Seymour Hersh, The Media, and the Nord Stream Pipeline

People should debate the evidence presented by Seymour Hersh, but they shouldn't dismiss the premise that the US was behind the Nord Stream pipeline bombing out of hand.

On February 8, 2023, the legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article claiming the United States government was behind the September 26, 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. The piece, published on Substack, is based on a single anonymous source. It alleges that the operation was carried out by Navy divers and approved at the highest levels by President Biden and CIA Director William Burns.

Unsurprisingly, Hersh’s piece has been deeply controversial. Large swaths of the traditional media have simply ignored it, whereas the White House, CIA, and State Department have all issued furious denials. Business Insider ran a headline referring to Hersh as a “discredited reporter” and the piece as a “gift to Putin.”

Throughout his career Hersh, whose reporting has frequently relied on anonymous sources, has been subject to similar denouncements.

Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre, but both Life and Look magazines passed on it. It was syndicated to newspapers by the small Dispatch News Service. As Hersh recounted in his memoir Reporter that Washington Post reporter Peter Brestrup, who had been assigned to rewrite the version of the story that would run in the Post, called him in the middle of night

to tell me that I was a lying son of a bitch: No one soldier could be responsible for the murder of 109 civilians. It was just impossible[…]I obviously anticipated pushback and anger from many in the government and military, but Braestrup alerted me to the possibility that my fellow reporters would be equally resentful.

Hersh’s reporting for The New York Times about CIA domestic spying on the anti-war movement was one of the catalysts for the formation of the Church Committee. But, as Mark Ames has excellently documented, when the story was first published many of his media peers attacked him. The Washington Post ran an editorial attacking Hersh’s reporting for relying on anonymous sources and questioning whether CIA domestic spying was illegal.

Hersh would also play an important role in exposing US prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Once again the story of Hersh’s revelations is also a story of media self-censorship. While pursuing the story, Hersh learned that 60 Minutes also possessed photos depicting detainee abuse. The television news show, however, was not eager to run them.As Hersh recounts in his memoir:

I telephoned Mary Mapes, the CBS producer on the story, at her home in Texas and told her I had both the photos they had and a report they did not have and if CBS did not run the photos the next week—60 Minutes aired Sundays and Thursdays in those days—I would have no choice, but to write about the network’s continuing censorship in The New Yorker.

Michiko Kakutani wrote in a New York Times review of Hersh’s 2004 book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, “much of his post-9/11 reporting -- which frequently provoked controversy and criticism when it first appeared -- has since come to be accepted as conventional wisdom.”

In short, Hersh’s reporting has always been controversial. Even those stories he broke that are now universally celebrated as investigative journalism at its finest were met with hostility from some of his peers. Many of Hersh’s contemporary critics glance over this when drawing a distinction between his now acclaimed work and whatever piece they are dismissing.

Particular fodder for critics of Hersh are his stories on the killing of Osama Bin Laden and use of chemical weapons during the Syrian war. Unlike My Lai or CIA domestic spying, where Hersh’s version is now the official one, Hersh’s reporting here has not had the same outside confirmation. Whether one believes this is because Hersh got these stories wrong or that he will some day be vindicated, the situation is objectively different. Nonetheless, it is dishonest to paint these stories as uniquely controversial or uniquely reliant on anonymous sources (my own opinions here don’t matter much, but I will for sake of transparency state that while I am unsure of all of the specific details believe that Hersh’s reporting on the killing of Bin Laden probably brought us closer to what really happened. His Syria reporting, especially his Welt am Sonntag piece, left me largely unpersuaded).

It goes without saying that just because Hersh got My Lai or CIA spying right and was met with skepticism, that doesn’t automatically mean his revelations about the killing of Bin Laden or the Nord Stream pipeline are factually accurate. But given his history of basing stories on anonymous sources that are initially dismissed as far-fetched only to be proven true, it’s worth treating Hersh seriously, as opposed to dismissing him as a conspiracy theorist unworthy of serious engagement.

I would like to see further corroboration before I treat it as the definitive account of what happened. And I am certainly open to the refutation of specific facts in Hersh’s Nord Stream pipeline piece. One claim that even people sympathetic to Hersh have called into question is Hersh’s description of NATO Supreme Commander Jens Stoltenberg as a “hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War.” As multiple people have pointed out, Stoltenberg was 16 years old when the war ended.

Yet, Mark Ames, who has so far conducted the only interview with Hersh about his latest piece, took this criticism on. Ames, who is clearly sympathetic to Hersh’s reporting, pointed out that Stoltenberg was notably involved in anti-Vietnam War protests. Ames notes many of his friends were arrested after a protest at the US embassy where windows were broken by rocks. Stoltenberg was not. This past is hardly buried. When Stoltenberg became NATO commander The Times ran the headline “Ex Vietnam protester to head Nato.” It’s certainly not impossible that Stoltenberg’s trajectory from member of a Marxist-Leninist youth group throwing rocks at the US embassy to head of NATO is the result of a sincere change of politics. After all, many people are not bound by the views they held as teenagers. But it does make Hersh’s admittedly vague claim that Stoltenberg “cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War” seem less far-fetched.

Many of those dismissing or ignoring Hersh’s conclusion are not doing so out of a close reading of Hersh’s claims. They do so, because the mere suggestion that the US could be responsible is treated as a non-starter. Anyone who is even willing to entertain that it may be possible is dismissed as conspiracy peddling crank or de facto Russian propagadnaist.

I was politicized by the Iraq War. The US government, with huge swaths of the mainstream media’s complicity, deliberately peddled lies to facilitate an unprovoked war of aggression. The US’s invasion and occupation were brutal, leaving hundreds of thousands, if not a million, dead. I am also aware at the litany of horrible crimes committed by the US intelligence community, including toppling democratic governments, mining the harbor of Nicaragua, and backing death squads, terrorists, and torturers. Yet, even I, at some level, struggle to believe the US would engage in an act of terrorism against a NATO-ally’s civilian infrastructure.

But when looking at the situation objectively, of who has the motive, capability, and history of such an actions, the US quickly emerges as the most likely suspect. The idea that Russia would blow up the pipeline is deeply illogical. And on top of that, European intelligence officials from nine countries told the Washington Post they uncovered no conclusive evidence that Russia was behind the attack. The same piece also contained this tidbit from the US side:

The United States routinely intercepts the communications of Russian officials and military forces, a clandestine intelligence effort that helped accurately forecast Moscow’s February invasion of Ukraine. But so far, analysts have not heard or read statements from the Russian side taking credit or suggesting that they’re trying to cover up their involvement, officials said.

In spite of the lack of evidence and motive, it is still entirely acceptable to assert Russia likely bombed the Nord Stream pipeline. Pursuing the obvious suspect, as Hersh did, is simply a nonstarter.

Governments security apparatuses do illogical things all the time. But for now claims that Russia was behind the attack, the most acceptable point of view inside the beltway, far more resemble fact-free conspiracy theories than Hersh’s latest reporting.