NEW YORK, February 9. /TASS/. Former NSA (National Security Agency) employee and whistleblower Edward Snowden has proposed recalling the examples when the US administration conducted secret operations but denied its involvement, Snowden wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.

"Can you think of any examples from history of a secret operation that the White House was responsible for, but strongly denied? Besides, you know, that little ‘mass surveillance’ kerfuffle," he tweeted.

As an example, he referred to the military operation in the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba orchestrated by the US intelligence agencies in 1961 to topple the government led by Fidel Castro (1926-2016), since the United States also denied any involvement in it.

Earlier on Wednesday, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article alleging that "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 said that US President Joe "Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community."

The American journalist reaffirmed the credibility of his source in a conversation with TASS.

Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House, responded to a request for comment from TASS that the story laid out by Hersh was totally false and complete fiction.