“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".

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?