There was a suspicious feeling around town that we were attempting to back up the Israelis.
—LUCIUS BATTLE, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR NEAR EASTERN AND SOUTH ASIAN AFFAIRS
Captain Merlin Staring began his legal review of the American court of inquiry in his fifth-floor office of the Navy’s headquarters on North Audley Street in central London on June 17. Staring had served throughout World War II and later earned his law degree at Georgetown University. Over the years, the New York native rose from a staff lawyer to a senior member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Now the top lawyer for Admiral John McCain, Jr., the commander of American naval forces in Europe and the Middle East, Staring had the duty to review the investigative report on the Liberty and make recommendations to McCain before the admiral forwarded it to his superiors at the Pentagon.
The top-secret volume on Staring’s desk for review totaled more than seven hundred pages, including a 158-page transcript of witness testimony and forty-nine exhibits that consisted of logs, telegrams, and photographs. The report even included the business card naval attaché Castle had dropped to the deck after the attack and the detailed breakdown of the 821 shell holes that riddled the spy ship’s hull and superstructure, handwritten on a piece of lined notebook paper. Staring saw evidence of the inquiry’s haste in its sloppy final report, replete with misspellings, typos, and scratch-outs. Some of the exhibits appeared incorrectly labeled and out of order and the names of some of the Liberty’s crewmembers were misspelled. The name of Dr. Richard Kiepfer, one of the central witnesses, was spelled two different ways throughout the report, both incorrect. The court even repeatedly misspelled Israeli.
The lawyer’s concerns grew as he delved into the report’s seemingly contradictory findings, which appeared to Staring designed to exonerate the Liberty of wrongdoing and provide political cover for Israel. The court determined that the Liberty sailed in international waters, flew the American flag, and sported clean and freshly painted hull markings. The Israelis reconned the ship throughout the morning and jammed the Liberty’s communications. The court congratulated the heroism of the officers and crew who fought to keep the ship afloat. The report at times even seemed in awe of the assault’s efficiency. “Attackers were well coordinated, accurate and determined. Criss-crossing rocket and machine gun runs from both bows, both beams, and quarters effectively chewed up entire topside,” the report stated. “Well directed initial air attacks had wiped out the ability of the four 50 cal. machine guns to be effective.”
The court criticized Israel’s explanation that its forces confused the Liberty with the El Quseir, noting any resemblance was “highly superficial.” “El Quseir is less than half the size and lacks the elaborate antenna array and distinctive hull markings of Liberty,” the report stated. “The location of the superstructure island, a primary recognition feature of merchant type ships, is widely different. By this criteria as a justification for attack, any ship resembling El Quseir was in jeopardy.” The report also refuted Israel’s accusation that the Liberty steamed too close to a war zone and outside normal shipping routes, flew no flag, and that its forces mistakenly determined the Liberty had shelled Israeli troops onshore. “It is inconceivable that either the IDF Navy or Air Force would associate Liberty, with her 4.50 caliber machine guns, or El Quseir, armed with two 3 pounders, with a shore bombardment.”
Despite the court’s apparent effort to discredit Israel’s explanations for the attack, the report ultimately concluded that the assault was a case of mistaken identity. The report asserted that the Liberty’s slow speed and the calm weather likely made it difficult for the attackers to spot the American flag during the hour-long assault. The westerly direction of the ship, the report ruled, possibly reinforced the attackers’ conclusion that the ship was Egyptian. The contradictory findings baffled Staring as he pored over the report until nearly 3 A.M., breaking only for the occasional cup of coffee or cigarette. How could the court blast Israel’s claim that its forces confused the Liberty for El Quseir, but still rule the attack a case of mistaken identity? Nowhere in the pages of testimony or exhibits could Staring find evidence to support that principal ruling.
Larger questions loomed. If Admiral McCain had barred investigators from traveling to Israel, and court members never received the war logs, diaries, or radio communications from the attackers, how could the court prove what had happened? Court members had no idea what had occurred inside the Israeli chain of command and could offer little more than guesswork. Didn’t the families of the men killed, the Navy, and the American public deserve real answers? “The number one paragraph on the preface to that record was that this was a case of mis-identification, but I encountered nothing even touching upon that,” recalled Staring, who was later promoted to the rank of rear admiral. “No self-respecting lawyer or naval officer could look at the limited nature of the evidence taken by or available to that court of inquiry and find it adequate to support the conclusions the court professed to have reached.”
Other senior officers in the London headquarters also doubted Israel’s explanation, though most would remain silent for decades. One of the more stinging repudiations of the report came decades later from Captain Ward Boston, Jr., the court’s attorney. “The evidence was clear,” Boston later said in a sworn affidavit. “I am certain that the Israeli pilots that undertook the attack, as well as their superiors who had ordered the attack, were well aware that the ship was American. I saw the flag, which had visibly identified the ship as American, riddled with bullet holes, and heard testimony that made it clear that the Israelis intended there be no survivors.” Even Rear Admiral Wylie, McCain’s deputy, confessed years later in an oral history interview with the Naval War College that he did not believe the attack was an accident. “That was deliberate,” Wylie told an interviewer. “I don’t know why in God’s name those idiotic people did it, but—I think I’ll not talk about it.”
Boston arrived in Staring’s office the morning of June 18. Staring had been up most of the night, taking a break only long enough to catch a few hours of sleep before returning to the office at sunrise. Boston asked Staring when he would finish his review. “I have some real problems with it,” Staring said. “I have yet to find any evidence in the record, so far as I have read it, that bears out some of the important findings of fact that the board has submitted.” Boston left and returned twenty minutes later. McCain now demanded the report back. Staring’s legal review was no longer necessary. McCain then signed his five-page endorsement of the court of inquiry. Court President Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, Jr., handcuffed a briefcase containing the top-secret report to his wrist, packed a pistol, and boarded a flight to Washington.
Kidd delivered the voluminous report to the Pentagon soon after he landed. The Defense Department’s senior leaders planned to shrink the report into an unclassified summary for the press. Deputy defense secretary Cyrus Vance organized the effort. The former secretary of the Army under President Kennedy, Vance was promoted in 1964 to the Pentagon’s second-in-command where he spent so much time with McNamara that he sometimes spoke in the same staccato manner as his boss. In the intelligence community, Vance had developed a reputation for handling the Pentagon and White House’s dirty jobs. He now tapped Pentagon spokesmen Phil Goulding and Richard Fryklund to help Kidd draft the abbreviated Liberty narrative.
The Navy’s full report concluded that the attack was a case of mistaken identity. But as Staring discovered in his review in London, witness testimony about the pre-attack reconnaissance, clear weather conditions, and the duration of the assault undermined the conclusions that appeared tacked on top. Neither the press nor the American public, however, would see the complete report or have access to its top-secret findings until it was declassified nearly a decade later. The Pentagon’s fourteen-page condensed version, in contrast, omitted all the evidence that contradicted Israel’s explanations, from the jamming of the spy ship’s communications to the court’s stinging denunciation of Israel’s claim that its forces had confused the Liberty for an aged Egyptian cargo ship.
The summary instead amplified details that supported Israel’s account. It noted that the attackers must have had difficulty spotting the American flag because of the ship’s slow speed, a lack of wind, and smoke from the fires on deck. It also singled out McGonagle’s testimony that the Liberty effectively fired its machine guns at the torpedo boats, even though other witnesses had refuted the skipper’s account. The abbreviated report also included the failure to move the spy ship hours earlier, subtly implying that the United States shared the blame for leaving a defenseless ship in harm’s way, though the Liberty sailed in international waters. Page after page, the summary reiterated statements and conclusions supporting Israel’s weak defense:
“The court found no evidence which indicated that the Israeli units which fired on Liberty knew they were attacking an American ship.”
“The court found ‘no available indications that the attack was intended against a U.S. ship.’”
“‘As far as the torpedo boats are concerned,’ the commanding officer testified, ‘I am sure that they felt they were under fire from USS Liberty.’”
“Her flag, while flying, was hanging fairly limply due to a lack of wind and the ship’s slow speed.”
“The court found that ‘The calm conditions and slow ship speed may well have made the American flag difficult to identify.’”
“Smoke from the burning whaleboat and other topside fires, and from the ship’s own stack—she was now building up speed—may have obscured her flag.”
The summary arrived in the fourth-floor office of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral David McDonald for review on June 22, exactly two weeks after the attack. The accompanying memo warned that “strong Navy non-concurrence in the draft is anticipated” and that the Pentagon’s press officers had “their marching orders from Secretary Vance.” Like many of the military’s senior officers, the sixty-year-old McDonald despised Robert McNamara’s leadership of the Pentagon. McNamara and his civilian analysts—dubbed the Whiz Kids—had centralized power, ignored the chain of command, and discounted the views of senior military leaders, whose experience was deemed parochial. Many in the military believed McNamara made decisions based on studies, spreadsheets, and cost-benefit analysis equations, often at the expense of human lives.
Despite his dislike of McNamara, McDonald knew to keep his criticisms of the controversial defense secretary private. He had landed his job as the Navy’s senior officer after his predecessor, Admiral George Anderson, who had graced the cover of Time magazine in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, publicly challenged McNamara and was fired. The soft-spoken son of a Georgia country preacher, McDonald told the press that McNamara was “probably the best Defense Secretary ever,” though in private he often ridiculed McNamara and his deputies with a harshness that made his aides uncomfortable. A pragmatist, McDonald realized that quitting would only hurt the Navy. “I have more influence and more chance of changing it by staying where I am than quitting in a huff,” he confided in an aide after a fight with McNamara. “I wouldn’t want to do that.”
The Liberty inquiry presented McDonald with another chance to challenge the Pentagon’s civilian leaders. McDonald attacked the draft summary of the Liberty’s court of inquiry with a red pencil. The veteran sailor immediately seized on the summary’s bold declarations that exonerated the attackers. In a note on the page, McDonald challenged the statement that the court found no evidence that Israel’s forces knew the Liberty was an American ship. “Was there any which indicated that they didn’t know?” McDonald wrote. Likewise, he questioned the statement that there was no available indication that the attack was intended against an American ship. “Any that the attack wasn’t intended?” he scribbled.
Other passages in the draft intended to prop up Israel’s weak explanations also bothered McDonald. He highlighted references to the poor visibility of the flag, the firing of the Liberty’s machine guns, and the failure to order the spy ship farther to sea hours before the attack. The Pentagon’s goal, McDonald soon realized, was to protect Israel. He articulated his frustration in a handwritten memo. “I think that much of this is extraneous and it leaves me with the feeling that we’re trying our best to excuse the attackers,” the admiral wrote. “Why not let them make the case of (a) unidentified, (b) non deliberate, etc.? Were I a parent of one of the deceased this release would burn me up. I myself do not subscribe to it.”
The office of the secretary of defense refused to relent. A follow-up draft of the summary prepared hours later addressed some of McDonald’s concerns, though the release largely contained many of the original passages that troubled the admiral. The draft still mentioned that calm weather and fires might have obscured the flag and that the Liberty fired on the attackers. An accompanying memo made it clear that despite having asked for the Navy’s participation, the Pentagon’s senior leaders had little interest in making any substantial changes to the draft. “Unfortunately, although Mr. Fryklund states that he agrees with the CNO’s position, he is bound by Mr. Vance’s guidance,” the memo stated. “Therefore while some of the wording has been shaded more toward the Navy stand, I am unable to get further changes or deletions.”
Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr., marked his “suggested deletions” on the revised draft with a green pen. McDonald’s senior deputy crossed out sentences that stated the court found no evidence that Israel had deliberately targeted the Liberty. The admiral also marked through passages about the poor visibility of the flag, the firing of the Liberty’s machine guns, and communications failures, many of the same sentences that troubled his boss. McDonald then reviewed a third draft of the press release and noted the same sections with his red pencil. The admiral dashed off another handwritten memo, again questioning why the United States appeared so interested in protecting Israel. “I see no reason whatsoever to mention Liberty’s firing of her .50 cal. machine guns,” McDonald wrote. “I still say let Israel say whether or not she could see the U.S. flag. Why volunteer the ‘perhaps they couldn’t see it, etc.’”
Senior officers also challenged the Pentagon’s insistence that the draft include the failure to contact the Liberty before the attack. “We have no business whatsoever accepting any burden of blame by indicating that we were trying to change her position at the last minute for reasons which are nobody’s business but ours,” Kidd wrote in a secret memo to McDonald. “I am convinced that the minute we open up Pandora’s communication box on the Liberty situation, the burden of responsibility will immediately shift in the American press, and probably the world press, from Israel’s irresponsible action to U.S. Naval Communications deficiencies.” McDonald echoed Kidd’s concerns in a handwritten memo. “I still do not agree to including possible Communication problems,” he wrote. “This is an internal matter and not germane.”
The admiral’s refusal to protect Israel reflected the general disbelief of many on his staff that the attack was an accident. To these senior officers, the idea that trained naval forces could fail to recognize the Liberty on a clear afternoon was incomprehensible. Captain Jerome King, Jr., McDonald’s executive assistant and senior aide, said many years later that at the time no one believed the Israeli claim that its forces confused the Liberty for a thirty-seven-year-old Egyptian horse and troop transport. “It certainly was not mistaken identity,” King, later a vice admiral, recalled. “I don’t buy it. I never did. Nobody that I knew ever did either. It wasn’t as though it was at night or a rainy day or anything like that. There wasn’t any excuse for not knowing what the ship was. You could divine from just the apparatus on deck—all the antennae and so on—what its mission was.”
The struggle between senior Navy officers and the Pentagon’s civilian leaders to draft the narrative soon leaked to the press. The Evening Star ran a story headlined “Report on Israel Ship Attack A Touchy Task for Pentagon,” outlining the political challenge of exonerating the Liberty’s officers and crew while not blaming Israel. “One of their big problems has been to find a way to tell the truth and nothing but the truth without telling the whole truth,” the article stated. “Pentagon officials would like somehow to emphasize that the ship was attacked without warning while she was in international waters, where she had every right to be, and yet to avoid damaging relations with the Israelis, who immediately apologized for the attack.”
McDonald and his staff achieved some success in shaping the public summary of the court of inquiry’s report. The final draft noted that the court determined that resemblance to El Quseir was “highly superficial” and that the attackers had “ample opportunity” to identify the Liberty prior to the assault. It also stated that the court had “insufficient information” to determine why the Israelis attacked and noted that the court heard no evidence from Israel, language absent in early drafts. But McDonald’s power had limits. The final draft stated that “witnesses suggested that the flag may have been difficult for the attackers to see,” even though that contradicted the testimony of every witness. References to the Liberty’s firing of its machine guns and botched orders to move the ship also remained. “You had fine comments on the previous draft,” stated a handwritten briefing memo that accompanied the Vance-approved release. “The other three objectionable passages, machine gun firing, difficulty in seeing the flag, and the communication delays, are still in this draft.”
The Pentagon released its censored summary of the Navy’s court of inquiry on June 28, twenty days after attack. The release included a nine-page summary of the court’s findings accompanied by nineteen edited pages of McGonagle’s testimony that captured the drama of the assault. The final narrative reflected the dueling interests of the Navy, anxious to keep the focus on Israel’s culpability, and the Pentagon’s civilian leaders, concerned with providing political cover for Israel and preserving diplomatic relations. As a result, the report appeared both to exonerate the crew of the Liberty and provide a plausible rationale that might explain how and why Israel attacked.
Major news outlets from the New York Times to the Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News seized on the bungled effort to move the Liberty. The Washington Post called it an “ironic twist” that the Navy’s most sophisticated spy ship “failed to get a message to move farther out to sea the day she was attacked.” In follow-up articles, many papers including the Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk questioned whether the firing of the spy ship’s machine guns had triggered the torpedo attack.
Only deep into the stories did most newspapers address the question of Israeli responsibility. Many articles noted that the court ruled that Israel “had ample opportunity to identify Liberty correctly.” Other stories quoted the report’s finding that the court had “insufficient information before it to make a judgment on the reasons” for the attack. In the twenty-second paragraph of its story, the New York Times wrote that the court did not interview any Israeli witnesses, a fact most newspapers omitted.
The insinuation that Liberty gunfire and the failed effort to move the ship triggered the assault shifted the responsibility for the attack from Israel to the United States, just as Kidd warned would happen in his secret memo. Press accounts implied that if the Pentagon’s communications system had not failed, the attack would not have happened. Likewise, had the sailors not fired the Liberty’s machine guns, the Israeli torpedo boats might have spared the spy ship the torpedo strike that resulted in twenty-five of its thirty-four fatalities. The subtle suggestion of American culpability overshadowed the court’s determination that the Liberty had a legal right to sail where it did.
The press coverage angered the Liberty’s officers in Malta. Many were particularly upset by the implication that the ship’s futile self-defense effort served as the attack’s catalyst. The men had only done what was expected of them and try to save the ship and themselves. Ensign Lucas described the allegations in a letter to his wife as “far fetched.” “If they had been pounding the hell out of us for half an hour, a little machine gun fire from our .50 cal. pea shooters wouldn’t have made much difference,” Lucas wrote. “Many of the articles are barking up the wrong tree.”
Editorials and opinion columns also spread blame widely. Some charged Israel with deliberately attacking the spy ship. Others zeroed in on the Liberty’s bungled orders. The Washington Daily News blamed McGonagle for not pulling his ship from the war’s sideline. Despite the varying accusations, editorials largely agreed on one point: the Pentagon’s summary failed to explain what had happened. The Washington Post slammed it as “not good enough.” Time griped that it offered only “fragmentary answers” while the Chicago Tribune complained that the report produced “more fog and unanswered questions than clarification.” The Evening Star called it an “affront” filled with “irrelevant tidbits of fact” that revealed “little of consequence that has not been public knowledge since the day of the attack.”
Many editorials doubted Israel’s explanations and criticized the Pentagon for its silence on that point. The conservative National Review urged Congress to investigate. “One thing at least is proved by analysis on the facts already at hand. The incident was not ‘an accident,’” the magazine opined. “It was an act either of stupidity gross enough to be negligence, or of aggression.” The National Observer blasted Israel’s supporters for blaming the United States. “The apologists are still maintaining that the Israelis made an understandable mistake because they thought the ship was Egyptian. This has to be sheer hokum,” it wrote. “Only the blind—or the trigger-happy—could have made such a mistake.” The Evening Star accused the Pentagon of failing to address the critical question of what Israel knew and when. “Did the attackers, in fact, know that the Liberty was an American ship? It seems to us they must have known. If so, why was the attack made and who ordered it?” the paper asked. “Surely the Defense Department knows the answers to these and other pertinent questions by this time. If it does not, there is something radically wrong in the Pentagon.”
Other editorials challenged the Pentagon’s failure to contact the Liberty hours before the attack, often evoking apocalyptic scenarios should the communications system fail again. “The prompt transmittal of orders, in this nuclear age, is the first essential of effective military command,” argued the Washington Post. “A similar lapse could result in the destruction of the Nation itself.” The Chicago Tribune exclaimed that the failure to pull the spy ship from harm’s way evoked “shades of Pearl Harbor!” “A warning to the Liberty was imperative enough, but what if a great world holocaust demanded an instant warning to the field?” the paper questioned. “Would we find again that defense communications failed at zero hour?”
Some columnists and editorial writers doubted the military had released all the facts. Syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick urged reporters to “keep digging.” “It surely will be some years, and it may be next to never, before the whole story is told,” Kilpatrick wrote. “Mum officially is the word.” The Baltimore Sun cautioned that Americans “have become wary of official announcements” and that readers must remember that public reports “are not necessarily the full story.” “The lay citizen, without access to the Navy’s classified information, cannot arrive at an informed judgment on the unfortunate event—beyond the point that it obviously should not have happened,” argued the paper. “So long as part of the episode remains shrouded in security secrecy, the rest of it cannot be expected to come into clear focus.”
Editorial pages in small towns and cities far removed from the Beltway’s insider gossip reflected frustration and disbelief with the efforts to explain the attack. The Edwardsville Intelligencer in Illinois said that the Navy’s report only confirmed what many already suspected: the Liberty did not provoke the attack. “Still unknown—and this is a question which can only be answered by the Israeli government—is whether the attack was accidental or deliberate. This question never may be answered to the satisfaction of everyone unless someone confesses,” the paper observed. “Portions of the testimony before the court of inquiry by the Liberty’s commanding officer, Cmdr. William L. McGonagle, would seem to indicate that the attack was deliberate.”