NSA tapes offer clues in '67 attack on U.S. spy ship

For 36 years, the fate of the Navy spy ship USS Liberty, attacked by Israeli fighters and torpedo boats during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, has been a painful question mark in the history of U.S.-Israeli relations.

Was the attack a tragic mistake, as Israel has always contended, resulting from the attackers' belief that the ship in their sights was Egyptian, despite its U.S. flag, U.S. markings and odd array of antennas?

Or did Israel, determined to keep the Americans from uncovering sensitive military operations, deliberately unleash a ferocious assault on an ally's intelligence ship?

Now, in a highly unusual release of eavesdropping tapes, the National Security Agency has made public recordings that show an Israeli ground controller telling helicopter pilots after the attack that the vessel was "an Arab ship" or "an Egyptian supply ship."

For believers in the official Israeli explanation, the new evidence is proof that the attack, which killed 34 Americans and injured 171, was a horrible case of mistaken identity.

But emotions in the deadliest attack in history on a U.S. intelligence operation are so deep, and the evidence so ambiguous, that the new recordings have not come close to ending the controversy.

The recordings were released in response to a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by A. Jay Cristol, a former Navy pilot and lawyer who has studied the incident for 16 years and published a book about it last year, The Liberty Incident, based on his doctoral dissertation. He says the recordings support his conclusion that the Israeli attackers had no idea they were targeting a U.S. vessel.

"These tapes contain nothing showing that the attack was deliberate, and, to me at least, they show it was a mistake," says Cristol, now a U.S. bankruptcy judge in Miami. Based in part on his analysis, Israeli news media are reporting that the material proves their government's case.

"There's nothing more of significance to be found," says Cristol. "I think it will settle the matter for all but that 2 percent of die-hard conspiracy theorists."

But James Bamford, a Navy veteran and author of two respected books on the NSA, says the tapes actually support the case he presented in his 2001 book Body of Secrets that the attack was deliberate.

The Israeli ground controller who called the ship "Arab" and "Egyptian" may be just repeating a bogus cover story, Bamford says. At one point, he notes, the controller directs the helicopter crews to check whether the survivors speak Arabic or English.

"If they knew it was an Egyptian ship, why did they think the crew might speak English?" Bamford asks.

In addition, the recordings show that one of the helicopter pilots spotted an American flag and read the ship's identification number. If the helicopter pilot saw those identifiers, Bamford asks, why didn't the fighter pilots and torpedo boat crews?

"All this backs up what the [Liberty] crew has said and disproves the lies the Israelis have told," Bamford says.

For Liberty veterans, most of whom have long been convinced that the attack was no mistake, the new tapes seem not to be changing minds.

"It's all hogwash," says Phillip F. Tourney, who was a 20-year-old sailor aboard the Liberty and now is president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association.

During the attack, he suffered burns and shrapnel wounds that left him disabled. Despite his injuries, he worked feverishly that day to patch holes in the ship and even assisted with surgery performed atop a desk, he says.

Tourney says the tapes may show merely that Israel knew that U.S. intelligence was listening; the helicopter communications were picked up by an NSA eavesdropping plane overhead. He believes the Israelis simply made sure that their radio communications supported their cover story.

"I lost a lot of friends on that ship," Tourney says, including a buddy he had just sent to check why a shipboard phone wasn't working. "This is just going to increase the survivors' determination to get our story out."

The posting of the Hebrew-language audio files and translations on NSA's Web site was a rare but not unprecedented move for the secretive eavesdropping agency based at Fort Meade. Other instances involved tapes of Soviet air communications during the 1983 shootdown of a South Korean airliner and recordings of Iraqi military officers apparently discussing hiding weapons from U.N. inspectors, which were played at the United Nations in February by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

But for the NSA, which lost a civilian Arabic linguist in the attack and had another wounded, the Liberty episode has long been a particularly sensitive subject. A tattered American flag taken from the ship is on display at the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum.

The Liberty was cut up in Baltimore's Curtis Bay shipyard and sold for scrap in 1973. But in the ensuing three decades, the dispute over what really happened on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of the Six-Day War, has only become more heated.

If Cristol derides Bamford as a "conspiracy theorist" who won't accept the testimony of Israeli witnesses, Bamford calls Cristol "an apologist for Israel" who ignores the Liberty survivors. Cristol says he is amazed by the hate mail he receives, including "an e-mail today saying I should be deported to Israel."

Cristol asserts that there have been no fewer than 10 U.S. and three Israeli investigations, and that no more are needed. Bamford says all have been whitewashes and lists the many high-ranking U.S. government officials who believed that the attack was deliberate, including the late Richard M. Helms, the CIA director at the time.

Those arguing the Israeli case must explain how Israeli forces, despite having the Liberty under surveillance for hours, missed its large antennas, flag, number and markings, and decided it was the El Quseir, an Egyptian troop and horse transport ship docked in Alexandria 250 miles away. According to a 1981 NSA report on the incident, the El Quseir "was approximately one-quarter of the Liberty's tonnage, about one-half its length, and offered a radically different silhouette."

On the other hand, those who say the attack was intentional must come up with a credible motive. Some say Israel was afraid that the United States would learn of its intention to attack Syria; others think the goal was to sink the ship, kill all the witnesses and blame the attack on Arab nations to inflame the United States against Israel's enemies.

Bamford points to evidence of the possible Israeli massacre of 800 Egyptian prisoners at the time and suggests that Israeli officers wanted to cover up the war crime. But even if the massacre occurred - Cristol and some Israeli historians say it did not - the theory rests on the questionable idea that it would be more acceptable for Israel to slaughter U.S. military personnel than its Egyptian enemies.

Louis J. Cantori, a Marine veteran and Middle East expert who has taught at U.S. military academies, says the Liberty episode still festers because Israel never punished anyone, the U.S. government never expressed appropriate outrage and Congress never conducted an investigation. He thinks it's not too late to start one.

"To this day, there's enormous animosity toward Israel about this at the command level of the Navy," says Cantori, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "There's a lot of pent-up anger on the part of the crew. ... If this was a deliberate act, it's beyond anyone's comprehension."

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If you look at Bamford's account, it's pretty clear that one of his chief sources was Dr. Louis Tordella, Deputy Director of NSA in 1967. In fact, I heard Bamford confirm on TV on Sunday that Tordella was one of his sources, and that Tordella concluded the attack was deliberate. Why would the Deputy Director of NSA have concluded this?

The memoir of Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence in 1967, has just been published posthumously. It reveals that a secret CIA board of inquiry into the Liberty incident concluded at the time that the Israeli attack was deliberate. The passage in Helms's book makes it clear that Helms shared this belief. Why would the board of inquiry and the Director of Central Intelligence have reached this conclusion?

This is a more controversial issue than I thought. When I mentioned the Liberty on another thread I was accused of Ku Klux Klanism, then Naziism, then Anti-Semitism. The screams and abuse I took did not come from people who thought they were innocent.

As far as the motives the Israelis had in attacking a clearly marked and obviously US Navy vessel, how am I to know what their motives were? If the Israelis won't say why they did it, how am I to know what their side of the story is? The "accident" stonewall is worthy of Bill Clinton. Am I to come to the conclusion that Israel and Bill Clinton are morally equal?

The fact is I support the United States pro-Israel policy. The Moslem nations must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into modern life (as ugly as modern life is.)

No kidding. I got hit right between the eyes on this one last week. I was a Jew-hater, didn't think Israel should have secure borders, I was even accused of making a comparison to 9-11 (that may have been due to my reference to suicide bombers; the ones in Israel's cafes and markets, not the hijackers). I guess to the most rabid Zionists, if you ever disagree with ANYTHING Israel does, you are an anti-semite. I also support our pro-Israel policy but I'm not especially happy with their leadership right now.

Because otherwise it becomes a BIG problem for his reputation, because he was probably the guy who deliberately (and feloniously) cut the Liberty off from the US Navy chain of command, preventing them from getting the order to move away from the war zone.

"If they knew it was an Egyptian ship, why did they think the crew might speak English?" Bamford asks.

Probably because their were Israeli boats at the scene when the Helos were enroute. The boats would have been the first to ident the ship. That info would have filtered up and down the chain of command quickly.

Well, the case is pretty clear at this point that the United States told the Israeli's that they had no ship in the area before the attack, and the tapes just released show the Israeli planes radioing back disputing that it was an Egyptian ship. If the IDA were attacking a known American ship, why would they be arguing if it was an American ship or not on their radios?

At this point Israel is pretty clearly been exonerated, and to go on ignoring the mountain of evidence to say they deliberately did it is set of loaded dice.

Perhaps you should discuss why the United states bombed the Canadians in Afghanistan, it is a bit more recent... Stuff happens in war, it is called the fog of war. Some people seem to never be able to clear the fog even after the war, or is it that they do not want too.

Must be a Beelzebub thing.

Your# 7..........

Because otherwise it becomes a BIG problem for his reputation, because he was probably the guy who deliberately (and feloniously) cut the Liberty off from the US Navy chain of command, preventing them from getting the order to move away from the war zone.

?.............the US Navy chain of command?.............

'State'.........?

Hmmmmm.... JRadcliffe, is that you? Did you miss us? Getting a bit antsy?

Posted by Brooklyn_Park_MD to PenguinWry
On News/Activism ^ 07/07/2003 2:51 AM PDT #68 of 91 ^
It is time to put President Bush and Donald Rumfeild on trial by US Citzens court, no doubt they are guilty and should be hang.

When I was in a U.S. Air Force signals intelligence unit in Berlin in the 1970's, we officially did not exist. The Russians, of course, were well aware that we were there. Our nonexistence was a diplomatic fiction.

I suspect that the supposed absence of the Liberty from the Med in 1967 was the same sort of diplomatic lie. And the Israelis would have been well aware of the need to take U.S. government denials of the presence of any ships with the requisite several grains of salt.

Well, let's see.....big, gray ship, broad daylight, American flag, lots of non-Arab-looking sailors on deck, or.....some unidentified guys, at night, in the dark, no flag. What does FOX say..."We report, you decide?" And please spare me the "YOU HATE ISRAEL" crap. It ain't true and it gets real old.

The Liberty was deliberately cut out of the Sixth Fleet chain of command by the NSA. The NSA did this by having orders issued to the Liberty that any signals to the Liberty had to go through certain NSA-approved channels before they could be acted on, and specifically forbade the Liberty from copying the Fleet Broadcast sent from NAVCAMS MED in Naples.

And the Israelis would have been well aware of the need to take U.S. government
denials of the presence of any ships with the requisite several grains of salt.

Maybe being in a shooting war caused a momentary (and tragic) "short between the ears"
for someone on the Israeli side...

(not excusing what happened, just wondering if that might be part of an explanation)

If Bamford's account is correct, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had themselves -- highly unusually -- taken direct command of the movements and mission of the Liberty, and the NSA, as a component of the Defense Department, was just obeying their orders.

Actually, it was somewhat in reverse. The NSA used its (considerable) influence with the Joint Staff to get orders issued to the Liberty that were to the NSA's liking. Part of those orders were sections forbidding the Liberty from acting on any directive that was not sent through NSA-approved channels. The biggest no-no was that the NSA ensured that the Liberty would not act on ANY directive sent over the NAVCAMS MED fleet broadcast.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a message to the Liberty well before the attack, directing that the ship stay a healthy distance away from the war zone. It was sent over the NAVCAMS MED broadcast. It was not acted on because it didn't come over an NSA-approved circuit. And then the NSA-blessed communications stations just plumb FORGOT how to properly route message traffic to the Liberty. They did fine in the days BEFORE the attack. They did just fine AFTER the attack. But the ONE time it was absolutely vital that the NSA's system work, it didn't. And nobody ever gave a convincing reason why.

That sounds like a military order that the NSA would not have had the authority to issue. The JCS -- or officers in the Navy acting on their command -- would, however, have had such authority.

That's right.

The NSA doesn't issue the orders. They just whip out their little black book, let their fingers do the walking, and make a few phone calls. And then the military authorities issue the orders, SHAZAM!

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