There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of Seymour Hersh’s claim that U.S. Navy divers planted explosives and destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines. Among other things, if the U.S. was secretly planning to attack the pipelines in late September 2022, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for the CIA to send a warning to Germany in June that someone might be trying to attack the pipelines. That would be like calling up a bank and warning about the risk of robberies three months before you come through the door in a ski mask.
Several defense and intelligence experts have pointed out aspects of Hersh’s report that don’t add up. Over the years, many reporters, including our Dan McLaughlin, have laid out how Hersh’s stories can’t be verified.
John Schindler scoffed, “This was allegedly a vast, multi-agency, multi-national conspiracy with surely at least hundreds of people ‘read on’ for, yet nobody talked (not even the very leaky Biden WH) — except one person who gave the story to the 85-year-old conspiracy theorist.”
But let me step back and point out one other odd aspect of Hersh’s account. In his version of events, President Joe Biden went from lifting all sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in mid May 2021 to preparing to destroy it in November, in what everyone involved recognized was a unilateral and preemptive act of war against Russia. In fact, since the whole point of the pipeline was to double the amount of natural gas available to Germany, it could also be construed as an act of war against Germany, one of our NATO allies.
That sounds particularly erratic, even by the standards of Joe Biden.
In fact, in June 2021, Biden met with Putin and declared, “The tone of the entire meetings — I guess it was a total of four hours — was — was good, positive. . . . It’s clearly not in anybody’s interest — your country’s or mine — for us to be in a situation where we’re in a new Cold War. And I truly believe he thinks that — he understands that.” (Go figure, the near-octogenarian did not accurately read the intentions of the former KGB lieutenant colonel.) For most of Biden’s first year in office, he and his top advisors emphasized their desire for a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia. Authorizing a secret operation to plant explosives on a pipeline between a U.S. ally and a country with nearly 6,000 nuclear weapons is not particularly stable or predictable.
The man who opposed the raid on Osama bin Laden because it was too risky, who said Russia might not be held accountable if there was only a “minor incursion” into Ukraine, and who has hemmed and hawed about sending various weapons systems to Ukraine, suddenly wanted to blow up a pipeline between Germany and Russia? The same Joe Biden who oversaw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan was itching to launch a unilateral attack against Russian critical infrastructure?
I know Biden critics will say the president is capable of anything, but does that sound like the Joe Biden we know?