Did 34 Americans die and were 75 wounded because of another Pearl Harbor–type communications fumble?
—THE PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND
Israeli chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin picked Colonel Ram Ron to investigate the attack. Ron’s family had immigrated to Israel from Poland in the mid-1920s when he was still a child. He was not certified as a lawyer or judge; he had served as an army paratrooper and later a military attaché in Washington. Unlike the American court of inquiry, made up of a panel of senior officers aided by a legal staff, Israel’s investigation into the Liberty attack consisted only of Ron. Some of the witnesses who testified before him—including the head of the Israeli Navy—outranked him, meaning he would have to pass judgment on his superiors. All told, Ron’s investigation lasted only four days.
Soon after Ron submitted his report to Rabin, the Israeli Foreign Liaison Office summoned American naval attaché Commander Ernest Castle to review the findings on the evening of June 17. A South Dakota native and graduate of the Naval Academy, Castle had served in the Korean War and later on defense secretary Robert McNamara’s staff during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Navy assigned Castle to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv in 1965. There he worked as a member of a small team of American officers to hunt down intelligence about Israel’s military, a job that often involved such basic tasks as counting ships in the harbor or cruising around in a black Ford station wagon with diplomatic plates.
Castle, who had flown out to the battered Liberty hours after the assault, had learned little more about the attack in the subsequent days. He relayed apologies and official messages from the Israeli government, but any efforts to investigate the assault proved futile. The only promising lead—a distraught Israeli sailor who initially discussed the torpedo attack with his embassy staffer neighbor—failed to develop when the sailor suddenly declined to answer any more questions. Israel refused to allow Castle to interview any of the pilots or torpedo boat commanders nor was he offered any government records. Castle confessed his frustration in a telegram to Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, Jr. “From information available,” he wrote, “it can be presumed that only the IDF knows with certainty the exact sequence of events that led to the tragic incident.”
Rabin aide Lieutenant Colonel Raphael Efrat dictated the report’s findings, translating them from Hebrew to English as Castle jotted down the points. Ron’s probe concluded that a series of several mistakes led to the attack, beginning with an erroneous report at 11:24 A.M. that an unidentified ship had shelled the Egyptian town of El Arish. The Navy dispatched three torpedo boats from Ashdod at 12:05 P.M. to investigate. One of the torpedo boats radioed at 1:47 P.M. that the unidentified ship steamed toward Egypt’s Port Said at thirty knots. Under standing Israeli orders, commanders could consider any ship traveling more than twenty knots in a conflict zone as hostile, since only warships normally sailed at such high speeds. The Navy ordered the torpedo boats to check the speed again. A second report moments later determined that the Liberty sailed at twenty-eight knots—nearly twice the Liberty’s maximum speed and almost six times its actual speed at the time.
Israeli reconnaissance planes had identified the Liberty early that morning, according to Ron, but when the torpedo boats zoomed in hours later, commanders failed to consider that the target might be the Liberty. “Even if the unidentified ship were thought to be Liberty,” Ron concluded, “the fact that she was reported to be making 30 knots would have denied the identification.” The torpedo boats called in an air strike. When the boats arrived after the air assault, two officers on separate vessels mistakenly concluded that the Liberty was the Egyptian horse and troop transport El Quseir, a thirty-seven-year-old ship a fraction the size of the Liberty and lacking the spy ship’s unusual antennae configuration. The Israeli skippers, believing that the Liberty fired at them, launched the torpedo attack.
Ron concluded that each error was either reasonable or outside the scope of his investigation. He refused to examine the source of the erroneous report that an unidentified ship had shelled El Arish, the catalyst for the attack. Ron also ruled that the gross miscalculation of the Liberty’s speed was understandable after the head of the Israeli Navy testified “that such estimations require expertise.” Ron conceded that torpedo boat officers might have been reckless in identifying the Liberty as a warship because “serious doubts” had surfaced about whether the ship was Egyptian. Despite those doubts, Ron determined that the officers’ conduct was acceptable because the Liberty failed to identify itself, was engulfed in black smoke, and “behaved suspiciously.”
The colonel reserved his harshest criticism for the United States, accusing the Liberty of inviting the attack. He blasted the American government for failing to alert Israel to the ship’s presence and criticized the Liberty for steaming near a war zone and outside normal shipping routes. Ron even accused the Liberty of hiding its identity by “flying a small flag” and trying to escape once Israeli forces attacked. In the end, Ron exonerated the attackers. “It is concluded clearly and unimpeachably from the evidence and from comparison of war diaries that the attack on USS Liberty was not in malice,” Ron determined. “There was no criminal negligence and the attack was made by innocent mistake.”
Israel’s report stunned Castle. Thirty-four Americans had been killed and nearly two hundred others injured. An American ship had been strafed, torpedoed, and almost sunk in an attack that raged for approximately an hour. Israel’s investigation had now exonerated all those involved of criminal negligence. The attack, in Ron’s words, was merely an “innocent mistake.” Castle wrote to his superiors the next day that Efrat must have noted his “appearance of surprise and incredulity” as he read off the report’s findings. Efrat asked for Castle’s “off the record” opinion when he finished. The attaché pretended not to hear the question and thanked the colonel for his time. Castle wrote that “the burden of diplomacy bore heavily” on him.
Castle challenged Israel’s findings in a report to the White House, Pentagon, and State Department, among others. He called Israel’s standing order to attack ships sailing more than twenty knots “incomprehensible” and described its justifications for the assault as “mutually contradictory.” If the thirty-knot speed of the unidentified ship ruled out the Liberty, it also eliminated El Quseir since its maximum speed was only fourteen knots, four less than the Liberty. Castle also questioned how “a professional Naval officer of the rank of commander could look at Liberty and think her a 30 knot ship.” Castle also criticized Israel’s excuse that thick smoke made it difficult to identify the Liberty, since the smoke had resulted from the attack.
Military and civilian leaders in Washington slammed Ron’s report soon after Castle’s synopsis rattled off the teletype. Walt Rostow complained to a senior diplomat at the Israeli Embassy that the report made “no goddamn sense at all.” Captain Mayo Hadden, Jr., in the Navy’s Politico-Military Policy Division, prepared a two-page secret analysis. Hadden based his review on his decades of experience in the Navy. The veteran officer, who ultimately would achieve the rank of rear admiral, had served as a fighter pilot during World War II, where he earned three Distinguished Flying Crosses and had eight confirmed shoot-downs of Japanese planes. Hadden later served as a navigator on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Yorktown and shortly before landing at the Pentagon, the two-time Silver Star recipient had commanded the carrier U.S.S. Hornet. Ron’s report struck Hadden as a cover-up. The senior officer wrote that the “report blandly glosses over” critical areas that he hoped the United States would refute.
The Israeli explanation for the attack conflicted with the fundamentals of Navy logic. Like Castle, Hadden seized on Israel’s claim that its forces had determined the Liberty sailed at thirty knots. “How could a ship clearly identifiable as a cargo vessel be credited with a speed of 28–30 knots either visually or by Radar?” he questioned. “Why did Israelis, knowing Liberty capable of only 18 knots and El Quseir capable of only 14 knots, attribute either ship with the 28–30 knot capability?” Hadden also puzzled over how trained Israeli commanders failed to recognize that the spy ship was unarmed. Likewise, he noted El Quseir had only two small cannons largely used for self-defense. Israeli naval officers should have recognized that neither ship could have shelled El Arish. Lastly, Hadden challenged Israel’s assertion that the Liberty behaved suspiciously. “How?” he asked. Hadden’s conclusion: “the Israelis apparently are attempting to whitewash the incident.”
Meanwhile, diplomats from the Israeli Embassy pressured the United States for an advance copy of the report of the Navy’s court of inquiry, even before American leaders had completed a review of Israel’s findings. Ephraim Evron told one senior Pentagon official that Israel wanted to swap reports prior to publication so the two governments could avoid a “public clash” over the facts. Evron noted that the American naval attaché in Tel Aviv already had been given the synopsis of Israel’s report. The United States should reciprocate. Evron added that Eugene Rostow had already agreed to such a swap in a recent talk with Harman.
Israel’s military attaché simultaneously pressured his contacts. Brigadier General Joseph Geva met with Hadden the same day the captain drafted his secret analysis of Israel’s report. Hadden reluctantly agreed to listen to Geva but as a precaution arranged for two officers to witness the meeting. Geva stated that the attackers “had made grievous errors and mistakes.” He felt certain Ron’s report contained many flaws. To guarantee its accuracy, he asked the United States to share its findings with Israel before making them public. Hadden recorded the fourteen-minute conversation in a confidential memo. “In short, there was no reason for both Courts to go parallel and never meet, when by coordinating they could travel along the same track and using some of the same facts, they could arrive at similar conclusions,” the memo shows Geva suggested. “The whole thing could be done covertly.”
The Navy balked. Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr., ordered the Israeli attaché to direct his request to the State Department. A secret memo to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral David McDonald—labeled “Private for the CNO” and “Original and Only Copy”—outlined Rivero’s concerns. Swapping reports before publication offered no advantage to the U.S., but carried considerable risk if news of the exchange leaked. “Such benefit to the United States is not apparent at this moment,” the memo stated. “To the contrary, it is clear that exchange prior to publication would have the appearance of US/Israel cooperation to the point of collusion, at least as it might be viewed by, for example, such persons as relatives of Liberty crewmen killed and their Congressmen.”
Ambassador Harman anxiously awaited the results of Ron’s investigation in his office at the Israeli Embassy. Press criticism had intensified and the ambassador feared officials in Jerusalem did not take the attack seriously enough. Hours before Ron’s report arrived in Washington, the ambassador outlined his frustrations in a telegram. “The American press has already interviewed injured from the Liberty, and these days 34 Americans are being brought for burial in various cities in the United States, and this reaches national and local newspapers, with the public getting the impression that the Israeli attack may have been deliberate since this was an electronic intelligence ship,” Harman wrote. “Each of the family and friends has representatives in the Congress, and there’s no doubt that the Congress is under great pressure on this subject, including, in the past few days, pressure to initiate a congressional inquiry into the circumstances of this incident.”
Harman’s concerns spread beyond the press. Reports from some of President Johnson’s closest advisers—Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, and Abe Feinberg—suggested America had proof Israel intentionally targeted the Liberty. The United States also knew no ships had shelled the coast, Israel’s alleged catalyst for the attack. The Pentagon expected to release the report of the Navy’s court of inquiry soon. Harman worried the report would prove damning for Israel. “There is no doubt now that these findings will give basis to the assumption that our people had identified or could have identified the ship long before the attack,” the ambassador wrote to Jerusalem. “In addition, as far as we know these findings could give basis to the assumption (very possibly, based on recorded conversations) that although our pilots had doubted the identity of the ship in the midst of the operation, they were still ordered to continue the attack that was later followed also by a torpedo attack.”
Ron’s report failed to satisfy Harman when it arrived. Unlike his American counterparts, who received only the brief synopsis dictated to the American naval attaché, Harman reviewed the full six-page analysis. Even before delving into its findings, the ambassador homed in on what he considered a fatal flaw: How could Israel settle for a one-man inquiry to investigate such a serious attack? He knew Washington would never accept such a report. Harman took the drastic step of cabling his reactions to Jerusalem with the demand that his memo be handed immediately to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. “I have no doubt that this treatment is inappropriate for a case in which 34 citizens of a friendly country were killed and 75 more were injured. Treatment of the matter at this level itself could anger the US Government and the delegations,” he wrote. “Such a grave matter requires an inquiry committee comprising several commanders, as well as a legal expert who is proficient in inquiries.”
The ambassador observed that Ron, a former military attaché, lacked the proper credentials to investigate such a severe attack. “We should also take into consideration that Ram Ron is well known in Washington. It is known that he is not an expert on the Air Force and the Navy,” he wrote. “There is no chance that the President, the People and the parents will perceive the fact that we have drawn conclusions based on the inquiry of one person, as appropriate response on our behalf to the severity of the matter.” Harman singled out other errors. Ron’s report failed to include details from the Liberty’s logs that the State Department provided Israel. Harman questioned some of the times listed in the report and why Ron neglected to call expert witnesses. More importantly, Ron interviewed only twelve witnesses—none of them the attacking pilots. Harman’s conclusion: “Ron’s investigation does not withstand the test of analysis and does not envelop all facts.”
The ambassador’s opinion would prove incredibly astute. Ron’s report did not accurately reflect the record in many important respects. For example, Israel told American reporters that the Liberty was unmarked and flew no flag. Not until after the jet fighter and torpedo boat attacks ended, Israel maintained, did its forces identify the spy ship. Evidence gathered for Ron’s report contradicted these claims. Israel in fact discovered the Liberty almost nine hours before the attack when a reconnaissance plane circled the ship at sunrise. An Israeli naval observer on board the flight spotted the Liberty’s distinct hull number: GTR-5. The crew radioed the information to ground control. The naval observer reported the same identification in a debriefing soon after landing. Officers looked up the ship’s identity. Hours before the attack, Israel knew not only that an American ship sailed nearby, but that it was the spy ship Liberty.
The transcript of radio communication between the pilots and air controllers—a copy of which was included as an exhibit in Ron’s report—also revealed that moments before the attack began, Israeli forces questioned whether the ship might be American. Approximately two minutes before the pilots first strafed the Liberty, a weapons system officer in general headquarters blurted out: “What is it? Americans?”
“Where are Americans?” one of the air controllers asked.
The officer didn’t answer. Lieutenant Colonel Shmuel Kislev, the chief air controller at general headquarters in Tel Aviv, queried his counterpart at Air Control Central. “What are you saying?”
“I didn’t say,” the other replied, his tone implying that he didn’t want to know.
Despite the doubts about the ship’s identification, Kislev—seated just a few feet away from the commander of the Israeli Air Force—neither halted the impending assault nor ordered his fighters to inspect the ship for identifying markings or a flag as the planes zeroed in on the Liberty. His only concern seemed to be whether any antiaircraft fire targeted his fighters.
“Does he have authorization to attack?” one of the controllers asked.
“He does,” Kislev snapped.
The pilots blasted the Liberty’s bridge, machine guns, and antennae, killing and injuring dozens of stunned sailors, firefighters, and stretcher bearers. Fires erupted on deck and blood soaked the bridge. Kislev ordered a pair of Super Mystère fighters to join the attack with napalm, which he deemed “more efficient.”
One of the pilots then instructed another. “We’ll come in from the rear. Watch out for the masts,” the pilot warned. “I’ll come in from her left, you come behind me.”
“Authorized to sink her?” asked one of the controllers.
“You can sink her,” Kislev ordered, asking a minute later for a report on the pilot’s progress in the attack. “Is he screwing her?”
“He’s going down on her with napalm all the time,” replied another controller.
A pilot joked during the strafing runs that hitting the defenseless ship was easier than shooting down MiGs, a reference to Soviet jet-fighters often used by Arab militaries. Another quipped that to sink the Liberty before the torpedo boats arrived would be a “mitzvah.” “Oil is spilling out into the water,” one pilot exclaimed. “Great! Wonderful! She’s burning! She’s burning!”
One of the air controllers parroted the pilot. “She’s burning!” the controller cried out. “The warship is burning!”
Shortly before planes exhausted all their ammunition, Kislev finally asked the pilots to look for a flag. He then ordered a third pair of fighters to join the attack. One of the pilots buzzed the ship moments later and spotted the Liberty’s hull number. He radioed it to ground control, albeit one letter off. The air controller ordered him to disengage.
“What country?” asked one of the air controllers.
“Probably American,” replied Kislev.
“What?”
“Probably American.”
More than twenty minutes before the fatal torpedo strike that killed twenty-five sailors, Israel’s chief air controller conclusively identified the Liberty as an American ship. Years later Kislev confessed that when the pilot radioed in the Liberty’s hull number, any doubt about the ship’s identity vanished. “At that point in time, in my mind, it was an American ship,” he admitted in a British television documentary. “I was sure it was an American ship.”
Pilots and air controllers were not the only Israelis aware of the Liberty’s identity. Ron’s report revealed that two naval officers—one in the Navy war room in Haifa, the other a senior liaison in the air force command center in Tel Aviv—testified that before the torpedo attack, both suspected the target was the Liberty. Neither officer intervened to halt the attack. Ron’s report also revealed that Captain Yitzhak Rahav, the Israeli navy’s second in command, dismissed the pilot’s report of the Liberty’s hull number, even though Egyptian ships are marked with Arabic script, not Roman letters. Rahav’s testimony reflected his belief that the Liberty’s hull number “was camouflage writing in order to allow an Egyptian ship to enter the area.”
The Israeli ambassador in Washington felt the only solution was for someone to go to jail. Despite Ron’s exoneration of the attackers, Harman wrote to Jerusalem that the report showed that several parties were guilty of negligence. The ambassador questioned why the identification of the Liberty as an American ship that morning was not communicated to the navy’s top leadership. He also challenged Ron’s attempt to justify the torpedo boat attack by blaming the Liberty. What conclusion will the Americans draw from the conversations between the pilots and air controllers? Harman asked. More importantly, he questioned how Ron ruled the attack reasonable “when he determined that two of the officers testified that after the aircraft attack and before the attack of the torpedo ships they feared that the ship being attacked was the Liberty…. The question is, was what had happened reasonable in accordance with existing IDF procedures,” Harman asked. “I doubt this is for us to claim.”
The ambassador knew that the Liberty attack could have dire implications for U.S.-Israeli relations. Ron’s report did not help matters. The ambassador suggested in a telegram to the prime minister and other recipients that the only way Israel might resolve the issue without jeopardizing ties between the countries was to tell the United States that the “military prosecutor insisted on continuing the investigation and deepening it.” Harman demanded his government appoint more investigators and legal counsel. The ambassador urged the investigators immediately to begin interviews with the pilots and torpedo boat skippers. “This matter has turned into an open wound that has inherent in it severe dangers to our relations on all levels the friendship of which we’d had until now, friendship that is essential for our status in the US, that is: the President, the Pentagon, public opinion and the intelligence community. Do you understand that the President is also the Supreme Commander of the US forces?” Harman wrote. “Only a thorough handling of the problem and our coming to clear-cut and serious conclusions could make our situation better.”
The ambassador reiterated his message the following day in an urgent telegram, again to the prime minister and other senior leaders. “It is difficult to overstate the explosive potential of this issue,” Harman wrote. “Even a superficial analysis of Ron’s findings provides basis to the assumption that there was negligence and rash action on the part of several parties.” Harman repeated his fears that the American naval court of inquiry would show that Israeli forces had identified the Liberty hours before the attack. To defuse the situation, Harman again urged Israel to indict the attackers. “In the severe situation created, the only way to soften the results is if we could let the US Government know already today that we intend to prosecute people in connection with this disaster,” the ambassador wrote. “This action is the only way to impress both on the US Government and on the public here, that the attack on the ship was not the result of malicious intent of the Israeli Government or authorized IDF parties.”
Harman’s answer came within hours. Rather than indict the attackers, Chief of Staff Rabin compromised. Israel would hold a judicial inquiry to determine whether the pilots, torpedo boat skippers, or commanders should stand trial on criminal charges. The military planned to announce the inquiry to the press in Tel Aviv at 8 P.M. that evening, June 20. Though not as dramatic a response as Harman might have hoped, the expanded probe at least promised to shield Israel from accusations that it had whitewashed the attack and provided extra time to await the outcome of the U.S. naval court of inquiry, since the United States had refused to share its findings in advance. If pressed about the attack, diplomats could always tell American leaders that the investigation continued and indictments were still possible.
Embassy officials hustled to deliver the news. Ephraim Evron passed Israel’s one-paragraph press release to NSC staffer Harold Saunders and asked that he immediately forward it to Rostow and Bundy. The ambassador also sent a copy of the release to Katzenbach and then briefed Eugene Rostow at the State Department, informing him that a military judge would oversee the inquiry. American officials remained convinced that Israel needed to punish the attackers. The announcement of the Israeli inquiry sparked optimism that might still happen. A State Department telegram to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv relayed the news: “Israeli Judge Advocate General now calling judicial inquiry that could bring persons to trial.”
NSA deputy director Louis Tordella climbed the steps of the Capitol on the afternoon of June 20 to brief select members of the House Appropriations Committee about the Liberty. The NSA’s second in command had a reputation as a brilliant mathematician who excelled in classical number theory and algebra, a natural skill set for cryptology. The tall and slender Tordella had earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Illinois and once taught at Chicago’s Loyola University. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tordella had served as a Navy cryptanalyst, where he applied his math skills to help break the German Enigma machine used to encrypt messages. Colleagues at the agency viewed Tordella as hardworking and conservative, a trait that was reflected in his daily wardrobe of brown suits and white shirts.
Democratic representative George Mahon of Texas sat down with Tordella in a private room across the hall from the committee’s defense appropriations office. Republican representative Glenard Lipscomb of California and senior clerk Robert Michaels joined the meeting. Mahon began by asking about the Liberty’s mission and why it had sailed in the Mediterranean. Tordella explained that the spy ship had been diverted from its assignment off Africa in response to the increased tensions in the Middle East. The move had allowed the agency to better serve the national intelligence interests, including those of the Sixth Fleet in case the United States had been forced to intervene in the conflict. Tordella used a map to show the lawmakers the Liberty’s track across the Mediterranean and told the men the spy ship never strayed from international waters.
Mahon asked for details of the attack and why the Liberty steamed so close to the Egyptian coast. Tordella explained that line-of-sight communications dictated the ship’s position. Tordella described the effort to move the Liberty hours before the attack, though the veteran spy deliberately chose not to go into any more details than required on the communications foul-up and refused to blame any individual or agency for the failure to contact the Liberty. Tordella’s hostility over Israel’s assault was reflected in the tone of his comments, as he recorded in a secret memo for the record. “I wryly mentioned that the apology from the Israelis was received and the order to the commanding officer of the America was sent with such speed as to enable the recall of the planes which had been sent out to sink the attacking torpedo boats on the assumption they were Egyptian.”
Mahon pressed Tordella to explain why Israel attacked. The senior spy could offer little. The NSA lacked concrete proof that Israel deliberately targeted the Liberty. A Navy spy plane overhead the afternoon of the attack had intercepted the communications of Israeli rescue helicopters sent out afterward, but failed to record the fighters or torpedo boats. The limited conversations between Israeli helicopter pilots and ground control were ambiguous and showed some confusion over the nationality of the ship. “If they are speaking Arabic (Egyptian), you take them to El Arish,” the transcript shows ground control ordered the pilots. “If they are speaking English, not Egyptian, you take them to Lod.” Transcripts of the intercepts confirmed that the Liberty flew the American flag as the pilots reported spotting it on the Liberty’s mast along with the ship’s hull numbers: “We request that you make another pass and check once more if this is really an American flag.”
The absence of concrete proof of a deliberate attack did not persuade Tordella and other NSA leaders that the assault was an accident. Many realized that only the attackers’ communications could answer that question and even that might not reveal what Israeli commanders in headquarters actually knew. An NSA task force created to examine the attack prepared a fact sheet for the agency’s leaders. Under the question of whether the attack was premeditated, analysts listed a half dozen bullet points that highlighted Israel’s exceptional military and pointed to the fact that it was unlikely to make such a blunder. Information the agency received from a source in Israel later made it clear to senior leaders the attack was no accident.
Tordella explained to Mahon what the agency knew from the limited intercepts. “I told him we simply did not know from either open or intelligence sources but that, by now, there probably was a fair amount of denial and cover-up by the Israelis for the sake of protecting their national position.” Mahon asked if a mistake of this nature was common. Tordella doubted it. “I told him that I thought a ship the size of the Liberty was unlike and much larger than Egyptian ships and that an obviously cargo-type vessel should not reasonably be mistaken by competent naval forces or air pilots for an Egyptian man-of-war. At best I estimated the attacking ships and planes were guilty of gross negligence and carelessness.” Mahon asked Tordella’s personal opinion. “I said that, for what it was worth, I believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities.”
Tordella’s beliefs echoed those of his boss, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter. The NSA director, who had served as a senior aide and confidant to George Marshall during his tenure as general and then secretary of state and of defense, had a background in intelligence and was politically well connected in Washington. President John Kennedy had chosen him in 1962 to serve as the deputy director of the CIA, where he remained until 1965, when Johnson appointed him head of the NSA. Soon after the Liberty attack, Carter appeared before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to discuss the Liberty. Cyrus Vance joined him for the closed-door session. Lawmakers asked whether Carter believed Israel deliberately tried to sink an American ship. “It couldn’t be anything else but deliberate,” he testified. “There’s just no way you could have a series of circumstances that would justify it being an accident.”
“I think it’s premature to make a judgment like that,” Vance countered. Carter would later tell an NSA historian that the Liberty was “where I first parted company with Vance.” Gerard Burke, Carter’s chief of staff, remembered when his boss returned to the NSA afterward, appearing in Burke’s ninth-floor office with stunning news. “Cy Vance just told me to keep my mouth shut,” Burke recalled his boss telling him. “Those were his exact words.” The implication was clear. Regardless of the opinions of Carter, Tordella and other senior leaders, Vance demanded the men remain silent. Carter fumed, but Burke described his boss as a loyal soldier who knew to follow orders. “There was absolutely no question in anybody’s mind that the Israelis had done it deliberately,” Burke said. “I was angrier because of the cover-up—if that’s possible—than of the incident itself, because there was no doubt in my mind that they did it right from the outset. That was no mystery. The only mystery to me was why was the thing being covered up.”
These views were shared by many of the NSA’s senior leaders. Soon after the attack, a team had flown to Malta to inspect the ship. The extensive damage stunned the men. “Just looking at the damage, it would be hard to say that was an accident,” said Allan Deprey, a Navy lieutenant assigned to the NSA who traveled to Malta. “One shot would be an accident or even one torpedo, but there was damage from all directions.” Oliver Kirby, deputy director for operations, said he believed Israel wanted an impenetrable defense line. The Liberty proved a threat. “We knew it was deliberate,” Kirby said of the attack. “It was very well planned, premeditated. They knew exactly what they were doing.” Brigadier General John Morrison, Jr., assistant deputy director for operations, said an accidental attack defied logic. “We just couldn’t believe that. We knew what the Liberty stood for. We knew what it looked like. It was not a small ship. It was a large ship,” Morrison said. “They being a bright bunch of folks, we had to believe that they knew. They saw the silhouettte of the ship. They knew when they looked at it what it was. Our flag was flying.”
Many senior officers in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research also doubted Israel’s explanation. Thomas Hughes, director of the department’s intelligence office, sent a detailed memo five days after the assault to Nicholas Katzenbach, outlining the details of the assault, the helicopter intercepts and his conclusions. The intercepts of Israeli helicopters failed to convince Hughes that the attack was an accident. He wrote that transcripts pointed to “an extraordinary lack of concern on the part of the attackers as to whether the target was hostile.” Hughes’s June 13 memo raised other questions about the extent and duration of the attack that eroded the credibility of Israel’s explanation.
“In six strafing runs, it appears remarkable that none of the aircraft pilots identified the vessel as American,” Hughes wrote. “The torpedo boat attack was made approximately 20 minutes after the air attack. The surface attack could have been called off in that time had proper air identification been made.” Hughes pointed out what was obvious to many. “Liberty crew members were able to identify and record the hull number of one of the small, fast moving torpedo boats during the two minutes that elapsed between their attack run and the launching of the first torpedo, but the Israeli boat commanders apparently failed to identify the much larger and more easily identifiable Liberty (11,000 tons, 455 feet long, large identification numbers on hull).”
Israel’s explanation, Hughes believed, “stretched all credibility.” “We were quite convinced the Israelis knew what they were doing,” he later said. “It was hard to come to any other conclusion.” Other senior staffers agreed, believing that Israel did not want the United States reading its wartime message traffic. “It wasn’t an accident,” recalled William McAfee, who served as the department’s liaison with other intelligence agencies. “Everybody knew it wasn’t an accident.” Granville Austin, director of the bureau’s Near East and South Asia office, reviewed intelligence reports that described Israel’s extensive reconnaissance of the Liberty hours before the attack. Despite Israel’s protestations that the attack was an accident, Austin believed that Israeli forces knew the Liberty was an American ship. “They knew damn well what it was,” he said. “That it was an accident, of course, was nonsense.”
Despite Jerusalem’s close ties with Washington, many State Department officials—and others in the intelligence community—believed the Jewish state’s survival instinct was so strong that, if necessary, Israel would attack a close ally in the interest of self-preservation. “Our reports were devastating,” recalled William Wolle, who worked on Arab-Israeli issues in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. “The feeling of those of us at the working level in NEA was that the Israelis had deliberately done this so that we couldn’t read all of their communications, etc. We are their ally but they are not going to trust us when it comes to a wartime situation in terms of what information might get out, what we might pass along to someone. We all felt it was no accident.”
In contrast to the strong views of many in the NSA and State Department, CIA officials backed Israel’s explanation days after the attack. A top-secret June 13 memo stated that the helicopter intercepts “leave little doubt that the Israelis failed to identify the Liberty as a US ship before or during the atack.” The memo also determined that even though the weather was clear and the Liberty’s hull number and flag were displayed, the attackers might have confused the spy ship for El Quseir, a position contrary to the beliefs of many in the Navy. “Although the Liberty is some 200 feet longer than the Egyptian transport El Quseir, it could easily be mistaken for the latter vessel by an overzealous pilot,” the memo stated. “Both ships have similar hulls and arrangements of masts and stack.”
A top-secret memo prepared on June 21 that evaluated Ron’s report cast greater doubts on Israel’s explanation, but reaffirmed the agency’s earlier opinion that the attack likely was an accident and “not made in malice.” The report, which blamed the assault on “overeager Israeli commanders,” challenged how qualified naval commanders could twice miscalculate the Liberty’s speed and fail to note that such a cargo ship could not travel thirty knots and was unarmed and incapable of a shore bombardment. “To say the least, it is questionable military policy to authorize an attack upon an unidentified ship based solely upon a radar track of over 20 knots and erroneous reports that Israeli positions were being shelled,” the memo stated. “The Israeli statement that the Liberty could not be identified because it was covered with smoke also is a piece of self-serving over rationalization. Clearly the smoke was the result of the Israeli attacks.”
The CIA based its analysis in part on the telegrams of the American naval attaché in Tel Aviv, who raised serious questions about the attack but still attributed it to trigger-happy commanders. However, other senior officers inside the American Embassy in Tel Aviv believed the attack was no accident. William Dale, the embassy’s second in command, suspected that the Israelis feared that the intelligence collected by the Liberty might fall into Arab hands. The department often sent telegrams with intelligence information to multiple embassies. A pro-Arab American diplomat stationed in Damascus, Beirut, or Cairo might pass along information to his contacts, a dangerous wartime proposition for Israel. Heywood Stackhouse, the embassy’s principal political officer, also said he didn’t believe Israel’s explanation. “The Israelis are very, very smart people,” Stackhouse said. “I just find it very hard to believe it was an error.”
But the CIA’s position on the attack soon changed. A secret internal history report declassified in 2006 shows that the agency’s faith in its two initial intelligence memos vanished. The emerging details of the sustained assault, coupled with the mounting evidence against Israel, swayed many senior leaders at the agency that the assault likely was no accident. “Although Israeli authorities in Tel Aviv immediately apologized for the grievous ‘accident,’ many informed Americans soon came to believe that the assault had been anything but accidental. CIA initially resisted this judgment,” stated the agency’s history report. “But the cumulative weight of the evidence rapidly undermined this position.”
Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor, the agency’s deputy director at the time of the attack, voiced his disbelief of Israel’s explanation in a June 22 memo to Director Richard Helms. Taylor had served as the head of naval intelligence and as the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The three-star admiral concluded that Israel deliberately attacked the Liberty. “To me, the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the Israelis knew that Liberty might be their target and attacked anyway,” Taylor wrote to his boss, “either through confusion in Command and Control or through deliberate disregard of instructions on the part of subordinates.”
Several agency field memos produced in the summer and fall of 1967 highlighted the fact that Israel rarely made mistakes. One report even suggested Moshe Dayan had ordered the attack. The CIA considered these field reports—based on unnamed agency contacts—as unevaluated intelligence. Many senior agency leaders by then had already concluded the attack was deliberate. “I don’t think there can be any doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing,” Helms told a CIA historian in an oral history interview declassified in 2008. “Why they wanted to attack the Liberty, whose bright idea this was, I can’t possibly know. But any statement to the effect that they didn’t know that it was an American ship and so forth is nonsense.”