by Lee Smith at Tablet Mag
The most astounding claim in the blockbuster new article from Seymour Hersh alleging that the U.S. is responsible for sabotaging two of Russia’s natural gas pipelines is that the Biden administration is led by a no-nonsense crew of highly capable tacticians. Forget what you’ve heard about secret classified documents turning up in various Biden residences; in Hersh’s telling the Biden White House practices exceptional operational security.
And it would need to, because according to the single anonymous source on whom Hersh bases his piece, the Russians have “superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.” Pulling off a plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines between Germany and Russia would require not only vision and leadership, but sophisticated cover. So what kind of highly advanced stealth technology did the Biden team employ to cloak the underwater operation? In fact, they did just the opposite. They hid the plot to start World War III in plain sight.
According to the source, who had “direct knowledge of the operational planning,” writes Hersh, a team of U.S. Navy divers planted the explosives in June 2022 during an annual NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea while tens of thousands of naval personnel from allied countries on site and hundreds of thousands more were monitoring the exercise remotely. That is, according to Hersh’s source, Team Biden thwarted the Russians’ “superb surveillance” by planting explosives before the eyes of an audience of military and intelligence officials from European countries that depend on the Russian gas carried through the pipelines.
It was a brilliant plan, to be sure, but according to Hersh’s source, Biden was still worried: If the pipelines blew up just 48 hours after NATO had conducted an enormous joint exercise in exactly the same place, the Russians might get suspicious. So the President asked for a mechanism that would allow him to detonate the explosives at a later date. According to Hersh’s source, it was something of a chore for a military with limitless resources to devise a way to blow something up later from somewhere else. But it was precisely that innovation that would keep Putin from suspecting U.S. involvement when the pipelines blew up four months after NATO had conducted a massive exercise in exactly the same place where the pipelines were sabotaged.
The White House has called Hersh’s story an “utterly false and complete fiction” while a Russian spokesperson said in response to the piece that Moscow has “repeatedly expressed” its conviction that the U.S. and NATO were responsible. Maybe the U.S. really did sabotage Russian pipelines, but it sure didn’t happen the way Hersh describes it. Maybe it was the Russians who did it to themselves, or perhaps it was those with seemingly the strongest motive for hitting Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainians. There is not enough evidence yet to know. But we do know enough about Biden’s public record to judge the story’s premise, never mind its absurd details, as questionable.
As Vice President, Biden warned against killing Osama bin Laden, even with an elite Navy SEAL team tasked for the mission. But as president he ordered Navy regulars to blow up the piggy bank of a state with a large nuclear arsenal? Biden let a Chinese spy balloon tour the American homeland, crossing over several sensitive sites, but he sucker-punched Putin in Russia’s backyard? Hard as it may be to believe, the big takeaway from the piece is just that: Joe Biden is one tough hombre. To conclude, Hersh writes:…