The Liberty Incident Revealed

by A. Jay Cristol

  Borne claims that McNamara, by “personal voice order,” recalled aircraft launched from the Saratoga at 0826 Washington time, 1426 Sinai time. First, all available evidence establishes that the earliest any aircraft could have been launched from carriers was 0850 Washington time, 1450 Sinai time. Second, there was no secure telephone link from Washington to ships in the Sixth Fleet. The David Lewis story (see chapter 8) on which Borne relies claims that McNamara gave the recall from the White House and that it was immediately confirmed by President Johnson, while Borne places McNamara at the Pentagon at the time of the alleged “personal voice order” recall. Finally, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara personally told this author that he never had any voice communication with anyone in the Sixth Fleet and that the only order to recall aircraft that he ever gave was from the Situation Room of the White House, after word had been received that Israel had advised the United States of its attack. The records of the message traffic and the Sixth Fleet command history confirm that all Sixth Fleet aircraft launched to protect the Liberty had already been recalled by Admiral Martin by the time McNamara issued his recall order at about 1125 Washington time, 1725 Sinai time. A review of the sanitized Naval Security Group file on the USS Liberty available from the Naval Historical Center (declassified on April 11, 1985) shows: “(C) 081415Z. LGEN [Lt. Gen.] Carter, DIRNSA, [Director of National Security Agency] telephoned Capt Cook to request that he pass by telephone to SECDEF McNamara info about the Liberty. . . . First attempts to reach Secretary McNamara personally by phone were unsuccessful. Capt Thomas held on the line until Secretary McNamara came to the phone at 081430Z [this is 1030 Washington time].” Borne’s claim that Secretary McNamara knew about the attack on the Liberty at 0826 Washington time is clearly a figment of his imagination or the result of inadequate research.

  In 1985, former U.S. congressman Paul Findley (R-Ill.) published They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, which in chapter 6 repeats several conspiracy theories amidst many factual inaccuracies.45 For example, Findley states that a U.S. carrier “was only 30 minutes away . . . prepared to respond almost instantly.”46 Findley ignores the official records, which establish that the carriers were over five hundred miles away and that the first U.S. aircraft were not launched until 1602 Sinai time, more than an hour after the attack was over.

  Findley was one of the first U.S. legislators to embrace the PLO and the Arab side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. His sentiments are clearly set forth in his books. Congressman Findley relied mainly on Ennes and thus generally follows the Ennes story, including the notion that the motive for the attack was to keep the secret of the impending Israeli attack on Syria. The rebuttal of the “Syrian attack secret” motive has been sufficiently discussed previously.

  Without offering any source or authority for the claim, Findley asserts that CIA had learned a day before the attack that the Israelis planned to sink the ship.47 Captain McGonagle heard this tale and was troubled by it. This author arranged a three-way telephone conversation between Captain McGonagle, this author, and the 1967 CIA chief of station at the U.S. embassy at Tel Aviv. The CIA chief of station (John Hadden) confirmed to Captain McGonagle that there was no record supporting that story and that he, who had been closely involved, knew nothing about it.

  Furthermore, Congressman Findley quotes Vice Adm. Donald D. “Don” Engen, who was the captain of the carrier America that day: “President Johnson had very strict control. Even though we knew the Liberty was under attack, I couldn’t just go and order a rescue.”48 Admiral Engen denied ever making that statement.49 (Engen later confirmed his confidence in this author’s research of the Liberty incident by a comment in his book, Wings and Warriors.)50 Findley quotes Admiral Kidd as giving explicit orders: “Answer no questions. If somehow you are backed into a corner, then you may say that it was an accident and that Israel has apologized. You may say nothing else.”51 Admiral Kidd denied to this author that he ever made the quote attributed to him by Findley. Obviously, these problems call into question the entirety of Findley’s work.

  In 1984, Donald Neff wrote the second of his two books on the Middle East. His earlier book, Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America into the Middle East, had been published in 1981.52 The second book, Warriors for Jerusalem, The Six Days That Changed the Middle East, deals with the Liberty incident.53 Neff argues that the Israeli attack was a deliberate attack on a ship known to be American. He begins his story with some misinformation regarding a request by the Liberty to the Sixth Fleet for an armed escort and a reply to the request on Tuesday, June 6, 1967, “To the ship’s [Liberty’s] request for an armed escort, Sixth Fleet commander Admiral Martin had replied: ‘Liberty is a clearly marked United States ship in international waters, not a participant in the conflict and not a reasonable subject for attack by any nation.’ In the unlikely event of an attack, Admiral Martin promised, jet aircraft could be over the ship within ten minutes. The request was denied.”54

  In fact, this author has not been able to locate such a request or denial anywhere. The Russ report, which focused primarily on the message traffic involved, does not include any such messages. Neff does not provide a source other than Ennes for the denial of the Liberty’s request by Vice Admiral Martin. Ennes remembers such a message and in his book states that he can remember the message verbatim, but he does not provide a citation or reference. According to Ennes, the evidence is just missing.55 If such messages had actually been exchanged, they would have been kept in the records of the Sixth Fleet commander on the cruiser Little Rock and very likely on other ships or shore stations, as it is customary to send copies of messages to other sites for their information, in addition to the action addressees. To arrange for such message records to vanish into thin air would have required a major conspiracy involving numerous naval personnel.

  The Neff allegation suffers from yet another flaw that results from Neff’s reliance on Ennes. In Neff’s notes at the end of his book,56 he confirms that he relies on a letter from Ennes that told him that “[Lt. Cdr.] Dave Lewis, who headed the SIGINT effort [on the Liberty], had authority to release messages without showing them to the Captain. The message was prepared by Dave and may not have been seen by McGonagle. In any case . . . the request was official, and it was scornfully declined by Admiral Martin.” That Lewis had authority to release messages without showing them to the captain is probably accurate, in that Lewis could communicate with the National Security Agency about his SIGINT operations without including the ship’s commanding officer in that loop. However, anyone who is familiar with U.S. naval procedures would find it very hard to believe that Lewis had “authority” to communicate with Commander McGonagle’s own immediate superiors about an issue concerned with the operation and security of the ship without involving the latter.

  If what Ennes wrote to Neff is true and Lewis did have such authority on June 6 to communicate directly with McGonagle’s superiors, the story still falls apart, because on that date the Liberty was still under the command and control of Admiral McCain, Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces Europe. Liberty did not “chop” to, or go under the command and control of, Vice Admiral Martin, the commander of the Sixth Fleet, until June 7, 1967. The idea that a subordinate cryptology officer (not a line naval officer) in the U.S. Navy would bypass the commanding officer on the ship to which his detachment was assigned, as well as Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, to request assistance from a nearby fleet commander on a matter of ship’s security is simply beyond belief.

  For the sake of further discussion, it could be assumed that the message was sent and Vice Admiral Martin did promise jet aircraft over the ship in ten minutes. How could that have been possible? The nearest U.S. carriers would have been over five hundred miles away from Liberty’s assigned patrol area. The fastest U.S. jet fighter on board the carriers, the F-4B Phantom, at maximum subsonic cruise speed, would have required a minimum of sixty minutes to reach the Liberty. In “afterburner
” mode at supersonic speed,57 the time to target would have been twenty to thirty minutes, if they could remain supersonic that long. But in fact the aircraft could not have arrived over Liberty, because in afterburner they would have run out of fuel well before reaching the ship. Was Vice Admiral Martin so lacking in knowledge of the performance of his fighter planes that he promised more than he could deliver to his comrades in arms? Or is it more plausible that Ennes’s memory of that message, which cannot be found anywhere, is simply not accurate?

  Neff notes that when President Johnson learned of the attack on the Liberty he immediately advised Soviet premier Kosygin about it via the hotline. He goes on to say:

  While the Kremlin now knew about the Israeli attack on the Liberty, the American people did not. From the very beginning, the Johnson Administration gave every evidence of a determination to play down the attack. . . . Although there was reported skepticism that the attack was totally accidental, the inclination of the officials was to accept Israel’s version since none of them could see why the Israelis would risk losing U.S. support by such a dangerous action. It may have been the result of a local trigger-happy commander, they agreed, though there was no evidence of that either. But even if that were the case, that did not amount to a hostile act ordered by the top echelons of the government.

  Beyond the lack of evidence, the President and his advisers were aware that they needed all the influence they could bring to bear on Israel to get it to stop fighting. A direct emotional confrontation at this time would only lessen Washington’s ability to achieve a cease-fire. In the end, Clark Clifford was detailed to investigate the attack and everyone else was ordered to keep mum until his report was completed.58

  Neff also tells a story about Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Dayan, ordering the attack and repeats the theory that “Israelis do not make mistakes.”59

  While it is clearly established that President Johnson and both Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were aware of Israel’s impending “blow at Syria” from several sources, including having specifically advised of the plan by the chief of Israeli intelligence, Gen. Aharon Yariv, Neff turns the facts around and suggests that this “secret” was learned by the Liberty and provided to the United States. He does not explain how the information was passed to the United States at a time when the Liberty was not in communication. In regard to the advance U.S. knowledge of the attack on Syria, he says: “Apparently the attack did not come as a surprise to the United States. In his memoirs, Lyndon Johnson asserted that ‘we did know Israel’s military intentions toward Syria’ . . . could the Liberty have accomplished at least part of its task? Did its sensitive antennas pick up the orders for the Thursday June 9 attack on Syria and relay them to Washington?”60

  The answer to Neff’s question is no. From the various positions of the Liberty from the time of her arrival at Point Alpha until the time of the Israeli attack, she was far over the horizon from both Tel Aviv and Israel’s Northern Command, which was responsible for the Syrian front. If somehow she could have heard transmission of orders to attack Syria, how would she have understood those orders in real time, since Liberty did not have any Hebrew linguists on board? It could be argued that perhaps she relayed raw data directly to NSA. But if Liberty had a direct communication link with NSA, why then did she not receive her stand-off orders over that same link?

  Again, the United States did know of the impending attack on Syria, from several sources. For example, the CIA’s June 8, 1967, intelligence memorandum, Arab-Israeli Situation Report (as of 9:00 a.m. EDT), indicates in paragraph 4 that the U.S. consul in Jerusalem on the morning of June 8, 1967, had a report of “intensive air and artillery bombardment of Syrian positions opposite the Central Demilitarized Zone . . . an apparent prelude to a large-scale attack in order to seize the heights overlooking the Israeli border.”61

  The most difficult story to believe was published in 1994 by John Loftus.62 He had served as a U.S. Army officer and then worked in the Office of Special Investigations of the Department of Justice, whose function is to prosecute Nazi war criminals who had entered the United States illegally after World War II. His book The Secret War against the Jews, written with Mark Aarons, includes a chapter entitled “The Liberty Incident.” Loftus claims that the CIA sent the Liberty to a position off the Sinai to spy on the Israeli forces and that the information obtained was then passed to the Egyptians via a British intelligence center in Cyprus. Loftus writes:

  Aramco and the other big players in the oil business were extremely concerned that American aid to Israel would alienate the Arab oil producers. It was not enough to withhold [U.S.] military assistance in the coming war. Everyone in the Moslem world knew that the United States was still neutral in favor of Israel. The oil men wanted some under-the-table help for the Arabs. [This assertion is supported by his footnote 26, which reads: “Confidential interviews, former liaison to the NSA; former analyst, Naval Intelligence.”]

  President Lyndon Johnson had been in the “erl bidness” himself down in Texas and knew how the game was played. The oil producers got to LBJ or someone very close to him in the White House. Our sources were never able to find out who. The oil men asked if the President could throw the Arabs a bone, some sort of secret assistance that the public would never find out about but would make the Arab leadership grateful. The point was to keep the oil flowing no matter what happened in the 1967 war.

  The White House approved a contingency plan to send the Arabs a little intelligence about the Israel Defense Forces.63

  The “little intelligence” to which Loftus refers would be provided by the Liberty. Loftus describes the ship as having such sophisticated eavesdropping equipment that she was capable of hearing and recording every Israeli electronic transmission in the Sinai, including “intercom” transmissions inside individual tanks. This electronic bonanza was sorted out by the British in Cyprus, using massive computers, and passed to the Egyptians. Loftus claims, therefore, that in the 1967 war, on the southern-front battlefield, the United States and Great Britain were actually helping the Arabs against Israel.64

  The allegations by Loftus that the CIA sent the Liberty to spy for the Egyptians, with the data being collected and passed to Cairo via a British intelligence computer base on Cyprus, began by placing the Liberty off the Sinai several days before she actually got there. He ascribed to the Liberty capabilities of listening equipment far beyond anything that the United States, or any other nation, had in the 1960s or probably would for the next decade or two. Anyone familiar with the literature on electronic intelligence (ELINT) could establish that Loftus’s claims about the listening capability of the Liberty in 1967 are fantasy. But let us assume that the Liberty could have gathered electronic data from the Sinai nearly, or even completely, to the extent claimed by Loftus. How did Israel know the capabilities of the Liberty in June 1967? If this capability existed and Israel knew about it, what was to be gained by the Israelis attacking her as late as June 8? The battle for the Sinai was virtually over by June 7. Israeli forces had defeated the Egyptians and were mopping up in the Sinai and were in the process of securing the western bank of the Suez Canal.

  Ironically, Loftus argument that the Liberty was involved in the 1967 war on the side of Egypt—that is, that it was fighting against Israel—would have provided a legitimate reason for Israel to attack the ship. Under the law of naval warfare, a belligerent may be attacked anywhere except in the territorial waters of a neutral nation, and a neutral aiding a belligerent is subject to the same rule.

  The general thesis of the Loftus book is that intelligence organizations all over the world, throughout modem history, have conducted covert operations against the Jews in general and against Israel, the Jewish state, in particular. While there may be a grain of truth in some of his claims for certain organizations at specific times, and while invidious anti-Semitism is a historical fact, this author suggests that the book is far off the mark regarding the r
elationship in 1967 of the CIA and the Mossad, a relationship that has historically been symbiotic. Also, the Liberty was assigned to the National Security Agency, part of the Department of Defense. Therefore, neither the CIA nor the Navy was in control of her intelligence operations.65 Loftus, like other writers, often confuses intelligence agencies and fails to understand their relationships, jurisdictions, and control, including their dealings with other governmental departments and agencies.

  Loftus spends much of his time traveling around the United States lecturing to Jewish audiences, who are generally receptive emotionally to his thesis. Loftus tells Jewish audiences what they want to hear. While a great deal of what he says may be historically accurate, his chapter on the Liberty incident is neither documented nor accurate. Loftus mainly relies on the information of unidentified “old spies” and “old” or “former” intelligence officers. The only names disclosed by Loftus are of persons who are dead, and therefore it is not possible to corroborate what Loftus attributes to them. His theory on the attack on the Liberty is far from persuasive.

  In 1980 James “Jim” Taylor privately published Pearl Harbor II. Taylor makes it immediately and abundantly clear that he is opposed to Zionism. The first seventy pages of his book are a tirade against Zionism. The Liberty is rarely mentioned. No research or new evidence is presented on the Liberty incident. He cites portions of the record of the U.S. Navy court of inquiry, which do not support his thesis. Material from the court of inquiry record that flatly contradicts his thesis is omitted.66

  The highest-ranking U.S. military officer to reject the Israeli explanation of the Liberty attack was Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, a hero of World War II, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1970 to 1974. When the Liberty incident occurred, he was not directly in the loop. He became Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) on August 1, 1967. He had no personal knowledge of the incident, but he has a strong emotional attachment to the victims of the attack. Admiral Moorer knew Lt. Steven Toth personally as the son of Capt. Joseph Toth, who had been at the U.S. Naval Academy while Moorer was there.