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CounterPunch
October
24, 2003
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies
Israel's Attack on the Liberty, Revisited
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
[This is an excerpt from CounterPunch's
hot new book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism, just released by AK Press.]
In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six
Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international
waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel's
attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance
ship.
Only hours after the Liberty arrived
it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance
planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period
of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was
easily recognizable as an American vessel.
A few hours later more planes came. These
were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine
guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters
opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine
guns.
A few minutes later a second wave of
planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not
only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets,
coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty
was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several
of the ship's top officers.
The Liberty's radio team tried to issue
a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed
by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist
called "a buzzsaw sound." Finally, an open channel
was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack
to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet's large aircraft carrier.
Two F-4s left the carrier to come to
the Liberty's aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with
nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return.
"Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,"
he barked. McNamara's injunction was reiterated in saltier terms
by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations:
"You get those fucking airplanes back on deck, and you get
them back down." The planes turned around. And the attack
on the Liberty continued.
After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied
their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached
the Liberty. Two torpedoes were  launched at the crippled ship, one tore
a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments,
and killing more than a dozen American sailors.
As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas,
its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water
and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded,
this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved
impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with
machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.
After more than two hours of unremitting
assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the
torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English
over a bullhorn: "Do you need any help?"
The wounded commander of the Liberty,
Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond
emphatically: "Fuck you."
The Israeli boat turned and left.
A Soviet destroyer responded before the
US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was
apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet
ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The
captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty's
conning officer refused.
Finally, 16 hours after the attack two
US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors
were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were
being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence
instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.
The following morning Israel launched
a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement
and seizing control of the Golan Heights.
Within three weeks, the Navy put out
a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack
had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as
soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. "These
errors do occur," McNamara concluded.
***
In Assault
on the Liberty, a harrowing first-hand account by James
Ennes Jr., McNamara's version of events is proven to be as big
a sham as his concurrent lies about Vietnam. Ennes's book created
a media storm when it was first published by Random House in
1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes was a liar and
an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies,
but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has
published an updated version, which incorporates much new evidence
that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the US government
went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the truth.
It's a story of Israel aggression, Pentagon
incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that persists to
this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy
of Ennes's first-hand account of the attack and the lies that
followed.
Now, 35 years later, Ennes warns that
the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath should serve
as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between
the US government and the government of Israel.
The Attack on the Liberty is the kind
of book that makes your blood seethe. Ennes skillfully documents
the life of the average sailor on one of the more peculiar vessels
in the US Navy, with an attention for detail that reminds one
of Dana or O'Brien. After all, the year was 1967 and most of
the men on the Liberty were certainly glad to be on a non-combat
ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than in the Gulf
of Tonkin or Mekong Delta.
But this isn't Two Years Before the Mast.
In fact, Ennes's tour on the Liberty last only a few short weeks.
He had scarcely settled into a routine before his new ship was
shattered before his eyes.
Ennes joined the Liberty in May of 1967,
as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a "spook
ship", as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed
to be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty's normal
routine was to ply the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping
equipment on the electronic traffic in the region.
The Liberty had barely reached Africa
when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff
to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was
to re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli
attack on Egypt and the allied Arab nations.
As the war intensified, the Liberty sent
a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an escort. It
was denied by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone
to a position in international waters about 13 miles from the
shore at El Arish, then under furious siege by the IDF.
On June 6, the Joint Chiefs sent Admiral
McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent message
instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a
position at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never
forwarded the message to the ship.
A little after seven in the morning on
June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take the morning
watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a "flying boxcar"
(later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown
over the ship at a low level.
Ennes says he noticed that the ship's
American flag had become stained with soot and ordered a new
flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a
light breeze.
At 9 am, Ennes spotted another reconnaissance
plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later two Israeli fighter
jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli planes
flew over the Liberty five more times.
When the first fighter jet struck, a
little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning the skies
from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands.
A rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the
fragments shredded the men closest to him.
After the explosion, Ennes noticed that
he was the only man left standing. But he also had been hit by
more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had
shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a
second fighter jet streaked above them and unleashed its payload
on the hobbled Liberty.
At that point, Ennes says the crew of
the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why. For a
few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an
officer mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew
that the Egyptian air force already had been decimated by the
Israelis. The idea that the Israelis might be attacking them
didn't occur to them until one of the crew spotted a Star of
David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.
Ennes was finally taken below deck to
a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded men. It was
hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg
might slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to
death, the Liberty was pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire
and an Italian-made torpedo packed with 1,000-pounds of explosive.
After the attack ended, Ennes was approached
by his friend Pat O'Malley, a junior officer, who had just sent
a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel.
He got an immediate message back. "They said, 'Wounded in
what action? Killed in what action?'," O'Malley told Ennes.
"They said it wasn't an 'action,' it was an accident. I'd
like for them to come out here and see the difference between
an action and an accident. Stupid bastards."
The cover-up had begun.
***
The Pentagon lied to the public about
the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In a decision
personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied
to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring
to it instead as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little
more than a military version of Jacques Cousteau's Calypso.
The military press corps on the USS America,
where most of the wounded sailors had been taken, were placed
under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from the
carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance,
objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest
from the reporters or their publications.
Predictably, Israel's first response
was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them so well
in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it
had asked the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any
US ships in the area and was told that there were none. Then
the Israeli government charged that the Liberty failed to fly
its flag and didn't respond to calls for it to identify itself.
The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian
supply ship called El Quseir, which, even though it was a rusting
transport ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF said it suspected
of shelling Israeli troops from the sea. Under these circumstances,
the Israeli's said they were justified in opening fire on the
Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted the attack almost
immediately, when they realized their mistake.
"The Liberty contributed decisively
toward its identification as an enemy ship," the IDF report
concluded. This was a blatant falsehood, since the Israelis had
identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack
on the ship.
Even though the Pentagon knew better,
it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that perhaps
the Liberty's flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless
sea. The Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted
less than 20 minutes.
After the initial battery of misinformation,
the Pentagon imposed a  news
blackout on the Liberty disaster until after the completion of
a Court of Inquiry investigation.
The inquiry was headed by Rear Admiral
Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn't have a free hand. He'd been instructed
by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and
to protect the reputation of Israel.
The Kidd interviewed the crew on June
14 and 15. The questioning was extremely circumscribed. According
to Ennes, the investigators "asked nothing that might be
embarrassing to Israeland testimony that tended to embarrass
Israel was covered with a 'Top Secret' label, if it was accepted
at all."
Ennes notes that even testimony by the
Liberty's communications officers about the jamming of the ship's
radios was classified as "Top Secret." The reason?
It proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship.
"Here was strong evidence that the attack was planned in
advance and that our ship's identity was known to the attackers
(for it its practically impossible to jam the radio of a stranger),
but this information was hushed up and no conclusions were drawn
from it," Ennes writes.
Similarly, the Court of Inquiry deep-sixed
testimony and affidavits regarding the flag-Ennes had ordered
a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack.
The investigators buried intercepts of conversations between
IDF pilots identifying the ship as flying an American flag.
It also refused to accept evidence about
the IDF's use of napalm during the attacks and choose not to
hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the
fact that the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.
"No one came to help us," said
Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty's physician. "We were
promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before
our own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came
to the war zone and we were turned down."
None of this made its way into the 700-page
Court of Inquiry report, which was completed within a couple
of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.
McCain approved the report over the objections
of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer assigned to
the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and
contrary to the evidence.
Staring sent a letter to the Judge Advocate
General of the Navy disavowing himself from the report. The JAG
seemed to take Staring's objections to heart. It prepared a summary
for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored
the Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:
- that the Liberty was easily recognizable
as an American naval vessel;
- that it's flag was fully deployed and
flying in a moderate breeze;
- that Israeli planes made at least eight
reconnaissance flights at close range;
- the ship came under a prolonged attack
from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.
This succinct and largely accurate report
was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed locked up for
many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some
in the Oval Office. But here was enough grumbling about the way
the Liberty incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that
old Washington fixer Clark Clifford to do damage control. It
didn't take Clifford long to come up with the official line:
the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.
It turns out that the Admiral Kidd and
Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers who prepared
the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the
Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words,
the IDF knew that they were striking an American spy ship and
they wanted to sink it and kill as many sailors as possible.
Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham report that
concluded it was an accident?
Twenty-five years later we've finally
found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the Navy Times:
"Officers follow orders."
It gets worse. There's plenty of evidence
that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that Israel intended
to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike
had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.
As the attacks were going on, conversations
between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force officers
in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted
by Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The
American plane narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.
Initial reports on the incident prepared
by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Security
Agency all reached similar conclusions.
A particularly damning report compiled
by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense minister Moshe
Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed
until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily
redacted version of the report was released in 1977. It reads
in part:
"[The source] said that Dayan personally
ordered the attack on the ship and that one of his generals adamantly
opposed the action and said, 'This is pure murder.' One of the
admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and
it was he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan."
This amazing document generated little
attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly questioned
about his role in the attack.
The analyses by the intelligence agencies
are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense Subcommittee
on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains
classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: "So as
not to embarrass Israel."
More proof has recently come to light
from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the Liberty
was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an
Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book
and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot
in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He
immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed
Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions.
Toni said he was ordered to "attack." He refused and
flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily
arrested for disobeying orders.
***
How tightly does the Israeli lobby control
the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on an America
ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress.
In 1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open
a senate hearing into the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened
by brokering a deal with Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed
to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to the ship. A State
Department press release announced the payment said, "The
book is now closed on the USS Liberty."
It certainly was the last chapter for
Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the following
year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his unsettling
questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign.
Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent,
Big Jim Thompson, and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.
But the book wasn't closed for the sailors
either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed the gist of
what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged
Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When
one sailor told an officer that he was having problems living
with the cover-up, he was told: "Forget about it, that's
an order."
The Navy went to bizarre lengths to keep
the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew. When gag
orders didn't work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of
the confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that
sounds like something right out of the CIA's MK-Ultra program.
"In an incredible abuse of authority,
military officers held two young Liberty sailors against their
will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the
base hospital," Ennes writes. "For days these men were
drugged and questioned about their recollections of the attack
by a 'therapist' who admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry
or psychology. At one point, they avoided electroshock only by
bolting from the room and demanding to see the commanding officer."
Since coming home, the veterans who have
tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed relentlessly.
They've been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often,
it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And,
oh yeah, they've also been painted as anti-Semites.
In a recent column, Charley Reese describes
just how mean-spirited and petty this campaign became. "When
a small town in Wisconsin decided to name its library in honor
of the USS Liberty crewmen, a campaign claiming it was anti-Semitic
was launched," writes Reese. "And when the town went
ahead, the U.S. government ordered no Navy personnel to attend,
and sent no messages. This little library was the first, and
at the time the only, memorial to the men who died on the Liberty."
***
So why then did the Israelis attack the
Liberty?
A few days before the Six Days War, Israel's
Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington to inform LBJ about
the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the US
could not support such an attack.
It's possible, then, that the IDF assumed
that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war plans. Possible,
but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and Leslie
Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the
Six Days War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship.
So closely were the two sides working that US intelligence aid
certainly helped secure Israel's devastating and swift victory.
In fact, it's possible that the Liberty had been sent to the
region to spy for the IDF.
A somewhat more likely scenario holds
that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel's plan to breach
the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.
It has also been suggested that Dayan
ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of pinning
the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political
opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of
course, for this plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed
and its crew killed.
There's another factor. The Liberty was
positioned just off the coast from the town of El Arish. In fact,
Ennes and others had used town's mosque tower to fix the location
of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline.
The IDF had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as
a prisoner of war camp. On the very day the Liberty was attacked,
the IDF was in the process of executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian
and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they surely wanted to conceal
from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an Israeli reporter,
who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: "The Egyptian
prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police
shot them to death."
The bigger question is why the US government
would participate so enthusiastically in the cover-up of a war
crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never been
slow to hide its own incompetence. And there's plenty of that
in the Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide
an escort, situating the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging
battle, the inability to intervene in the attack and the inexcusably
long time it took to reach the battered ship and its wounded.
That's but par for the course. But something
else was going on that would only come to light later. Through
most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on the sale
of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty
attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on
the Hill) was seeking to have this proscription overturned. The
top brass certainly knew that any evidence of a deliberate attack
on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle their plans. So they
hushed it up.
In January 1968, the arms embargo on
Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow.
By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons
a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost
overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms
and aircraft.
Perversely, then, the IDF's strike on
the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind
of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks
defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and
Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody
assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden
partner.
Thus, does the legacy of Liberty live
on, one raid after another.
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