“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".

Initially I had the same reaction. After reading the piece slowly again my impression is:

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is very carefully and lucidly written, with so many details, each of which can be refuted. How does he know about all the meetings between the CIA, Sullivan, etc. Why does no one refute individual facts?

I think he did have a source who provided all this. If the source lied, tough. Investigative journalism is always a gamble. If mainstream media worked, they'd try to press the government on the myriads of claims presented in Hersh's article. Perhaps this would lead somewhere. But the days when mainstream opposed the U.S. government like in the case of Abu Ghraib are over.