Once the torpedo boats departed, McGonagle directed his vessel to Malta. Sixth Fleet escorts reached the Liberty sixteen hours after the attack and trailed the vessel, picking up classified and cryptographic keying material escaping from the hole in the hull. The Liberty limped into Malta on 14 June after a heroic struggle to stay afloat that eventually earned McGonagle the Medal of Honor. In all, thirty-four crewmembers were killed, including one NSA civilian Arabic linguist, Allen Blue. The men lost their lives in a war in which the U.S. was not a combatant because of errors in a military communications system that, by 1967, could no longer do the job.
At NSA, word of the attack reached [NSA] Director [General] Marshall Carter at 0915 Washington time. The telephone began ringing almost at once, as word of the attack spread through Washington. While Carter was directing intercept coverage reallocation, Secretary of Defense McNamara called him (at 1015) to ask for details on the vessel and the voyage so that he could make a statement to the press. Deputy Director [of the NSA] Louis Tordella took charge of devising a cover story. Carter diverted many of the queries to NSG (Naval Security Group). At one point during the day the director got a call from the Joint Reconnaissance Center suggesting that the vessel be sunk. Carter replied that this was the worst thing they could do—heaps of classified documents and equipment would end up in shallow water. He was right, and McGonagle’s heroic piloting of his vessel to moorage in Malta saved what could have become a much worse situation.
Lyndon Johnson got word at 0949. At the time the U.S. still did not know the identity of the attackers, but the White House soon found out through a Defense Attaché Office message from Tel Aviv that the Israeli navy had admitted the error. This presented the president with a very touchy dilemma. Because of Arab charges that the U.S. had assisted the Israelis, the Sixth Fleet was standing far away from the conflict in the central Mediterranean. Yet here, unannounced, was an American naval vessel only a few miles off the coast of Israel, in the middle of a war zone. Johnson’s first concern was about Soviet reaction. He had Walt Rostow send a message to Kosygin [premier of the USSR] stating that the Israelis had apparently fired on a U.S. ship in error and that the Sixth Fleet was sending ships and planes to investigate (he repeated it twice). Kosygin replied that he had passed the message to Nasser.
Meantime, the Pentagon had released a statement about the attack, indicating that the Liberty’s mission was to “assure communications between U.S. Government posts in the Middle East and to assist in relaying information concerning the evacuation of American dependents and other American citizens from countries in the Middle East.” This was the cover story that NSA had devised under hurried circumstances. It didn’t work, but like the [American] U-2 [downed by the Soviets] incident in 1960, no cover story would have worked in the situation. The press very quickly sniffed out the truth, which was attributed to an anonymous military officer that the Liberty was a “spy ship.” According to this source, “Russia does the same thing. We moved in close to monitor the communications of both Egypt and Israel. We have to. We must be informed of what’s going on in a matter of minutes.” The assertion was denied by official sources, but the true mission of the Liberty was never in doubt again. (The vessel did not, in fact, have an Israeli mission because linguists were too scarce.)
How did the incident happen? Was it a deliberate attack by Israel, as has been alleged countless times by many people? (Even General Carter believed it to have been deliberate.) If it was an accident, how could the Israelis have possibly misidentified the ship? The Liberty was flying an American flag, was clearly marked on the hull “AGTR-5,” [NOTE: The ship was actually marked GTR 5.] and when the first flag was shot down by the attacking fighters, McGonagle hoisted the largest flag he had on board, a holiday ensign seven by thirteen feet. This enormous flag was flying above the Liberty when the torpedo boats executed their attack.
The idea that the attack was deliberate turned out to be wrong. Although there was no SIGINT bearing directly on the attack, there was a [redacted] report shortly after the incident dealing with the aftermath. It reported air/ground conversations between a ground controller at Hatsor [Israel Air Force base] and two Israeli helicopters which reconnoitered the Liberty as it was turning toward Malta. Hatsor first identified the vessel as Egyptian, but later became unsure, and requested that the helicopter crews “verify the first man that you [bring up] as to what nationality he is.” A few minutes later Hatsor instructed: “Pay attention; if they speak Arabic and are Egyptians take them to Al Arish. If they speak English and are not Egyptians, take them to Lydda . . . the first thing is for you to clarify what nationality they are.” Two minutes later Hatsor asked, “Did it clearly signal an American flag?” And a minute later, “Requesting that you make another pass and check again whether it is really an American flag.”
One can imagine the panic at Israeli naval headquarters at the time. They had apparently attacked a vessel of their closest ally. [NOTE: It is a bit of a stretch to refer to the U.S. and Israel as “allies” in 1967. U.S.-Israeli relations would blossom into a close friendship—never a formal alliance—only later.]
Based on this report, Rostow told Johnson that the Israelis appeared to be confused about the nationality of the vessel, and he suggested that there might have been some breakdown within the Israeli military which resulted in the attack.
The official Israeli court of inquiry concluded on 21 July [1967] that it had in fact been an identification error. When the Liberty was first discovered by an Israeli spotter plane on the morning of the eighth, it was unidentified but possibly hostile, and a red marker was placed on the map in the naval war room. Later in the morning, the identification was tentatively changed to friendly (American), and a green marker replaced the red one. But the Israeli navy then went a period of time without a location, and someone, instead of retaining the green marker with a question mark, pulled it off the map entirely.
The [Israeli navy] shift changed at 1100 Israeli time, and the new shift knew nothing about the American vessel, which was no longer designated on the map. What they did know was that Israeli army units in the Sinai coastal town of Al Arish were reporting artillery bombardment from an unknown source. (It later turned out to be the explosion of an ammunition dump.) The Israelis began searching the Sea for a possible hostile ship, and they found the Liberty. The crew of the vessel that did the identification claimed that its radar showed the ship to be heading at twenty-eight knots toward Suez (an impossible speed for the Liberty—an error by the radar operator), and Israeli naval control ordered an air attack. Two Mirage fighters on their way home from an air patrol over the Suez Canal were diverted to the spot where the supposed hostile [ship] was. After a quick pass, the pilots claimed that the ship was not displaying a flag (another error) and were ordered to execute an attack.
The torpedo boats arrived in the area at 1418. A low-flying aircraft had just radioed to its controller that he had seen a marking “CPR-5” on the hull. The naval controller told the torpedo boats to attempt a better identification, but the captain of one of the boats claimed that when he requested identification, the ship requested him to identify himself first. Based on identification aids available on board, it appeared to him to be the Egyptian supply vessel El-Kasir, and with this information in hand Israeli naval control again ordered an attack. After the first torpedo hit the boat the markings “CTR-5” were observed on the hull. Control immediately terminated the attack, just before the torpedo boats were about to launch additional torpedoes that would have sunk the Liberty. An Israeli helicopter flying over the ship after the attack finally noticed an American flag, and the Israeli navy realized what it had done.
An Israeli court of inquiry, whose findings were kept secret at the time (but which were uncovered and published by two Israeli journalists in 1984), condemned the confusion, incompetence, and interservice rivalry that contributed to the attack. There was no finding of a deliberate attack, but there was plenty of blame for all the Israelis
associated with the incident.
The Johnson administration was properly outraged. The State Department, in a scathing statement highly unusual for diplomats, called the attack “quite literally incomprehensible. As a minimum, the attack must be condemned as an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.” But Clark Clifford, who was appointed by the president to render a final judgment, called it an identification error. Clifford relied heavily on COMINT reports showing Israeli confusion about the identification; these would have been difficult to fake. Going into it with a preconceived notion that the Israelis must have known, he concluded that what was involved was “a flagrant act of gross negligence . . .” rather than a deliberate act.
This did not, of course, quiet the press. Journalists, both reputable and disreputable, supported the “deliberate attack” theory, and the legend arose, without basis in fact, that the Israelis wanted to blind American SIGINT sensors to their communications, both to keep them from finding out that Israel actually started the war and to keep secret a plan to launch an attack on Syria. (As was stated already, the vessel was not targeting Israeli communications and had no Hebrew linguists on board.) All these charges were repeated and embellished by James M. Ennes, a lieutenant on board the Liberty who published a book on the subject in 1980. Most of the crew still believes that the attack was deliberate.
Many of the journalists properly questioned the position of the vessel at the time. Clifford, too, made a special point of this. The Liberty was clearly not where it should have been. The original plan was formulated before war broke out. Once the eastern Mediterranean became a battleground, it was decided to hold the Liberty out of the area, but the messages never reached McGonagle. The U.S. communications system was approaching breakdown; war sufficed to push it over the edge.
The crew, on the other hand, performed magnificently, and they and their vessel deserved better. NSA wanted to refurbish the ship and use it again, but the price tag of over $10 million was too high. The Liberty was decommissioned a year after the attack, and in 1973 it was cut up for scrap in Baltimore’s Curtis Bay Shipyard. An abashed Israeli government paid $13 million in compensation for the loss of life and damage to the vessel.
The attack on the Liberty should not be viewed as a bizarre, or even an especially unusual identification error. Even in peacetime such errors are made all too frequently—the Soviet shootdown of KAL 007 and the American shootdown of an Iranian airliner are good examples. When a country is at war, the possibility of error is compounded by haste and fear. Losses to friendly fire always represent a substantial percentage of the casualties. And the Israeli agreement to compensate should not be taken as proof of guilty knowledge, but rather as an attempt to retain the friendship of a benefactor wronged.
Dr. Johnson’s comment that “the Israeli agreement to compensate should not be taken as proof of guilty knowledge” is fully supported by facts. When the incident occurred the Israelis were shocked and horrified at what had happened and initially assumed that the mistake was all on the Israeli side. As more facts became available it became apparent that there were multiple mistakes by both Israel and the United States—a “perfect storm” that had compounded to bring about the tragedy.
Within about a year, the Israelis tried to make amends by paying humanitarian reparations to the wounded and the families of the deceased. Under international law and most national legal systems, such payments for human suffering are considered humanitarian gestures and not admissions of guilt or liability. However, under both international and most local law, payment for property damage is considered an admission of guilt or fault. For that reason Israel refused to pay for damage to the ship until it was finally agreed by exchange of diplomatic notes on December 17, 1980, that payment by Israel to the U.S. for damages to the USS Liberty was “without prejudice to the legal position of the Government of Israel and to the question of liability for the tragic event.”5
Chapter 21
FINAL ANALYSIS
There are many important lessons that can be learned from this tragic story. One important one is that field commanders need to know what they are doing and why. The better briefing a participant in a military operation receives, the more likely it is that the participant will exercise discretion in the face of unforeseen events or changes in conditions or circumstances on the scene. Not every sailor on the Liberty needed to know the details of the Liberty’s mission, but the commanding officer most certainly should have been fully briefed on the purpose of his ship’s mission. Since the purpose of the mission had been overtaken by events, there was no need for the Liberty to remain in harm’s way. If Commander McGonagle had been informed of the purpose of the ship’s mission, perhaps he would have withdrawn his ship from a position of potential danger. He clearly had that inherent authority, and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff certainly confirmed his authority to exercise discretion by virtue of orders transmitted on June 7: “1. In view of present situation east Med, operating area specified ref for guidance only and may be varied as local conditions dictate.”1
Sending insufficiently armed military units either into, or close to, areas controlled by friendly or hostile forces where major wars are raging is risky at best. Today, it is neither prudent nor necessary to collect electronic intelligence in this manner. With the advent of modern satellite technology, the National Security Agency became aware that satellites are a more effective, far safer way to collect the electronic intelligence (ELINT) that the Liberty and her sister ships had been designed to collect.
Less than a year after the tragedy of the Liberty, on January 23, 1968, the U.S. Navy lost another ELINT ship, the USS Pueblo. The reference to history repeating itself printed on the cover of Trevor Armbrister’s book on the Pueblo affair is uncanny: “A combat-oriented naval bureaucracy sends an unfit intelligence ship commanded by an ill-informed officer on a confused mission into dangerous waters.”2 Following the tragedy of the Liberty, the loss of the Pueblo in the Sea of Japan and of a U.S. Navy EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft shot down by North Korea over the Sea of Japan on April 15, 1969, the ELINT ships were decommissioned; since then the same and better data has been collected by satellite, without risk to life.3
Another lesson, not new, is even more important. Truth and candor are best when it comes to national policy. Misleading the public by issuing false press releases (as, for the Liberty, the U.S. Department of Defense did on April 14, 1969) and keeping the facts classified (as both the United States and Israel did for ten years in this incident) only feeds conspiracy theories and tall tales. While the plain and simple facts of the Liberty tragedy, perhaps embarrassing to some, remained classified, a wide-ranging literature developed, with a spectrum of conspiratorial explanations running from the interesting to the bizarre. No useful purpose was accomplished by this governmental nondisclosure. Moreover, the image of the United States was damaged by the initial false statement and subsequent failure to disclose the whole truth.
The Liberty incident, in its externals—occurring as it did during an armed conflict with the loss of thirty-four U.S. lives—is similar to the cases of the Stark, in which thirty-seven died; the Mayaguez incident, with forty-one fatalities;4 and the Black Hawk incident of April 14, 1994, over northern Iraq, with twenty-six killed. Unlike the Liberty case, the investigations of the Stark, Mayaguez, and Black Hawk incidents were all completed quickly and transparently. Perhaps it is for that reason these incidents did not seem to have the lasting allure of the Liberty incident. Certainly they have not become the hot-button political issue that the Liberty incident has become. Probably the biggest mistake made, after the event, by both the United States and Israel was the failure to quickly and publicly disclose the contents of their numerous official investigations for so many years.
With the National Security Agency releases of July 2, 2004, and June 6, 2007, and the State Department release of Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume XIX, essentially all of the known significant
data is now declassified or obtainable, but the stories and theories of the conspiracy theorists and doubters have had at least a ten-year head start. It is easy to read a letter to the editor or a newspaper or magazine article and form an opinion without making a complete examination of the many details of the official investigations that put more light on the subject. In addition, as has been discussed, many of the conspiracy theorists have their own agendas, which do not always coincide with precise factual presentation or even with a need to be truthful. The Israeli factor plays a role here, in that so many Muslim organizations and Arab countries have special reasons to attack the U.S.-Israeli relationship. They know the answer before they investigate the issue. They then select or twist the facts to support their advance conclusion, ignoring the facts that undermine, let alone negate, their thesis.
This investigation began as a quest to answer on question: Did the Israelis knowingly and deliberately attack a U.S. naval vessel? This author did not decide the answer in advance of the investigation. The initial effort began with a search for a “smoking gun.” That search proved fruitless. Adm. Isaac Kidd, the president of the U.S. Navy court of inquiry held on the incident, when asked by this author if the court had found any smoking guns, replied “We didn’t even find a water pistol.”
This author’s twenty-seven year research effort fully corroborates the findings of the U.S. and Israeli official investigations, with which the network television programs on the subject generally agree. The facts are by now clear, and the totality of the evidence establishes that while in port in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on May 24, 1967, the Liberty received orders to proceed at her best speed to a point in the Mediterranean near Port Said, Egypt. The Liberty sailed promptly and reached the U.S. naval base at Rota, Spain, on June 1, 1967; there she underwent hurried repairs and took on board several Arabic and some Russian linguists for duty in the National Security Agency compartment of the ship. On June 2, 1967, the Liberty sailed from Rota for an assigned patrol station off the coast of the Sinai peninsula. On her patrol, assigned before the 1967 war began, Liberty’s closest position to the pre 1967 war Israel border was beyond the range of her VHF/UHF listening capability.5
The Liberty Incident Revealed Page 31