James M Ennes Jr. American-Arab Affairs. Issue 17, June 1986, Washington.

Mr. Ennes was a lieutenant on the bridge of the USS Liberty on the day it was attacked by Israeli forces. His book on the subject, Assault on the Liberty (Random House, 1980), is a “Notable Naval Book” selection of the U.S. Naval Institute and was “editor’s choice” when reviewed in The Washington Post in May 1980. The book is now in its fifth printing.

Nineteen years have passed since Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked and nearly sank the American intelligence ship USS Liberty during the six-day war in 1967. Thirty-four crewmen died in the attack and 171 more were injured, many seriously. Yet, aside from some behind-the-scenes diplomatic notes, almost the only official American reaction was a hasty acceptance of the Israeli excuse, even though it was known to be untrue, while “press guidance” campaigns by both governments worked hard to make the attack seem accidental.

More important than “truth” and “justice” was the desire to maintain unruffled relations between the United States and Israel. “You cannot see the big picture,” survivors were told when they complained. Good relations with Israel were more important than the lives that were lost.

So crewmen were told that they would be punished if they ever told the truth about the attack. Congressmen learned from the Israeli lobby that this was a subject to be avoided, while newsmen were fed watered-down stories and blocked from having open access to survivors. As a result, most news of the USS Liberty vanished from view almost overnight.

Yet, behind the scenes, senior U.S. government officials complained bitterly, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk did in a secret diplomatic note to Israel, that the ship had been properly identified as American by the Israelis before they attacked. “The attack was literally incomprehensible [and] must be condemned as an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life,” wrote Secretary Rusk. “The silhouette and conduct of the USS Liberty readily distinguished it from any vessel that could have been considered hostile.”

As a result of these and other pressures, the Israeli government has, over a period of 19 years, released a series of ever-more-detailed excuses. Some have been officially released by the Israeli government through their foreign office, embassies and consulates, or the Israeli Defense Force. Others have been released by Israeli surrogates such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL). Still others have been released by pro-Israeli journalists—apparently with cooperation of the Israeli government since the writers claim broad access to Israeli government files.

Israeli Excuses—Weak and Inconsistent

The Israeli excuses are remarkable for two reasons. First, they are unsupportable. Unlike American accounts, the Israeli excuses contain no supporting testimony or documentation of any kind; they must be accepted on blind faith. Yet the Israeli accounts conflict with Liberty’s official logs and sworn testimony of Liberty survivors, and in some cases they are physically impossible. Second, the Israeli excuses keep changing. Each new Israeli excuse is different from all previous Israeli excuses.

Let us examine each of the major Israeli excuses in turn.

The First Official Israeli Excuse

The first Israeli excuse was telephoned to U.S. Navy Commander Ernest Carl Castle, the U.S. Naval Attache in Israel, by Israel’s Lieutenant Colonel Michael Bloch almost twenty-four hours after the attack. And it immediately poisoned the atmosphere in an already-tense situation since, rather than accept responsibility for the attack, even this very early Israeli account seemed to say that Liberty’s commanding officer caused the attack by his own reckless behavior.

Bloch’s report, consisting only of seven terse, numbered sentences, claimed that the attack occurred because the Liberty was operating contrary to international custom near an area of hostilities which had been closed to neutral shipping and which was, in any case, not a common passage for ships. According to Bloch, the Israelis had received reports that the village of El Arish was being shelled from the sea. When sighted in the area of the shelling and recognized as a naval ship, the Liberty “was not flying a flag” and “moved at high speed westward toward the enemy coast.”

The Second Official Israeli Excuse

The Israeli government required another nine days to concoct their second report. It was prepared by Israeli Colonel Ram Ron, a former military attache to Washington. This time Commander Castle was summoned to the Israeli Foreign Liaison Office to receive the news from Lieutenant Colonel Efrat, an aide to Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin. Castle was not permitted to have a copy, but was allowed to make copious notes as a translation of the Hebrew text was read to him.

Already the story was changing, and it was becoming vastly more elaborate. Here the Israelis acknowledge that El Arish was not shelled from the sea after all; but they explain the presence of torpedo boats by claiming that the boats were sent to investigate an erroneous report of shelling from the sea. According to Ron, the boats spotted the Liberty on radar and erroneously calculated her speed at 30 knots, then rechecked and erroneously reported 28 knots. Because 28 knots was close to the top speed of the boats, an air strike was called. Then, when the torpedomen drew close enough to examine the Liberty visually, two officers on two boats compared the Liberty with photographs of the Egyptian freighter El Quseir and identified the Liberty incorrectly as the Egyptian freighter.

Unable to sustain their earlier claim that the Liberty flew no flag, here the Israelis assert that the ship “tried to hide its identity by flying a small flag which was difficult to see from a distance” and by “trying to escape” when discovered.

Like the earlier report, Ron asserts even more forcefully that the Liberty really brought the attack on itself. The ship was burning furiously from napalm and rocket hits, and the decks were littered with dead and wounded men when the torpedo boats approached. Yet, according to Colonel Ron’s account, when asked to identify herself, the Liberty responded with a signal meaning “Identify yourself first”—thus causing the torpedomen to presume the ship to be an enemy. Even if that exchange had occurred, it could not have stopped the air attack which had already taken nine lives.

Ron’s conclusion: The attack was an innocent mistake and was not a result of negligence on the part of the Israelis. The Liberty, according to Ron, “contributed decisively towards its identification as an enemy ship by failing to identify itself by its own initiative and by failing to do so when asked.”

An Unofficial Israeli Excuse

The Israeli excuses were largely withheld from the public except for some “leaked” accounts that received scant attention. Television news ignored the story almost entirely. Yet the few newspapers and magazines that mentioned the Liberty tended to be skeptical of the Israeli version.

Apparently to counter the critical editorial comment, sparse as it was, an amazing story appeared in The New York Times on July 7, 1967, almost one month after the attack. Here, one Micha Limor, said to be an Israeli naval reservist (but in some accounts called the commanding officer of one of the torpedo boats), described the attack as supposedly seen from the torpedo boats.

According to Limor, the torpedomen were in their home port in Ashdod when they received orders during the noon hour to head toward Liberty’s location. When they spotted the ship, she was moving at about ten knots (not thirty, as previously claimed, and not five, which was the ship’s actual speed) when Limor saw two Israeli aircraft circle the Liberty several times [sic] before firing two rockets [sic] and then promptly depart, leaving the ship enveloped in smoke. The boatmen, Limor claims, then arrived and spent several minutes circling the ship and demanding identification. Unable to get any response, he claims, they fired across the “empty bridge,” and circled the ship several more times, all the while demanding identification by radio and flashing light. No flag or other markings were visible, Limor claims.

Only after being fired upon by a lone machine-gunner, whom Limor tells us was promptly hit by return fire, did the boatmen fire torpedoes which, according to Limor, struck the ship’s “left side.” (The torpedo actually struck Liberty’s right side.)

Then a helicopter radioed, “They are raising the American flag,” and the boatmen realized for the first time that they had been shooting at Americans.

All this, Limor laments, could have been avoided if only the Americans had not so stubbornly refused to identify themselves.

The Third Official Israeli Excuse

Despite Ram Ron’s official finding that no one in Israel had done anything wrong, Israel found itself compelled to flog the issue a bit more before declaring it dead. To do this, the Israeli government assigned Military Judge Lieutenant Colonel Yeshayahu Yerushalmi to conduct a detailed examination of the circumstances in order to determine whether anyone in the military forces should be tried by court martial.

The Yerushalmi report, the first truly comprehensive Israeli version of the attack, was completed on July 21, 1967, and a copy delivered to Eugene Rostow at the Department of State on August 15. It was preceded by urgent message appeals from the Israeli government to keep the contents from the American public because the story, if it is to be believed, “strips the Israeli Navy naked.” The report is still officially withheld 19 years later and is considered secret, although copies have been leaked [see p. 131 for the text of the Yerushalmi report].

What makes Yerushalmi’s report notable—and probably one reason it is still withheld—is that this report, for the first time, provides enough detail to reconstruct the course of events. Any such close examination exposes fatal flaws in the Israeli account.

For instance, Yerushalmi tells us that the torpedomen left their Ashdod base at 12:05; spotted the Liberty on radar at 1:41; called in the aircraft after two careful checks of the Liberty’s course, speed and range; and fired torpedoes from less than a mile away at 2:36.

Because the boats have a top speed of about 30 knots, and because they had to cover approximately 75 miles in 151 minutes, it became possible for the first time to plot the progress of the boats from their base at Ashdod to the Liberty’s position near El Arish. Doing this makes it clear that at 1:41, when Yerushalmi tells us the boats first plotted the Liberty on radar, the boats could not have travelled more than 48 miles from their base. Thus they were still 27 nautical miles from the Liberty!

Since the laws of physics limit radar range to line-of-sight, or about 15 miles at sea in most cases, the Yerushalmi report in fact blew enormous holes in the Israeli story. The Israelis blame the entire attack upon a radar plotting error which supposedly occurred when the torpedomen misread Liberty’s actual 5 knot speed as 30 knots at 1:41 and called in the aircraft. Yet the Yerushalmi report shows clearly that the torpedo boats could not possibly have made the critical plotting error which supposedly caused the attack. They were much too far away. In fact, the boats could not have detected the presence of the Liberty at all until at least 2:00, the moment the air attack began.

But the Yerushalmi report makes an even more pronounced about-face in the Israeli story. Before Yerushalmi, the Israelis had claimed that they were unaware of the Liberty’s presence until after 34 men had been killed. Yerushalmi’s report, however, was intended for senior American government officials, many of whom knew full well that the Israelis had identified the Liberty during the morning. So the Yerushalmi report goes to great lengths to explain why Israel attacked a ship that it knew to be American.

According to Yerushalmi, the attack occurred because a senior Israeli officer removed the Liberty’s name and marker from a war room plotting table “in order to keep it uncluttered”—a story which any officer who has ever worked in a military war room will find quite incredible.

Finally, like Ron and Bloch before him, Yerushalmi reports that no one in Israel was negligent and that, in any case, at least equal fault belonged to the Liberty for being within shooting distance in the first place, for “trying to hide its identity,” and, again, for refusing to identify itself when asked.

The Fourth Official Israeli Excuse

After the Yerushalmi report, the Liberty affair almost faded from view until 1980, when Assault on the Liberty was first published. The book, however, moved the Israeli Foreign Office to release a spirited rebuttal which was distributed to newsmen and American supporters of Israel. Whole paragraphs and word-for-word excerpts from the Foreign Office document then reappeared in rebuttals published by AIPAC and the ADL and in letters-to-editors and at least one radio broadcast.

In these accounts, the Israelis claim that reconnaissance airplanes reported by crewmen to have circled the ship repeatedly at masthead level during the morning were actually cargo planes high in the sky carrying troops to the battlefield. The accounts generally ignore the still-secret Yerushalmi report and revert to the earlier claim that no one in Israel was aware of the Liberty’s presence. Several of these accounts claim that the Israeli government asked the United States on June 5 whether any American ships would be operating near the coast but received no reply, and an AIPAC booklet called Myths and Facts goes a step further to assert that Israel received official assurances that no American ships were within 100 miles of the Israeli coast.

Several phrases recur regularly in these accounts, including a charge that Ennes’s conclusions “fly in the face of logic and the military facts,” that Israel would not “risk a dispute” with the United States, whose goodwill is “the cornerstone of Israeli foreign policy.”

The accounts generally assert that Ennes’s version is contradicted by a U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry, when in fact much of Ennes’s most persuasive evidence comes from the Court of Inquiry. Many of the accounts describe Secretary of Defense McNamara quoting from a Court of Inquiry finding that the attack was not intentional, yet the Israeli editors conveniently fail to mention that McNamara’s remark was made while he was under heavy fire from several angry senators who charged clearly that the attack was deliberate and that the truth was being covered up.

Most Israeli accounts have since dropped the silly claim that the ship flew no flag. Instead, they now charge that the ship’s “tiny flag” could not be seen from airplanes “high in the sky,” when in fact the airplanes were close enough that Liberty crewmen could see the pilots.

The Fifth Official Israeli Excuse

From 1979 to 1981, coincidental with publication of Assault on the Liberty and publication in Naval Institute Proceedings of an article on the Liberty by historian Richard K. Smith, Proceedings commenced an in-print discussion of the Liberty affair that continued for almost two years. That period included a major review of Assault on the Liberty, selection of the book by the Naval Institute as a “Notable Naval Book,” and selection of the book for sale through the Naval Institute.

Since the Naval Institute is a semi-official U.S. Navy organization with headquarters on the grounds of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and since the President of the Institute is always the Chief of Naval Operations, the Institute’s interest brought the Liberty to the attention of 1980s Navy leadership.

Thus, when Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Hayward visited Israel in 1982, he mentioned the Liberty to his Israeli counterpart, Rear Admiral Zeev Almog. A few weeks later, Admiral Hayward received from Admiral Almog yet another report on the Liberty affair—this one prepared by the Israeli Defense Force History Department. This report, labeled (again) “the official version of the government of Israel,” was prepared specifically as a rebuttal to the book Assault on the Liberty. Much more detailed than even the Yerushalmi report, the IDF History Department report runs to 55 single-spaced pages. As one would expect, the report reshapes the story to help patch over some of the holes in previous accounts.

For instance, where earlier accounts reported that the torpedo boats left their base at 12:05 on specific orders to investigate the report of shelling at El Arish (and Limor’s story supports this), the new account asserts that the boats were already at sea when they received orders at 12:15—thus they did not have as far to travel and were only 22 miles from Liberty (not 27) when they detected Liberty on radar. The report acknowledges that even detection at 22 miles was “unusual” (we believe it was impossible) but attributes the anomaly to “ghosts” or other unexplained aberrations.

The Yerushalmi report asserts that the Israelis checked and rechecked Liberty’s claimed 30-knot speed before dispatching aircraft, and that the aircraft also looked the ship over carefully before firing, yet managed to fire the first salvo just 19 minutes after initially detecting the ship—assertions which were rejected as unlikely in a State Department study. The new IDF report seeks to remove that conflict, however, by asserting that the aircraft were already airborne and returning from a mission in the Suez area—yet scores of Liberty crewmen saw the aircraft approach from Tel Aviv, which is in the opposite direction.

Unlike the Israeli surrogates, IDF does not assert that they would have used heavy bombers if their intentions had been truly premeditated. No doubt the IDF is aware that Israel had no heavy bombers in 1967.

Unlike Limor, who tells us he watched the Israeli aircraft fire only two rockets into the Liberty, and unlike reports from the Israeli Embassy that the aircraft were armed only with “rockets and guns used in ground-support missions [instead of heavy bombs, which they would have used in a deliberate attack],” and unlike an article in Hebrew published in the Israeli daily Maariv, which describes four aircraft making “several bombing runs each,” the History Department tells us that the aircraft made only four strafing runs [sic] and two napalm runs, and that they fired only guns because they had no rockets or other ordnance.

But the one thread that runs consistently through all the Israeli versions is that no one in Israel was at fault and that a large measure of responsibility for what happened must lie with the Liberty itself. Said the report, “Liberty’s behavior helped create the impression that she was indeed an enemy craft.”

General Rabin Checks In

Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Army Chief of Staff during the Liberty attack, has published yet another startling account in his memoirs. According to Rabin, it was he who personally gave the order to investigate the supposed shelling of El Arish. (Official Israeli accounts give credit for that faux pas to Navy officers while American Central Intelligence Agency reports say the attack on the Liberty itself was directed by General Moshe Dayan.) And while all other reports tell us that the boats called in the aircraft, Rabin tells us that the aircraft called in the torpedo boats.

Like most accounts intended for public consumption, Rabin ignores Israeli reports which admit that the Liberty was identified as an American ship during the morning. When Rabin’s Liberty recollections were published, however, that part of the story had not yet leaked to the public. Apparently Rabin felt obliged to continue the masquerade.

According to Rabin, four Israeli airplanes flew over the Liberty at low level looking for a flag or other identification. The pilots could see no flag or markings and concluded that the ship was Egyptian. Only then, says Rabin in a masterpiece of understatement, “Our air force and navy zeroed in on the vessel and damaged it. They notified the Navy of their attack, and one of our ships fired off a torpedo, leaving the vessel heavily damaged.”

Yet, in a most remarkable muddling of history, Yitzhak Rabin, who claims to have personally made some of the key decisions leading up to the attack, tells his readers that the Liberty attack occurred on June 7 during a critical period when his attention was fully focused on the Israeli assault on the Old City of Jerusalem. While calling the Liberty attack “the most alarming development” in the six-day war, Rabin has not only turned the story upside down but has placed it a day early.

Finally, in a predictable pattern which attempts to shift blame away from Israel, Rabin tells us that on June 5 Israel had asked the United States to remove all ships from Israeli coastal waters. Because the United States failed to do that, says Rabin, “we refused to bear the cost of repair of the vessel, since we did not consider ourselves responsible for the train of errors. Regrettably, the Americans remained somewhat resentful….”

The Israeli President Speaks …

Israeli President Chaim Herzog, in his book The Arab-Israeli Wars, has contributed yet another version for the historical record. According to Herzog, El Arish did receive an “artillery bombardment” from the sea—not just the “erroneous reports” claimed by other apologists. Unlike others, Herzog does not even pretend that the aircraft examined the ship closely before attacking. Investigating aircraft spotted the Liberty, Herzog writes, and “without further ado the Israeli aircraft attacked this strange naval vessel, which had not been identified as friendly, killing 34 members of her crew.” He avoids any mention of the torpedo attack, which caused most of the deaths, or of the fact, admitted privately to the American government, that the ship was identified as American during the morning—but was attacked anyway.

Like Rabin and all his countrymen known to have written on this subject, Herzog rejects the notion of any Israeli responsibility for what happened. Says Herzog, “The blame would appear to have been primarily that of the United States authorities, who saw fit to position an intelligence-gathering ship off the coast of a friendly nation in time of war without giving any warning whatsoever and without advising of the position of their ship.”

The Atlantic Monthly Version

In September 1984, The Atlantic Monthly brought Americans the first comprehensive treatment of the Liberty story ever published in any large-circulation American periodical. Unfortunately, the 10,000-word article was written by two Israeli journalists, and, except for some background information, all the details came from Israel.

Although none of the sources is available to others, the authors claim to have had broad access to Israeli military logs and personnel. Thus it appears that the writers had some official support, as otherwise their story could not have gotten past the notorious Israeli censors.

The story they tell, like all the Israeli versions before them, is one of an understandable wartime error largely brought on by Liberty’s own poor judgment. And like all the earlier stories from Israel, this one conflicts not only with the U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry and the sworn statements of Liberty survivors, it also conflicts in some key details with earlier official Israeli accounts.

For instance, the IDF History Department report makes a special effort to minimize the severity of the attack, asserting forcefully and repeatedly that the Liberty was strafed “only” four times by Mirages, received one napalm hit by a Mystere and one torpedo hit. Atlantic, on the other hand, tells us that each of the Mirages strafed the ship four times in the first six minutes of the attack alone.

Until now, Israeli reports written for publication (as apart from those usually-secret reports intended exclusively for top American officials) have consistently denied that the ship was identified as American until the moment the shooting stopped. Atlantic, for the first time, tells the American public that the ship was identified as American after all and was so marked on a chart in the Israeli war room. Like the heretofore secret versions, Atlantic tells presumably gullible Americans that the crack Israeli military force, after identifying the Liberty as American, attacked the ship because a pin was removed from a chart, and everyone in the war room forgot about the American ship being there.

Atlantic’s conclusion: “To this day, the wounds have not healed. The issue resurfaces periodically, and with it the pain.”

No wonder.