The Liberty Incident Revealed

by A. Jay Cristol

  Admiral Moorer has maintained the notion that the first aircraft launched from the carrier Saratoga were armed with nuclear weapons, as claimed by James Ennes and some other sources.67 All available evidence points to the contrary.68 Moorer says that he refuses “to swallow” the Israeli story. His main argument is that the Liberty was the ugliest ship in the U.S. Navy and that an attacking pilot had to recognize it as the U.S. Navy’s Liberty and could not confuse it with an Egyptian ship.

  This author respectfully acknowledges that Admiral Moorer, with his special knowledge of U.S. ships and his naval flying experience, probably would have recognized the Liberty from the air.69 However, the CIA report differs from the admiral’s assessment and specifically states that the Liberty could have been mistaken for the Egyptian ship El Quseir.70 Admiral Moorer does not explain why Israel Air Force pilots, whose experience in naval matters was virtually nonexistent, should have been expert in U.S. ship identification. The history of Israeli naval aviation combat prior to the 1967 war was quite limited. For example, during the 1956 Sinai campaign, two Israel Ouragon jets strafed the Egyptian destroyer Ibrahim Al-Awwal near Haifa, and Israel Air Force colonel Danny Shapira led an attack by a flight of four Mystère aircraft against the British destroyer HMS Crane in the Red Sea, upon the mistaken assumption that the Crane was an Egyptian warship.

  What little knowledge of warships they had was focused on the ships of navies of Arab countries with which Israel was at war. In fact, if they had been able to distinguish the antennae array, they would have been far more likely to have identified the Liberty as a Soviet intelligence collector, since there were several Soviet intelligence collectors operating in the eastern Mediterranean and no U.S. warship had visited an Israeli port in several years.71

  The Israeli pilots of Royal Flight and the chief air controller recognized a problem after only ten to twelve minutes and terminated the air attack. Ultimately, the recognition had nothing to do with the beauty or ugliness of the ship but rather with its conduct during the attack—that is, she was not shooting back. Royal Flight leader identified Liberty as not being an Arab warship by her hull markings “GTR 5,” not by her multiple antennas, her lack of beauty, or U.S. flag.

  Admiral Moorer told this author that when he was Chief of Naval Operations, he did not talk one-on-one with the president or the secretaries of state or defense and never discussed the Liberty incident with them. (As CNO he did attend meetings, along with other senior officers and service chiefs, with the president and the secretary of defense once or twice a year.)72 He was quoted by Jim Anderson in a United Press International article dated December 12, 1985: “Moorer, who was not in a position of command during the Liberty attack, told the news conference he did not investigate it when he became head of the Joint Chiefs because it was during the Vietnam war ‘and I was concerned with what was about to happen, not what had happened.’” His position of “not swallowing” the Israeli story developed years later. Notwithstanding Admiral Moorer’s eventual position of refusing to accept the explanation that the attack was a mistake, he apparently swallowed it when he was Chief of Naval Operations. The final endorsement on the U.S. Navy court of inquiry proceedings concluding that the attack was a tragic mistake was approved by his office on March 25, 1968.

  It should always be understood that while in many instances perception is more important than reality, in most instances perception is not synonymous with reality. Thus different conspiracy theories, for the most part, focus on the notion that the Israeli attack was intended to keep the Liberty from discovering the military intentions or activities of Israel. The common threads in all these accounts tend to be: (1) a total and absolute disregard for all fourteen official U.S. and Israeli inquiries, and (2) disregard for facts when the facts disagree with the conspiracy theory. As Professor Dan Schueftan points out:

  Beyond the detailed and well substantiated macrodata, the Liberty conspiracy theory is fundamentally flawed in the macro perspective, since it disregards the political strategy of the Israeli decision makers at that time.

  In the summer of 1967 the Israel leadership considered American goodwill towards Israel to be its supreme political interest, second only to Israel’s existence. The bitter lesson of the Sinai Campaign of 1956 and its aftermath in 1957, when Israel was forced to withdraw by American and Soviet pressure was only too vivid. In 1967 Israel could not risk another political defeat to follow her military victory. To preserve this goodwill, Israel waited for three weeks for an American approval before launching the war, even though Israel believed that her very existence was at stake. The Israeli leaders knew that only American support could give their political strategy a chance to work to trade the territorial and strategic assets of the war for a lasting political settlement that would secure Israel’s future in the region.

  By June 8, the Israeli success in defeating the Egyptian threat had already manifested itself. To suggest that Israel would risk the fruits of her military victory by purposely attacking an American surveillance ship and killing US personnel indicates a total failure to understand the overall picture of the “Six Day War.” None of the dubious theories presented to date offer a motivation for the attack on the Liberty that could be vital enough to override these considerations.

  To suggest that Israel attacked the Liberty to keep the US in the dark about the offensive in the Golan is to assume that Israel was prepared to revert to the 1956 pattern, after it endangered its very existence for three weeks before the war to avoid just that. To suggest that it was done to cover up a major atrocity that did not even happen, hardly deserves a serious response. To suggest that such a major decision could be taken on a level lower than the Prime Minister or Minister of Defense is to ignore the way the Israeli Defense Force worked at the time (and still works today). Finally, an experienced student of Israeli media and political practices would know that if there were a grain of truth in these conspiracy theories, that truth would have surfaced in Israel long ago.73

  Chapter 10

  TALL TALES VS. REALITY

  In 1984 Seth Mintz told a story to a Liberty crew member that caught the attention of the Liberty Veterans Association. According to his story, Mintz had been an intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces during June 1967, sitting quietly in the “Israeli War Room,” where he saw and heard unidentified Israeli officers examine aerial photographs of the USS Liberty and then, with full knowledge that the Liberty was flying the U.S. flag, order the attack on the Liberty. The Liberty Veterans Association newsletter carried an item with the headline “An Israeli Major Speaks Up”:

  In January, one of our shipmates was approached by a man claiming to be a former Israeli major who had observed the attack from the Israeli war room. “The business about no flag flying is a lie,” the man said. “We could hear the pilots reporting during the attack that the ship flew an American flag.” . . . The man does claim that Embassy officials were asked to move the ship away from the Israeli coast, and he claims that U.S. Embassy officials insisted that there were no American ships in the area.1

  A more detailed variation on this story had been printed several weeks before by United Press International, dated March 18, 1984. The article does not mention Mintz by name but indicates that his name is known to UPI and to author Stephen Green. Green wrote about the Liberty incident in his 1984 book Taking Sides. Green does not mention Mintz or this story in his book, although he interviewed Mintz by telephone in two calls. Green passed his notes of this interview to Rich Bonin, an associate producer of the CBS News program 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes sent a crew to Maine to tape an interview with Mintz. It was never aired on 60 Minutes. Bonin passed the notes to the research editor of the Thames TV production Attack on the “Liberty,” Adrian Pennink, who interviewed Mintz but did not use the Mintz story in the Thames TV production.

  Pennink’s notes of the Mintz interview contain a number of assertions made by Mintz that certainly raise questions about his credibility. Mintz told Pennink t
hat “there were three attempts to contact the U.S. Embassy about the ship. He also remembers a phone call that Beni Moti made to the Military Attache at 9:00 a.m. in the morning.” While there is some dispute about whether the IDF ever contacted the U.S. embassy to inquire about U.S. ships in the area, the call at 9:00 a.m. was just a few minutes after the Liberty arrived at Point Alpha. The air attack began just before 2:00 p.m. Did Mintz sit in the war room unnoticed for five hours? Mintz “remembers seeing the Liberty marker on their operation board stay throughout the day. It was not removed.” All available evidence establishes that the wedge representing the Liberty was on the sea plot at naval headquarters at Stella Maris, Haifa. There was no ship plot at air force or army headquarters in Tel Aviv. Mintz said he heard “reports coming through the loud speakers from the pilots attacking the ship.” The Israel Air Force has transcribed and translated the pilot and controller communications available. The tapes do not support the Mintz claims. Finally, Mintz “cannot remember exactly where Southern Command is but said he could easily find it were he in Tel Aviv.” In 1967 the high commands of the air force and army were in Tel Aviv. (The Israel Air Force Command Center was not at all like Mintz’s description of it.) Southern Command was with Maj. Gen. Yeshayahu “Sheike” Gavish on an armored personnel carrier moving through the Sinai toward the Suez Canal. It is suggested that these were sufficient reasons for Thames TV to reject Mintz’s tale.2

  Mintz was back in public view in 1991 when he was interviewed over the telephone for about fifteen minutes in connection with a column by Roland Evans and Robert Novak. The column, which appeared in the Washington Post on November 6, 1991, states:

  American-born Israeli Maj. Seth Mintz, who was present in IDF headquarters for several hours before the Mirage fighter-bomber radioed that the ship he had been sent to attack was American. Mintz had been allowed to accompany his friend and mentor Gen. Benni Matti,3 into the “war room”—a [highly classified] secure headquarters in Tel Aviv. As the minutes went by, he told us, the mood took a definitive turn from doubt to certainty as to the ship’s identity. “They were discussing photographs of a ship that they thought was American,” Mintz told us by telephone from his home in Houlton, Maine. “No one wanted to take responsibility.”

  He said the photos were sent to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv for identification. The embassy said it knew of no American ship in that part of the Eastern Mediterranean—a lie following the precepts of the intelligence game. IDF officers studied Jane’s Fighting Ships, Mintz told us, and “everyone felt it was an American ship and that it was the Liberty. . . . There were comments about the markings, about the flag. Everybody in that room was convinced it was an American ship.”

  Mintz said the order to sink the ship came not from the war room but from superior officers. Immediately thereafter, Mintz said many Israeli officers “had doubts whether they had done the right thing.” As for himself, Mintz told us: “The Israelis were guilty of an outrage, but the American refusal to admit the Liberty was there helped precipitate the outrage.”4

  The Evans and Novak column did not go unchallenged. Two days later, on November 8, 1991, senior New York Times editorial writer A. M. Rosenthal published an op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled “Anatomy of a Scoop.” Regarding the portion of the Evans and Novak column relating to Mintz, Rosenthal had this to say:

  Evans-Novak reported that an American who was then an Israeli major was in the Israeli Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv that day and corroborates “evidence that the Israelis were well aware that they were attacking an American ship.”

  Like hell he does.

  Evans-Novak said their “eyewitness” was Seth Mintz, now a salesman of chemicals in Houlton, ME. When I called him, expecting a confirmation of hard reporting, I got a furious denial that he had ever “corroborated” that the Israelis knew. He said he told the reverse to Mr. Evans.5

  The next day the Washington Post carried a letter to the editor signed by Seth Mintz of Houlton, Maine, and captioned “Attack on the Liberty: A Tragic Mistake.” Mintz claims that Evans and Novak misquoted him. He says they changed the order of events and took his answers out of context. His letter concludes:

  Finally, the columnists quote me as saying that the Israelis “had doubts whether they had done the right thing” as if I was referring to a deliberate attack on an American ship when, in fact, I was talking about uncertainty regarding the ship’s identity that lingered among some of the officers, even after the embassy’s second denial.

  The Liberty incident was a terrible human tragedy. There is no excuse for using it to fan hatred through distortions and misrepresentations.6

  Evans and Novak defended their original column in an article in the Washington Post on November 11, 1991, explaining that Mintz was now denying what he had told them because he was afraid “that he might be in danger.” The column states, “Mintz told an Israeli newspaper that he doesn’t need the Mossad and Shin Bet knocking at his door.”7 The column further confirms that the telephone call to Mintz from Evans occurred on October 22 and that Mintz “spoke to us for more than 15 minutes.”8

  The last word in this war of columnists was written by Hirsh Goodman, editor of the Jerusalem Report, whose column “The Last Word” was published on November 21, 1991. Titled “Messrs. Errors and No Facts,” Goodman’s column takes the Evans and Novak article apart, line by line, and chides the columnists for omitting much significant data and for relying on the Mintz story, because the story does not make sense and “was less than convincing.”9

  Seth Mintz has told a number of conflicting stories about what he knows of the Liberty incident. He first claimed in his story carried by the Liberty veterans newsletter to have been a major in the Israel Army, assigned to intelligence, and to have been in the Israeli military command center in Tel Aviv on June 8, 1967. Mintz’s story was that he went to Israel as an American Jew at the age of fifteen and a half and spent some time on a kibbutz, which he identified as Kibbutz Magen. He told Adrian Pennink, the research editor for the Thames TV production on the Liberty, that the kibbutz was “located in the Negev on the Gaza Strip.” There is indeed a Kibbutz Magen (which is the Hebrew word for shield) located in the Negev near a more famous kibbutz, Yad Mordechai. On June 20, 2001, at the request of this author, a representative of Israel TV Channel 1 contacted Kibbutz Magen and was advised by telephone that in November 1963 an adult male named Seth Mintz came to the kibbutz. He was not fifteen and a half years old, as Mintz told Adrian Pennink, but old enough to marry, and in fact he married a woman named Karen. They left the kibbutz together in September 1964 and were not heard from again. The kibbutz representative also stated that there was no important or well-known IDF general from the kibbutz during the 1963–67 time frame.

  This is significant because Mintz claims to have been befriended by a senior Israeli general whom he identified as his “kibbutz father” and whose name he could not exactly recall in his earlier stories and to whom he did not refer at all in his interview with author Stephen Green.10 He did, however, identify the general to Adrian Pennink as Benni Moti, and later as Gen. Benni Matti in the Evans and Novak article. Concerning Gen. Benni Matti, Goodman writes in his article, “There has never been such a person in the Israeli Army.”11 There is a well-known Israeli general named Daniel “Danny” Matt, but when he was asked by this author whether he was the kibbutz father or a friend of Mintz or Dagan, the alias Mintz claimed he used when he joined the IDF, the general replied that he was not and that he had never heard of Mintz or Dagan.12

  Mintz claims he enlisted in the Israel Army under the pseudonym “Giora Dagan,” in order to prevent loss of his U.S. citizenship. He claims his IDF serial number was 968409. He has not been able or willing to identify to Adrian Pennink anyone in Israel who can corroborate his story or who knew him during his five-year sojourn there prior to 1967. Pennink’s notes reflect that Mintz did not have a stamped passport to establish that he ever traveled to Israel and did not have any oth
er documentation to support his other claims. Col. Raanan Gissin, deputy spokesman of the Israel Defense Forces, researched the IDF personnel records looking for a Giora Dagan, IDF serial number 968409, and for Seth Mintz. Gissin found no record of Seth Mintz. He did, however, find there was a Giora Dagan with that serial number in the Israel Army in 1967, but Dagan was neither a major nor an intelligence officer. Dagan was a driver in a motor pool. The possibility that a motor pool driver had access to the air force command post during the 1967 war is very remote, to say the least. It is even less plausible that while just “sitting around” the command post Mintz saw Israel Air Force officers receive aerial reconnaissance photographs of the Liberty with the U.S. flag clearly visible, as he claims. Although Mintz claims to have heard them discuss the flag and to have heard them call the U.S. embassy and ask if the ship was American, the U.S. embassy has no record of such a call. According to Mintz, after a person at the U.S. embassy, whom he does not identify, advised the Israel Air Force officers that the ship was not American, Mintz heard them order the attack.

  After “An Israeli Major Speaks Up” was published in the Liberty veterans newsletter of May 1984,13 Richard Bonin, an associate producer of the CBS Television program 60 Minutes, sent a television crew to Maine to interview Mintz on videotape for a 60 Minutes segment. The producer told this author that he was not satisfied with Mintz’s credibility and dropped the story.

  When a Thames TV team arrived in Washington, D.C., to begin shooting the documentary Attack on the “Liberty,” Bonin passed the story to his friend Adrian Pennink, the research editor for the Thames production. According to Bonin, the Thames TV production team hired David Walsh, a “pro-conspiracy” public relations person in Washington, to assist them, and he put them in touch with both Seth Mintz and Stephen Green. Pennink brought Mintz and his wife, Barbara, to Washington and interviewed him but, like Bonin, did not find his story credible and did not include it in the Thames documentary.14 Mintz also gave author Stephen Green a couple of telephone interviews, in which he told a similar story except that he placed the Liberty off the Sinai on the evening before the Liberty arrived there. Perhaps Mintz had read the Pearson stories.15 In any event, Green apparently was not impressed with Mintz’s story, because when Green published Taking Sides,16 the Mintz story was not included. Of course the story Mintz told Green is quite different from the story Green told in his book as to the reason for the attack, which Green claims was to cover up U.S. Air Force assistance immediately prior to the war.