Nord Stream 2: it was the USA after all
Reporter legend Seymour Hersh reports on his blog who, according to his research, is really behind the attack on the German-Russian Nord Stream pipeline. His text immediately provokes controversy. And yet it seems to be conclusive. This was the most-read “Cicero” article in February.
Sy Hersh is a legend. What the now 85-year-old investigative journalist and former author of the New Yorker magazine says or - even worse - writes carries weight. Even today. Hersh's role in the self-cleansing powers of American democracy cannot be overestimated. Perhaps it is only comparable to that of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the former Watergate investigators of 1972.
Seymour Myron Hersh, the full name of the top journalist born in Chicago in 1937, not only wrote history with his essays, reports and books, as they say, but he became history himself. Hersh researched the Israeli nuclear weapons program and wrote about the Gulf War Syndrome. But his research into the massacre in My Lai, Vietnam , which, together with the unforgettable photos by Nick Ut, marked the beginning of the end of the American adventure in Indochina, is still truly legendary today. Even a tough guy like Richard Nixon could not fight back against this news.
And his series of articles on the Abu Ghraib torture prison was just as groundbreaking as it was shocking. He first wrote them for the New Yorker in 2003. A year later, they were published as a book under the title "Chain of Command" and became a bestseller. In short, there is hardly a dirty trick in the second half of the "American Century" once so highly praised by Henry Luce that Hersh didn't get to the bottom of at some point.
On Biden's orders
It is therefore particularly surprising that this Sy Hersh, of all people, published a text on his own blog on Wednesday in which he attributed direct responsibility for the blowing up of the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline to the USA - or more precisely, to US Navy deep-sea divers: "Last June, Navy divers operating under the guise of a widely publicised NATO mid-summer exercise called BALTOPS 22 planted the remote-controlled explosives that destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines three months later, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning," writes Hersh in an initially very graphic report on the background to the attack on the German energy infrastructure, which still poses numerous puzzles to this day.
According to Hersh's research , President Biden, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Victoria Nuland , Under Secretary of State for Policy, had previously repeatedly spoken out clearly against Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. Both run from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, 750 miles under the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm, before finally returning to the dry surface in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
According to Hersh, Biden's decision to blow up the pipelines was made after more than nine months of top-secret debates about how best to achieve this goal. The issue was not so much "if" but rather "how" of the subsequent operation. According to Hersh, the US administration feared from the outset that Germany, like the rest of Europe, could become increasingly dependent on cheap Russian natural gas - while its dependence on America would decrease.
The doubts are obvious
This article hit like a bomb. And not because the transfer of blame from Russia to the USA was particularly new in terms of journalism. An insightful article appeared in the Washington Post last December , which gave countless clues as to why it was probably not the Russians who blew up the pipes. And even the Federal Prosecutor's Office announced just last week that it had no evidence of Russian perpetrators. No, what really caused a stir about yesterday's article was the author himself: Seymour Myron Hersh. Did he know more than the others again?
In Germany, this seems almost unimaginable. And so, since yesterday, numerous media outlets have been falling over themselves to publish official voices from the USA that raise doubts about Hersh's version of the story: the White House, as we can now hear from Bayerischer Rundfunk, Die Welt and Deutschlandfunk , has rejected the investigative reporter's report . Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, is prominently quoted as saying in various newspapers and online media.
What looks like one person is copying from another is actually just a sentence from Hersh's own text. He makes no secret of the fact that, as a good journalist, he also asked the White House for a statement in an email and subsequently received the above-mentioned response.
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