“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

Seymour Hersh has decades of credibility from reporting the My Lai Massacre to the abuses at Abu Graib.

But he does often rely on sources who remain anonymous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Use_of_anonymous...

I did find it interesting in that Wikipedia article to read that The New Yorker's editor insists on knowing the identify of all of the anonymous sources that Hersh has used when his reporting is published in that magazine. That suggests to me that while Hersh can probably be generally trusted, his work is of a higher quality when it's published in an outlet like The New Yorker, as the editor-in-chief and other staff submit it to a more rigorous internal discussion. That's in comparison to probably no internal review or discussion by Substack.

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi... goes over how his more recent work verges on conspiracy theory.

That even that inconsistent Bin Laden story purportedly relied on two distinct sources, and yet his Nord Stream story purportedly relies on only a single anonymous source, should be a significant red flag here. I have no reason to doubt that Hersh heard the quotes in his Nord Stream story from at least someone in government, but that source's motivations and truthfulness were not independently verified even, by his own admission, by Hersh. And that's just... not credible reporting.

It's unfortunate, but Sy Hersh has kinda flown the coop in the last 10 years. He egged on the Seth Rich conspiracy and tried to deny the US killed bin Laden. The New Yorker has basically disowned him and he hasn't had a byline in many years.

Too bad the New Yorker abandoned him. If your writing makes it past the editors, fact checkers and attorneys at that mag, you're probably golden. The effort they spent on Lawrence Wright's Scientology article was pretty hardcore: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/133561256

> tried to deny the US killed bin Laden

If he denied the US killed bin Laden he would be unreliable. He never denied the US killed bin Laden. You saying he said that is what is unreliable.

He said that some of the White House and Pentagon assertions about bin Laden, which the New York Times did not question in the days after (but did question, to some extent, later on) were not accurate. Particularly that no one high up in the Pakistani Army, government or intelligence knew Bin Laden was in Abbottabad. Hersh asserted that was incorrect, as were some other things.

> were not independently verified even, by his own admission, by Hersh. And that's just... not credible reporting

since by his own admission, [what you said], that is credible reporting.

it might not be a credible source or story

Seymour Hersh has had a long and storied career, and he has made some very bold claims that later turned out to be correct.

He's also, especially recently, made some very bold claims that so far have not turned out to be correct, whether because the truth just hasn't been revealed yet, or because Hersh was wrong or misled by his sources.

It's also worth noting that Hersh - as with any journalist - is only as good as his sources. If people choose to leak juicy secrets to him (not implausible!) he may end up publishing accurate stories that reveal nefarious conspiracies (which has happened). If people choose to give him lies and misinformation, he may end up publishing conspiracy theories instead. And as he keeps publishing, the odds that this will happen (if it hasn't already) keep increasing.

So I absolutely wouldn't write off any claim Hersh makes, but I wouldn't blindly believe it either. And here he is relying, by his own admission, almost entirely on a single anonymous source, giving details that can't really be independently confirmed.

Was Hersh told by someone that the US took out the pipeline? Probably! Does that mean the US did so? I'm not sure I'd seriously update my priors based on this.

No, credible reporting includes verifying what sources say. Hersh is transparent about not verifying, but he continues to present their statements as fact. That's not dishonest, but it's not a standard of reporting anyone should accept.

I have to disagree. The very first line in https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp is "verify information before releasing it." Disclosing that there is only one source is a first step, but an insufficient one. And the tone of the article, from the headline onward, reports not only that "a source said X" but presents "X" as factual. That's simply not a credible practice.

Biden stated last year: "If Russia invades [Ukraine] there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." [1] This was a clear threat, clear as day, that the US could destroy Nordstream. It should surprise nobody that the US was involved.

Since Nordstream was destroyed amidst public pressure from US energy companies who wanted to takeover the European energy market, the US has become the world's leading exporter of liquid natural gas, Europeans are paying record natural gas prices, and US energy companies are reporting record profits. Again, the relationship between these things should surprise nobody.

1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/08/bidens-bi...

you're suggesting that the ethics code requires you to state how many sources you verified with, and the number Hersh reported is too small a number. (you're going to deny you suggested that, but just keep reading, there's a point here)

I suggest that the ethics code says don't report facts as facts that you haven't verified as facts, but if you say "I could not verified this and I heard it from one source" you are within the code. "Sources in the Administration" often report things to reporters, and most of what they say can't be verified, it can only be echoed by more than one person. And if a reporter has a relationship with one leaker who has been reliable, you're claiming they can't use that, and I'm claiming they can and do. Sure, verify what you can, but being an honest reporter is what is required, not certain fact patterns.

Yes, in a deep dive publication like the New Yorker, they will often kill certain facts or an entire story if it cannot be corroborated, but that doesn't define journalism.

Can you name a single news org or reporter who does not engage in that practice?

A lot of journalists with extremely long track records and tons of accolades were excluded from media outlets after 2016 for not reporting correctly.

It’s not out of the realm of possibility but that statement is hardly an admission of future sabotage. I would imagine the US has more tools than deep sea bombing to convince their allies. Very high risk operation

Sure, a threat is not an admission of guilt. But I think most people were unaware of this statement, and how aggressive the US' posture towards the pipeline was, which is important context for this article.

Nobody was excluded in my country but America going insane was COMPLETELY missed by almost every expert and America watcher.

It was funny how suddenly all the journalists started to report from Kentucky or Alabama instead of Fifth avenue. As the media it is your job to explain how the world works.

> That even that inconsistent Bin Laden story

Worth noting that both the White House and the New York Times walked back inconsistent claims they made in the days after bin Laden's death. So the White House and Times were self-admittedly inconsistent about it. If Hersh is inconsistent it is in that light.

Hersh pokes holes in different points of the official narrative. Particularly the idea no one high up in the Pakistani government knew bin Laden was in the compound. Contradicting the White House, but very convincing to me and others.

However, to be fair to you, Hersh goes into a great deal of detail about the initial intelligence, the raid etc. Was any part of that wrong or inconsistent? It's hard to know. He didn't just make a few statements but went into a lot of detail. So there could theoretically be inconsistencies in Hersh's reporting about it too, since he covered so much ground. It is hard to know though. You just take what the White House said, what Hersh says, what the Pakistani press says and try to figure out what actually happened.

Why destroy NS1 then and not NS2 (NS1 and NS2 both have two pipes and only one of the two NS2 pipes were destroyed)? And why destroy it at this exact time when Russia was already coming up with less and less plausible excuses to halt deliveries via NS1 (both NS1 pipes were destroyed)? Why not wait with the nuclear option until there were even signs that NS2 would come online (Germany had already halted the certification process for NS2 shortly before the invasion).. NS2 was already dead.

I know nothing of him, but given that there's an entire paragraph about Jens Stoltenberg where almost every sentence is just completely factually wrong in a way that could be verified to be wrong with a look at the first paragraph on his Wikipedia page, I'm not inclined to take what he says seriously.

I mean, par for the course for modern journalism, I suppose.

And he also claimed that Moraji Desai was... an American spy.

The guy is obviously picks up lobby chatter, and lets his imagination to run.

My Lai was never a giant secret, he was just the first to bring it to the wider audience.

The alleged "compound" of bin Laden was located less than a mile from PMA Kakul [0]. So there was at least one odd thing about this event: would we expect that the world's most wanted terrorist could live across the street from USMA West Point for five years, without the government knowing?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden%27s_compound_i...

The sun? The onion ?

They must have not been paying attention. Trump was very vocal against it and was laughed at by the genius German technocrats. The Obama admin was also against it

What makes you think this was even written by Seymour Hersh?

In the first few hours after publication, that would be a reasonable question. But since it's been a full day, and Seymour Hersh hasn't stepped in to say "Hey, that's not me", at this point it's quite reasonable to believe that he wrote it. It seems unlikely that the piece generated a full Whitehouse response but somehow Seymour, his agent, his publisher, or any of his close friends haven't yet issued a denial of authorship. Not impossible, but not the way I'd bet.

Thanks for that angle. The desire to repeat ones brightest hour can certainly be a strong force and might lead even the most careful astray when a big scoop like Abu Graib makes all further successes seem trivial. I'm not suggesting that he personally made it up, but his desire to believe could be spectacularly strong, turning him into an instrument that is easy to play by people with an agenda.

But I'm biased as well, my desire to believe is strong, only that I'm in team "'t was an inside job" so my bias is in clear opposition of these claims (but in limited to speculation, I find "Russia jumped from excuse to excuse to keep the pipelines closed anyways, so the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow who felt threatened by some real or imagined "make money not war" faction" logically compelling, but that's all there is, I guess, strongly, but can't claim to know)

He has decades of renown from his My Lai reporting, and he renewed it with Abu Ghraib. However, substantially everything he's ever written uses anonymous sourcing to tell a story of intrigue and conspiracy... and only those two stores amounted to anything. There's a reason he's publishing this on Substack: nobody reputable will publish him anymore.

The thing that a good journalist would do is be skeptical of his crank sources and try to confirm them with reputable sources and evidence. He does neither.

But a broken clock is right twice a day and a bad journalist can break two big stories in a career of publishing lies.

matt taibbi confirmed it on twitter.

Your question makes me wonder if they even bothered to check areas around US domestic military bases for OBL.

> This was a clear threat, clear as day, that the US could destroy Nordstream [2]. It should surprise nobody that the US was involved.

Or you could take a breath and realize that Nordstream 2 was not yet complete. It was an ongoing, non-operational project. In that context, “bringing it to an end” could easily mean not completing it. In fact, that’s the far more reasonable interpretation—-the literal physical destruction interpretation is only made by someone who wants to believe that.

Did you see Zero Dark Thirty?

If so, do you trust it to be accurate?

How can you call his sources crank without knowing who they are yourself?

Yeah, the idea that he was involved in the American war in Vietnam seems far-fetched. Perhaps this is a confusion with some other, older Stoltenberg?

It's not fair to compare anyone else to "the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events ... maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires"

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...

That's hairsplitting. If you report something that some anonymous guy said as fact, without being able to verify anything, it's not credible. To be credible, one needs to provide some, you know, credits. Some evidence of why it's true. With all love of everybody around to say "without evidence" on anything they disagree with, somehow when there's a case when somebody literally says something without any evidence, we're supposed to just take it as fact? No way.

Does Zero Dark Thirty claims to be a factual description of the events, or a work of fiction?

WTF, he's born in 1959. That makes him 16 by the time the war ended? How can a professional journalist make a claim like that?

It is a dramatization of the hunt for OBL. It elides names, sources and methods for obvious reasons. The larger shape of the story aligns without how the administration and CIA claim the search and assassination of OBL played out. It is alleged that the CIA cooperated heavily with the filmmakers. This would make sense given the amount of torture apologia that is in the movie.

Easy - they reported things that don't fit into this person's worldview.

At the time the physical construction had been completed.

Likely. Jens's father was Thorvald Stoltenberg, a powerful Labour politician working in foreign policy most of his life. He was allegedly trying to negotiate between the US and Vietnam.

This reminds me of the old defense of OJ Simpson, that in fact only very few of men who domestically abuse their wives go on to murder them.

And yeah, that is true. But when the wife was in fact murdered, then the odds that the known abusive husband did it are very high.

Maybe it was a reasonable interpretation that he didn't mean blowing up the pipeline, before the pipeline was blown up.

I believe the US often takes stupid risks, despite having better options.

This is not an indictment of the US, it's just an assessment based on my own and other's extensive experiences with large, hierarchical organizations.

The article implicitly suggests that the goal was indeed to sabotage both pipelines fully.

It doesn't say it outright, but if the hastily re-programmed explosives were triggered by a sonar buoy after three months in sea water as the article says, then it would not be surprising at all if some of them failed to go off.

Precisely that the article implicitly gives very plausible answers to good questions like yours, is why I think it's credible.

Because if the best you can do as a whistleblower is to give anonymous info to an independent reporter who won't verify it, you're probably on the crank side of things.

Neither the mechanism nor the reasoning in the article sound plausible to me (nor the involvement of Norway..). NS1 was already shutdown by Russia within weeks of the supposed time of installation of the explosives, after which there was no more point to explode them and it would make more sense to silently remove them again. NS2 was already dead in the water since couple days before the invasion.

In addition the bad-trigger scenario would imply that the explosives and triggering mechanism remained in place on the remaining pipe, which would require the US to rush there to remove them or trigger the missing one to avoid terrible diplomatic consequences if the unexploded device were to be discovered.

I don’t think he’s calling him a crank, anymore than he’s talking about a specific broken clock being right twice a day. It’s just hypothetical to demonstrate a point. If he were a crank journalist, being accidentally right twice could still make him a journalistic legend. Therefore, we can’t trust simply because he’s famous, because a broken clock is right twice a day.

>If people choose to give him lies and misinformation, he may end up publishing conspiracy theories instead.

I am an investigative reporter who covers crime, and my sources often insist on anonymity. There are ways to mitigate the possibility of being lied to.

All of my sources know that we have a deal: I promise to do everything that I reasonably can to keep their identity secret, and they promise me the truth. If a source lies to me or intentionally misleads me, my agreement to keep their identity secret no longer stands.

There’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist, and it has worked well for years. I have never burned a source, and as far as I know, I have never published an investigative story that is wrong about anything material.

I think this case is special in that the source would get the Snowden treatment if the name leaks.

If you publish all at once, others can go and verify the details. The source is protected.

If you verify pre-publication, e.g., go to the diving school in Florida and ask too many questions, you (and the source) will be under surveillance in no time.

First, the whole point of these pipes from Russia's side, and the concern about them from the US, was that they could be used as leverage to keep EU from supporting Ukraine. So there was absolutely a "point" in blowing them up even though they were turned off. The point being, when they're blown up, they can't be turned on, thus Russia has no leverage anymore.

Second, those terrible diplomatic consequences probably happened, behind the scenes (and weren't that terrible, because no one really wants to denounce the US in the middle of the Ukraine war). I'll remind you that both Sweden and Denmark claimed nothing other than sabotage could be concluded, and closed down their investigations and classified the heck out of the details. Feel free to make freedom of information requests to them, so that you can get those "national security interest" refusals.

Odds are that the US didn't directly admit anything to them, but strongly suggested they shouldn't look too closely or be too specific in their statements, and that those states were quick to comply. And probably cleaned up well enough that there was nothing left for the Russians to find, in the case that they should run their own investigation (although, Russia can't run a real investigation to save their ass, they're too used to have their conclusions dictated to them, so I wouldn't worry if I was the USG).

It was not in operation. The project had not been completed.

Russia already had no leverage anymore. Shutting them down was their "all in" move, but that clearly didn't cut it, so no, there was no point anymore. For Russia there were more upsides to this however: Getting out of contracts (since they can only halt deliveries for so long before fines kick in), solidifying internal positions, sending a message (since it happened 1-2 days after the opening of a Norway-Poland pipeline; also it was less than 500m from a sweden-poland undersea electrical cable), sewing chaos in the west. Not that there is any more evidence that they have done it than for the US..

And the rest is all putting the cart in front of the horse. Would it look any different if Russia (or anyone else) were the culprit? No, it wouldn't (since otherwise the fact it's classified itself leaks information). Maybe the investigation just yielded nothing conclusive? Which given the location and event (big explosion and lots of gas output making sure everything gets nicely distributed elsewhere) wouldn't be that surprising?

This piece posits a “crank theory” of Seymour Hersh:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/05/seymour-hershs-u...

They explicitly dumped him because his reporting could not be validated and he insisted on publishing anyway.

https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/the-new-yorker-...

I'm trying to keep an open mind and engage with people who don't agree, but you're not making it easy for me here.

You're suggesting that when Russia cut off the gas, and Germany didn't immediately capitulate, that's evidence the leverage was worthless? It wasn't even winter yet.

Also, blowing up your pipeline just as a competitor comes on line? Whatever you think of Hersh's article, it's undeniable that Norway made a lot of money on the sabotage. Even if Russia had stayed firm and sent no gas through the pipeline, the fact that they could have alone would have kept prices lower.

Third, you're suggesting that Sweden/Denmark would have kept it secret if they found evidence of Russian meddling? They absolutely would not. In fact, if there was even evidence exculpating the US, without implicating anyone else, they would have blasted it to the heavens.

NATO-aligned think tanks have gotten better at this - something I view as a good thing, despite that I am not a fan of them, and I don't think they did it willingly. But with the rise of Bellingcat, they're now routinely publishing embarrassing material on Russia that they would have LOVED to keep secret as a bargaining chip, in earlier decades.

In fact, if there was a Russian team that blew up the pipeline, they would have left a trail a mile wide in public data and the countless leaked databases (another huge one just a few days ago, from Roskomnadzor). Bellingcat, or anyone interested, could have given you their damn cell phone numbers, if it was a Russian op. Yet they have instead remained utterly uninterested in the question of how the pipelines were sabotaged.

Of course, it's difficult to tell whether articles like that were written because Hersh is wrong, or because he is right.

There are plenty of powerful people trying to discredit reporters who tell who tell the truth, so we should also be skeptical of attacks on Hersh.

Seriously. The article's author couldn't think of any reason why they might want to stage the bin Laden assassination? I can think of a bunch of reasons just off the top of my head. Doesn't make the story true, but the author is conspicuously unimaginative.

> men who domestically abuse their wives

> known abusive husband

Not sure what you’re referring to here. If you’re analogizing what Biden said with domestic abuse, that’s just ridiculous. It’s more akin to telling the wife they’re going to need to divorce if she doesn’t stop threatening the children. If you’re saying the US in general has a history of doing things that could be compared to domestic abuse, sure, but so could all parties involved, particularly Russia. So we’re back at square one.

I knew you would take offense at the comparison.

But it's not a comparison, it's just an example of the same statistical dishonesty.

When the pipeline was in fact blown up, of course we're going to look at vaguely worded threats in another light.

What are some of your stories?

I imagine there are very good reasons why he can’t trust the editors of certain publications for certain stories. Many of them are among the “power elite” who collaborate with the security state, whether directly or indirectly. There’s a long, storied history of that.

That argument makes no sense.

Russia doesn’t lose all leverage the moment they shut off the pipeline. They still have the leverage from being able to turn the pipeline back on, which impacts competitors and customers by giving the option.

Blowing up the pipeline takes that option off the table for the foreseeable future, and with the advantage that it doesn’t cause immediate dangerous supply shocks to Allies since it was already off.

Win/win for the Allies (though if public, Western Europe gov’ts would have no choice but to be pissed in public), not great for Russia who has their last leverage knocked off the table.

I personally don’t have an opinion on if the US did or did not do it, and I doubt we’d know for at least several decades.

But the US has done lots weirder stuff with far less concrete potential benefits before. hell, nearly anything the CIA had been caught doing in the 60’s or 70’s has far less plausible justification!

More likely they were listening, but continued to pursue the path that was in Germany’s national interest. German voters do not care about helping maintain US hegemony; they care about economic stability and energy security. It will be interesting to see what happens in German domestic politics as more evidence emerges that its supposed ally carried out industrial sabotage against it. The rest of Europe’s voters will also take note.

It is true, they have trillions of subscribers.

> I knew you would take offense at the comparison.

I was stating my opinion that the comparison was of low intellectual quality, not taking offense.

> When the pipeline was in fact blown up, of course we're going to look at vaguely worded threats in another light.

Except it’s only vaguely worded if you’re approaching it from the bias of wanting to think it was a threat of blowing it up. Approaching it a different way, they’re just the words a person would use if they were talking about ending the project, not literally blowing it up.

If Biden were going to be so aggressive as to threaten to blow up an infrastructure project of a close ally, why specifically limit it to Nordstream 2? “We’re going to lose our ever-loving minds here, but only for phase 2 of the project”.

It was completed in every sense of the word. It was merely awaiting approval/certification.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-europe-ru...

Yes but would you publish this big a story without corroboration? It’s the single source that’s more of a problem than the anonymity.

> the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow

Come on now. I get the desire for people to believe their own government could just never possibly engage in this kind of skullduggery (at least, not until they're comfortably removed from the incident in question by many decades and can safely file it under "well we don't do that kind of thing anymore"), but the idea that the Russians were the only ones with motive?!

> Very high risk operation

I'm not sure what would make it so high risk. The truth could easily be castigated and maligned as "conspiracy theory," a dismissal that most people in the Western countries will readily accept. The only people with the resources to investigate and find hard evidence would either be in on it (Western/NATO allies) or easily written off as pushing lies and propaganda (the Russians).

You're getting downvoted, despite the fact that when he headed the CIA, Allen Dulles used to just call up the editor of the Washington Post to have troublesome reporters fired.

In that case they still have exactly same leverage as before, since one NS2 pipe is still available and several land-based pipelines are also still online.

My personal belief is that we will never know who actually performed the acts of sabotage. But taking some Biden soundbites, mixing it with some public information and some hand-waving doesn't produce any actual evidence about who actually did it.

> Also, blowing up your pipeline just as a competitor comes on line? Whatever you think of Hersh's article, it's undeniable that Norway made a lot of money on the sabotage.

Did they though? Looking at the gas futures chart it's not obvious to me at all. The prices suddenly spiked much higher when NS1 was suddenly shutdown. After the explosion they actually went down slightly. They did profit, but just from the actions from the Russian side (which were earlier in time).

As for whatever you mean with competitor coming online. Towards Germany the flows from Norway didn't change that much after the invasion, Europipe II from Norway to Germany was already maxed out since January 2021 pretty much.

Given the circumstances, which were Russia refusing to send meaningful amounts down those pipes anyways, yes. Next best candidate would be some rogue group refusing to accept that all their preparations were made pointless for the time being.

That is exactly right, and nothing has changed— the CIA still has plenty of influence over WaPo, NYT, etc. I would say it’s perhaps slightly less direct now, but even worse because they have such a large network of think tanks and cutouts to shape the narrative. Remember when CBS news had that 60 Minutes piece last year about how most US arms and supplies were not actually getting to the front in Ukraine? How long did it take for them to “partially” retract it for some embarrassingly bogus reason? PS: if you haven’t read “The Devil’s Chessboard” by David Talbot, highly recommend.

It was not completed in the most important sense for this discussion—it was not operational. The project could still be ended short of completion without blowing it up.

Most people would find it very hard to believe that Germany would allow such a valuable investment to sit unused for any significant amount of time. Other European countries also had significant investment in Nordstream AG. The Germans were merely placating the Americans while a a diplomatic solution was being sought for Ukraine. The Americans undermined the proposed solutions at every turn while they baited Russia to invade per the RAND report game plan and then decided to remove the pipeline from the bargaining table entirely.

You’re missing the point. This is about what Biden meant when he said Nordstream 2 could be ended. Whether the Germans would have been onboard or not isn’t particularly relevant.

I had been assuming that the working theory amongst the “America definitely blowed up the pipeline” crowd was that this would have been a scheme cooked up amongst the NATO allies. Because, the alternative, that America did that against the will of Germany is just utter insanity. The idea that they would risk turning the entirety of Europe against them with such an act of brazen hostility is just…I can’t even.

actually gas prices in Europe are lower than just before the invasion and in any case the provider of Nord Stream is blackmailing with nukes. Finally, threatening does not lead to proof. Maybe yes, maybe not.

I think you’re underestimating the arrogance of American power. I did miss your point, because I couldn’t conceive that anyone would still be making the argument that Russia would blow up its own pipeline. Quibbling over how direct Biden’s threat was in terms of foreshadowing a kinetic attack— not even worth discussing at this point. Good day.

> It is alleged that the CIA cooperated heavily with the filmmakers.

I'm sure if they did, that was with the sole purpose of ensuring maximum factual accuracy, and no other purpose whatsoever.

> I did miss your point, because I couldn’t conceive that anyone would still be making the argument that Russia would blow up its own pipeline.

It would certainly be an extreme, and strange escalation of their previous attempts to use gas supplies as a retaliatory device. But, IMO, it’s less far-fetched than what you’re suggesting.

How would Biden "end the project?" Say pretty please?

> "Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg ... He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War."

During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Stoltenberg (born 1959) was -4 to 16 years old..

Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.

Links/sources follow:

«Thorvald Stoltenberg and Reiulf Steen visited Hanoi in 1970.»

https://vietnamkrigen-wordpress-com.translate.goog/2010/02/2...

«In a new biography of Thorvald Stoltenberg, it is described how Norway brokered peace between the parties in the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s.»

https://www-vg-no.translate.goog/nyheter/innenriks/i/Pk947/n...

«Defense Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg was praised for his negotiating skills in a so far classified CIA report from 1980.«

https://www-nettavisen-no.translate.goog/nyheter/cia-vurdert...

Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.

See my other comment for quotes and sources.

Yes. Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.

See my other comment for quotes and sources.

>Yes but would you publish this big a story without corroboration? It’s the single source that’s more of a problem than the anonymity.

No, but corroboration doesn't require multiple sources.

For example, sources often provide copies of official records that corroborate their story. That can be enough, particularly when the authenticity of the records can be independently verified.

First point - most of it is now taken off the table because there is an implicit (explicit?) unknown party with the proven ability and willingness to cut off any remaining supply at the drop of a hat, and the ability to supply is severely curtailed. It stops 'cheating' or 'backsliding' on the part of either party.

Second point - agreed. If for no other reason than there is little to no incentive for any of the players to share any evidence or info they may have found that would support or disprove any of the scenarios.

For Russia, if they could prove the US did it, it would strengthens the image of the US as a powerful world player with their foot on Russia's neck. If someone else did it, it would make them look even weaker.

For Western European allies, it would make it really obvious how much influence the US has on them, especially since their own fate continues to depend on the US - and it's large natural gas supplies. Even if they wanted to cut off the US, Russia is even worse for them, and they can't stand on their own two feet against either Russia or the US right now (militarily or economically). If someone other than the US did it, it would make their key infrastructure look even more fragile and vulnerable.

For the US, if they did it, it would expose the extent they are playing dirty (hurting the 'clean hands' narrative) and lose them good will with most of the public. If they found someone else doing it, it would reduce their apparent 'dirty tricks' power folks need to worry about, which is a major deterrent to enemies and allies doing dirty tricks.

you're holding their identity hostage like that? I would just not talk to you

HN favorite Mark Ames has another theory about Stoltenberg fils that wouldn't contradict TFA: perhaps even his teenage war protest was of the "observe then snitch" variety?

https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/162420098079862374...