Seymour Hersh Ups the Ante, Exposes Norway and CIA’s Secret Ops in Run-Up to Vietnam War

Feb. 23, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—Seymour Hersh evidently was loaded for bear, as he prepared for the possibility of a servile media attempting to stonewall his Feb. 8 charges, of U.S. President Biden ordering the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. He had stated then that he had more material—and yesterday he let loose with a second round.

His new Substack posting, “From the Gulf of Tonkin to the Baltic: The secret and incomplete history of U.S.-Norway collaboration in covert operations,” relates that the “Norwegian Navy has a long and murky history of cooperation with American intelligence.” In early 1964, Norway provided the CIA special, heavily armed but fast boats, along with Norwegian captains and crew to train U.S. and South Vietnamese sailors, for a long-running series of clandestine coastal attacks upon North Vietnam, directed by the CIA and controlled by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. This is based, again, upon Hersh’s source “within the intelligence community.” The secret actions were the prelude, over several months, prior to the North Vietnamese confronting U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The rest is, as they say, history.

Previously it was thought that the forays against North Vietnam’s coastline had been run out of the American command in Saigon, but it turns out that even they evidently were bypassed. Hersh characterizes the bypassing of the regular military: “It was a secret war within a secret war.” At least two Navy SEALs (the SEALs had been created in January 1962) were wounded on these missions, and received the Medal of Honor in secret. “This bit of top secret and heretofore unknown history raises, to this reporter, an obvious question: What else do we not know about the secret operation in Norway that led to the destruction of the pipelines?”

Hersh, keeping busy, recently granted a 26-minute interview to Turkiye’s “Inside America with Ghida Fakhry,” on his original case on the Nord Stream sabotage.