The Attack on the Liberty

by James Scott

  CHAPTER 6

  I just don’t believe that it was an accident or trigger-happy local commanders. There was just too much of a sustained effort to disable and sink the Liberty.

  —SECRETARY OF STATE DEAN RUSK

  President Lyndon Johnson woke at about 7:45 A.M. Thursday morning, June 8. Normally an early riser, the president enjoyed a leisurely morning, eating his breakfast of creamed chip beef off a tray in his bedroom and washing it down with a cup of hot tea. Johnson had weathered a late night the evening before, working until nearly 10:30 when he finally sat down with the first lady for dinner of corned beef, potatoes, and cornbread muffins with butter and honey. He had followed the meal with two servings of chocolate pudding before retiring to the personal residence at 11:30. He chatted on the phone at midnight with close friend and Israel supporter Mathilde Krim.

  The morning papers carried the latest news of the Middle East war. Israel now claimed victory in the Sinai Peninsula and announced that it had broken the blockade of the Strait of Tiran that triggered the conflict. Israeli pilots, whose average age was only twenty-three, had destroyed 441 Arab airplanes in strikes on twenty-five bases. Israeli forces had driven Egypt into retreat behind the Suez Canal and captured much of Jordan’s territory along the West Bank of the Jordan River. Photos showed Israeli soldiers weeping and praying alongside the Wailing Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem.

  Across the Potomac, Robert McNamara arrived at the Pentagon. Most mornings the defense secretary began early, riding his private elevator up from the basement parking garage to his third-floor office overlooking the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. Elsewhere, Secretary of State Dean Rusk prepared to testify this morning on the latest developments in the Middle East war before a closed-door session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

  In the wooded suburbs outside of Washington, guards at the National Security Agency screened employees arriving for work at the clandestine agency tucked away behind three barbed wire and electric fences. More than three hundred miles south of the capital in North Carolina, Liberty Ensign John Scott’s mother drafted a letter, wishing her son a happy birthday. “You are getting so old that I have to strain to remember what went on 24 years ago,” Ruth Scott wrote in her suburban Charlotte home. “We were so pleased with you, and have been ever since. You were the pride of the hospital nursery—the biggest, fattest, healthiest, most active baby in the lot!”

  Unbeknownst to all of them, at that moment the Liberty struggled to survive.

  At 9:11 A.M. Washington time—thirty-six minutes after the torpedo ripped open the side of the spy ship—the headquarters of America’s European Command called the Pentagon with the news. The first reports relayed from the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean confirmed that the Liberty was under attack, had been torpedoed, and was listing badly. Early estimates put the spy ship approximately sixty to seventy miles from Egypt’s Port Said. The Sixth Fleet commander had declared the attackers hostile and ordered fighters to defend the Liberty.

  John Connell, the NSA’s liaison officer to the Joint Reconnaissance Center, was chatting on the phone with his colleague Eugene Sheck back at NSA headquarters in Maryland when a Pentagon staffer darted in with the news. “The Liberty’s been torpedoed.”

  “What?” Connell asked, interrupting his call. “What the hell is going on?”

  “The Liberty’s been torpedoed,” repeated the officer.

  “By whom?”

  No one knew.

  “Did you hear that?” Connell asked his counterpart on the phone back at NSA.

  “If I got you straight, the ship’s been torpedoed,” Sheck answered. “My God!”

  “That’s right, start telling people, get up to the top right away.”

  “The top” meant the ninth floor of the NSA’s headquarters, which housed the offices of the spy agency’s director and his senior lieutenants. Moments after word of the attack arrived, Director Lieutenant General Marshall Carter and Deputy Director Louis Tordella gathered to determine the best plan of action. The first priority after the safety of the crew was to find out who had attacked the Liberty. Carter fired off a top-secret telegram to intelligence commands at 9:28 A.M.—thirteen minutes after he learned of the attack—ordering an immediate review of all recent intercepts. “USS Liberty has been reportedly torpedoed by unknown source in Med near 32N 33E,” Carter wrote. “Request examine all communications for possible reaction/reflections and report accordingly.”

  Next the men focused on classified materials. Early reports showed the spy ship barely more than a dozen miles off the Sinai Peninsula. Charts the men consulted revealed the water was at most 240 feet deep. At that shallow depth, it would be easy for the Egyptians, Soviets, or any other nation to salvage the Liberty’s records and top-secret equipment. That bounty would immediately expose the Liberty’s mission and reveal that the United States had the capability to intercept and decipher VHF and UHF radio frequencies, common frequencies used for government and military communications. If the Liberty sank, America needed immediately to secure the site where the spy ship went down so divers could recover the equipment.

  With each passing minute, the magnitude of the situation increased as fears mounted in Washington over the possibility that the Soviets had torpedoed the Liberty. The situation could no longer be handled solely by the Defense Department. Thirty-eight minutes after the first report reached Washington, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow dialed the president. Johnson had remained in the White House residence since he woke, though his daily planner shows that his leisurely morning had evolved into a typically hectic day. By the time Rostow phoned to inform him of the attack, the president already had checked in with his chief of staff between calls to four senators, the attorney general, and his defense and press secretaries.

  Rostow followed up his phone call one minute later with a memo outlining the basic facts of the attack. Details remained scarce. “We have a flash report from the Joint Reconnaissance Center indicating that a U.S. elint (electronics intelligence) ship, the Liberty, has been torpedoed in the Mediterranean,” the national security adviser wrote. “The ship is located 60–100 miles north of Egypt. Reconnaissance aircraft are out from the 6th fleet. We have no knowledge of the submarine or surface vessel which committed this act. We shall keep you informed.”

  The president phoned Robert McNamara ten minutes later, presumably about the Liberty, though no record of this conversation has surfaced. The attack was no doubt concerning, but absent more information, the president soon turned his attention back to politicking. “Get me in twenty minutes how many states I have been in since I became President,” he barked to his secretary in a call on his private line. With five minutes to spare, the president’s staff provided a rundown, showing that he had visited every state except Alabama, Mississippi, and North and South Dakota.

  By 10:15 A.M., the latest report on the Liberty to reach Washington showed that carriers had launched eight fighter planes—four A-4’s and four A-1’s—to protect the Liberty. The United States still did not know who had torpedoed the ship. Reports indicated that the crippled ship faced serious trouble. Rostow shot off another memo to the president, this one only a single line: “The Liberty is listing badly to starboard.”

  At the same time, Deputy Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Foy Kohler called the Soviet Embassy in Washington and informed one of its senior diplomats that the United States had an “urgent message.” America could not risk an unnecessary confrontation with the communist power in the Middle East. Soviet naval forces had shadowed the Sixth Fleet for days in the Mediterranean. No doubt, commanders had watched the carriers turn into the wind and launch fighters. “An American ship, the USS Liberty, was torpedoed a few hours ago off Port Said,” Kohler told Minister-Counselor Yuri Tcherniakov, according to a memo of the conversation. “We are not sure of the exact location where the incident took place. It is an auxiliary ship.” Kohler told the Soviet diplomat that the United States had launche
d eight fighters “to investigate.” “We wanted the Soviet Government to know that this was the purpose and the only purpose of those aircraft approaching in that direction.”

  Nearly six thousand miles away in Tel Aviv, the Israeli Foreign Liaison Office sent a car for American Naval Attaché Ernest Castle, the only time that happened during his tenure in Tel Aviv. The senior of America’s two naval attachés, the forty-one-year-old Castle was a professional intelligence officer who had spent the past two years working out of the embassy alongside attachés from the other services. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Bloch told Castle upon arrival that Israeli pilots and torpedo boats had erroneously attacked an American ship, possibly a Navy vessel. Bloch apologized for the attack and asked if America had any other ships near the war zone. Castle fired off a six-sentence flash telegram—the highest priority available—to more than a dozen recipients, including the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and the Sixth Fleet.

  At 11 A.M.—fifteen minutes after Castle’s message arrived in the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center—an unsigned memo on White House stationery shows it had reached the administration. “Our Defense Attaché in Tel Aviv has informed us that the attack on the USS Liberty was a mistaken action of Israeli boats,” the memo stated. “The Israelis have helicopters en route to the ship for the purpose of facilitating rescue survivors. Tel Aviv message appears to be apology for mistaken action.”

  The president ordered a four-sentence message sent over the hotline—the telegraphic link connecting Washington and the Kremlin—to inform Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin of Israel’s admission. More importantly, the president assured Kosygin that American fighters had been ordered only to investigate the attack. He asked Kosygin to relay his message to Egypt. Records show operators transmitted the message at 11:17 A.M. and it reached the Kremlin seven minutes later.

  To reinforce the message, Kohler again called the Soviet Embassy. He told Tcherniakov in an 11 A.M. call that the United States now knew that Israel had attacked the Liberty. Kohler reiterated his earlier message that American fighters zooming to the scene were “in connection with the vessel and not for any other purpose.”

  At 11:04 A.M. the president departed the White House residence and made a brief stop in the Oval Office. Press Secretary George Christian and his deputy accompanied him. Two minutes later, the president arrived in the Situation Room. Maps plastered the walls and black ashtrays nearly filled to the rim with cigarette butts sat in the center of the wooden conference table in the basement command center. Around the table this morning sat the president’s senior advisers: McNamara, Rusk, Rostow, Chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Clark Clifford, special consultant McGeorge Bundy, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, and Llewellyn Thompson, Jr., America’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, who was in Washington at the time. The men had been summoned when word arrived of the attack. Johnson perched at the head of the table. A white phone sat in front of him.

  Tensions soared. Rusk’s calendar shows that the advisers had gathered as early as 10:40 A.M.—nearly half an hour before the president arrived—and pored over maps of the region and debated possible scenarios. Absent facts, the men had speculated that the attackers could have been the Egyptians or possibly the Soviets. Egypt was fuming over its loss to Israel. The Liberty’s location off the Sinai Peninsula, coupled with Egypt’s hostility toward the United States over its support of the Jewish state, made an attack by the Arab nation a real possibility. The men on the Liberty originally suspected Egypt. The potential ramifications of a Soviet assault overshadowed one by Egypt. The communist power had backed the Arab states in the war and was likely frustrated by the devastating battlefield losses. While many of the president’s advisers doubted the Soviets would go so far as to attack an American ship, the scenario could not be ruled out. America simply didn’t know. “You tend to look at a worst case,” recalled Katzenbach. “If you don’t know, you say, ‘Well what if.’”

  When the men learned moments later that the Israelis had attacked the Liberty, tensions eased. The fear of a confrontation with the Soviets or a retaliatory attack by a rogue Russian proxy vanished. The administration could handle the attack diplomatically without the threat of war. The Navy could stand down. At approximately 11:25 A.M.—midway through the president’s thirty-nine-minute meeting in the Situation Room—the order went out to recall the fighters, though Vice Admiral Martin had already done so about forty-five minutes earlier.

  New questions soon arose. Israel claimed that its forces had attacked in error. But how could its exceptional military, which had nearly wiped out its Arab neighbors in only four days, make such a colossal blunder? The attack occurred in the middle of the afternoon, not at night when visibility would be more difficult. Knowing Soviet ships sailed in the area, why would the Israelis be so reckless as to torpedo an unidentified ship? None of it made any sense.

  “We were baffled,” Clifford later wrote in his memoir, Counsel to the President. “From the beginning, there was skepticism and disbelief about the Israeli version of events. We had enormous respect for Israeli intelligence, and it was difficult to believe the Liberty had been attacked by mistake. Every conceivable theory was advanced that morning. It became clear that from the sketchy information available we could not figure out what had happened.”

  Some American officials, even as the ship still struggled, urged the White House to downplay the attack. “Israelis do not intend [to] give any publicity to incident,” wrote Walworth Barbour, America’s ambassador to Israel at 11:10 A.M. as the president met with his advisers. “Urge strongly that we too avoid publicity. If it is US flag vessel its proximity to scene [of] conflict could feed Arab suspicions of US-Israel collusion.” Barbour wasn’t alone. Thirty-five minutes later, America’s ambassador to Egypt, Richard Nolte, sent a telegram urging that the United States quickly come up with a cover story to explain the Liberty. “We had better get our story on torpedoing of USS Liberty out fast and it had better be good.”

  Israel’s attack would soon trigger the unimaginable. The Liberty—now riddled with cannon blasts, its decks soaked in blood, and its starboard side ripped open by a torpedo—evolved in a matter of hours from a top-secret intelligence asset to a domestic political liability. That became clear to NSA deputy director Louis Tordella in a phone conversation with Captain Merriwell Vineyard at the Pentagon’s Joint Reconnaissance Center. Vineyard confessed that to shield Israel, some people in Washington wanted the spy ship sunk. The proposal outraged Tordella, who described it in a secret memo for the record. “Captain Vineyard had mentioned during this conversation that consideration was then being given by some unnamed Washington authorities to sink the Liberty in order that newspaper men would be unable to photograph her and thus inflame public opinion against the Israelis,” he wrote. “I made an impolite comment about that idea.”

  White House Press Secretary George Christian took the podium at 11:18 A.M. for his morning briefing. Reporters for major newspapers and television networks camped out daily in the West Lobby, working out of small alcoves in the nearby pressroom and returning to home bureaus only long enough to pick up paychecks. The reporters spent so much time in the White House that some napped regularly in the lobby’s sofas and chairs, prompting Christian to describe it as a “genteel flophouse.”

  Each morning and afternoon, the press secretary briefed reporters on the day’s news and fielded questions. Many of the sessions had become intense and adversarial, particularly as the nation grew dissatisfied with the war in Vietnam and suspected that the White House was hiding information. Presidential adviser Jack Valenti compared the briefings to the Madrid bullring with reporters, like picadors, aiming “barbed questions” at the press secretary. Christian once likened it to being a “prisoner in the dock.”

  Christian, a fifth-generation Texas native, tangled skillfully with the press. A former reporter and editor, he had served as Texas governor John Connally’s press secretary
before President Johnson lured him to Washington. Christian made no mention of the Liberty—now smoldering in the Mediterranean—or the emergency meeting under way in the Situation Room. He started his briefing with the announcement that the president of Malawi would arrive in about an hour. Johnson would meet privately with the African leader then the two would have lunch. Christian then announced that the president had nominated thirty-eight Navy captains for promotion to rear admiral and passed out a list of names.

  The reporters were suspicious. Many had heard that Secretary of State Dean Rusk had suddenly excused himself from testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had left Capitol Hill for an urgent meeting at the White House. The press smelled a story. After Christian opened up the briefing for questions, one of the reporters asked if Rusk was in the White House.

  “Yes,” the press secretary replied.

  “Seeing the President?”

  “Yes.”

  A reporter noted that Senator Wayne Morse had told journalists on Capitol Hill that the secretary of state was called a way for an “emergency meeting.” “Is that true?”

  Christian conceded only that Rusk was in the White House.

  “There is some grumbling on the Committee that he gave them short shrift and left suddenly,” a reporter pressed. “That is the same question phrased a bit differently.”

  “The Secretary is here in the White House seeing the President.”