The Liberty Incident Revealed

by A. Jay Cristol

  The core of the Pearson story is that it was the Liberty that “had discovered Israel’s violation of the scheme” (a day before she arrived in the area) and that therefore she was ordered destroyed by the Israelis on the morning of June 7. This is curious, because on Wednesday, June 7, Israel’s chief of staff, Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, publicly announced that Israel was in possession of the Sinai, Sharm el-Sheikh, Jerusalem, and the West Bank of the Jordan River.16 In fact, hundreds, if not thousands, of newspapers around the world carried major front-page stories of the capture of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Western Wall before the Liberty was in a position to hear anything. The validity of the Pearson story wilts on the time line, since the Liberty arrived off the Sinai coast about 0849 on the morning of June 8.17 Pearson places the Liberty in times and places where she simply was not. For example, he places the Liberty at a point twenty-eight miles due northwest of Tel Aviv at 0850 on the morning of June 8, 1967. According to the Liberty deck log, at 0849 on that morning she turned to a westerly heading of 253° after arriving at Point Alpha, 31-27 N, 34-00 E. Her position was in fact about fifty-eight miles southwest of Tel Aviv, the closest she ever got to that city.18 Furthermore, neither the U.S. government nor the Israelis have any record of any exchange of Pearson’s alleged messages from the Liberty to Washington or from Washington to the Liberty.

  By Pearson’s own admission, he took on the Liberty story as a writing assignment for Penthouse “during the summer of 1975,” when “he was broke” and needed money.19 He explained: “The circumstances of the Liberty incident were related to me in Doha Qatar by an American film producer, Tito de Nagy Howard. I had met him early in April in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Dubai. When he discovered that I was an investigative journalist and that I was considered by the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] to be pro-Palestinian, he eagerly gave me an idea to resurrect the Liberty incident as a whole new story.”

  Pearson describes Howard as “a man at war with the Israelis” who claimed to have won a court battle with the government of Israel over distribution of a documentary film and, according to Pearson, was “riding high through the Arab world on the euphoria of his legal victory.” Howard is further described by Pearson as blaming “Zionist agents” for burning a nightclub he owned in an effort to bankrupt him and because he took a “radical pro-Arab stance.”20

  Pearson’s book confirms his primary interest. He needed to write a story that would sell. An article or book confirming that the U.S. and Israeli official investigations were properly conducted and their conclusions were sound and that the incident had been a tragic mistake very likely would not have sold to Penthouse or to a book publisher looking for sensation. The Pearson story is entertaining, but it should be classified as fiction. Actually, it belongs in the “man bites dog” category of reporting.

  In 1978, Richard K. Smith, a freelance aviation historian, wrote an article entitled “The Violation of the Liberty,” which was published by the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in June of that year.21 Smith’s article provoked numerous letters to the editor of the Proceedings on all sides of the issue. Eighteen letters were published in the Proceedings, ranging from rational to highly emotional. Smith rejects the Israeli explanation that the incident was a mistake and argues that Israel attacked because

  a vital part of Israel’s war plan was preventing the rest of the world from knowing about its military victories until they could be presented as a political fait accompli.

  After two or three days, this news blackout created great anxieties among the civilian population of Israel, but it was more important to keep foreign powers in the dark. The Israeli leaders feared superpower pressures for a cease-fire before they could seize the territory which they considered necessary for Israel’s future security. Any instrument which sought to penetrate this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal “fog of war” would have to be frustrated.22

  Smith concludes with an assessment that the Japanese were more regretful about sinking the U.S. river gunboat Panay (PR 5) on the Yangtze River in China in 1937 than the Israelis were about the Liberty incident.23 He sums up his thesis: “If there is a timeless lesson to be relearned from the savage violation of the Liberty it is that nations do not have ‘friends.’ They have only interests. . . . In any given set of circumstances nations are guided to action by what they perceive to best serve their own interests.”24

  Smith does not provide evidence to support his assessment about Israeli regrets, nor does he address ample evidence to the contrary. Apparently he did not look at the message traffic generated by the incident, or he would have seen the cable from Ambassador Walworth “Wally” Barbour, stationed in Tel Aviv, to Secretary of State Rusk, that said, “Israelis obviously shocked by error and tender sincere apologies.”25 The records also contain:

  •A letter of condolence from Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Avraham Harman, to Secretary Rusk dated June 8, 1967

  •A cable conveying condolences from Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Abba Eban, dated June 8, 1967, to Secretary Rusk

  •A letter from Eban to President Johnson

  •A message from Secretary Rusk dated June 8, 1967 (081815Z June 67), to the American embassy, Tel Aviv, which states, “[Harman] had learned of it [the attack] within the hour during call on Assistant Secretary [Lucius] Battle to whom he had expressed his great sorrow”

  •A cable from the American embassy in Tel Aviv (number 008296, 090810Z June 67) to the U.S. secretary of state requesting that condolences of Israel’s Prime Minister Levy Eshkol be transmitted to the president of the United States

  •The letters of condolence sent by the ambassador of Israel to the United States to the families of those killed in the attack.26

  At least the U.S. diplomats who met with the Israeli diplomats at the time seemed convinced of the sincerity of the latter’s regrets, in clear contradistinction to Smith’s assessment formed years later.

  The Smith article offers no supporting evidence to establish that the attacking Israelis knew the ship was American. He reaches his conclusion by drawing an inference from his claim that the Israelis attacked to prevent the United States from learning the extent of the Israeli military success as of the afternoon of June 8, 1967. Smith ignores facts such as that, for example, there were no Hebrew-speaking personnel on board the Liberty and that thus the ship could not have provided real-time intelligence concerning Israeli military actions. Furthermore, Israel’s high command headquarters was located in Tel Aviv, while its Naval Command Headquarters was located in Haifa, far north of Tel Aviv. A point farther north from where the Liberty actually sailed would have been a much better position for Smith’s conjectured role.

  However, worldwide public news on and before June 8 revealed the full extent of Israel’s military victories, as is borne out by the front pages and headlines of U.S. and foreign newspapers, including the Times, London; Le Figaro, Paris; Il Messaggero, Rome; the New York Times; the Wall Street Journal; the Washington Post; the Chicago Tribune; and the Miami Herald. The Smith theory was best evaluated by Alfred Friendly, foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, who won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting for his coverage of the 1967 war in Israel. In his response to the Smith article published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Friendly says: “That the attack on the Liberty was ordered by the Israel High Command to prevent American and world knowledge of the capture of El Arish announced with fanfare in Tel Aviv more than two days before, or of further progress of the Israeli Forces to or near the Canal, also announced day by day, almost hour by hour, is a thesis that simply does not hold water.”27

  In 1980, Wilbur Eveland, a former CIA officer, published a book entitled Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East that contradicts the official position of the Central Intelligence Agency set forth in its intelligence memorandum of June 13, 1967, and reconfirmed publicly many times thereafter. Eveland states that President Johnson aut
horized James Jesus Angleton to inform Ephraim Evron, the Israel deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington, that the United States would prefer that Israel lessen the tension but would not intervene to stop an attack on Egypt.28 Eveland explains that he obtained this bit of information after he left the CIA. He states:

  Under orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the USS Liberty was rushed to the waters off Israel’s shore to permit this sophisticated communications-monitoring vessel to follow the fighting should the Israelis attack Egypt. The Liberty wasn’t sent alone, for an even more important reason. Stationed below her was the Polaris nuclear submarine Andrew Jackson, for the Pentagon knew that the CIA had aided Israel in acquiring a nuclear capability. Moreover the U.S. had provided the Israelis with missiles, to which atomic warheads could be attached.29 Thus, in case a bogged-down Israeli army decided to use ballistic missiles to win a war against the Soviet-equipped Egyptian army, the U.S. was in a position to warn both Israel and Russia that the introduction of nuclear warfare would produce instantaneous retaliation.

  . . . Message intercepts by the Liberty made it clear that Israel had never intended to limit its attack to Egypt. . . . To destroy this incriminating evidence, Moshe Dayan ordered his jets and torpedo boats to destroy the Liberty immediately. . . .

  Then the U.S. Government shrouded the entire Liberty matter in secrecy under a cloak of national security considerations. . . . Why? Defense Minister Dayan had stated his government’s position bluntly: unless the United States wished the Russians and Arabs to learn of joint CIA-Mossad covert operations in the Middle East and of Angleton’s discussions before the 1967 fighting started, the questions of the lost American ship and how the war originated should be dropped. That ended the U.S. protestations!30

  Professional reviews of the Eveland book are critical and express doubt that he had plausible access to information to back up his “revelations.” CIA director Richard Helms, referring to the Eveland book at a conference organized by Ambassador Richard B. Parker and held on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1967 war at the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs of the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute in Rosslyn, Virginia, said: “Books like . . . Eveland’s Ropes of Sand, and others: The Central Intelligence Agency has had the misfortune to have certain former employees who have written mischievous books, not necessarily based on fact, a lot of it just plain fiction.”31

  The Evans and Novak column in the Washington Post of November 6, 1991, included two conspiracy stories about the Liberty incident.32 One involves U.S. ambassador Dwight Porter; the other relates to Seth Mintz and is discussed in chapter 10. Evans and Novak interviewed Dwight Porter, who was the ambassador to Lebanon in June 1967. That interview was by telephone and was brief. The column vividly dramatizes:

  “It’s an American ship!” the pilot of an Israeli Mirage fighter-bomber radioed Tel Aviv as he sighted the USS Liberty 15 miles off the Israeli-Egyptian coast on June 8, 1967.

  The U.S. embassy in Beirut intercepted that frantic message and the reply from the Israeli Defense Forces headquarters. The decoded transmissions handed to U.S. Ambassador Dwight Porter shocked him and his staff. The reply from Tel Aviv disregarded the pilot’s warning and ordered him to carry out his mission.

  The column went on to say, “The remarkable intercepted radio traffic was chilling for Ambassador Porter, but he was preoccupied with official duties in Beirut. He was organizing a crisis evacuation of hundreds of U.S. citizens, including most of his own embassy personnel, as Arab militants called for throwing America out of the Mideast. He kept silent on the facts until we approached him.”

  Several issues emerge about the statements Evans and Novak attribute to the ambassador. First, the radio transmissions between the Israel Air Force Mirage and the Israel Air Force headquarters in Tel Aviv were by UHF radio and could only be heard in line of sight. They could not be heard over the horizon.33

  The U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1967 was at sea level. The Mirage was off El Arish in excess of 180 miles away. If the Mirage was at an altitude of ten thousand feet, its UHF transmission could be heard at a distance of 123 miles, according to calculations based on the standard formula from the U.S. Department of Transportation publication Instrument Flying Handbook, which is published to advise pilots how far their transmissions on VHF/UHF radio can be heard.34 But even if the Mirage were flying in space, like the space shuttle, at an altitude high enough for its UHF radio transmissions to be heard at sea level in Beirut, how could the embassy in Beirut have heard the response ordering the pilot to attack, which was allegedly transmitted from Israel Air Force headquarters at sea level in Tel Aviv?

  A second, more important question is: Why would a distinguished professional diplomat, Ambassador Porter, disregard such important information and not disclose it to anyone in the State Department? Why would he disclose it to Evans and Novak in a brief telephone interview twenty-four years later? Finally, and strangely, the Evans and Novak column that was printed on November 6, 1991, differs substantially from the story Ambassador Porter told this author in an interview on November 21, 1991.

  Ambassador Porter has a fine reputation and a distinguished career as a diplomat representing the United States. At the time of the interview with this author, he was alert and competent and authorized this authorized this author to record the interview.35 On that tape Ambassador Porter said he had seen some transcripts of material in June 1967. He did not recall who presented the transcripts to him. He was under the impression that this event occurred on June 8, 1967, the day of the attack on the Liberty. He remembers reading some transcripts and then having them burned because the U.S. embassy was under siege by a street mob and the ambassador feared the mob might break into it. Contrary to the Evans and Novak column describing the data the ambassador saw as “intercepted radio traffic,” Ambassador Porter confirmed to this author in a handwritten letter dated December 14, 1991, that “I certainly did not state that the interception was made by or in the Embassy.”36

  A Freedom of Information Act inquiry to the U.S. Department of State established that the day of the mob attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut was June 6, 1967, not June 8, 1967. All this proves is that the memory of the ambassador about a very stressful event twenty-four years earlier was not perfect. This author was not privy to the telephone interview of Ambassador Porter by Evans and Novak. The information in this author’s recorded interview of the ambassador and correspondence in the ambassador’s own handwriting tells a quite different story from the story Evans and Novak allege he told them. This documentation, together with the physical facts relating to ability to hear UHF radio transmissions, suggests that the Evans and Novak column did not report accurately what Ambassador Porter said.37

  In 1984, Stephen Green published Taking Sides: Americas Secret Relations with a Militant Israel.38 His support for the Arab side of the Arab-Israeli conflict is well established. Green claims that the U.S. Air Force supported the Israeli war effort in 1967 with four RF-4C Phantom photo-reconnaissance aircraft.39 The attack on the Liberty is described by him as an attempt to prevent the world from learning about this U.S. support through the Liberty’s radio intercepts.

  Richard B. Parker, who in 1967 served as a political counselor at the U.S. embassy in Cairo and later as U.S. ambassador to several Arab countries,40 examined this story in a detailed article published in 1997. This article put to rest the tale of the participation of the U.S. Air Force on Israel’s side in the 1967 war.41 One wonders: If the U.S. government was able to keep USAF participation in the 1967 war on Israel’s side a secret for thirty years by telling the U.S. Air Force participants—and there had to have been quite a number of them—to keep silent, why could the U.S. government not have followed the same practice with the Liberty personnel? Those on board the Liberty who would have been privy to this knowledge were limited to NSA personnel, whose business was secrecy. Surely, they could have kept this story a secret if quite a few Air Force pilots, ground cre
ws, and photo interpreters could do that.

  If the NSA detachment on the Liberty or any other of the ship’s crewmen had in fact learned of, let alone taken an active part in, USAF activity in the 1967 war on Israel’s side and had become aware that they were attacked by Israel with the intention to suppress such information, it is very odd indeed that none of the Liberty survivors have come forward, in more than four decades, to tell this story. As noted, the Liberty survivors have been quite vocal about their own theories, but this is not one of them. If this theory is accurate, why does it have no support from the surviving victims?

  According to Parker’s article, former CIA director Richard Helms “categorically denied that there had been any U.S.-Israeli plot in 1967. . . . He also commented that there was no substance to the accusation contained in Stephen Green’s book, Taking Sides, that a U.S. Reconnaissance Squadron had flown missions for Israel during the war. Neither Helms nor Robert McNamara had ever heard of such missions, which would have been impossible without knowledge of either of the two.”42

  Still another approach to the Liberty incident was taken by Dr. John E. Borne in 1993. He became acquainted with the Liberty incident through the James Ennes book Assault on the “Liberty.” He wrote a dissertation and then a book, The USS “Liberty”: Dissenting History vs. Official History. Borne generally supports his argument that Israel attacked knowing that the target was a U.S. ship by reciting a number of unrelated anecdotes. His perception was established primarily through his study of Ennes’s writings, and his dissertation relies heavily on Ennes. Borne’s own research reflects little use of primary sources, and he is not especially careful with the rather limited amount of research he did perform.

  For example, he states that the June 8 “Daily Diary shows a telephone call from McNamara to the president at 0838.”43 The diary does indeed report that call, except that it was not a call from McNamara to the president but from the president to McNamara.44 The error would not seem significant except for the incredible claims that Borne then makes on the basis of the 0838 telephone call.