NEW YORK, April 12./TASS/. The indecisiveness and indifference of US President Joe Biden's administration on a number of issues is leading to a breakdown in trust between the White House and some arms of the intelligence community, US investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh said in an article posted on the Substack subscription network on Wednesday.
A lack of leadership is "leading to a ‘total breakdown’ of trust between the White House and some elements of the intelligence community," he wrote.
Among other things, the work of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is a source of dissatisfaction for the intelligence community, since "the president and his two main foreign policy advisers ‘live in different worlds’ than the experienced diplomats and military and intelligence officers assigned to the White House," he wrote.
Hersh quoted "a prominent retired American diplomat who strenuously opposes Biden’s foreign policy toward China and Russia" as depicting Blinken "as little more than a ‘jumped-up congressional staffer’ and Sullivan as ‘a political campaign manager’." The diplomat qualified them as ‘decent pols’ who "suddenly find themselves front and center in the world of high-powered diplomacy ‘with no empathy for the opposition’," Hersh said.
Earlier, Seymour Hersh published an article alleging that "last June, 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," which included National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.
The White House and CIA flatly denied this.
On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported that "unprecedented damage" occurred on three strings of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines. Swedish seismologists registered two explosions on subsea routes of pipelines on September 26, 2022. The Russian Office of the Prosecutor General initiated an international terrorism case thereafter.