I first caught wind of this story this morning on Twitter from Matt Taibbi (of Twitter Files fame) and it was certainly a provocative headline. He pointed to a new Substack account that was set up by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. The report, which Taibbi described as a “blockbuster,” claimed to provide proof that the Nord Stream pipelines that were blown up last year were actually destroyed by U.S. Navy divers, presumably under orders from the White House.

The great Seymour Hersh returns, on Substack, with a blockbuster story:

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline https://t.co/RxfoZOUwDH

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 8, 2023

Hersh weaves a tale of an obscure Navy facility on the Florida panhandle known as the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC). It’s definitely a real place (though I’d never heard of it) and they train highly-skilled deep water divers and demolition experts. Graduates are sent on a variety of treacherous missions, including clearing harbors and beaches of dangerous munitions using C4 explosives.

But according to Hersh, last year some of their divers were sent on a very different type of mission. They were sent to the Baltic Sea as part of a scheduled joint-force naval training mission. While there, they surreptitiously planted charges on the Nord Stream 1 pipelines that could be detonated remotely. Three months later… boom.

The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

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.

Could this have really happened, at least in theory? I suppose so. If you wanted a “job” like that done, those divers would be the people to hand it off to. But it’s still an incredibly incendiary claim to publish. The fact that the reporting is seemingly based on the claims of a single, unnamed source “with direct knowledge” of the operation doesn’t help much either.

Hersh informs us that a White House spokesperson responded to a request for comment by saying, “This is false and complete fiction.” Another spokesperson for the CIA similarly said, “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Hersh’s story goes much deeper and further back in the Biden administration timeline than just the days and weeks leading up to the explosion. He claims that Biden was angling for a way to take out Nord Stream 1 before he was even sworn into office. He claims that his source told him that the plans started coming to fruition when Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a new, secret task force in December of 2021. This group supposedly included men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments. Their purpose was to find a way to shut down Russia’s natural gas pipeline to Europe. Sullivan’s goal was to have the group come up with a plan to blow the pipelines up and he was “delivering on the desires of the President.”

This is all sounding like something that was lifted out of a Tom Clancy novel, and I honestly find it very difficult to believe. A planned attack on Russian assets in international waters without any consultation with or oversight by Congress (which Hersh says never happened) would be tantamount to a criminal plot and potentially an act of war. Bringing in people from all of the departments listed above makes these actions a massive conspiracy including multiple departments, both civilian and military.

And you’re telling me that none of this ever leaked out? Further, we’re to believe that everyone would come out and flatly deny it in the strongest possible terms. But if the story actually is true and evidence of it comes forward, these people are going to be facing claims about more than simply telling lies.

I’ve maintained from the beginning that the idea that Putin would blow up his own pipeline (as the White House has insisted) made absolutely no sense. It was an insane claim in my view, and I’m hardly the only person who suspected that the United States and/or some of our NATO allies might have been involved, with Poland as a leading suspect. But this story from Seymour Hersh sounds, if anything, even crazier than the “Putin did it” theory. Hopefully, the truth will come out in time, but I will personally be taking today’s report with a grain of salt for now.