“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

It's a great story, but it's all unsourced and could be a decent Tom Clancy story at best. You could probably write a similar one with Russia or German agents as the key players and be just as convincing.

The only anchor in reality appears to be Biden suggesting that they knew how to take it out which seems like a pretty weak place to build a large story.

What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".

It's not unsourced, the source is being kept private. That may not seem like a meaningful difference but there is a difference. And that difference is the reason Seymour Hersh's reputation is relevant.

Does it actually say that anywhere?

I read the first half of the article, and skimmed the second. It doesn't claim to be sourced from anywhere, and the only paragraph that discusses sources and fact checking is when they point out the White House says the entire article is a work of fiction. It doesn't present any evidence that it happened (other than that the US has a big swimming pool that the navy trains in), and summarizes itself by saying that it was a perfect plan (presumably meaning it left behind no evidence), except that they actually did it.

What am I missing?

> 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 third paragraph in the article.

FWIW, that doesn't really even make sense. If you had direct knowledge only of the planning, then what's the source for the execution? I don't think anyone would be surprised that there was a plan for doing this. The US plans lots of stuff. Why did "planning" even appear in that sentence? Why not "a source with direct knowledge of the operation"?

Again, there's a huge weasel word right there in the only sourcing for the whole article. That just... yikes. Maybe it's a typo. Maybe it's something an editor could have cleaned up. But maybe it's also the sort of thing Hersh's editors simply threw out as unpublishable, which is why it's an uneditted substack blog.

Someone plans to blow something up. And then it blows up.

Makes a lot of sense to connect the dots given that it's a covert activity.

Often planning is done by senior members, who get out of the military more frequently (especially recently) and the younger people who are operational stay quiet.

The people who were on the operation, aren't going to talk right now, because they are still operating and aren't ready to spill the beans and write a book/movie script.