"Body of Secrets" — Attack on the USS Liberty

On June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab States, Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats attacked the U.S. Navy intelligence ship Liberty for 90 minutes in international waters, following several hours of low-level reconnaissance flights by Israeli aircraft.  In the incident, 34 American servicemen were killed and 171 more wounded.

Israel maintains that the attack was a mistake.  The Liberty's surviving crew members, as well as a number of former U.S. government officials -- including then-CIA Director Richard Helms and then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk -- assert that the attack was deliberate and that Israel knew the ship was American.

Throughout the attack, the Liberty was flying a large American flag.  It also had its name painted in English in five-foot letters across the stern.

The following text on the incident is excerpted from the book, Body of Secrets by James Bamford:

In the days following the attack, the Israeli government gave the U.S. government a classified report that attempted to justify the claim that the attack was a mistake.  On the basis of that same report, an Israeli court of inquiry completely exonerated the government and all those involved.  No one was ever court-martialed, reduced in rank, or ever reprimanded.  On the contrary, Israel chose instead to honor Motor Torpedo Boat 203, which fired the deadly torpedo at the Liberty.  The ship's wheel and bell were placed on prominent display at the naval museum, among the maritime artifacts of which the Israeli navy was most proud. . . .

The [Israeli] torpedo-boat crew claimed that they had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian troop transport, El Quseir.  At the time of the attack, the Egyptian ship was rusting alongside a pier in the port of Alexandria, 250 miles from where the Liberty was attacked, and along that pier El Quseir remained throughout the war.  The location of every Egyptian ship would have been a key piece of intelligence before Israel launched its war.  According to the long-secret 1981 NSA [National Security Agency] report:

Finally the NSA report, fifteen years after the fact, added:

"I believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities," said [NSA deputy director, Dr. Louis] Tordella.  His statement was amazingly astute, since he likely had no idea of the war crimes being committed on the Sinai at the time, within easy earshot of the antenna groves that covered the Liberty's deck.

On the morning of June 8, the Israeli military command received a report that a large American eavesdropping ship was secretly listening only a few miles off El Arish.  At that same moment, a scant dozen or so miles away, Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds, a fact that the entire Israeli army leadership knew about and condoned, according to the army's own historian.  Another military historian, Uri Milstein, confirmed the report.  There were many incidents in the Six Day War, he said, in which Egyptian soldiers were killed by Israeli troops after they had raised their hands in surrender.  "It was not an official policy," he added, "but there was an atmosphere that it was okay to do it.  Some commanders decided to do it; others refused.  But everyone knew about it."

Israel had no way of knowing that NSA's Hebrew linguists were not on the ship, but on a plane flying high above.  Nevertheless, evidence of the slaughter might indeed have been captured by the unmanned recorders in the NSA spaces.  Had the torpedo not made a direct hit there, the evidence might have been discovered when the tapes were transmitted or shipped back to NSA.  At the time, Israel was loudly proclaiming -- to the United States, to the United Nations, and to the world -- that it was the victim of Egyptian aggression and that it alone held the moral high ground.  Israel's commanders would not have wanted tape recordings of evidence of the slaughters to wind up on desks at the White House, the UN, or the Washington Post.  Had the jamming and unmarked fighters knocked out all communications in the first minute, as they attempted to do; had the torpedo boat quickly sunk the ship, as intended; and had the machine gunners destroyed all the life rafts and killed any survivors, there would have been no one left alive to tell any stories.

That was the conclusion of a study on the Liberty done for the U.S. Navy's Naval Law Review, written by a Navy lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Walter L. Jacobsen.  "To speculate on the motives of an attack group that uses unmarked planes and deprives helpless survivors of life rafts raises disturbing possibilities," he wrote, "including the one that the Liberty crew was not meant to survive the attack, and would not have, but for the incorrect 6th Fleet radio broadcast that help was on its way -- which had the effect of chasing off the MTBs [motor torpedo boats]."

Since the very beginning, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, appointed Chief of Naval Operations shortly after the attack, has also been convinced that the assault was deliberate.  "I have to conclude that it was Israel's intent to sink the Liberty and leave as few survivors as possible," he said in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of the assault.  "Israel knew perfectly well that the ship was American."

And in a CIA report received by that agency on July 27, 1967, a CIA official quotes one of his sources, who seems to be an Israeli government official:

The CIA called the document "raw intelligence data," and said it was one of "several which indicated a possibility that the Israeli Government knew about the USS Liberty before the attack."

In fact, another CIA report, prepared in 1979, indicates that Israel not only knew a great deal about the subject of signals intelligence during the 1967 war, but that Sigint was a major source of their information on the Arabs.  "The Israelis have been very successful in their Comint [communications intelligence] and Elint [electronic intelligence] operations against the Arabs," said the report.  "During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis succeeded in intercepting, breaking, and disseminating a tremendous volume of Arab traffic quickly and accurately, including a high-level conversation between the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the UAR and King Hussein of Jordan.  Over the years the Israelis have mounted cross-border operations and tapped Arab landline communications for extended periods.  The Israelis have also on occasion boobytrapped the landlines."

The same CIA report also made clear that after collecting intelligence on the Arab world, spying on the United States was Israel's top priority:  "The principal targets of the Israeli intelligence and security services are:... (2) collection of information on secret U.S. policy or decisions, if any, concerning Israel."

A mistake or mass murder?  It was a question Congress never bothered to address in public hearings at the time.  Among those who have long called for an in-depth congressional investigation was Admiral Thomas Moorer, who went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  "Congress to this day," he said, "has failed to hold formal hearings for the record on the Liberty affair.  This is unprecedented and a national disgrace."  Perhaps it is not too late, especially for a Congress that rushes into lengthy hearings on such momentous events as the firing of a few employees from a travel office in the White House.

"I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation....  Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations.  I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day.  The attack was outrageous."
--former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk