Hersh’s Substack Account Created One Hour Before Nord Stream Article

The Substack account attributed to Hersh was created one hour before the article

A Substack account under a Pulitzer Prize winner’s name appeared online one hour before publishing the most serious accusation against Washington in the ongoing war. The text, signed by Seymour Hersh and titled «How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline», claims US Navy divers placed explosives in the Nord Stream gas pipelines with support from Norwegian specialists. The ownership of that account is unverified. And everything starts there.

What the report claims and with what it is backed

The narrative describes an operation involving groups, individuals, and dates: a team of elite divers, a sound emitter, and a beacon to erase the trail, and a Norwegian aircraft that drops the initiator into the sea. The detonation procedure — via an acoustic signal, not a conventional timer — is the passage most circulated by those defending the text’s veracity, because it is not public knowledge. Hersh confirmed to Sputnik the content of the information attributed to him.

What is missing is documentation. The source that allegedly leaked the operation is never identified, and no institution has certified the details. Those who argue the text is fabricated cling precisely to that: a meticulous narrative without a single paper.

The account that appeared one hour earlier

The detail fueling suspicion is logistical. The Substack account was created one hour before the article went live, there is no verification that it belongs to the journalist, and the first to spread it were third parties. Minutes after publication, Matt Taibbi shared it on Twitter, after which the text went viral.

Taibbi — who began his career as a journalist in the Soviet Union in the 1990s and has been accused of amplifying Russian disinformation — carries a pattern of suspiciously familiar headlines: «How America Got It So Wrong» (November 2016) and «How America Made Trump Unstoppable» (March 2016). The Nord Stream one trinc the same formula. For some analysts, this is no coincidence: it is the signature of a style, not that of a Pulitzer Prize.

Who benefited from the explosion? The argument that doesn’t hold

The question of the beneficiary has become the battleground. If Russia lost its main pressure tool on Germany — gas — with the sabotage, the attack did not suit it. That reasoning, repeated ad nauseam, has its counter: the thread argues that Moscow had been playing with the faucet for months, threatening to cut supplies to condition European policy.

The chronology provides ammunition for both sides. On February 22, 2022, Dmitry Medvedev sarcastically celebrated the halt of Nord Stream 2 certification and predicted Europeans would face gas at 2,000 euros per 1,000 cubic meters. A year later, his 2023 predictions — oil at $150, gas at $5,000, the UK’s return to the EU, European collapse, and a supposed Fourth Reich — aged poorly.

The Pulitzer versus the absence of evidence

Here, consensus breaks. A Pulitzer Prize is no small thing, and Hersh’s curriculum includes exposing torture of Iraqi prisoners during the Iraq invasion, accusations initially attacked and later confirmed. Those defending the text recall that they attacked it then, too, and time was on his side. They add that self-publishing is a way to bypass editorial vetoes, not a sign of fraud.

On the other side, the argument is more prosaic: an extraordinary story demands extraordinary evidence, and here there is not a single document, not an identifiable source, nor independent confirmation. Just a well-constructed narrative and a newly created account.

The TV loudspeaker and suspicion of a manual

The report has reached talk shows and late-night programs, presented as definitive proof of US responsibility. That unverified text circulates with that stamp bothers even those who do not subscribe to the official version. Because the problem is not doubting Washington — for which there are plenty of reasons — but replacing legitimate doubt with borrowed certainty, varnished moreover with brave dissidence.

The external echo and the alleged aphasia

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused Western media of falling into «collective aphasia» after the report’s dissemination. The thesis does not hold: the text has been covered by US cable networks, Spanish TV programs, and leading media. That a government uses an unverified report as a diplomatic weapon says much about the piece, but nothing about its veracity.

With these threads, the matter remains where it started: a serious accusation, an author with serious credentials, and an non-existent documentary trail. Does anyone expect the next leak to arrive with a notarial deed?