Seymour Hersh Quotes

America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines... Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential....

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school... The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership — the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

Asked for comment... a White House spokesperson, said in an email, "This is false and complete fiction."... a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: "This claim is completely and utterly false."
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

Last June, the Navy divers... planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.... Two of the pipelines... had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade...

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name... The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades... to do the good—using C4 explosives... as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals...

The New York Times called it a "mystery," but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

What you’ll find here is, I hope, a reflection of that freedom. The story you will read today is the truth as I worked for three months to find, with no pressure from a publisher, editors or peers to make it hew to certain lines of thought—or pare it back to assuage their fears. Substack simply means reporting is back . . . unfiltered and unprogrammed—just the way I like it.

I’m at my best when I swig cheap bourbon with the servicemen, work over the first-year law firm associates for intel, or swap stories with the junior minister from a country most people can’t name.

I’ve never been interested in socializing with pols or cozying up to money types at the self-important cocktail get togethers—the star-fu----- parties, I always liked to call them.

Here [at Substack], I have the kind of freedom I’ve always fought for. I’ve watched writer after writer on this platform as they’ve freed themselves from their publishers’ economic interests, run deep with stories without fear of word counts or column inches, and—most importantly—spoken directly to their readers. And that last point, for me, is the clincher.

The crime was covered up at the top of the military chain of command for eighteen months—until I uncovered it... but getting it before the American public was no easy task... [It was] initially rejected by the editors at Life and Look magazines. When the Washington Post finally published it, they littered it with Pentagon denials and the unthinking skepticism of the rewrite man...

I’ve been a freelancer for much of my career. In 1969, I broke the story of a unit of American soldiers in Vietnam who... were ordered to attack an ordinary peasant village.. and told to kill on sight. The boys murdered, raped and mutilated for hours, with no enemy to be found.

I want the American people to stop believing everything they hear and to ask more questions, to become more skeptical. I think it's the one reason a guy like Donald Trump ran. They understood where he was coming from. That Trump is just a blowhard. They laughed at him. They knew Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. But Trump wasn't the same old big smile and a lot of good words. The Democrats have been going around saying, "We're for the people, we're for the little guy." And all they do is run to Wall Street for money. And the one guy that didn't, [Bernie] Sanders, was sabotaged by the Democratic National Committee.
... What did these hacked messages from the DNC say, anyway? It was about cutting off money for Sanders. Everything that was leaked showed that the Democratic Party was working against the one guy who wasn't running on campaign funds from the big corporations.

I gave a talk at a journalism school recently and I told them they must read before they write. It's amazing. Even with Wikipedia, people don't know obvious things. In terms of journalism just get the hell out of the way of the story. Do the work. There is a dispute between two people about an issue. That is not the story. The story is which one of the two people is right. But reporters and journalists are apparently just happy to say, "So-and-so said this today." That's how it goes now.... I worry about people who still think the world is flat when in reality the world is round. If I want to tell them it's round and they don't want to hear it, what do I care? I can't worry about it.