by James Scott
There was only one answer: urge the Israelis to quietly take back the letter, tone it down, and resubmit it. The meeting minutes show the advisers all agreed: “Get Israelis to recall it.” Bundy drafted a secret memo for the record following the meeting, outlining the committee’s actions. The Liberty was the first item on Bundy’s memo and would be the last declassified more than three decades later. “After reviewing the Israeli Government’s reply to our note protesting its attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, the Committee decided (a) to clear up our own preliminary understanding of the facts surrounding the attack and (b) to suggest unofficially to the Israelis that they take back their note and rewrite it in a more moderate vein.” The job of negotiating with the Israelis fell to Katzenbach. The undersecretary of state days later summoned the Israeli ambassador to Foggy Bottom. The secret memo recording the meeting—declassified thirty-three years later—shows Katzenbach “suggested Harman think about the possibility of making some amendments in the Israeli note, which we think contains some statements they might find it hard to live with if the text some day became public. There was a tentative agreement that the best procedure might be to make a few revisions in both notes and back-date them to replace the originals.”
CHAPTER 12
That evening and thru the night we got the boys out that had been trapped down below where the torpedo hit. Found 25 in all. It was a pretty sorry day.
—SEAMAN APPRENTICE DALE LARKINS, LETTER TO HIS PARENTS
The Liberty sailed past the Ricasoli lighthouse at daybreak Wednesday, June 14, and entered the Grand Harbor in Valletta, Malta. Nearly a week had passed since the attack. A maritime crossroads dating back seven thousand years, Valletta offered the nearest drydock in the Mediterranean that could patch the Liberty’s steel skin. The destroyer Davis escorted the injured ship; the tugboat Papago continued to trail behind. Bandaged crewmembers, including one with an eye patch, lined the rails. McGonagle appeared on deck, binoculars around his neck, relieved his ship had completed the thousand-mile journey.
Reporters watched the Liberty’s arrival from a nearby hillside, jotting notes about its riddled hull and superstructure, torched life rafts, and the torpedo hole that poked above the waterline. Television journalists shot grainy video of the spy ship as it eased into the crowded harbor. The Chicago Tribune observed that the shell marks, which exposed the Liberty’s orange primer, matched “the colors of the dawn.” A reporter with the Associated Press wrote that the ship’s “funnel had more holes than a pepperpot.” Life magazine described the Liberty as “shot up as a tin can on a firing range.”
Harbor pilots moored the spy ship to a pier in the British Royal Navy base. By 7:45 A.M., the Liberty had secured its mooring lines, set the in-port watch, and mustered the crew. Senior Navy officers waited to board. Divers slipped into wet suits and scuba tanks to make a final inspection. Unlike the Mediterranean’s clear waters, the Valletta harbor was murky, forcing the Navy’s divers to feel along the Liberty’s hull for rips or gashes that might trigger the ship to collapse once workers drained the water from drydock.
A Maltese harbor pilot climbed aboard at 1:52 P.M. Twenty-seven minutes later, the ship’s log shows that the pilot assumed control of the Liberty and guided the injured ship into drydock No. 2. There the Liberty settled onto a row of more than one hundred keel blocks positioned in a line along the drydock floor. Workers anchored the ship to the walls with wooden timbers. The Navy rigged a canvas tarp over the torpedo hole to block reporters from photographing the secret research spaces and concocted a cover story: the tarp protected the privacy of the dead trapped inside.
Dockworkers pumped out the seawater. To prevent the loss of classified papers, the Navy covered the drains with screens. Divers and men in rafts paddled around, searching for classified tapes, memos, or messages that might have floated out of the hole as the water level fell. At sea, only the tip of the torpedo hole jutted above the waterline. In drydock, the crew leaned over the rails to watch its full jagged profile emerge. The torpedo had ripped a teardrop-shaped gash twenty-four feet tall and thirty-nine feet wide, nearly large enough for the tugboat Papago to sail through.
The aftermath of the torpedo blast awaited the body recovery team, who now crowded around the sealed hatch that led to the destroyed compartments below. Some sailors dressed this afternoon in rubber boots and coveralls. Others wore only T-shirts and dungarees. Officers handed out battle lanterns, flashlights, and a few pair of gloves. Some of the men would have to work barehanded.
The watertight hatch divided the living and the dead. Soon after the attack, Dr. Kiepfer had recruited several sailors to check for the remote possibility of survivors trapped inside the torpedoed compartments. Heavy fumes of fuel oil spilled out when the men unsealed the hatch. The mix of oil and seawater had receded since engineers stabilized the Liberty and corrected its nine-degree list. The men spotted a body stretched out at the bottom of the ladder.
“What do we do?” one sailor had asked.
“Get a body bag,” Kiepfer replied.
Kiepfer’s men roped the oil-coated corpse from the compartment and zipped it into a body bag. Sailors lugged the remains to the ship’s walk-in freezer and once again sealed the compartment. Each day as the Liberty crawled west toward Malta, the smell of the rotting bodies trapped below intensified, prompting one officer to describe the Liberty as a “death ship.” Sailors slept with the stench, showered with it, and choked down coffee with it. Seaman Jack Beattie, a fireman in the engineering department, captured the conditions in a letter to his parents: “The smell was so bad that you couldn’t even eat.”
With drydock now dewatered, Lloyd Painter readied a team for the gruesome job of recovering the dead. Painter had worked in the Liberty’s research spaces before the attack, reviewing intelligence reports and determining the NSA’s spy targets. The Navy allowed only crewmen with top-secret clearance, like Painter, to clean up the torpedoed compartment. The few engineers and medical corpsmen needed to help with the grisly task were ordered to recite oaths promising never to reveal what they saw inside. A guard stood watch at the entrance and forced sailors to sign in and out.
Painter undogged the hatch and crawled first into the dark compartment, navigating the oil-coated ladder that had somehow survived the blast. When he reached the deck below, Painter switched on his flashlight. He panned the room. The compartment had been divided into several rooms and offices equipped with receivers, transmitters, desks, chairs, and filing cabinets. The torpedo had blown out all of the interior walls, leaving only a single expansive space. Piles of tangled debris, mangled metal, and broken furniture were rammed in piles up against the remaining interior bulkhead.
Fuel oil from busted tanks in the bowels of the ship coated the corrugated metal deck, walls, and even the ceiling. Painter aimed his flashlight upward. Electrical wires and cables that once powered this secret intelligence hub now sagged from the ceiling. He froze. Wrapped in the wires, one of the dead officers, eyes open, stared down at him. Painter recognized his former colleague even though the remains were bloated from days in the salty seawater. Painter moved his flashlight down the length of the body. Only the head and torso remained. Good Lord, he thought.
Other sailors crawled down the ladder, handing shovels and body bags through the narrow hatch. The men picked through the piles of warped filing cabinets, broken chairs, desks, and typewriters in search of friends and colleagues as well as classified manuals, records, and equipment that the government wanted cataloged. The work proved difficult. Oil coated everything and the men often slipped. Battle lanterns and flashlights provided only minimal light. The hot summer day—and the lack of ventilation—made the air thick and the stench of death unbearable.
The searchers easily located some of the dead. Other remains proved more difficult to find as the bodies often lay buried beneath piles of heavy debris or stuffed between steam pipes, the only clue a protruding hand or foot or the intense smell. Six days in the salty seawater had
left the dead grotesquely swollen and distended. The skin had bleached white—the color of nursing stockings, one sailor later recalled—and the hair largely had fallen out. “You’d puke, then go back at it,” recalled Petty Officer 2nd Class Robert Schnell, a twenty-four-year-old from Montana. “It had to be done.”
Petty Officer 2nd Class Dennis Eikleberry spotted feet protruding from a pile of twisted metal. Eikleberry, who had been in a room across the hall when the torpedo exploded, let his eyes wander up the body, past the legs, torso, and arms. Instead of a head, Eikleberry found only a long piece of skin that looked like string. Another body he found resembled hamburger meat. The smell was horrendous. “When they picked him up by the belt and the breastbone,” Eikleberry recalled, “his arms fell off.”
Though many of the bodies were largely intact, some of the recovered remains consisted of only decaying tissue and intestine littered amid teletype papers, tapes, and work manuals, much of it unrecognizable. “Not just arms and legs,” recalled Seaman Don Pageler, “inside pieces of bodies and all sorts of stuff.” Pageler, a twenty-one-year-old from Kansas, picked up a piece of equipment and found a severed arm. Pageler stared at it in shock. “I looked at the muscle structure,” he remembered, “and I knew whose arm it was.”
The men tied ropes on the end of the body bags and hoisted them through the same hatch where many had escaped six days earlier. Sam Schulman, the Liberty’s junior corpsman, unzipped each bag and removed the shoes and socks. He wiped ink on the bottom of the feet and hands and took prints to help identify the men. “You knew who they were, but they didn’t look anything like they did when they were alive,” Schulman recalled years later. “The texture of the tissue was such that you were afraid that if you pulled too hard, you would pull the skin off the bone.”
Petty Officer 1st Class Ron Kukal helped Schulman. The twenty-seven-year-old Nebraska native said the partial bodies presented the greatest challenge. The men depended on names stenciled on the dead sailors’ shirts and pants to help reassemble the remains. “Some of the bodies had arms and legs. Other times you had to take arms and legs and figure out who they belonged to,” recalled Kukal, who had supervised communications technicians before the attack. “It was just like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Many of the men took breaks from the grisly chore. Kiepfer poured brandy into four-ounce bottles and passed it out. Later he washed out the oil that had clogged Painter’s ears and rendered him nearly deaf. The crew worked through the night, picking through piles of debris, shoveling up papers, and identifying and packing the remains of friends. An early status report filed from the Liberty revealed that the team identified twelve bodies found in the flooded compartments. Four others were unidentifiable. The team also found a head and an arm.
Recovery of the bodies concluded by the following day. The men continued to sift through piles of classified records, much of it little more than soggy mush, before zipping it inside 168 canvas bags for future sorting. “Twenty remains have been shipped to Naples. It may not be possible to identify all twenty,” a final report read. “Bodies of five of the twenty-five originally reported missing have not been found. It is reasonable to assume that the five not found were lost at sea.”
The attack had slipped from the front pages of most American newspapers, but media speculation over the Liberty’s mission intensified. Press queries swamped the Pentagon as reporters demanded to know if it had been spying. The Pentagon responded by shutting down. The day the Liberty reached Malta, McNamara ordered a news blackout. No one could speak to reporters. If pressed, officials could say only that the Navy had convened a court of inquiry to investigate and planned to release a statement when the court concluded.
To explain the Pentagon’s sudden news blackout, spokesman Phil Goulding released a five-sentence statement. “Many rumors and reports about the attack have been circulating,” Goulding wrote. “The Department of Defense has no evidence to support some of these rumors and reports. Others appear to be based on partial evidence. Some appear to be accurate on the basis of present information here, which is incomplete. Until the Court has had an opportunity to obtain the full facts, the Department of Defense will have no further comment.”
The Pentagon’s news release—described by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the most intriguing pieces of prose that ever came out of the department’s press office”—followed rigid precautions the Navy adopted soon after the attack. Reporters had no access to the Liberty or the majority of its crew as the injured ship steamed to Malta, which made it easy to control the news during that time. The few interviews with the evacuated sailors on board the aircraft carrier America were rigorously monitored by Navy public affairs officials.
The day after the attack, four sailors sat for a filmed interview. A second interview followed two days later with Seaman Kenneth Ecker, who showed reporters his dinged battle helmet, with several holes in it and a piece of shrapnel still lodged near the temple. The Navy prepped the sailors in advance and made them sign agreements to conceal the Liberty’s mission and acknowledge that Israel had claimed the attack “was made in error.” Public affairs staff monitored—and occasionally interrupted—the interviews. Afterward staff cabled summaries of the interviews, and in Ecker’s case, a complete transcript, to Navy commanders.
In a sign of how politically sensitive the attack remained, a public affairs officer highlighted one of Ecker’s comments later in a report. “At one point, when asked of the general feeling among Liberty crewmen as they spent the night in distress, Ecker answered rather passionately: ‘We wanted to get them sons of bitches whoever attacked us.’ When pressed for the feeling after it became known that the attackers were Israelis, Ecker replied: ‘We still wanted to get them. We didn’t care whether they were friends or enemies. They hit our ship and we wanted to make them pay.’”
Another example of the Navy’s unease centered on a story filed the day after the attack by Associated Press reporter Bob Horton. The reporter quoted an unnamed officer on the America who stated that the Liberty was loaded with eavesdropping equipment and tasked to spy on the Middle East war. “To put it bluntly, she was there to spy for us. Russia does the same thing,” Horton quoted the officer. “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.”
That quote sparked a secret investigation to uncover whom Horton talked to and how he fooled the Navy’s minders. The results did not please the brass. Reporters typically filed stories using the carrier’s teletypes. But Horton smuggled his scoop off the carrier on a routine delivery flight to Greece. “Mr. Horton’s copy was not submitted for review for security or accuracy and it was not transmitted by Navy communications,” stated a telegram. “It is believed to have been sent ashore in a sealed envelope placed together with other media material.”
Malta presented a far greater challenge in attempting to conceal the truth. Unlike the tight confines of an aircraft carrier, which made keeping tabs on journalists easy—except in Horton’s case—the Mediterranean island was wide open. Reporters roamed bars, restaurants, and beaches, the spots sailors sought out to unwind. The battered ship also would be on display, undergoing weeks of repairs in the drydock. Days before the Liberty’s arrival, the Navy and the American Embassy developed a plan. Additional public affairs officers soon began arriving in Malta to help.
The embassy arranged for the Liberty to dock that morning at the British Royal Navy base to “minimize immediate scrutiny.” The Navy also barred reporters from the drydock. Most reporters watched the Liberty’s arrival from a nearby hillside, a vantage point that prevented them from viewing the side of the ship with the torpedo hole. To satisfy the press, a Navy photographer shot six photographs of Commander McGonagle pointing out blast holes on the bridge and staterooms. The Navy gave the undeveloped roll to the Associated Press to disseminate over the news wires.
After completing the body recovery, the Navy planned a �
��rigidly controlled” tour of the Liberty’s topside and one or two lower compartments “to prevent lending credence” to the spy ship story. “McGonagle would meet with newsmen and be photographed, but aside from paying tribute to his crew he would make no comments about the attack nor would he answer questions about it. “Believe that if newsmen know captain will continue to be unavailable for some time,” a Navy message states, “this tour will close out story here and out of town newsmen will depart.”
The Navy also banned interviews with the crew by pointing out that members of the crew were potential witnesses before a naval court of inquiry into the incident. But despite the Navy’s efforts, uncensored information still leaked. The parents of eighteen-year-old Seaman Apprentice Robert Reilly, whose older brother Thomas also served on the Liberty and was critically injured in the attack, released a letter he wrote to the press. Wire services picked up Reilly’s letter, and his graphic account of the attack immediately ran in papers nationwide. “We were just sitting ducks,” Reilly wrote. “Guys were just torn in half. Some of my best buddies lay dead in three pieces.”