The Liberty Incident Revealed
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13.There are a possible six hundred VHF frequencies or channels (118 MHZ to 132 MHZ) and over 1,930 UHF frequencies or channels (225 MHZ to 418 MHZ) from which to select.
14.Record U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry, Liberty Incident, Record of Proceedings, testimony of Lt. (jg) L. Painter, 59/164/164.
15.Deck log of USS Amberjack for June 9, 1967, on file at the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC).
16.Deck log of USS Andrew Jackson for June 8, 1967, on file at NHHC.
17.Deck log of USS Trutta for June 8, 1967, on file at NHHC.
18.Deck log of USS Requin for June 8, 1967, on file at NHHC.
19.The original affidavit of Capt. Augustine Hubel is on file with the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida. It may be reviewed at The Liberty Incident, www.thelibertyincident.com, Amberjack Skipper’s affidavit.
20.The original affidavit of Vice Adm. Marmaduke G. Bayne is on file with the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida. It may be viewed at The Liberty Incident, www.thelibertyincident.com, COMSUBFLOT8 Affidavit.
21.Vice Adm. Marmaduke Gresham Bayne, oral history, August 26, 1998, NHHC, 75.
22.See record of U.S. District Court, Case No. 03–20123-CIV-HUCK, A. Jay Cristol v. National Security Agency.
23.Ibid.
24.Nikolai Cherkashin, “On Moscow’s Orders,” Russian Life, October 1996, 13. Originally published in Russian in Rodina.
25.Ibid., 14.
26.Passover 1968 was celebrated from April 12 to April 20; Passover 1967 was celebrated from April 25 to April 30.
27.Cherkashin, “On Moscow’s Orders,” 13.
Chapter 18. Confirmation: Department of State
1.Letter
From: “Tudda, Christopher J”
The United States, the Middle East, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1967
Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
January 12–13, 2004
The Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, will host a conference on the Arab-Israeli Crisis and War of 1967, within the broader context of U.S. relations with the Middle East during the Johnson administration. The conference will be held on January 12 and 13, 2004, in Washington, DC, and coincide with the release of the forthcoming volume in the Department of State’s historical series, Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. XIX, The Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967. The volume covers the period from May 1967, when Egyptian President Nasser requested the removal of the United Nations Emergency Force, to November 1967, when the United Nations passed Resolution 242. The Office of the Historian invites proposals for original papers on topics relating to the pre-war regional crises, the war itself, and the immediate post-war impact. Paper proposals should concentrate on the time period under consideration. Possible themes include:
Origins of the 1967 war (e.g., military and strategic decisions, Arab states and leaders, Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union)
U.S. diplomacy leading up to and during the war
The USS Liberty incident and the role of intelligence
Immediate consequences of the crisis and war (e.g., for NATO, the first oil embargo, the regional balance of power)
Regional and international economic dislocations (e.g., Suez canal closure)
U.S. view of post-war problems (e.g., Palestinians, refugees)
U.N. Resolution 242
Other immediate post-war issues
Paper proposals (abstract and c.v.) should be sent, preferably via e-mail or fax, by
October 20, 2003 (NEW DATE) to:
Laurie West Van Hook
Conference Coordinator
Office of the Historian
U.S. Department of State
2401 E Street, NW
Room L-409
Washington, DC 20522
fax: 202–663–1289
tel: 202–663–1125
2.C-SPAN ID:179892-01/12/2004.
3.U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations, 1964–1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967. Summary released by the office of the historian, January 12, 2004, paragraphs 13–15. See www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xix/28165.htm.
4.Dr. Charles Smith, The Palestine and Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
5.The cable was passed to the White House at 6:22 p.m. Significant text of the five-page secret cable declassified on April 27, 1999, follows:
INCOMING TELEGRAM Department of State . . .
P 08164 0Z JUN 67
FM AMEMBASSY TEL AVIV
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY . . .
TEL AVIV 4020
JOINT EMBASSY/DAO . . .
1.FOLLOWING IS SUMMARY OF IDF INTELLIGENCE CHIEF’S BRIEFING OF MCPHERSON OF WHITE HOUSE JUNE 8, 11:30 A. M.
2.GENERAL YARIV SAID THAT THE PRINCIPAL TASK OF THE IDF NOW WAS TO EXPLOIT ITS SUCCESS. THERE STILL REMAINED THE SYRIAN PROBLEM AND PERHAPS IT WOULD BE NECESSARY TO GIVE SYRIA A BLOW TO GET MORE QUOTE ELBOW ROOM UNQUOTE . . .
12.. . . YARIV SAID THERE WERE NO GROUND OPERATIONS IN SYRIA YET, QUOTE UNFORTUNATELY UNQUOTE . . .
BARBOUR
6.U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry, Liberty Incident, Record of Proceedings, Findings of Fact, page 161 of original pagination (p. 266 of AJC and JAG pagination).
Chapter 19. Confirmation: Court of Inquiry Audiotapes
1.The testimony of Ens. John D. Scott is recorded beginning on page 59/163/163 of the U.S. Navy court of inquiry record. See below, note 2.
2.The original court of inquiry record, dated June 18, 1967 consisted of six copies. Copy number 3 is on file with the Office of the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General. Although the entire record is posted on The Liberty Incident, www.thelibertyincident.com/docs/ CourtOfInquiry.pdf, on June 9, 2008, this author received the following information from the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center: “The Court of Inquiry for the Liberty Incident is box 110 of CNO (00) 1969 Collection and is copy 4 of 6. Unfortunately that collection is currently closed. Records that had been reviewed for declassification under Executive Order 12958 (17 April 1995) and authorized for release have been closed pending another review. This new declassification review wsa [sic] mandated by Public Law 105–261, also known as Kyl-Lott. Until Kyl-Lott declassification review is completed the previously declassified records will be closed.”
3.Case No. 2:07–2972-PMD-RSC, James Scott, pro se, Plaintiff v. Naval Historical Center Operational Archives Branch, Defendant.
4.See paragraph 10 of complaint in Scott v. Naval Historical Center.
5.As noted above, there were six copies of the official record of the U.S. Navy court of inquiry. The tapes were found only with the U.S. Naval Historical Center copy number 3. It is not known who made the recordings or how they got to the Naval Historical Center file.
6.The CDs may be obtained by Freedom of Information Act request to Naval History and Heritage Command, 805 Kidder Breese Street, SE, #1, Washington, DC 20374–5055.
7.See Scott v. Naval Historical Center.
8.Ibid.
9.Belt seven of the tapes.
10.See U.S. Navy court of inquiry record, page 174 of original pagination. The record was repaginated by the Judge Advocate General (JAG) to include additional documents and endorsements and also repaginated by this author (AJC). On the Internet, the pages contain three pagination numbers. The JAG and AJC numbers are essentially the same (p. 279 of AJC and JAG pagination).
11.Affidavit of Ward Boston dated October 22, 2003. Boston later also signed a “declaration,” on January 9, 2004.
12.Telephone conversation with Capt. Bert Atkinson, May 22, 1992.
13.Handwritten letter dated 3 August 1991 on letterhead of Adm. I. C. Kidd Jr. to Judge A Jay Cristol.
14.First endorsement of CINCUSNAVEUR (Commander in Chief, Naval Forces Europe), to U.S. Navy court of inquiry dated June 18, 1967.
15.The endorsements are attached to the U.S. Navy court of inquiry. The endorsements reflect the breadth of intere
st in the report within the Navy.
16.James Scott, Attack on the Liberty (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009).
17.Phil G. Goulding, Confirm or Deny: Informing the People on National Security (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 137–67.
18.See “China Rejects U.S. Explanation for Belgrade Embassy Bombing,” Washington Post, June 29, 1999.
19.See Michael Friscolanti, Friendly Fire: The Untold Story of the U.S. Bombing That Killed Four Canadian Soldiers in Afghanistan (Mississauga, Ont.: John Wiley & Sons, 2005).
20.Letter from Cdr. Maurice Bennett to this author, June 3, 2003.
21.E-mail, December 23, 2003, from John Gidusko, a former Liberty crew member, to this author transmitting the text of an e-mail Gidusko sent to Commander Bennett in July 2003.
22.See chapter 7, pages 76 through 88.
23.On March 3, 2000, Marvin E. Nowicki sent a letter to James Bamford together with five enclosures. These materials may be viwed at The Liberty Incident, www.thelibertyincident.com.
24.“Tragic Gross Error in 1967 Attack,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2001, A-23.
25.U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, Case No. 03–20123-CIV-HUCK, Cristol v. National Security Agency.
26.See Castle’s epilogue to this book for a description of that flight.
27.Attack on the Liberty (London: Thames Television, 1987), aired on BBC2, January 27, 1987.
28.Telephone conversation with Hadden.
29.Hartford Courant, August 1, 1967, 16.
30.National Review, September 5, 1967, 956.
31.Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963–1969 (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 300.
32.Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Henry Holt, 2007). Originally published in Hebrew as 1967: Vehaaretz Shinta et Paneiha (Jerusalem: Keter, 2005).
33.Translated for A Jay Cristol by Mitchell Dabach, University of Miami.
34.White House log, Friday, June 9, 1967, 15, Charles “Chuck” Roberts of Newsweek 7:55 p.m.–9:06 p.m.; pages 16–17, Mr. Hugh Sidey 9:12–10:05 p.m.
35.Telephone interview of Hugh Sidy, April 18, 1994 (A Jay Cristol in Miami, Hugh Sidy in Washington, D.C.). Sidy wrote a column titled “The Presidency” for Life from 1966 until 1972 and then wrote the same column for Time. He confirmed that the notes in the White House log sounded like Johnson, who, he said, “figured the world was against him.” He said further that President Johnson liked to play being president in front of reporters and that he was a “congenital liar.”
36.Johnson, Vantage Point, 300–301, 304.
37.See U.S. Navy court of inquiry record.
38.Johnson, Vantage Point, 300.
39.Ibid., 304.
40.Clark Clifford Report, July 18, 1967, 4.
41.Richard Helms and William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), 300–301.
42.Intelligence memorandum, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, June 21, 1967. See U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States Volume XIX, item 317, 540.
Chapter 20. Confirmation: NSA 1995 Historian’s Analysis
1.Siobhan Gorman, “In a New History of NSA, Its Spies Successes Are [redacted],” Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2008, A1.
2.Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War 1945–1989, United States Cryptologic History (Fort George G. Meade, Md.: National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 1995). Originally classified Top Secret, code word Umbra.
3.Gorman, “In a New History of NSA,” A1.
4.“Electronic Briefing Book No. 260,” National Security Agency, History of Cold War Intelligence Activities, National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., www.gwu.edu.
5.A note from Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie to Ephraim Evron, Ambassador of Israel, dated December 17, 1980, states, as follows:
Excellency:
I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note No. AO/315 of December 15, 1980 relating to the U.S. ship “Liberty,” which reads as follows: The Ambassador of Israel presents his compliments to the Secretary of State and has the honour to refer to the Embassy’s note of 22 February 1978 and to consequent exchange of notes concerning physical damage to the U.S. ship “Liberty” on 8 June 1967. Without prejudice to the legal position of the Government of Israel and to the question of liability [emphasis added] for the tragic event the Government of Israel has the honour to propose as full and final settlement of the U.S. claim that Israel pay the United States Government the sum of $6,000,000 (six million dollars) to be paid in three annual Payments of $2,000,000 each, commencing 15 January 1981.
The Ambassador of Israel avails himself of this opportunity to renew to the Secretary of State the assurances of his highest consideration.
I have the honor to inform you that the Government of the United States agrees with your proposed settlement and that your note and my reply thereto constitute the agreement of our two Governments concerning this matter. Accept, Excellency, the renewed assurances of my highest consideration.
For the Secretary of State.
Chapter 21. Final Analysis
1.Confidential message from JCS to USCINCEUR (information copy to Liberty), 072230Z June 67.
2.Trevor Armbrister, A Matter of Accountability: The True Story of the Pueblo Affair (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970).
3.The United States continues to operate the EP-3E, which is a four-engine turboprop ELINT aircraft that replaced the Navy EC-121 in about 1971. The EP-3E community insists that its intelligence gathering is real-time and superior to satellite collection methods. The aircraft has the ability to maintain real-time communication and carry air-search radar that can at least alert it to incoming aircraft. It is vulnerable to surface-to-air missiles. Its maximum speed is less that four hundred nautical miles per hour, which does not allow it to run away from jet fighters or even get out of their way, as evidenced by the midair collision between a U.S. Navy EP-3E Aries II and a Chinese F-8 jet fighter on April 1, 2001. Fortunately, in that incident the entire U.S. Navy crew survived. Sadly, the Chinese fighter pilot, Wang Wei, did not. The aircraft landed on Hainan island. Only the crew, NSA, and the Chinese know the extent of the compromise of highly classified sophisticated electronic equipment, some of which is believed to have been similar to classified surveillance equipment used on the Liberty.
4.On May 12, 1975, the U.S. merchant ship SS Mayaguez was seized in international waters near Cambodia by Khmer Rouge gunboats. In a failed rescue operation, forty-one U.S. Marines were killed and fifty wounded. The failure was attributed to lack of accurate intelligence and faulty communications. See John F. Guilmartin Jr., A Very Short War: The “Mayaguez” and the Battle of Koh Tang (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1995).
5.It is possible that the Liberty had other tasks assigned in the middle-frequency/high-frequency ranges, but these tasks probably could have been accomplished from Cyprus or Turkey or even Greece. This author remains convinced that her primary task was within the VHF/UHF spectrum.
6.UN Security Council Official Records, Twenty-Second Year, 1348th Meeting: 6 June 1967 (New York, n.d.), 2.
7.The specific official reason(s) that the NSA made the initial request is, or are, not known. However, it is known (see JCS Russ Report) that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff realized that Liberty’s scheduled offshore operations area near the Sinai put her in direct conflict with the public announcements of U.S. government officials regarding the location of U.S. ships in relationship to the Arab-Israeli war.
8.Diplomatic note dated December 17, 1980, from U.S. Secretary of State to Ephraim Evron, Ambassador of Israel, referencing note no. AO/315 of December 15, 1980.
9.For the first eleven years following the Liberty incident, there was no mention of Liberty’s mission connected in any way with Israel’s nuclear facility at D
imona. The notion was first presented by Anthony Pearson in his Penthouse articles and his book Conspiracy of Silence: The Attack on the USS “Liberty” (London: Quartet Books, 1978), 148. Wilbur Crane Eveland repeated the story in 1980 in his book Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). Occasionally since 1980 various tales have been published about the Liberty mission as the surveillance of Dimona in order to observe and report any nuclear launch by Israel. There is no supporting evidence for these stories.
10.Dale Andrade, “The Controversy Continues,” Retired Officer, June 1999, 59. In fact, it has been recently revealed that part of the ship’s mission was to find out if the Egyptian air force’s Soviet-made bombers were controlled and flown by Russian pilots.
11.Interview of Maj. Gen. Mordechai Hod on January 11, 1990, by this author, at Tel Aviv.
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
A-A
international maritime query, “What ship?”
A/C
aircraft
AGER
auxiliary environmental research ship
AGI
intelligence-collection ship
AGTR
auxiliary technical research ship
ARAMCO
Arabian American Oil Company
ARPA
automatic radar plotting aid
ATD
automatic tracking device
ATF
fleet tug
AWACS
Airborne Warning and Control System