James M Ennes Jr. American-Arab Affairs. Issue 15, December 1985, Washington.

The ill-fated American intelligence ship USS Liberty has burst back into the news. And supporters of Israel are not happy about it.

This little-known subject, it seems, is finally coming out of the closet—albeit with some unintended help from Israel. Angry Americans are asking their Congressmen about the Liberty. Articles are appearing in military magazines after years of silence. News stories, editorials, letters to the editor and national talkshows mention the subject regularly. Former heads of various government agencies are starting to speak out. And a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has called upon the Congress “once and for all to clear up the unanswered questions surrounding this tragedy.”

On the fourth day of the 1967 Arab-Israeli six day war, Israeli naval, air and reconnaissance forces worked together to attack and almost sink the USS Liberty, a lightly-armed neutral ship in international waters. Thirty-four Americans died and 171 were wounded from a crew of 294. The crippled vessel had to be sold for scrap.

But the story vanished from the news like the political bombshell it still is. Israel swore the attack was a mistake, and no amount of evidence to the contrary made any difference. Not the testimony of crewmen. Not CIA reports that Moshe Dayan ordered the attack against a ship he knew to be American. Not CIA findings that it was planned in advance. Not the opinions of a presidential advisor that the Israeli excuse was unbelievable nor an official State Department finding that it was untrue, nor the opinion of Secretary of State Dean Rusk that the attack was deliberate.

All evidence paled alongside the sad reality that friends of Israel wielded power in the Lyndon Johnson White House. Murder of Americans could be tolerated; embarrassment of Israel could not. So the truth about the USS Liberty was buried in top secret-files while crewmen and others who knew the story were coerced into silence.

For 18 years the story has simmered on the back burners of public consciousness—known to a few, denied by both governments, never fully reported in any news media. Newspaper articles have explored the subject briefly. Several books have been written. A number of government and military leaders have spoken out. Lawsuits under the Freedom-of-Information Act have brought ever more damning evidence into the open and persistent pressure by survivors has kept the story alive. But until recently the story of the USS Liberty has never received the important national coverage it deserves.

In 1984, however, the Atlantic magazine commissioned two leading Israeli journalists, Zeev Schiff and Hirsch Goodman, to write an article about the Liberty attack. This would be the first major American magazine to give the Liberty more than passing mention. From the start, unfortunately, there seemed little chance that this would be the objective account that the story calls for, exploring both sides and searching for the truth.

Atlantic is owned by Canadian Mortimer Zuckerman, whose goals for the magazine were outlined in a February 14, 1982, article in The New York Times Magazine. No articles would be allowed, said Zuckerman, that “challenge Israel’s right to exist.” That injunction may be open to interpretation, the magazine noted, citing an earlier $10,000 Zuckerman grant to The Nation. Zuckerman cancelled the “no strings” grant when he objected to some of the reporting about Israel in The Nation.

Thus it was not surprising when word came from Israel that reporters Schiff and Goodman expected their piece to “thoroughly discredit everyone who has written about the USS Liberty.” Clearly that was the intent of the article: to tell a story supporting the Israeli position and to attempt to refute the stories told by survivors and others who have previously investigated the affair.

Meanwhile, writer Stephen Green (Taking Sides, William Morrow & Co., 1984) appealed to Atlantic editors for a chance to review the Schiff/Goodman manuscript or to publish an opposing view. No deal, said the editors. No opposing view would be entertained until after publication of the Schiff/Goodman piece, and then only in the letters-to-the-editor section. Green appealed personally to publisher Zuckerman. Still no deal.

After several unexplained delays, the article finally appeared in the September 1984 issue of Atlantic under the title, “The Attack on the Liberty.” Running to more than 10,000 words, it was an imposing spread. “Now new evidence throws light on this tragic accident,” announced a subtitle, while an insert described the authors’ credentials: “Hirsch Goodman is the defense correspondent of The Jerusalem Post and the Israel correspondent of The Sunday Times of London. Zeev Schiff is the defense and military-affairs editor of the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz and a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”

“Was the Liberty attacked intentionally?” the authors ask rhetorically in an opening paragraph. “Countless magazine articles and several books … have been written … but the mystery remains.” Then, having presumably disarmed critics by sounding like open minded investigators, the authors proceed to present all the arguments for the defense, sidestepping the many contradictions, while ignoring the case for the prosecution.

“Mistakes are common in war,” the authors write. “Such tragic accidents have happened to every army in the history of modern war. But many reasonable people have not been able to accept Israel’s attack on the Liberty as such an accident.”

As examples of such nonacceptance, they cite “Remember the Liberty” bumper stickers (distributed by a surviving Liberty crewman at his own expense) and a New York Times 1984 memorial announcement for the men who died in the attack.

“Some groups, believed by Israeli intelligence to be funded by the Arabs, want to keep the issue alive,” write Schiff and Goodman.[4] Then they present a scenario of the attack which, if believed, would convince most readers that the attack was, indeed, another tragic accident of war.

The “New Evidence”

For almost eighteen years, the Israeli government has insisted publicly that the Liberty’s presence in the area was unknown to Israel until after the attack—while admitting privately to the American government that the ship was correctly identified, and presenting an elaborate scenario to explain why the ship, after being correctly identified, was nevertheless attacked. This is the story, previously denied by the Israeli government, now told in the Atlantic.

According to this officially denied (but widely leaked and previously published) version, the Liberty was correctly identified by crewmen of a Nord reconnaissance aircraft eight hours before the attack and was properly marked on a chart in the Israeli war room. Unfortunately, say the authors, a “Lieutenant Colonel ‘L’ ordered the marker removed from the battle control table” in order to keep the table “as uncluttered as possible.”

That move, say Schiff and Goodman, wiped out all reference to the ship in the Israeli war room. When Liberty was again sighted several hours later, the sighting coincided with explosions then occurring at the nearby town of El Arish, and the now-unidentified Liberty was mistakenly presumed to be an enemy engaged in shore bombardment.

According to the Atlantic account, torpedo boats dispatched to investigate the mistaken reports of “shore bombardment” sighted the Liberty on radar twenty nautical miles northwest of El Arish and mistakenly plotted the ship’s speed at thirty knots—which, under Israeli gunnery doctrine, made the target an enemy who could be fired upon. A second radar check was ordered. This time Liberty was mistakenly determined to be moving in an evasive course at 28 nautical miles per hour (knots).

Since 18 knots was also the top speed of the boats, “which were still twenty nautical miles away from the target,” an air strike was called. According to Schiff and Goodman, two Mirage III C fighters on their way back to Israel from an air patrol over the Suez Canal were diverted to the target. The lead plane dropped to 3,000 feet and circled the ship twice searching for identifying marks, while the second aircraft circled the target once. Two “cannons” could be seen on the forecastle and the ship was determined not to be Israeli, but no markings could be seen.

The presence or absence of a flag, say the authors, is moot, since Israeli headquarters was left with the impression that the ship had no markings and acted on that basis.

Each pilot strafed the ship four times before the arrival of two Super Mystere jets armed with napalm bombs. The Mysteres made two bombing runs each, but only one bomb hit the ship.

At 2:27 p.m., torpedo boat T-204 asked “What ship?” by flashing light. Liberty, according to this account, refused to identify itself, insisting instead that the torpedomen identify themselves first.

After an exchange of gunfire, the boats fired five torpedoes. Four missed. One exploded “just below the water line.”

Still trying to sink the ship and also to establish her identity, we are told, the torpedomen crossed to the ship’s left side, and while crossing the bow “noticed” the letters GTR on the hull of the ship. The time was 2:47. All firing ceased for fear the ship “could be Russian because of the letters on its hull.”

At 3:20 p.m., after 33 more minutes of careful study from close range, the torpedomen reported that the ship was American.

At 4:40 the Israelis offered help, which was refused.

At 5:04 the boats commenced their return to base.

At 5:50 the Liberty disappeared from their radarscopes.

Subsequent Israeli investigations concluded that “the attack on the ship was not conducted out of malice … nor was there any evidence of criminal negligence. It was a genuine mistake.”

“To this day,” the authors conclude, “the wounds have not healed. The issue resurfaces periodically, and with it the pain.”

A Press Blitz Spreads the Israeli Version

In what looked like a well-coordinated press blitz, the Atlantic article and excerpts from it were widely reprinted, often with headlines proclaiming, “New Evidence Shows Attack on American Ship was a Mistake.” Excerpts from the article and interviews with the authors were filed with United Press International in New York, while The Baltimore Sun correspondent in Jerusalem filed a detailed excerpt that appeared in many American newspapers. A reporter in Beirut filed an excerpt with the Associated Press. The Jerusalem Post International Edition reprinted the original article, as did some other newspapers.

While some newspapers did publish rebuttal letters and interviews with Liberty survivors, most efforts to present the American side of the story met with stony silence. The Sacramento Bee angrily refused any rebuttal space. United Press International ignored requests to present the American side. The Sunday Times of London asserted that printing a rebuttal in the Times would be “disloyal” to their correspondent and that, in any case, Schiff and Goodman have “credentials” which others presumably lack.

Reaction to the Article

Letters to the editor published by the Atlantic in December, however, were uniformly critical of Israel for attacking the ship and of the magazine for publishing a one-sided account.

Among the letters published in December is one from me showing that Atlantic’s “new evidence” is not new at all, has been officially discounted by the American government as false, and is overwhelmingly refuted by other, more compelling material. “Anyone studying the entire body of evidence,” I wrote, “will reach the same conclusions.”

Author Stephen Green writes: “To say that Goodman and Schiff are selective in their presentation … is an understatement. They seem unaware of literally hundreds of pages of detail [in other published sources]…. One would have expected the authors to at least remark on the dozens of inconsistencies between their story and the [U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry] report, even if they preferred to accept the version given by their Israeli sources.”

“Simply outrageous … the heart aches over such duplicity from an ‘ally’,” writes a reader. “… Savage and inexcusable,” says another.

In a counter-rebuttal, Schiff and Goodman reply: “We have in our possession the verbatim transcripts of the dialogue between the Israeli Naval War Room and the attacking vessels, the verbatim dialogue between Israeli Air Force HQ and the pilots, classified documents from three commissions of inquiry into the affair, the Yerushalmi Report, the testimony of all the major participants to the various commissions of enquiry, transcripts of our own interviews with the Israeli principals, and detailed charts.

“… What Mr. Ennes claims … is not the issue. What is relevant is the sworn testimony of the captain of the Israeli torpedo boat, and those around him ….”

A similar exchange of letters appeared in The Jerusalem Post and its international edition. Here, however, Schiff and Goodman complain bitterly that criticism of their article amounts to a “personal attack” on the authors, and assert that “James Ennes has presented his own version of history.”

“The picture we paint is not complimentary to Israel,” the authors confess. “In fact, we were told by many in Israel that we did the country a disservice for having written on the subject at all…. The Liberty was not attacked with malice aforethought. That is a myth that Ennes has chosen to perpetuate.”

“It is time,” say Schiff and Goodman, “That the cloak of historical respectability and investigative objectivity was lifted from Ennes.”

Some Atlantic readers cancelled their subscriptions to protest what they saw as unbalanced reporting. By February, however, the tone had changed. Here readers praised the scholarship of the article and lauded the magazine for publishing it. A former U.S. Marine officer asserted that only malice or special interest could cause one to conclude that Israel had deliberately attacked an American vessel, while a political science professor from Rutgers published his professorial opinion that the attack could not have been deliberate and a history professor from William Paterson College asserted that “Arab propagandists” are making “war through other means” by continuing “to exploit the Liberty incident.”

Neither of the professors apparently looked beyond the one-sided Atlantic story. Neither questioned the fact that, except for some carefully selected background material, all of the “new evidence” cited by Atlantic came from Israel. No one apparently wondered why information from American government, military or intelligence sources was not included or why survivors of the attack were not questioned. No one, including the authors, apparently bothered to check the voluminous files of the Navy Court of Inquiry or the State Department or other public records or wondered why the official American records told a different story. No one asked Atlantic to provide sources or asked how they might be checked. And while the authors clearly did read my book on the subject—they used it for much of their background material—they chose to ignore the evidence and testimony provided there.

The Associated Press Checks In

In New York, however, the Associated Press assigned veteran newsman David Smyth to look into both sides of the story. Smyth sought out several survivors of the attack, plus key military, intelligence and diplomatic leaders of the era, and reviewed pertinent U.S. government files.

The story he found is quite different from that told in the pages of the Atlantic: Smyth discovered that, except for some names and other details, the story told by Schiff and Goodman is not new. It is the same story told privately by the Israeli government to top U.S. government officials and rejected by them in 1967.

The Israeli report was prepared by Israeli Military Judge Lieutenant Colonel Yeshayahu Yerushalmi on July 21, 1967, and delivered by hand several days later to State Department Under Secretary for Political Affairs Eugene Rostow, along with urgent requests that it be withheld from the American public. There it was assigned to State Department legal advisor Carl F. Salans for review.

The Salans review was devastating to the Israeli excuse—so devastating that, along with the Yerushalmi report itself, it was classified Top Secret by U.S. government officials and locked away from public scrutiny. The report finally surfaced in 1983, only because a Minneapolis citizen invested $15,000 in legal action under the Freedom of Information Act to pry it loose.

The Yerushalmi report itself, the object of the sensitive analysis, is still officially withheld eighteen years later, even though it was leaked to Liberty survivors in 1980 and has been widely published.

The State Department Discounts the Israeli Excuse

The Salans report cites several embarrassing discrepancies in the Israeli story:

1. Israel claims the ship was traced at 28 to 30 knots on an evasive course. The U.S. Navy inquiry, however, shows that the ship’s top speed was 18 knots and that during the pre-attack period she held a constant five knot speed on a steady course.
2. Israel claims that the only prior knowledge of the ship was an aircraft sighting at 6:00 a.m. The Court of Inquiry, however, shows that the ship was reconnoitered by Israeli aircraft on eight occasions during daylight (most of which were very low-level flights which I personally observed).
3. Israel claims the attacking aircraft made three runs over the ship moments before the attack in attempts to identify it. The ship’s commanding officer, however, and other crewmen (I was on the bridge at the time) insist that no pre-attack reconnaissance runs were made by the attacking aircraft.
4. Israel claims the torpedo boats approached the ship before attacking and asked for identification, but that the ship answered with an “AA” signal meaning “identify yourself first.” Salans discounts this report as contrary to sworn testimony of surviving crewmen.
5. Israel claims that no flag or identification markings could be seen on the ship. The Navy Court of Inquiry established, however, that the ship’s normal five-by-eight-foot colors flew at all times during and preceding the air attack, that they were quickly replaced after being shot down by the airplanes, and that an oversize seven-by-thirteen-foot flag was hauled up five minutes before the start of the torpedo boat attack. Liberty’s configuration and standard markings were clearly sufficient for identification, Salans notes. Her hull markings were clear and freshly painted. The ship’s name appeared in English on the stern.
6. Israel claims the Liberty was mistakenly identified as the Egyptian freighter El Quseir. Salans notes, however, that El Quseir was roughly one fourth Liberty’s size, very differently configured, and lacked Liberty’s unusual antenna array and hull markings. Perhaps unknown to Salans but certainly known to the Israelis, El Quseir was actually a 40-year-old horse carrier for the Egyptian cavalry and was then in Alexandria waiting to be scrapped. Salans notes that even long-time Israeli supporter Clark Clifford officially described the El Quseir excuse as “unbelievable.”
7. The Top Secret State Department report notes that if the Israeli forces believed that their target had been moving at 30 knots, they should have known immediately that the El Quseir, which has a top speed of about 14 knots, was not their target.
8. The report notes that “any trained observer” should immediately have recognized that the Liberty was incapable of a shore bombardment and thus could not have been the target the Israelis were supposedly looking for.
9. The report notes that if the first sighting of the Liberty by torpedo boats was at 1:41 p.m. as claimed, and the report was then transmitted to headquarters, rechecked and verified by the torpedomen, retransmitted, a decision to attack then made, aircraft dispatched and the attack launched, all in the space of about fifteen minutes, then “no significant time was expended in an effort to identify the ship from the air before the attack was launched.”

What the Department of State Did Not Know

Carl Salans had only limited information to work with: the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry file, which is deeply flawed and incomplete, and a report prepared for President Johnson by presidential advisor Clark Clifford (which has since vanished from government files). Although the Salans report serves as a powerful indictment of the Israeli excuse, it would have been even more damning if Salans had interviewed Liberty survivors or had full access to Central Intelligence Agency records.

For instance, Salans had no way of knowing that the firing did not stop at 2:47 as the Israelis claim. The torpedo boats fired cannon and machine guns on the Liberty until 3:15, when they sank the ship’s empty life rafts waiting in the water for evacuees.

Salans had no way of evaluating the Israeli claim that only four aircraft participated in the attack. Senior U.S. Navy officers estimated later that at least ten aircraft were required to inflict the 821 rocket and cannon hits the Liberty received.

Salans probably had no way of knowing that Israeli reconnaissance aircraft at 10:30 had been overheard by Liberty and other American radio intercept operators informing Israeli headquarters that they could see the ship’s American flag.

He probably had no way of knowing that the Israeli claim of having picked up the Liberty on radar at 1:41 p.m. was physically impossible. At that time the boats were about 27 miles from the Liberty; due to the curvature of the earth, they could not have detected a ship the size of the Liberty from more than about 15 miles.

Salans overlooked an official Court of Inquiry finding that the Israelis jammed the ship’s radio frequencies in an attempt to prevent her call for help. The selective jamming could not have been accomplished without prior knowledge that the ship was American.

Salans did not mention the Israeli claim that pilots (and later, torpedomen) feared that the letters “GTR-5” meant that they had been firing on a Russian ship. Surely the Israelis are aware that Soviet ships write their hull number in Cyrillic (rather than Roman) letters and Arabic numerals on the hull near the bridge, not on the bow.

And Salans could not have known that while he was preparing his report, CIA officials were informing members of the Defense Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations that the attack was deliberate. According to Stephen Green, who interviewed chairman Robert L.F. Sikes of Florida and other committee members, the CIA learned a day before the attack that the Israelis had already decided to attack the Liberty if she operated in Israeli coastal waters because they could not tolerate an electronic eavesdropper in the area.

The Salans report does not contain an overall conclusion as to whether the attack was deliberate. Instead, the report is an item-by-item review of the main points of the Israeli excuse in which each Israeli argument is analyzed and rejected, point by point.

Although the conclusion seemed obvious, Washington reporter David Walsh tracked down Carl Salans recently to ask what conclusion he had drawn. “Oh, they knew the ship was American and attacked it deliberately,” Salans said.

Survivors and Government Leaders Speak Out

Reporter Smyth weighed the Salans report against the Atlantic article and then contacted survivors and the American officials who were most directly involved. His findings were reported in two important Associated Press wire service stories that appeared in about 300 American newspapers in September and October 1984, as well as in numerous newspapers overseas. Although coverage was far from universal, the story nevertheless reached millions of Americans for the first time, plus more readers in overseas versions, and it set the story straight in the large-circulation news media.

After summarizing the Atlantic account and citing key discrepancies, the Associated Press stories reported the opinions of both survivors and key leaders of the era:

Liberty’s engineer officer, George Golden: “I had proof that they knew who we were. We had monitored the communications between the Israeli planes and gunboats and their bases in which they referred to us as an American ship. I turned my proof over to an admiral, but I don’t know what was done with it. The Court of Inquiry was a whitewash. There was also just too many people trying to shut our men up. Somebody higher up was putting a squeeze on our people not to say anything about the incident. The information I had showed it was not an accident, and our government knows this.”

I, James Ennes, Liberty’s officer-of-the-deck: “That very morning I had ordered a brand-new flag put up. It was streaming freely in a 12-knot wind.”

Liberty’s signalman, Russell David: “When [the flag] was shot down by Israeli planes, I put up a holiday ensign that was three times bigger. When the Israeli gunboats attacked, I kept flashing with my lamp “U.S. NAVY SHIP” until my lamp was shot out and I was wounded. I knew then they wanted us all dead.”

Liberty’s chief radioman Wayne L. Smith: “The Israelis jammed five of our six radio circuits as we tried to call for help.”

Richard Helms, CIA director at the time: “To say that it was an accident is drawing a pretty long bow, in view of the evidence.”

Dr. Louis Tordella, who was National Security Agency Deputy Director: “I believe it was a deliberately planned attack.”

Dean Rusk, Secretary of State at the time: “I have never believed the Israeli explanation.”

Former Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer, now a senior consultant at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies: “It’s ridiculous to say this was an accident. In the real world there is no way it could have happened” the way the Israeli journalists describe it. “Congress should investigate this matter, even now.”

The Story Won’t Go Away

Those who would have us believe that the attack was a “tragic mistake” must certainly wish the Atlantic had never brought the subject up, and they now seem once more content to remain silent in the hope that the truth about the Liberty will fade quietly into oblivion. It will not. Every new demonstration of Israeli intransigence brings the Liberty back into public consciousness; every new Israeli theft of American intelligence or technology, every new revelation of undue Israeli influence on American institutions, every new Israeli demand for American weapons systems or American money, moves more Americans to demand a better accounting of the Israeli attack upon the USS Liberty. And each letter to a Congressman moves the government very slightly closer to telling the truth.

“Why should people believe survivors of the attack and disbelieve the story told by the government of Israel?” we are asked recently by Israeli Foreign Affairs.

Our answer: Because survivors are believable. The conviction that it was no accident is unanimous among known survivors and is supported by people who held key government positions at the time of the attack. They speak out publicly and give their names. Their stories agree with one another. What they say can be verified in sworn testimony and public records available from the government of the United States. The Israeli excuse, on the other hand, keeps changing. It conflicts with eyewitness accounts of survivors. It conflicts with most previous Israeli excuses. Israeli sources are anonymous or unavailable or hide behind pseudonyms. Meanwhile, the evidence behind the Israeli excuses is locked away in Israeli files, released only to apologists and friendly journalists. If the attack were accidental, as the Israelis claim, surely the Israeli government could come up with a believable excuse, documented with verifiable sources, consistent with sworn testimony of survivors and compatible with the firm laws of physics.