Translation of the Sy Hersh German interview
"I" is for the interviewer questions, "H" is Hersh's replies.
Interview with Seymour Hersh: Joe Biden blew up Nord Stream because he didn't trust Germany
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published a controversial investigation into the Nord Stream attack. We talked to him. An interview.
Interviewer: Fabian Scheidler
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published an investigation showing that the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines were initiated by the US government with the support of Norway. The U.S. government and the CIA have denied his account at Hersh's request. In many media outlets, Hersh has been accused of failing to disclose his anonymous source, so his claims cannot be verified. The criticism was also formulated that the research was not consistent. The Berlin publicist Fabian Scheidler spoke to Seymour Hersh for the Berliner Zeitung.
I: Mr. Hersh, please explain your findings in detail. According to your source, what exactly happened, who was involved in the Nord Stream attack and what were the motives?
H: It was a story that cried out to be told. At the end of September 2022, eight bombs were to be detonated near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, six of which went off, in an area where it is quite flat. They destroyed three of Nord Stream 1 and 2's four major pipelines. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline has supplied Germany and other parts of Europe with very cheap natural gas for many years. And then it was blown up, as was Nord Stream 2, and the question was who did it and why. On February 7, 2022, just over two weeks before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden said at a White House press conference he held with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the US would stop Nord Stream.
Biden said: "If Russia invades, there will be no more Nord Stream 2, we will put an end to the project." And when a reporter asked how exactly he intended to do that, since the project was mainly under German control, Biden said only: "I promise that we will be able to do it."
His deputy secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, who was deeply involved in the events of the Maidan revolution in 2014, had made similar comments a few weeks earlier.
I: They say that the decision to shut down the pipeline was made even earlier by President Biden. You write in your report that in December 2021, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of the newly formed task force of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the State Department and the Treasury Department. They write: "Sullivan wanted the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines."
H: This group was originally convened to study the problem. They met in a very secret office. Right next to the White House there is an office building, the Executive Office Building, it is connected underground by a tunnel to the White House. And at the top is an office for a secret external group of consultants called the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. I mentioned this to signal to people in the White House that I have information. So the meeting was called to examine what we would do if Russia went to war.
That was three months before the war, before Christmas 2021. It was a high-level group that probably had a different name, I just called it "Interagency Group", I don't know the official name, if there was one. They were the CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitors and intercepts communications, the State Department and the Treasury Department, which provides money. And probably a few other organizations that were involved. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were also represented. It was about making recommendations on how to stop Russia, either with reversible measures such as further sanctions and economic pressure, or with irreversible, "kinetic" measures, such as demolitions.
I don't want to go into the details here and not talk about a specific meeting because I have to protect my source. I don't know how many people participated, you understand what I mean?
I: In your article, you wrote that the CIA task force reported to Sullivan's Interagency Group in early 2022, saying, quote, "We have a way to blow up the pipelines."
H: They had a way. There were people there who knew what we in America call "mine warfare." In the United States Navy there are units dealing with submarines, there is also a command for nuclear technology. And there is a mine squad. The field of underwater mines is very important, and we have trained specialists for it. A central location for their education is a small resort town called Panama City in the middle of nowhere in Florida. We train very good people there and deploy them. Underwater mining specialists are of great importance, for example to clear blocked entrances to ports and to blow up things that stand in the way. You can also blow up a particular country's underwater oil pipelines. It's not always good things they do, but they work absolutely in secret.
For the group in the White House, it was clear that they could blow up the pipelines. There's an explosive called C4 that's incredibly potent, especially at the amount they use. It can be controlled remotely with underwater sonar devices. These sonar devices emit signals at low frequencies. So it was possible, and this was communicated to the White House in early January, because two or three weeks later, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said we could do it. I think that was on January 20. And then the President, when he held the press conference together with the German Chancellor on February 7, 2022, also said that we could do it.
The German chancellor did not say anything concrete at the time, he was very vague. One question I'd like to ask Scholz if I were chairing a parliamentary hearing is this: Did Joe Biden tell you about it? Did he tell you then why he was so confident that he could destroy the pipeline? We as Americans didn't have a plan at the time, but we knew we had the ability to do it.
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| Scholz and Biden |
I: You write that Norway played a role. To what extent was the country involved – and why should the Norwegians do this?
H: Norway is a great seafaring nation, and they have energy sources at depth. They are also keen to increase their natural gas supplies to Western Europe and Germany. And that's what they've done, they've increased their exports. So why shouldn't they join forces with the US for economic reasons? In Norway, there is also a strong hostility towards Russia.
I: In your article, you write that the Norwegian secret service and navy were involved. They also say that Sweden and Denmark were informed in some way, but did not learn everything.
H: I was told: they did what they did, and they knew what they were doing, and they understood what was going on, but maybe no one ever said "yes." I've worked a lot on this topic with the people I've talked to. In any case, in order for this mission to be carried out, the Norwegians had to find the right place. The divers, who were trained in Panama City, were able to dive up to 100 meters deep without heavy equipment. The Norwegians found us a spot off the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, which was only 260 feet (about 80 meters) deep, so that they could operate there.
The divers had to slowly return upwards, there was a decompression chamber, and we used a Norwegian submarine hunter. Only two divers were used for the four pipelines. One problem was how to deal with the people who monitor the Baltic Sea. The Baltic Sea is monitored very thoroughly, there is a lot of freely available data, so we took care of it, there were three or four different people for it. And what was done then is quite simple. For 21 years, our Sixth Fleet, which controls the Mediterranean and also the Baltic Sea, has been conducting an exercise for the NATO navies in the Baltic Sea every summer (BALTOPS, editor's note). We are sending an aircraft carrier and other large ships to these exercises. And for the first time in history, the NATO operation in the Baltics had a new program. A twelve-day mine dropping and detection exercise should be conducted. A number of nations sent out mining teams, one group dropped a mine, and another group of mines went in search and blew it up.
So there was a time when things blew up, and that time allowed the deep-sea divers who attached the mines to the pipelines to operate. The two pipelines are about a mile apart, they lie a little under the silt on the seabed, but they are not difficult to reach, and the divers had practiced it. It only took a few hours to place the bombs.
I: So that was in June 2022?
H: Yes, they did towards the end of the exercise. But at the last minute, the White House got nervous. The president said he was afraid to do it. He changed his mind and gave new orders, so that it was possible to detonate the bombs remotely at any time. You do this with a normal sonar, a product of Raytheon by the way, you fly over the spot and drop a cylinder. It sends a low-frequency signal, you can describe it as a flute tone, you can set different frequencies.
The fear, however, was that the bombs would not work if they remained in the water for too long, which was indeed the case with two bombs. So there was concern within the group about finding the right remedy, and we actually had to turn to other intelligence agencies that I deliberately didn't write about.
I: And what happened then? The explosives were placed and a way was found to control them remotely.
H: Joe Biden decided back in June not to blow them up, it was five months after the war began. But in September, he ordered it to be done. The operational staff, the people who do "kinetic" things for the United States, they do what the president says, and they initially thought this was a useful weapon to use in negotiations. But at some point, after the Russians invaded and then, when the operation was completed, the whole thing became increasingly repugnant to the people who carried it out. These are people who work in top positions in the secret services and are well trained. They turned against the project, they thought it was crazy.
Shortly after the attack, after they had done what they had been ordered, there was a lot of anger among those involved about the operation and rejection. That's one of the reasons I learned so much. And I'm going to tell you something else. The people in America and Europe who are building pipelines know what happened. I will tell you something important. The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story. I didn't learn the story from them, but I quickly learned that they know.
I: Let us return to this situation in June of last year. President Joe Biden decided not to do it directly and postponed it.
H: Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a press conference a few days after the pipelines blew up that Putin had been deprived of a major power factor. He said the destruction of the pipelines was a tremendous opportunity – a chance to deprive Russia of the opportunity to use the pipelines as a weapon. The point was that Russia could no longer put pressure on Western Europe to end US support in the Ukraine war. The fear was that Western Europe would no longer participate.
I think the reason for this decision was that the war was not going well for the West and they were afraid of the approaching winter. Nord Stream 2 was put on hold by Germany itself, not by international sanctions, and the US was afraid that Germany would lift the sanctions because of a cold winter.
I: What do you think are the motives for the attack? The US government was against the pipeline for many reasons. Some say she was against it because she wanted to weaken Russia or to weaken relations between Russia and Western Europe, especially Germany. But perhaps also to weaken the German economy, which is a competitor of the US economy. High gas prices have caused companies to migrate to the US. What is your view of the motives of the US government?
H: I don't think they thought it through thoroughly. I know that sounds strange. I don't think Secretary Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers. There are certainly people in the American economy who like the idea of us becoming more competitive. We sell liquefied natural gas (LNG) with extremely high profits, we make a lot of money from it.
I'm sure there were some people who thought, 'Boy, this is going to give the American economy a long-term boost.' But in the White House, I think, they were always obsessed with re-election, and they wanted to win the war, they wanted to win a victory, they wanted Ukraine to somehow magically win. There might be some people who think that maybe it's better for our economy if the German economy is weak, but that's crazy. I think we've gotten caught up in something that's not going to work, the war isn't going to end well for this government.
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| Still waiting for the big American environmental groups linked to the Democratic party to speak out against Biden. He created the single biggest release of climate-damaging methane ever recorded, the United Nations Environment Programme has reported. | |
I: How do you think this war could end?
H: It doesn't matter what I think. What I do know is that there is no way this war is going to end the way we want it to, and I don't know what we're going to do if we look further into the future. It scares me that the president was willing to do that. And the people who carried out this mission believed that the president was aware of what he was doing to the people of Germany, that he was punishing them for a war that was not going well. And in the long run, this will not only damage his reputation as president, but also be very damaging politically. It will be a stigma for the US.
The White House feared that it might be in a losing position, that Germany and Western Europe would no longer supply the weapons we wanted, and that the German chancellor might put the pipeline back into operation – that was a big concern in Washington. I would ask Chancellor Scholz a lot of questions. I would ask him what he learned in February when he was with the President. The operation was top secret and the president was not supposed to tell anyone about our ability, but he likes to chat, he sometimes says things he shouldn't say.
I: Your story was reported rather cautiously and critically in the German media. Some attacked your reputation or said you had only one anonymous source and that it was not reliable.
H: How could I talk about my source? I have written many stories based on unnamed sources. If I named someone, they would be fired or, worse, jailed. The law is very strict. I've never exposed anyone, and when I write, of course, as I did in this article, I say it's a source, period. Over the years, the stories I've written have always been accepted.
I: How did you check your facts?
H: For the current story, I worked with equally experienced fact-checkers as I used to have at the New Yorker. Of course, there are many ways to check obscure information that is shared with me. The personal attacks on me also miss the point. The point is that Biden has decided to let Germans freeze this winter. The President of the United States would rather Germany freeze than Germany possibly stop supporting Ukraine, and that to me is a devastating thing for this White House.
I: The point is also that this can be perceived as an act of war not only against Russia, but also against Western allies, especially Germany.
H: I would put it more simply. The people involved in the operation saw that the president wanted to freeze Germany for his short-term political goals, and that horrified them. I'm talking about Americans who are very loyal to the United States. With the CIA, as I put it in my article, you're working for power, not for the Constitution.
The CIA's political advantage is that a president who can't get his plans through Congress can walk with the CIA director in the White House Rose Garden to plan something secret that can affect many people on the other side of the Atlantic – or anywhere else in the world. That has always been the unique selling point of the CIA – with which I have my problems. But even this community is appalled that Biden has decided to expose Europe to the cold in order to support a war he will not win. This is nefarious to me.
I: You said in your article that the planning of the attack was not reported to Congress, as is necessary in other covert operations.
H: The matter was also not reported to many places within the military. There were people in other places who should have been informed but were not informed. The operation was very secret.
I: What role does courage play for you in your profession?
H: What's brave about telling the truth? Our job is not to be afraid. And sometimes it gets ugly. There have been times in my life when... -- you know, I'm not talking about it. But threats are not directed at people like me, but at the children of people like me. There were terrible things. But you don't worry about it, you can't. You just have to do what you do.
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