DISINFO: Biden spoke publicly about a plan to undermine the Nord Stream pipelines
SUMMARY
The team behind the plan to blow up Nord Streams was upset when the US President Joe Biden publicly said he knew how to shut down the pipelines. Initially, the sabotage was conceived as a covert operation. Within three weeks of the briefing, in which Biden was briefed on the plan, he spoke about it publicly, as did Under Secretary Victoria Nuland.
Within three weeks [of the briefing], in late January/early February of last year, they both publicly stated, "We know we can stop it. The President said this at a press conference: "We will stop Nord Stream 1."" After these words, there was a question from a journalist. It's all known, documented, and was on the evening news shows. The journalist asked: "How will you do it?" [Biden] responded, "I'll tell you: we know how to do it. We can do it".
The pipelines were mined during the NATO exercise BALTOPS 22 using remotely activated devices.
RESPONSE
Claims made in Seymour Hersh’s Substack post titled “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” are not supported by any evidence.
On 7 February 2022 President Biden said at a press conference: "if Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the — the border of Ukraine again — then there will be — we — there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
Question: "But how will you — how will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?"
President Biden: "We will — I promise you, we’ll be able to do it".
President Biden referred to the US sanctions on Nord Stream 2, which were imposed by the US administration in 2019 and were lifted in 2021. Also, Biden only referred to the Nord Stream 2, while the disinformation narrative expands his words over Nord Stream 1 and 2 at once, using "Nord Streams" in plural, the Insider points out.
Nord Streams September 2022 explosions are investigated by the concerned countries – Denmark, Germany and Sweden.
The false narrative is part of a wider pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign aiming to amplify and exploit Seymour Hersh’s controversial article accusing the US of blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines. The article can’t be considered an evidence of this: it is based on a single, unidentified anonymous source and published in Hersh’s personal blog, so no editorial team was involved in its preparation.
The central parts of its affirmations have been credibly debunked by journalists, experts and OSINT researchers, such as claims about NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg cooperating with the US since the Vietnam War (who was 15 at the time this war ended), the use of the M350 Alta ship (which had been out of use since 2012 and sent to the scrapyard in 2022), or that a P-8 aircraft of the Norwegian Navy was involved to detonate the explosives (none of Norway’s P-8 was remotely closer to the area of the explosions).
Other allegations have been reported as highly implausible, such as the presence of this single source in all the preparatory meetings for the operation; that selected members of the US Congress and other government agencies weren’t informed out of need for maximum secrecy, but then Norway was enrolled and Sweden and Denmark would have been informed at some point; or that this top-secret operation was carried out during the BALTOPS military exercises, attended and closely watched by multiple NATO countries.
The White House dismissed Hersh’s report as ‘utterly false and complete fiction.’ Similarly, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the allegations ‘nonsense.’ However, pro-Kremlin outlets and Russian authorities have massively reported and commented on it as if this allegation had been proven.
The story has received great attention from Kremlin key propaganda outlets.
See more disinformation narratives on Nord Stream, as well as the Russian's invasion of Ukraine in the TV-documentaries by the four Nordic public broadcasters' documentaries presenting new evidence of Russian vessels around the Nord Stream explosion sites.