The Attack on the Liberty

by James Scott

  Harman’s answer came within hours. Rather than indict the attackers, Chief of Staff Rabin compromised. Israel would hold a judicial inquiry to determine whether the pilots, torpedo boat skippers, or commanders should stand trial on criminal charges. The military planned to announce the inquiry to the press in Tel Aviv at 8 P.M. that evening, June 20. Though not as dramatic a response as Harman might have hoped, the expanded probe at least promised to shield Israel from accusations that it had whitewashed the attack and provided extra time to await the outcome of the U.S. naval court of inquiry, since the United States had refused to share its findings in advance. If pressed about the attack, diplomats could always tell American leaders that the investigation continued and indictments were still possible.

  Embassy officials hustled to deliver the news. Ephraim Evron passed Israel’s one-paragraph press release to NSC staffer Harold Saunders and asked that he immediately forward it to Rostow and Bundy. The ambassador also sent a copy of the release to Katzenbach and then briefed Eugene Rostow at the State Department, informing him that a military judge would oversee the inquiry. American officials remained convinced that Israel needed to punish the attackers. The announcement of the Israeli inquiry sparked optimism that might still happen. A State Department telegram to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv relayed the news: “Israeli Judge Advocate General now calling judicial inquiry that could bring persons to trial.”

  NSA deputy director Louis Tordella climbed the steps of the Capitol on the afternoon of June 20 to brief select members of the House Appropriations Committee about the Liberty. The NSA’s second in command had a reputation as a brilliant mathematician who excelled in classical number theory and algebra, a natural skill set for cryptology. The tall and slender Tordella had earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Illinois and once taught at Chicago’s Loyola University. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tordella had served as a Navy cryptanalyst, where he applied his math skills to help break the German Enigma machine used to encrypt messages. Colleagues at the agency viewed Tordella as hardworking and conservative, a trait that was reflected in his daily wardrobe of brown suits and white shirts.

  Democratic representative George Mahon of Texas sat down with Tordella in a private room across the hall from the committee’s defense appropriations office. Republican representative Glenard Lipscomb of California and senior clerk Robert Michaels joined the meeting. Mahon began by asking about the Liberty’s mission and why it had sailed in the Mediterranean. Tordella explained that the spy ship had been diverted from its assignment off Africa in response to the increased tensions in the Middle East. The move had allowed the agency to better serve the national intelligence interests, including those of the Sixth Fleet in case the United States had been forced to intervene in the conflict. Tordella used a map to show the lawmakers the Liberty’s track across the Mediterranean and told the men the spy ship never strayed from international waters.

  Mahon asked for details of the attack and why the Liberty steamed so close to the Egyptian coast. Tordella explained that line-of-sight communications dictated the ship’s position. Tordella described the effort to move the Liberty hours before the attack, though the veteran spy deliberately chose not to go into any more details than required on the communications foul-up and refused to blame any individual or agency for the failure to contact the Liberty. Tordella’s hostility over Israel’s assault was reflected in the tone of his comments, as he recorded in a secret memo for the record. “I wryly mentioned that the apology from the Israelis was received and the order to the commanding officer of the America was sent with such speed as to enable the recall of the planes which had been sent out to sink the attacking torpedo boats on the assumption they were Egyptian.”

  Mahon pressed Tordella to explain why Israel attacked. The senior spy could offer little. The NSA lacked concrete proof that Israel deliberately targeted the Liberty. A Navy spy plane overhead the afternoon of the attack had intercepted the communications of Israeli rescue helicopters sent out afterward, but failed to record the fighters or torpedo boats. The limited conversations between Israeli helicopter pilots and ground control were ambiguous and showed some confusion over the nationality of the ship. “If they are speaking Arabic (Egyptian), you take them to El Arish,” the transcript shows ground control ordered the pilots. “If they are speaking English, not Egyptian, you take them to Lod.” Transcripts of the intercepts confirmed that the Liberty flew the American flag as the pilots reported spotting it on the Liberty’s mast along with the ship’s hull numbers: “We request that you make another pass and check once more if this is really an American flag.”

  The absence of concrete proof of a deliberate attack did not persuade Tordella and other NSA leaders that the assault was an accident. Many realized that only the attackers’ communications could answer that question and even that might not reveal what Israeli commanders in headquarters actually knew. An NSA task force created to examine the attack prepared a fact sheet for the agency’s leaders. Under the question of whether the attack was premeditated, analysts listed a half dozen bullet points that highlighted Israel’s exceptional military and pointed to the fact that it was unlikely to make such a blunder. Information the agency received from a source in Israel later made it clear to senior leaders the attack was no accident.

  Tordella explained to Mahon what the agency knew from the limited intercepts. “I told him we simply did not know from either open or intelligence sources but that, by now, there probably was a fair amount of denial and cover-up by the Israelis for the sake of protecting their national position.” Mahon asked if a mistake of this nature was common. Tordella doubted it. “I told him that I thought a ship the size of the Liberty was unlike and much larger than Egyptian ships and that an obviously cargo-type vessel should not reasonably be mistaken by competent naval forces or air pilots for an Egyptian man-of-war. At best I estimated the attacking ships and planes were guilty of gross negligence and carelessness.” Mahon asked Tordella’s personal opinion. “I said that, for what it was worth, 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.”

  Tordella’s beliefs echoed those of his boss, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter. The NSA director, who had served as a senior aide and confidant to George Marshall during his tenure as general and then secretary of state and of defense, had a background in intelligence and was politically well connected in Washington. President John Kennedy had chosen him in 1962 to serve as the deputy director of the CIA, where he remained until 1965, when Johnson appointed him head of the NSA. Soon after the Liberty attack, Carter appeared before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to discuss the Liberty. Cyrus Vance joined him for the closed-door session. Lawmakers asked whether Carter believed Israel deliberately tried to sink an American ship. “It couldn’t be anything else but deliberate,” he testified. “There’s just no way you could have a series of circumstances that would justify it being an accident.”

  “I think it’s premature to make a judgment like that,” Vance countered. Carter would later tell an NSA historian that the Liberty was “where I first parted company with Vance.” Gerard Burke, Carter’s chief of staff, remembered when his boss returned to the NSA afterward, appearing in Burke’s ninth-floor office with stunning news. “Cy Vance just told me to keep my mouth shut,” Burke recalled his boss telling him. “Those were his exact words.” The implication was clear. Regardless of the opinions of Carter, Tordella and other senior leaders, Vance demanded the men remain silent. Carter fumed, but Burke described his boss as a loyal soldier who knew to follow orders. “There was absolutely no question in anybody’s mind that the Israelis had done it deliberately,” Burke said. “I was angrier because of the cover-up—if that’s possible—than of the incident itself, because there was no doubt in my mind that they did it right from the outset. That was no mystery. The only mystery to me was why was
the thing being covered up.”

  These views were shared by many of the NSA’s senior leaders. Soon after the attack, a team had flown to Malta to inspect the ship. The extensive damage stunned the men. “Just looking at the damage, it would be hard to say that was an accident,” said Allan Deprey, a Navy lieutenant assigned to the NSA who traveled to Malta. “One shot would be an accident or even one torpedo, but there was damage from all directions.” Oliver Kirby, deputy director for operations, said he believed Israel wanted an impenetrable defense line. The Liberty proved a threat. “We knew it was deliberate,” Kirby said of the attack. “It was very well planned, premeditated. They knew exactly what they were doing.” Brigadier General John Morrison, Jr., assistant deputy director for operations, said an accidental attack defied logic. “We just couldn’t believe that. We knew what the Liberty stood for. We knew what it looked like. It was not a small ship. It was a large ship,” Morrison said. “They being a bright bunch of folks, we had to believe that they knew. They saw the silhouettte of the ship. They knew when they looked at it what it was. Our flag was flying.”

  Many senior officers in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research also doubted Israel’s explanation. Thomas Hughes, director of the department’s intelligence office, sent a detailed memo five days after the assault to Nicholas Katzenbach, outlining the details of the assault, the helicopter intercepts and his conclusions. The intercepts of Israeli helicopters failed to convince Hughes that the attack was an accident. He wrote that transcripts pointed to “an extraordinary lack of concern on the part of the attackers as to whether the target was hostile.” Hughes’s June 13 memo raised other questions about the extent and duration of the attack that eroded the credibility of Israel’s explanation.

  “In six strafing runs, it appears remarkable that none of the aircraft pilots identified the vessel as American,” Hughes wrote. “The torpedo boat attack was made approximately 20 minutes after the air attack. The surface attack could have been called off in that time had proper air identification been made.” Hughes pointed out what was obvious to many. “Liberty crew members were able to identify and record the hull number of one of the small, fast moving torpedo boats during the two minutes that elapsed between their attack run and the launching of the first torpedo, but the Israeli boat commanders apparently failed to identify the much larger and more easily identifiable Liberty (11,000 tons, 455 feet long, large identification numbers on hull).”

  Israel’s explanation, Hughes believed, “stretched all credibility.” “We were quite convinced the Israelis knew what they were doing,” he later said. “It was hard to come to any other conclusion.” Other senior staffers agreed, believing that Israel did not want the United States reading its wartime message traffic. “It wasn’t an accident,” recalled William McAfee, who served as the department’s liaison with other intelligence agencies. “Everybody knew it wasn’t an accident.” Granville Austin, director of the bureau’s Near East and South Asia office, reviewed intelligence reports that described Israel’s extensive reconnaissance of the Liberty hours before the attack. Despite Israel’s protestations that the attack was an accident, Austin believed that Israeli forces knew the Liberty was an American ship. “They knew damn well what it was,” he said. “That it was an accident, of course, was nonsense.”

  Despite Jerusalem’s close ties with Washington, many State Department officials—and others in the intelligence community—believed the Jewish state’s survival instinct was so strong that, if necessary, Israel would attack a close ally in the interest of self-preservation. “Our reports were devastating,” recalled William Wolle, who worked on Arab-Israeli issues in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. “The feeling of those of us at the working level in NEA was that the Israelis had deliberately done this so that we couldn’t read all of their communications, etc. We are their ally but they are not going to trust us when it comes to a wartime situation in terms of what information might get out, what we might pass along to someone. We all felt it was no accident.”

  In contrast to the strong views of many in the NSA and State Department, CIA officials backed Israel’s explanation days after the attack. A top-secret June 13 memo stated that the helicopter intercepts “leave little doubt that the Israelis failed to identify the Liberty as a US ship before or during the atack.” The memo also determined that even though the weather was clear and the Liberty’s hull number and flag were displayed, the attackers might have confused the spy ship for El Quseir, a position contrary to the beliefs of many in the Navy. “Although the Liberty is some 200 feet longer than the Egyptian transport El Quseir, it could easily be mistaken for the latter vessel by an overzealous pilot,” the memo stated. “Both ships have similar hulls and arrangements of masts and stack.”

  A top-secret memo prepared on June 21 that evaluated Ron’s report cast greater doubts on Israel’s explanation, but reaffirmed the agency’s earlier opinion that the attack likely was an accident and “not made in malice.” The report, which blamed the assault on “overeager Israeli commanders,” challenged how qualified naval commanders could twice miscalculate the Liberty’s speed and fail to note that such a cargo ship could not travel thirty knots and was unarmed and incapable of a shore bombardment. “To say the least, it is questionable military policy to authorize an attack upon an unidentified ship based solely upon a radar track of over 20 knots and erroneous reports that Israeli positions were being shelled,” the memo stated. “The Israeli statement that the Liberty could not be identified because it was covered with smoke also is a piece of self-serving over rationalization. Clearly the smoke was the result of the Israeli attacks.”

  The CIA based its analysis in part on the telegrams of the American naval attaché in Tel Aviv, who raised serious questions about the attack but still attributed it to trigger-happy commanders. However, other senior officers inside the American Embassy in Tel Aviv believed the attack was no accident. William Dale, the embassy’s second in command, suspected that the Israelis feared that the intelligence collected by the Liberty might fall into Arab hands. The department often sent telegrams with intelligence information to multiple embassies. A pro-Arab American diplomat stationed in Damascus, Beirut, or Cairo might pass along information to his contacts, a dangerous wartime proposition for Israel. Heywood Stackhouse, the embassy’s principal political officer, also said he didn’t believe Israel’s explanation. “The Israelis are very, very smart people,” Stackhouse said. “I just find it very hard to believe it was an error.”

  But the CIA’s position on the attack soon changed. A secret internal history report declassified in 2006 shows that the agency’s faith in its two initial intelligence memos vanished. The emerging details of the sustained assault, coupled with the mounting evidence against Israel, swayed many senior leaders at the agency that the assault likely was no accident. “Although Israeli authorities in Tel Aviv immediately apologized for the grievous ‘accident,’ many informed Americans soon came to believe that the assault had been anything but accidental. CIA initially resisted this judgment,” stated the agency’s history report. “But the cumulative weight of the evidence rapidly undermined this position.”

  Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor, the agency’s deputy director at the time of the attack, voiced his disbelief of Israel’s explanation in a June 22 memo to Director Richard Helms. Taylor had served as the head of naval intelligence and as the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The three-star admiral concluded that Israel deliberately attacked the Liberty. “To me, the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the Israelis knew that Liberty might be their target and attacked anyway,” Taylor wrote to his boss, “either through confusion in Command and Control or through deliberate disregard of instructions on the part of subordinates.”

  Several agency field memos produced in the summer and fall of 1967 highlighted the fact that Israel rarely made mistakes. One report even suggested Moshe Dayan had or
dered the attack. The CIA considered these field reports—based on unnamed agency contacts—as unevaluated intelligence. Many senior agency leaders by then had already concluded the attack was deliberate. “I don’t think there can be any doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing,” Helms told a CIA historian in an oral history interview declassified in 2008. “Why they wanted to attack the Liberty, whose bright idea this was, I can’t possibly know. But any statement to the effect that they didn’t know that it was an American ship and so forth is nonsense.”

  CHAPTER 16

  There was a suspicious feeling around town that we were attempting to back up the Israelis.

  —LUCIUS BATTLE, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR NEAR EASTERN AND SOUTH ASIAN AFFAIRS

  Captain Merlin Staring began his legal review of the American court of inquiry in his fifth-floor office of the Navy’s headquarters on North Audley Street in central London on June 17. Staring had served throughout World War II and later earned his law degree at Georgetown University. Over the years, the New York native rose from a staff lawyer to a senior member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Now the top lawyer for Admiral John McCain, Jr., the commander of American naval forces in Europe and the Middle East, Staring had the duty to review the investigative report on the Liberty and make recommendations to McCain before the admiral forwarded it to his superiors at the Pentagon.

  The top-secret volume on Staring’s desk for review totaled more than seven hundred pages, including a 158-page transcript of witness testimony and forty-nine exhibits that consisted of logs, telegrams, and photographs. The report even included the business card naval attaché Castle had dropped to the deck after the attack and the detailed breakdown of the 821 shell holes that riddled the spy ship’s hull and superstructure, handwritten on a piece of lined notebook paper. Staring saw evidence of the inquiry’s haste in its sloppy final report, replete with misspellings, typos, and scratch-outs. Some of the exhibits appeared incorrectly labeled and out of order and the names of some of the Liberty’s crewmembers were misspelled. The name of Dr. Richard Kiepfer, one of the central witnesses, was spelled two different ways throughout the report, both incorrect. The court even repeatedly misspelled Israeli.