The Nord Stream Sabotage｜The Secret U.S. Operation Exposed by Seymour Hersh

Lately, the provocations that European leaders direct at Russia have grown increasingly extreme. Amid all this, one emblematic development has been reported with remarkable restraint. German prosecutors have indicted a Ukrainian national who had been detained as one of the perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage.

The explosions of September 26, 2022, are often said to be shrouded in “mystery,” yet one man has been naming the culprit openly ever since they happened. He is Jeffrey Sachs, the economist at Columbia University.

At the time, while Western governments and media were loudly blaming Russia, Professor Sachs stated flatly that the United States had done it. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said he would “bet” that it was an American operation, and the remark drew a storm of criticism down on him. From the beginning, the one source he trusted and cited again and again, refusing to be swayed by government statements or the press, was the journalist Seymour Hersh. On February 8, 2023, Hersh, the celebrated American investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, published “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline” in his own newsletter.

Drawing on an anonymous source, the article described the operation in close detail. It shook the administration of the day, but because pressure was brought to bear on the press, it never became widely known. The most startling point in his report is that planning for the operation began in December 2021, more than two months before Russia invaded Ukraine. In other words, the story begins before the war in Ukraine.

According to Hersh, Jake Sullivan, then President Biden’s national security adviser, led the effort, convening a top-secret task force that brought together the heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the State Department, and the Treasury. At first, the discussion centered on how to stop Russia from operating the pipelines and how to wean Europe, and Germany in particular, off its dependence on Russian energy. The Navy proposed a direct attack by submarine, and the Air Force proposed dropping bombs with delayed fuses. William Burns, then director of the CIA, insisted that the overriding priority was secrecy. It must never come out that the United States had done it.

So, in early 2022, a CIA working group reported to the task force that “there is a way to blow up the pipelines,” and preparations for the sabotage began in earnest. Hersh charges that a loophole in American law was exploited when the team was chosen. The men selected were not a covert unit of Special Operations Command (SOCOM) but experienced divers from the U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Florida. Secret military operations run by SOCOM must by law be reported in advance to the leaders of Congress, and by using ordinary “Navy divers” instead, he alleges, the administration escaped that duty to inform Congress and kept the operation completely hidden.

Nor did the United States act alone. Because the operation was difficult to carry out single-handedly, Norway’s military and intelligence services joined it, as Hersh revealed. Why Norway, of all countries? The reason is plain. Norway was the home country of Jens Stoltenberg, then Secretary General of NATO, and a staunch ally of the United States. It has also been pointed out that Norway had an economic motive, since cutting off the Russian gas on which Europe depended would let it export more gas of its own.

Indeed, Stoltenberg, who had been appointed NATO Secretary General in March 2014, was due to finish his term on September 30, 2022, but “a certain event” extended his tenure, and in the end he served until September 30, 2024. Then, perhaps as a reward for his “contributions,” he was named governor of Norway’s central bank in February 2022 and became Norway’s finance minister in February 2025, a post he still holds.

The Norwegian Navy reported that the shallow waters off Bornholm, the Danish island, at a depth of about 80 meters, were ideal for the operation, since the currents there are gentle and divers can work with ease. The plan was moving forward in secret under the control of the United States and NATO when President Biden made an unbelievable slip of the tongue.

On February 7, 2022, at a joint press conference with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, Biden blurted out, “If Russia invades, there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Far from a mere gaffe, this was an emblematic statement in which he announced, in his own words, an event that was about to happen, namely that the Biden administration would be the one to destroy Nord Stream. Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, I should add, came on February 24 of that same year. The self-incriminating remark of an American president who had declared his own guilt on the world stage threw the people running the covert operation into turmoil. And because Biden had named the target himself, the operation fell into confusion and was turned from a covert action into a military operation, as Hersh’s account lays bare.

Then, in June 2022, BALTOPS 22, the NATO exercise held every year in the Baltic Sea, was used as cover. The American side had a new item added to the exercise schedule, live training in “research and development” for mine detection and clearance, and under cover of the exercise, U.S. Navy divers went down and attached shaped C4 charges to two of the pipelines. The explosives were fitted with special camouflaged casings that would not corrode in salt water.

The charges were first set on timers to detonate 48 hours after the exercise ended, but Biden rejected this, saying he wanted to decide the timing himself. The mechanism was therefore changed so that the timers would start only when they picked up a particular low-frequency sound emitted by a sonar buoy dropped into the sea. The operation was put on hold, and finally, on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane, flying what looked like a routine mission, dropped the sonar buoy. A few hours after the signal was received, the C4 charges went off, and three of the four pipelines were destroyed.

From the moment it happened, Western governments and media, as if they had agreed on their story in advance, named Russia as the culprit and attacked it furiously. Why, then, was the “timing” Biden wanted the end of September, rather than June as first planned? Hersh contends that the reason Biden chose that moment for the explosion is obvious. The main reason, he writes, was “the coming of winter.”

In other words, the target was a seasonal condition peculiar to Europe. By then, under American pressure and in the name of the war in Ukraine, the Europeans had already taken the reckless step of cutting themselves off from Russian gas supplies. Yet because Europe’s leaders had no alternative source of energy, they have faced a severe energy shortage to this day, and that shortage, of all things, set off the steep decline of German industrial power.

And just as in the Iran war, the leaders of the United States and Europe arrogantly assumed they could bring the war to a quick end. Russia, however, saw through their real intentions and pursued a strategy of protracted war from the start. The Biden administration’s design had been read by the Putin government, and Russia, convinced that Europe would inevitably falter, staked its hopes not on a military victory but on a long war in which its adversaries would destroy themselves.

If the war in Ukraine dragged on, Europe’s self-destruction was a future that could easily be foreseen. The United States reckoned that as autumn 2022 deepened and Europe faced bitter cold and a shortage of energy, Chancellor Scholz, pushed by public opinion, would open the valves of Nord Stream 2 and break away from the sanctions on Russia. What Washington feared most was the lifting of those sanctions.

The true aim of the sabotage, then, was not to weaken Russia but “to physically eliminate the option of Germany buying natural gas from Russia.” This is what Hersh exposed behind the scenes.

But Europe, sheltered by American military power, has no strength to criticize the United States. Having tightened the noose around their own necks, Western governments and media did something astonishing. They swapped in the Ukrainian military as the perpetrator.

On March 7, 2023, The New York Times reported that “new intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack.” The same day, Germany’s Die Zeit, working with the public broadcaster ARD and others, reported on the Nord Stream investigation under the headline “The trail leads to Ukraine.” On November 11 of that year, The Washington Post reported that a Ukrainian military officer had coordinated the sabotage. And so, strangely, from 2023 onward a “pattern” took shape, formed by nothing more than the prevailing mood, in which the view that Ukraine alone was responsible gained ground.

Then, on September 30, 2025, Polish police detained a Ukrainian national on suspicion of involvement in the attack. This is the man who has now been indicted. His real name has not been released, and he is referred to as “Volodymyr Z.,” a former soldier. Jeffrey Sachs, meanwhile, keeps insisting that we must not be fooled by America’s new story. The likelihood is high that casting the attack as the work of Ukraine alone is a maneuver to draw our eyes elsewhere.

Today, tragically, the people of Ukraine are being used as a testing ground for the day when Europe and NATO fight Russia directly. The newest drone weapons, intelligence operations, and AI-driven tactics are all being tested with the support of Europe and NATO. To them, it does not matter how many millions of Ukrainians die, how many cities are laid waste, or whether the country disappears altogether. This “cold fact” is what this affair demands that we see.

Turning to our own side of the world, yesterday, July 6, a Chinese submarine fired a ballistic missile into the Pacific, and the Japanese government and media have reacted with fury. Government and press alike call it a “provocation,” but we have to see it as a “warning.”

Unlike Japan, which still does whatever the United States wishes, China has an accurate grasp of who stands behind East Asia. In the middle of the strange spectacle of Japan, for some reason, celebrating “the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States,” China sent an unmistakable warning by way of a missile. Needless to say, it was aimed not at the Japanese government but at the American one. China pays no attention whatsoever to the Japanese government, and it delivered its warning directly to the owner of the pet dog. Packed into this launch is a message, “Stop destabilizing East Asia.” Even as that tension rises, Japan is lavishly celebrating its owner’s founding. This fact alone makes it plain who owns us.

Japan and Taiwan may be headed for a future like Ukraine’s. It is a future in which we cannot decide our own affairs, in which the fate of our homeland is held by the United States and NATO far away, and in which we are used however they please. What we Japanese must face now is the cruel fact that Ukraine has been sacrificed as a testing ground for the United States and NATO, and that the same thing is steadily making its way toward Taiwan, and then Japan, as its next stage. It is neither China nor Russia that is moving it forward.

The United States, far away, is free to live in its own megalomaniac fantasy in which China and Russia are cast as “evil.” For Ukraine, Europe, Taiwan, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula, however, those countries are neighbors, not some one-sided “evil” with whom dialogue and diplomacy should be refused. Europe has already shut down dialogue and diplomacy with Russia of its own accord, has spoken of a direct war in terms that can only be called mad, and on top of that is launching strikes straight at Moscow through Ukraine and others. In effect, NATO is attacking Russia. Russia’s patience with all this is close to snapping, and things have reached the point where attacks inside Europe, and even the use of nuclear weapons, are being openly discussed within its government.

Will Japan follow the same path to ruin? Perhaps the moment for a great decision has already passed.