An American investigator accused divers from the United States of mining the "Nord Streams"

Hersh wrote about this on his website, referring to an informed source.

'Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, 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", - Hersh's investigation says.

The author believes that a hydroacoustic buoy, which dropped a Norwegian Navy plane on September 26, contributed to the activation of underwater bombs laid on pipelines.

Hersh believes that US President Joe Biden gave the sanction to undermine the "Northern Streams" following lengthy secret discussions with national security experts in Washington.

Hersh calls one of Biden's main motives that the "Nord Streams" could become a driver of Putin's political and territorial ambitions in the midst of a military operation on Ukraine.

"During the discussions, the main question was not whether or not to perform the operation, but how not to leave evidence", - he said.

The author shared his thoughts with high-ranking officials and sent requests to the authorities by e-mail. However, the White House rejected Hersh's version of the involvement of the US army and NATO forces in the sabotage of the Nord Streams, saying that they consider it "a lie" and "complete fiction", - the investigator explains.

At the same time, Hersh believes that Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to the US president, could have been involved in conducting a special operation to destroy Russian pipelines.

The branches of the Nord Stream-2 pipeline were damaged by explosions at the end of September 2022. The gas leak was unprecedented, as was the damage to the pipes. Experts believe that taking into account the colossal destruction, actions to restore the flows may be fruitless.

A number of Western politicians tried to call the incident a "crossbow" on the part of the Russian Federation, while in Russia the explosions were called sabotage.

Seymour Hersh (born 1937) is a well—known investigative journalist in the United States. Already his first book "Chemical and bacteriological weapons: America's Hidden Arsenal" (1968) became a political exposure. Two books by Seymour Hersh about the Vietnam War — "Milay-4: A Report on the Massacre and its Consequences" (1970) and "Hiding the Facts: a Secret military investigation of the Milay-4 massacre" (1972) — became bestsellers. The first of them (the journalist was forced to publish it abroad, only after that it was published in the USA) brought him the Pulitzer Prize. In 1974 Seymour Hersh received the award for a series of essays on the influence of the CIA on US life.