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Conspiracy Theories Persist in Israeli Attack on US Spy Ship
By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
June 08, 2007
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Forty years ago Friday, as Israel undertook a fierce battle for its survival, the Israeli Air Force bombed a U.S. spy ship off the coast of Egypt. Thirty-four American servicemen died in the attack.
Although Israel insisted it mistook the ship for an Egyptian vessel, some of the USS Liberty’s crewmembers still insist the attack was intentional and that subsequent investigations were a cover-up.
Numerous American (and Israeli) investigations officially concluded that the Israeli attack resulted from a case of mistaken identity and that no malicious intent was involved.
Israel apologized for the incident and paid compensation to the families, and the nations formally agreed not to re-open the case.
But in the minds of the some survivors, the case was never closed. Some of them gathered in Washington this week to mark the 40th anniversary of the incident.
What happened
It was June 8, 1967, the fourth day of the Six-Day war, which ended in Israel’s stunning victory over the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. At midday, Israeli planes and then torpedo boats mistakenly identified the USS Liberty as an Egyptian war ship and opened fire.
But skeptics charge that Israel deliberately attacked the electronic intelligence-gathering ship, aiming to sink it.
Some say Israel hoped to blame the attack on the Egyptians, thereby giving the United States a chance to attack Egypt. Others say Israel wanted to prevent the U.S. from learning about an imminent attack to reclaim the Golan Heights. And some say Israel had slaughtered 1,000 Egyptian POWs and the U.S. vessel had intercepted a message about it.
A number of senior U.S. military and governmental figures, including then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk have gone on record saying they believed that the attack was deliberate and that Israel covered up the truth.
The USS Liberty Veterans Association’s website accused Israel of war crimes and is still demanding an investigation.
“The Israeli government, the Anti-Defamation League, and certain notorious apologists for Israel insist that the attack was a tragic accident and that the US government accepts that assertion,” the group says. “Virtually every knowledgeable American official with the lone exception of Robert McNamara is on public record calling the attack deliberate and the Israeli story untrue,” it says.
Rusk, in his 1990 memoir, wrote that the U.S. never accepted Israel’s explanation. “I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them to this day,” he said.
Former President Lyndon Johnson’s biographer Robert Dallek wrote that the highest officials in Johnson’s administration, including the president, “believed it ‘inconceivable’ that Israel’s ‘skilled’ defense forces could have committed such a gross error.”
Captain William L. McGonagle, commanding officer of the USS Liberty, was wounded in the attack. At a memorial ceremony in 1997, he said that it “appears to me that it was not a pure case of mistaken identity.”
Author and historian Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center’s Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, said there are three reasons for the continued conspiracy theories.
First, the crewmembers are “hurt and sore,” Oren told Cybercast News Service on Friday. But war is about people shooting at everybody. It’s normal to have 20 percent of any side’s casualties in a war come from so-called “friendly-fire,” he said.
Oren, a reservist in the Israeli army, said he lost 25 of his men in a single “friendly-fire” incident in broad daylight during Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon. And in an article he wrote on the USS Liberty incident seven years ago, Oren noted that more than five thousand American casualties in Vietnam were caused by friendly fire in 1967 alone.
Oren said the USS Liberty survivors’ organization appeared to be well-funded and hinted that some of the money may come from anti-Israel sources. (Israeli columnists Hirsh Goodman and Zeev Schiff noted earlier that “plainly, some groups, believed by Israeli intelligence to be funded by the Arabs, want to keep the issue alive.”)
Finally, Oren said, all the documents regarding the incident have been de-classified except one, which pertains to what the USS Liberty was actually doing in the war zone.
The vessel’s crew did not include any Hebrew speakers, so it could not have been spying on Israel, Oren said. Arabic and Russian translators were on board, however, and they were probably on a mission to track Egyptian troop movements and those of their Soviet advisors, he added.
Oren suggested that Israel is still blamed for the incident to avoid any culpability by the U.S. No Americans were ever accused of any wrongdoing in the incident but there were a number of “snafus” on the U.S. side, he said.
The ship had been ordered to pull back 100 miles from the Egyptian and Israel coasts but due to the Navy’s inefficient cabling system, the orders were received two days after they were sent — on June 9, the day after the attack.
Oren said no one — from President Johnson on down — actually knew where the Liberty was. Washington also had refused Israel’s request to identify all of its ships in the area; and it also refused a separate request for an American naval liaison, Oren said.
The ship’s captain William McGonagle and his officers were sunbathing on the deck of the ship when it was strafed for the first time, said Oren. According to Oren, McGonagle later was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, probably to disguise the fact that he was not court-martialed, he said.
One of the lingering discrepancies involves the claim of Liberty crewmembers that the ship was flying the American flag when it was attacked. But Israeli pilots insisted they never saw it. Oren said that one of the Israeli inquiries suggested that a flag hanging limply on a still day would not have been visible to pilots flying overhead.
A spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League in Jerusalem said that the cover-up theory has been discredited time and again by numerous U.S. investigations, which all concluded that the Israeli attack was a mistake.
“It’s pathetic and unfair and discriminatory against Israel,” Arieh O’Sullivan said. “It goes along with a host of other conspiracy theories.”
As a former journalist for the Jerusalem Post, O’Sullivan was one of two reporters in June 2004 allowed to listen to Israel Air Force archives audiotapes of the radio transmissions made prior, during and after the attack.
“Obviously, listening to the tapes sends chills down one’s spine,” he wrote at the time. “The pilots speak only before and after they act. There are full minutes of almost total silence and you know that men are being killed.”
On Friday, he said that a “chain of stupid mistakes” had led to the bombing.
In 2003, O’Sullivan was the first person ever to be granted an interview with the pilot, Reserve Brig-Gen. Yiftah Spector, who was the first to arrive at the USS Liberty’s position. Although he said he could not identify the ship, he knew it was military, according to the radio transmission.
“I did not fire on the Liberty as a human target. I was sent to attack a sailing vessel. This ship was on an escape route from the El Arish [Egypt] area, which at that same moment had heavy smoke rising from it,” Spector said. Spector said the ship was displaying no flag or symbol.
He said it’s a good thing he didn’t have bombs in his plane on that day, or the ship would have gone to the bottom of the sea.
“It was a tragic accident for which Israel has strictly apologized and paid compensation,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev.
He said Israel has experienced “many examples of friendly fire” in the course of various conflicts. Israel regards the incident with the USS Liberty in a “similar light,” Regev said.
Copyright 1998-2006 Cybercast News Service
I herd a theory from a guy connected to naval intelligence. That the data the Liberty was collecting was mapping the war in real time. But because the ship could not or did not have the computers necessary to do it they sent via microwave to a, British, American joint intelligence base on, Cyprus where they had the computer to do the mapping. Someone connected with that operation was slipping battle field information to the Egyptians, USSR. That then Israel found out and disabled the Liberty ability to harvest data. The accidental attack was cover so British and American Intelligence could find out who was leaking the information to the USSR.
Considering the size of computers then it would take to do this real time mapping and the Cold war it made sense to me.
] If I rememebr his autobiography correctly, Richard Helsm of the CIA believed this as well. It is hard to imagine that such a thing would be possible.
] If I remember his autobiography correctly, Richard Helms of the CIA believed this as well. It is hard to imagine that such a thing would be possible.
Sorry for the double post - the first message was some sloppy typing!