The bombshell last week was that Seymour Hersh, an investigative reporter who made his name in Vietnam reporting on the My Lai massacre, had released a Substack essay proving that Joe Biden ordered the Nord Stream pipelines to be blown up. Now, though, an analyst says that the essay is manifestly untrue. (This doesn’t erase the possibility that Biden blew up the pipelines; it just means that Hersh’s version isn’t what happened.)

You can read Hersh’s long, very detailed essay here. I summed up the key points here, along with adding that, to the extent Hersh’s report was based on a single anonymous source, I wasn’t ready to believe it without further corroboration. I believe Biden was perfectly capable of doing what Hersh alleged but, because it would have been a war crime, we need more information than Hersh offered. To date, that corroboration has not been forthcoming.

Oliver Alexander is an analyst who uses publicly available information to reach his conclusions. He’s written a Substack essay explicitly challenging Hersh’s view: “Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh’s Pipe Dream: On the surface Seymour Hersh's story looks passable, but as you dig deeper it has more holes than the Nord Stream pipeline.”

Alexander’s key point is that the endless details that Hersh threw into his essay are what undo its veracity. In other words, as Pooh-Bah says in Gilbert & Sullivan’s  The Mikado, it was a case of “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

When first reading through Hersh’s account of the events, the level of detail he provides could add credence to his story. Unfortunately for Hersh’s story, the high level of detail is also where the entire story begins to unravel and fall apart. It is often stated that people who lie have a tendency to add too much superfluous detail to their accounts. This attempt to “cover all bases” is in many cases what trips these people up. Extra details add extra points of reference that can be crosschecked and examined. In Hersh’s case, this is exactly what appears to have happened. On the surface level, the level of detail checks out to laymen or people without more niche knowledge of the subject matter mentioned. When you look closer though, the entire story begins to show massive glaring holes and specific details can be debunked.

Alexander’s debunking is every bit as long as Hersh’s original essay, but here are just a few of the points he makes:

The alleged initial planning meetings show the CIA and other agencies acting as if the only point at which to attack the pipeline was directly next to Russia, a dangerous access point when there was a whole long pipeline that could be attacked.

Image: The Nord Stream pipeline explosion. YouTube screen grab.

In discussing Norway’s involvement, Hersh implies that NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg began to work with US intelligence during or immediately after the Vietnam War—except that Stoltenberg was born in 1959, making him 16 when the war ended.

To the extent Hersh claims the U.S. used BALTOPS (Baltic Operations) exercises as a cover, the exercises are always planned long in advance. This means Hersh asserts that, without telling BALTOPS what was going on, this covert operation managed to convince BALTOPS to change its activities without an explanation and in a way that covered up to 80 km distance.

Additionally, Hersh alleges that the divers used “a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter,” except that no such ship was used in the BALTOPS op. A similar ship was used in the op, but it was nowhere near the pipeline explosions.

And then there’s this:

Then Hersh goes on to speak absolute nonsense about the US having to “camouflage” the explosives from the Russians by adapting their salinity to that of the water. This is complete and utter drivel that makes no sense at all. Russia is not conducting minesweeping operations in the Danish and Swedish EEZ. Even if they were, they are not going to detect what Hersh himself described as a shaped charge placed on the pipeline. The salinity aspect is just random buzzwords.

Alexander’s article continues in this vein with myriad other publicly available facts that do not align with Hersh’s narrative. Again, this doesn’t mean that Hersh isn’t stating the truth. To begin with, we have no more reason to accept Alexander’s version at face value than we do Hersh’s version.

As for Hersh, his source may have gotten the core fact correct—Biden made the call—while garbling the details. Alternatively, Hersh, who is in his mid-80s, may have grasped the gist of the report but been the one to garble the details. Or Hersh may have been duped entirely.

The bottom line is that we really don’t know where the truth lies and, absent more information, I continue to be agnostic about Biden’s and America’s culpability—although this is clearly a matter that needs to be investigated.