'No One Ever Apologized' (USS Liberty)

John Hrankowski will be miles away from Arlington National Cemetery this weekend, but he will be close in spirit as fellow crewmates from the USS Liberty gather to remember the 35th anniversary of an Israeli attack on an American intelligence ship.

The Greece man said his health is preventing him from attending the "No Greater Love Remembrance Ceremony" Saturday in Washington, D.C., where crewmates will pause to remember the 34 who died and 172 wounded during the June 8, 1967 air and sea attack. The attack occurred during the Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states.

"It's got to be rectified because we didn't get killed. We're still here," said Hrankowski, who was 19 at the time of the attack and earned a Purple Heart for wounds he suffered.

The attack is controversial because Israel claimed it mistook the USS Liberty for an out-of-service Egyptian horse carrier El Quseir and that the U.S. was operating in a war zone without displaying a flag.

Hrankowski and other Americans dispute that account. They say the ship was in international waters, away from fighting, and that the American flag was flying.

Ever since the USS Liberty Veterans Association formed 20 years ago, Hrankowski - the only known USS Liberty survivor in Monroe County and one of only a few in the state - has been an outspoken advocate, talking to groups all over the country to tell the full story.

"Our government said Israel apologized and paid, but the Israelis have not answered and no one ever apologized," Hrankowski said.

According to information on the USS Liberty website, Lyndon Johnson in his memoirs called the attack "a tragic accident." Robert McNamara, his secretary of defense, stated "I didn't believe [the attack] was intended at the time, and I don't believe it now."

But Dean Rusk, Johnson's secretary of state, differed, saying: "I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it to this day. The attack was outrageous."

Hrankowski, 55, still suffers from post traumatic stress disorder because of wounds he suffered from being hit by metal pieces from explosives during the attack.

A former deputy sheriff with the Monroe County Court system, he left work because of his health 10 years ago. Over the past 10 years, he's endured colon surgery and a heart attack - in addition to the ongoing mental trauma.

"There's not a night I've slept a full night," said Hrankowski.

Hrankowski was 21 when he was discharged from the Navy in November of 1969 and returned to Rochester with his wife, Mary Ann, whom he married a few months before getting out of the service.

Hrankowski said for years, there wasn't much publicity about the attack until the early 1980s, when the Veterans Association formed.

During that time period, survivor Jim Ennes, an officer who witnessed the attack, wrote "Assault on the Liberty," which tells the story.

Since then, another book, "Body of Secrets," was written by another survivor, James Bamford, and a History Channel special called "Cover-up Attack on the USS Liberty," was aired four times this year.

A European film about the USS Liberty is about to be released, along with a book written by a Pulitzer-prize winning author, Hrankowski said.

Hrankowski and other veterans traveled to Washington earlier this year to talk to U.S. congressmen about the incident. He said there could be hearings in the future, but nothing is definite yet.

Because of the anniversary of the attack, Hrankowski said he's been deluged with requests for interviews from the local and national media, including MSNBC and CNN.

Hrankowski said publicity helps the cause, but what veterans want is full disclosure to Congress.

"All we want is to have everything released," he said. "We're just asking them to give us a shot like every other incident and have it documented for history and let us be on our way."

For more information on the USS Liberty attack, go to the website at www.ussliberty.org. The website was created by Jim Ennes and Joe Meadors, two survivors of the attack.

The source of information for the following post is "Bitter Harvest A Modern History of Palestine" by Sami Hadawi. The author relies on magazine articles by reporter Anthony Pearson as the source for this section of his book.

In 1965 after President Nasser had exposed an illegal American arms deal to Israel, James Angleton (head of CIA counter-intelligence) conducted a number of meetings with Mossad officers to decide how and when to get rid of Nasser. It was impossible to overthrow the President within Egypt by any sort of coup. First his charisma had to be undermined and his popular support destroyed. Nasser's constant and increasing threats against Israel, and his assurances to his people that the Israeli menace would be defeated, suggested to the CIA that an Egyptian loss of face could be achieved by calling Nasser's bluff- by actually making him confront Israel.

At a series of secret meetings in Tel Aviv and Washington between CIA officers the Israeli general staff, selected Israeli politicians, and inner members of the Johnson administration, it was decided to promote a contained war between Israel and Egypt-a war that would not affect the territorial lines between Israel and Syria and Jordan.

The plan was organized in Israel by a group that included Yigal Allon, Intelligence chief Meir Amit, Aharon Yariv, head of Army intelligence,Shinon Peres, Ezer Weizmann, Air force chief Mordechai Hod, David Hacochen and Moshe Dayan. Their liason officer in Washington was Eppy Evron, Who dealt directly with Angleton at the CIA and Eugene Rostow at the State Department.

In principle, they agreed that the situation of an increasing hardline by Nasser combined with the Soviet build up in Egypt and Syria, should be exploited to arouse maximum public opinion for war, and that the Israeli Army should be placed on full alert to induce action by either Damascus or Cairo. In these circumstances, the Knesset would have to give its approval for war. And when this war was launched- the Israelis assured the Americans, it would be fought to a pre designed American plan for containment.

The conspiracy began to unfold on May 30 1967: Robert Anderson, an American special envoy, was sent to Cairo to talk to Nasser. He met the Egyptian president on June 1 and succeeded in persuading him to consider an option of detente with the United States. As a gesture of goodwill, Nasser said he would send his deputy, Zacharia Mohieddin, to Washington on June 5. This message was transmitted to Washington and within two hours of it's receipt by the State Department, the Israeli secret service knew every detail of it. That same day, June 1 , the Israeli Knesset gave a majority vote for war, and Moshe Dayan was appointed minister of defense.

The joint CIA-Israeli plan for war had an initial strike date in the second week in June. And the USS Liberty had been dispatched by the CIA to arrive off Sinai before the planned hostilities began- in order to make certain that the Israelis didn't overstep the objectives of the containment plan.

Right up to the moment of the attack, Eppy Evron was assuring his Washington contacts that Israeli troop movements were simply a precautionary measure against the buildup of arab troops. Evron believed he could tell the American government anything he liked. He didn't know about the Liberty and her mission.

Thus as the war began, the listening devices on the Liberty were tuned to transmissions from both the Arabs and the Israelis. With radar monitoring, it was possible to carefully map the movements and positions of troops, armor, and aircraft, showing the true progress of battle. All this information was being transmitted in full to the National Security Agency in Washington. Selected parts were also passed on to the United Nations in New York.

It was clear to observers on the Liberty that the decoding capabilities of the arabs had failed to crack the Israeli codes. But the Israelis had penetrated Egyptian and Jordanian codes from the minute the war began. Somewhere between Amman and Cairo, in a relay station in Sinai, the messages were being blocked by the Israelis, then reconstructed and passed on so swiftly and effectively that there was no apparent break. In the language of intelligence this type of interference is called "cooking".

The first batch of messages from Cairo advised King Hussein of a bad military situation on the Egyptian front. The Israelis blocked these and recorded them by misinforming the King that three quarters of the Israeli Air Force had been destroyed over Cairo and that the 300 plus aircraft now picking up on radar approaching Jordan were Egyptian jets raiding targets in Israel.

Throughout the first day of the fighting, the Israelis continued to cook messages in order to give both sides the impression that the war was going favorably for the Arabs. There was no chance of the plan going wrong, because Hussein had broken off diplomatic relations with Syria (over an allegation of sabotage by the Syrian secret service) a week before the Israelis attacked, and he was not in communication with Damascus. No Israeli interference with messages between Cairo and Damascus was necessary because the Syrians, although told of the bad situation in Sinai, were also being told that their flank was still covered by the Jordanians. This encouraged them to withdraw troops from the Golan towards Damascus, in order to cover the road from Amman as a second line to the Jordanian Army.

Another group of cooked transmissions on June 6 and 7 falsely informed Hussein that the Egyptians were counter-attacking and needed support from Jordan in the form of an attack against the Israeli positions in the Hebron area. To make this attack, Hussein had to withdraw his forces from a planned offensive that had been designed to cut Israel in two (in the Tulkarem-Netanya area). The Egyptians were also misled into believing the Jordanians were making a successful attack in Hebron, and they in turn counter-attacked during the early hours of June 8 and ignored a United Nations call for a cease fire.* The Israelis gained enough time from this to enable them to capture all the Jordanian territory they needed to finish off the Egyptians in Sinai, and to move their troops right up the east bank of the Suez immobilizing the Canal.

In Washington on the evening of June 7, Avraham Harman, the Israeli Ambassador, had been called to the State Department and told by Eugene Rostow that the Israeli attack on Jordan and Egypt had to stop immediately adn that no move was to be made against the Syrians on the Golan. A cease fire was being implemented, at the request of the Arabs, by the United Nations.

Harman argued his country was acting against arab aggression. No mention was made by Rostow of the Liberty, but four hours later in Tel Aviv, orders were passed from the offices of the minister of defense and the commander of the air force to undertake a surveillance of an American communications ship operating off the Sinai coast. Then, four hours after the surveillance orders, at 1:30 p.m. Tel Aviv time, further orders were issued from the same sources to attack and sink the ship. (Israeli sources however say that no written orders were ever issued.) Aircraft were called upon to knock out all communications antennae in the first strike. Subsequent strikes would completely immobilize the ship, preparatory to final torpedo hits from the MTB's. It was imperative that the ship should be destroyed.

For the Israelis, Liberty was an unknown factor. On June 8, Israel was still three days away from her final objectives. it was possible that drastic measures might have to be taken at any time. The Israeli leaders were afraid that the continued presence of the Liberty off Sinai monitoring their activities for both the U.S. government and the United Nations might wreck their plans. If the ship was sunk with all hands, the attack would be blamed on the Egyptians, or perhaps on Russian fighters from a Soviet fleet carrier. It would also serve the purpose of involving the Americans directly and commiting them totally to Israel's side. It was a daring plan, a vicious plan, but certainly well coordinated and well executed. It seems suprising that it failed. Everything seemed stacked against the Liberty.

*Soon after the cease fire, the author visited Amman; and while waiting for an audience with King Hussein, he was informed by a high ranking official of the palace whom he knew before, that the loss of the west bank was due to false information supplied by Nasser that the Israeli Air Force had been destroyed and that the Egyptian army was advancing in Sinai. Not until his research in 1978 did the author learn the truth.

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.