by James Scott
The graphic testimony bothered the court members, who also explored the damaged ship. Captain Boston watched men haul bodies out of the torpedoed spaces during a recess. He spotted a sailor emerge from the hole, crying and vomiting after finding a headless body. These sights, coupled with the testimony of the crew, led Boston to conclude the attack must have been deliberate. The excessive damage, the pre-attack reconnaissance, and the sustained and violent assault ruled out friendly fire, he believed. Alone in a stateroom at night, Kidd confided in his lawyer that he agreed, describing the attackers as “murderous bastards.” Boston, who would not voice his opinions publicly for thirty-five years, hinted at his true beliefs in his summation. “After living intimately with the facts of this case for the past week, I have become more and more appalled that such a tragedy should have ever occurred,” he told the court. “No matter what conclusions are reached as to the cause of the incident, the horrendous impact of the effect should disturb even the most impassioned.”
Despite two days of often-gruesome testimony that would fill 158 pages of transcripts, the court failed to answer the central question: How and why did the attack happen? The Navy had tasked court members to examine all relevant facts. The final transcript, however, revealed a shallow investigation, plagued by myriad disagreements between the captain and his crew. Reconstructing the assault had proved challenging. No one wrote in the quartermaster’s notebook for fifty-one minutes during the most intense part of the attack. The bloodstained log jumped from the arrival of Ensign Patrick O’Malley on the bridge at 1:55 P.M. to Lucas’s identification of one of the torpedo boat’s hull numbers at 2:46 P.M. Thirty-four men had either been killed or mortally wounded in the interim. The court recognized this weakness. After the first day of testimony, it asked McGonagle to gather with his officers and crew and assemble a concrete timeline to present to the court the next day. Even then the men’s testimony clashed.
McGonagle testified that he observed the first reconnaissance flight at 10:30 A.M. followed by others at roughly half-hour intervals. Other witnesses told the court that reconnaissance flights began as early as 5:15 A.M. and that planes reconned the ship at least eight times, a figure the State Department later adopted in its report. The skipper also said that the fighter jet attack lasted only five to six minutes, much less time than his men recalled. Painter, who testified immediately after McGonagle, told the court that the jets pounded the ship for at least twenty minutes. Chief Petty Officer Harold Thompson also testified that the air attack lasted between twenty minutes and a half hour. Other witnesses including Lucas, Lamkin, and Kiepfer described fighting fires, rescuing the injured, and even performing surgery as the fighters strafed the Liberty, impossible actions to accomplish in the brief time the skipper recalled.
The skipper also stated that he never issued an order to prepare to abandon ship. His men again refuted him. Painter recalled the order and said he ran out on deck to prepare liferafts for the wounded. Scott testified that he torched confidential messages and publications in a wastebasket. Kiepfer mobilized an evacuation of the wounded from the mess deck and Chief Petty Officer Wayne Smith burned radio authentication codes. Petty Officer 2nd Class Charles Cocnavitch, whose testimony was not included in the transcript, told Kidd that he heard the order passed over the sound-powered phones. Someone eventually produced a handwritten copy of the Liberty’s Combat Information Center log—entered as exhibit 14—showing that at 2:33 P.M. the demolition bill was set, an order that often means to destroy classified materials, set explosive charges, and open valves to scuttle a ship.
McGonagle and Lucas, who stood just feet apart during much of the attack, offered contradictory views on vital events. McGonagle testified that Francis Brown, who was on the helm during the attack, died before the torpedo strike. Lucas took Brown’s place at the helm upon his death. He told the court that Brown died after the torpedo hit as the patrol boats strafed the ship with cannons and machine guns. Cocnavitch pulled Brown’s body off the bridge seconds after he was killed. Though not asked by the court, Cocnavitch later confirmed Lucas’s account. Lucas and the skipper also clashed on the issue of when the Israelis signaled the Liberty. McGonagle testified that he believed the signaling occurred before the torpedo attack. Lucas again disagreed. “This was definitely after the torpedo attack,” he told the court.
“The flashing lights from the boats were after the torpedo attack?” court members pressed.
“Yes,” Lucas answered. “That is correct.”
The officers also differed on the Liberty’s machine gunning of the torpedo boats. McGonagle testified that a Liberty sailor accurately fired on the Israeli boats and that the Israelis likely believed the spy ship had fired on them. Lucas told the court that he investigated the gunfire and found only ammunition cooking off in a blaze. Thompson also testified that ammunition exploded in the fire. Had the court called Dale Larkins, its members would have heard another witness with a clear view of the bridge’s guntub fire. Larkins, who likely fired the Liberty’s only effective defensive round during the entire assault, watched the machine gun ammunition cook off. The mounted gun barrel never rose. “The barrel basically was laying on the edge of the tub,” Larkins recalled. “I’m sure there wasn’t anybody there.”
The crewmembers even painted opposing pictures of McGonagle during the attack and immediate aftermath. Lucas testified that while the skipper bled profusely, he continued to bark orders and “insisted on being everywhere that he could.” Painter said one of the quartermasters summoned him to the bridge immediately after the attack to take over for the injured skipper. He arrived to find McGonagle unconscious on a stretcher, his leg soaked with blood. Painter photographed the captain on his back, life jacket cinched tightly around him, bathed in sunlight with his eyes closed, a photo the court never saw. Kiepfer’s testimony corroborated Painter. The doctor told the court that shortly after the attack he found the captain sweating, having difficulty standing, and showing excessive anxiety, all signs of shock.
Though it is common for witnesses to remember events differently, none of these significant discrepancies prompted the court to recall any of the officers or crewmembers other than McGonagle. Even with the skipper the court members failed to address any of the contradictions. Rather the court asked McGonagle to submit various records, including a timeline of the attack, a breakdown of the projectile hits, and the chart that showed the Liberty’s projected track. Kidd appeared more interested in McGonagle’s account of guiding the ship that night by the North Star. He asked the skipper to recount the story as the court members listened in silence. The court’s final report relied almost exclusively on the testimony of McGonagle, who according to some of his men had passed out from blood loss and shock.
Many of the officers said the court appeared afraid of uncovering information that might prove the Israelis deliberately targeted the Liberty. Scott photographed the first reconnaissance flight at dawn the morning of the attack. He believed he gave the court a “critical piece of information” that showed Israel had detected the Liberty almost nine hours before the attack. The court appeared uninterested, asking instead whether Scott had attended damage control school and whether he found it useful. The court’s final report dismissed his testimony, stating that reconnaissance flights began hours later than he said. Declassified Israeli records show the plane Scott observed was in fact the reconnaissance flight that first identified the Liberty. “It was all perfunctory,” Scott later said of the court’s interview. “The questioning was not probing or in-depth. It was all superficial.”
Other officers who testified described the court as “shallow,” “cursory,” and focused on “process rather than product.” The transcript shows that some of the witnesses testified for only a few minutes, if even that long. The court asked Golden, the Liberty’s chief engineer, only thirteen questions, including such basic information as his name, how many years he had served in the Navy, and the cost of his waterlogged tape recorder. Court m
embers asked Lamkin, who fought fires on deck as the planes strafed the ship, just eleven questions and Thompson only eight, ranging from whether he had attended damage control school to whether he was aware that a court had been convened to examine the attack. Mac Watson, another of the Liberty’s officers, was asked only five questions.
The court ignored other important details. No one followed up on Painter’s testimony that the Liberty sailed seventeen and a half miles from shore moments before the attack, a fact that clearly established that the Liberty was in international waters and well beyond the territorial limits of either Israel or Egypt. Another fact absent from the discussion was that the Liberty, attacked off the coast of Egypt, never approached within thirty-eight miles of the Israeli coast. The court also failed to explore the testimonies of Wayne Smith or Lamkin that the attackers jammed the Liberty’s communications, indicating possible foreknowledge of the ship’s identity. James Halman, the radioman who made the calls for help, was available to testify, but the court never summoned him. The jamming convinced Halman that the Israelis knew the Liberty was an American ship.
Other crewmembers said the court deleted testimony unfavorable to Israel and the Navy from its published report. Lucas submitted a container of unburned napalm jelly that he scraped off the front of the Liberty’s superstructure after the attack. Nowhere in the court’s printed transcript or in any of its findings is that mentioned, though court members did ask the ship’s doctor if he treated any napalm burns. Painter’s testimony that the torpedo boats machine gunned the life rafts—witnessed by other crewmembers and recalled years later by Captain Boston—also is absent from the court’s final transcript. Cocnavitch said he was ordered to report to the wardroom, sworn in, and asked about the abandon ship order he heard passed over the sound-powered phones. None of the radarman’s testimony appears in the court’s final record, nor is Cocnavitch even listed as a witness.
More importantly, the court failed to challenge Israel’s story despite a directive “to inquire into all the pertinent facts and circumstances leading to and connected with the armed attack.” The American government never forced Israel to produce its pilots, torpedo boat skippers, or commanders to testify. Likewise, the government never demanded that Israel submit its ship logs, flight books, or recordings of its pilot communications, all reasonable requests between allied nations. The only evidence submitted on Israel’s behalf were telegrams from Ernest Castle, the American naval attaché in Tel Aviv. These telegrams repeated Israel’s claim that the Liberty was unmarked, acted suspiciously, and resembled an Egyptian cargo ship a fraction of the Liberty’s size. When shown one of these messages, McGonagle refuted it.
Kidd confessed years later that his superiors had handicapped the investigation. Israel had been off-limits. “Our Navy’s Inquiry was tasked to paint but one part of the picture,” the admiral wrote in a letter to one of the Liberty’s officers. “Any dealings with any other Nation or any like sources beyond our own people were precluded.” Inside the Liberty’s wardroom that picture became clear to the testifying officers. Many believed that the court was more interested in whether the Liberty and its crew had erred than what actually prompted the attack. “The court didn’t seem interested at all in who attacked us and why,” recalled Painter, who described the court as a “sham.” “It was all about whether we had done something wrong.”
Despite contradictions in testimony, the witnesses agreed on one fact: the Liberty flew the American flag. Scott testified that he looked up at dawn to check the wind direction and saw the flag flying. Painter told the court he observed the flag later that morning and again right after the torpedo attack as he prepared life rafts in response to the abandon-ship order. Golden recalled that after lunch, while sunbathing with McGonagle, he observed two recon flights circle the ship. When the latter plane buzzed the Liberty’s smokestack, Golden couldn’t help but notice the flag.
“Was it extended?” the court’s lawyer asked.
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “There was a slight breeze blowing.”
“And it was standing out where it could be seen?” the court pressed.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “Not completely the full length, but it was standing out.”
Watson also told the court he saw the flag flying during lunch that afternoon. Like Golden, the young officer noted the wind was blowing while he tracked a recon flight as it zoomed over the ship’s radar mast.
“Extended?” the court asked.
“Yes, sir,” Watson replied.
Wayne Smith testified that during the attack he sprinted from the main radio room to the transmitter room in part so that he personally could check to make sure the flag was hoisted. Lucas recounted spotting it on the mast during the attack. Even McGonagle, whose testimony differed from his men on other points, agreed with his crew that the Liberty flew the American flag. The skipper testified that when he first observed the torpedo boats approaching from about fifteen miles away—long before the torpedo hit the ship—he ordered the signalman to hoist the Liberty’s largest flag.
Jim O’Connor, who was en route to a military hospital in Germany to have his blasted kidney removed when the inquiry took place, later provided one of the clearest accounts of the flag at the start of the attack. He told officials at the NSA that an explosion knocked him to the deck of the flying bridge during the first strafing run. When he fell, he looked up to check the flag. “That question was in my mind,” O’Connor recalled. “The American flag was up there and it was flying.”
“It was not obscured by any smoke or any of that stuff?” NSA officials asked.
“No,” O’Connor replied. “The flag was ahead of where the smoke stack was. We hadn’t taken that many hits at that point.”
“And there was enough wind to have it—”
“It was standing straight up.”
CHAPTER 13
Thursday and Friday were the longest days we have experienced.
—GEORGE SCOTT, LETTER TO HIS SON, ENSIGN JOHN SCOTT
Less than a week after the attack Newsweek broke the story that many senior Washington officials believed Israel had deliberately targeted the Liberty. President Johnson was the magazine’s source. The 178-word article headlined “Sinking the Liberty: Accident or Design?” observed that the assault left a “wake of bitterness and political charges of the most serious sort.” Previous speculation about the mission vanished. The article defined the Liberty as a spy ship tasked to intercept battlefield messages. “One top-level theory holds,” Newsweek reported, “that someone in the Israeli armed forces ordered the Liberty sunk because he suspected it had taken down messages showing that Israel started the fighting. (A Pentagon official has already tried to shoot down the Israeli claim of ‘pilot error.’) Not everyone in Washington is buying this theory, but some top Administration officials will not be satisfied until fuller and more convincing explanations of the attack on a clearly marked ship in international waters are forthcoming.”
Similar articles followed in other newspapers and magazines. U.S. News & World Report declared that “questions outnumbered answers” and “the full story may never be made public.” “Pending investigations, the U.S. Government’s position is that it has accepted the Israeli apology but rejected the explanation that the attack was entirely accidental,” the magazine wrote. “Well-informed officials feel the attack was too deliberate to have been made without a key decision by some Israeli officer.” Life magazine echoed the skepticism, calling the Liberty an “unexplained casualty” in a two-page article that included a photograph of sailors offloading the injured from a helicopter on the deck of the carrier America. “A storm of controversy about the incident immediately swelled,” the magazine reported. “As the listing vessel headed for repairs, the only indisputable facts about the episode were the grim casualty figures.”
Newspaper editorials berated Israel and accused the American government of lying. “When the essentials of an espionage operation have been exposed
, continued secrecy or obfuscation only serves to plant more seeds of doubt,” wrote the Washington Post. “The insinuations, carefully circulated by Pentagon officials, that the attack was deliberate and conscious only compound the impression of a shabby cover-up.” Syndicated columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson urged Congress to investigate the “puzzling circumstances.” “The facts are that the Liberty was seen by the Israelis off the Egyptian coast at dawn. They did not attack until 2:30 P.M. This gave them ample time to ascertain the identity of the ship,” the journalists wrote in a joint column. “Furthermore, a coordinated attack by both torpedo boats and airplanes means that the action was planned in advance.”
The families of Liberty sailors raised some of the same questions in telephone calls and letters to the men in Malta. Many of the wives and parents had received detailed accounts from loved ones that discussed Israel’s reconnaissance of the ship, the efficiency of the attack, and the crew’s doubts that it was an accident. Some family members even speculated about possible motives. In a two-page letter to her son, Ruth Scott questioned whether America’s failure to support Israel in the 1956 Suez Canal crisis might have been a factor in the attack. “No one can figure out why the Israelis did it,” she wrote. “Could they have thought you were giving information to the Arabs? Everything they struck they did swiftly and that is why they won so easily. I don’t know. They struck you, apologized to Johnson before our planes got to you. I would like to know what was behind all this.”
Many of the Liberty’s officers, frustrated by the court’s shallow probe, feared the government planned to downplay the attack. George Golden disobeyed orders and talked to the Associated Press. The Liberty’s chief engineer told a reporter in a Malta bar that the assault’s duration and intensity convinced senior crewmen the attack was intentional. The reporter wrote a story attributed to an unnamed sailor and it appeared in newspapers nationwide. “We were flying the Stars and Stripes and it’s absolutely impossible that they shouldn’t know who we were,” the reporter quoted his source. “This was a deliberate and planned attack and the remarkable thing about it was the accuracy of their air fire.” The Navy in response ordered McGonagle to silence his men: “Because other reporters may attempt to follow up, you may feel it appropriate to repeat previous admonition to your fine crew to refrain from speaking about matters under investigation.”