Ex-journalist Sy Hersh's Believe It or Don't Revisited: Nord Stream Edition

I published Seymour Hersh's Believe It or Don't on 8 April 2014 in response to Sy Hersh's attempt to use spurious “anonymous sources” to exonerate Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad for his use of sarin to kill over 1400 people, including hundreds of children, in East Ghouta on 21 August 2013. In spite of Hersh's determined defense of Assad, subsequent investigations conclusively proved Assad was behind those, and many more chemical murders in Syria. I revisited the question of Sy Hersh's incredible secret source again on 4 July 2017 when he again emerged citing “anonymous sources” to exhorate Assad for sarin use in Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April 2017. On 6 September 2017, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights' Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic concluded that a Syrian Air Force aircraft was responsible the sarin attack, saying “the Syrian air force used sarin in Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib, killing dozens, the majority of whom were women and children",[2] according to Wikipedia.

In Whatever happened to Seymour Hersh?, Prospect Magazine, 17 July, 2018, Steve Bloomfield compares Hersh's new style of “reporting” to the investigative journalism that made him famous:

Unlike his investigations into America’s chemical and biological warfare programme in the 1960s, there were no witnesses, no documents and no damning evidence. Instead he had quotes from a handful of anonymous former US officials. To Hersh’s band of supporters, this didn’t matter. It was Sy Hersh, the guy who uncovered My Lai and won a Pulitzer. It must be true.

A few days later, 22 Jul 2018, Daniella Peled, in an opinion piece in Haaretz, simply asked Why Hasn't Seymour Hersh's Syria War Crimes Denial Ended His Career?

Well, it seems that the task of cleaning out Hersh's stables is never quite done. Now ex-journalist Sy Hersh is again citing a single source as his sole proof that Joe Biden is responsible for blowing up the Northrom pipelines—just like Vladimir Putin said. As we will see, Sy Hersh's claims rest entirely on a single anonymous source that doesn't name names or cite independently verifiable facts. That being the case, the credibility of his story rests entirely on a belief in Hersh's integrity. So, its time to revisit Sy Hersh's “Believe It or Don't.” In his most recent attempt at newsmaking, ex-journalist Seymour Hersh issues an indictment of President Joe Biden for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline on Substack in a 8 Feb 2023 piece titled How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.

Unfortunately, Sy Hersh relies on a single anonymous source for his whole story. He begins by citing “a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning” of Navy divers, operating under the cover of mid-summer NATO exercise BALTOPS 22. The problem is that he doesn't ever cite another source. He does cite “the source” 13 times, making it clear that this story is based on a single source. What else can we deduct about The Source from what Sy Hersh reveals? 

After Hersh references “a source,” he speaks of “the source with direct knowledge of the process” of a series of top-secret meetings in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). (1)  So, The Source is given to be someone with very high-level access. Hersh tells us his opinion of the operation:

“This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”(2)

Hersh tells us The Source definitely thought blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline was a bad idea, as did many people in the government:

Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”(3)

So,  The Source was also privy to conversations of unnamed “working guys” in both the CIA and the State Department, and now he's responsible for the “political nightmare” of “an act of war” coming out, if he's to be believed.

Axiomatic to the theory that Biden is behind the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines is his warning before Russia invaded, on 7 Feb 2022, that if "Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” About that statement, The Source said:

“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”(4)

There are only a couple of problems with the theory that Biden's statement proves he was responsible for the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines eight months later: 1) Both pipelines had already been shut down before the explosion. 2) Biden never threatened Nord Stream 1, which was completely blown up. 3) Germany had agreed to shutdown Nord Stream 2 in case of invasion—this is what Biden was referring to, and 4) Nord Stream 2 wasn't destroyed by the sabotage. Only one of its pipelines was hit, along with both of the pipelines from Nord Stream 1, making the remaining pipeline all the more valuable. If this was an attempt to carry out a threat to end Nord Stream 2, it failed. In anycase, because of Biden's statement, Hersh tells us:

According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”(5)

Apparently, The Source knew what some senior officials in the CIA were saying. Why these senior officials think anyone would need Biden to confirm that the pentagon knows how to blow up a pipeline is less clear. Hersh continues:

Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”(6)

Nevermind The Source finds Russia's surveillance of the Baltic Sea praiseworthy, apparently he's also a legal expert. Isn't this something Sy Hersh should have verified independently? Instead, he tell us:

The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”(7)

The Source was privy to the director of the CIA giving the go-ahead on a top secret operation? This is high-level indeed! How many people heard Burns say "Do it"? The director of the CIA is the only person named by The Source as being involved in the pipeline sabotage. Isn't he afraid of being exposed? 

“He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.(8)

Apparently, Sy Hersh thinks The Source's opinion of NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg is worth quoting. 

“They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said.(9)

Sy Hersh relies on The Source to confirm there are many expert sailors and divers in Norway, as if that amounts to circumstantial evidence they were involved in the pipeline explosion. He also offers us his opinion of the Norwegian attitude towards Russians. Is he an expert on that too? 

“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.(10)

So, apparently they weren't planning on using Norwegian divers after all. Good thing The Source is in tight with the community of divers the CIA tells to be on standby whenever a a big underwater operation is in the works. 

The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me.(11)

So, The Source also knew what the Norwegians and Americans told some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden.

“The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.(12)

The use of the pronoun “we” here certainly puts The Source at the middle of the action.

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.”(13)

Finally, Sy Hersh ends by quoting The Source one more time:

“The only flaw was the decision to do it.” 

But if we are to believe The Source, he was one of the high level “we” that accomplished the dastardly deed, and afterwards, instead of coming forward as a forthright whistle blower and naming names in a congressional hearing or other official proceeding, goes sculking off to Sy Hersh to offer his opinions on everything from Norway's hatred of Russia to the size of Biden's balls, but telling “all” off the record, on the Q-T, and very huss-huss. Really? What kind of story is that? Why doesn't Sy Hersh offer us anything like a shred of evidence? I guess you just have to believe it, or don't.

Clay Claiborne

25 February 2023

More of my exposures of ex-journalist Seymour Hersh:

9  Dec 2013 Whose Seymour Hersh? 

8  Apr 2014 Seymour Hersh's Believe It or Don't

10 Apr 2014 Seymour Hersh's chemical weapons fetish

12 Apr 2014 Mỹ Lai and Sy Hersh, a Reappraisal

13 Apr 2014 After Hersh lays smoke screen, Assad lobes gas bombs

23 Apr 2014 How Seymour Hersh confuses Syria with Libya

4  Jul 2017 Sy Hersh's incredible secret source

6  Jul 2017 Syria, Seymour Hersh and the Sarin denialists

7  Jul 2017 Seymour Hersh exposes Russian & Syrian lies about sarin attack

10 Jul 2017 Russia admits sarin used in spite of Sy Hersh fantasy

21 Jun 2018 Seymour Hersh admits to racist cover up in his Mỹ Lai story on @DemocracyNow

How a German MP reveals @DemocracyNow's support for Russia in Ukraine

On its January 25th show, under a segment with the title  "As Germany & U.S. Agree on Tanks for Ukraine, German MP Accuses U.S. of Pushing Berlin into Proxy War," Democracy Now brought on a German MP to give us the perspective of European socialists on Russia's war against Ukraine. They did so without telling their audience that she was well known as a Putin mouthpiece in Germany. They left that task to me.

Amy Goodman introduced their guest as follows:

For more, we speak with lawmaker Sevim Dağdelen, a member of the Left Party in the German parliament who says the majority of the German public wants more diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. “It concerns me a lot that many so-called progressives in the United States are supporting this line by the Biden administration to push Germany more and more into this proxy war,” says Dağdelen.

Dağdelen then goes on to repeat well-worn Kremlin propaganda about how they had to invade Ukraine because of NATO expansion, and because they are all Nazis, as if this was a representative view of progressives in Europe.

One might get a clue that she has more than a dog in that fight when she fastened on like this: 

Well, I really have to warn: All these illusionists, all these people who are fantasizing about a victory against Russia, they are underestimating Russia like Napoleon and Hitler did in the past. And, you know, it’s a nuclear — the most powerful nuclear power in the world. And there is no way to win a war, a conventional war, against such a nuclear power.

Really? Tell that to the Vietnamese. And the Iraqis, and the Afghans-twice-against two nuclear powers! No way to win a war of independence against a nuclear power? This is a very strange thing to be preached by a leftist. Fortunately, history proves her wrong. As to the lesson from history that she would have us draw—that Russia always wins—it should be enough to point out that against both Napoleon and Hitler, Russia had both the moral and military advantage of being the country being invaded, plus it had Ukrainians on its side. Today, none of that applies.

This piece in Tagesspiegel was published just days before Putin invaded Ukraine, and it gives us a very different perspective on Dağdelen than the one Democracy Now would want us to have. The translation from the original Germany is via Google:

Putin's left-back: MPs from the left show understanding for the Kremlin

Bundestag deputies Sevim Dagdelen and Sahra Wagenknecht defend the Kremlin's policy. This is met with criticism in the Left Party.

By Claudia von Salzen
02/21/2022, 4:55 p.m

The left-wing member of the Bundestag Sevim Dagdelen appeared at a rally at the Brandenburg Gate last Friday. "Security for Russia is security for our country" was the motto of the event to which Peace Coordination Berlin had invited. According to the call for the rally, Russia feels "rightly threatened" by NATO.

Dagdelen conveyed the "greetings of solidarity" to her faction, and then in a 20-minute speech settled accounts with the USA and NATO, which she accused of "warmongering and warmongering". Dagdelen accused the German media of spreading "the US secret service's tall tales" and asked: "Yes, are we in a totalitarian state?"

At the same time, the left-wing deputy defended the Russian troop deployment on the border with Ukraine. Russia reacted because Ukraine wanted to recapture eastern Ukraine militarily. The Kremlin had to be careful "if there was an attack on the Donbass, on the Russian minorities there", "and maybe even on Crimea."

She said this two days before Russian tanks crossed the border between Belarus and Ukraine in their failed attempt to take Kyiv. Tagesspiegel continues:

In doing so, the left-wing politician reflects pretty much the reading of the events disseminated by the Russian state media. She did not say a word about the deployment of more than 100,000 soldiers on Ukraine's borders. On the other hand, Dagdelen accused the USA of having an interest in the escalation: The Americans "do not care whether Ukrainians die or Russians die." They are only concerned with asserting their geopolitical interests.

Salzen notes that not only is Dağdelen pro-Putin with regards to Ukraine, she has a long history of promoting Putin propaganda:

However, Dagdelen does not advocate a policy of equidistance to the governments in Washington and Moscow. From their point of view, such a step does not go far enough. The equidistance slogan serves “to trivialize the NATO armament”. Dagdelen is one of those within the left-wing faction who have repeatedly loudly defended the Kremlin's policies. After the Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned with the chemical warfare agent Novichok in Great Britain in 2018, Dagdelen addressed a parliamentary question to the federal government. She took over all the questions from the Russian government.

Democracy Now has every right to put Sevim Dağdelen, or any other Putin propagandist, on its show. After all, we celebrate the freedom of the press in the US. But they should make it clear whose views they are promoting. I suspect they imported a Swedish MP because their usual crop of tankies, such as Medea Benjamin, have become overexposed. Well, this fresh face is promoting the same old Putin propaganda.

Clay Claiborne

5 February 2023