Seymour Hersh in Conversation. On U.S. Sabotage of Nord Stream Pipelines

Transcript

On March 6, Seymour “Sy” Hersh spoke about the Nord Stream explosion on September 26, 2022. He reveals in his substack how it was the result of Washington Administration authorizing C4 explosives be planted on the pipelines in June under the cover of a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea, and then setting them off using a signal from a sonar buoy dropped on the surface. Hersh discusses the discussion of the sabotage at the UN, the decline of his brand of journalism in mainstream media and more!

Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh is an investigative journalist and a political writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970 for exposing the My Lai massacre and the cover-up. At the New York Times he covered the Watergate scandal, the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA’s program on Domestic spying. He has written eleven books and has also won a record five George Polk awards, and two National Magazine Awards.

Select quotes from the interview:

“When they’re talking about two dark ships, they’re talking about images, electronic pulses. And I can tell you that, on a mission like this – I’ve actually asked that question – open-source becomes a great asset, because you can make up anything.

“People in the intelligence community, that I know of, this is – the NSA, the National Security Agency was involved in this too, the mission to build – to give the President an option to bomb the pipelines. They could have recreated a major Japanese task force scheming towards Hawaii, you know, for Pearl Harbor, you know. They could have created anything they wanted in the water. So, when you start talking about, ‘They couldn’t track this and they couldn’t track that,’ they’re just ignoring the possibility that there are people that know exactly what an open-source intelligence does. And rather than ignore it, you use it as part of a cover. Of course he didn’t have his transponder on, of course he wasn’t seen, of course the ship, the Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper, whatever it was – it could have been squawking on a different frequency. It turns out, when you’re given a code, detonating code, you have to punch in the code. But you can punch in any code in an emergency, you don’t have to punch in your own. You could fake it up, it’s that simple.”

…

” I’ve been in this business for 50 or 60 years and I’ve never had anybody that – who talked to me ever get in trouble.”

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“You know, the President, when he went to Kyiv he took a walk in mid-day. And you know what happened? The bombing alarm signal, the sirens that indicated a Russian bombing was coming, a Russian attack – their warning signal, I guess, I forget. In World War II – I don’t know what they called it – you know, the sirens would ring. And it hadn’t rung in 10 days before, and it – I know for a few days afterwards it hadn’t rung. But when they were taking the walk, the warning signals came on of an imminent air attack. And you know what I say? I say, if I’d been a reporter I would have said to the White House, ‘Did you guys set it up so it rang when he was walking in mid-day in the middle of Kyiv so he could look more heroic?’ But that’s what I basically – that’s the only explanation I have for it. Because there was no air raid. So, here comes all these air raid sirens and the press all writes about it. It’s amazing.”

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“If I had a chance to ask a question of Mr. Biden…I would just say…’why don’t you just test the American intelligence community to do a deep study and tell you who did it?’ Because we monitor everything, we could find out who did it. You could ask the guy who runs the intelligence – for the Director of National Intelligence – has access to everything. Everything: covert, non-covert, signals. The CIA has a branch called the Directorate of Intelligence that does great work. And another lower level if you have a group in the field like there was in Norway, at that time there/s a special unit in the CIA that – and an agency that monitors even local phone calls to make sure they’re still covert, they’re not being exposed. Or somebody’s neighbour is saying there’s something funny going down, you know, across the street. Of course they’re on an island, but still. Why didn’t they ask that question?”

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“Well, of course they’re going to want to downplay it because they obviously know what happened and can’t admit they know. The whole purpose of – you have to know historically, since the Kennedy days there’s been an enormous amount of worry of America in the Cold War in our days of containment – that was the big theory, containment – containing the evil spread of communism or the spread of evil communism. And so, they’ve always been worried about the enormous reserves of Russian gas and oil that they were selling to Western Europe even back then. And pipelines were just beginning to go into Europe and there was a lot of stuff coming through Ukraine. And there was a lot of worry – constantly phrased, again and again – about Russia weaponizing its gas, cheap gas, and oil for sale to Germany and Europe in order to get some leverage with them. And maybe it diminished the power of NATO, diminished the cohesiveness. Western Europe has no gas or oil, they get raw materials from elsewhere.”

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“In Stalingrad, the last Stalingrad, the Russians lost 2,400 dead and wounded every four hours and they beat Germany, the Nazis then. They’re not going to lose that war, they’re not going to win that war. And so, I think by Fall that was clear to everybody and I think Biden and his zeal to keep the war going because it was politically useful to him. Americans, we love our Presidents at war. I think at that point he chose to destroy the pipeline so that Chancellor Scholz, who controls – and that’s the second pipeline called Nord Stream 2 – he controlled – he had shut it down at the request from us, he sanctioned it. It was full of gas, 750 miles of methane gas, that’s why there was such a big outpouring of gas. It hadn’t started delivering yet, it was just frozen. He had the – or the chance to unfreeze it. I think Biden decided to take that away from him. And I think, ultimately, that’s going to be the big problem for Biden, particularly maybe next winter if it’s a bad winter.”

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“The politics of the destruction of the gas line, whether it’s an act of war or what, but it was a slap in the face of Europe. Saying, you know, ‘If you’re not going to play ball with me and Ukraine –’ says the President, ‘–I don’t care what happens there.’ ‘I don’t care if it’s going to be harder to keep your people wealthy and warm,’ basically that’s what he’s done. And that’s the real input of the story.”

…

“It’s as if what I hear from people who write me, who read stuff from the Substack and other places, is that they understood that this kind of journalism did exist and has existed before. They just weren’t seeing enough of it. I mean, we actually had a story that the New York Times ran on Page 1 for two days about two or three years ago when the Afghan War was still going on. And there were occasions where the Aghans would shoot an American, because they were very angry at what happened there. The Afghan army wasn’t happy with our total control of most things there. And so, one of the stories said that Afghan soldiers – quoting anonymous sources, speaking of anonymous sources – that the Kremlin was paying bounties to Afghan soldiers that killed an American GI on duty in Afghanistan. And that story disappeared because it was a complete fraud. But when you run that kind of stuff, you really lose credibility, you know, that kind of madness.”

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“I guess they think it doesn’t – you know, Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, wouldn’t go to a meeting with his peers in China because of a balloon….Weather balloon or whatever it was. I mean, a balloon? He cancelled a meeting because he was – they’re just, you know… They’re just children. And this is a really serious business. And I’m sorry, about the President’s leadership isn’t there on this issue.”

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“And so, I come to My Lai 10 years later as a police reporter and I worked for the United Press covering a State House in South Dakota which was fun. I’d never been there. I spent the winter in South Dakota. And then I worked for the AP in Chicago where I had a great time. And then, in Washington where I had covered the War. Covered the Pentagon. And then, a couple years later I do My Lai. And I’m 11 years out of college. I know no rich people. And I do this story sticking two fingers to the My Lai story about a massacre that was covered up by everybody: Kissinger, Nixon, you name ‘em. And Westmoreland, who ran the War. I’m sticking two fingers in the eye of a sitting president, Richard Nixon. And in many countries in the world, I would’ve been in a gulag for doing that. Not here.”