The Attack on the Liberty

by James Scott

  The executive officer had demonstrated his camaraderie with his men a year earlier. The Navy holds an initiation ceremony the first time a sailor crosses the equator. Veteran sailors called “shellbacks” shave the heads of the uninitiated “pollywogs.” The pollywogs climb through an approximately thirty-foot chute made from a tarp and filled with rotting trash and food waste as sailors heckle and paddle them. Armstrong had never participated in a line-crossing ceremony despite his long career in the Navy. The shellbacks couldn’t wait. For two weeks, cooks hoarded rotting food in a locked compartment as nervous sailors waited. The day before the ceremony, Armstrong met in secret with a dozen of his fellow pollywogs. Lieutenant j.g. Mac Watson recorded the meeting with a single line in his journal: “Formulated plan to capture garbage.” The pollywogs broke into the locked compartment that night and seized the trash. Bag after bag of garbage soon dropped into the ocean as Armstrong secured his hero status.

  Unlike the rigid McGonagle, Armstrong often bent regulations. The ship’s supply officer discovered in a routine audit that the executive officer had used some of the Liberty’s money to buy personal power tools and carpeting for his Virginia Beach home. His close ties with some sailors at a repair shop back in a Norfolk had resulted in a taxpayer-funded paint job for his aged Plymouth, albeit battleship gray. His most serious infraction concerned his thirst for scotch. The Navy barred alcohol on ships, which meant Liberty sailors could go as long as a month without a drink. But not Armstrong. Ensign Scott discovered that when he first reported aboard the Liberty and knocked on the door of the executive officer’s stateroom. A gravelly voice ordered him inside, where Scott found Armstrong at his desk and two other officers seated on a nearby couch. The Liberty’s newest officer introduced himself.

  “What’s your pleasure?” Armstrong asked. “Scotch or bourbon?”

  “Sir?”

  “Scotch or bourbon?” he repeated.

  Scott froze. The twenty-three-year-old was no prude but was stunned by Armstrong’s offer. Scott recalled one of his instructors in Officer Candidate School ordering him to crank out extra push-ups as punishment for a hangover he had earned while on time off. He felt certain Armstrong’s invitation was a test. Not until later did Scott learn this was how the executive officer welcomed all new officers aboard the Liberty. Scott considered his options when he noticed a couple of bottles that poked out of one of the drawers of Armstrong’s desk. He glanced at the officers on the couch. Each one held a glass. One of the men raised his and shook it so the cubes rattled in the bottom. Armstrong motioned for Scott to decide.

  “Scotch, please,” he said. “Sir.”

  The executive officer fished a bottle of his favorite Johnnie Walker Black Label from the drawer, unscrewed the top, and poured a glass for the Liberty’s new ensign in what would become an afternoon ritual. Armstrong mixed his Johnnie Walker with cold water from the fountain in the passageway outside his stateroom. Fearful that McGonagle might discover his afternoon cocktail hour, Armstrong later asked a favor of Scott, one of the Liberty’s engineers. With the help of a couple of shipfitters one afternoon, Scott pulled the water fountain away from the wall, removed the rear plate, and spliced a new waterline. The men cut a hole through the passageway bulkhead into the executive officer’s stateroom with a blowtorch and ran the new cold water line into Armstrong’s room just beneath his sink that produced only tepid water. A valve on the end controlled the flow. Armstrong never again would have to leave his stateroom to mix a cold drink.

  Many of Armstrong’s men looked past his flaws. The executive officer recognized that the majority of the Liberty’s sixteen officers were under thirty. The Navy was the first time many had been away from home. Armstrong invited some of them to his Virginia Beach home each week when the Liberty was in port, for dinner with his wife and children. He encouraged both officers and enlisted men to seek him out with problems. He graciously corrected errors and tried not to demean his men. Though Armstrong endeared himself to the younger sailors, some senior officers disapproved of his behavior. Lieutenant Commander Dave Lewis, who ran the National Security Agency’s operation, had lived across the hall from Armstrong at the Naval Academy. Armstrong’s drinking concerned Lewis. He also disliked the executive officer’s habit of swiping the NSA’s magnetic tapes to record music on the reel-to-reel recorder in his stateroom.

  Despite Armstrong’s flaws, McGonagle respected him. The skipper would deny years later that he knew Armstrong drank on board, though it was well-known among the officers and crew. McGonagle rated his second in command in his performance evaluations as “outstanding” and “exceptional,” the two highest marks. Because Armstrong was a Naval Academy graduate—and would ascend the ranks faster—McGonagle likely would have been reserved with his criticism, but his evaluations appeared genuine. He singled out Armstrong’s loyalty, cooperation, and imagination. He noted no weaknesses in Armstrong’s evaluation and often recommended him for promotion, including in the evaluation he worked on as the Liberty steamed north toward Spain. “LCDR Armstrong is self-confident and inspires confidence in his ability,” McGonagle wrote in one report. “He is concerned with the welfare, personal and professional advancement of his subordinates and willingly assists them whenever possible.” That confidence and willingness to assist would prove essential on this next mission.

  CHAPTER 2

  The circumstances surrounding the misrouting, loss and delays of those messages constitute one of the most incredible failures of communications in the history of the Department of Defense.

  —HOUSE ARMED SERVICES INVESTIGATING SUBCOMMITTEE

  President Lyndon Johnson charted the latest headlines out of the Middle East that rattled off the Oval Office teletype machines in late May 1967. In the background, other news reports droned on three televisions next to his desk. The crisis between Israel and Egypt could not have come at a more inopportune time. The cost of the Vietnam War had soared to more than $2 billion a month. Casualties for May 1967 totaled 9,142, including 1,177 deaths. America lost 337 men in the third week of May alone—a new weekly record. The war had evolved into an obsession that poisoned the White House. “Vietnam was a fungus, slowly spreading its suffocating crust over the great plans of the president, both here and overseas,” observed Jack Valenti, one of Johnson’s closest advisers. “No matter what we turned our hands and minds to, there was Vietnam, its contagion infecting everything that it touched, and it seemed to touch everything.”

  America had ramped up its bombing campaign in the past two years in an attempt to force the North Vietnamese to surrender. The 25,000 sorties flown in 1965 more than quadrupled by 1967. During the same time period, the tonnage of bombs jumped from 63,000 to 226,000. American bombers choked the skies day and night, pounding bridges, railroads, power stations, and factories. Nearly a half-million American soldiers and Marines slogged through the damp jungles, battling over obscure strongholds with names such as Hill 861. To ferret out communist guerrillas, troops bulldozed villages and hamlets. Others torched fruit trees and rice granaries. The Pentagon spent $32 million on five million gallons of defoliants in 1967 alone, and increased the budget to about $50 million for the following year. Civilian casualties climbed into the thousands.

  The ferocity of the American attacks repulsed national religious leaders and some members of Congress. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in an April speech at Manhattan’s Riverside Church, ran through a litany of American atrocities and begged the president to end the war. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam,’” preached the Nobel Peace Prize winner. “I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.” Democratic senator George McGovern of South Dakota lashed out three weeks later on Capitol Hill at what he described as a “war without end.” “We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it,” he said in a speech on the Senate fl
oor that grabbed national headlines. “I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness.”

  It was clear the president’s policy had failed. In interrogations with captured North Vietnamese fighters and fishermen, the Central Intelligence Agency had determined in a string of reports released in May that twenty-seven months of American bombing had not weakened North Vietnam’s strategy or morale. Its leadership remained “fanatically devoted.” Even the popular mood, the spy agency concluded, comprised “resolute stoicism with a considerable reservoir of endurance still untapped.” On May 23—the same day Liberty sailors strolled the wide boulevards of Abidjan—the CIA said that the United States might have to resort to extreme measures not seen since World War II if it wanted to win in Southeast Asia: “Short of a major invasion or nuclear attack, there is probably no level of air or naval action against North Vietnam which Hanoi has determined in advance would be so intolerable that the war had to be stopped.”

  Vietnam had hit a stalemate.

  The frustration that permeated the White House and Congress reflected the mounting tension and hostility of the American public. The first president to regularly employ a private polling company, the fifty-eight-year-old Johnson obsessed over public-approval polls. Over the past year, as the president paced the Oval Office, he had watched his approval numbers plummet from 61 percent in March 1966 to 48 percent in early May 1967. Beyond popularity, polls showed that nearly three out of four Americans doubted Johnson was telling them the truth about the war. The 1968 election loomed less than eighteen months away. Polls taken in the winter and spring showed that Republican candidates Richard Nixon and George Romney might tie or beat Johnson if the election were held then. It all came down to Vietnam.

  The president and his senior advisers became magnets for criticism and anger, particularly Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The men outwardly projected a stoic front, but the increased hostility and ugliness of the antiwar campaign rattled them. The Georgia-born Rusk, who once joked that he looked more like Hoss Cartwright from the television western Bonanza than a statesman, found himself the target of protesters, some of whom on occasion hurled bags of cow’s blood at him. During an April speech at Cornell University with his son in the audience, dozens of students suddenly jumped up and pulled on skull masks. The jarring scene left Rusk’s wife in tears in the car afterward. The stress manifested into nightmares and a constant stomachache that left Rusk at times on his back on the living room floor in agony. The secretary of state propelled himself on a daily regimen of “aspirin, scotch, and four packs of Larks.”

  McNamara fared no better. Twice activists set fire to his Colorado vacation home. Once at Harvard several hundred angry students blocked his car and mobbed him, forcing the defense secretary to escape through the university’s underground tunnels. When McNamara waited to board a plane in the Seattle airport in August 1966, a man spit on him and called him a “murderer.” A similar event had happened over the Christmas holidays as McNamara and his wife dined in an Aspen restaurant. “Baby burner,” a woman yelled at him. “You have blood on your hands!” McNamara’s wife and son developed ulcers; his wife’s even required surgery. To get through the night, McNamara began swallowing sleeping pills.

  Even the president, shielded by Secret Service agents who increasingly restricted his public appearances, felt the sting of the public’s growing hatred of the war. He watched as his frustrated aides defected to other jobs in Washington and beyond, and his plans for the Great Society stagnated. The war’s fallout infiltrated the president’s private life, dominating conversations with the first lady. At night, the president often lay awake. “The only difference between the Kennedy assassination and mine,” he complained to friends, “is that I am alive and it has been more torturous.” Lady Bird Johnson detailed the tensions in her diary. “Now is indeed ‘the Valley of the Black Pig,’” she confessed, quoting a poem by William Butler Yeats. “A miasma of trouble hangs over everything.”

  The Liberty reached the Spanish port of Rota the morning of June 1 after a three-thousand-mile trip north from Abidjan that had taken eight days. The spy ship had averaged fifteen knots even after it suffered a boiler failure, followed by high winds and heavy seas that ripped life raft covers, toppled paint cans inside the deck locker, and coated the bow in salt. Conditions had improved the day before the Liberty’s arrival in Spain, allowing crews the first chance in a week to swab the decks with salt water. The Liberty reduced speed from seventeen knots to five knots as it approached the American naval station on the southern tip of Europe. A harbor pilot climbed aboard at 9:40 A.M. as two Navy tugboats pulled alongside to help guide the Liberty to pier 1, near the U.S.S. Canopus, a docked submarine tender. The Liberty secured anchor detail, doubled its mooring lines and set the in-port watch by 10:29 A.M.

  Commander McGonagle had hoped to spend as little as five hours in Rota, time enough to pump 380,000 gallons of fuel and load food, personnel, and crypto records before steaming east toward the spy ship’s assigned operating area twelve and a half miles off the Egyptian coast. Mechanical failures slowed the Liberty’s departure by a day as technicians repaired a faulty hydraulic line on the satellite dish and removed two antennae and a cable from one of the masts for repairs. Deck crews used the time to clean and rearrange the paint locker, stitch the damaged life raft covers, and remove the harbor pilot ladder for repairs after one of the tugs damaged it. Vice Admiral William Martin, the commander of the Sixth Fleet, planned a visit to the Liberty the next week. McGonagle ordered his executive officer and deck crew to inspect the ropes and pulleys that might be needed to high-line the admiral between ships. “I can just see us dunking him in the water,” Ensign Dave Lucas wrote to his wife. “That would be a gas!”

  Questions over the Liberty’s mission had intensified as the spy ship steamed up the African coast. Uncertainty evolved into apprehension after a rumor spread that astrologer and professed psychic Jeane Dixon had predicted America would lose a Navy ship that year. The celebrity psychic claimed in 1956 in an article published in Parade magazine that America would elect a Democrat as the president in the 1960 election and that he would die in office. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 cemented her pop culture status and earned her the nickname the “Seeress of Washington.” Though Dixon never actually predicted the loss of a ship, rumor morphed into fact in conversations in the mess deck, wardroom, and berthing spaces. Even those uninterested in her alleged predictions still wondered what lay ahead. “Everybody is speculating as to where the ship is going exactly; what ports we’ll visit, if any, and for how long we’ll be in the Med.,” Ensign John Scott wrote to his parents. “If you don’t hear from me again before I return to Norfolk, it will be because we couldn’t offload any mail and not because I’m lazy.”

  Marine Staff Sergeant Bryce Lockwood strode up the gangway in the June heat soon after the Liberty docked in Rota. Normally based in Germany with his wife and three children, the twenty-seven-year-old had been given temporary duty orders to Spain. The lanky Russian linguist had spent the past couple of weeks in the back of a spy plane, eavesdropping on the Soviet Navy as it performed its annual exercises in the North Sea. His hopes to return home to Germany ended with a knock on the barracks door in the middle of the night. He opened the door to find a Navy messenger with a new set of orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lockwood tossed some uniforms in a sea bag and soon after sunrise marched to the end of the Rota pier to meet the Liberty. Five Arabic linguists joined him as he climbed aboard the spy ship, including two Marines and three NSA civilians.

  Lockwood and the other new arrivals differed from the Liberty’s usual cadre of French and Portuguese linguists needed for missions off West Africa. The Middle East had become another beachhead in the Cold War. America supported Israel; the Soviets backed the Arab countries. Neither side wanted its proxy to lose if war broke out. The Liberty’s new linguists would allow the United States to interce
pt Egypt’s air and defense communications. Intelligence indicated that a Soviet squadron of Tupolev Tu-95s, a long-range bomber and reconnaissance plane known as the Bear, operated out of Alexandria, Egypt. America wanted proof. Because the Liberty’s mission was directed solely against Egypt, the spy ship carried no Hebrew linguists, though one Arabic speaker had briefly studied Hebrew. U.S. spy missions against Israel, which used Athens-based airplanes, were so politically sensitive that the NSA classified its Hebrew speakers as “special Arabic” linguists.

  The Liberty prepared to sail on the afternoon of June 2. McGonagle’s new orders directed him to steam east along the North African coast and advised him to remain just beyond the territorial waters of nations such as Libya, Algeria, and Tunisia, a position that would allow the spooks to intercept communications en route. McGonagle was aware of the dangers. Though the Liberty was classified as a scientific research ship, its towering antennae revealed its true mission. As the skipper would later tell Navy investigators, the spy ship’s unusual configuration had prompted some African navies to harass the Liberty on two of its four previous cruises. McGonagle ordered a five-section watch with two officers stationed on the bridge at most times. The log shows that at 1:22 P.M., the harbor pilot climbed aboard. Two Navy tugs helped guide the Liberty out of port. The harbor pilot departed at 1:58 P.M. and McGonagle assumed the conn, meaning he dictated the ship’s speed and direction. The Liberty soon increased speed to seventeen knots.

  Sailors crowded the deck as the ship slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow waterway that separates Africa and Europe. The Liberty overtook three Soviet ships that steamed in a column at thirteen knots. Officers on the Liberty identified two of the ships as the Semen Dezhnev and the Andrey Vilishksit in a message to the Navy’s London headquarters. One of the ships queried the Liberty’s identity with a signal light. McGonagle ordered a curt reply: “U.S. Navy ship.” The winds created whitecaps in the entrance to the Mediterranean. Even at a distance of approximately six miles and with a late afternoon haze, sailors pointed to and snapped photos of the jagged Rock of Gibraltar rising 1,400 feet above the sea. The fabled Pillars of Hercules amazed even the seasoned McGonagle, who likely had only imagined them as a poor youth in the California date fields. One of the officers captured the skipper’s fascination in a letter: “Shep was like a kid with a new toy when he saw the Rock.”