version of the indefatigable investigative journalist who’s at his best when accompanied by a rigorous editorial process.

But that’s not entirely accurate. Some of Hersh’s most bizarre reports were published in The New Yorker, a publication once recognized as America’s most prestigious magazine. In a 2008 article, for instance, Hersh questioned whether the Israelis really bombed a Syrian nuclear facility the year before, a fact corroborated by virtually everyone in the world aside from the Syrian government. The Israelis bombed something, concluded Hersh, but probably not a nuclear facility, at least not according to his sources.

The Lebanese press portrayed him as an asset of Syrian intelligence and even identified who in Damascus controlled him, facts that apparently went unnoticed by The New Yorker’s famed fact-checking department. In a 2007 New Yorker article, Hersh reported that Vice President Dick Cheney and Saudi Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan backed Al Qaeda-linked extremist groups to wage terror operations. One of Hersh’s sources was a former Lebanese minister named Michel Samaha, a pro-Syrian operative who a few years after the story was published was arrested in Lebanon for arranging Al Qaeda-linked terror operations on behalf of Syrian intelligence services. Damascus, it seems, had used Hersh to give cover to its own murderous campaign.