|
 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
|
Posted on 09/08/2003 12:01:02 AM PDT by SAMWolf
|
are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
|
| Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel free to address their specific circumstances or whatever issues concern them in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, brotherhood and support. The FReeper Foxhole hopes to share with it's readers an open forum where we can learn about and discuss military history, military news and other topics of concern or interest to our readers be they Veteran's, Current Duty or anyone interested in what we have to offer. If the Foxhole makes someone appreciate, even a little, what others have sacrificed for us, then it has accomplished one of it's missions. We hope the Foxhole in some small way helps us to remember and honor those who came before us.
|
|
On June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War, Israeli forces attacked the USS Liberty, a U.S. Navy intelligence-gathering ship off the coast of Gaza, killing 35 men and wounding 171. Israeli apologized and called the attack an accident. The U.S. government accepted the apology and did not openly challenge the explanation For almost three decades the crewmen of the Liberty have waged a campaign to have the attack investigated. Indeed, they claim that not only was the attack was intentional, but also that Johnson recalled the Sixth Fleet rescue flights to avoid a clash between the U.S. and Israel. The USS LIBERTY was a freighter built in the Kaiser shipyards of Oregon and launched in May 1945. It sailed the Pacific until 1958 when it was "mothballed" in Puget Sound. In 1964 it was refitted as a technical research ship for the National Security Agency. In the center of the ship below deck was a room containing electrical equipment which could pick up all radiio broadcasts over a wide area. The information from these broadcasts could be relayed back to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.  USS LIBERTY (AGTR-5) The ship had no armor and was armed only with four 50-caliber machine guns, two forward and two aft. For protection it relied upon the flag it flew and upon being recognized by any observer as "in a surveillance mode", i.e. it was not a warship and was remaining in international waters. It was easily recognizable as an electronics listening ship because of the large amount of electronic gear visible on deck and superstructure. This gear, including a tall Trescomm tower amidships, gave the ship a silhouette unlike that of any other ship in the world. The ship had its identification number, Gtr5, painted in l0-foot high letters on the bow. This id. number is prominent and visible in all photos of the ship both before and after the attack. The ship also had its name painted on the stern, and a large flag flew from the forward mast. These facts are important because Israeli spokesmen would later claim that the ship had no flag or other marks of identification. LIBERTY was listed in JANE'S FIGHTING SHIPS as a non-combatant. The ship was 460 feet long, displaced 10,000 tons, and had a top speed of16 knots (18 mph). It had a crew of 290 men.  LIBERTY displaying normal streaming colors. LIBERTY was one of five LIBERTY-type ships deployed worldwide. One of its sister ships, PUEBLO, would be captured off the coast of North Korea eight months after the attack on LIBERTY. (The reader can see at once that the NSA policy was a faulty and ill-considered one. These NSA communications ships, without armor or serious armament, but loaded with valuable and confidential equipment and records, were sent without escort into dangerous waters. In May 1967 LIBERTY was stationed off the Ivory Coast in west Africa. As the Mideast crisis developed, NSA sent orders to the ship to proceed to Rota, Spain, to take on board six NSA technical specialists (speakers of Russian and Arabic). The ship was then to proceed to a specifically assigned station 13 miles off the Gaza coast. The US has never made any official statement concerning the ship's mission, but the crewmen generally agree with the following scenario. There was in 1967 a dispute between the US and Egypt concerning the status of several Soviet "Bear" bombers based near Alexandria. The US suspected that Soviet pilots still manned these planes. Since the ship's assligned station enabled it to hear radio traffic in northern Egypt, and the NSA men brought on board understood Arabic and Russian, it made sense to assume that the ship's mission centered around these bombers. (The ship had no official Hebrew speaking technicians, but some of the crewmen understood Hebrew and later were able to understand overheard Israeli radio talks). As the ship was passing south of Sicily, the Six Day War began. Captain McGonagle, commander of LIBERTY, was worried about the danger to his ship, and asked Admiral William Martin, commander of the US Sixth Fleet stationed off Crete, to provide LIBERTY with a destroyer escort. Martin refused, stating that "LIBERTY is a clearly marked ship in international waters, not a participant in the conflict and not a likely subject for attack by anyone". He promised that in the unlikely event of an attack, jet fighters from the Sixth Fleet would be overhead "in ten minutes".  USS Liberty turns while under attack by Israeli motor torpedo boats, off the Sinai Peninsula, 8 June 1967. Note fire-damaged structure at left, with what appears to be a .50 caliber machine gun. Unknown to both McGonagle and Martin, NSA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had begun to reconsider LIBERTY's mission. Several messages went from NSA to the ship on June 7, instructing LIBERTY to withdraw 25 miles or more from the Gaza coast, or to leave the area altogether. All messages were misrouted and none reached the ship. On board the ship, Lt. James Ennes at 0700 assumed his post as Officer of the Day. He was told by Ensign John Scott that the ship had passed Port Said during the night, and the sky was filled with smoke and fire. He was also told that at 0600 an Israeli "flying boxcar" had observed the ship. This was the first of Israeli surveillance flights which would continue through the morning. How many and how close these flights were would later become a major source of controversy. On June 8, 1967, the American naval intelligence-gathering ship USS LIBERTY was attacked by Israeli air and naval forces off the coast of Gaza. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and 171 wounded. Beyond these two statements almost everything concerning this event is a matter of controversy. Furthermore, there are many unanswered questions, and mysterious circumstances not yet fully explained.  The crewmen of the ship believe that the attack was deliberate, and that the US and Israeli Governments cooperated to hide this fact, with false and rigged investigations and with untrue official accounts. The crewmen were ordered to keep silent on the matter, and as military men they had to obey. Fourteen years later, retired and no longer silenced, many of them formed the LIBERTY Veterans Association to wage a campaign to tell their version of events, a dissenting history opposed to the official history. The men have waged a remarkable campaign for attention and have gained the backing of important public figures and journalists. Their views are largely ignored by officials of the United States Government. The Israeli Government and its supporters have denounced the dissenting history produced by the LIBERTY crewmen as false and untruthful. Some of the questions on this subject which have not been answered to the satisfaction of all parties, and other questions concerning plain information (i.e., not partisan) still need to be more fully discussed. Among these questions are: 
Those who claim that the attack was accidental point to ten US and three Israeli investigations which, they claim, all concluded that the attack was an accident. How valid is this claim? What criticisms can be made of these inquiries? Answers to these questions can clarify the facts about this important event.  Damage to the ship's bridge area, received in attacks by Israeli forces off the Sinai Peninsula on 8 June 1967. View looks aft and to port, from just in front of the superstructure. Note rocket entrance and exit holes, and ruined signal lamp in lower left. It is impossible to write a "factual" account of the attack on the LIBERTY by Israeli forces. From the first hour of the event the story of what happened is in dispute between the crewmen and the Israelis. The most basic facts are challenged. For this reason I will frequently, in presenting an account of events, follow this with an opposing account and make clear that these contradictory claims are not reconciled. There has been a third of a century of discussion over the LIBERTY incident without resolution of the disputes. There are two large overall questions involved here. First, was the Israeli attack deliberate or accidental? Secondly, did the LBJ administration recall the rescue flights sent toward the ship to avoid a clash between US and Israeli forces? The first question, as to whether the attack was accidental or intentional, revolves around testimony from both sides concerning the events of June 8, 1967, and consideration of this question begins with an argument over the Israeli aerial surveillance of THE LIBERTY.  The crewmen claim that there were eight surveillance's of the ship, from 0600 to 1245. Most observations were by Noratlas "flying boxcars", a few by Mirage III fighter- bombers. Some of the flights stayed at a distance of a mile or more, but most came close to the ship and a few passed over the ship at low levels. The flight at 1000 by a Mirage III was of particular importance, for Hebrew- speaking radio operators on the ship heard the plane reporting back to its base that the ship was a US naval ship and in fact was the USS LIBERTY. By late morning the crew had become accustomed to these flights and regarded them as friendly surveillance, with the crew waving to the pilots who waved back. ISRAELI ACCOUNT: While the crewmen are exact and specific in their statements about the aerial surveillance, the Israelis relate various stories without reconciling them. The Israelis describe overflights ranging in number from none to seven, with three as the average (compared to the crewmen¹s claim of eight). They claim that many of the flights which the crew believed were surveillance were merely the traffic of planes back and forth from Israel to Egypt, and that some of these planes barely noticed the ship. Furthermore, Israeli spokesmen claim that it was impossible for the crewmen to see the pilots of the ships and to see them wave. The Israelis do say, however, that the 1000 flight which was so important to the crewmen did indeed observe and identify the ship. The 0600 sighting had resulted in a marker on the table classifying the ship as "unknown". The 1000 sighting now changed this marker to "neutral".  By 1130 the ship had reached its assigned spot and then turned westward, slowing its speed to 5 knots. On the shore in El Arish at 1145 there was a huge explosion and a thick cloud of black smoke spread along the beach. It was impossible for the crew to tell what this might mean. In fact, the explosion had been caused by Egyptian sappers blowing up ammunition dumps left by the Egyptian army in its retreat. The Israeli army in El Arish notified HQ in Tel Aviv that the shore was being bombarded, and that this might be connected to the ship (LIBERTY) which they saw 14 miles offshore, slowly heading westward. Meanwhile, other events were occurring which led the Israelis to believe, in their account, that LIBERTY was an enemy ship. In Ashdod at 1100 the marker signifying LIBERTY as a neutral ship was removed from the table by CMDR Lunz, in charge. He stated later that the marker referred to the ship at 0600, but now five hours later the ship would not be there and so the marker was removed. Lunz did not notify the incoming shift at 1100 of this, so when reports came in about a ship after 1100 the ship would be "rediscovered", this time as a possible enemy. Lunz claimed later that his actions were routine and according to procedure. LIBERTY ACCOUNT: The crewmen claim that Lunz's claim that there were no reports of the ship after 0600 is false. In particular, they point to the 1000 report from an Israeli plane back to base which identified the LIBERTY.  Points out damage inflicted on the ship's superstructure when Israeli forces attacked the Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula on 8 June 1967. The photograph was taken on 16 June, two days after Liberty arrived at Valletta, Malta, for repairs. Unknown to the crewmen, their ship was now the center of Israeli attention. In order to investigate the possible bombardment of the coast, three motor torpedo boats were assigned to investigate the situation.
|
Yep! And I'm plotting our return already!!! LOL!
Here's a link to her post.
I agree with you and some of the others. I beleive the attack was deliberate, but I doubt we'll ever know the real reason it occured. I'm generally pro-Israel, but this and the Pollard case are big black marks for them in my book.
I had a nice chat with our friend the colonel who during his army career was at the building of the Wall checking the nationality of the tank crews on the other side (Russian), discovering the joys of getting his killers pinned down in a rubber plantation, and later as an observer as Israeli tankers on the Golan heights rotated their turrets without changing elevation during their turkey shoot.
Apparently we supply arms and intelligence to Arabs and Israelis in an eternal grab-ass which came to a bind with USS Liberty.
Free Republic Radio's Luis Gonzalez had John Loftus as guest earlier this year. Loftus is co-author with Mark Aarons of The Secret War Against the Jews, St. Martin's Griffin, 1994, from which pages 276-286 I excerpt the following paragraphs:
In the last quarter of a century, more disinformation has been spread about the Liberty incident than any other episode in U.S.-Israeli relations. The cover-up continued with stories planted in the press during 1991 and 1992. The fact that both the United States and Israeli governments continued to lie about the incident a quarter of a century later is testimony to the sensitivity felt by them both about what really happened. Let us examine the lies, one by one.
The first had to do with the Liberty's mission. What was it doing off the coast of Israel? Immediately after the attack, a U.S. diplomat in Egypt said that "we had better get our cover story out fast, and it had better be good." 55 [confidential interviews, former officers, CIA] Within hours the Pentagon had released a media statement claiming that the Liberty had been stationed there to facilitate communications in case American citizens had to be evacuated from Egypt or Israel. It was a pretty thin story and was attacked almost immediately by the American press. In order to deflect accusations that the Liberty was spying on Israel, the Pentagon quickly floated a rumor that the ship was observing newly installed Soviet radar systems, which implied that it was spying on Egypt. 56 [The New York Times reported each of the rumors as they surfaced during June and July of 1967. Neither the Pentagon nor the White House ever explained how or why the various stories were initiated. Several people have pointed their finger at one of Lyndon Johnson's aides at National Security Affairs. See, for example, Anthony Pearson, Conspiracy of Silence, p. 70]
The problem with the spying-on-Egypt story was that the Liberty was so close to the Israeli coast that its crew literally could see buildings on the Gaza shore only twelve miles away. A few attempts were made to lie about the ship's position, such as the claim that it was "73 miles off the Sinai desert," but that lie was contradicted by an admission that it had been stationed "as much as 13.5 nautical miles" off the coast in international waters, and was never "closer than 12.5 miles" from Israel. 57 [The New York Times, July 25, 1967, p. 19, June 12, 1967, p. 11, and June 11, 1967, p. 27] So much for the spying-on-Egypt theory.
. . . .
. . .The press wanted to know why the Liberty remained twelve miles off the coast on June 8. For the first several weeks after the attack, the navy stuck to the relay-evacuation-messages story, but then on June 29 it admitted that it did not know why the Liberty remained behind. Both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Admiral of the Sixth Fleet had ordered the ship to pull out, but apparently it had never received the messages. 59 [Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zinonist Connection (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), p. 563.
The missing-message explanation immediately raised questions about the previous lie that the Liberty was to play a vital role as a radio relay station. If it could not even hear its own admirals broadcasting from a powerful aircraft carrier, how could it pick up a group of evacuees with weak radios and low batteries? The navy countered with the admission that somehow the messages were never sent to the Liberty. There had been an embarrassing foul-up in communications.
. . . .
We now know that the low-priority story was a half-truth wrapped in a double lie. The pull-back messages were not sent low priority, and they were in fact received by the Liberty. It is true that a desk at Fort Meade, home of the United States' ultra-secret service for electronic espionage, was involved, but the pull-back message was not lost there. In fact, Fort Meade told someone on the Liberty to ignore all orders from the Joint Chiefs. The ship was not under the command of the navy on June 8, 1967. It was assigned to the National Security Agency. 62 [Confidential interviews, former officers, CIA; former employees, the NSA; former liaison to the NSA; former analyst, Naval Intelligence.]
First, the low-priority orders to pull out were actually sent on the highest priority, code-named "Pinnacle." We now know from the declassified files that both the Sixth Fleet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were trying desperately to order the Liberty away from Israel. At least three high-priority messages were sent, the last only a short time before the attack. 63 [Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, pp. 562-563]
It is incredible that for two days none of the navy's messages got through to the Liberty's communications center. The ship had radio receivers so powerful that it could pick up a transmission from a field radio inside a tank forty miles away. Even the navy admitted that the ship was perfectly equipped to monitor communications in the Arab-Israeli war. Of course the ship could hear orders from its own headquarters. It was designed as an electronic listening post. The Liberty could receive radio messages better than any ship in the world at that time.
. . . .
The fact is that no one in either the Pentagon or the navy could send orders through the Liberty's communications center. None of the ship's officers could even set foot in that area. Commander McGonagle did not know it at the time, but the real masters of his ship were the civilian spies of the NSA.
On June 2, 1967, three days before the Six Day War erupted, the Liberty had been taken over by a special three-man civilian crew from the NSA, picked up at Rota, Spain. The senior officer among them was known to the ship's crew simply as "the Major," and only he and his men had access to the supersensitive communications areas in the hull. 66 ["The communications areas below decks--which housed intricate computers, decoding and listening devices manned by linguistic experts and other personnel who could be changed according to the ship's mission--were off limits to the crew, including the officer in charge, Commander (later Captain) William L. McGonagle. The communications areas were under direct control of a National Security Agency technician, known to the crew simply as 'the Major,' who had joined the ship with two other civilians at Rota, in Spain." Ibid.] This confirms what our sources among the "old spies" told us: The ship was on a secret mission from the NSA, about which the navy neither had understanding nor control. 67 [Confidential interviews, former officers, CIA; former employees, the NSA; former liaison to the NSA; former analyst, Naval Intelligence.]
We now know a little more about the civilians who came aboard the ship in Spain. They were experts in Hebrew. 68 [Ramparts, (August 1972), p. 48.] The Liberty had nothing to do with evacuating civilians, observing Soviet radar systems in Egypt, or even monitoring Arab communication; it was there to spy on the Jews. That was its only mission. On-the-record confirmation comes from a former NSA officer who had been stationed in Turkey during the Six Day War. While the navy could not communicate with the Liberty, the NSA was receiving a great deal of intelligence from the ship and relaying summaries back and forth to other NSA stations in Crete and Turkey. It is clear, from this officer's firsthand account, that the NSA was using the ship to spy only on the Jews. 69 ["The whole idea of sending the Liberty in was that at that point, the US simply did not know what was going on. We sent it in really close so that we could find out hard information about what the Israelis' intentions were. What it found out, among other things, was that [Israeli Commander Moshe] Dayan's intentions were to push on to Cairo and Damascus. The Israelis shot at the Liberty, damaged it pretty badly and killed some of the crew, and told it to stay away. It became pretty clear that the White House got caught with its pants down." Ibid., p. 43.]
. . . .
. . .While confirming much of the version of the Liberty affair given by our intelligence sources, the young NSA officer in Turkey was simply too far out of the loop to know why the ship's mission was so sensitive to the White House. It had nothing to do with uncovering Israeli strategic planning. In the first place, both the CIA and the White House already had been briefed in full about Israeli strategy. They knew full well that the advance to Cairo was only a feint and that the Israelis were planning to move north to the Golan Heights.
In any event, the Liberty was in the wrong place for eavesdropping on an Israeli move into Syria. Although it could listen in on the entire theater of operations, the ship would have been much better positioned off the coast north of Tel Aviv, near the Lebanese border, if the attack on Syria was its target. Instead, it was over a hundred miles farther south, below Tel Aviv, off the Gaza Strip. What was it doing there, so far from the action on June 8?
The position was not accidental. The ship was given specific orders. It left its station off the Egyptian coast and sailed all through the night of June 7 in order to reach this position. Then it stoped and sailed in slow circles for the rest of the day, as close to the Gaza shore as possible without crossing the twelve-mile limit. But why? What was the Liberty listening for? Certainly not the Syrians, and there had been no major Egyptian forces there for several days. The only ones left to listen to were the Israelis. On June 8 the mobile reserves and support units of the Israeli army on the southern front were scheduled to pull out of the Sinai, travel northward past Gaza, and prepare for the assault on the Golan Heights.
The only reason the Liberty would have come in so close to shore by the Gaza Strip was to monitor the transmissions of Israeli squad and tank radios, which virtually were impossible to intercept without the powerful listening devices on board the ship. These were the only low-range, battery-powered units that it could have been listening to. This was the type of information the Egyptian army needed most: intelligence on the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the Sinai. As each unit moved north past Gaza, the ship tracked it, identified it, and placed it on the war map. The only possible purpose for such close monitoring of the Israeli troop withdrawal was to tell Nasser where the holes were in the remaining Israeli forces.
It seems that the "old spies" were right. The Liberty was the Arabs' best hope. While the Israelis were stripping their forces in the Sinai, whether ground or air, or both, for an attack in the north, the Arabs were planning a counterattack in the south in an effort to retake Gaza. The American ship was there to keep track of the exhausted and undermanned units and show the Arabs where Israel's weak points were located on the southern front.
Military historians have wondered for years why Nasser kept fighting and refused the UN offer of a cease-fire. Actually, he was waiting for the overextended Israelis to open the northern front. He was waiting for the Liberty's order of battle intelligence to reveal precisely the exact locations of the remaining Israeli forces in the Sinai. With the help of the ship's war map, Nasser might be able to bloody the Israelis where their forces were weakest and perhaps restore the status quo in the Sinai.
. . . .
. . . .The White House was reeling from the threats of an oil embargo and diplomatic isolation in the Arab world that resulted from Nasser's propaganda. June 7 was when the secret offer of the war map was made and the Liberty diverted to the Gaza shoreline. That was what the Israelis heard when they tapped Nasser's phone line. 74 [Confidential interviews, former Israeli military attache; former Israeli military intelligence officers; former members, Israeli intelligence.]
Perhaps some people cannot believe that the United States would ever betray Israel by giving intelligence to the Arabs in time of war. Yet the Liberty was not the only example during the 1967 Six Day War. For example, two British historians reported a conversation that occurred on June 4, 1967, between King Hussein and a CIA agent in Jordan, who warned the king that Israel would attack Egypt the very next day. Hussein, of course, phoned Nasser immediately to tip him off. 75 [Cockburn and Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, p. 149.]
As we now know, Israeli intelligence had tapped the phone line between Hussein and Nasser. They had tape-recorded proof that the U.S. government had betrayed Israel's battle plans to the Arabs. . . .
The Israelis also knew in advance of the Liberty's mission. On the day before the ship arrived at Gaza, the NSA "Major" informed Commander McGonagle that the Liberty had picked up Israeli transmissions that caused him "concern." 76 [Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, p. 563.] An Israeli air patrol was waiting at first light when the ship arrived off the Gaza coast. For the next four hours, the Israelis tried to jam the ship's frequencies, to no effect. The Liberty's equipment was much too sophisticated to be stopped in that fashion.
There can be no doubt whatsoever that the Liberty was continuing to spy on Israeli battle communications. At 12:30 P.M. Israeli time the ship intercepted a discussion from an Israeli reconnaissance plane, positively identifying the ship as American.
. . . .
. . .How did the Liberty know that the next plane to come over would be hostile, unless it had intercepted the conversation from the previous reconnaissance flight? The only possible answer is the one suggested by our sources in the intelligence community: The NSA "Major" decoded the earlier reconnaissance tape and warned the executive officer to expect an attack. 84 [Confidential interviews, former officers, CIA; former employees, the NSA; former liaison to the NSA; former analyst, Naval Intelligence.]
. . . .
As previously mentioned, the earlier reconnaissance flight was made by a flying boxcar jammed with top-secret Israeli coding equipment. The Americans could not admit they had intercepted that conversation without admitting that the Liberty was spying on Israel and had broken its most secure codes. That is why Evans and Novak were misled. Confirmation of the code breaking might have opened an inquiry that would have discovered that the ship's mission was to spy on the United States' ally and help Israel's enemies in the midst of a war that could bring about the Jewish state's destruction.
. . . .
It is no secret that the Israelis identified the Liberty as an American ship before the attack. The secret is that Israel attacked an American ship in self-defense. Almost a quarter of a century later [1994], the White House still must lie about the incident. The reason is simple: If the Israelis told all they knew about American aid to the Arabs, Congress might start poking around the oil companies. There are far too many skeletons in that closet. The Israelis had Lyndon Johnson over the barrel, a barrel of oil.
Phil's note: Our friend who was tasked [army intel] with the Chinese order of battle after the Korean armistice gave me this interesting book.
At the time of the incident my college poli sci department head was a State Department veteran fluent in eight languages with a perspective encompassing the domino theory and attempts to resolve international relations in the context of a concept of limits.
A fellow poli sci student from Oman, perhaps a member of the royal family, convinced me that Arab hatred of Jews would not be tempered by any such concept of limits.
That we have colored our foreign policy to sustain our access to oil is the thesis of Robert Baer, Sleeping With the Enemy: How America Sold Her Soul For Saudi Crude.
The Saudis, to whom we taught everything about oil, so they could steal it from us to screw us down through the years, not excluding Khobar, madrassahs, al Qaeda, Osama, and the 28-page redaction.
What price liberty?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
