Rockets, Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies
Israel's Attack on the Liberty, Revisited
by Jeffrey St. Clair
Dissident Voice
November 27,
2002
In early June of
1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from
Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress
of Israel's attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed
surveillance ship.
Only hours after
the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out
reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period
of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily
recognizable as an American vessel.
A few hours
later more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with
rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the
fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.
A few minutes
later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets,
which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets,
coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and
dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship's top officers.
The Liberty's
radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had
been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist
called "a buzzsaw sound." Finally, an open channel was found and the
Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth
Fleet's large aircraft carrier.
Two F-14
phantoms left the carrier to come to the Liberty's aid. Apparently, the jets
were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return.
"Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately," he
barked. McNamara's injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David
L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: "You get those fucking
airplanes back on deck, and you get them back down." The planes turned
around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.
After the
Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack
boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship,
one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and
killing more than a dozen American sailors.
As the Liberty
listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts
into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded,
this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as
the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was
going to get out alive that way.
After more than
two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One
of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a
bullhorn: "Do you need any help?"
The wounded
commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster
to respond emphatically: "Fuck you."
The Israeli boat
turned and left.
A Soviet
destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert
mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet
ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the
Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty's conning officer refused.
Finally, 16
hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34
US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being
evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men
not to talk about their ordeal with the press.
The following
morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new
cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.
Within three
weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming
the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as
they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the
whole affair should be forgotten. "These errors do occur," McNamara
concluded.
***
In Assault
on the Liberty, a harrowing first-hand account by James Ennes Jr.,
McNamara's version of events is proven to be as big a sham as his concurrent
lies about Vietnam. Ennes's book created a media storm when it was first
published by Random House in 1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes
was a liar and an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies,
but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has published an
updated version, which incorporates much new evidence that the Israeli attack
was deliberate and that the US government went to extraordinary lengths to
disguise the truth.
It's a story of
Israel aggression, Pentagon incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that
persists to this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy of
Ennes's first-hand account of the attack and the lies that followed.
Now, 35 years
later, Ennes warns that the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath
should serve as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between the
US government and the government of Israel.
The Attack on
the Liberty is the kind of book that makes your blood seethe. Ennes skillfully
documents the life of the average sailor on one of the more peculiar vessels in
the US Navy, with an attention for detail that reminds one of Dana or O'Brien.
After all, the year was 1967 and most of the men on the Liberty were certainly
glad to be on a non-combat ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than
in the Gulf of Tonkin or Mekong Delta.
But this isn't
Two Years Before the Mast. In fact, Ennes's tour on the Liberty last only a few
short weeks. He had scarcely settled into a routine before his new ship was
shattered before his eyes.
Ennes joined the
Liberty in May of 1967, as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a
"spook ship", as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed to
be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty's normal routine was to ply
the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping equipment on the electronic
traffic in the region.
The Liberty had
barely reached Africa when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of
Staff to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was to
re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli attack on Egypt and
the allied Arab nations.
As the war
intensified, the Liberty sent a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an
escort. It was denied by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone to a
position in international waters about 13 miles from the shore at El Arish,
then under furious siege by the IDF.
On June 6, the
Joint Chiefs sent Admiral McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent
message instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a position
at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never forwarded the message to
the ship.
A little after
seven in the morning on June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take
the morning watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a "flying
boxcar" (later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown
over the ship at a low level.
Ennes says he
noticed that the ship's American flag had become stained with soot and ordered
a new flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a light
breeze.
At 9 am, Ennes
spotted another reconnaissance plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later
two Israeli fighter jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli
planes flew over the Liberty five more times.
When the first
fighter jet struck, a little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning
the skies from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands. A
rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the fragments shredded
the men closest to him.
After the
explosion, Ennes noticed that he was the only man left standing. But he also
had been hit by more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had
shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a second fighter jet
streaked above them and unleashed its payload on the hobbled Liberty.
At that point,
Ennes says the crew of the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why.
For a few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an officer
mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew that the Egyptian air
force already had been decimated by the Israelis. The idea that the Israelis
might be attacking them didn't occur to them until one of the crew spotted a
Star of David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.
Ennes was
finally taken below deck to a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded
men. It was hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg might
slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to death, the Liberty was
pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire and an Italian-made torpedo packed with
1,000-pounds of explosive.
After the attack
ended, Ennes was approached by his friend Pat O'Malley, a junior officer, who
had just sent a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He
got an immediate message back. "They said, 'Wounded in what action? Killed
in what action?'," O'Malley told Ennes. "They said it wasn't an
'action,' it was an accident. I'd like for them to come out here and see the
difference between an action and an accident. Stupid bastards."
The cover-up had
begun.
***
The Pentagon
lied to the public about the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In
a decision personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied
to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring to it instead
as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little more than a military version
of Jacques Cousteau's Calypso.
The military
press corps on the USS America, where most of the wounded sailors had been
taken, were placed under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from
the carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance,
objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest from the
reporters or their publications.
Predictably,
Israel's first response was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them
so well in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it had asked
the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any US ships in the area and
was told that there were none. Then the Israeli government charged that the
Liberty failed to fly its flag and didn't respond to calls for it to identify
itself. The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian
supply ship called El Quseir, which, even though it was a rusting transport
ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF said it suspected of shelling Israeli
troops from the sea. Under these circumstances, the Israeli's said they were
justified in opening fire on the Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted
the attack almost immediately, when they realized their mistake.
"The
Liberty contributed decisively toward its identification as an enemy
ship," the IDF report concluded. This was a blatant falsehood, since the
Israelis had identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack on
the ship.
Even though the
Pentagon knew better, it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that
perhaps the Liberty's flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless sea. The
Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted less than 20 minutes.
After the
initial battery of misinformation, the Pentagon imposed a news blackout on the
Liberty disaster until after the completion of a Court of Inquiry
investigation.
The inquiry was
headed by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn't have a free hand. He'd been
instructed by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and to
protect the reputation of Israel.
The Kidd
interviewed the crew on June 14 and 15. The questioning was extremely
circumscribed. According to Ennes, the investigators "asked nothing that
might be embarrassing to Israeland testimony that tended to embarrass Israel
was covered with a 'Top Secret' label, if it was accepted at all."
Ennes notes that
even testimony by the Liberty's communications officers about the jamming of
the ship's radios was classified as "Top Secret." The reason? It
proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship. "Here was
strong evidence that the attack was planned in advance and that our ship's
identity was known to the attackers (for it its practically impossible to jam
the radio of a stranger), but this information was hushed up and no conclusions
were drawn from it," Ennes writes.
Similarly, the
Court of Inquiry deep-sixed testimony and affidavits regarding the flag-Ennes
had ordered a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack. The
investigators buried intercepts of conversations between IDF pilots identifying
the ship as flying an American flag.
It also refused
to accept evidence about the IDF's use of napalm during the attacks and choose
not to hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the fact that
the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.
"No one
came to help us," said Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty's physician.
"We were promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before our
own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came to the war zone and
we were turned down."
None of this
made its way into the 700-page Court of Inquiry report, which was completed
within a couple of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.
McCain approved
the report over the objections of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer
assigned to the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and
contrary to the evidence.
Staring sent a
letter to the Judge Advocate General of the Navy disavowing himself from the
report. The JAG seemed to take Staring's objections to heart. It prepared a
summary for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored the
Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:
* that the
Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel;
* that it's flag
was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze;
* that Israeli
planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range;
*
the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo
boats.
This succinct
and largely accurate report was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed
locked up for many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some in
the Oval Office. But here was enough grumbling about the way the Liberty
incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that old Washington fixer Clark
Clifford to do damage control. It didn't take Clifford long to come up with the
official line: the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.
It turns out
that the Admiral Kidd and Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers
who prepared the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the
Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words, the IDF knew that
they were striking an American spy ship and they wanted to sink it and kill as
many sailors as possible. Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham
report that concluded it was an accident?
Twenty-five
years later we've finally found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the
Navy Times: "Officers follow orders."
It gets worse.
There's plenty of evidence that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that
Israel intended to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike
had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.
As the attacks
were going on, conversations between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force
officers in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted by
Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The American plane
narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.
Initial reports
on the incident prepared by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the
National Security Agency all reached similar conclusions.
A particularly
damning report compiled by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense
minister Moshe Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed
until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily redacted version
of the report was released in 1977. It reads in part:
"[The
source] said that Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship and that one
of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, 'This is pure murder.'
One of the admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and it was
he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan."
This amazing
document generated little attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly
questioned about his role in the attack.
The analyses by
the intelligence agencies are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense
Subcommittee on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains
classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: "So as not to embarrass
Israel."
More proof has
recently come to light from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the
Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli
pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him
his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter
to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy
vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for
instructions. Toni said he was ordered to "attack." He refused and
flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested
for disobeying orders.
***
How tightly does
the Israeli lobby control the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on
an America ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress. In
1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open a senate hearing into
the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened by brokering a deal with
Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to
the ship. A State Department press release announced the payment said,
"The book is now closed on the USS Liberty."
It certainly was
the last chapter for Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the
following year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his
unsettling questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign.
Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent, Big Jim Thompson,
and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.
But the book
wasn't closed for the sailors either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed
the gist of what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged
Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When one sailor told
an officer that he was having problems living with the cover-up, he was told:
"Forget about it, that's an order."
The Navy went to
bizarre lengths to keep the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew.
When gag orders didn't work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of the
confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that sounds like something
right out of the CIA's MK-Ultra program.
"In an
incredible abuse of authority, military officers held two young Liberty sailors
against their will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the base
hospital," Ennes writes. "For days these men were drugged and
questioned about their recollections of the attack by a 'therapist' who
admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry or psychology. At one point,
they avoided electroshock only by bolting from the room and demanding to see
the commanding officer."
Since coming
home, the veterans who have tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed
relentlessly. They've been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often,
it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And, oh yeah,
they've also been painted as anti-Semites.
In a recent
column, Charley Reese describes just how mean-spirited and petty this campaign
became. "When a small town in Wisconsin decided to name its library in
honor of the USS Liberty crewmen, a campaign claiming it was anti-Semitic was
launched," writes Reese. "And when the town went ahead, the U.S.
government ordered no Navy personnel to attend, and sent no messages. This
little library was the first, and at the time the only, memorial to the men who
died on the Liberty."
***
So why then did
the Israelis attack the Liberty?
A few days
before the Six Days War, Israel's Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington
to inform LBJ about the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the
US could not support such an attack.
It's possible,
then, that the IDF assumed that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war
plans. Possible, but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and
Leslie Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the Six Days
War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship. So closely were
the two sides working that US intelligence aid certainly helped secure Israel's
devastating and swift victory. In fact, it's possible that the Liberty had been
sent to the region to spy for the IDF.
A somewhat more
likely scenario holds that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel's plan
to breach the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.
It has also been
suggested that Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of
pinning the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political
opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of course, for this
plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed and its crew killed.
There's another
factor. The Liberty was positioned just off the coast from the town of El
Arish. In fact, Ennes and others had used town's mosque tower to fix the
location of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline. The IDF
had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as a prisoner of war camp.
On the very day the Liberty was attacked, the IDF was in the process of
executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they
surely wanted to conceal from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an
Israeli reporter, who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: "The
Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot
them to death."
The bigger
question is why the US government would participate so enthusiastically in the
cover-up of a war crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never
been slow to hide its own incompetence. And there's plenty of that in the
Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide an escort, situating
the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging battle, the inability to
intervene in the attack and the inexcusably long time it took to reach the
battered ship and its wounded.
That's
but par for the course. But something else was going on that would only come to
light later. Through most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on
the sale of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty
attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on the Hill) was
seeking to have this proscription overturned. The top brass certainly knew that
any evidence of a deliberate attack on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle
their plans. So they hushed it up.
In January 1968,
the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to
flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year.
Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had
become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft.
Perversely,
then, the IDF's strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel
together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF
attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache
helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint
operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.
Thus, does the
legacy of Liberty live on, one raid after another.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the co-author of Five Days that
Shook The World: The Battle For Seattle and Beyond with Alexander Cockburn,
and is a co-editor of Counterpunch, the nation’s best muckraking
newsletter. Email: counterpunch@counterpunch.org