CHAPTER SEVEN
BLOOD
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For four years NSA's “African Queen" lumbered inconspicuously up
and down the wild and troubled East African coast with the speed of an
old sea turtle. By the spring of 1967, the tropical waters had so
encrusted her bottom with sea life that her top speed was down to
between three and five knots. With Che Guevara long since gone back to
Cuba, NSA's G Group, responsible for the non-Communist portion of the
planet, decided to finally relieve the Valdez and send her back to Norfolk,
where she could be beached and scraped.
It was also decided to take maximum advantage of the situation by
bringing the ship home through the Suez Canal, mapping and charting
the radio spectrum as she crawled slowly past the Middle East and the
eastern Mediterranean. "Now, frankly," recalled Frank Raven, former
chief of G Group, "we didn't think at that point that it was highly
desirable to have a ship right in the Middle East; it would be too
explosive a situation. But the Valdez, obviously coming home with a foul
bottom and pulling no bones about it and being a civilian ship, could get
away with it." It took the ship about six weeks to come up through the
canal and limp down the North African coast past Israel, Egypt, and
Libya.
About that same time, the Valdez's African partner, the USS Liberty,
was arriving off West Africa, following a stormy Atlantic crossing, for the
start of its fifth patrol. Navy Commander William L. McGonagle, its newest captain, ordered the speed reduced to four knots, the lowest
speed at which the Liberty could easily answer its rudder, and the ship
began its slow crawl south. On May 22, the Liberty pulled into Abidjan,
capital of the Ivory Coast, for a four-day port call.
Half the earth away, behind cipher-locked doors at NSA, the talk was
not of possible African coups but of potential Middle East wars. The
indications had been growing for weeks, like swells before a storm. On
the Israeli-Syrian border, what started out as potshots at tractors had
quickly escalated to cannon fire between tanks. On May 17, Egypt (then
known as the United Arab Republic [UAR]) evicted UN peacekeepers and
then moved troops to its Sinai border with Israel. A few days later, Israeli
tanks were reported on the Sinai frontier, and the following day Egypt
ordered mobilization of 100,000 armed reserves. On May 23, Gamal
Abdel Nasser blockaded the Strait of Tiran, thereby closing the Gulf of
Aqaba to Israeli shipping and prohibiting un-escorted tankers under any
flag from reaching the Israeli port of Eilat. The Israelis declared the action
"an act of aggression against Israel" and began a full-scale mobilization.
As NSA's ears strained for information, Israeli officials began arriving
in Washington. Nasser, they said, was about to launch a lopsided war
against them and they needed American support. It was a lie. In fact, as
Menachem Begin admitted years later, it was Israel that was planning a
first strike attack on Egypt. "We . . . had a choice," Begin said in 1982,
when he was Israel's prime minister. "The Egyptian army concentrations
in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to
attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
Had Israel brought the United States into a first-strike war against
Egypt and the Arab world, the results might have been calamitous. The
USSR would almost certainly have gone to the defense of its Arab friends,
leading to a direct battlefield confrontation between U.S. and Soviet
forces. Such a dangerous prospect could have touched off a nuclear war.
With the growing possibility of U.S. involvement in a Middle East war,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff needed rapid intelligence on the ground situation
in Egypt. Above all, they wanted to know how many Soviet troops, if any,
were currently in Egypt and what kinds of weapons they had. Also, if
U.S. fighter planes were to enter the conflict, it was essential to pinpoint
the locations of surface-to-air missile batteries. If troops went in, it would
be vital to know the locations and strength of opposing forces.
Under the gun to provide answers, officials at NSA considered their
options. Land-based stations, like the one in Cyprus, were too far away
to collect the narrow line-of-sight signals used by air defense radar, fire
control radar, microwave communications, and other targets.
Airborne Sigint platforms—Air Force C-130s and Navy EC-121s—
could collect some of this. But after allowing for time to and from the "orbit areas," the aircrews would only have about five hours on station—
too short a time for the sustained collection that was required. Adding
aircraft was also an option but finding extra signals intelligence planes
would be very difficult. Also, downtime and maintenance on those
aircraft was greater than for any other kind of platform.
Finally there were the ships, which was the best option. Because they
could sail relatively close, they could pick up the most important signals.
Also, unlike the aircraft, they could remain on station for weeks at a
time, eavesdropping, locating transmitters, and analyzing the
intelligence. At the time, the USS Oxford and Jamestown were in
Southeast Asia; the USS Georgetown and Belmont were eavesdropping off
South America; and the USNS Muller was monitoring signals off Cuba.
That left the USNS Valdez and the USS Liberty. The Valdez had just
completed a long mission and was near Gibraltar on its way back to the
United States. On the other hand, the Liberty, which was larger and
faster, had just begun a: new mission and was relatively close, in port in
Abidjan.
Several months before, seeing the swells forming, NSA's G Group had
drawn up a contingency plan. It would position the Liberty in the area of
"L0L0" (longitude 0, latitude 0) in Africa's Gulf of Guinea, concentrating
on targets in that area, but actually positioning her far enough north
that she could make a dash for the Middle East should the need arise.
Despite the advantages, not everyone agreed on the plan. Frank Raven,
the G Group chief, argued that it was too risky. "The ship will be
defenseless out there," he insisted. "If war breaks out, she'll be alone and
vulnerable. Either side might start shooting at her. ... I say the ship
should be left where it is." But he was overruled.
On May 23, having decided to send the Liberty to the Middle East, G
Group officials notified John Connell, NSA's man at the Joint
Reconnaissance Center. A unit within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the JRC
was responsible for coordinating air, sea, and undersea reconnaissance
operations. At 8:20 that spring evening, amid the noisy clatter of teletype
machines, a technician tapped out a brief Flash message to the Liberty:
MAKE IMMEDIATE PREPARATIONS TO GET UNDERWAY.
WHEN READY FOR SEA ASAP DEPART PORT ABIDJAN AND
PROCEED REST POSSIBLE SPEED TO ROTA SPAIN TO
LOAD TECHNICAL SUPPORT MATERIAL AND SUPPLIES.
WHEN READY FOR SEA PROCEED TO OPERATING AREA
OFF PORT SAID. SPECIFIC AREAS WILL FOLLOW.
In the coal-black Ivorian night, an island of light lit up the end of the
long wooden pier where the USS Liberty lay docked. Beyond, in the harbor, small dots of red and green blinked like Christmas-tree lights as
hulking cargo ships slowly twisted with the gentle tide.
It was around 3:45 A.M. when Lieutenant Jim O'Connor woke to a
knock on his stateroom door. The duty officer squinted as he read the
message in the red glow of an emergency light. Still half asleep, he
mumbled a curse and quickly threw on his trousers. "It was a message
from the Joint Chiefs of Staff," O'Connor recalled telling his cabinmate.
"Whoever heard of JCS taking direct control of a ship?" Within minutes
reveille sounded and the Liberty began to shudder to life. Less than three
hours later, the modern skyline of Abidjan disappeared over the stern as
the ship departed Africa for the last time. Silhouetted against the rising
sun was the large moon-bounce antenna on the rear deck, pointing
straight up as if praying.
For eight days, at top speed, the bow cut a silvery path through 3,000
miles of choppy Atlantic Ocean. The need for linguists was especially
critical on the Liberty, which, because of her West African targets, carried
only French and Portuguese language experts. Therefore, five Arabic
linguists—two enlisted Marines and three NSA civilians—were ordered to
Rota to rendezvous with the Liberty. Although the ship already had
numerous Russian linguists, it was also decided to add one more, a
senior analytical specialist.
NSA had originally wanted to also put Hebrew linguists on the ship,
but the agency just didn't have enough. "I mean, my God," said Frank
Raven, "you're manning a crisis; where are you going to get these
linguists from? You go out and ask the nearest synagogue? We got
together every linguist we could manage and we not only sent them to
Rota but then we have to back up every military station in the Middle
East—we're sending them into Athens, we're sending them into Turkey—
by God, if you can speak Arabic and you're in NSA you're on a plane!"
As the Liberty steamed northward, Marine Sergeant Bryce Lockwood
was strapped in a signals intelligence plane flying 30,000 feet above the
frigid Norwegian Sea off Iceland. Lockwood was an experienced signals
intelligence intercept operator and Russian linguist; he and his
crew members were shadowing the Russian Northern Fleet as it
conducted summer war games. But the ferret operation had been
plagued with problems. A number of the missions had been canceled as
a result of aircraft equipment failures and the one Lockwood was on
intercepted only about three minutes of Russian voice, which was so
garbled that no one could understand it.
During the operation, Lockwood was temporarily assigned to the U.S.
Navy air base at Keflavik, Iceland. But as the Russian exercise came to
an end, he headed back to his home base, the sprawling Navy listening
post at Bremerhaven, where he specialized in analyzing intercepted Russian communications. The plane flew first to Rota, where he was to
catch another military flight back to Germany. However, because it was
the Memorial Day weekend, few U.S. military flights were taking off; he
was forced to spend the night. That afternoon Lockwood went to a picnic,
had a few beers, and then went to bed early in his quarters.
About 2:00 A.M. he was suddenly woken up by some loud pounding
on his door. Assuming it was just a few of his fellow Marines wanting to
party, he pulled the cover over his head and ignored it. But the banging
only got louder. Now angry, Lockwood finally threw open the door.
Standing in front of him in the dim light was a sailor from the duty office.
"I have a message with your name on it from the Joint Chiefs of Staff," he
said somewhat quizzically. "You're assigned to join the USS Liberty at
0600 hours. You better get up and pack your seabag." It was a highly
unusual order, a personal message from the JCS at two in the morning;
Lockwood had little time to ponder it.
It was just an hour or so after dawn on the first of June when the
Liberty slid alongside a pier in Rota. Already waiting for them were
Lockwood and the five Arabic linguists. A short time later, thick black
hoses, like boa constrictors, disgorged 380,000 gallons of fuel into the
ship's tanks while perspiring sailors in dungarees struggled to load
crates of vegetables and other food. Several technicians also retrieved
boxes of double-wrapped packages and brought them aboard. The
packages contained super sensitive signals intelligence data left for them
by the Valdez as she passed through Rota on the way back to Norfolk.
Included were critical details on Middle East communication patterns
picked up as the Valdez transited the area: "who was communicating on
what links—Teletype, telephone, microwave, you name it," said Raven.
As she steamed west across the Mediterranean to Rota, the Valdez
had also conducted "hearability studies" for NSA in order to help
determine the best places from which to eavesdrop. Off the eastern end
of Crete, the Valdez discovered what amounted to a "duct" in the air, a
sort of aural pipeline that led straight to the Middle East. "You can sit in
Crete and watch the Cairo television shows," said Raven. "If you're over
flat water, basically calm water, the communications are wonderful." He
decided to park the Liberty there.
But the Joint Chiefs of Staff had other ideas. In Rota, Commander
McGonagle received orders to deploy just off the coasts of Israel and
Egypt but not to approach closer than twelve and a half nautical miles to
Egypt or six and a half to Israel. Following some repairs to the
troublesome dish antenna, the Liberty cast off from Rota just after noon
on June 2.
Sailing at seventeen knots, its top speed, the Liberty overtook and
passed three Soviet ships during its transit of the Strait of Gibraltar. From there it followed the North African coastline, keeping at least
thirteen miles from shore. Three days after departing Rota, on June 5, as
the Liberty was passing south of Sicily, Israel began its long-planned
strike against its neighbors and the Arab-Israeli war began.
On June 5, 1967, at 7:45 A.M. Sinai time (1:45 A.M. in Washington,
D.C.), Israel launched virtually its entire air force against Egyptian
airfields, destroying, within eighty minutes, the majority of Egypt's air
power. On the ground, tanks pushed out in three directions across the
Sinai toward the Suez Canal. Fighting was also initiated along the
Jordanian and Syrian borders. Simultaneously, Israeli officials put out
false reports to the press saying that Egypt had launched a major attack
against them and that they were defending themselves.[It's all these people know how to do is lie DC]
In Washington, June 4 had been a balmy Sunday. President
Johnson's national security adviser, Walt Rostow, even stayed home from
the office and turned off his bedroom light at 11:00 P.M. But he turned it
back on at 2:50 A.M. when the phone rang, a little over an hour after
Israel launched its attack. "We have an FBIS [Foreign Broadcast
Information Service] report that the UAR has launched an attack on
Israel," said a husky male voice from the White House Situation Room.
"Go to your intelligence sources and call me back," barked Rostow. Ten
minutes later, presumably after checking with NSA and other agencies,
the aide called back and confirmed the press story. "Okay, I'm coming
in," Rostow said, and then asked for a White House car to pick him up.
As the black Mercury quickly maneuvered through Washington's
empty streets, Rostow ticked off in his mind the order in which he
needed answers. At the top of the list was discovering exactly how the
war had started. A few notches down was deciding when to wake the
president.
The car pulled into the Pennsylvania Avenue gate at 3:25 and Rostow
was quickly on the phone with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was
still at home. "I assume you've received the Flash," he said. They agreed
that, if the facts were as grim as reported, Johnson should be awakened
in about an hour. Intelligence reports quickly began arriving indicating
that a number of Arab airfields appeared to be inoperative and the
Israelis were pushing hard and fast against the Egyptian air force.
Sitting at the mahogany conference table in the Situation Room, a
map of Vietnam on the wall, Rostow picked up a phone. "I want to get
through to the President," he said. "I wish him to be awakened." Three
stories above, Lyndon Johnson picked up the phone next to his carved
wood bedstead. "Yes," he said.
"Mr. President, I have the following to report." Rostow got right to
business. "We have information that Israel and the UAR are at war." For the next seven minutes, the national security adviser gave Johnson the
shorthand version of what the United States then knew.
About the same time in Tel Aviv, Foreign Minister Abba Eban
summoned U.S. Ambassador Walworth Barbour to a meeting in his
office. Building an ever larger curtain of lies around Israel's true activities
and intentions, Eban accused Egypt of starting the war. Barbour quickly
sent a secret Flash message back to Washington. "Early this morning,"
he quoted Eban, "Israelis observed Egyptian units moving in large
numbers toward Israel and in fact considerable force penetrated Israeli
territory and clashed with Israeli ground forces. Consequently, GOI
[Government of Israel] gave order to attack." Eban told Barbour that his
government intended to protest Egypt's action to the UN Security
Council. "Israel is the victim of Nasser's aggression," he said.
Eban then went on to lie about Israel's goals, which all along had
been to capture as much territory as possible. "GOI has no rpt [repeat]
no intention taking advantage of situation to enlarge its territory. That
hopes peace can be restored within present boundaries." Finally, after
half an hour of deception, Eban brazenly asked the United States to go
up against the USSR on Israel's behalf. Israel, Barbour reported, "asks
our help in restraining any Soviet initiative." The message was received at
the White House at two minutes before six in the morning.
About two hours later, in a windowless office next to the War Room in
the Pentagon, a bell rang five or six times, bringing everyone to quick
attention. A bulky gray Russian Teletype suddenly sprang to life and
keys began pounding out rows of Cyrillic letters at sixty-six words a
minute onto a long white roll of paper. For the first time, an actual online encrypted message was stuttering off the Moscow-to-Washington hotline. As it was printing, a "presidential translator"—a military officer
expert in Russian—stood over the machine and dictated a simultaneous
rough translation to a Teletype operator. He in turn sent the message to
the State Department, where another translator joined in working on a
translation on which both U.S. experts agreed.
The machine was linked to similar equipment in a room in the
Kremlin, not far from the office of the chairman of the Council of
Ministers of the USSR. Known formally as the Washington—Moscow
Emergency Communications Link (and in Moscow as the Molink), the hot
line was activated at 6:50 P.M. on August 30, 1963, largely as a result of
the Cuban missile crisis.
The message that June morning in 1967 was from Premier Alexei
Kosygin. The Pentagon and State Department translators agreed on the
translation:
Dear Mr. President,
Having received information concerning the military clashes
between Israel and the United Arab Republic, the Soviet
Government is convinced that the duty of all great powers is
to secure the immediate cessation of the military conflict.
The Soviet Government has acted and will act in this
direction. We hope that the Government of the United States
will also act in the same manner and will exert appropriate
influence on the Government of Israel particularly since you
have all opportunities of doing so. This is required in the
highest interest of peace.
Respectfully, A. Kosygin
Once the presidential translator finished the translation, he rushed it
over to the general in charge of the War Room, who immediately called
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara several floors above.
McNamara had arrived in his office about an hour earlier. "Premier
Kosygin is on the hotline and asks to speak to the president," the War
Room general barked. "What should I tell him?"
"Why are you calling me?" McNamara asked.
"Because the hot line ends in the Pentagon," the general huffed.
(McNamara later admitted that he had had no idea that the connection
ended a short distance away from him.) "Patch the circuit over to the
White House Situation Room, and I'll call the president," McNamara
ordered.
McNamara, not having been in on the early morning White House
calls, assumed Johnson would still be sleeping, but he put the call
through anyway. A sergeant posted outside the presidential bedroom
picked up the phone. "The president is asleep and doesn't like to be
awakened," he told the Pentagon chief, not realizing that Johnson had
been awake since 4:30 A.M. discussing the crisis. "I know that, but wake
him up," McNamara insisted.
"Mr. President," McNamara said, "the hot line is up and Kosygin
wants to speak to you. What should we say?"
"My God," Johnson replied, apparently perplexed, "what should we
say?"
McNamara offered an idea: "I suggest I tell him you will be in the
Situation Room in fifteen minutes. In the meantime, I'll call Dean and
we'll meet you there."
Within half an hour, an American-supplied
Teletype was cranking out English letters in the Kremlin. Johnson told
Kosygin that the United States did not intend to intervene in the conflict.
About a dozen more hotline messages followed over the next few weeks.
As the first shots of the war were being fired across the desert
wasteland, NSA had a box seat. A fat Air Force C-130 airborne listening
post was over the eastern Mediterranean flying a figure-eight pattern off
Israel and Egypt. Later the plane landed back at its base, the Greek air
force section of Athens International Airport, with nearly complete
coverage of the first hours of the war.
From the plane, the intercept tapes were rushed to the processing
center, designated USA-512J by NSA. Set up the year before by the U.S.
Air Force Security Service, NSA's air arm, it was to process intercepts—
analyzing the data and attacking lower-level ciphers—produced by Air
Force eavesdropping missions throughout the Mediterranean, North
Africa, and the Middle East. Unfortunately, they were not able to listen to
the tapes of the war immediately because they had no Hebrew linguists.
However, an NSA Hebrew linguist support team was at that moment
winging its way to Athens. (To hide their mission and avoid the
implication of spying on Israel, Hebrew linguists were always referred to
as "special Arabic" linguists, even within NSA.)
Soon after the first CRITIC message arrived at NSA, an emergency
notification was sent to the U.S. Navy's listening post at Rota. The base
was the Navy's major launching site for airborne eavesdropping missions
over the Mediterranean area. There the Navy's airborne Sigint unit, VQ-2,
operated large four-engine aircraft that resembled the civilian passenger
plane known as the Constellation, an aircraft with graceful, curving lines
and a large three-section tail. Nicknamed the Willy Victor, the EC-121M
was slow, lumbering, and ideal for eavesdropping—capable of long,
twelve- to eighteen-hour missions, depending on such factors as weather,
fuel, altitude, intercept activity, and crew fatigue.
Within several hours of the tasking message, the EC-121 was airborne
en route to Athens, from where the missions would be staged. A few days
before, a temporary Navy signals intelligence processing center had been
secretly set up at the Athens airport near the larger U.S. Air Force Sigint
facility. There, intercepts from the missions were to be analyzed and the
ciphers attacked.
After landing, the intercept operators were bused to the Hotel Seville
in Iraklion near the Athens airport. The Seville was managed by a
friendly Australian and a Greek named Zina; the crew liked the fact that
the kitchen and bar never closed. But they had barely reached the lobby
of the hotel when they received word they were to get airborne as soon as
possible. "We were in disbelief and mystified," said one member of the
crew. "Surely, our taskers did not expect us to fly into the combat zone in
the dead of the night!" That was exactly what they expected.
A few hours later, the EC-121 was heading east into the dark night
sky. Normally the flight took about two or three hours. Once over the eastern Mediterranean, they would maintain a dogleg track about
twenty-five to fifty miles off the Israeli and Egyptian coasts at an altitude
of between 12,000 and 18,000 feet. The pattern would take them from an
area northeast of Alexandria, Egypt, east toward Port Said and the Sinai
to the El Arish area, and then dogleg northeast along the Israeli coast to
a point west of Beirut, Lebanon. The track would then be repeated
continuously. Another signals intelligence plane, the EA3B, could fly
considerably higher, above 30,000 to 35,000 feet.
On board the EC-121 that night was Navy Chief Petty Officer Marvin
E. Nowicki, who had the unusual qualification of being a Hebrew and
Russian linguist. "I vividly recall this night being pitch black, no stars, no
moon, no nothing," he said. "The mission commander considered the
precariousness of our flight. He thought it more prudent to avoid the
usual track. If we headed east off the coast of Egypt toward Israel, we
would look, on radar, to the Israelis like an incoming attack aircraft from
Egypt. Then, assuming the Israelis did not attack us, when we reversed
course, we would then appear on Egyptian radar like Israeli attack
aircraft inbound. It, indeed, was a very dangerous and precarious
situation."
Instead, the mission commander decided to fly between Crete and
Cyprus and then head diagonally toward El Arish in the Sinai along an
established civilian air corridor. Upon reaching a point some twenty-five
miles northeast of El Arish, he would reverse course and begin their
orbit.
"When we arrived on station after midnight, needless to say the
'pucker factor' was high," recalled Nowicki; "the crew was on high,
nervous alert. Nobody slept in the relief bunks on that flight. The night
remained pitch black. What in the devil were we doing out here in the
middle of a war zone, was a question I asked myself several times over
and over during the flight. The adrenaline flowed."
In the small hours of the morning, intercept activity was light. "The
Israelis were home rearming and reloading for the next day's attacks,
while the Arabs were bracing themselves for the next onslaught come
daylight and contemplating some kind of counterattack," said Nowicki.
"Eerily, our Comint and Elint positions were quiet." But that changed as
the early-morning sun lit up the battlefields. "Our receivers came alive
with signals mostly from the Israelis as they began their second day of
attacks," Nowicki remembered. Around him, Hebrew linguists were
furiously "gisting"—summarizing—the conversations between Israeli
pilots, while other crew members attempted to combine that information
with signals from airborne radar obtained through electronic intelligence.
From their lofty perch, they eavesdropped like electronic voyeurs. The
NSA recorders whirred as the Egyptians launched an abortive air attack on an advancing Israeli armored brigade in the northern Sinai, only to
have their planes shot out of the air by Israeli delta-wing Mirage aircraft.
At one point Nowicki listened to his first mid air shootdown as an
Egyptian Sukhoi-7 aircraft was blasted from the sky. "We monitored as
much as we could but soon had to head for Athens because of low fuel,"
he said. "We were glad to get the heck out of there."
As they headed back, an Air Force C-130 flying listening post was
heading out to relieve them.
Down below, in the Mediterranean, the Liberty continued its slow
journey toward the war zone as the crew engaged in constant general
quarters drills and listened carefully for indications of danger. The Navy
sent out a warning notice to all ships and aircraft in the area to keep at
least 100 nautical miles away from the coasts of Lebanon, Syria, Israel,
and Egypt. But the Liberty was on an espionage mission; unless
specifically ordered to change course, Commander McGonagle would
continue steaming full speed ahead. Meanwhile, the Soviet navy had
mobilized their fleet. Some twenty Soviet warships with supporting
vessels and an estimated eight or nine submarines sailed toward the
same flashpoint.
On hearing that war had started, Gene Sheck, an official in NSA's K
Group section, which was responsible for managing the various mobile
collection platforms, became increasingly worried about the Liberty.
Responsibility for the safety of the ship, however, had been taken out of
NSA's hands by the JCS and given to the Joint Reconnaissance Center.
Nevertheless, Sheck took it upon himself to remind NSA's representative
at the JRC, John Connell, that during the Cuban missile crisis five years
earlier, the Oxford had been pulled back from the Havana area. Then he
asked if any consideration was being given to doing the same for the
Liberty. Connell spoke to the ship movement officer at the JRC but they
refused to take any action.
Although analysts in K Group knew of the Liberty's plight, those in G
Group did not. Thus it was not until the morning of June 7 that an
analyst rushed into Frank Raven's office and asked incredulously, "For
God's sake, do you know where the Liberty is?" Raven, believing she was
sitting off the east end of Crete as originally planned, had barely begun to
answer when the analyst blurted out, "They've got her heading straight
for the beach!" By then the Liberty was only about ten hours from her
scheduled patrol area, a dozen miles off Egypt's Sinai Desert.
"At this point," recalled Raven, "I ordered a major complaint [protest]
to get the Liberty the hell out of there! As far as we [NSA] were concerned,
there was nothing to be gained by having her in there that close, nothing
she could do in there that she couldn't do where we wanted her. . . . She could do everything that the national requirement called for [from the
coast of Crete]. Somebody wanted to listen to some close tactical program
or some communications or something which nobody in the world gave a
damn about—local military base, local commander. We were listening for
the higher echelons. . . . Hell, you don't want to hear them move the
tugboats around and such, you want to know what the commanding
generals are saying."
The JRC began reevaluating the Liberty's safety as the warnings
mounted. The Egyptians began sending out ominous protests
complaining that U.S. personnel were secretly communicating with Israel
and were possibly providing military assistance. Egypt also charged that
U.S. aircraft had participated in the Israeli air strikes. The charges
greatly worried American officials, who feared that the announcements
might provoke a Soviet reaction. Then the Chief of Naval Operations
questioned the wisdom of the Liberty assignment.
As a result of these new concerns, the JRC sent out a message
indicating that the Liberty's operational area off the Sinai was not set in
stone but was "for guidance only." Also, it pulled the ship back from 12½
to 20 nautical miles from the coast. By now it was about 6:30 P.M. in
Washington, half past midnight on the morning of June 8 in Egypt. The
Liberty had already entered the outskirts of its operational area and the
message never reached her because of an error by the U.S. Army
Communications Center at the Pentagon.
About an hour later, with fears mounting, the JRC again changed the
order, now requiring that Liberty approach no closer than 100 miles to
the coasts of Egypt and Israel. Knowing the ship was getting dangerously
close, Major Breedlove in the JRC skipped the normal slow message
system and called Navy officials in Europe over a secure telephone to tell
them of the change. He said a confirming message would follow. Within
ten minutes the Navy lieutenant in Europe had a warning message
ready.
But rather than issue the warning, a Navy captain in Europe insisted
on waiting until he received the confirmation message. That and a series
of Keystone Kops foul-ups by both the Navy and Army—which again
misrouted the message, this time to Hawaii—delayed sending the critical
message for an incredible sixteen and a half hours. By then it was far too
late. More than twenty years had gone by since the foul-up of warning
messages at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, yet it was as if no
lesson had ever been learned.
At 5:14 A.M. on Thursday, June 8, the first rays of sun spilled softly
over the Sinai's blond waves of sand. A little more than a dozen miles
north, in the choppy eastern Mediterranean, the Liberty continued eastward like a lost innocent, 600 miles from the nearest help and
oblivious to at least five warning messages it never received. The "Plan of
the Day" distributed throughout the ship that morning gave no hint of
what was in store. "Uniform of the Day" for officers was "tropical wash
khaki" and, for enlisted men, "clean dungarees." The soda fountain,
crewmembers were informed, would be open from 6:00 P.M. until 7:30
P.M.
Just after sunup, Duty Officer John Scott noticed a flying boxcar
making several circles near the ship and then departing in the direction
of Tel Aviv. Down in the NSA spaces, Chief Melvin Smith apparently also
picked up signals from the plane, later identified as Israeli. Shortly after
the plane departed, he called up Scott and asked if he had had a close
air contact recently. Scott told him he had, and Smith asked which
direction it had gone in. "Tel Aviv," said Scott. "Fine, that's all I want to
know," replied Smith. Scott glanced up at the American flag, ruffling in a
twelve-knot breeze, to check the wind direction, and then scanned the
vast desert a little more than a dozen miles away. "Fabulous morning,"
he said without dropping the stubby binoculars from his eyes.
But the calmness was like quicksand—deceptive, inviting, and
friendly, until too late. As the Liberty passed the desert town of El Arish,
it was closely watched. About half a mile away and 4,000 feet above was
an Israeli reconnaissance aircraft. At 6:03 A.M. the naval observer on the
plane reported back to Israeli naval headquarters. "What we could see
was the letters written on that ship," he said. "And we gave these letters
to the ground control." The letters were "GTR-5," the Liberty's
identification. "GTR" stood for "General Technical Research"—a cover
designation for NSA's fleet of spy ships.
Having passed El Arish, the Liberty continued on toward the Gaza
Strip. Then, about 8:30 A.M., it made a strange, nearly 180-degree turn
back in the direction of El Arish and slowed down to just five knots. The
reason for this maneuver was that the ship had at last reached Point
Alpha, the point on the map where it was to begin its back-and-forth
dogleg patrol of the Sinai coast.
For some time, Commander McGonagle had been worried about the
ship's proximity to the shore and about the potential for danger. He
called to his cabin Lieutenant Commander David E. Lewis, head of the
NSA operation on the ship. "How would it affect our mission if we stayed
farther out at sea?" McGonagle asked.
"It would hurt us, Captain," Lewis
replied. "We want to work in the UHF [ultra-high-frequency] range. That's
mostly line-of-sight stuff. If we're over the horizon we might as well be
back in Abidjan. It would degrade our mission by about eighty percent."
After thinking for a few minutes, McGonagle made his decision. "Okay,"
he said. "We'll go all the way in."
The reconnaissance was repeated at approximately thirty-minute
intervals throughout the morning. At one point, a boxy Israeli air force
Noratlas NORD 2501 circled the ship around the starboard side,
proceeded forward of the ship, and headed back toward the Sinai. "It had
a big Star of David on it and it was flying just a little bit above our mast
on the ship," recalled crewmember Larry Weaver. "We really thought his
wing was actually going to clip one of our masts. . . . And I was actually
able to wave to the co-pilot, a fellow on the right-hand side of the plane.
He waved back, and actually smiled at me. I could see him that well. I
didn't think anything of that because they were our allies. There's no
question about it. They had seen the ship's markings and the American
flag. They could damn near see my rank. The underway flag was
definitely flying. Especially when you're that close to a war zone."
By 9:30 A.M. the minaret at El Arish could be seen with the naked eye, like a solitary mast in a sea of sand. Visibility in the crystal clear air was twenty-five miles or better. Through a pair of binoculars, individual buildings were clearly visible a brief thirteen miles away. Commander McGonagle thought the tower "quite conspicuous" and used it as a navigational aid to determine the ship's position throughout the morning and afternoon. The minaret was also identifiable by radar.
Although no one on the ship knew it at the time, the Liberty had suddenly trespassed into a private horror. At that very moment, near the minaret at El Arish, Israeli forces were engaged in a criminal slaughter.
From the first minutes of its surprise attack, the Israeli air force had owned the skies over the Middle East. Within the first few hours, Israeli jets pounded twenty-five Arab air bases ranging from Damascus in Syria to an Egyptian field, loaded with bombers, far up the Nile at Luxor. Then, using machine guns, mortar fire, tanks, and air power, the Israeli war machine overtook the Jordanian section of Jerusalem as well as the west bank of the Jordan River, and torpedo boats captured the key Red Sea cape of Sharm al-Sheikh.
In the Sinai, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers pushed toward the Suez Canal along all three of the roads that crossed the desert, turning the burning sands into a massive killing field. One Israeli general estimated that Egyptian casualties there ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 killed, compared with 275 of his own troops. Few were spared as the Israelis pushed forward.
A convoy of Indian peacekeeper soldiers, flying the blue United Nations flag from their jeeps and trucks, were on their way to Gaza when they met an Israeli tank column on the road. As the Israelis approached, the UN observers pulled aside and stopped to get out of the way. One of the tanks rotated its turret and opened fire from a few feet away. The Israeli tank then rammed its gun through the windshield of an Indian 170 jeep and decapitated the two men inside. When other Indians went to aid their comrades, they were mowed down by machine-gun fire. Another Israeli tank thrust its gun into a UN truck, lifted it, and smashed it to the ground, killing or wounding all the occupants. In Gaza, Israeli tanks blasted six rounds into UN headquarters, which was flying the UN flag. Fourteen UN members were killed in these incidents. One Indian officer called it deliberate, cold-blooded killing of unarmed UN soldiers. It would be a sign of things to come.
By June 8, three days after Israel launched the war, Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai had become nuisances. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport them to prison camps. But there was another way to deal with them.
As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert sand turned red. Then they forced other prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves. "I saw a line of prisoners, civilians and military," said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of those who dug the graves, "and they opened fire at them all at once. When they were dead, they told us to bury them." Nearby, another group of Israelis gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to cover them with sand.
In still another incident at El Arish, the Israeli journalist Gabi Bron saw about 150 Egyptian POWs sitting on the ground, crowded together with their hands held at the backs of their necks. "The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death," Bron said. "I witnessed the executions with my own eyes on the morning of June eighth, in the airport area of El Arish."
The Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, who worked in the army's history department after the war, said he and other officers collected testimony from dozens of soldiers who admitted killing POWs. According to Yitzhaki, Israeli troops killed, in cold blood, as many as 1,000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai, including some 400 in the sand dunes of El Arish.
Ironically, Ariel Sharon, who was capturing territory south of El Arish at the time of the slaughter, had been close to massacres during other conflicts. One of his men during the Suez crisis in 1956, Arye Biro, now a retired brigadier general, recently admitted the unprovoked killing of forty-nine prisoners of war in the Sinai in 1956. "I had my Karl Gustav [weapon] I had taken from the Egyptian. My officer had an Uzi. The Egyptian prisoners were sitting there with their faces turned to us. We turned to them with our loaded guns and shot them. Magazine after magazine. They didn't get a chance to react." At another point, Biro said, he found Egyptian soldiers prostate with thirst. He said that after taunting them by pouring water from his canteen into the sand, he killed them. "If I were to be put on trial for what I did," he said, "then it would be necessary to put on trial at least one-half the Israeli army, which, in similar circumstances, did what I did." Sharon, who says he learned of the 1956 prisoner shootings only after they happened, refused to say whether he took any disciplinary action against those involved, or even objected to the killings.
Later in his career, in 1982, Sharon would be held "indirectly responsible" for the slaughter of about 900 men, women, and children by Lebanese Christian militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps following Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Despite his grisly past, or maybe because of it, in October 1998 he was appointed minister of foreign affairs in the cabinet of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sharon later took over the conservative Likud Party. On September 28, 2000, he set off the bloodiest upheaval between Israeli forces and Palestinians in a generation, which resulted in a collapse of the seven year peace process. The deadly battles, which killed over 200 Palestinians and several Israeli soldiers, broke out following a provocative visit by Sharon to the compound known as Haram as-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims and Temple Mount to Jews. Addressing the question of Israeli war crimes, Sharon said in 1995, "Israel doesn't need this, and no one can preach to us about it—no one."
Of the 1967 Sinai slaughter, Aryeh Yitzhaki said, "The whole army leadership, including [then] Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Chief of Staff [and later Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin and the generals knew about these things. No one bothered to denounce them." Yitzhaki said not only were the massacres known, but senior Israeli officials tried their best to cover them up by not releasing a report he had prepared on the murders in 1968.
The extensive war crimes were just one of the deep secrets Israel had sought to conceal since the start of the conflict. From the very beginning, an essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies. Lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies to the American president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public. Thus, as the American naval historian Dr. Richard K. Smith noted in an article on the Liberty for United States Naval Institute Proceedings, "any instrument which sought to penetrate this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal 'fog of war' would have to be frustrated."
By 9:30 A.M. the minaret at El Arish could be seen with the naked eye, like a solitary mast in a sea of sand. Visibility in the crystal clear air was twenty-five miles or better. Through a pair of binoculars, individual buildings were clearly visible a brief thirteen miles away. Commander McGonagle thought the tower "quite conspicuous" and used it as a navigational aid to determine the ship's position throughout the morning and afternoon. The minaret was also identifiable by radar.
Although no one on the ship knew it at the time, the Liberty had suddenly trespassed into a private horror. At that very moment, near the minaret at El Arish, Israeli forces were engaged in a criminal slaughter.
From the first minutes of its surprise attack, the Israeli air force had owned the skies over the Middle East. Within the first few hours, Israeli jets pounded twenty-five Arab air bases ranging from Damascus in Syria to an Egyptian field, loaded with bombers, far up the Nile at Luxor. Then, using machine guns, mortar fire, tanks, and air power, the Israeli war machine overtook the Jordanian section of Jerusalem as well as the west bank of the Jordan River, and torpedo boats captured the key Red Sea cape of Sharm al-Sheikh.
In the Sinai, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers pushed toward the Suez Canal along all three of the roads that crossed the desert, turning the burning sands into a massive killing field. One Israeli general estimated that Egyptian casualties there ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 killed, compared with 275 of his own troops. Few were spared as the Israelis pushed forward.
A convoy of Indian peacekeeper soldiers, flying the blue United Nations flag from their jeeps and trucks, were on their way to Gaza when they met an Israeli tank column on the road. As the Israelis approached, the UN observers pulled aside and stopped to get out of the way. One of the tanks rotated its turret and opened fire from a few feet away. The Israeli tank then rammed its gun through the windshield of an Indian 170 jeep and decapitated the two men inside. When other Indians went to aid their comrades, they were mowed down by machine-gun fire. Another Israeli tank thrust its gun into a UN truck, lifted it, and smashed it to the ground, killing or wounding all the occupants. In Gaza, Israeli tanks blasted six rounds into UN headquarters, which was flying the UN flag. Fourteen UN members were killed in these incidents. One Indian officer called it deliberate, cold-blooded killing of unarmed UN soldiers. It would be a sign of things to come.
By June 8, three days after Israel launched the war, Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai had become nuisances. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport them to prison camps. But there was another way to deal with them.
As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert sand turned red. Then they forced other prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves. "I saw a line of prisoners, civilians and military," said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of those who dug the graves, "and they opened fire at them all at once. When they were dead, they told us to bury them." Nearby, another group of Israelis gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to cover them with sand.
In still another incident at El Arish, the Israeli journalist Gabi Bron saw about 150 Egyptian POWs sitting on the ground, crowded together with their hands held at the backs of their necks. "The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death," Bron said. "I witnessed the executions with my own eyes on the morning of June eighth, in the airport area of El Arish."
The Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, who worked in the army's history department after the war, said he and other officers collected testimony from dozens of soldiers who admitted killing POWs. According to Yitzhaki, Israeli troops killed, in cold blood, as many as 1,000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai, including some 400 in the sand dunes of El Arish.
Ironically, Ariel Sharon, who was capturing territory south of El Arish at the time of the slaughter, had been close to massacres during other conflicts. One of his men during the Suez crisis in 1956, Arye Biro, now a retired brigadier general, recently admitted the unprovoked killing of forty-nine prisoners of war in the Sinai in 1956. "I had my Karl Gustav [weapon] I had taken from the Egyptian. My officer had an Uzi. The Egyptian prisoners were sitting there with their faces turned to us. We turned to them with our loaded guns and shot them. Magazine after magazine. They didn't get a chance to react." At another point, Biro said, he found Egyptian soldiers prostate with thirst. He said that after taunting them by pouring water from his canteen into the sand, he killed them. "If I were to be put on trial for what I did," he said, "then it would be necessary to put on trial at least one-half the Israeli army, which, in similar circumstances, did what I did." Sharon, who says he learned of the 1956 prisoner shootings only after they happened, refused to say whether he took any disciplinary action against those involved, or even objected to the killings.
Later in his career, in 1982, Sharon would be held "indirectly responsible" for the slaughter of about 900 men, women, and children by Lebanese Christian militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps following Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Despite his grisly past, or maybe because of it, in October 1998 he was appointed minister of foreign affairs in the cabinet of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sharon later took over the conservative Likud Party. On September 28, 2000, he set off the bloodiest upheaval between Israeli forces and Palestinians in a generation, which resulted in a collapse of the seven year peace process. The deadly battles, which killed over 200 Palestinians and several Israeli soldiers, broke out following a provocative visit by Sharon to the compound known as Haram as-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims and Temple Mount to Jews. Addressing the question of Israeli war crimes, Sharon said in 1995, "Israel doesn't need this, and no one can preach to us about it—no one."
Of the 1967 Sinai slaughter, Aryeh Yitzhaki said, "The whole army leadership, including [then] Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Chief of Staff [and later Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin and the generals knew about these things. No one bothered to denounce them." Yitzhaki said not only were the massacres known, but senior Israeli officials tried their best to cover them up by not releasing a report he had prepared on the murders in 1968.
The extensive war crimes were just one of the deep secrets Israel had sought to conceal since the start of the conflict. From the very beginning, an essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies. Lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies to the American president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public. Thus, as the American naval historian Dr. Richard K. Smith noted in an article on the Liberty for United States Naval Institute Proceedings, "any instrument which sought to penetrate this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal 'fog of war' would have to be frustrated."
Into this sea of lies, deception, and slaughter sailed the USS Liberty,
an enormous American spy factory loaded with $10.2 million worth of
the latest eavesdropping gear. At 10:39 A.M., the minaret at El Arish was
logged at seventeen miles away, at bearing 189 degrees. Sailing at five
knots, the Liberty was practically treading water.
By 10:55 A.M., senior Israeli officials knew for certain that they had an American electronic spy in their midst. Not only was the ship clearly visible to the forces at El Arish, it had been positively identified by Israeli naval headquarters.
The Israeli naval observer on the airborne reconnaissance mission that had earlier observed the Liberty passed on the information to Commander Pinchas Pinchasy, the naval liaison officer at Israeli air force headquarters. "I reported this detection to Naval Headquarters," said Pinchasy, "and I imagine that Naval Headquarters received this report from the other channel, from the Air Force ground control as well." Pinchasy had pulled out a copy of the reference book Jane's Fighting Ships and looked up the "GTR-5" designation. He then sent a report to the acting chief of naval operations at Israeli navy headquarters in Haifa. The report said that the ship cruising slowly off El Arish was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy, named Liberty, whose marking was GTR-5."
Not only did the ship have "GTR-5" painted broadly on both sides of its bow and stern, it also had its name painted in large, bold, black letters: "U.S.S. LIBERTY."
Although no one on the Liberty knew it, they were about to have some company.
"We were 'wheels in the well' from Athens about mid-morning," said Marvin Nowicki, who was aboard the EC-121 headed back to the war zone. In the rear NSA spaces, the crew strapped on their seat belts. It was an everyday routine. The VQ-2 squadron would fly, on average, six to twelve missions per month against Israel and the Arab countries of the Middle East. Exceptions took place when higher-priority Soviet targets came up, for example when the Soviet fleet conducted exercises in the Mediterranean or Norwegian Sea. Nowicki himself accumulated over 2,000 hours in such spy planes over his career.
Back at Athens Airport, the 512J processing center had been beefed up to help analyze the increasing flow of intercepts. Three NSA civilian Hebrew linguists had arrived and were attacking the backlog of recording tapes. The pile had grown especially large because the Air Force had no Hebrew linguists for their C-150 Sigint aircraft. "As it turns out," said Nowicki, "they were blindly copying any voice signal that sounded Hebrew. They were like vacuum cleaners, sucking every signal onto their recorders, with the intercept operators not having a clue as to what the activity represented."
In charge of the half-dozen Elint specialists aboard the EC-121, searching for radar signals and analyzing their cryptic sounds, was the evaluator, who would attempt to make sense of all the data. Elsewhere, several intercept operators were assigned to monitor VHF and UHF radiotelephone signals. In addition to Chief Nowicki, who could translate both Hebrew and Russian, there were two other Hebrew and two Arabic linguists on board.
Soon after wheels-up from Athens, a security curtain was pulled around the "spook spaces" to hide the activity from members of the flight crew who did not have a need to know. In front of the voice-intercept operators were twin UHF/VHF receivers, essential because the Israelis mostly used UHF transceivers, while the Arabs used Soviet VHF equipment. To record all the traffic, they had a four-track voice recorder with time dubs and frequency notations. Chief Nowicki, the supervisor, had an additional piece of equipment: a spectrum analyzer to view the radio activity in the form of "spikes" between 100 to 150 megahertz and 200 to 500 megahertz. It was very useful in locating new signals.
About noon, as they came closer to their orbit area, the activity began getting hectic. Fingers twisted large black dials, sometimes quickly and sometimes barely at all. "When we arrived within intercept range of the battles already in progress," Nowicki recalled, "it was apparent that the Israelis were pounding the Syrians on the Golan Heights. Soon all our recorders were going full blast, with each position intercepting signals on both receivers."
In addition to recording the voices of the Israeli and Egyptian troops and pilots, the linguists were frantically writing down gists of voice activity on logs and shouting to the evaluator what they were recording. The evaluator in turn would then direct his Elint people to search for corresponding radar activity. At other times, the Elint operators would intercept a radar signal from a target and tip off the linguists to start searching for correlating voice activity. A key piece of equipment was known as Big Look. It enabled the Elint operators to intercept, emulate, and identify the radar signals, and to reverse-locate them—to trace them back to their source.
Sixty miles north of Tel Aviv, atop Mount Carmel, Israel's naval command post occupied a drab former British Royal Air Force base built in the 1920s. Known as Stella Maris, it contained a high-ceilinged war room with a large map of Israel and its coastal areas on a raised platform. Standing above it, senior naval officials could see the location of ships in the area, updated as air reconnaissance passed on the changing positions of various ships. Since dawn that morning, the Liberty had been under constant observation. "Between five in the morning and one in the afternoon," said one Liberty deck officer, "I think there were thirteen times that we were circled."
About noon at Stella Maris, as the Liberty was again in sight of El Arish and while the massacres were taking place, a report was received from an army commander there that a ship was shelling the Israelis from the sea. But that was impossible. The only ship in the vicinity of El Arish was the Liberty, and she was eavesdropping, not shooting. As any observer would immediately have recognized, the four small defensive 50mm machine guns were incapable of reaching anywhere near the shore, thirteen miles away, let alone the buildings of El Arish. In fact, the maximum effective range of such guns was just 2,200 yards, a little over a mile. And the ship itself, a tired old World War II cargo vessel crawling with antennas, was unthreatening to anyone—unless it was their secrets, not their lives, they wanted to protect.
By then the Israeli navy and air force had conducted more than six hours of close surveillance of the Liberty off the Sinai, even taken pictures, and must have positively identified it as an American electronic spy ship. They knew the Liberty was the only military ship in the area. Nevertheless, the order was given to kill it. Thus, at 12:05 P.M. three motor torpedo boats from Ashdod departed for the Liberty, about fifty miles away. Israeli air force fighters, loaded with 30mm cannon ammunition, rockets, and even napalm, then followed. They were all to return virtually empty.
At 1:41 P.M., about an hour and a half after leaving Ashdod, the torpedo boats spotted the Liberty off El Arish and called for an immediate strike by the air force fighters.
On the bridge of the Liberty, Commander McGonagle looked at the hooded green radar screen and fixed the ship's position as being 25½ nautical miles from the minaret at El Arish, which was to the southeast. The officer of the deck, Lieutenant (junior grade) Lloyd Painter, also looked at the radar and saw that they were 17½ miles from land. It was shortly before two o'clock in the afternoon.
McGonagle was known as a steamer, a sailor who wants to constantly feel the motion of the sea beneath the hull of the ship, to steam to the next port as soon as possible after arriving at the last. "He longed for the sea," said one of his officers, "and was noticeably restless in port. He simply would not tolerate being delayed by machinery that was not vital to the operation of the ship." He was born in Wichita, Kansas, on November 19, 1925, and his voice still had a twang. Among the first to join the post—World War II Navy, he saw combat while on a minesweeper 175 during the Korean War, winning the Korean Service Medal with six battle stars. Eventually commanding several small service ships, he had taken over as captain of the Liberty about a year earlier, in April 1966.
A Chief of Naval Operations once called the Liberty "the ugliest ship in the Navy," largely because in place of powerful guns it had strange antennas protruding from every location. There were thin long-wire VLF antennas, conical electronic-countermeasure antennas, spiracle antennas, a microwave antenna on the bow, and whip antennas that extended thirty-five feet. Most unusual was the sixteen-foot dish-shaped moon-bounce antenna that rested high on the stern.
Despite the danger, the men on the ship were carrying on as normally
as possible. Larry Weaver, a boatswain's mate, was waiting outside the
doctor's office to have an earache looked at. Muscular at 184 pounds, he
exercised regularly in the ship's weight room. Planning to leave the Navy
shortly, he had already applied for a job at Florida's Cypress Gardens as
a water skier. With the ability to ski barefoot for nine miles, he thought
he would have a good chance.
As for Bryce Lockwood, the Marine senior Russian linguist who had been awakened in the middle of a layover in Rota, Spain, and virtually shanghaied, his wife and daughter had no idea where he was. Having boarded the ship on such short notice, Lockwood had gone to the small ship's store to buy some T-shirts and shorts. While waiting to go on watch, he was sitting on his bunk stamping his name in his new underwear.
On the stern, Stan White was struggling with the troublesome moonbounce antenna. A senior chief petty officer, he was responsible for the complicated repair of the intercept and cipher gear on board. The giant dish was used to communicate quickly, directly, and securely with NSA back at Fort Meade, and for this purpose both locations had to be able to see the moon at the same time. But throughout the whole voyage, even back in Norfolk, the system was plagued with leaking hydraulic fluid. Now another critical part, the klystron, had burned out and White was attempting to replace it.
Below deck in the Research Operations Department, as the NSA spaces were known, Elint operators were huddled over round green scopes, watching and listening for any unusual signals. Charles L. Rowley, a first-class petty officer and a specialist in technical intelligence collection, was in charge of one of the Elint sections. "I was told to be on the lookout for a different type of signal," he said. "I reported a signal I thought was from a submarine. ... I analyzed it as far as the length of the signal, the mark and space on the bods, and I could not break it, I didn't know what it was, I had no idea what it was . . . and sent it in to NSA." But NSA had an unusual reaction: "I got my butt chewed out. They tried to convince me that it was a British double-current cable code and I know damn good and well that it wasn't." In fact, the blackness deep beneath the waves of the eastern Mediterranean was beginning to become quite crowded.
By 10:55 A.M., senior Israeli officials knew for certain that they had an American electronic spy in their midst. Not only was the ship clearly visible to the forces at El Arish, it had been positively identified by Israeli naval headquarters.
The Israeli naval observer on the airborne reconnaissance mission that had earlier observed the Liberty passed on the information to Commander Pinchas Pinchasy, the naval liaison officer at Israeli air force headquarters. "I reported this detection to Naval Headquarters," said Pinchasy, "and I imagine that Naval Headquarters received this report from the other channel, from the Air Force ground control as well." Pinchasy had pulled out a copy of the reference book Jane's Fighting Ships and looked up the "GTR-5" designation. He then sent a report to the acting chief of naval operations at Israeli navy headquarters in Haifa. The report said that the ship cruising slowly off El Arish was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy, named Liberty, whose marking was GTR-5."
Not only did the ship have "GTR-5" painted broadly on both sides of its bow and stern, it also had its name painted in large, bold, black letters: "U.S.S. LIBERTY."
Although no one on the Liberty knew it, they were about to have some company.
"We were 'wheels in the well' from Athens about mid-morning," said Marvin Nowicki, who was aboard the EC-121 headed back to the war zone. In the rear NSA spaces, the crew strapped on their seat belts. It was an everyday routine. The VQ-2 squadron would fly, on average, six to twelve missions per month against Israel and the Arab countries of the Middle East. Exceptions took place when higher-priority Soviet targets came up, for example when the Soviet fleet conducted exercises in the Mediterranean or Norwegian Sea. Nowicki himself accumulated over 2,000 hours in such spy planes over his career.
Back at Athens Airport, the 512J processing center had been beefed up to help analyze the increasing flow of intercepts. Three NSA civilian Hebrew linguists had arrived and were attacking the backlog of recording tapes. The pile had grown especially large because the Air Force had no Hebrew linguists for their C-150 Sigint aircraft. "As it turns out," said Nowicki, "they were blindly copying any voice signal that sounded Hebrew. They were like vacuum cleaners, sucking every signal onto their recorders, with the intercept operators not having a clue as to what the activity represented."
In charge of the half-dozen Elint specialists aboard the EC-121, searching for radar signals and analyzing their cryptic sounds, was the evaluator, who would attempt to make sense of all the data. Elsewhere, several intercept operators were assigned to monitor VHF and UHF radiotelephone signals. In addition to Chief Nowicki, who could translate both Hebrew and Russian, there were two other Hebrew and two Arabic linguists on board.
Soon after wheels-up from Athens, a security curtain was pulled around the "spook spaces" to hide the activity from members of the flight crew who did not have a need to know. In front of the voice-intercept operators were twin UHF/VHF receivers, essential because the Israelis mostly used UHF transceivers, while the Arabs used Soviet VHF equipment. To record all the traffic, they had a four-track voice recorder with time dubs and frequency notations. Chief Nowicki, the supervisor, had an additional piece of equipment: a spectrum analyzer to view the radio activity in the form of "spikes" between 100 to 150 megahertz and 200 to 500 megahertz. It was very useful in locating new signals.
About noon, as they came closer to their orbit area, the activity began getting hectic. Fingers twisted large black dials, sometimes quickly and sometimes barely at all. "When we arrived within intercept range of the battles already in progress," Nowicki recalled, "it was apparent that the Israelis were pounding the Syrians on the Golan Heights. Soon all our recorders were going full blast, with each position intercepting signals on both receivers."
In addition to recording the voices of the Israeli and Egyptian troops and pilots, the linguists were frantically writing down gists of voice activity on logs and shouting to the evaluator what they were recording. The evaluator in turn would then direct his Elint people to search for corresponding radar activity. At other times, the Elint operators would intercept a radar signal from a target and tip off the linguists to start searching for correlating voice activity. A key piece of equipment was known as Big Look. It enabled the Elint operators to intercept, emulate, and identify the radar signals, and to reverse-locate them—to trace them back to their source.
Sixty miles north of Tel Aviv, atop Mount Carmel, Israel's naval command post occupied a drab former British Royal Air Force base built in the 1920s. Known as Stella Maris, it contained a high-ceilinged war room with a large map of Israel and its coastal areas on a raised platform. Standing above it, senior naval officials could see the location of ships in the area, updated as air reconnaissance passed on the changing positions of various ships. Since dawn that morning, the Liberty had been under constant observation. "Between five in the morning and one in the afternoon," said one Liberty deck officer, "I think there were thirteen times that we were circled."
About noon at Stella Maris, as the Liberty was again in sight of El Arish and while the massacres were taking place, a report was received from an army commander there that a ship was shelling the Israelis from the sea. But that was impossible. The only ship in the vicinity of El Arish was the Liberty, and she was eavesdropping, not shooting. As any observer would immediately have recognized, the four small defensive 50mm machine guns were incapable of reaching anywhere near the shore, thirteen miles away, let alone the buildings of El Arish. In fact, the maximum effective range of such guns was just 2,200 yards, a little over a mile. And the ship itself, a tired old World War II cargo vessel crawling with antennas, was unthreatening to anyone—unless it was their secrets, not their lives, they wanted to protect.
By then the Israeli navy and air force had conducted more than six hours of close surveillance of the Liberty off the Sinai, even taken pictures, and must have positively identified it as an American electronic spy ship. They knew the Liberty was the only military ship in the area. Nevertheless, the order was given to kill it. Thus, at 12:05 P.M. three motor torpedo boats from Ashdod departed for the Liberty, about fifty miles away. Israeli air force fighters, loaded with 30mm cannon ammunition, rockets, and even napalm, then followed. They were all to return virtually empty.
At 1:41 P.M., about an hour and a half after leaving Ashdod, the torpedo boats spotted the Liberty off El Arish and called for an immediate strike by the air force fighters.
On the bridge of the Liberty, Commander McGonagle looked at the hooded green radar screen and fixed the ship's position as being 25½ nautical miles from the minaret at El Arish, which was to the southeast. The officer of the deck, Lieutenant (junior grade) Lloyd Painter, also looked at the radar and saw that they were 17½ miles from land. It was shortly before two o'clock in the afternoon.
McGonagle was known as a steamer, a sailor who wants to constantly feel the motion of the sea beneath the hull of the ship, to steam to the next port as soon as possible after arriving at the last. "He longed for the sea," said one of his officers, "and was noticeably restless in port. He simply would not tolerate being delayed by machinery that was not vital to the operation of the ship." He was born in Wichita, Kansas, on November 19, 1925, and his voice still had a twang. Among the first to join the post—World War II Navy, he saw combat while on a minesweeper 175 during the Korean War, winning the Korean Service Medal with six battle stars. Eventually commanding several small service ships, he had taken over as captain of the Liberty about a year earlier, in April 1966.
A Chief of Naval Operations once called the Liberty "the ugliest ship in the Navy," largely because in place of powerful guns it had strange antennas protruding from every location. There were thin long-wire VLF antennas, conical electronic-countermeasure antennas, spiracle antennas, a microwave antenna on the bow, and whip antennas that extended thirty-five feet. Most unusual was the sixteen-foot dish-shaped moon-bounce antenna that rested high on the stern.
As for Bryce Lockwood, the Marine senior Russian linguist who had been awakened in the middle of a layover in Rota, Spain, and virtually shanghaied, his wife and daughter had no idea where he was. Having boarded the ship on such short notice, Lockwood had gone to the small ship's store to buy some T-shirts and shorts. While waiting to go on watch, he was sitting on his bunk stamping his name in his new underwear.
On the stern, Stan White was struggling with the troublesome moonbounce antenna. A senior chief petty officer, he was responsible for the complicated repair of the intercept and cipher gear on board. The giant dish was used to communicate quickly, directly, and securely with NSA back at Fort Meade, and for this purpose both locations had to be able to see the moon at the same time. But throughout the whole voyage, even back in Norfolk, the system was plagued with leaking hydraulic fluid. Now another critical part, the klystron, had burned out and White was attempting to replace it.
Below deck in the Research Operations Department, as the NSA spaces were known, Elint operators were huddled over round green scopes, watching and listening for any unusual signals. Charles L. Rowley, a first-class petty officer and a specialist in technical intelligence collection, was in charge of one of the Elint sections. "I was told to be on the lookout for a different type of signal," he said. "I reported a signal I thought was from a submarine. ... I analyzed it as far as the length of the signal, the mark and space on the bods, and I could not break it, I didn't know what it was, I had no idea what it was . . . and sent it in to NSA." But NSA had an unusual reaction: "I got my butt chewed out. They tried to convince me that it was a British double-current cable code and I know damn good and well that it wasn't." In fact, the blackness deep beneath the waves of the eastern Mediterranean was beginning to become quite crowded.
One deck down, just below the waterline, were the Morse code as well
as Russian and Arabic voice-intercept operators, their "cans" tight
against their ears. Lined up along the bulkheads, they pounded away on
typewriters and flipped tape recorders on and off as they eavesdropped
on the sounds of war. Among their key missions was to determine
whether the Egyptian air force's Soviet-made bombers, such as the
TU-95 aircraft thought to be based in Alexandria, were being flown and
controlled by Russian pilots and ground controllers. Obtaining the
earliest intelligence that the Russians were taking part in the fighting
was one of the principal reasons for sending the Liberty so far into the
war zone.
In another office, communications personnel worked on the ship's special, highly encrypted communications equipment.
Nearby in the Coordination—"Coord"—spaces, technicians were shredding all outdated documents to protect them from possible capture. Others were engaged in "processing and reporting," or P&R. "Processing and reporting involves figuring out who is talking," said Bryce Lockwood, one of the P&R supervisors, "where they're coming from, the other stations on that network, making some kind of sense out of it, forwarding it to the consumers, which primarily was the NSA, the CIA, JCS."
But as the real war raged on the shore, a mock war raged in the Coord spaces. One of the Arabic-language P&R specialists had developed a fondness for Egypt and had made a small Egyptian flag that he put on his desk. "The guys would walk by and they would take a cigarette lighter," recalled Lockwood, "and say, 'Hey, what's happening to the UAR [United Arab Republic, now Egypt] over there?' And they would light off his UAR flag and he would reach over and say, 'Stop that,' and put the fire out, and it was getting all scorched."
Then, according to Lockwood, some of the pro-Israel contingent got their revenge. They had gotten Teletype paper and scotch-taped it together and with blue felt marking pens had made a gigantic Star of David flag. This thing was about six feet by about twelve feet—huge. And stuck that up on the starboard bulkhead.
"You'd better call the forward gun mounts," Commander McGonagle yelled excitedly to Lieutenant Painter. "I think they're going to attack!" The captain was standing on the starboard wing, looking at a number of unidentified jet aircraft rapidly approaching in an attack pattern.
Larry Weaver was still sitting outside the doctor's office when he first heard the sound. A few minutes before, an announcement had come over the speaker saying that the engine on the motor whaleboat was about to be tested. "All of a sudden I heard this rat-a-tat-tat real hard and the first thing I thought was, 'Holy shit, the prop came off that boat and went right up the bulkhead,' that's exactly what it sounded like. And the very next instant we heard the gong and we went to general quarters."
Stan White thought it sounded like someone throwing rocks at the ship. "And then it happened again," he recalled, "and then general quarters sounded, and by the captain's voice we knew it was not a drill. Shortly after that the wave-guides to the dish [antenna] were shot to pieces and sparks and chunks fell on me."
"I immediately knew what it was," said Bryce Lockwood, the Marine, "and I just dropped everything and ran to my GQ station which was down below in the Co-ord station."
Without warning the Israeli jets struck—swept-wing Dassault Mirage IIIC's. Lieutenant Painter observed that the aircraft had "absolutely no markings," so that their identity was unclear. He then attempted to contact the men manning the gun mounts, but it was too late. "I was trying to contact these two kids," he recalled, "and I saw them both; well, I didn't exactly see them as such. They were blown apart, but I saw the whole area go up in smoke and scattered metal. And, at about the same time, the aircraft strafed the bridge area itself. The quartermaster, Petty Officer Third Class Pollard, was standing right next to me, and he was hit."
With the sun at their backs in true attack mode, the Mirages raked
the ship from bow to stern with hot, armor-piercing lead. Back and forth
they came, cannons and machine guns blazing. A bomb exploded near
the whaleboat aft of the bridge, and those in the pilothouse and the
bridge were thrown from their feet. Commander McGonagle grabbed for
the engine order annunciator and rang up all ahead flank.
"Oil is spilling out into the water," one of the Israeli Mirage pilots reported to base.
Charles L. Rowley, an electronics intelligence specialist who doubled as the ship's photographer, grabbed his Nikon and raced to the bridge to try to get a shot of the planes. Instead, the planes shot him. "They shot the camera right out of my hands," he recalled. "I was one of the first ones that got hit."
In the communications spaces, radiomen James Halman and Joseph Ward had patched together enough equipment and broken antennas to get a distress call off to the Sixth Fleet, despite intense jamming by the Israelis. "Any station, this is Rockstar," Halman shouted, using the Liberty's voice call sign. "We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft 178 and require immediate assistance."
"Great, wonderful, she's burning, she's burning," said the Israeli pilot.
As Bryce Lockwood rushed into the Co-ord unit, most of the intercept operators were still manning their positions. Suddenly one of the other Russian voice supervisors rushed over to him excitedly, having at last found what they had been looking for, evidence of Soviet military activity in Egypt. "Hey, Sarge, I found them, I found them," he said. "You found who?" Lockwood asked. "I got the Russkies."
Now the operators began frantically searching the airwaves, attempting to discover who was attacking them. At the same time, Lockwood and some others started the destruction procedure. The Marine linguist broke out the white canvas ditching bags, each about five feet tall. The bags were specially made with a large flat lead weight in the bottom and brass fittings that could be opened to let in the water so they would sink to the bottom faster. At the top was a rope drawstring. "We had a room where we did voice tape transcripts," said Lockwood, "and there were literally hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes in there that had to be put in those ditching bags. So we got these ditching bags and started putting these tapes in there. These were voice conversations of, mostly, UAR targets. All the tapes and transcripts were loaded in the bags, a lot of code manuals, and so forth."
At 2:09, the American aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, operating near Crete, acknowledged Liberty's cry for help. "I am standing by for further traffic," it signaled.
After taking out the gun mounts, the Israeli fighter pilots turned their attention to the antennas, to sever the Liberty's vocal cords and deafen it so it could not call for help or pick up any more revealing intercepts. "It was as though they knew their exact locations," said Senior Chief Stan White. Lieutenant Commander Dave Lewis, in charge of the NSA operation on the ship, agreed. "It appears to me that every tuning section of every HF antenna had a hole in it," he said. "It took a lot of planning to get heat-seeking missiles aboard to take out our entire communications in the first minute of the attack. If that was a mistake, it was the best planned mistake that has ever been perpetrated in the history of mankind."
Not hearing anything from the Saratoga for a few minutes, the radio operator repeated his call for help. "Schematic, this is Rockstar. We are still under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate assistance." But the Saratoga demanded an authentication code. Unfortunately, it had been destroyed during the emergency destruction and the Saratoga operator was giving him a hard time about it. "Listen to the goddamned rockets, you son-of-a-bitch," the Liberty radioman screamed into his microphone.
In another office, communications personnel worked on the ship's special, highly encrypted communications equipment.
Nearby in the Coordination—"Coord"—spaces, technicians were shredding all outdated documents to protect them from possible capture. Others were engaged in "processing and reporting," or P&R. "Processing and reporting involves figuring out who is talking," said Bryce Lockwood, one of the P&R supervisors, "where they're coming from, the other stations on that network, making some kind of sense out of it, forwarding it to the consumers, which primarily was the NSA, the CIA, JCS."
But as the real war raged on the shore, a mock war raged in the Coord spaces. One of the Arabic-language P&R specialists had developed a fondness for Egypt and had made a small Egyptian flag that he put on his desk. "The guys would walk by and they would take a cigarette lighter," recalled Lockwood, "and say, 'Hey, what's happening to the UAR [United Arab Republic, now Egypt] over there?' And they would light off his UAR flag and he would reach over and say, 'Stop that,' and put the fire out, and it was getting all scorched."
Then, according to Lockwood, some of the pro-Israel contingent got their revenge. They had gotten Teletype paper and scotch-taped it together and with blue felt marking pens had made a gigantic Star of David flag. This thing was about six feet by about twelve feet—huge. And stuck that up on the starboard bulkhead.
"You'd better call the forward gun mounts," Commander McGonagle yelled excitedly to Lieutenant Painter. "I think they're going to attack!" The captain was standing on the starboard wing, looking at a number of unidentified jet aircraft rapidly approaching in an attack pattern.
Larry Weaver was still sitting outside the doctor's office when he first heard the sound. A few minutes before, an announcement had come over the speaker saying that the engine on the motor whaleboat was about to be tested. "All of a sudden I heard this rat-a-tat-tat real hard and the first thing I thought was, 'Holy shit, the prop came off that boat and went right up the bulkhead,' that's exactly what it sounded like. And the very next instant we heard the gong and we went to general quarters."
Stan White thought it sounded like someone throwing rocks at the ship. "And then it happened again," he recalled, "and then general quarters sounded, and by the captain's voice we knew it was not a drill. Shortly after that the wave-guides to the dish [antenna] were shot to pieces and sparks and chunks fell on me."
"I immediately knew what it was," said Bryce Lockwood, the Marine, "and I just dropped everything and ran to my GQ station which was down below in the Co-ord station."
Without warning the Israeli jets struck—swept-wing Dassault Mirage IIIC's. Lieutenant Painter observed that the aircraft had "absolutely no markings," so that their identity was unclear. He then attempted to contact the men manning the gun mounts, but it was too late. "I was trying to contact these two kids," he recalled, "and I saw them both; well, I didn't exactly see them as such. They were blown apart, but I saw the whole area go up in smoke and scattered metal. And, at about the same time, the aircraft strafed the bridge area itself. The quartermaster, Petty Officer Third Class Pollard, was standing right next to me, and he was hit."
"Oil is spilling out into the water," one of the Israeli Mirage pilots reported to base.
Charles L. Rowley, an electronics intelligence specialist who doubled as the ship's photographer, grabbed his Nikon and raced to the bridge to try to get a shot of the planes. Instead, the planes shot him. "They shot the camera right out of my hands," he recalled. "I was one of the first ones that got hit."
In the communications spaces, radiomen James Halman and Joseph Ward had patched together enough equipment and broken antennas to get a distress call off to the Sixth Fleet, despite intense jamming by the Israelis. "Any station, this is Rockstar," Halman shouted, using the Liberty's voice call sign. "We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft 178 and require immediate assistance."
"Great, wonderful, she's burning, she's burning," said the Israeli pilot.
As Bryce Lockwood rushed into the Co-ord unit, most of the intercept operators were still manning their positions. Suddenly one of the other Russian voice supervisors rushed over to him excitedly, having at last found what they had been looking for, evidence of Soviet military activity in Egypt. "Hey, Sarge, I found them, I found them," he said. "You found who?" Lockwood asked. "I got the Russkies."
Now the operators began frantically searching the airwaves, attempting to discover who was attacking them. At the same time, Lockwood and some others started the destruction procedure. The Marine linguist broke out the white canvas ditching bags, each about five feet tall. The bags were specially made with a large flat lead weight in the bottom and brass fittings that could be opened to let in the water so they would sink to the bottom faster. At the top was a rope drawstring. "We had a room where we did voice tape transcripts," said Lockwood, "and there were literally hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes in there that had to be put in those ditching bags. So we got these ditching bags and started putting these tapes in there. These were voice conversations of, mostly, UAR targets. All the tapes and transcripts were loaded in the bags, a lot of code manuals, and so forth."
At 2:09, the American aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, operating near Crete, acknowledged Liberty's cry for help. "I am standing by for further traffic," it signaled.
After taking out the gun mounts, the Israeli fighter pilots turned their attention to the antennas, to sever the Liberty's vocal cords and deafen it so it could not call for help or pick up any more revealing intercepts. "It was as though they knew their exact locations," said Senior Chief Stan White. Lieutenant Commander Dave Lewis, in charge of the NSA operation on the ship, agreed. "It appears to me that every tuning section of every HF antenna had a hole in it," he said. "It took a lot of planning to get heat-seeking missiles aboard to take out our entire communications in the first minute of the attack. If that was a mistake, it was the best planned mistake that has ever been perpetrated in the history of mankind."
Not hearing anything from the Saratoga for a few minutes, the radio operator repeated his call for help. "Schematic, this is Rockstar. We are still under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate assistance." But the Saratoga demanded an authentication code. Unfortunately, it had been destroyed during the emergency destruction and the Saratoga operator was giving him a hard time about it. "Listen to the goddamned rockets, you son-of-a-bitch," the Liberty radioman screamed into his microphone.
"He's hit her a lot," reported an Israeli Army commander at El Arish,
where the war crimes were taking place. "There's black smoke, there's an
oil slick in the water."
Then the planes attacked the bridge in order to blind her, killing
instantly the ship's executive officer. With the Liberty now deaf, blind,
and silenced, unable to call for help and unable to move, the Israeli pilots
next proceeded to kill her. Designed to punch holes in the toughest
tanks, the Israeli shells tore through the Liberty's steel plating like hot
nails through butter, exploding into jagged bits of shrapnel and
butchering men deep in their living quarters.
"Menachem, is he screwing her?" headquarters asked one of the pilots, excitedly. As the Israelis continued their slaughter, neither they nor the Liberty crew had any idea that witnesses were present high above. Until now. According to information, interviews, and documents obtained for Body of Secrets, for nearly thirty-five years NSA has hidden the fact that one of its planes was overhead at the time of the incident, eavesdropping on what was going on below. The intercepts from that plane, which answer some of the key questions about the attack, are among NSA's deepest secrets.
Two hours before the attack, the Navy EC-121 ferret had taken off from Athens and returned to the eastern Mediterranean for its regular patrol. Now it was flying a diagonal track from Crete and Cyprus to El Arish and back. "When we arrived within intercept range of the battles already in progress," said Marvin Nowicki, "it was apparent that the Israelis were pounding the Syrians on the Golan Heights. Soon all our recorders were going full blast, with each position intercepting signals on both receivers [Hebrew and Arabic]. The evaluator called out many airborne intercepts from Arab and Israeli aircraft. We were going crazy trying to cope with the heavy activity."
Then, a few hours later, about the time the air attack was getting underway, Nowicki heard one of the other Hebrew linguists excitedly trying to get his attention on the secure intercom. "Hey, Chief," the linguist shouted, "I've got really odd activity on UHF. They mentioned an American flag. I don't know what's going on." Nowicki asked the linguist for the frequency and "rolled up to it." "Sure as the devil," said Nowicki, "Israeli aircraft were completing an attack on some object. I alerted the evaluator, giving him sparse details, adding that we had no idea what was taking place." For a while the activity subsided.
Deep down in the NSA spaces Terry McFarland, his head encased in earphones, was vaguely aware of flickers of light coming through the bulkhead. He had no idea they were armor-piercing tracer bullets slicing through the Liberty's skin. The "flickers" were accompanied by a strange noise that sounded like chains being pulled across the bottom of the ship. Then McFarland looked up to see "Red" Addington, a seaman, race down the ladder from above with blood running down his right leg. "Somebody up there shooting at us," he said.
When the attack started, Larry Weaver had run to his general
quarters station but it was located on an old helicopter pad that left him
exposed and vulnerable. He grabbed for a dazed shipmate and pushed
him into a safe corner. "I said, 'Fred, you've got to stay here, you've just
got to because he's coming up the center,' " Weaver recalled. "I yelled,
screaming at him probably, and finally he said he would stay." Then the
only place Weaver could find to hide was a small chock, the kind used to
hold lines. "I got in the fetal position," he said, "and before I closed my
eyes I looked up and I saw the American flag and that was the last thing
I saw before I was hit. And I closed my eyes just waiting for hell's horror
to hit me. And I was hit by rocket and cannon fire that blew two and a
half feet of my colon out and I received over one hundred shrapnel
wounds. It blew me up in the air about four and a half, five feet. And just
blood everywhere. It felt like a really hot electrical charge going through
my whole body."
Stan White raced for the enclosed NSA spaces, cutting through the sick bay. "Torn and mutilated bodies were everywhere," he said. "Horrible sight! On the mess deck I ran into one of my ETs [electronics technicians], he had a hole in his shoulder and one you could see through in his arm. The sound of the shells and rockets was overwhelming and I can only tell you that I didn't know a person could be so terrified and still move."
Lloyd Painter was also trying to get to his general quarters station on the mess decks. "I was running as fast as I could," he recalled. "By the time I got to the Chief's Lounge, the entrance through the lounge to the mess docks, I saw [Petty Officer John C.] Spicher, our postal clerk, lying there cut in half with strafing."
As soon as the Mirages pulled away they were replaced by Super
Mystère fighters which first raked the ship from stern to bow and then
crisscrossed it broadside. A later analysis would show 821 separate hits
on the hull and superstructure. Now in addition to rocket, cannon, and
machine-gun fire, the Mystères attacked with thousand-pound bombs
and napalm. Deafening explosions tore through the ship and the bridge
disappeared in an orange-and-black ball. Lying wounded by shrapnel,
his blood draining into his shoe, was Commander McGonagle. Seconds
later they were back. Flesh fused with iron as more strafing was followed
by more rockets which were followed by napalm.
"He's going down low with napalm all the time," shouted someone with the Israeli Southern Command at El Arish, where soldiers were hiding the slaughtered prisoners under the sand.
Crisscrossing the ship almost every forty-five seconds, the Mystères let loose more napalm—silvery metallic canisters of jellied gasoline that turned the ship into a crematorium. Not satisfied, the flight leader radioed to his headquarters. "It would be a mitzvah [blessing] if we can get a flight with iron bombs," he said. "Otherwise, the Navy's going to get here and they're going to do the shooting." With the iron bombs, the pilot was hoping for the coup de grace—to sink the ship before the Navy arrived to finish her off. In World War II, during the battle of Midway, American dive-bombers sank three Japanese aircraft carriers with such bombs in only ten minutes.
One of the quartermasters raced down to the mess deck. "The captain's hurt," he yelled to Lieutenant Painter, "and the operations officer was dead, and the executive officer is mortally wounded." Painter charged up to the bridge.
"Pay attention," one of the pilots told his headquarters. "The ship's markings are Charlie Tango Romeo 5," he said, indicating that the Liberty's identification markings were CTR-5. (Actually, they were GTR-5.) Then, with the American flag having been shot down during earlier passes, he added, "There's no flag on her."
"Leave her," replied headquarters.
As the last fighter departed, having emptied out its on-board armory and turned the Liberty's hull into a flaming mass of gray Swiss cheese, sailors lifted mutilated shipmates onto makeshift stretchers of pipe frame and chicken wire. Damage control crews pushed through passageways of suffocating smoke and blistering heat, and the chief petty officer's lounge was converted into a macabre sea of blood-soaked mattresses and shattered bodies. A later analysis said it would take a squadron of fifteen or more planes to do such damage as was inflicted on the ship.
At 2:24, minutes after the air attack, horror once again washed over the crew. Charles Rowley, the ship's photographer, was lying in the wardroom being treated for shrapnel wounds when armor-piercing bullets began penetrating the bulkhead. Through the porthole he saw three sixty-two-ton motor torpedo boats rapidly approaching in attack formation. Closing in at about forty knots, each of the French-built boats had a crew of fifteen and were heavily armed with a 40mm cannon, four 20mm cannons, and two torpedoes. Like a firing squad, they lined up in a row and pointed their guns and torpedo tubes at the Liberty's starboard hull. Seeing that the Israeli fighters had destroyed the American flag, Commander McGonagle ordered the signalman to quickly hoist another—this one the giant "holiday ensign," the largest on the ship. Almost immediately, the boats opened up with a barrage of cannon fire. One armor-piercing bullet slammed through the ship's chart house and into the pilothouse, coming to rest finally in the neck of a young helmsman, killing him instantly. Three other crewmen were slaughtered in this latest shower of steel.
Back up in the EC-121 ferret, the Hebrew linguist called Nowicki again. "He told me about new activity and that the American flag is being mentioned again. I had the frequency but for some strange reason, despite seeing it on my spectrum analyzer, couldn't hear it on my receiver, so I left my position to join him to listen at his position. I heard a couple of references to the flag during an apparent attack. The attackers weren't aircraft; they had to be surface units (we later found out at USA-512J it was the Israeli motor torpedo boats attacking the Liberty). Neither [the other Hebrew linguist] nor I had ever heard MTB attacks in voice before, so we had no idea what was occurring below us. I advised the evaluator; he was as mystified as we were."
"Stand by for torpedo attack, starboard side," McGonagle shouted frantically into the announcing system. The Israelis were ready for the kill. At 2:37 P.M., the safety plug was pulled from a 19-inch German made torpedo on Motor Torpedo Boat 203. Seconds later it sped from its launcher and took direct aim at the Liberty's, NSA spaces. Four other torpedoes—more than enough to sink the largest aircraft carrier—were also launched. Had all or most of them hit their mark, the Liberty's remaining life would have been measured in minutes. Through a miracle, only one struck home. But that hit was devastating.
Down in the NSA spaces, as the sound of shells hitting the hull grew louder, Petty Officer Ronnie Campbell jammed a sheet of paper into his typewriter and started pounding out a letter to his wife. "Dear Eileen," he started, "you wouldn't believe what's happening to us . . ."
Nearby, Bryce Lockwood had been summoned to help carry the ditching bags up to the main deck and throw them overboard. He stepped from the NSA spaces out into the passageway and a few seconds later, he said, "There was just a—I have the sense of a large object, and then a tremendous flash and explosion, just a sheet of flame. It was the torpedo—I was less than ten feet from it. The first thought that crossed my mind—'Well, it looks like it's over with. I guess I'm coming home, Lord. At least Lois and the kids are taken care of.' There were twenty-five men that were killed all around me." The torpedo struck dead center in the NSA spaces, killing nearly everyone inside, some by the initial blast and others by drowning—including Ronnie Campbell, who never finished his letter. "The whole irony," said Lockwood, "is that that Israeli torpedo struck within just a few feet of the Star of David flag that had been taped to the starboard bulkhead."
Frank Raven of G Group later talked to several of the few survivors from the NSA spaces. "They told me that they saw the torpedo ... in the room with them. The torpedo came right through the side of the ship before it exploded—they saw it before it exploded. They had the torpedo in the room with them. It came right through the side of the ship and they jumped behind desks and things of that sort and it went off."
Down on the mess deck, where many of the wounded were being treated, Donald W. Pageler had just finished giving blood. Following the torpedo-attack warning, someone told him to throw himself across the wounded. "I did just as I was told," he said.
Stan White heard the announcement just as he was about to go down a hatch. "We knelt down and braced ourselves against the bulkheads and waited. You could hear the shells from the torpedo boats hitting the ship—seemed like a long time but wasn't, I'm sure. And then the torpedo hit. The ship was lifted up out of the water somewhat, the place filled with smoke, and the lights went out. I was praying before it hit, and after it hit I concluded the prayer with 'Please take care of my wife and two little children.' We had kids late in our marriage and I thought how little time I had had with them."
At the moment of the announcement, Larry Weaver, having had his colon blown out by a rocket, was lying on a table in sick bay. "I could feel a lot of warmth from the blood," he said. "They said, 'Stand by for torpedo run, starboard side.' And I said, 'Fred, get me a life jacket, get one on me.' . . . Well we got hit by the torpedo and it's like a giant grabbed the ship and threw it. ... And right afterwards they called [prepare to] abandon ship."
Despite his injuries, Weaver tried to make it to one of the life rafts. "And I was going as fast as I could and I remember my feet were going through blood that was running down the deck like a small river, I will never forget that." But by the time he reached his life raft, it had been destroyed. "My life raft was all blown to smithereens, there just wasn't anything left of it. ... And there was a guy beside me, a couple feet beside me, and you could just hear the incoming shells. All of a sudden he was there and the next thing I knew he wasn't and I was slipping, trying to hold on to the rail, and there was a lot of blood and I looked down and I was standing on what was left of his thigh. I remember the skin and the hair from his legs underneath my foot. And I was sliding."
"Menachem, is he screwing her?" headquarters asked one of the pilots, excitedly. As the Israelis continued their slaughter, neither they nor the Liberty crew had any idea that witnesses were present high above. Until now. According to information, interviews, and documents obtained for Body of Secrets, for nearly thirty-five years NSA has hidden the fact that one of its planes was overhead at the time of the incident, eavesdropping on what was going on below. The intercepts from that plane, which answer some of the key questions about the attack, are among NSA's deepest secrets.
Two hours before the attack, the Navy EC-121 ferret had taken off from Athens and returned to the eastern Mediterranean for its regular patrol. Now it was flying a diagonal track from Crete and Cyprus to El Arish and back. "When we arrived within intercept range of the battles already in progress," said Marvin Nowicki, "it was apparent that the Israelis were pounding the Syrians on the Golan Heights. Soon all our recorders were going full blast, with each position intercepting signals on both receivers [Hebrew and Arabic]. The evaluator called out many airborne intercepts from Arab and Israeli aircraft. We were going crazy trying to cope with the heavy activity."
Then, a few hours later, about the time the air attack was getting underway, Nowicki heard one of the other Hebrew linguists excitedly trying to get his attention on the secure intercom. "Hey, Chief," the linguist shouted, "I've got really odd activity on UHF. They mentioned an American flag. I don't know what's going on." Nowicki asked the linguist for the frequency and "rolled up to it." "Sure as the devil," said Nowicki, "Israeli aircraft were completing an attack on some object. I alerted the evaluator, giving him sparse details, adding that we had no idea what was taking place." For a while the activity subsided.
Deep down in the NSA spaces Terry McFarland, his head encased in earphones, was vaguely aware of flickers of light coming through the bulkhead. He had no idea they were armor-piercing tracer bullets slicing through the Liberty's skin. The "flickers" were accompanied by a strange noise that sounded like chains being pulled across the bottom of the ship. Then McFarland looked up to see "Red" Addington, a seaman, race down the ladder from above with blood running down his right leg. "Somebody up there shooting at us," he said.
Stan White raced for the enclosed NSA spaces, cutting through the sick bay. "Torn and mutilated bodies were everywhere," he said. "Horrible sight! On the mess deck I ran into one of my ETs [electronics technicians], he had a hole in his shoulder and one you could see through in his arm. The sound of the shells and rockets was overwhelming and I can only tell you that I didn't know a person could be so terrified and still move."
Lloyd Painter was also trying to get to his general quarters station on the mess decks. "I was running as fast as I could," he recalled. "By the time I got to the Chief's Lounge, the entrance through the lounge to the mess docks, I saw [Petty Officer John C.] Spicher, our postal clerk, lying there cut in half with strafing."
"He's going down low with napalm all the time," shouted someone with the Israeli Southern Command at El Arish, where soldiers were hiding the slaughtered prisoners under the sand.
Crisscrossing the ship almost every forty-five seconds, the Mystères let loose more napalm—silvery metallic canisters of jellied gasoline that turned the ship into a crematorium. Not satisfied, the flight leader radioed to his headquarters. "It would be a mitzvah [blessing] if we can get a flight with iron bombs," he said. "Otherwise, the Navy's going to get here and they're going to do the shooting." With the iron bombs, the pilot was hoping for the coup de grace—to sink the ship before the Navy arrived to finish her off. In World War II, during the battle of Midway, American dive-bombers sank three Japanese aircraft carriers with such bombs in only ten minutes.
One of the quartermasters raced down to the mess deck. "The captain's hurt," he yelled to Lieutenant Painter, "and the operations officer was dead, and the executive officer is mortally wounded." Painter charged up to the bridge.
"Pay attention," one of the pilots told his headquarters. "The ship's markings are Charlie Tango Romeo 5," he said, indicating that the Liberty's identification markings were CTR-5. (Actually, they were GTR-5.) Then, with the American flag having been shot down during earlier passes, he added, "There's no flag on her."
"Leave her," replied headquarters.
As the last fighter departed, having emptied out its on-board armory and turned the Liberty's hull into a flaming mass of gray Swiss cheese, sailors lifted mutilated shipmates onto makeshift stretchers of pipe frame and chicken wire. Damage control crews pushed through passageways of suffocating smoke and blistering heat, and the chief petty officer's lounge was converted into a macabre sea of blood-soaked mattresses and shattered bodies. A later analysis said it would take a squadron of fifteen or more planes to do such damage as was inflicted on the ship.
At 2:24, minutes after the air attack, horror once again washed over the crew. Charles Rowley, the ship's photographer, was lying in the wardroom being treated for shrapnel wounds when armor-piercing bullets began penetrating the bulkhead. Through the porthole he saw three sixty-two-ton motor torpedo boats rapidly approaching in attack formation. Closing in at about forty knots, each of the French-built boats had a crew of fifteen and were heavily armed with a 40mm cannon, four 20mm cannons, and two torpedoes. Like a firing squad, they lined up in a row and pointed their guns and torpedo tubes at the Liberty's starboard hull. Seeing that the Israeli fighters had destroyed the American flag, Commander McGonagle ordered the signalman to quickly hoist another—this one the giant "holiday ensign," the largest on the ship. Almost immediately, the boats opened up with a barrage of cannon fire. One armor-piercing bullet slammed through the ship's chart house and into the pilothouse, coming to rest finally in the neck of a young helmsman, killing him instantly. Three other crewmen were slaughtered in this latest shower of steel.
Back up in the EC-121 ferret, the Hebrew linguist called Nowicki again. "He told me about new activity and that the American flag is being mentioned again. I had the frequency but for some strange reason, despite seeing it on my spectrum analyzer, couldn't hear it on my receiver, so I left my position to join him to listen at his position. I heard a couple of references to the flag during an apparent attack. The attackers weren't aircraft; they had to be surface units (we later found out at USA-512J it was the Israeli motor torpedo boats attacking the Liberty). Neither [the other Hebrew linguist] nor I had ever heard MTB attacks in voice before, so we had no idea what was occurring below us. I advised the evaluator; he was as mystified as we were."
"Stand by for torpedo attack, starboard side," McGonagle shouted frantically into the announcing system. The Israelis were ready for the kill. At 2:37 P.M., the safety plug was pulled from a 19-inch German made torpedo on Motor Torpedo Boat 203. Seconds later it sped from its launcher and took direct aim at the Liberty's, NSA spaces. Four other torpedoes—more than enough to sink the largest aircraft carrier—were also launched. Had all or most of them hit their mark, the Liberty's remaining life would have been measured in minutes. Through a miracle, only one struck home. But that hit was devastating.
Down in the NSA spaces, as the sound of shells hitting the hull grew louder, Petty Officer Ronnie Campbell jammed a sheet of paper into his typewriter and started pounding out a letter to his wife. "Dear Eileen," he started, "you wouldn't believe what's happening to us . . ."
Nearby, Bryce Lockwood had been summoned to help carry the ditching bags up to the main deck and throw them overboard. He stepped from the NSA spaces out into the passageway and a few seconds later, he said, "There was just a—I have the sense of a large object, and then a tremendous flash and explosion, just a sheet of flame. It was the torpedo—I was less than ten feet from it. The first thought that crossed my mind—'Well, it looks like it's over with. I guess I'm coming home, Lord. At least Lois and the kids are taken care of.' There were twenty-five men that were killed all around me." The torpedo struck dead center in the NSA spaces, killing nearly everyone inside, some by the initial blast and others by drowning—including Ronnie Campbell, who never finished his letter. "The whole irony," said Lockwood, "is that that Israeli torpedo struck within just a few feet of the Star of David flag that had been taped to the starboard bulkhead."
Frank Raven of G Group later talked to several of the few survivors from the NSA spaces. "They told me that they saw the torpedo ... in the room with them. The torpedo came right through the side of the ship before it exploded—they saw it before it exploded. They had the torpedo in the room with them. It came right through the side of the ship and they jumped behind desks and things of that sort and it went off."
Down on the mess deck, where many of the wounded were being treated, Donald W. Pageler had just finished giving blood. Following the torpedo-attack warning, someone told him to throw himself across the wounded. "I did just as I was told," he said.
Stan White heard the announcement just as he was about to go down a hatch. "We knelt down and braced ourselves against the bulkheads and waited. You could hear the shells from the torpedo boats hitting the ship—seemed like a long time but wasn't, I'm sure. And then the torpedo hit. The ship was lifted up out of the water somewhat, the place filled with smoke, and the lights went out. I was praying before it hit, and after it hit I concluded the prayer with 'Please take care of my wife and two little children.' We had kids late in our marriage and I thought how little time I had had with them."
At the moment of the announcement, Larry Weaver, having had his colon blown out by a rocket, was lying on a table in sick bay. "I could feel a lot of warmth from the blood," he said. "They said, 'Stand by for torpedo run, starboard side.' And I said, 'Fred, get me a life jacket, get one on me.' . . . Well we got hit by the torpedo and it's like a giant grabbed the ship and threw it. ... And right afterwards they called [prepare to] abandon ship."
Despite his injuries, Weaver tried to make it to one of the life rafts. "And I was going as fast as I could and I remember my feet were going through blood that was running down the deck like a small river, I will never forget that." But by the time he reached his life raft, it had been destroyed. "My life raft was all blown to smithereens, there just wasn't anything left of it. ... And there was a guy beside me, a couple feet beside me, and you could just hear the incoming shells. All of a sudden he was there and the next thing I knew he wasn't and I was slipping, trying to hold on to the rail, and there was a lot of blood and I looked down and I was standing on what was left of his thigh. I remember the skin and the hair from his legs underneath my foot. And I was sliding."
The firing continued, now from the torpedo boats. Weaver and a
number of other wounded were placed on gurneys between metal
barriers. "We were laying there," he recalled, "and if I was to summarize what it sounded like, we were all praying. And it just almost sounded like
a guru type of chant, like a mum-mum-mum-mum, that's the way it
sounded because all these guys were wounded and we were all praying
and almost in the same tone. And I remember the sound of that. And we
could hear them [shells] hitting the bulkhead, just unbelievable. I was so
scared to close my eyes because I thought I would never open them
again."
Still down near the NSA spaces was Bryce Lockwood, who had been knocked unconscious. When he awoke all he could feel was cold, frigid, oily water. Around him were more than two dozen dead intercept operators, analysts, and communications personnel. The water was pouring in from the massive torpedo hole below the waterline, and smoke, oil, and darkness filled the space. Lockwood heard a groan behind him and found one sailor alive, Petty Officer Joseph C. Lentini. The sailor's leg had been smashed by an armor-piercing bullet and then crushed by a bulkhead when the torpedo struck. In spite of the difficulties, Lockwood managed to free the sailor's leg, put him over his shoulder, and climb up the ladder to the next level, where he again passed out. Once again he awoke as the water, climbing still higher, washed over him. Desperate to escape, he again put the sailor on his shoulder and climbed a second ladder—but now the top hatch had been sealed shut to help prevent the ship from sinking. Two, three, four times Lockwood dropped Lentini into the rising water as he pounded on the hatch with one hand, held a flashlight with the other, and screamed at the top of his lungs. Each time he would retrieve Lentini, re-climb the ladder, and continue pounding. Finally, a sailor doing a damage control survey opened the hatch and found Lockwood with the wounded Lentini, who, his leg shredded, was still clinging to life. Lockwood was later awarded the Silver Star for his heroism. Lentini survived. He was one of two sailors Lockwood saved.
Immediately after the attack, one of the boats signaled by flashing light, in English, "Do you require assistance?" McGonagle, with no other means to communicate, hoisted the flags indicating that the ship was maneuvering with difficulty and that they should keep clear. Instead, the torpedo boats continued to terrorize the crew, firing at the ship, at firefighters, at rescue personnel, and even at the life rafts in their racks. Larry Weaver, whose raft was destroyed, said: "They must have known where they [the rafts] were. They tried to blow them out in their racks."
To prevent anyone from escaping the badly wounded ship, the Israelis even destroyed the few surviving life rafts that were put into the water following the call to abandon ship. "I watched with horror as the floating life rafts were riddled with holes," said Lieutenant Lloyd Painter, in charge of the evacuation. "No survivors were planned for this day!"
Stan White, the top enlisted man on the ship, also witnessed the lifeboat attack. "When 'prepare to abandon ship' was announced, what was left of our lifeboats were released overboard; these were immediately machine gunned by the torpedo boats. It was obvious that no one was meant to survive this assault."
Jumping overboard to escape the sinking ship was also not an option.
"If you don't go down with the ship," said Seaman Don Pageler, "you're
going to jump overboard. If you jump overboard, the way these people
were attacking us, we knew they would shoot us in the water. We did
firmly believe that there was no way they intended to capture anybody."
Earlier that day, the Israelis had massacred civilians and prisoners in the desert; now they were prepared to ensure that no American survived the sinking of the Liberty. Another witness to the lifeboat attacks was shipfitter Phillip F. Tourney. "As soon as the lifeboats hit the water they were sunk. They would shoot at us for target practice, it seemed like. They wanted to kill and maim and murder anyone they could. . . . One of the torpedo boats picked a life raft up and took it with them."
"They made circles like they were getting ready to attack again," added former petty officer Larry B. Thorn, who also witnessed the sinking of the life rafts. "Our biggest fear was that the Israeli commandos . . . would come back and get us that night and finish the job," said Phillip Tourney.
The Israelis, not knowing what intelligence NSA had picked up, would have had reason to suspect the worst—that the agency had recorded evidence of the numerous atrocities committed that morning only a few miles away. This would be devastating evidence of hundreds of serious war crimes, approved by senior Israeli commanders.
Indeed, many Israeli communications had been intercepted. "We heard Israeli traffic," said section supervisor Charles L. Rowley. Much of what was recorded was to be listened to and analyzed later, either at the secret processing station in Athens or back at NSA.
As the Liberty continued to burn and take on water from the forty four-foot hole in its starboard side, damage control crews dodged Israeli shells to try to save it. Commander McGonagle, however, was quietly considering killing it himself. He had glimpsed an Israeli flag on one of the torpedo boats, and he feared that next the Israelis would attempt to board the ship, kill everyone not yet dead, and capture the super secret NSA documents. (Because of the constant strafing by the fighters and the torpedo boats, the crew had been unable to throw overboard any of the ditching bags.) Rather than let that happen, he told his chief engineer, Lieutenant George H. Golden, about the Israeli flag and, said Golden, "told me that he wanted to scuttle the ship. I told him that we were in shallow water [the depth was 35 to 40 fathoms], that it would be impossible to do that. If it came to that point we would need to get our wounded and everybody off the ship and move it out into deeper water where we can scuttle it. And he asked me how long it would take me to sink the ship. And I gave him a rough idea of how long it would take for the ship to sink after I pulled the plug on it. But we had to be out in deep water—we were too shallow, and people could get aboard the ship and get whatever that was left that some of them might want."
High above, the intercept operators in the EC-121 ferret continued to eavesdrop on voices from the war below, but they heard no more mentions of the American flag. "Finally," said Chief Nowicki, "it was time to return to Athens. We recorded voice activity en route home until the intercepts finally faded. On the way home, the evaluator and I got together to try to figure out what we copied. Despite replaying portions of the tapes, we still did not have a complete understanding of what transpired except for the likelihood that a ship flying the American flag was being attacked by Israeli air and surface forces."
After landing on the Greek air force side of the Athens airport, Nowicki and the intercept crew were brought directly to the processing center. "By the time we arrived at the USA-512J compound," he said, "collateral reports were coming in to the station about the attack on the USS Liberty. The first question we were asked was, did we get any of the activity? Yes, we dared to say we did. The NSA civilians took our tapes and began transcribing. It was pretty clear that Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats attacked a ship in the east Med. Although the attackers never gave a name or a hull number, the ship was identified as flying an American flag. We logically concluded that the ship was the USS Liberty, although we had no idea she was even in the area and could become the object of such an attack." At the time, based on the fractured conversations he heard on the intercepts, Nowicki just assumed that the attack was a mistake.
The question then was whether to send a CRITIC to NSA, CRITIC being the highest priority for intercept intelligence. "After much deliberation," Nowicki said, "we decided against the CRITIC because our information was already hours old. To meet CRITIC criteria, information should be within fifteen minutes of the event. ... It had been quite a day and other days remained before us. We returned to the Hotel Seville for rest and relaxation, feeling a sense of exhilaration but not comprehending the chaos and calamity taking place on the Liberty at that very moment as she struggled to leave the attack area."
The message sent by the Liberty shortly after the attack requesting immediate help was eventually received by the Sixth Fleet, which was then south of Crete, 450 miles to the west. Suddenly high-level 187 communications channels came alive. At 2:50 P.M. (Liberty time), fifty minutes after the first shells tore into the ship and as the attack was still going on, the launch decision was made. The aircraft carrier USS America, cruising near Crete, was ordered to launch four armed A-4 Skyhawks. At the same time, the carrier USS Saratoga was also told to send four armed A-1 attack planes to defend the ship. "Sending aircraft to cover you," the Sixth Fleet told the Liberty at 3:05 P.M. (9:05 A.M. in Washington). "Surface units on the way."
At 9:00 A.M. (3:00 P.M. Liberty) bells sounded and the first CRITIC message, sent by either the America or the Saratoga, stuttered across a role of white Teletype paper in NSA's Sigint Command Center. The senior operations officer then passed it on to Director Marshall Carter. With Carter in his ninth-floor office was Deputy Director Tordella. At 9:28 A.M. (3:28 P.M. Liberty) Carter sent out a CRITIC alert to all listening posts. "USS Liberty has been reportedly torpedoed by unknown source in Med near 32N 33E," said the message: "Request examine all communications for possible reaction/reflections and report accordingly."
Eleven minutes after the CRITIC arrived at NSA, the phone rang in the Pentagon's War Room and European Command Headquarters told the duty officer that the Liberty had been attacked by unknown jet fighters.
At that moment in Washington, President Johnson was at his desk, on the phone, alternately shouting at congressional leaders and coaxing them to support his position on several pieces of pending legislation. But four minutes later he was suddenly interrupted by Walt Rostow on the other line. "The Liberty has been torpedoed in the Mediterranean," Rostow told Johnson excitedly. A minute later, the adviser rushed into the Oval Office with a brief memorandum. "The ship is located 60 to 100 miles north of Egypt. Reconnaissance aircraft are out from the 6th fleet," it said. "No knowledge of the submarine or surface vessel which committed this act. Shall keep you informed."
In the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara called Carter at NSA for precise information on the ship, its personnel, and other details. Carter told him what he knew but said that the Naval Security Group, which manned and operated the ship, would have the most up-to-date facts. Carter told McNamara that he would have Captain Ralph E. Cook, the Security Group's director, call him immediately. Carter then called Cook's office, only to discover that he was at the dentist's. Cook's deputy, a Captain Thomas, got on the phone, and Carter told him to call McNamara at once. About ten minutes later McNamara again called Carter and said he still hadn't heard from anyone. After a few more minutes of crossed wires, McNamara and Thomas finally talked.
NSA's worst fears had come true. "After considerations of personnel safety," said Tordella, "one of General Carter's and my immediate concerns, considering the depth of the water and the distance of the ship off shore, had to do with the classified materials which she had on board." Tordella got on the phone to the Joint Reconnaissance Center and spoke to the deputy director, a Navy captain named Vineyard. "I expressed my concern that the written material be burned if at all possible and that the electronic equipment be salvaged if that were possible," he said.
But Tordella was not prepared for what he heard. According to NSA documents classified top secret/umbra and obtained for Body of Secrets, Tordella was told that some senior officials in Washington wanted above all to protect Israel from embarrassment. "Captain Vineyard had mentioned during this conversation," wrote Tordella, "that consideration was then being given by some unnamed Washington authorities to sink[ing] the Liberty in order that newspaper men would be unable to photograph her and thus inflame public opinion against the Israelis. I made an impolite comment about the idea." Almost immediately Tordella wrote a memorandum for the record, describing the conversation, and then locked it away.
Concern over the secrets on the ship grew and Carter said he was prepared to order the ship scuttled to prevent their loss. He only reconsidered when informed that the shallowness of the water made compromise of materials and equipment "a distinct possibility." Then he began worrying about the security of the material if the ship ended up sinking. "If it appeared the ship was going to sink," Carter told Vineyard, "it was essential that the security of the sinking site be maintained. ... It would be necessary to get down and remove the sensitive material from the ship."
Also, there was discussion of sending in a replacement ship, the USS Belmont. A cover story for the Liberty was then quickly devised. "She was a communications research ship that was diverted from her research assignment," it said, "to provide improved communication-relay links with the several U.S. embassies around the entire Mediterranean during the current troubles." On the America and Saratoga, the pilots were instructed to "destroy or drive off any attackers who are clearly making attacks on the Liberty." They then catapulted into the air toward the Liberty at 3:45 P.M. Liberty time (9:45 A.M. Washington).
At 4:00 P.M. on the Liberty (10:00 A.M. Washington), the crew was still screaming for help. "Flash, flash, flash," Radioman Joe Ward shouted into his microphone. "I pass in the blind. [That is, he didn't know who was picking up the transmission.] We are under attack by aircraft and high-speed surface craft. I say again, flash, flash, flash." By then, unencrypted voice messages had been filling the open airwaves for two hours. If the Israelis were monitoring the communications, as they did continuously during the war, they would now have begun to worry how soon the American fighters would arrive.
From the White House Situation Room, Rostow phoned Johnson at 10:14 A.M. (4:14 P.M. Liberty) to tell him that the ship was "listing badly to starboard. The Saratoga has launched 4-A4's and 4-A1's." Johnson feared that the attack had been conducted by Soviet planes and submarines and that the United States was on the verge of war with Russia. Later he called all his advisers for an emergency meeting in the Situation Room.
About the same moment that Joe Ward was again pleading for help, Commander Ernest C. Castle, the U.S. naval attaché in Tel Aviv, was summoned urgently to Israeli Defense Force Headquarters. There, he was told that Israeli air and sea forces had attacked the Liberty "in error." Castle raced back to the embassy and at 4:14 P.M. Liberty time (10:14 P.M. Washington), he dashed off a Flash message to Washington concerning this development. Strangely, NSA claims that it first learned of Israel's involvement fifteen minutes before Castle was called by the Israeli Defense Forces and half an hour before Castle's Flash message. It has never been explained how NSA discovered this.
At the White House, Johnson was relieved to learn that the attackers were not Soviet or Egyptian. There would be no war today. But he became very worried that the Russians, through Sigint, radar, or observation, would become aware that a squadron of American fighters was streaking toward the war zone, and that if the USSR suspected that America had suddenly decided to become involved, it would launch an attack. So at 11:17 AM. (5:17 P.M. Liberty) he sent a hot-line message to Kosygin in Moscow.
The small office next to the War Room had lately become a busy place. Supervisor Harry O. Rakfeldt, a Russian-speaking Navy cryptologic chief, was already pounding out a hot-line message to Moscow, one of a number he had sent during the crisis, when the White House phone rang. Army Major Pawlowski, the presidential translator, picked it up, listened for a moment, then told Rakfeldt to notify Moscow to stand by for an emergency message. Immediately Rakfeldt stopped typing, dropped down several lines, and sent "Stand by for an emergency message." Then, as Major Pawlowski dictated, Rakfeldt typed the following alert:
We have just learned that USS Liberty, an auxiliary ship, has apparently been torpedoed by Israel Forces in error off Port Said. We have instructed our carrier Saratoga, now in the Mediterranean, to dispatch aircraft to the scene to investigate. We wish you to know that investigation is the sole purpose of this flight of aircraft and hope that you will take appropriate steps to see that proper parties are informed. We have passed the message to Chernyakov but feel that you should know of this development urgently.
The message arrived in the Kremlin at 11:24 A.M. Washington time; Kosygin replied about forty-five minutes later that he had passed the message on to Nasser.
Black smoke was still escaping through the more than 800 holes in the Liberty's hull, and the effort to hush up the incident had already begun. Within hours of the attack, Israel asked President Johnson to quietly bury the incident. "Embassy Tel Aviv," said a highly secret, very limited-distribution message to the State Department, "urged de-emphasis on publicity since proximity of vessel to scene of conflict was fuel for Arab suspicions that U.S. was aiding Israel." Shortly thereafter, a total news ban was ordered by the Pentagon. No one in the field was allowed to say anything about the attack. All information was to come only from a few senior Washington officials.
At 11:29 A.M. (5:29 P.M. Liberty), Johnson took the unusual step of ordering the JCS to recall the fighters while the Liberty still lay smoldering, sinking, fearful of another attack, without aid, and with its decks covered with the dead, the dying, and the wounded. Onboard the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, Rear Admiral Lawrence R. Geis, who commanded the carrier force in the Mediterranean, was angry and puzzled at the recall and protested it to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.
Admiral Geis was shocked by what he heard next. According to information obtained for Body of Secrets, "President Lyndon Johnson came on with a comment that he didn't care if the ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies." Admiral Geis told Lieutenant Commander David Lewis, the head of the NSA group on the Liberty, about the comment but asked him to keep it secret until after Geis died. It was a promise that Lewis kept.
The hole in the Liberty's twenty-three-year-old skin was nearly wide enough to drive a bus through; the ship had a heavy list to starboard, most of its equipment was destroyed, thirty-two of its crew were dead (two others would later die) and two-thirds of the rest wounded; its executive officer was dead, and its commanding officer was badly hurt. Despite all this, the Liberty was heroically brought back to life and slowly made her way toward safer waters. To keep the ship from sinking, the hatches to the flooded NSA spaces had been dogged down, sealing the bodies of the twenty-five Sigint specialists inside.
Throughout the long night, propped up in a chair on the port wing of the bridge, Commander McGonagle continued to conn his ship, using the North Star ahead and the long wake behind for direction. Shortly after dawn, 16½ hours after the attack, help finally arrived. Rendezvousing with the Liberty, 420 miles east-southeast of Soudha Bay, Crete, were the American destroyers Davis and Massey.
Helicopters soon arrived and began lifting litters containing the most seriously wounded to the deck of the America, still 138 miles away. There they were transported by plane to Athens and then to the naval hospital in Naples. At the completion of the transfer, after eighteen continuous hours on the bridge, the weary skipper finally headed to what was left of his cabin. Despite his injuries, he remained with the ship until she docked in Malta.
As the wounded landed at Athens Airport, NSA civilians at USA 512J a short distance away finished transcribing most of the tapes from the previous day's EC-121 ferret mission. They then sent the raw information back to NSA over the agency's special channel, SPINTCOMM ("Special Intelligence Communications"). Later, the civilians were instructed to pack up the original tapes and send them by armed courier to NSA as soon as possible.
At NSA, concern had shifted from the rescue of the crew to the possible loss of sensitive documents from Liberty's ruptured signals intelligence spaces. Boats from the destroyers were ordered to search around the Liberty for two hours looking for classified papers that might be washing out from the gaping, pear-shaped hole. Later, as the Liberty sailed slowly toward Malta, a major concern was the possibility that Russian ships would attempt to retrieve the flotsam. "Do whatever is feasible to keep any Soviet ships out of Liberty's wake," the Sixth Fleet commander was told. "Maintain observation of Liberty's wake and if possible find out what sort of documents are being lost in the wake . . . take whatever steps may be reasonable and appropriate to reduce possibility of compromise, noting that a compromise could have both political and technical aspects."
Like a shark sensing blood, a Soviet guided-missile destroyer did tag along with the Liberty for a while, but the two American destroyers and a fleet ocean tug trailed Liberty to recover any papers before the Russians had a chance to grab them. Along the way, the tug used boat hooks and grab nets to pick up the top secret material. When the tug could not recover a document, it ran over it with the propeller and then backed down over it to shred the paper into small pieces. Despite this vigilance, the bodies of five technicians washed out of the hole and were never recovered.
Another concern at Fort Meade was the three NSA civilian Arabic linguists on the ship. They had earlier been flown to Rota, where they joined the crew. One, Allen M. Blue, had been killed; another, Donald L. Blalock, had been injured; and a third, Robert L. Wilson, had survived unscathed. Marshall Carter ordered an NSA official to meet the ship in Malta and provide maximum assistance in getting Blalock and Wilson back to the United States as quickly and as quietly as possible.
Once the Liberty pulled into Malta on June 14, the effort to bury the incident continued at full speed ahead. A total news blackout was imposed. Crew members were threatened with courts-martial and jail time if they ever breathed a word of the episode to anyone—including family members and even fellow crew members. "If you ever repeat this to anyone else ever again you will be put in prison and forgotten about," Larry Weaver said he was warned.
Now that the ship was safely in dry dock, the grisly task of searching the NSA spaces, sealed since the attack six days earlier, also began. "I took a crew . . . down in the spaces to inventory the classified equipment and info," said former senior chief Stan White. "The smell was so awful it can't be described. We got the bodies out and then the pieces of bodies were picked up and put in bags and finally the inventory. The sights and smells I am still sometimes aware of today." Seaman Don Pageler also spent two and a half days helping to search and clean out the cavernous compartment. At one point he lifted a piece of equipment only to make a grim discovery. "Below it was this guy's arm. ... I looked at the muscle structure and I knew whose arm it was. I didn't know him well but I knew who he was."
In July 1967, the Liberty returned to Norfolk from Malta. There it languished while NSA tried unsuccessfully to obtain $10.2 million from the Pentagon to restore her to signals intelligence operational status. When that effort failed, the Liberty was decommissioned, on June 28, 1968. In 1970 the ship was turned over to the U.S. Maritime Administration and sold for $101,666.66. In 1973 the ship came to an ignominious end in Baltimore's Curtis Bay shipyard as welders' torches at last did what the Israeli attack hadn't. She was cut up and sold for scrap.
On April 28, 1969, almost two years after the attack, the Israeli government finally paid about $20,000 to each of the wounded crewmen. This compensation was obtained, however, only after the men retained private counsel to negotiate with Israel's lawyers in Washington. A substantial portion of the claim, therefore, went to lawyers' fees. Ten months earlier, the Israelis had paid about $100,000 to each of the families of those killed.
Finally, the U.S. government asked a token $7,644,146 for Israel's destruction of the ship, even though $20 million had been spent several years earlier to convert her to a signals intelligence ship and another $10.2 million had gone for the highly sophisticated hardware. Yet despite the modest amount requested, and the agony its armed forces had caused, the Israeli government spent thirteen years in an unseemly battle to avoid paying. By the winter of 1980, the interest alone had reached $10 million. Israeli ambassador Ephraim Evron then suggested that if the United States asked for $6 million—and eliminated the interest entirely—his country might be willing to pay. President Jimmy Carter, on his way out of office, agreed, and in December 1980 accepted the paltry $6 million.
In the days following the attack, the Israeli government gave the U.S. government a classified report that attempted to justify the claim that the attack was a mistake. On the basis of that same report, an Israeli court of inquiry completely exonerated the government and all those involved. No one was ever court-martialed, reduced in rank, or even reprimanded. On the contrary, Israel chose instead to honor Motor Torpedo Boat 203, which fired the deadly torpedo at the Liberty. The ship's wheel and bell were placed on prominent display at the naval museum, among the maritime artifacts of which the Israeli navy was most proud.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel had attacked the ship and killed the American servicemen deliberately, the Johnson administration and Congress covered up the entire incident. Johnson was planning to run for president the following year and needed the support of pro-Israel voters. His administration's actions were disgraceful. Although Captain McGonagle was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism in saving the ship and bringing it back to safety, senior White House officials decided to keep the occasion as quiet as possible. Because the medal, the nation's highest honor, is only rarely awarded, it is almost always presented by the president in a high-profile White House ceremony. But McGonagle's award was given by the secretary of the Navy in a low-profile, hastily arranged gathering at the Washington Navy Yard, a scrappy base on the banks of the smelly Anacostia River.
"I must have gone to the White House fifteen times or more to watch the president personally award the Congressional Medal of Honor to Americans of special valor," said Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who became Chief of Naval Operations within weeks of the attack. "So it irked the hell out of me when McGonagle's ceremony was relegated to the obscurity of the Washington Navy Yard and the medal was presented by the Secretary of the Navy. This was a backhanded slap. Everyone else received their medal at the White House. President Johnson must have been concerned about the reaction of the Israeli lobby."
Later, a naval officer connected with the awards told Jim Ennes, a lieutenant on the ship, the reason. "The government is pretty jumpy about Israel," he said. "The State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal. 'Certainly not!' Israel said. But to avoid any possible offense, McGonagle's citation does not mention Israel at all, and the award ceremony kept the lowest possible profile."
In the period immediately after the incident, several quick reviews were conducted by the Navy and CIA, among other agencies. However, they dealt principally with such topics as the failure of the Naval Communications System and how the crew of the ship performed during the crisis. No American investigators ever looked into the "why" question or brought the probe to Israel, the scene of the crime. Investigators simply accepted Israel's bizarre "mistake" report at face value. This was a document which included such statements as a claim by the torpedo boat crew that the Liberty—an ancient World War II cargo ship then loitering at five knots—was attempting to escape at an incredible thirty knots (the Liberty's top speed was seventeen knots)—outracing even their torpedo boats. This was the reason, the report said, for calling in the air force.
The Israeli report then said that their observers checked in Jane's Fighting Ships and misidentified the Liberty as El Quseir, an Egyptian troop and horse transport. But Jane's gave the top speed of El Quseir as only fourteen knots; how could a ship supposedly doing thirty knots have been mistaken for it? Jane's also contained details on the Liberty, the same details that Commander Pinchas Pinchasy, at air force headquarters, had used to positively identify the ship. (And Pinchasy had reported the identification to Israeli naval headquarters.)
The Israeli report also said that the whole reason for the attack was to stop the Liberty, with its few short-range machine guns, from bombarding the town of El Arish, more than a dozen miles away. This was nonsense.
Nevertheless, most of the U.S. investigations took the path of least resistance, the one onto which they were pushed by the White House, and accepted the "mistake" theory. Incredibly, considering that 34 American servicemen had been killed and 171 more wounded, and that a ship of the U.S. Navy had been nearly sunk (no U.S. naval vessel since World War II had suffered a higher percentage [69 percent] of battle casualties), Congress held no public hearings. With an election coming up, no one in the weak-kneed House and Senate wanted to offend powerful pro-Israel groups and lose their fat campaign contributions.
But according to interviews and documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the senior leadership of NSA, officials who had unique access to the secret tapes and other highly classified evidence, was virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate. They strongly believed that Israel feared what the Liberty might have intercepted, and therefore ordered it killed leaving no survivors.
Israel has never wavered on one critical point: that no one ever saw a flag flying from the Liberty during either the air or sea attack, despite the virtually unanimous agreement among survivors that flags were flying during both periods. "Throughout the contact," said the "mistake" report, "no Israeli plane or torpedo boat saw an American or any other flag on the ship."
But former Chief Marvin Nowicki, the senior Hebrew linguist on the EC-121 flying above the scene, knows what he heard. "As I recall, we recorded most, if not all, of the attack," he said. "I heard a couple of references to the flag during an apparent attack." Nowicki, who later received a Ph.D. in political science and taught public administration at the college level, is an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, who originally assumed his information would help clear Israel. Instead, it convicts the government. If the Israelis did see the flag, then the attack was cold blooded murder—like the hundreds of earlier murders committed by Israelis that day at El Arish.
As soon as the incident began, Marshall Carter appointed a small task force led by Walter Deeley, a senior official in the Production Organization, the agency's Sigint operations division. The task force was to keep track of all information regarding the Liberty and prepare a report for the director. Unlike the other probes, this one included all the signals intelligence details—the intercept tapes from the EC-121, and interviews with the signals intelligence survivors from the Liberty. Because of the enormous secrecy in which NSA held its Sigint operations, and especially because the information involved its most secret activity— eavesdropping on a close ally—the details were never shared with anyone else. In the end, Walter Deeley came to the only possible conclusion, given his knowledge of Israel's intelligence capabilities. "There is no way that they didn't know that the Liberty was American," he said, suggesting premeditated murder.
NSA Director Carter agreed. "There was no other answer than that it was deliberate," he told the author in a 1980 interview, although he asked that the information be kept off the record at the time. Carter has since died.
NSA's deputy director, Dr. Louis Tordella, also believed that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the Israeli government was attempting to cover it up. According to highly classified and long-hidden NSA documents obtained for Body of Secrets, Tordella not only put his belief 196 in an internal memorandum for the record but also expressed his view to Congressman George Mahon (D-Texas) of the House Appropriations Committee. "Mr. Mahon probed several times to discover the reason for the Israeli attack," wrote Tordella on June 20, 1967, nearly two weeks after the incident. "I told him we simply did not know from either open or intelligence sources but that, by now, there probably was a fair amount of denial and cover-up by the Israelis for the sake of protecting their national position. He asked my private opinion of the attack and I said that, for what it was worth, I believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities.
"He asked if a mistake of this sort was common or should be expected," Tordella continued. "I told him that I thought a ship the size of the Liberty was unlike and much larger than Egyptian ships and that an obviously cargo-type vessel should not reasonably be mistaken by competent naval forces or air pilots for an Egyptian man-of-war. At best I estimated that the attacking ships and planes were guilty of gross negligence and carelessness." So angry was Tordella over the attack and cover-up that he scrawled across the top of the Israeli "mistake" report: "A nice whitewash."
Finally, U.S. Air Force Major General John Morrison, at the time the deputy chief—and later chief—of NSA's operations, did not buy the Israeli "mistake" explanation, either. "Nobody believes that explanation," he said in a recent interview with the author. "The only conjecture that we ever made that made any near sense is that the Israelis did not want us to intercept their communications at that time." When informed by the author of the gruesome war crimes then taking place at El Arish, Morrison saw the connection. "That would be enough," he said. "Twelve miles is nothing. . . . They wouldn't want us to get in on that." He added: "You've got the motive. . . . What a hell of a thing to do."
Even without knowledge of the murders taking place nearby in the desert, many in NSA's G Group, who analyzed the intercepts sent back by both the Liberty and the EC-121, were convinced that the attack was no mistake. And among the survivors of the Liberty, the conviction is virtually unanimous. "The Israelis got by with cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Americans on June 8, 1967," said Phillip F. Tourney, president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association, in July 2000. "There is widespread cynicism that our elected officials will not go up against the powerful Israeli lobby out of fear. . . . This cover-up must be investigated, now."
For more than thirty years, Captain William L. McGonagle refused to say a single word on the issue of whether the killing of his crew was done with foreknowledge or by mistake. Finally, dying of cancer in November 1998, he at last broke his long silence. "After many years I finally believe that the attack was deliberate," he said. "I don't think there has been an adequate investigation of the incident. . . . The flag was flying prior to the attack on the ship." McGonagle died less than four months later, on March 3, 1999, at the age of seventy-three.
Even without the NSA evidence, many people in the administration disbelieved the Israeli "mistake" report. "Frankly, there was considerable skepticism in the White House that the attack was accidental," said George Christian, Johnson's press secretary at the time. "I became convinced that an accident of this magnitude was too much to swallow. If it were a deliberate attack the question remains, of course, of whether it was a tactical decision on the part of elements of the Israeli military or whether it was ordered by high officials."
Another NSA review, conducted fifteen years later and classified Top Secret/Umbra, ridiculed the decision by the Israeli court of inquiry that accepted the "mistake" theory and exonerated all Israeli officials. "Exculpation of Israeli nationals," it said, "apparently not being hindmost in the court's calculations." Next the review accused the Israeli fighter pilots of outright perjury:
Though the pilots testified to the contrary, every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gives consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag—and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to assure its easy observance and identification. These circumstances—prior identification of the Liberty and easy visibility of the American flag—prompted the Department of State to inform the Israeli Government that "the later military attack by Israeli aircraft on the USS Liberty is quite literally incomprehensible. As a minimum, the attack must be condemned as an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life." (Emphasis in original.)
The pilots, said the report, were not the only ones lying: the story told by the torpedo-boat crewmen who blew up the ship—after missing with their first four torpedoes—was also unbelievable. The torpedo-boat crew claimed that they had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian troop transport, El Quseir. At the time of the attack, the Egyptian ship was rusting alongside a pier in the port of Alexandria, 250 miles from where the Liberty was attacked, and along that pier El Quseir remained throughout the war. The location of every Egyptian ship would have been a key piece of intelligence before Israel launched its war. According to the long-secret 1981 NSA report:
The fact that two separate torpedo boat commanders made the same false identification only raises the question of the veracity of both commanders. The El-Kasir [El Quseir] was approximately one-quarter of the Liberty's tonnage, about one-half its length, and offered a radically different silhouette. To claim that the Liberty closely resembled the ElKasir was most illogical. The Department of State expressed its view of the torpedo attack in these words:
"The subsequent attack by Israeli torpedo boats, substantially after the vessel was or should have been identified by Israeli military forces, manifests the same reckless disregard for human life. The silhouette and conduct of USS Liberty readily distinguished it from any vessel that could have been considered hostile. ... It could and should have been scrutinized visually at close range before torpedoes were fired."
Finally the NSA report, fifteen years after the fact, added:
A persistent question relating to the Liberty incident is whether or not the Israeli forces which attacked the ship knew that it was American . . . not a few of the Liberty's crewmen and [deleted but probably "NSA's G Group"] staff are convinced that they did. Their belief derived from consideration of the long time the Israelis had the ship under surveillance prior to the attack, the visibility of the flag, and the intensity of the attack itself.
Speculation as to the Israeli motivation varied. Some believed that Israel expected that the complete destruction of the ship and killing of the personnel would lead the U.S. to blame the UAR [Egypt] for the incident and bring the U.S. into the war on the side of Israel . . . others felt that Israeli forces wanted the ship and men out of the way.
"I believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities," said Tordella. His statement was amazingly astute, since he likely had no idea of the war crimes being committed on the Sinai at the time, within easy earshot of the antenna groves that covered the Liberty's deck.
On the morning of June 8, the Israeli military command received a report that a large American eavesdropping ship was secretly listening only a few miles off El Arish. At that same moment, a scant dozen or so miles away, Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds, a fact that the entire Israeli army leadership knew about and condoned, according to the army's own historian. Another military historian, Uri Milstein, confirmed the report. There were many incidents in the Six Day War, he said, in which Egyptian soldiers were killed by Israeli troops after they had raised their hands in surrender. "It was not an official policy," he added, "but there was an atmosphere that it was okay to do it. Some commanders decided to do it; others refused. But everyone knew about it."
Israel had no way of knowing that NSA's Hebrew linguists were not on the ship, but on a plane flying high above. Nevertheless, evidence of the slaughter might indeed have been captured by the unmanned recorders in the NSA spaces. Had the torpedo not made a direct hit there, the evidence might have been discovered when the tapes were transmitted or shipped back to NSA. At the time, Israel was loudly proclaiming—to the United States, to the United Nations, and to the world—that it was the victim of Egyptian aggression and that it alone held the moral high ground. Israel's commanders would not have wanted tape recordings of evidence of the slaughters to wind up on desks at the White House, the UN, or the Washington Post. Had the jamming and unmarked fighters knocked out all communications in the first minute, as they attempted to do; had the torpedo boat quickly sunk the ship, as intended; and had the machine gunners destroyed all the life rafts and killed any survivors, there would have been no one left alive to tell any stories.
That was the conclusion of a study on the Liberty done for the U.S. Navy's Naval Law Review, written by a Navy lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Walter L. Jacobsen. "To speculate on the motives of an attack group that uses unmarked planes and deprives helpless survivors of life rafts raises disturbing possibilities," he wrote, "including the one that the Liberty crew was not meant to survive the attack, and would not have, but for the incorrect 6th Fleet radio broadcast that help was on its way—which had the effect of chasing off the MTBs [motor torpedo boats]."
Since the very beginning, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, appointed Chief of Naval Operations shortly after the attack, has also been convinced that the assault was deliberate. "I have to conclude that it was Israel's intent to sink the Liberty and leave as few survivors as possible," he said in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of the assault. "Israel knew perfectly well that the ship was American."
And in a CIA report received by that agency on July 27, 1967, a CIA official quotes one of his sources, who seems to be an Israeli government official:
[Regarding the] attack on USS LIBERTY by Israeli airplanes and torpedo boats . . . He said that, "You've got to remember that in this campaign there is neither time nor room for mistakes," which was intended as an obtuse reference that Israel's forces knew what flag the LIBERTY was flying and exactly what the vessel was doing off the coast. [Deletion] implied that the ship's identity was known six hours before the attack but that Israeli headquarters was not sure as to how many people might have access to the information the LIBERTY was intercepting. He also implied that [deletion] was no certainty on controls as to where the intercepted information was going and again reiterated that Israeli forces did not make mistakes in their campaign. He was emphatic in stating to me that they knew what kind of ship the USS LIBERTY was and what it was doing offshore.
The CIA called the document "raw intelligence data," and said it was one of "several which indicated a possibility that the Israeli Government knew about the USS Liberty before the attack."
In fact, another CIA report, prepared in 1979, indicates that Israel not only knew a great deal about the subject of signals intelligence during the 1967 war, but that Sigint was a major source of their information on the Arabs. "The Israelis have been very successful in their Comint and Elint operations against the Arabs," said the report. "During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis succeeded in intercepting, breaking, and disseminating a tremendous volume of Arab traffic quickly and accurately, including a high-level conversation between the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the UAR and King Hussein of Jordan. Over the years the Israelis have mounted cross-border operations and tapped Arab landline communications for extended periods. The Israelis have also on occasion boobytrapped the landlines."
The same CIA report also made clear that after collecting intelligence on the Arab world, spying on the United States was Israel's top priority: "The principal targets of the Israeli intelligence and security services are: ... (2) collection of information on secret U.S. policy or decisions, if any, concerning Israel."
A mistake or mass murder? It was a question Congress never bothered to address in public hearings at the time. Among those who have long called for an in-depth congressional investigation was Admiral Thomas Moorer, who went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Congress to this day," he said, "has failed to hold formal hearings for the record on the Liberty affair. This is unprecedented and a national disgrace." Perhaps it is not too late, especially for a Congress that rushes into lengthy hearings on such momentous events as the firing of a few employees from a travel office in the White House.
Throughout its history, Israel has hidden its abominable human rights record behind pious religious claims. Critics are regularly silenced with outrageous charges of anti-Semitism—even many Liberty crewmembers who managed to survive the bloody attack and dared call for an investigation. Evidence of Israel's deliberate killing of civilians is as recent as May 2000. The British Broadcasting Corporation has charged that the death of one of its drivers that month was caused by a deliberate and unprovoked strike on civilian targets during an Israeli tank attack.
The driver was Abed Takkoush, a news assistant for the BBC in Lebanon for twenty-five years. Takkoush was killed on May 23, when an Israeli Merkava tank, in Israel, fired an artillery shell across the southern Lebanon border at his blue Mercedes. "I saw Abed lurch out of the driver's side of the car and then fall to the ground," said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC reporter whom Takkoush had driven to the scene. As Bowen rushed to help the driver, Israelis opened up on him with machine-gun fire. They also fired at a Lebanese Red Cross truck as it attempted to come to the rescue.
According to the BBC's account, which is supported by extensive video footage from its own camera crew and those of four other television news organizations, the killing was totally unprovoked. "Everything was quiet," said Bowen. There had been no gunfire, rocket attacks, or artillery exchanges during the day as Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon, which they had occupied for more than two decades. Bowen was close enough to the border to wave at residents of a local kibbutz across the fence. Predictably, as it did in the case of the attack on the Liberty, the Israeli government claimed the shooting was a "mistake." But the BBC was not buying that, and instead began investigating whether Israel could be accused of a war crimes violation under the Geneva Convention.
Even more damningly, the BBC contends that its news film shows that the Israeli Army "appeared to be sporadically targeting vehicles" driven by Lebanese civilians along the same stretch of road earlier on May 23 and on May 22, despite the absence of any "retaliatory fire from the Lebanese side of the border."
Since the Israeli attack on the Liberty, U.S. taxpayers have subsidized that country's government to the tune of $100 billion or more— enough to fund NSA for the next quarter of a century. There should be no question that U.S. investigators be allowed to pursue their probe wherever it takes them and question whoever they need to question, regardless of borders. At the same time, NSA should be required to make all transcripts available from the EC-121 and any other platform that eavesdropped on the eastern Mediterranean on June 8, 1967. For more than a decade, the transcripts of those conversations lay neglected in the bottom of a desk drawer in NSA's G643 office, the Israeli Military Section of G Group.
The time for secrecy has long passed on the USS Liberty incident, in both Israel and the United States. Based on the above evidence, there is certainly more than enough probable cause to conduct a serious investigation into what really happened—and why.
next
SPINE
Still down near the NSA spaces was Bryce Lockwood, who had been knocked unconscious. When he awoke all he could feel was cold, frigid, oily water. Around him were more than two dozen dead intercept operators, analysts, and communications personnel. The water was pouring in from the massive torpedo hole below the waterline, and smoke, oil, and darkness filled the space. Lockwood heard a groan behind him and found one sailor alive, Petty Officer Joseph C. Lentini. The sailor's leg had been smashed by an armor-piercing bullet and then crushed by a bulkhead when the torpedo struck. In spite of the difficulties, Lockwood managed to free the sailor's leg, put him over his shoulder, and climb up the ladder to the next level, where he again passed out. Once again he awoke as the water, climbing still higher, washed over him. Desperate to escape, he again put the sailor on his shoulder and climbed a second ladder—but now the top hatch had been sealed shut to help prevent the ship from sinking. Two, three, four times Lockwood dropped Lentini into the rising water as he pounded on the hatch with one hand, held a flashlight with the other, and screamed at the top of his lungs. Each time he would retrieve Lentini, re-climb the ladder, and continue pounding. Finally, a sailor doing a damage control survey opened the hatch and found Lockwood with the wounded Lentini, who, his leg shredded, was still clinging to life. Lockwood was later awarded the Silver Star for his heroism. Lentini survived. He was one of two sailors Lockwood saved.
Immediately after the attack, one of the boats signaled by flashing light, in English, "Do you require assistance?" McGonagle, with no other means to communicate, hoisted the flags indicating that the ship was maneuvering with difficulty and that they should keep clear. Instead, the torpedo boats continued to terrorize the crew, firing at the ship, at firefighters, at rescue personnel, and even at the life rafts in their racks. Larry Weaver, whose raft was destroyed, said: "They must have known where they [the rafts] were. They tried to blow them out in their racks."
To prevent anyone from escaping the badly wounded ship, the Israelis even destroyed the few surviving life rafts that were put into the water following the call to abandon ship. "I watched with horror as the floating life rafts were riddled with holes," said Lieutenant Lloyd Painter, in charge of the evacuation. "No survivors were planned for this day!"
Stan White, the top enlisted man on the ship, also witnessed the lifeboat attack. "When 'prepare to abandon ship' was announced, what was left of our lifeboats were released overboard; these were immediately machine gunned by the torpedo boats. It was obvious that no one was meant to survive this assault."
Earlier that day, the Israelis had massacred civilians and prisoners in the desert; now they were prepared to ensure that no American survived the sinking of the Liberty. Another witness to the lifeboat attacks was shipfitter Phillip F. Tourney. "As soon as the lifeboats hit the water they were sunk. They would shoot at us for target practice, it seemed like. They wanted to kill and maim and murder anyone they could. . . . One of the torpedo boats picked a life raft up and took it with them."
"They made circles like they were getting ready to attack again," added former petty officer Larry B. Thorn, who also witnessed the sinking of the life rafts. "Our biggest fear was that the Israeli commandos . . . would come back and get us that night and finish the job," said Phillip Tourney.
The Israelis, not knowing what intelligence NSA had picked up, would have had reason to suspect the worst—that the agency had recorded evidence of the numerous atrocities committed that morning only a few miles away. This would be devastating evidence of hundreds of serious war crimes, approved by senior Israeli commanders.
Indeed, many Israeli communications had been intercepted. "We heard Israeli traffic," said section supervisor Charles L. Rowley. Much of what was recorded was to be listened to and analyzed later, either at the secret processing station in Athens or back at NSA.
As the Liberty continued to burn and take on water from the forty four-foot hole in its starboard side, damage control crews dodged Israeli shells to try to save it. Commander McGonagle, however, was quietly considering killing it himself. He had glimpsed an Israeli flag on one of the torpedo boats, and he feared that next the Israelis would attempt to board the ship, kill everyone not yet dead, and capture the super secret NSA documents. (Because of the constant strafing by the fighters and the torpedo boats, the crew had been unable to throw overboard any of the ditching bags.) Rather than let that happen, he told his chief engineer, Lieutenant George H. Golden, about the Israeli flag and, said Golden, "told me that he wanted to scuttle the ship. I told him that we were in shallow water [the depth was 35 to 40 fathoms], that it would be impossible to do that. If it came to that point we would need to get our wounded and everybody off the ship and move it out into deeper water where we can scuttle it. And he asked me how long it would take me to sink the ship. And I gave him a rough idea of how long it would take for the ship to sink after I pulled the plug on it. But we had to be out in deep water—we were too shallow, and people could get aboard the ship and get whatever that was left that some of them might want."
High above, the intercept operators in the EC-121 ferret continued to eavesdrop on voices from the war below, but they heard no more mentions of the American flag. "Finally," said Chief Nowicki, "it was time to return to Athens. We recorded voice activity en route home until the intercepts finally faded. On the way home, the evaluator and I got together to try to figure out what we copied. Despite replaying portions of the tapes, we still did not have a complete understanding of what transpired except for the likelihood that a ship flying the American flag was being attacked by Israeli air and surface forces."
After landing on the Greek air force side of the Athens airport, Nowicki and the intercept crew were brought directly to the processing center. "By the time we arrived at the USA-512J compound," he said, "collateral reports were coming in to the station about the attack on the USS Liberty. The first question we were asked was, did we get any of the activity? Yes, we dared to say we did. The NSA civilians took our tapes and began transcribing. It was pretty clear that Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats attacked a ship in the east Med. Although the attackers never gave a name or a hull number, the ship was identified as flying an American flag. We logically concluded that the ship was the USS Liberty, although we had no idea she was even in the area and could become the object of such an attack." At the time, based on the fractured conversations he heard on the intercepts, Nowicki just assumed that the attack was a mistake.
The question then was whether to send a CRITIC to NSA, CRITIC being the highest priority for intercept intelligence. "After much deliberation," Nowicki said, "we decided against the CRITIC because our information was already hours old. To meet CRITIC criteria, information should be within fifteen minutes of the event. ... It had been quite a day and other days remained before us. We returned to the Hotel Seville for rest and relaxation, feeling a sense of exhilaration but not comprehending the chaos and calamity taking place on the Liberty at that very moment as she struggled to leave the attack area."
The message sent by the Liberty shortly after the attack requesting immediate help was eventually received by the Sixth Fleet, which was then south of Crete, 450 miles to the west. Suddenly high-level 187 communications channels came alive. At 2:50 P.M. (Liberty time), fifty minutes after the first shells tore into the ship and as the attack was still going on, the launch decision was made. The aircraft carrier USS America, cruising near Crete, was ordered to launch four armed A-4 Skyhawks. At the same time, the carrier USS Saratoga was also told to send four armed A-1 attack planes to defend the ship. "Sending aircraft to cover you," the Sixth Fleet told the Liberty at 3:05 P.M. (9:05 A.M. in Washington). "Surface units on the way."
At 9:00 A.M. (3:00 P.M. Liberty) bells sounded and the first CRITIC message, sent by either the America or the Saratoga, stuttered across a role of white Teletype paper in NSA's Sigint Command Center. The senior operations officer then passed it on to Director Marshall Carter. With Carter in his ninth-floor office was Deputy Director Tordella. At 9:28 A.M. (3:28 P.M. Liberty) Carter sent out a CRITIC alert to all listening posts. "USS Liberty has been reportedly torpedoed by unknown source in Med near 32N 33E," said the message: "Request examine all communications for possible reaction/reflections and report accordingly."
Eleven minutes after the CRITIC arrived at NSA, the phone rang in the Pentagon's War Room and European Command Headquarters told the duty officer that the Liberty had been attacked by unknown jet fighters.
At that moment in Washington, President Johnson was at his desk, on the phone, alternately shouting at congressional leaders and coaxing them to support his position on several pieces of pending legislation. But four minutes later he was suddenly interrupted by Walt Rostow on the other line. "The Liberty has been torpedoed in the Mediterranean," Rostow told Johnson excitedly. A minute later, the adviser rushed into the Oval Office with a brief memorandum. "The ship is located 60 to 100 miles north of Egypt. Reconnaissance aircraft are out from the 6th fleet," it said. "No knowledge of the submarine or surface vessel which committed this act. Shall keep you informed."
In the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara called Carter at NSA for precise information on the ship, its personnel, and other details. Carter told him what he knew but said that the Naval Security Group, which manned and operated the ship, would have the most up-to-date facts. Carter told McNamara that he would have Captain Ralph E. Cook, the Security Group's director, call him immediately. Carter then called Cook's office, only to discover that he was at the dentist's. Cook's deputy, a Captain Thomas, got on the phone, and Carter told him to call McNamara at once. About ten minutes later McNamara again called Carter and said he still hadn't heard from anyone. After a few more minutes of crossed wires, McNamara and Thomas finally talked.
NSA's worst fears had come true. "After considerations of personnel safety," said Tordella, "one of General Carter's and my immediate concerns, considering the depth of the water and the distance of the ship off shore, had to do with the classified materials which she had on board." Tordella got on the phone to the Joint Reconnaissance Center and spoke to the deputy director, a Navy captain named Vineyard. "I expressed my concern that the written material be burned if at all possible and that the electronic equipment be salvaged if that were possible," he said.
But Tordella was not prepared for what he heard. According to NSA documents classified top secret/umbra and obtained for Body of Secrets, Tordella was told that some senior officials in Washington wanted above all to protect Israel from embarrassment. "Captain Vineyard had mentioned during this conversation," wrote Tordella, "that consideration was then being given by some unnamed Washington authorities to sink[ing] the Liberty in order that newspaper men would be unable to photograph her and thus inflame public opinion against the Israelis. I made an impolite comment about the idea." Almost immediately Tordella wrote a memorandum for the record, describing the conversation, and then locked it away.
Concern over the secrets on the ship grew and Carter said he was prepared to order the ship scuttled to prevent their loss. He only reconsidered when informed that the shallowness of the water made compromise of materials and equipment "a distinct possibility." Then he began worrying about the security of the material if the ship ended up sinking. "If it appeared the ship was going to sink," Carter told Vineyard, "it was essential that the security of the sinking site be maintained. ... It would be necessary to get down and remove the sensitive material from the ship."
Also, there was discussion of sending in a replacement ship, the USS Belmont. A cover story for the Liberty was then quickly devised. "She was a communications research ship that was diverted from her research assignment," it said, "to provide improved communication-relay links with the several U.S. embassies around the entire Mediterranean during the current troubles." On the America and Saratoga, the pilots were instructed to "destroy or drive off any attackers who are clearly making attacks on the Liberty." They then catapulted into the air toward the Liberty at 3:45 P.M. Liberty time (9:45 A.M. Washington).
At 4:00 P.M. on the Liberty (10:00 A.M. Washington), the crew was still screaming for help. "Flash, flash, flash," Radioman Joe Ward shouted into his microphone. "I pass in the blind. [That is, he didn't know who was picking up the transmission.] We are under attack by aircraft and high-speed surface craft. I say again, flash, flash, flash." By then, unencrypted voice messages had been filling the open airwaves for two hours. If the Israelis were monitoring the communications, as they did continuously during the war, they would now have begun to worry how soon the American fighters would arrive.
From the White House Situation Room, Rostow phoned Johnson at 10:14 A.M. (4:14 P.M. Liberty) to tell him that the ship was "listing badly to starboard. The Saratoga has launched 4-A4's and 4-A1's." Johnson feared that the attack had been conducted by Soviet planes and submarines and that the United States was on the verge of war with Russia. Later he called all his advisers for an emergency meeting in the Situation Room.
About the same moment that Joe Ward was again pleading for help, Commander Ernest C. Castle, the U.S. naval attaché in Tel Aviv, was summoned urgently to Israeli Defense Force Headquarters. There, he was told that Israeli air and sea forces had attacked the Liberty "in error." Castle raced back to the embassy and at 4:14 P.M. Liberty time (10:14 P.M. Washington), he dashed off a Flash message to Washington concerning this development. Strangely, NSA claims that it first learned of Israel's involvement fifteen minutes before Castle was called by the Israeli Defense Forces and half an hour before Castle's Flash message. It has never been explained how NSA discovered this.
At the White House, Johnson was relieved to learn that the attackers were not Soviet or Egyptian. There would be no war today. But he became very worried that the Russians, through Sigint, radar, or observation, would become aware that a squadron of American fighters was streaking toward the war zone, and that if the USSR suspected that America had suddenly decided to become involved, it would launch an attack. So at 11:17 AM. (5:17 P.M. Liberty) he sent a hot-line message to Kosygin in Moscow.
The small office next to the War Room had lately become a busy place. Supervisor Harry O. Rakfeldt, a Russian-speaking Navy cryptologic chief, was already pounding out a hot-line message to Moscow, one of a number he had sent during the crisis, when the White House phone rang. Army Major Pawlowski, the presidential translator, picked it up, listened for a moment, then told Rakfeldt to notify Moscow to stand by for an emergency message. Immediately Rakfeldt stopped typing, dropped down several lines, and sent "Stand by for an emergency message." Then, as Major Pawlowski dictated, Rakfeldt typed the following alert:
We have just learned that USS Liberty, an auxiliary ship, has apparently been torpedoed by Israel Forces in error off Port Said. We have instructed our carrier Saratoga, now in the Mediterranean, to dispatch aircraft to the scene to investigate. We wish you to know that investigation is the sole purpose of this flight of aircraft and hope that you will take appropriate steps to see that proper parties are informed. We have passed the message to Chernyakov but feel that you should know of this development urgently.
The message arrived in the Kremlin at 11:24 A.M. Washington time; Kosygin replied about forty-five minutes later that he had passed the message on to Nasser.
Black smoke was still escaping through the more than 800 holes in the Liberty's hull, and the effort to hush up the incident had already begun. Within hours of the attack, Israel asked President Johnson to quietly bury the incident. "Embassy Tel Aviv," said a highly secret, very limited-distribution message to the State Department, "urged de-emphasis on publicity since proximity of vessel to scene of conflict was fuel for Arab suspicions that U.S. was aiding Israel." Shortly thereafter, a total news ban was ordered by the Pentagon. No one in the field was allowed to say anything about the attack. All information was to come only from a few senior Washington officials.
At 11:29 A.M. (5:29 P.M. Liberty), Johnson took the unusual step of ordering the JCS to recall the fighters while the Liberty still lay smoldering, sinking, fearful of another attack, without aid, and with its decks covered with the dead, the dying, and the wounded. Onboard the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, Rear Admiral Lawrence R. Geis, who commanded the carrier force in the Mediterranean, was angry and puzzled at the recall and protested it to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.
Admiral Geis was shocked by what he heard next. According to information obtained for Body of Secrets, "President Lyndon Johnson came on with a comment that he didn't care if the ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies." Admiral Geis told Lieutenant Commander David Lewis, the head of the NSA group on the Liberty, about the comment but asked him to keep it secret until after Geis died. It was a promise that Lewis kept.
The hole in the Liberty's twenty-three-year-old skin was nearly wide enough to drive a bus through; the ship had a heavy list to starboard, most of its equipment was destroyed, thirty-two of its crew were dead (two others would later die) and two-thirds of the rest wounded; its executive officer was dead, and its commanding officer was badly hurt. Despite all this, the Liberty was heroically brought back to life and slowly made her way toward safer waters. To keep the ship from sinking, the hatches to the flooded NSA spaces had been dogged down, sealing the bodies of the twenty-five Sigint specialists inside.
Throughout the long night, propped up in a chair on the port wing of the bridge, Commander McGonagle continued to conn his ship, using the North Star ahead and the long wake behind for direction. Shortly after dawn, 16½ hours after the attack, help finally arrived. Rendezvousing with the Liberty, 420 miles east-southeast of Soudha Bay, Crete, were the American destroyers Davis and Massey.
Helicopters soon arrived and began lifting litters containing the most seriously wounded to the deck of the America, still 138 miles away. There they were transported by plane to Athens and then to the naval hospital in Naples. At the completion of the transfer, after eighteen continuous hours on the bridge, the weary skipper finally headed to what was left of his cabin. Despite his injuries, he remained with the ship until she docked in Malta.
As the wounded landed at Athens Airport, NSA civilians at USA 512J a short distance away finished transcribing most of the tapes from the previous day's EC-121 ferret mission. They then sent the raw information back to NSA over the agency's special channel, SPINTCOMM ("Special Intelligence Communications"). Later, the civilians were instructed to pack up the original tapes and send them by armed courier to NSA as soon as possible.
At NSA, concern had shifted from the rescue of the crew to the possible loss of sensitive documents from Liberty's ruptured signals intelligence spaces. Boats from the destroyers were ordered to search around the Liberty for two hours looking for classified papers that might be washing out from the gaping, pear-shaped hole. Later, as the Liberty sailed slowly toward Malta, a major concern was the possibility that Russian ships would attempt to retrieve the flotsam. "Do whatever is feasible to keep any Soviet ships out of Liberty's wake," the Sixth Fleet commander was told. "Maintain observation of Liberty's wake and if possible find out what sort of documents are being lost in the wake . . . take whatever steps may be reasonable and appropriate to reduce possibility of compromise, noting that a compromise could have both political and technical aspects."
Like a shark sensing blood, a Soviet guided-missile destroyer did tag along with the Liberty for a while, but the two American destroyers and a fleet ocean tug trailed Liberty to recover any papers before the Russians had a chance to grab them. Along the way, the tug used boat hooks and grab nets to pick up the top secret material. When the tug could not recover a document, it ran over it with the propeller and then backed down over it to shred the paper into small pieces. Despite this vigilance, the bodies of five technicians washed out of the hole and were never recovered.
Another concern at Fort Meade was the three NSA civilian Arabic linguists on the ship. They had earlier been flown to Rota, where they joined the crew. One, Allen M. Blue, had been killed; another, Donald L. Blalock, had been injured; and a third, Robert L. Wilson, had survived unscathed. Marshall Carter ordered an NSA official to meet the ship in Malta and provide maximum assistance in getting Blalock and Wilson back to the United States as quickly and as quietly as possible.
Once the Liberty pulled into Malta on June 14, the effort to bury the incident continued at full speed ahead. A total news blackout was imposed. Crew members were threatened with courts-martial and jail time if they ever breathed a word of the episode to anyone—including family members and even fellow crew members. "If you ever repeat this to anyone else ever again you will be put in prison and forgotten about," Larry Weaver said he was warned.
Now that the ship was safely in dry dock, the grisly task of searching the NSA spaces, sealed since the attack six days earlier, also began. "I took a crew . . . down in the spaces to inventory the classified equipment and info," said former senior chief Stan White. "The smell was so awful it can't be described. We got the bodies out and then the pieces of bodies were picked up and put in bags and finally the inventory. The sights and smells I am still sometimes aware of today." Seaman Don Pageler also spent two and a half days helping to search and clean out the cavernous compartment. At one point he lifted a piece of equipment only to make a grim discovery. "Below it was this guy's arm. ... I looked at the muscle structure and I knew whose arm it was. I didn't know him well but I knew who he was."
In July 1967, the Liberty returned to Norfolk from Malta. There it languished while NSA tried unsuccessfully to obtain $10.2 million from the Pentagon to restore her to signals intelligence operational status. When that effort failed, the Liberty was decommissioned, on June 28, 1968. In 1970 the ship was turned over to the U.S. Maritime Administration and sold for $101,666.66. In 1973 the ship came to an ignominious end in Baltimore's Curtis Bay shipyard as welders' torches at last did what the Israeli attack hadn't. She was cut up and sold for scrap.
On April 28, 1969, almost two years after the attack, the Israeli government finally paid about $20,000 to each of the wounded crewmen. This compensation was obtained, however, only after the men retained private counsel to negotiate with Israel's lawyers in Washington. A substantial portion of the claim, therefore, went to lawyers' fees. Ten months earlier, the Israelis had paid about $100,000 to each of the families of those killed.
Finally, the U.S. government asked a token $7,644,146 for Israel's destruction of the ship, even though $20 million had been spent several years earlier to convert her to a signals intelligence ship and another $10.2 million had gone for the highly sophisticated hardware. Yet despite the modest amount requested, and the agony its armed forces had caused, the Israeli government spent thirteen years in an unseemly battle to avoid paying. By the winter of 1980, the interest alone had reached $10 million. Israeli ambassador Ephraim Evron then suggested that if the United States asked for $6 million—and eliminated the interest entirely—his country might be willing to pay. President Jimmy Carter, on his way out of office, agreed, and in December 1980 accepted the paltry $6 million.
In the days following the attack, the Israeli government gave the U.S. government a classified report that attempted to justify the claim that the attack was a mistake. On the basis of that same report, an Israeli court of inquiry completely exonerated the government and all those involved. No one was ever court-martialed, reduced in rank, or even reprimanded. On the contrary, Israel chose instead to honor Motor Torpedo Boat 203, which fired the deadly torpedo at the Liberty. The ship's wheel and bell were placed on prominent display at the naval museum, among the maritime artifacts of which the Israeli navy was most proud.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel had attacked the ship and killed the American servicemen deliberately, the Johnson administration and Congress covered up the entire incident. Johnson was planning to run for president the following year and needed the support of pro-Israel voters. His administration's actions were disgraceful. Although Captain McGonagle was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism in saving the ship and bringing it back to safety, senior White House officials decided to keep the occasion as quiet as possible. Because the medal, the nation's highest honor, is only rarely awarded, it is almost always presented by the president in a high-profile White House ceremony. But McGonagle's award was given by the secretary of the Navy in a low-profile, hastily arranged gathering at the Washington Navy Yard, a scrappy base on the banks of the smelly Anacostia River.
"I must have gone to the White House fifteen times or more to watch the president personally award the Congressional Medal of Honor to Americans of special valor," said Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who became Chief of Naval Operations within weeks of the attack. "So it irked the hell out of me when McGonagle's ceremony was relegated to the obscurity of the Washington Navy Yard and the medal was presented by the Secretary of the Navy. This was a backhanded slap. Everyone else received their medal at the White House. President Johnson must have been concerned about the reaction of the Israeli lobby."
Later, a naval officer connected with the awards told Jim Ennes, a lieutenant on the ship, the reason. "The government is pretty jumpy about Israel," he said. "The State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal. 'Certainly not!' Israel said. But to avoid any possible offense, McGonagle's citation does not mention Israel at all, and the award ceremony kept the lowest possible profile."
In the period immediately after the incident, several quick reviews were conducted by the Navy and CIA, among other agencies. However, they dealt principally with such topics as the failure of the Naval Communications System and how the crew of the ship performed during the crisis. No American investigators ever looked into the "why" question or brought the probe to Israel, the scene of the crime. Investigators simply accepted Israel's bizarre "mistake" report at face value. This was a document which included such statements as a claim by the torpedo boat crew that the Liberty—an ancient World War II cargo ship then loitering at five knots—was attempting to escape at an incredible thirty knots (the Liberty's top speed was seventeen knots)—outracing even their torpedo boats. This was the reason, the report said, for calling in the air force.
The Israeli report then said that their observers checked in Jane's Fighting Ships and misidentified the Liberty as El Quseir, an Egyptian troop and horse transport. But Jane's gave the top speed of El Quseir as only fourteen knots; how could a ship supposedly doing thirty knots have been mistaken for it? Jane's also contained details on the Liberty, the same details that Commander Pinchas Pinchasy, at air force headquarters, had used to positively identify the ship. (And Pinchasy had reported the identification to Israeli naval headquarters.)
The Israeli report also said that the whole reason for the attack was to stop the Liberty, with its few short-range machine guns, from bombarding the town of El Arish, more than a dozen miles away. This was nonsense.
Nevertheless, most of the U.S. investigations took the path of least resistance, the one onto which they were pushed by the White House, and accepted the "mistake" theory. Incredibly, considering that 34 American servicemen had been killed and 171 more wounded, and that a ship of the U.S. Navy had been nearly sunk (no U.S. naval vessel since World War II had suffered a higher percentage [69 percent] of battle casualties), Congress held no public hearings. With an election coming up, no one in the weak-kneed House and Senate wanted to offend powerful pro-Israel groups and lose their fat campaign contributions.
But according to interviews and documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the senior leadership of NSA, officials who had unique access to the secret tapes and other highly classified evidence, was virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate. They strongly believed that Israel feared what the Liberty might have intercepted, and therefore ordered it killed leaving no survivors.
Israel has never wavered on one critical point: that no one ever saw a flag flying from the Liberty during either the air or sea attack, despite the virtually unanimous agreement among survivors that flags were flying during both periods. "Throughout the contact," said the "mistake" report, "no Israeli plane or torpedo boat saw an American or any other flag on the ship."
But former Chief Marvin Nowicki, the senior Hebrew linguist on the EC-121 flying above the scene, knows what he heard. "As I recall, we recorded most, if not all, of the attack," he said. "I heard a couple of references to the flag during an apparent attack." Nowicki, who later received a Ph.D. in political science and taught public administration at the college level, is an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, who originally assumed his information would help clear Israel. Instead, it convicts the government. If the Israelis did see the flag, then the attack was cold blooded murder—like the hundreds of earlier murders committed by Israelis that day at El Arish.
As soon as the incident began, Marshall Carter appointed a small task force led by Walter Deeley, a senior official in the Production Organization, the agency's Sigint operations division. The task force was to keep track of all information regarding the Liberty and prepare a report for the director. Unlike the other probes, this one included all the signals intelligence details—the intercept tapes from the EC-121, and interviews with the signals intelligence survivors from the Liberty. Because of the enormous secrecy in which NSA held its Sigint operations, and especially because the information involved its most secret activity— eavesdropping on a close ally—the details were never shared with anyone else. In the end, Walter Deeley came to the only possible conclusion, given his knowledge of Israel's intelligence capabilities. "There is no way that they didn't know that the Liberty was American," he said, suggesting premeditated murder.
NSA Director Carter agreed. "There was no other answer than that it was deliberate," he told the author in a 1980 interview, although he asked that the information be kept off the record at the time. Carter has since died.
NSA's deputy director, Dr. Louis Tordella, also believed that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the Israeli government was attempting to cover it up. According to highly classified and long-hidden NSA documents obtained for Body of Secrets, Tordella not only put his belief 196 in an internal memorandum for the record but also expressed his view to Congressman George Mahon (D-Texas) of the House Appropriations Committee. "Mr. Mahon probed several times to discover the reason for the Israeli attack," wrote Tordella on June 20, 1967, nearly two weeks after the incident. "I told him we simply did not know from either open or intelligence sources but that, by now, there probably was a fair amount of denial and cover-up by the Israelis for the sake of protecting their national position. He asked my private opinion of the attack and I said that, for what it was worth, I believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities.
"He asked if a mistake of this sort was common or should be expected," Tordella continued. "I told him that I thought a ship the size of the Liberty was unlike and much larger than Egyptian ships and that an obviously cargo-type vessel should not reasonably be mistaken by competent naval forces or air pilots for an Egyptian man-of-war. At best I estimated that the attacking ships and planes were guilty of gross negligence and carelessness." So angry was Tordella over the attack and cover-up that he scrawled across the top of the Israeli "mistake" report: "A nice whitewash."
Finally, U.S. Air Force Major General John Morrison, at the time the deputy chief—and later chief—of NSA's operations, did not buy the Israeli "mistake" explanation, either. "Nobody believes that explanation," he said in a recent interview with the author. "The only conjecture that we ever made that made any near sense is that the Israelis did not want us to intercept their communications at that time." When informed by the author of the gruesome war crimes then taking place at El Arish, Morrison saw the connection. "That would be enough," he said. "Twelve miles is nothing. . . . They wouldn't want us to get in on that." He added: "You've got the motive. . . . What a hell of a thing to do."
Even without knowledge of the murders taking place nearby in the desert, many in NSA's G Group, who analyzed the intercepts sent back by both the Liberty and the EC-121, were convinced that the attack was no mistake. And among the survivors of the Liberty, the conviction is virtually unanimous. "The Israelis got by with cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Americans on June 8, 1967," said Phillip F. Tourney, president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association, in July 2000. "There is widespread cynicism that our elected officials will not go up against the powerful Israeli lobby out of fear. . . . This cover-up must be investigated, now."
For more than thirty years, Captain William L. McGonagle refused to say a single word on the issue of whether the killing of his crew was done with foreknowledge or by mistake. Finally, dying of cancer in November 1998, he at last broke his long silence. "After many years I finally believe that the attack was deliberate," he said. "I don't think there has been an adequate investigation of the incident. . . . The flag was flying prior to the attack on the ship." McGonagle died less than four months later, on March 3, 1999, at the age of seventy-three.
Even without the NSA evidence, many people in the administration disbelieved the Israeli "mistake" report. "Frankly, there was considerable skepticism in the White House that the attack was accidental," said George Christian, Johnson's press secretary at the time. "I became convinced that an accident of this magnitude was too much to swallow. If it were a deliberate attack the question remains, of course, of whether it was a tactical decision on the part of elements of the Israeli military or whether it was ordered by high officials."
Another NSA review, conducted fifteen years later and classified Top Secret/Umbra, ridiculed the decision by the Israeli court of inquiry that accepted the "mistake" theory and exonerated all Israeli officials. "Exculpation of Israeli nationals," it said, "apparently not being hindmost in the court's calculations." Next the review accused the Israeli fighter pilots of outright perjury:
Though the pilots testified to the contrary, every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gives consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag—and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to assure its easy observance and identification. These circumstances—prior identification of the Liberty and easy visibility of the American flag—prompted the Department of State to inform the Israeli Government that "the later military attack by Israeli aircraft on the USS Liberty is quite literally incomprehensible. As a minimum, the attack must be condemned as an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life." (Emphasis in original.)
The pilots, said the report, were not the only ones lying: the story told by the torpedo-boat crewmen who blew up the ship—after missing with their first four torpedoes—was also unbelievable. The torpedo-boat crew claimed that they had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian troop transport, El Quseir. At the time of the attack, the Egyptian ship was rusting alongside a pier in the port of Alexandria, 250 miles from where the Liberty was attacked, and along that pier El Quseir remained throughout the war. The location of every Egyptian ship would have been a key piece of intelligence before Israel launched its war. According to the long-secret 1981 NSA report:
The fact that two separate torpedo boat commanders made the same false identification only raises the question of the veracity of both commanders. The El-Kasir [El Quseir] was approximately one-quarter of the Liberty's tonnage, about one-half its length, and offered a radically different silhouette. To claim that the Liberty closely resembled the ElKasir was most illogical. The Department of State expressed its view of the torpedo attack in these words:
"The subsequent attack by Israeli torpedo boats, substantially after the vessel was or should have been identified by Israeli military forces, manifests the same reckless disregard for human life. The silhouette and conduct of USS Liberty readily distinguished it from any vessel that could have been considered hostile. ... It could and should have been scrutinized visually at close range before torpedoes were fired."
Finally the NSA report, fifteen years after the fact, added:
A persistent question relating to the Liberty incident is whether or not the Israeli forces which attacked the ship knew that it was American . . . not a few of the Liberty's crewmen and [deleted but probably "NSA's G Group"] staff are convinced that they did. Their belief derived from consideration of the long time the Israelis had the ship under surveillance prior to the attack, the visibility of the flag, and the intensity of the attack itself.
Speculation as to the Israeli motivation varied. Some believed that Israel expected that the complete destruction of the ship and killing of the personnel would lead the U.S. to blame the UAR [Egypt] for the incident and bring the U.S. into the war on the side of Israel . . . others felt that Israeli forces wanted the ship and men out of the way.
"I believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities," said Tordella. His statement was amazingly astute, since he likely had no idea of the war crimes being committed on the Sinai at the time, within easy earshot of the antenna groves that covered the Liberty's deck.
On the morning of June 8, the Israeli military command received a report that a large American eavesdropping ship was secretly listening only a few miles off El Arish. At that same moment, a scant dozen or so miles away, Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds, a fact that the entire Israeli army leadership knew about and condoned, according to the army's own historian. Another military historian, Uri Milstein, confirmed the report. There were many incidents in the Six Day War, he said, in which Egyptian soldiers were killed by Israeli troops after they had raised their hands in surrender. "It was not an official policy," he added, "but there was an atmosphere that it was okay to do it. Some commanders decided to do it; others refused. But everyone knew about it."
Israel had no way of knowing that NSA's Hebrew linguists were not on the ship, but on a plane flying high above. Nevertheless, evidence of the slaughter might indeed have been captured by the unmanned recorders in the NSA spaces. Had the torpedo not made a direct hit there, the evidence might have been discovered when the tapes were transmitted or shipped back to NSA. At the time, Israel was loudly proclaiming—to the United States, to the United Nations, and to the world—that it was the victim of Egyptian aggression and that it alone held the moral high ground. Israel's commanders would not have wanted tape recordings of evidence of the slaughters to wind up on desks at the White House, the UN, or the Washington Post. Had the jamming and unmarked fighters knocked out all communications in the first minute, as they attempted to do; had the torpedo boat quickly sunk the ship, as intended; and had the machine gunners destroyed all the life rafts and killed any survivors, there would have been no one left alive to tell any stories.
That was the conclusion of a study on the Liberty done for the U.S. Navy's Naval Law Review, written by a Navy lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Walter L. Jacobsen. "To speculate on the motives of an attack group that uses unmarked planes and deprives helpless survivors of life rafts raises disturbing possibilities," he wrote, "including the one that the Liberty crew was not meant to survive the attack, and would not have, but for the incorrect 6th Fleet radio broadcast that help was on its way—which had the effect of chasing off the MTBs [motor torpedo boats]."
Since the very beginning, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, appointed Chief of Naval Operations shortly after the attack, has also been convinced that the assault was deliberate. "I have to conclude that it was Israel's intent to sink the Liberty and leave as few survivors as possible," he said in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of the assault. "Israel knew perfectly well that the ship was American."
And in a CIA report received by that agency on July 27, 1967, a CIA official quotes one of his sources, who seems to be an Israeli government official:
[Regarding the] attack on USS LIBERTY by Israeli airplanes and torpedo boats . . . He said that, "You've got to remember that in this campaign there is neither time nor room for mistakes," which was intended as an obtuse reference that Israel's forces knew what flag the LIBERTY was flying and exactly what the vessel was doing off the coast. [Deletion] implied that the ship's identity was known six hours before the attack but that Israeli headquarters was not sure as to how many people might have access to the information the LIBERTY was intercepting. He also implied that [deletion] was no certainty on controls as to where the intercepted information was going and again reiterated that Israeli forces did not make mistakes in their campaign. He was emphatic in stating to me that they knew what kind of ship the USS LIBERTY was and what it was doing offshore.
The CIA called the document "raw intelligence data," and said it was one of "several which indicated a possibility that the Israeli Government knew about the USS Liberty before the attack."
In fact, another CIA report, prepared in 1979, indicates that Israel not only knew a great deal about the subject of signals intelligence during the 1967 war, but that Sigint was a major source of their information on the Arabs. "The Israelis have been very successful in their Comint and Elint operations against the Arabs," said the report. "During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis succeeded in intercepting, breaking, and disseminating a tremendous volume of Arab traffic quickly and accurately, including a high-level conversation between the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the UAR and King Hussein of Jordan. Over the years the Israelis have mounted cross-border operations and tapped Arab landline communications for extended periods. The Israelis have also on occasion boobytrapped the landlines."
The same CIA report also made clear that after collecting intelligence on the Arab world, spying on the United States was Israel's top priority: "The principal targets of the Israeli intelligence and security services are: ... (2) collection of information on secret U.S. policy or decisions, if any, concerning Israel."
A mistake or mass murder? It was a question Congress never bothered to address in public hearings at the time. Among those who have long called for an in-depth congressional investigation was Admiral Thomas Moorer, who went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Congress to this day," he said, "has failed to hold formal hearings for the record on the Liberty affair. This is unprecedented and a national disgrace." Perhaps it is not too late, especially for a Congress that rushes into lengthy hearings on such momentous events as the firing of a few employees from a travel office in the White House.
Throughout its history, Israel has hidden its abominable human rights record behind pious religious claims. Critics are regularly silenced with outrageous charges of anti-Semitism—even many Liberty crewmembers who managed to survive the bloody attack and dared call for an investigation. Evidence of Israel's deliberate killing of civilians is as recent as May 2000. The British Broadcasting Corporation has charged that the death of one of its drivers that month was caused by a deliberate and unprovoked strike on civilian targets during an Israeli tank attack.
The driver was Abed Takkoush, a news assistant for the BBC in Lebanon for twenty-five years. Takkoush was killed on May 23, when an Israeli Merkava tank, in Israel, fired an artillery shell across the southern Lebanon border at his blue Mercedes. "I saw Abed lurch out of the driver's side of the car and then fall to the ground," said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC reporter whom Takkoush had driven to the scene. As Bowen rushed to help the driver, Israelis opened up on him with machine-gun fire. They also fired at a Lebanese Red Cross truck as it attempted to come to the rescue.
According to the BBC's account, which is supported by extensive video footage from its own camera crew and those of four other television news organizations, the killing was totally unprovoked. "Everything was quiet," said Bowen. There had been no gunfire, rocket attacks, or artillery exchanges during the day as Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon, which they had occupied for more than two decades. Bowen was close enough to the border to wave at residents of a local kibbutz across the fence. Predictably, as it did in the case of the attack on the Liberty, the Israeli government claimed the shooting was a "mistake." But the BBC was not buying that, and instead began investigating whether Israel could be accused of a war crimes violation under the Geneva Convention.
Even more damningly, the BBC contends that its news film shows that the Israeli Army "appeared to be sporadically targeting vehicles" driven by Lebanese civilians along the same stretch of road earlier on May 23 and on May 22, despite the absence of any "retaliatory fire from the Lebanese side of the border."
Since the Israeli attack on the Liberty, U.S. taxpayers have subsidized that country's government to the tune of $100 billion or more— enough to fund NSA for the next quarter of a century. There should be no question that U.S. investigators be allowed to pursue their probe wherever it takes them and question whoever they need to question, regardless of borders. At the same time, NSA should be required to make all transcripts available from the EC-121 and any other platform that eavesdropped on the eastern Mediterranean on June 8, 1967. For more than a decade, the transcripts of those conversations lay neglected in the bottom of a desk drawer in NSA's G643 office, the Israeli Military Section of G Group.
The time for secrecy has long passed on the USS Liberty incident, in both Israel and the United States. Based on the above evidence, there is certainly more than enough probable cause to conduct a serious investigation into what really happened—and why.
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