In his latest Substack article , Pulitzer prize winning investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh blasted the New York Times ‘ and other ma...
In his latest Substack article, Pulitzer prize winning investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh blasted the New York Times‘ and other mainstream media’s attempts to distract from his bombshell Nord Stream exposé, calling them “willing takers” for a “CIA cover story.”
CIA officials “have been supplying phony stories to the media“ in a “successful effort to keep the world focused on any possible suspects outside of what has emerged as the most logical one—the president of the United States“, Hersh charged.
The CIA is “constantly running covert operations around the world, and all must have a cover story in case things go badly, as they often do,” Hersh wrote.
“It is just as important to have an explanation when things go well, as they did in the Baltic Sea last fall. Within weeks of my report that Joe Biden ordered the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, the agency produced a cover story and found willing takers in the New York Times and two major German publications,“ according to Hersh.
On March 7, New York Times, German weekly Die Zeit and German public broadcaster ARD simultaneously ran stories claiming a “pro-Ukrainian group” unrelated to Western intel agencies or the Ukrainian government had blown up the Nord Stream pipelines Sept. 26, 2022.
The Times story “got worldwide attention,”, Hersh writes, “but nothing more has been heard since from the newspaper about who did what.” In a Times podcast, one of the three authors had “inadvertently explained why the story was dead on arrival”, Hersh says, stating that “we know really very little.”
“By creating a story of deep sea divers and a crew who did not exist, the agency was following protocol, and the story would have been part of the first days of secret planning to destroy the pipelines”, Hersh writes. “The essential element was a mythical yacht ironically named the Andromeda—after the beautiful daughter of a mythical king who was chained to a rock, naked. The cover story was shared with and supported by the BND, Germany’s federal intelligence service.”
“The trick of a good propaganda operation is to provide the targets—in this case the Western media—with what they want to hear”, according to Hersh. “One intelligence expert put it to me more succinctly: ‘When you do an operation like the pipelines, you need to plan a counter-op—a red herring that has a whiff of reality. And it must be a detailed as possible to be believed.’”
Hersh spoke to an unnamed intelligence expert, who pointed out numerous holes in the “cover story”:
“’Any serious student of the event would know that you cannot anchor a sailboat in waters that are 260 feet deep’”, Hersh’s source told him, “but the story was not aimed at him but at the press who would not know a parody when presented with one’.”
The expert also pointed out you needed a registered captain’s license to rent a 50-ft yacht. Similar qualifications are required for Nitox deep sea diving equipment. None of this equipment would be easily available to a team using forged documents, the source noted.
“How does a 49-foot sailboat find the pipelines in the Baltic Sea?”, the source asked. “The pipelines are not that big and they are not on the charts that come with the lease. Maybe the thought was to put the two divers into the water”—not very easy to do so from a small yacht—“and let the divers look for it. How long can a diver stay down in their suits? Maybe fifteen minutes. Which means it would take the diver four years to search one square mile.”
“None of these questions is asked by the media”, Hersh’s source said. “So you have six people on the yacht—two divers, two helpers, a doctor and a captain leasing the boat. One thing is missing—who is going to crew the yacht? Or cook? What about the logbook that the leasing company must keep for legal reasons? None of this happened,” the expert told Hersh. “Stop trying to link this to reality. It’s a parody.”
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