The story purports to be a near tick-tock of the events leading up, according to Hersh, to the destruction of the Russian-owned Nord Stream1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines by a joint force of US and Norwegian Navy personnel.

Not only was the account trending on social media, but it also drew the attention of some prominent political figures.

I’m troubled that I can’t immediately rule out the suggestion that the U.S. blew up Nord Stream. I checked with a bunch of Senate colleagues. Among those I’ve asked, none were ever briefed on this. If it turns out to be true, we’ve got a huge problem. https://t.co/DG0dYTByPI

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 8, 2023

Indeed. If Hersh’s story is true, we have a huge problem. It means the US military carried out a premeditated attack on a sovereign nation in international waters.

On September 26, 2022, two massive explosions, one at 2:03 a.m. and the second at 7:03 p.m., severed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. Neither pipeline was active due to the reluctance on the part of Germany to continue buying natural gas from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. Because the blasts took place in the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark, those two countries launched independent investigations. The determination was that the explosions were an act of sabotage. Both countries kept the investigation closely held. To date, no one has been blamed.

Former US Navy SEAL Team 6 platoon leader Chuck Pfarrer thinks it happened like this.

NORDSTREAM SABOTAGE: Video taken of the blast site by @ErikWiman reveals straight-line damage caused by the exterior application of linear shaped charges. This indicates sabotage by Naval Special Warfare Operators, most likely deployed by submarine. https://t.co/HDF7bWQe65 pic.twitter.com/wUmKDhjjEU

— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) October 20, 2022

I’ll just say upfront, to remove the suspense, that I think Hersh’s account is nutbaggery. I’ve followed Hersh’s writing for years, and while there is no doubt he’s broken significant stories, like the My Lai massacre, he’s had way more than his share of stories that were sheer fabulism. He specializes in unsourced reporting that is impossible to nail down. He reminds me of Frederick Forsyth’s early novels, like Day of the Jackal, where you can find the major events and personages on the front pages of newspapers, and it is nearly impossible to tease out the fact from the fiction.

This is how Hersh describes the sequence of events.

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

It would be the first 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). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?

What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.

I have a lot of difficulty believing that Joe Biden was the driving force behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines. It is not in keeping with his history, though dementia does change people. It is not consistent with the circumstances. Before early March, the consensus was that Ukraine could not hold out against Russia. The rationale for planning a “kinetic” response at this stage seems bizarre because of the damage that would be done if someone leaked that it was being considered to stop the planning. We have no source at all for this statement.

Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. 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. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.

There seem to be at least two sources here—someone who was at the central meeting and someone else inside the CIA. Let’s examine what we do know. Why would the Navy propose to use a “newly commissioned submarine?” The USS Oregon, fast attack boat SSN-793 was commissioned in May 2022; before the USS Oregon, the most recently commissioned submarine was the fast attack USS Vermont, SSN-792. Both are capable of delivering SEAL Delivery Vehicles or divers. The USS Vermont belongs to the Atlantic Fleet. The Navy proposing that a nuclear submarine torpedo a pipeline is farfetched. The idea the CIA came up with the plan to use Navy divers because the Navy didn’t think of it also strikes me as nonsense.

The Air Force volunteering to drop bombs with “delayed fuses” is also rather bizarre. Aside from the possibility of being seen, what is even meant by a delayed fuse? One that doesn’t go off when it hits the water? Or one that goes off much later? If the former, then that would go without saying. If the latter, that presents a significant problem to the narrative.

I also find it difficult to believe that any number of bureaucrats would sit around the table cavalierly planning something they thought was “an act of war.”

This next part is where I think the whole story goes off the rails.

Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

And, by September 2022, the Biden White House had brought an end to Nord Stream. It was shut down. Germany, under significant political pressure, pulled the plug on the pipeline. I think that is all Biden’s statement means. The context in which he made the statement, after a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz in which Scholtz agreed to oppose the imminent Russian invasion, indicates he’s talking about the movement of gas from Russia to Germany. To infer that this is some kind of an Alzheimer-ish slip of the tongue is just silly.

Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Exactly right. But even though Nuland has become the supervillain in the conspiracy theories woven by Russia and its fellow travelers in the West, Nuland’s statement is not, in my view, yet another subtle threat to attack the pipeline. Instead, it is a statement that US policy will oppose Nord Stream operations if Russia follows through on its planned invasion.

Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. 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.”

The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. 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.”

This is bullsh** on toast. You can’t get from “an act of war” to “let’s do it and not tell the Gang of Eight” like that. Title 50 of the US Code at § 3093(e) defines “covert action” as “an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” An attack on the Russian-owned pipeline by the US military would have political, economic, and military consequences, and the fact that the US government didn’t hold a press conference afterward indicates that, if this story is true, the government did not want its role either apparent or publicly acknowledged. The law says nothing about a loophole involving the president making an off-the-cuff comment. Arguably, this provision was triggered once the CIA formed a working group to develop a plan for the attack. As the Department of Defense was going to be the action agency, the DoD General Counsel and the Secretary of Defense would decide on reporting to Congress, as their asses would be in the sling if they made the wrong decision.

The very idea that multiple agencies, some with competing agendas (do you really think the State Department was going along with this willingly?) would all agree to take an action that had a substantial probability of going pear-shaped without telling Congress, is nonsense.

Hersh says Norway was chosen because we’ve invested a lot of money there.

A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.

In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.

The SDCA didn’t go into effect until June 17, 2022. The link that Hersh uses to substantiate that a submarine base at Ramsund navy base is operational, in fact, says:

The agreement must still be ratified by the Norwegian Parliament, a move expected by the summer.

Once it’s approved, the US will be able to start building new facilities at the Rygge, Sola, and Evenes airfields, along with the Ramsund navy base, while rotating troops and contractors to those bases to maintain facilities and service US aircraft and ships.

So approval to start work didn’t exist until June, meaning the rest of the reason for choosing Norway is just a lie. Hersh also misrepresents the NATO Status of Force Agreement as:

Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.

That isn’t what the agreement says at all.

Norway Defense SDCA Ready for Review page 20 by streiff on Scribd

A SOFA protects US military members and dependents from many local law violations. But it isn’t anything like extraterritoriality or a “get-out-of-jail-free” card. The agreement specifies that it contains the NATO SOFA; this is not a nefarious plot.

Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014.

The supreme commander of NATO is General Christopher Cavoli. Stoltenberg is the NATO Secretary General. These are not remotely the same thing. Stoltenberg has the same relationship with the NATO defense ministers that an executive director in a non-profit has with the board of directors. He’s not remotely in charge of policy.

Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.

The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.

The entire Baltic is shallow. The average depth in the Baltic is about half that of the depth where the explosions occurred. If you have time, play with the sea-depth module of Google Earth and see how the explosion was not at the shallowest place of the Nord Stream route. The waters around Bornholm, indeed, have no major tidal currents. That’s something those waters have in common with the rest of the f***ing Baltic. According to the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI):

The Baltic Sea has no noticeable permanent currents.

Now we get to the actual operation.

At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, [link added by editor] are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner.

…

“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.

This is really not how any of this works. The CIA is not going to plan and brief an operation to Navy divers because the CIA doesn’t own any of the assets in the operation and, not being military, they can’t give a lawful order to a military member.

The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.

BALTOPS 22 is real. It did include minehunting exercises near Bornholm.

Now we come to the part that stops making sense if we assume anything beforehand did.

It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.

The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.

And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.

Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”

…

The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives.

And then comes the finale.

On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

To me, this is the paragraph that says if the US was behind the explosion, it didn’t happen the way Hersh imagines it.

The first explosion went off at 2:03 a.m. on September 26, so this part of the story is wrong unless Hersh defines “a few hours” as less than two. He also gives the impression that the explosives on both pipelines went off simultaneously. They didn’t. The explosion closest to Bornholm targeting Nord Stream 2 went off at 2:03 a.m., and the blast targeting Nord Stream 1 and 2 went off 15 hours later and about 50 miles away.

Link to archived source.

MAP CREDIT: Wikipedia, Creative Commons license SA 4.0

These are the reasons that I don’t believe Hersh’s account.

The decision to cut the congressional Gang of Eight out of this operation based on some lackwit understanding of the law doesn’t pass the smell test. If they did cut out Congress, they would’ve come up with a reason that didn’t draw guffaws from the members of a Joint Investigative Committee when it inevitably convenes.

The CIA’s role in operational planning does not match how the services conduct special operations, even in concert with the CIA.

The use of deep water divers from the US Navy Diving and Salvage Training Center strikes me as unlikely. It is a training installation, not a deployable unit. The depth of the water in the Baltic doesn’t require skills found only at that school. The depth of the pipelines, less than 300 feet, didn’t require specialized diving skills as much as specialized demolition skills.

And the real experts in underwater operations are Navy SEALs. So going outside that community seems counterintuitive.

Using a NATO training exercise to mask the operation sounds cool until you realize that this required the explosives to be left armed and in place for 90 days. Using a sonar buoy to set off the explosions seems to add another level of complication to an already complicated operation.

The explosions going off 15 hours and 50 miles apart calls into question the sonar buoy detonation story.

From a plausibility standpoint, I can’t believe that Joe Biden or anyone in his inner circle came up with this idea.

The idea that we’d surreptitiously blow up two pipelines in the economic zone of two allies when the pipelines were already shut down makes no sense. Nothing was to be gained from blowing up the pipelines, and the political fallout of the operation being exposed would be immense.

The Norwegians cooperating in such an operation makes no sense. In fact, I’m not sure what the Norwegians even brought to the table.

Too many people from too many agencies were involved for this to be an accurate portrayal of events. You can’t have that many people involved not to have leaks before or after the event.

I stick by my original assessment that this was a Russian operation. Unlike the theory of planting explosives three months before the attack, Russian Navy diving support ships were tracked in the area of both explosions days before the event. You can read my thoughts at the time at Putin’s PR Machine Throws up Smoke as the Nord Stream Pipeline Explosion Investigation Begins.

Now that this story is in play, the House and Senate owe it to themselves and the country to investigate it. It isn’t like they haven’t investigated patent dumbf***ery in the past; they actually looked into the claim that vice presidential candidate George H. W. Bush flew to Paris in an SR-71 to negotiate a release of the embassy hostages held by Iran and guarantee Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.

Senator Mike Lee is correct. If Hersh has any part of this story right, the nation has a real problem with rogue actors in the CIA and Department of Defense. But, as the old saying goes, it is the seriousness of the allegation, not the quality of the evidence, that demands a full-blown investigation.