The explosives were planted at the pipelines back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise, Hersh reported, citing a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
The journalist noted that he had reached out to the White House and CIA for comment, with both firmly rejecting the claim that the US “took out” the pipelines as “utterly false.”
The bombs were detonated three months later on September 26 with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy. The buoy was dropped near the Nord Stream pipelines by a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane, according to the report.
The operation came to fruition following months of back-and-forth between the White House, CIA, and military, with officials focusing on how to leave no trace of US involvement in the attack. The planning process began back in December 2021, when a special task force was created with the direct participation of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” the report read.
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The White House on Wednesday categorically rejected information that US Navy divers, under the cover of the Baltops exercise, had planted explosive devices beneath Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline last June.
ReplyDelete"This is utterly false and complete fiction," White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson told TASS in reply to a request to comment on the abovementioned version, which had been previously voiced by an unnamed source to US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
In his article, Hersh wrote that the decision on the operation was made personally by US President Joe Biden after nine months of discussions with administration officials dealing with national security: US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, and others.
The press services of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the US Navy have not yet responded to a request from TASS to comment on the information provided by Hersh.
Nord Stream AG reported that three threads of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 offshore gas pipelines had suffered unprecedented damage on September 27. Swedish seismologists later revealed that two explosions had been recorded along the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26. After that, investigators from Russia’s Federal Security Service initiated an probe into this act of international terrorism in connection with the explosions.