Seymour Hersh: Only 6 Out of 8 Bombs Planted Under Nord Stream Pipelines Were Detonated

BERLIN (Sputnik) - Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said on Tuesday that only six out of eight bombs planted under the Nord Stream pipelines went off as US President Joe Biden postponed the special operation and the bombs were under water for too long.

Last week, Hersh published a report saying that US Navy divers during NATO Baltops exercises in the summer of 2022 planted explosives to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, which Norway activated three months later. According to the report, Biden decided to sabotage the Nord Streams after more than nine months of secret discussions with the national security team.

"It was the story I wanted to tell. At the end of September 2022, eight bombs were to be blown up off the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, and six of them exploded," Hersh said in an interview with German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, citing an unnamed source.

He added that the two bombs did not explode as they spent too much time underwater because Biden postponed the special operation on the destruction of the pipelines.

The journalist said that Biden did not have an elaborate plan for the blowing up of pipelines during the meriting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in February 2022.

"We Americans did not have a plan worked out at the time, but we knew we had an opportunity to implement it," Hersh said, referring to January-February 2022.

He said it was clear to the White House team they could blow up the pipelines using an "incredibly powerful" explosive called C4, adding that the detonation could be controlled remotely by underwater hydroacoustic instruments. In early January, according to Hersh, the option was reported to the White House, and two or three weeks later, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland herself said that Washington "could do it."

The operation was top secret, and the president should not have told anyone about US capabilities, but "he likes to talk and sometimes says things he should not say," Hersh told the media, adding that Scholz at the time found nothing to object to and expressed himself very "vaguely."

Moreover, the journalist added that Biden decided to go on with the operation out of fear that Germany could lift sanctions, imposed against Russia over its special military operation in Ukraine.

"I think the reason for this decision was that the war was not going well for the West, and they were afraid of the coming winter. Nord Stream 2 was suspended by Germany itself, not by international sanctions, and the US feared that Germany would lift the sanctions because of the cold winter," Hersh said, claiming that "Biden decided to let the Germans freeze this winter. The president of the United States would rather have Germany frozen than that Germany possibly stops supporting Ukraine."

The US government has repeatedly denied involvement in the blowing up of the Russian pipelines, while the Russian government has said the United States should explain itself and an open investigation into the blast needs to be undertaken.

On September 26, 2022, three of the four strings of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines were damaged after an underwater blast.