(Reuters) - Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. reporter Seymour Hersh said this week that U.S. Navy divers, in a CIA operation ordered by President Joe Biden, planted explosives that destroyed three Russian gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea last September.
The White House dismissed Hersh's report, which relied on a single source to support its claim about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, as "utterly false and complete fiction."
Reuters was unable to corroborate Hersh's self-published article, which said Biden authorized the operation to blunt Moscow's ability to use gas sales to Europe to fund its invasion of Ukraine.
Here are some key events in Hersh's career:
- Hersh in 1969 exposed the massacre of South Vietnamese villagers by U.S. troops in the hamlet of My Lai. His syndicated report was credited with helping end the Vietnam War. His subsequent book "My Lai" won a 1970 Pulitzer Prize.
- His reporting for the New York Times on President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal led to an award-winning book on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
- Hersh wrote critically acclaimed books on the 1983 Soviet downing of a South Korean passenger jet, Israel's nuclear arms program, and abuses of inmates at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison by American soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
- He ignited a storm of controversy with a 2013 article in the London Review of Books blaming a sarin nerve agent attack that killed hundreds of Syrian civilians in a rebel-held Damascus suburb on rebels acting under Turkey's direction. Turkey denied involvement and the United States and other countries blamed the attack on the Assad government.
- He attracted more controversy with a May 2015 London Review of Books article quoting Pakistani and U.S. sources as saying the U.S. and Pakistani governments lied about details of the 2011 U.S. commando raid that killed al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan. Both governments denied Hersh's allegations that Pakistan had been holding bin Laden prisoner and knew about the raid in advance.
(This story has been refiled to correct the spelling of Nord Stream in paragraph 2)