A "source with direct knowledge of the operation" is the involuntary protagonist, as well as being anonymous, of the latest controversial exit from the keyboard of journalist Seymour Hersh (Chicago, 85 years old): the information on the alleged blowing up by the US of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in September.
The explosives, Hersh denounces, were placed in June by US divers during NATO exercises in the Baltic, and the detonation is the work of the Norwegian Navy three months later.
Based on that single source, the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for uncovering the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War has stirred up American public opinion with a theory that some call conspiracy theories, and which has brought the media to its feet. of war… between them.
The White House has denied Hersh's information.
"It is totally false, a complete fiction" that the US blew up the gas pipeline to blame Russia for the sabotage.
But for Washington, Hersh argues, the pipeline embodied "the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas" within reach of Germany and Western Europe, a supply contrary to the interests of the US gas sector. The story, for the most critical, would be halfway between a montage and misinformation.
The veteran investigative journalist, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the father of another reporter, reported the alleged undercover operation two weeks ago on his website, his information redoubt after going through publications such as The New York Times, a newspaper
for
which he covered Watergate, and
The New Yorker
magazine
, in which he published his investigation into torture in the secret CIA prison at Abu Ghraib (Iraq).
Then, in 2004, no one objected to a single letter of what was published.
But the Nord Stream is not the first controversy it has caused.
In 2013, he refuted the Western version that the chemical weapons bombardment of Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, had been the work of Assad's army and pointed to the responsibility of Syrian rebels.
"I wrote a story saying that there were many reasons to think that [the attack] did not come from [the Army of] Syria, but it was not published in the US," he lamented in 2019 in an interview with this newspaper.
Two years later he published, in the
London Review of Books
, that the US and Pakistan had lied about the circumstances of Osama Bin Laden's death, and suspicions increased, also due to the use of anonymous and indirect sources.
It was the turning point in his career, when he definitely became an
outsider .
, always against, one of those journalist-activists who take sides and against which journalistic orthodoxy warns.
His last two works, the one on Syria and the one on Bin Laden, had been rejected by
The New Yorker
, which spends tons of time weighing down to the last comma.
Objecting to an official version with plausible evidence from anonymous sources, especially in cases of a sensitive nature, has been for years—those of Hersh's consecration—a pertinent investigative exercise.
Today, not a few consider it a method bordering on misinformation.
But the reporter has not given his arm to twist.
"I will gladly allow history to judge my recent work," he writes in his memoirs, published in 2019 in Spanish under the title
Reporter
(Peninsula).
In that same book, Sy Hersh recalls his childhood and his work in the laundry of his parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe, where he forged his inquisitive character, which he has passed on to his son, also an investigative journalist.
In
Reporter
she describes herself as the "survivor of a golden age in journalism."
From that time when "we did not have to compete with 24-hour news channels, newspapers swam in abundance thanks to advertising revenue and I was free to travel as I wanted," he explained to this newspaper;
when journalists could dedicate themselves solely to revealing "important and unwanted truths", as it prides itself on having done for six decades.
That is why he has also maintained that, more than what was published, he regrets what he did not tell, such as the beating that Richard Nixon gave his wife, Pat, in 1974, after resigning as president due to Watergate, and
that
, according to the journalist, it was not the first.
Hersh had direct information from the hospital where Pat Nixon was treated, but considered that the president's private conduct had not affected her public performance.
A mistake he has always regretted.
Hersh isn't the only big name in journalism clouded by suspicion.
Examples of this are the attempts to review the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the supposed inclination of the British Robert Fisk towards Syrian official positions in his last years of life or the reservations about personal involvement -his relationship with one of the warlords- of the pioneer Oriana Fallaci in her reports on Lebanon.
But they are all dead, and few living representatives of the golden age of American journalism remain, led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Watergate) and Hersh: arcana of history, the official, the unofficial, and the one that never came to light. be told.
The memory of an increasingly torn trade in the battle between critics and apologists.
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