These sensitive operations are carried out in an atmosphere of great secrecy. If they go public, it usually happens several decades after they were held. Therefore, the sensational investigation of Nord Streams may look like a journalist’s attempt to hastily make a name for himself on a new topic. Everything would be so, but the author does not need a big name, because he has had it for a long time. Seymour Hersh is one of America’s most celebrated investigative and government secrets reporters.
Hersh, born in 1937, is the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Poland. Their family business was their own dry cleaner in Chicago, but the curious teenager had other plans for life. At 23, a trained historian and half-trained lawyer, he took a job at a news bureau in Chicago, where he received his first lessons in investigative and fact-checking while working on issues related to the crime. He then secured them in the Investigative Department of The Associated Press. It would be tedious for the reader to list all of Hersh’s CVs – the restless journalist worked in many top print media outlets but didn’t stay anywhere for long, his uncompromising nature cramped in the confines editorial policy.
Seymour Hersh’s name first rang out around the world in 1969, when he revealed the killing of around 500 civilians by American soldiers in the Vietnamese village of Song My a year earlier. After learning from a journalist acquaintance that a certain US military officer’s case for the murder of civilians in Vietnam was being quietly heard by a military tribunal, Hersh gripped the story with a bulldog fist. Posing as a government official or police officer, he made fun of those directly involved in the My Song My massacre and obtained details from them, then sold the written story to the Dispatch. News Service. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation.
Later, he wrote about the Watergate scandal (1972-1974), was the first to point the finger at the involvement of the CIA in the military coup in Chile (1973), and at the same time revealed the facts illegal surveillance by the secret services. anti-war movements in the United States itself. Another investigative gem in Hersh’s collection was the 2004 exposure of the brutal torture the US military inflicted on prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and other secret prisons. A beautiful story about the democratization mission of Uncle Sam’s soldiers and their fight against the scourge of terror in Iraq has collapsed before our eyes. This is not a complete list of Hersh’s most high-profile investigations, for which he received several other prestigious journalistic awards.
An author with such a solid track record is trustworthy, right? But the problem is that claims to the accuracy of information and the reliability of sources have haunted the famous journalist almost as long as the fame of the investigator.
It is easy to see that Hersh’s investigations often not only contradicted the official character of US authorities, but also displayed their most unbiased and often illegal activities, which ended great careers.
But it is not only the revenge of the defendants in his investigations who want to silence him. Fact checkers have caught Hersh more than once for inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and even fabrications. For example, many such claims were made against his book “The Dark Side of Camelot” about President John F. Kennedy. In 2013, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, the journalist called the official version of the US authorities about the murder of “number one terrorist” Osama bin Laden “a big lie”, and then wrote an article about it. Hersh faced a barrage of criticism from mainstream journalists who called him a conspiracy theorist.
He was criticized for the fact that sometimes the documents (for example, on Nord Stream) are built around the statements of a single anonymous source, which Hersh would not have verified by other means. However, in 2003, The New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, who worked with him, said that he had always discussed his sources thoroughly with Hersh, and that all of these people were real, down-to-earth people.
In any case, mainstream media have stopped publishing Hersh’s articles in recent years. But he himself is not ready to compromise, especially since today the media no longer have a monopoly on the public dissemination of information – the journalist contented himself with publishing an article on the breach of Nord Stream on a blog on the Substack platform.
Was Hersh himself wrong? Or did his sources do it? Willingly or unknowingly? Do individual errors also cast doubt on other investigations? And, more importantly, should Hersh’s article on Nord Streams be trusted?
There is hardly a simple and unequivocal answer to these questions. But the fact is, no matter how hard Western mainstream journalists try to dismiss Hersh’s work with disgust as a conspiracy theorist’s fantasy, his name is a sign of quality. Not without reason, his investigation provoked a strong reaction in the United States, including categorical denials from the White House and the CIA. By the way, that rare case where the CIA lost its cool and broke its traditional vow of silence in the spirit of “neither confirm nor deny”.
Republican Senator Mike Lee remarked that “if the story turns out to be true, we’re in big trouble.” Lee was referring to the fact that, according to Hersh, the CIA deliberately withheld an embarrassing operation from members of Congress. The senator’s skepticism is not surprising, as there are many examples of how the CIA has carried out illegal actions covertly from Congress, even in recent American history.
The attacks on the new Hersh investigation did not deter him. He is holding up. On the Radio War Nerd podcast, he called the gas pipeline blast “unimaginable stupidity” and suggested that CIA chief William Burns was trying to curry favor and take the place of the Secretary of State. American State. It’s Seymour Hersh. And whether or not to believe his investigation, let each reader decide for himself.
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What did the Hersh investigation find?
The operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipes was carried out by the CIA, the US Navy and the Norwegian army with the personal authorization of Joe Biden.
