Who is Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer-winning journalist who claims the US bombed Nord Stream gas pipelines?

It might seem like another conspiracy theory involving the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). But if investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is to be believed the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed by the United States. According to a blog published by Hersh, the CIA carried out the covert operation last September at the direction of US president Joe Biden. The 85-year-old journalist claims that US Navy divers, operating under cover of a NATO exercise, planted bombs to destroy three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, designed to carry Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. He quoted an anonymous source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning”. The White House has rubbished the report calling it “utterly false and complete fiction”. [caption id=“attachment_12134012” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] This file photo taken in September 2022, released by the Danish Defence Command, shows the gas leak at the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline as it is seen from the Danish Defence’s F-16 rejection response off the Danish Baltic island of Bornholm, south of Dueodde. The White House flatly rejected the new report by Seymour Hersh that the US was behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines last year. AFP[/caption] While Hersh’s blog cannot be corroborated, he is no conspiracy theorist. Also, this is not the first time he has come out with a shocking claim. A veteran, Hersh has in the past won the Pulitzer Prize, considered the highest honour in journalism. Also read: Accident or sabotage? Why are the Russia-Europe Nord Stream pipelines leaking? Who is Seymour Hersh? Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He started his career as a police reporter for the city news bureau of Chicago in 1959 and then worked for publications like the United Press International in South Dakota and the news agency The Associated Press. He took a break from journalism for a bit to dabble in politics. During the 1968 presidential election, he served as the press secretary for the campaign of Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy. But soon after, he returned to reporting. As a freelancer, he covered the Vietnam War. Hersh later went on to work for The New York Times. He has also contributed to The New Yorker on national security matters and has written for the London Review of Books. Why was Hersh awarded the Pulitzer? Hersh won the Pulitzer for International Reporting in 1970 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War (1954 to 1975). The investigative report published on 12 November 1969 revealed how the US army had murdered thousands of unarmed Vietnamese civilians. In the village of Ma Lai in South Vietnam, a company of American soldiers killed more than 500 people, including women, children and old men on 16 March 1968. Some of the young women and girls were raped. [caption id=“attachment_12134032” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Truong Thi Tri, 76, visits the memorial museum for victims of the My Lai massacre in Son My village in Quang Ngai province in March 2018. The massacre, which left 504 villagers dead, was uncovered in 1970 by Seymour Hersh. AFP[/caption] After the shootings, the soldiers “burned every house, destroyed livestock and food, and fouled the area’s drinking water”, Hersh wrote in The New Yorker in January 1972. This was not reported to the headquarters but instead claimed that 120 Viet Cong, members of an armed Communist organization in South Vietnam, were killed and three weapons captured. It was then “reported to the world’s press as a significant victory”, the journalist wrote. The investigation was published in 33 newspapers for which Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize. What are Hersh’s other well-known works? Hersh joined The New York Times and covered the Watergate scandal, which involved the administration of then-US president Richard Nixon. One of the most spectacular political controversies in America, it revealed massive spying and political sabotage by the White House which was seeking to get the president re-elected. Two years later, it led to the resignation of Nixon. In 1973, Hersh revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. “United States B‐52 bombers made at least 3,500 secret bombing raids over Cambodia in a 14‐month period beginning in March, 1969,” Hersh wrote in The NYT report. A decade later, he wrote one of his most talked-about books, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Published in 1983, it delves into the influence of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s influence on the country’s foreign policy during Nixon’s time in the White House. In this book, he also accused former Indian prime minister Monarji Desai of taking “$20,000 a year from the CIA” during the Lyndon B Johnson and Nixon administrations for information on India. Desai later filed a libel suit against Hersh but he was acquitted. [caption id=“attachment_12134102” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Seymour Hersh is not new to controversy. He has raised questions about the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Reuters[/caption] For The New Yorker, Hersh wrote several reports on the US invasion of Iraq. In 2004, he covered the US military’s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. He also wrote extensively on post-9/11 activities and Iran. Most recently, in 2015, he alleged that the Obama administration had lied about the 2011 raids in Pakistan’s Abbottabad in which Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed. According to him, Pakistan had kept the terrorist in prison since 2006 and they knew about the raid. The US, of course, has rubbished the claim . Hersh also disputed the claim that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian civil war. In an article for the London Review of Books, he claimed that the top leaders of the Pentagon deliberately subverted American policy toward Syria, sabotaging US efforts to aid Syrian rebels and even sending US intelligence to al-Assad. From the fall of 2013 to September 2015, he says, US military leaders effectively conducted a secret alliance with Assad and with Russian president Vladimir Putin, whom they saw as their best allies in fighting ISIS, according to a Vox article. A 2018 article titled “Whatever happened to Seymour Hersh?” published in Prospect talks about how Hersh became a backer of Assad. He has described the Syrian leader as “secular” and claimed that he has given support to the CIA. While Hersh has done credible work and won many awards – two National Magazine Awards for Public Interest, five George Polk Awards for exceptional long-form investigative or enterprise journalism and the George Orwell Award – his recent articles have been criticised for making implausible claims, often citing anonymous sources. What does Hersh have to say? In an interview with Asia Society, when he was asked about his critics who argued that his sources were anonymous, Hersh said, “I’ve been hearing about anonymous sources forever… “Unnamed” sources have been a staple of the American reporting scene in Washington since I can recall, since I got here.” “…the only way you measure my stories in any reasonable way is to say that I’ve been writing an alternative history of the war… And the question is: Is it basically right? And I think overwhelmingly it’s right. If you had any rational sense of fairness, you have to agree that there has been much more right than wrong. There were wrong things certainly, I’m writing about a secret world and they don’t have access to the papers. But clearly something is going on. So those critics are just being uncharitable, and as critics of course they have every right to be uncharitable.” With inputs from agencies Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.