Seymour Hersh is an interesting character. He's a famed journalist who worked for the New York Times and New Yorker and won a Pulitzer prize. He reported the stories of the My Lai Massacre, Abu Ghraid and several other major international incidents.
However the 85-year-old has edged more into conspiracy theories more recently and that brings us to a bombshell report from him today:
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
The destruction of the pipeline has been a bit of a mystery because it doesn't make a lot of sense for Russia to blow up their own pipeline, aside from as a propaganda exercise. More notably, if the US did it, it's an act of war against Russia.
The report itself is long and detailed so it would take either real sources or a great imagination.
All that said, Russia knows whether it blew it up and they know that if it wasn't them, it was the US or a NATO ally. So it's not news to them and they didn't retaliate when it happened.
So the only real consequence of the report could be hardening Russia's resolve to win the war and/or firming up support at home. Still, the report is interesting reading.
