Russia Today (RT), the main media centre of Russian war propaganda, had only one day to be - possibly - worried last Friday, when the EU suspended the broadcasting licenses of their programmes in Arabic.
The very next day, they broadcast an interview with the new star of the pro-Russian narrative in the West, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
The head of RT and one of Putin's main propagandists, Margarita Simonyan, triumphantly announced on Twitter: “Hersh gave us an interview. Wait.”
This was a sure sign that the Kremlin thought it had a landed a major propaganda trump card, and expected a lot from it. Perhaps even a shift in the information war.
Hersh's half-hour interview for RT's show Going Underground was just the media highlight of his full exploitation for the benefit of Kremlin politics.
Star of the UN Security Council
Last Tuesday, because of Hersh's writing, Russia convened a special session of the UN Security Council.
Russia found proof in his "research" report that it was the US that destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
“The perpetrator was now known, thanks to an investigating journalist who had determined not only that the United States did it, but how they did it”, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya said at the Security Council session last Tuesday.
What did Seymour Hersh's "research" report lead to? An ostracised country, a permanent member of the UN Security Council which has been waging an aggressive war against a neighbouring country for a year, used his claims, which are based on only one anonymous source, as proof of the justification of its war campaign.
Media machine of the Russian security services
Before the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Europe and the US had a united front against Russian propaganda and deception.
However, many "guerrillas" who spread Russian propaganda, exploit the freedom that does not exist in Russia, and remain behind the lines of that front.
Among those "guerrillas" is Seymour Hersh, who claimed that US President Joe Biden made a big mistake by ordering the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, and thus caused a problem with heating for Germany and NATO member states.
Hersh claimed, based on an anonymous source, that the US Navy planted remotely-detonated mines last June during a NATO naval exercise.
He also knows that the decision to blow up the pipeline was taken by US President Joe Biden, and that the US abused NATO. And he also knows how the attack was carried out. There is no evidence for any of this in Hersh's report and interviews.
Anyone with some knowledge of the Russian propaganda narrative would recognise the media box of tricks of the Russian security services.
At the basis of Hersh's claims is the attitude that all NATO member states are just US colonies, which have been members of the Alliance only because of their corrupt elites and the fear of the Americans.
Hersh did not mention that no one in Europe froze this winter, or that Europe has been functioning smoothly without Russian gas, and that no one had determined how the explosion on the gas pipeline connecting Russia and Germany occurred.
The investigation is being conducted by Sweden, Denmark and Germany, and their governments informed the UN Security Council last Tuesday that “these investigations have not yet been concluded”, and “at this point, it is not possible to say when they will be concluded”.
The Russian government does not trust these three democratic governments, but chose to believe one journalist at the end of his career and his anonymous source, which is why its ambassador to the UN claimed that “the perpetrator was now known”.
An implausible alibi
Hersh's credibility suffers when he resorts to historical analogies, which he uses to explain the causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because this has been another favourite propaganda tool of the Kremlin.
Hersh claims that Biden led the US into war with lies, as Lyndon Johnson did with a staged North Vietnamese attack on a US ship in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify the Vietnam War.
His comparison of the start of Russian aggression with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which was a direct reason for the First World War, is particularly irrational.
Mentioning the war in Vietnam has the sole purpose of reminding that the US also attacked some countries. Russian propaganda magazines list daily all the wars in which the US participated directly or indirectly.
Hersh allows himself to sink to the lowest level by quoting the most low-level Russian propagandists, claiming that "Putin was forced into war" because NATO promised not to expand after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"What would the Americans do if the Russians deployed missiles in Canada and Mexico?”, is Hersh's echo of the Kremlin's frequently repeated propagandistic attitude, which, amongst other things, qualified him as the "star" of this venture.
Speaking of himself as not only a journalist, but also a concerned US citizen, troubled by his government's mistakes regarding Europe and Ukraine, Seymour Hersh provides an implausible alibi.
He has put his journalistic career, his award and his reputation in the service of the war propaganda of an isolated country, working as its "guerrilla" behind the front lines.
