by James Scott
An uneasy quiet settled over the bridge this morning as Scott scanned the dark horizon with binoculars. The spy ship, after days of steaming east at seventeen knots, had slowed to ten knots as it neared the Egyptian coast. A helmsman, quartermaster, and a couple of lookouts joined Scott on the bridge. Most of the other officers slept below in nearly a dozen staterooms. The chief petty officers bunked in a single compartment and the rest of the crew shared three cavernous berths, the largest able to sleep 135 men in bunks stacked three high. The Liberty required only a few sailors to run the engineering plant, guide the ship, and stand watch. Far below deck in the National Security Agency’s hub, work continued at a frenetic pace despite the early hour. Behind locked doors, communications technicians eavesdropped on radio communications, intercepted Morse code messages, and sniffed out radar systems.
Scott normally found the morning watch a miserable assignment. To stay awake, the young officer downed cups of black coffee and counted rivets on the deck plates. If he was lucky, the Liberty might sail through a patch of phosphorescent algae that sparkled in the dark seas and occasionally illuminated porpoises that liked to swim in the ship’s bow wake. A couple of times, he had even spotted whales. The most exciting event Scott had witnessed on watch happened on an earlier cruise in Africa. The radarman that night had reported fuzzy blips as the ship trolled the coastline, but a scan of the dark waters revealed nothing. A small fleet of fishermen in dugout canoes suddenly appeared in front of the Liberty. The fishermen lit torches to signal the spy ship, but it was too late. Scott could do little more than shout apologies as the lumbering Liberty sliced through their fishing lines.
On this morning—Scott’s twenty-fourth birthday—the eastern Mediterranean was empty. A stream of merchant ships exiting the war zone had passed the Liberty in recent days, but that traffic had ended. The deck log shows that the Liberty’s last encounter with another ship had come at 2:30 P.M. the day before, when it sailed within fifteen hundred yards of the Greek merchant vessel Ioannis Aspiotis. The Liberty’s teletype had churned out daily updates on Israel’s stunning success in the war. In three days, the Jewish state had obliterated Egypt’s forces, seized much of the Sinai Peninsula, and reached the banks of the Suez Canal. On the Jordanian front, Israel had captured much of the West Bank, including the Old City of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jericho. “All this the armed forces of Israel did alone,” declared Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s chief of staff, in comments widely distributed by the wire services. “Everyone fought like lions.”
Though the Liberty sailed in international waters, the crew remained on edge. The proximity to the war zone magnified the sense of loneliness and isolation. The rest of the Sixth Fleet, with its aircraft carriers and destroyers, assembled approximately five hundred miles west off the southern coast of Crete. The potential danger prompted McGonagle to occasionally summon intelligence officers to the bridge to provide updates. The night before, as the Liberty skirted the Egyptian coast, the men had watched the Israelis bomb the Suez Canal. The fire and smoke had clouded the night sky. Scott scanned the horizon this morning in silence. It all felt so eerie. A war raged on shore yet on the bridge the normal sense of routine permeated. In a few moments, the cooks would arrive with the first batch of warm biscuits. Scott felt like Marlow headed up the river in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The early morning light illuminated the empty horizon as Scott glanced up at the mast at about 5 A.M., where he spotted the American flag fluttering in the breeze. Fifteen minutes later, a lone plane zipped high overhead. Scott trained his binoculars on the plane. It flew high, too high to discern any markings, but he noted that the plane had a double fuselage and twin engines. The flying boxcar, as it was commonly known, lazily circled the Liberty several times.
High above the Liberty in the cockpit of the Nord 2501 Noratlas reconnaissance plane, an Israeli observer stared down at the spy ship. The plane had been airborne since 4:10 A.M., patrolling Israel’s coastline to detect ships beyond radar range. Other than the Liberty, the sea was largely empty. The recon plane dropped as low as three thousand feet and circled a half mile away to better study the foreign vessel. The observer radioed that he had found what looked like a destroyer seventy miles west of Gaza. The observer soon corrected his earlier report. He had spotted an American supply ship. From the cockpit, the observer noted the Liberty’s unique hull markings, GTR-5, which identified it as a general technical research ship. The flight engineer later recalled that the ship lacked cannons. “It was a gray color,” he said. “Not too big, not too small, like a cargo ship.”
Back on the Liberty’s bridge far below, Scott watched the unidentified plane circle in the clear skies. It was obvious from the plane’s maneuvering—and sudden interest in the Liberty—that it was on a reconnaissance mission. Scott snapped four pictures with a 35-mm camera. He then watched as the plane banked and soon departed. Seaman Apprentice Dale Larkins, who was on watch with Scott, later sketched the plane in his journal. “It made 3 runs fore and 2 aft in a figure eight pattern,” Larkins wrote. “It then crossed from port to starboard in front of the ship and flew over the horizon.” Using the gyrocompass on the wing of the bridge, Scott shot a direction bearing. The officer consulted a map and noted the plane headed toward Tel Aviv. There was no doubt in Scott’s mind that the plane was Israeli. The phone on the bridge rang moments later. One of the chief petty officers in the NSA research spaces below asked Scott if he had spotted any aircraft. The spooks must have detected the plane’s communications, Scott thought.
“You’re clairvoyant,” Scott replied. “I just did.”
“Did you happen to notice which way it went?” the chief petty officer asked.
“It flew over us, circled, and headed back towards Tel Aviv.”
The Liberty had been detected.
Commander McGonagle risked nothing. Since the outbreak of the war several days earlier—and even as the Liberty remained approximately nine hundred miles from the Middle East—the rigid skipper ramped up the ship’s alert level to Modified Condition of Readiness Three. The Navy jargon mandated that sailors retrieve boxes of ammunition from the ship’s magazine and store them alongside the four machine guns. McGonagle demanded that sailors remove the gun covers unless heavy sea spray threatened to soak them. For safety reasons he ordered that the weapons remain unloaded. He stationed two sailors at the forward machine guns at all times and instructed lookouts to remain ready to man the guns aft of the bridge.
The skipper also ordered that the ship immediately sound the general quarters alarm if any unidentified aircraft appeared to approach the ship on a strafing, bombing, or torpedo run. Likewise, he declared that any boat racing toward the Liberty at twenty-five knots or faster should be considered hostile and should prompt a ringing of the general quarters alarm. “Maximum effort must be made to minimize personnel/material damage, safeguard the watertight integrity of the ship, and continue performance of primary mission,” McGonagle wrote in a memo to his officers Monday. “It is better to set general quarters in doubtful cases than to be taken by surprise and be unable to fight.”
A former gunnery officer during the Korean War, McGonagle recognized that even with the heightened alert, the spy ship remained virtually defenseless. The four Browning .50-caliber machine guns—capable of firing up to five hundred rounds a minute with an effective range of only about one mile—would prove worthless against fighter jets or agile torpedo boats. The gunner had to manually track targets with an open sight while another sailor loaded rounds. Even the ship’s four-page gunnery doctrine declared the mounted guns’ “primary function” was to repel boarders, not shoot down fighters. On the rare occasion that gunners had to target a plane, the ship’s doctrine stated that estimating the altitude would come down to “guess work.” Two days earlier, the edgy skipper had cabled a gentle reminder of the Liberty’s meager arsenal to his superiors. “Self defense capability limited to four .50 caliber machine guns and small arms.”
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sp; McGonagle initiated a relentless drill schedule to prepare the crew. In the last three days, he had drilled his men almost daily for a surprise attack. The deck log shows he ordered a steering casualty drill at 10:59 A.M. Monday to test the officers’ ability to guide the ship in case the Liberty lost rudder power. He followed that up with a general quarters drill at 1:02 P.M. to simulate an attack. Sailors raced to battle stations, dogged down hatches to create watertight compartments, and unrolled fire hoses. McGonagle ordered another general quarters drill Wednesday at 1:01 P.M. With the Liberty steaming so close to a war zone, the officers and crew expected more drills today. “With all the excitement, the Captain hasn’t chewed my ass for anything in about a week,” one of the officers wrote in a letter. “He’s too busy with other matters.”
Reveille sounded soon after daybreak, and hungry sailors streamed into the mess deck, chief petty officers’ lounge, and the officers’ wardroom. Executive Officer Lieutenant Commander Philip Armstrong, Jr., mustered the crew at approximately 7:45 A.M. as he did most mornings. Before him on the main deck, sailors lined up by department as the ship’s officers reviewed morning reports. The Plan of the Day reflected the Liberty’s proximity to the conflict. Posted throughout the ship, the two-page memo advised sailors on how to respond to a chemical attack—slip on gas masks and report to decontamination stations—and how to distinguish between nerve, blister, and blood agents. If infected with deadly nerve gas, sailors were instructed to immediately inject themselves with atropine.
The corpsmen began sick call at approximately 8 A.M. in the Liberty’s six-bed infirmary, a routine that involved checking sore throats and earaches, and administering the occasional shot of penicillin to clear up a case of gonorrhea picked up in the last port. Days of heavy seas had coated much of the bow with salt spray. Crews prepared to scrape rust from the decks and paint. Down in the engine room, a check revealed the Liberty still had more than 650,000 gallons of fuel oil, burning an average of 360 gallons an hour. A faulty steam-line gasket troubled the engineering officer, a problem that would require the Liberty to operate off a single boiler while crews replaced the gasket. Research operators who scanned frequencies in the NSA’s hub now found Hebrew dominated the airwaves as the Israelis controlled the skies.
The deck log shows that the Liberty crossed the hundred-fathom curve—the edge of the continental shelf—at 8:08 A.M. as it steamed toward its operating area twelve and a half miles off Egypt. Forty-one minutes later, the spy ship turned and sailed a southwesterly course parallel to the Egyptian coast. The Liberty slowed to five knots at 9:05 A.M., a speed that allowed the operators to zero in on communications. Twenty-five minutes later, bridge officers spotted a minaret rising above El Arish twenty miles away on the Sinai Peninsula. Navigators used the conspicuous landmark that towered above the date palms of the dusty Bedouin town to identify the Liberty’s precise location. In the empty desert, no other distinguishable features registered on the radar.
Thursday morning shaped up beautifully. The sun climbed high in the cloudless sky and a warm breeze blew across the decks. The Liberty’s weather log recorded calm seas, a seventy-four-degree water temperature, and visibility of at least ten miles, though officers on the bridge could see farther. Crewmembers occasionally lined the rails to catch a glimpse of Egypt. The desert dunes peppered by palm groves seemed to roll right into the sea. Sailors wrestling with cabin fever after days of gray weather stretched out during break on beach chairs and towels to sunbathe. Many smoked cigarettes and swapped stories of girlfriends while wondering what Mediterranean ports the Liberty might visit.
Reconnaissance flights now regularly buzzed the Liberty. A single jet aircraft passed astern then circled the spy ship at 8:50 A.M. Two more jets returned at 10:30 A.M. and orbited the ship three times. Twenty-six minutes later a single aircraft at a high altitude again circled the Liberty. Crewmembers noted other reconnaissance flights at 11:26 A.M., 11:50 A.M., 12:20 P.M., and 12:45 P.M. Many of the men on deck believed that the planes, which at times buzzed the Liberty at low altitude, snapped photos of the spy ship. Beyond the reconnaissance flights, officers observed a propeller-driven patrol plane inspecting the El Arish coastline at an altitude of five hundred feet. The recon flights zoomed by with such regularity that when a plane failed to materialize as expected promptly at lunchtime, one of the radar men commented: “Where’s our buddy?”
McGonagle remained on edge. Only a dozen miles separated the spy ship from the war zone. Soon after the Liberty turned to parallel the Egyptian coast, the skipper left the bridge and headed down to the NSA’s research spaces. He passed through the cipher-lock door and arrived at the office of Dave Lewis, the Liberty’s senior intelligence officer. The thirty-six-year-old Lewis had spent the morning directing his men. With the Liberty now in earshot of the war, operators hustled to soak up communications to later beam back to the NSA. McGonagle closed the door behind him. “Would it affect your mission if we moved farther offshore?” he asked.
Lewis recognized that one of the Liberty’s functions was to pick up ultrahigh-and very-high-frequency radio communications, commonly used by battlefield commanders. Those communications worked best when the sender and receiver were within each other’s line of sight, typically no more than twenty miles apart. If the Liberty sailed over the horizon, Lewis knew the curvature of the earth would diminish some of those capabilities. Many of the Liberty’s other functions, such as intercepting Morse code transmissions, would not be affected. Lewis leveled with the captain. “Yes,” he answered. “We’d lose some line of sight.”
The skipper considered his options. The Liberty had sailed more than five thousand miles in the past two weeks for the sole purpose of eavesdropping on the war. At the same time, McGonagle had to ensure the safety of nearly three hundred crewmembers. The skipper had no way of knowing that the day before, the chief of naval operations had frantically dashed off a memo to pull the ship farther from shore. That message ordering the Liberty to remain at least one hundred miles from the coast had yet to roll off the ship’s teletype. As far as McGonagle knew, he was right where the Navy wanted him—within eyesight of the war.
The skipper also had no way of knowing that the Israeli reconnaissance plane that buzzed the ship at 5:15 A.M. had landed. The naval observer aboard that plane had reported the Liberty’s distinct hull markings during debriefing. An Israeli officer looked up the ship’s identity and forwarded his findings to his navy’s war room and naval intelligence. Israel knew not only that an American ship trolled off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula, but that it was the spy ship Liberty.
“Well, if it affects your mission,” McGonagle told Lewis, “we won’t move offshore.”
McGonagle joined his officers on the forward deck during lunch to sunbathe. The forty-one-year-old skipper maintained a running competition with his men for the best tan, often bragging that no one could ever beat him. McGonagle slipped back into his khaki uniform and strode onto the bridge at 1:05 P.M. The Liberty had changed course at 11:32 A.M. and now steamed northwest at five knots, paralleling the Egyptian coast. The ship’s weather log shows that the morning’s clear skies, calm seas, and excellent visibility carried over into the afternoon. Reconnaissance flights continued to buzz the spy ship about every half hour. The sense of danger loomed, prompting the spooks to torch the previous month’s key cards required to operate the crypto equipment. The Liberty advised that it now planned to destroy all excess materials daily given the “current situation and shallow water operating area.”
The week’s rigorous drill schedule prompted crewmembers to speculate that the skipper planned another that afternoon. Soon after lunch, many sailors gravitated toward battle stations in anticipation. McGonagle didn’t disappoint. The skipper ordered a chemical warfare drill at 1:10 P.M. The public address system broadcast the now familiar order: “General quarters! General quarters! All hands man your battle stations.” Sailors hustled to set up chemical decontamination centers in the ship’s showers and pr
acticed on the Liberty’s gunners and topside crew. Damage control teams sealed hatches to compartmentalize the ship and create watertight integrity. Firefighters unrolled hoses and broke out stretchers as medical corpsmen manned casualty collection centers. The gunners, once successfully processed through the mock decontamination center, raced to the Liberty’s four .50-caliber machine guns.
McGonagle monitored the drill from the bridge. His earlier concern over the Liberty’s proximity to the war zone returned. At the start of the drill, the skipper spotted a cloud of black smoke on the beach approximately fifteen to twenty miles west of El Arish and thirteen miles from the Liberty. Twenty minutes into the drill, the skipper noted another dark cloud about five to six miles east of El Arish. McGonagle estimated that the second cloud, which appeared smaller, was about twenty-five miles from the Liberty. The quartermaster recorded both in the ship’s log. Thirty-eight minutes after the general quarters drill began, the skipper ended it. The crew’s overall performance pleased him. Sailors successfully manned battle stations in three minutes, though the skipper was unhappy that it took nearly five minutes for the ship to set condition zebra, the highest state of battle readiness. With his slow drawl, he addressed his crew over the loudspeaker, singling out the column of black smoke onshore as a reminder of the Liberty’s perilous location.