Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.
That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted
Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.
Politiken journalist Hans Davidsen-Nielsen wrote that the interaction had given the harbour master—who was “not allowed to say a thing” at first—some “faith in the theory that American star journalist Seymour Hersh, among others, has put forward without any documentation: that the U.S. was behind the sabotage.”
Davidsen-Nielsen’s report has received a large amount of attention on social media but has barely been picked up by the international press.
Responding to the revelation, American journalist Glenn Greenwald joked: “Remember when multiple major U.S. media outlets … tried to convince Americans and Europeans that it was mostly likely Putin who blew up his own Nord Stream 2 pipeline? I do.”
Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche added that this new information “calls into question the previously favoured hypothesis that a Ukrainian group was responsible for the sabotage.” Asked how Politiken’s report fit in with the theory of Ukraine’s involvement, journalist Thomas Fazi also said: “Only one of the two stories can be true.”
Reporting on the Nord Stream sabotage appears to have dwindled in recent months, with Denmark closing its investigations in February and German officials complaining just last month that Poland was sabotaging its own investigative efforts.
