I herd an explanation that the Liberty was a spy ship monitoring and mapping the war in real time. The computing power to analyze the data was in Cyprus under joint operations with the British. A spy was giving the intelligence on Israel to the Arabs (Egypt) So Israel is fighting for her life and they discover source of the intelligence to the Arabs. So it makes since that we didn’t want our capability to map battlefields in real time compromised and we need to catch a spy too.
“mapping the war in real time” makes absolutely no sense under the circumstances of the USS Liberty attacks. With only one Hebe linguist onboard, there could be no “real time” anything. This is 1967 and there was no such ability to do real time anything. Everything was funneled back to the analysts where ever that might have been and it would have taken a long time to figure out who was doing what to whom.
The spy angle is fiction. It makes for an interesting novel but it just is not true. How would the Israelis know of such a spy and how would they have known to whom he or she was passing such information? This is 1967 and the ability to catch such a spy real time is very limited as can be seen by the Pollard situation and others. It took years to finally catch the spies.
The idea that the US was passing info to the Russians to calm fears of losing client states is possible. An unknown spy passing TS information real time is almost impossible. Pollard and others did not steal real time information.