Pro-Kremlin media , as well as Russian officials, have circulated an "investigation" by 85-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh alleging that the US Navy, CIA and Norwegian Navy blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines on the direct orders of Joe Biden. Hersh said that in June 2022, US Navy divers planted C-4 explosive charges on pipelines at strategic locations chosen by the Norwegians. The charges were placed under the cover of a military simulation involving several states, and three months later were remotely detonated on the signal of a sonar buoy dropped by a P-8 reconnaissance aircraft of the Norwegian Navy.
This article caused a real sensation – however, only in Russia. Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov complains that such a “serious publication” has not been widely disseminated in the Western media, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov threatens the United States with “consequences”, and State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin plans to prepare an appeal to the UN to “judge Biden”.
Meanwhile, the evidence base of the “investigation” raises serious doubts. The article is published on the Substack platform from Hersh's page, created a few hours earlier. All his high-profile statements are based on a single anonymous source.
Hersh is a former journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War and has contributed to such prominent publications as The New York Times and The New Yorker. But for the past 10 years he has not had a permanent job – most likely because recently he has been spreading conspiracy theories with reference to "anonymous sources." For example, he published an entire alternate version of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, relying on an anonymous "retired US intelligence official." He also claimed , without evidence, that the US and Saudi Arabian governments are funding the terrorist organization Fatah al-Islam.
Hersh questioned the involvement of the Bashar al-Assad regime in chemical attacks against civilians. His articles on this topic refused to be published by The New Yorker and Washington Post. Another version was that the government troops did not use sarin, but attacked the meeting place of the jihadists and accidentally hit the fertilizer warehouse, which led to mass casualties. This publication, also based largely on an anonymous source, was extensively parsed and refuted by Bellingcat: Hersh's information about the location and circumstances of the attack contradicted the OPCW report, Western intelligence, Syrian and Russian government claims, and satellite imagery.
But thanks to such publications, Hersh began to be regularly called to RT, and since then he has been spreading the pro-Kremlin agenda: for example, after the poisoning of ex-GRU officer Sergei Skripal, the journalist said that not the Russian authorities, but “organized crime” were behind this crime.