To the question “5. Finally, could I have your judgment and that of the Agency you head, based on information acquired by the Agency from all sources, that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was deliberate or an honest mistake?” Admiral Turner responded in a letter dated February 27, 1978, “Comment: ‘It remains our best judgment that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was not made in malice toward the United States and was a mistake.’”
Throughout the many accounts of the Liberty incident, much ink has been expended on the issue of the similarities between the Liberty and the Egyptian warship El Quseir.17 The June 13, 1967, CIA report states: “Although the Liberty is some 200 feet longer than the Egyptian transport El Quseir, it could easily be mistaken for the latter vessel by an overzealous pilot. Both have similar hulls and arrangements of masts and stack.”18
While some naval experts may disagree with the conclusion of the CIA report that Liberty and El Quseir have similar hull shapes, the question is best answered by viewing the silhouettes of both ships. Page 40 of the NSA document shows unclassified pictures of USS Liberty and El Quseir. Each ship has a mast forward and a mast aft, a superstructure amidships, and a single smokestack. The simple silhouettes shown in the illustration reflect the similarities (Liberty above, El Quseir below). It is even more instructive to imagine a jet fighter pilot twenty one or twenty two years old who has never before attacked a ship approaching a target already identified as an enemy at almost six hundred miles per hour, or almost one-half mile each three seconds.
Liberty and El Quseir silhouettes
It was not only the Navy and the CIA that were immediately concerned with the cause of Liberty tragedy. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) were concerned as well that five messages directed to the Liberty had gone astray. Army major general Joseph R. Russ was directed by the JCS to commence a fact-finding study of the communications failure; he began the investigation on June 9, 1967.19
In part 2, section 1 of his report, Russ outlined thirty-six “Findings of Fact,” most of which are followed by a “Discussion”; however, because of the charter of the fact-finding team, General Russ did not make any findings about the actual attacks.20 The team collected, compiled, and analyzed all of the significant message traffic.
Russ was more concerned with errors and omissions by the U.S. military than with duplicating the work of the court of inquiry being conducted by Rear Admiral Kidd. The JCS was concerned with the inability of the U.S. military communications system to prevent the event. While this investigation gathered a very important compilation of U.S. messages, its focus was on failures and responsibilities of the U.S. military communications system. Therefore, the Russ Report is an invaluable resource in the study of the Liberty incident.
The most mysterious and elusive of all contemporary investigations was carried out by Clark Clifford, who chaired the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and was a close adviser to President Johnson.21 He was asked two questions by the president through National Security Advisor, Walt Rostow. Question 1: Who fired the first shot in the 1967 War? Question 2: Was the attack on the Liberty intentional or a mistake? Clifford’s answer to the first question remains classified, although it is generally believed that he concluded that Israel fired the “first shot.”22 The Clifford Report on the question of whether the attacks were intentional or a mistake remained classified top secret until this author obtained its declassification on October 25, 1995.23
The Clifford Report stated the following conclusions:
a.The information thus far available does not reflect that the Israeli high command made a premeditated attack on a ship known to be American. . . .
d.The best interpretation from available facts is that there were gross and inexcusable failures in the command and control of subordinate Israeli naval and air elements. . . .
f.The unprovoked attack on the Liberty constitutes a flagrant act of gross negligence for which the Israeli Government should be held completely responsible, and the Israeli military personnel involved should be punished.24
The bottom line was that Clifford found no premeditation but rather “inexcusable failures” constituting “gross negligence” on the part of Israeli subordinate military personnel. Clifford, looking through American eyes, concluded further: “e. There is no justification for the failure of the IDF—with the otherwise outstanding efficiency which it demonstrated in the course of the war—to ensure prompt alerting of all appropriate elements of the IDF of the fact that a U.S. ship was in the area.”25
In an interview with this author, Clifford recalled that the Liberty attack was “a matter of enormous delicacy.”26 He obtained material from the Department of Defense, and after review he concluded that the attack was a mistake, in effect a case of “Murphy’s Law.”27 He stated that his investigation had been conducted without staff and that he did not travel to the Pentagon. He recalls attending a couple of meetings in the Map Room of the White House,28 and after “looking into it and listening to electronically recorded material it seemed to establish that it was an accident.”29
In 1991 Clifford published a memoir entitled Counsel to the President. The Liberty incident is discussed:
There was no evidence that the highest levels of the Israeli government . . . were aware of Liberty’s true identity or the fact that an attack was taking place. At the same time, however, no one could prove that they did not know.
The best interpretation from the facts available to me was that there were inexcusable failures on the part of the Israeli Defense Forces.30
Shortly after the incident, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held three days of hearings on S. 1872, a bill to amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. “The Israeli Attack on the U.S.S. Liberty” was put into question by Senator Bourke Blakemore Hickenlooper of Iowa,31 who was never considered a supporter of Israel.32 Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara gave the following testimony to the committee:
In the case of the attack on the Liberty, it was the conclusion of the investigatory body headed by an admiral of the Navy in whom we have great confidence that the attack was not intentional. I read the record of the investigation, and support that conclusion. . . . It was not a conscious decision on the part of the Government of Israel.
Senator Hickenlooper: Perhaps not. . . .
Secretary McNamara: There is no evidence that the individuals attacking the Liberty knew they were attacking a U.S. ship, and there is some evidence, circumstantial, that they did not know it . . .
Secretary McNamara: Senator Hickenlooper, I don’t want to carry the torch for the Israelis. It was an inexcusable error in judgment. . . . And an inexcusable error of professional tactics. I would simply point out to you that, at the same time, I was denying that we had struck a Russian ship in Haiphong Harbor [sic]; and I proved to be in error. These errors do occur. We had no more intention of attacking a Russian ship than Israel apparently did of attacking an American ship.33
Contrary to some claims, Congress took the Liberty attack quite seriously and looked into the events surrounding the attack a total of five times. On the afternoon of February 1, 1968, in the Old Senate Office Building, a hearing before the Committee on Armed Services of the U.S. Senate again heard from Secretary of Defense McNamara, who was accompanied by Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were there to testify about the more recent Pueblo incident, in which another U.S. intelligence-gathering ship had been captured by North Korea.34 Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri asked McNamara about air support for the Pueblo in its hour of need. In his response, McNamara compared the Pueblo incident to the Liberty attack:
The kind of uncertainty you have in that kind of a situation was illustrated by the Liberty incident. When the Liberty was attacked, we had a task force in the Mediterranean. We received a flash report here in the Pentagon at the time of the attack. We examined the situation. My first reaction—that is the question I immediately posed to the Chiefs and the Joint
Staff was: Is it not likely it was attacked by Soviet forces?
We knew the location of certain Soviet forces in the area. Certainly the initial reaction, having known their location, would be to attack those forces. Within a half hour or 45 minutes, however, we concluded that a Soviet attack was unlikely.
The next obvious answer was it had been attacked by Egyptians. Who else would have done it if it were not the Soviets or the Egyptians? Well that too proved in error. It took us a while to find that out.
What I am suggesting to you is that it is very difficult for a commander not on the scene to know what happened and how he should react.35
The transcripts of these hearings indicate a genuine bipartisan concern for developing information about military command and control.
The House of Representatives was also interested in the Liberty affair. Hearings were held before the Subcommittee on Department of Defense of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, on April 8, 1968. After Air Force lieutenant general Richard P. Klocko made an opening statement, Congressman Robert Lee Fulton Sikes of Florida indicated that he wished to discuss the worldwide communication system of the Department of the Defense “with emphasis on the USS Liberty incident.” Sikes began with the comment, “A general conclusion could be drawn from the staff reports that the use and operational capabilities of the Defense Communications system is nothing less than pathetic, and that the management of the system needs to be completely overhauled.”36
Solis Horowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense (Administration), commented on an investigation of the Liberty incident by the Department of Defense. He testified that the Department of Defense investigation and the House Appropriations hearing had both focused on the defects in the existing system that had left the Liberty in harm’s way. A great deal of testimony and conversation reviewed not only the Liberty incident but also other aspects of Defense communications. Structure, procedures, and equipment as well as problems in Vietnam were on the table, but the discussion seemed to keep coming back to the Liberty. The comment of Congressman John Jacob Rhodes of Arizona is noteworthy:
The record speaks for itself as far as the handling of this message to the USS Liberty. It is a comedy of errors. You could not have written it any better if you were writing a musical comedy.
It would be funny if it were not so tragic. Here we are, with the most sophisticated communications system ever known to mankind and maybe it is so sophisticated we do not know how to operate it.37
It appears from its printed report that the committee felt that there was some stonewalling by both the JCS and the Navy, and although the committee adopted a “summary of study,”38 it is apparent that the House Armed Services Committee investigation of worldwide communications in 1971 had its genesis in the dissatisfaction of this committee with the cooperation of the JCS and the Navy with this earlier investigation.
The House Appropriations Committee report was partially published in the Congressional Record—House under the heading “Navy Communications ‘Foulup’ Caused USS ‘Liberty’s’ Presence off Sinai Coast.” One passage read: “Mr. Halpern: Mr. Speaker, I was shocked to learn that a Navy communications ‘foulup’ led to the presence of the USS Liberty of the Sinai coast in June 1967 where it was mistaken for an Egyptian vessel and attacked by Israel torpedo boats and planes.”39
While almost all other investigations relating to the Liberty have been declassified, or partially declassified, a portion of the above report remains highly classified, with a code-name classification. All efforts to have the remainder of this report declassified have been unsuccessful.40
In 1971 the House Armed Services Investigating Subcommittee conducted a review of Department of Defense worldwide communications.41 The House Armed Services Committee investigation of 1971 seems to have been the culmination of the interest in U.S. military communications first developed by the JCS/Russ Report in 1967 and expanded upon by the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1968 and the House Appropriations Committee in 1968. The concern about communications problems had been exacerbated by the losses of the USS Pueblo in 1968 and a U.S. Navy EC-l21 intelligence gathering plane in 1969. The investigation sought to deal with inadequacies in U.S. military worldwide communications, as a national interest.
The portion of the text of the report regarding the USS Liberty is extremely important and highly instructive. Nevertheless, there are a few mistakes in the report. For example, it states that the Liberty suffered seventy-five wounded instead of the correct 171.42 The report traces each of the five delayed messages, catalogues the specific route of each message, and attributes the reasons for the delays. The report discloses that deletions were made from the report on the recommendation of the Office of the Directorate of Security Review of the Department of Defense.43 Rear Adm. Francis J. Fitzpatrick, Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Communications and the number-two person on the Russ Report team, testified extensively before the committee in secret session.44 The admiral informed the committee on a number of facts and nuances that were ultimately deleted from the published report for security reasons, as indicated above.
The committee was shocked by testimony of Admiral Fitzpatrick that in June 1967 there was no protocol between the Army Communications Station in the Pentagon and the U.S. Navy for sending a message to a ship. The Navy sent messages to fleet broadcast via Navy communications daily. The army rarely sent messages to ships, and on the few occasions when it did, the messages were to ships off Vietnam. This is probably the reason the messages were routed to the Navy Communications Station in the Philippines.
To better appreciate the text of the report, one should be aware that, notwithstanding the fact that the United States has the world’s finest navy, for some reason even as recently as the Gulf War the Navy remained woefully inadequate in its routine communications with its deployed ships. Brig. Gen. Roscoe Cougill (Ret.), speaking at Harvard University on the status of naval communications during the Gulf War, said: “Then Desert Storm began. I did have message backlogs when the war started, mainly in the priority and routine area and mainly with the U.S. Navy, which was still locked somewhere in the 17th century with its communications.”45
In 1967, fleetwide broadcasts and other naval messages were generated by teletype. If the message was classified up to secret, following its being typed in English into the teletype machine, it was automatically encrypted and then transmitted. When received, the message was automatically decoded and printed. This process was known as “on-line encryption.” However, if the message being generated was classified top secret, after being typed it was first manually encrypted. The message then had to be decoded manually and printed at the receiving end. This was known as “off-line encryption.”
This completely manual procedure (with the built-in factor of greater likelihood of human error) meant that there was a greater possibility of delay in understanding commands in the rare top-secret messages sent over the fleetwide broadcast system to second-level units such as the Liberty.
Hence some of the “Findings and Conclusions” of the House Armed Services Investigating Subcommittee Report are noteworthy:
1.Communications systems are only as good as those who operate and use them in the command and decision making process. . . .
b.The Department of Defense Satellite Communications System will not achieve operational capability for some time. That system has lagged several years behind commercial systems. . . .
g.The time required for processing of messages, before and after their electronic transmission, has prevented any significant improvement in “writer-to-reader” time, despite installation of automatic switch equipment. Statistics reflect that an average of 70 minutes is required for processing a “flash” message, whereas the average time for electronic transmission of such a message is only 5 minutes.
2.Unresponsive communications systems of the Department of Defense delayed the execution of command decisions and retarded the transmission of information to
command officials in critical international situations.46
In the summary of the report, a colloquy between Rep. Durward C. Hall of Missouri and Air Force lieutenant general Richard P. Klocko,47 the director of the Defense Communications Agency, was carried on:
Mr. Hall. The clincher is to ask the General one question: Given another scenario like the Liberty, are you confident in your own mind that now we would have the necessary communications to promptly and effectively complete the command decision?
General Klocko. No, sir, I couldn’t guarantee that.
Mr. Hall. Then we are in a hell of a mess Mr. Chairman.48
The problem of inadequate communications was not unique to the Liberty incident. It should be remembered that in 1812 the war between the United States and England concluded with the Treaty of Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814. But because that information couldn’t be communicated in a timely way, the Battle of New Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815, fifteen days after the combat had effectively ended, costing seventy-one U.S. casualties and the loss of 289 lives by the British. Communications capability has improved over the years to the state described by Vice Adm. John M. McConnell, deputy director of the CIA, at the U.S. Naval Institute Military Intelligence Seminar at Suitland, Maryland, on June 27, 1995. Admiral McConnell said: “Today signals that are intercepted on the battlefield usually are too complex to be handled on the battlefield. It requires a lot of computer power. It is routine for us now to bring them from the battlefield back to NSA to do whatever the processing is needed on the signal and then move it back to the battlefield. In Yugoslavia that takes us twelve seconds. In some places we do it in as few as three seconds.” Unfortunately, in 1967, the U.S. Navy communications capability was more like that of 1812 than 1995.
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