“I am compelled to speak out about one of U.S. history’s most shocking cover-ups. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked our proud naval ship — the USS Liberty — killing 34 American servicemen and wounding 172. Those men were then betrayed and left to die by our own government.”
— Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was Chief of Naval Operations in 1967, later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Fifty years ago on June 5, 1967, Israel attacked Egypt. This began the Six-Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Jerusalem which continues to this day. The USS Liberty, a spy ship, unarmed except for four machine guns, was sent to monitor events from international waters off Gaza. All morning on June 8, Israeli reconnaissance planes flew passes over the Liberty. Off-duty sailors sunbathing on the deck testified the planes were close enough to see the pilots as they waved. The sailors waved back. Without warning, unmarked Mirage and Super Mystere jets attacked the Liberty with napalm, rockets, cannon and machine guns. Nine Americans were killed, many wounded and the ship was an inferno. Survivors report that the initial barrage was to knock out the antennas so the ship couldn’t get off a distress call. A sailor managed to run a cable to an unused antenna. The patch worked but the Israelis, against international law, were jamming Liberty’s distress frequencies. They had to stop jamming while they strafed and the Americans were able to use those few seconds to get off a message to the Sixth Fleet.
Twice the Fleet, fifteen minutes away by air, launched jets to help the Liberty. Both times Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered them back. Rear Admiral Larry Geis couldn’t believe it and challenged the second order. Then President Lyndon Johnson repeated the recall order reportedly telling Geis that, “…he didn’t care if the ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies.”*
About 2 p.m. three Israeli torpedo boats arrived to finish the job. Captain William McGonagle, badly wounded, still on the bridge, evaded the first four torpedoes but the fifth hit Liberty midship killing 25 sailors and blowing a forty foot diameter hole in her below the waterline. The Israeli torpedo boats came in close to machine gun men fighting fires and carrying wounded. Captain McGonagle gave the order to lower life rafts for the most seriously wounded men in case the ship rolled. The Israelis machine gunned and sank those rafts at point blank range
Unknown to Israel, a U.S. Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane high above the attack made audio recordings, some recently declassified, of Israeli pilots identifying the Liberty as an American ship to Israeli ground control. The pilots were ordered to attack the vessel and sink it.**
There was no Congressional inquiry. The U.S. Navy’s inquiry was rushed through in a week. Surviving crew members were ordered never to mention the attack to anyone, not even family or be ‘court-martialed, imprisoned or worse.’
To this day Israel claims their coordinated, two-hour attack on a sunny day with unlimited visibility, in calm seas was an accident. Given its size, coloring, American flag, four-foot tall ship’s letters, plus forty antennas, including huge round ones, the Liberty has been called the most distinctive vessel in the Mediterranean. Israel claims they mistook it for a small 1920’s era Egyptian horse freighter, the El Quseir. That’s like mistaking the state ferry Columbia for a Bering Sea crabber.
You can believe Israel’s narrative or you can believe Admiral Moorer and CIA Chief at the time Richard Helms, Secretary of State at the time Dean Rusk, NSA Director Lt. General Marshall Carter, National Security Council member Harold Sanders, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arliegh Burke, General of Marines Ray Davis, Captain Ward Boston, legal counsel for the only U.S. Navy Liberty inquiry committee, various American diplomats, the Liberty’s officers and crew and many more on record stating Israel deliberately tried to kill our ship and its entire crew. The cover-up remains a disgrace to our country and a defining moment in American Middle East policy. Undersecretary of State George C. Ball put it this way, “The ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack was to have far more effect on policy in Israel than in America. … If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.”
* “The Cover Up” by James Bamford in The Guardian, Aug. 1, 2001. Also see: “New revelations in attack on American spy ship” by John Crewdson in The Chicago Tribune, Oct. 10, 2007.
**”The Day Israel Attacked America,” Al Jazeera documentary, 2014. The Moorer Commission’s findings and recommendations to Congress are at: www.gtr5.com/evidence/moorer.htm on the Liberty Memorial website.
• Dick Callahan is a Juneau writer.
