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USS Liberty – Feds Still Silent On Israel Attack Against US Warship

Monday, June 11, 2012 20:08

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Although 45 years have passed since Israel attacked a US Navy ship in international waters, the US government still maintains silence on the incident.

US military veterans and intelligence officers are calling on the US government to end the 46 year cover up of the deliberate attack on USS Liberty by Israel.

As Press TV reports:

Press TV – June 8 marks the day when Israel’s air and naval forces attacked the US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty killing 34 crew members and wounding 174 others.

At that time, USS Liberty was the most advanced spy ship in the US navy and was totally destroyed in the powerful attack by Israeli forces.

Although Israeli surveillance recognized the vessel as an American ship many hours before the attack, Israeli officials lied afterwards by claiming that the attack was just an accident.

US media have been banned during the past 46 years from saying anything about the incident.

The attack came on June 8, 1967, when Israel was engaged with Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies in its third war with Arab countries.

Washington was concerned that Israel might carry out an attack against Soviet Union’s close ally, Syria and thus bring about a confrontation between the two superpowers.

Washington dispatched USS Liberty, which could monitor all kinds of communication to a radius of 500 miles, to make sure about Israel’s intent to engage with Syria.

Knowing about the ship’s mission, the then Israeli Minister of War Moshe Dayan ordered Israeli forces to target the American vessel.

“After surveilling USS Liberty for more than nine hours with almost hourly aircraft overflights and radar tracking, the air and naval forces of Israel attacked our ship in international waters without warning,” an unnamed former crew member said.

“The Israeli forces attacked without warning and without attempting to contact us. Thirty four Americans were killed in the attack and another 174 were wounded. The ship, a $40-million dollar state-of-the-art signals intelligence platform, was later declared unsalvageable and sold for scrap,” the crew member added.

Despite a near-universal consensus that the Israeli attack was conducted with the full knowledge that USS Liberty was a US Navy ship, the Johnson administration began an immediate cover-up of this fact.

Though administration officers continued individually to characterize the attack as deliberate, the Johnson administration never sought the prosecution of the guilty parties or otherwise attempted to seek justice for the victims.

“Americans who volunteer for military service effectively write a blank check, payable to the United States of America for an amount ‘up to and including my life’. The United States, in turn, promises … to protect them and to seek retribution against anyone who harms them. In the case of USS Liberty, the United States has failed to keep its end of the bargain,” the former crew member concluded.

U.S. military veterans who were on-board the USS liberty during the attack say there is no way Israel didn’t know they were attacking Americans and Israel purposely attacked by the ship in part of a plot to frame their enemies to drag the the US into war on the side of the Israelis

Those allegation are confirmed by many intelligence analysts from the NSA, CIA and the Air Force who listened to Israel communications while the attack occurred or read transcripts immediately afterward.

The claims are further corroborated by many other top government officials that the US has known the entire time and has continued to the cover it up.

These allegations are also corroborated by recently declassified documents.

Here are some quotes taken from a Chicago Tribune article on the attack as well as a discussion on some of these documents.

Steve Forslund, Air Force Intelligence Analyst who was working at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha during the attack:

“The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it,” Forslund recalled. “The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.

“The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors.”

Forslund said he clearly recalled “the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely.”

“He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots’ responses that it didn’t sink.”

Forsland, now retired after 26 years in the military, says everybody saw the transcripts corroborating his account of the attack. Other analysts working all over the world independently verify his claims.

James Gotcher, was working for the NSA in Vietnam.

“It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty,” Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. “Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to ‘complete the job’ and get out of there.”

Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of 100 analysts and cryptologists in the Mediterranean island of Crete speaks of the communications his wing intercepted.

“There were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack,” Block said. “The pilots said, ‘This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?’

“And [Israeli] ground control came back and said, ‘Yes, follow orders.’”

“Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as American and asked for further instructions from ground control.”

Retired CIA officer, speaking on condition that he not be named discussing a clandestine informant.

I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day. [...] He was certain, listening in to the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was deliberate.”

Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon:

Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting, “But sir, it’s an American ship — I can see the flag!’ To which the ground control responded, ‘Never mind; hit it!’” [...]

American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, quotes Porter as saying:

“Israel was attacking, and they know it’s an American ship.”

Haviland Smith, a CIA officer who was stationed in Beirut although he never saw the transcript, he had

“heard on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me about what that transcript contained.”

Diplomatic cables sent exchanged between the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, and Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv

Cable sent, 5 days after the attack:

A source the Israelis code-named “Hamlet” was reported that the Americans had “clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway.”

Cable sent, 8 days after the attack

The White House was “very angry, the reason for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American.”

Oliver Kirby, the NSA’s deputy director for operations when asked if he personally read the [NSA] transcripts [of the intercepted Israeli communications]:

“I sure did. I certainly did. They said, ‘We’ve got him in the zero,’” Kirby recalled, “whatever that meant — I guess the sights or something. And then one of them said, ‘Can you see the flag?’ They said ‘Yes, it’s U.S, it’s U.S.’ They said it several times, so there wasn’t any doubt in anybody’s mind that they knew it.”

W. Patrick Lang, retired Army colonel who spent eight years as chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency:

“The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag,” Lang recalled in an e-mail.

“The flight commander was reluctant,” Lang said in a subsequent interview. “That was very clear. He didn’t want to do this. He asked them a couple of times, ‘Do you really want me to do this?’ I’ve remembered it ever since. It was very striking.”

The NSA has declassified 3 tapes and published them on the internet along with other documents at http://www.nsa.gov/liberty .

However, several of the tapes including those that contained the actual attacks are missing.

The Tribune quotes several officers independently corroborating more recordings were made and are simply missing.

Kirby, the NSA Deputy Director who was quoted discussing the transcripts above confirms the NSA intercepted adn recorded the actual attack.

Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired senior NSA official, replied, “We sure did.”

Michael Prostinak a Hebrew linguist was aboard a Navy ship and recorded 2 of the 3 recordings released by the NSA.

Prostinak says there are more recordings than those released by the NSA.

“I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the Internet,” he said. “No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes.”

At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured Israeli communications “in which people were not just tranquil or taking care of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked,” Prostinak said. “Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know, it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of the American flag was made.”

[...]

After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA, Prostinak said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.

One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prostinak said there was a preceding tape, A1104/A-01.

That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak said a second tape, which preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard the same plane, also appeared to be missing.

Another linguist speaking on a condition of anonymity to the Tribune says he believes there are five or six tapes.

The NSA would not respond to the assertion that the NSA had more tapes of the incident.

How The Israel Attempted False Flag Attack On The USS Liberty Unfolded

From the Chicago Tribune:

New revelations in attack on American spy ship

Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story of deadly ’67 incident

Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone.

“I’m angry! I’m seething with anger! Forty years, and I’m seething with anger!”

Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War.

For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots who had confused the U.S. Navy‘s most distinctive ship with an Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a dissimilar profile. And they’re also incredulous that, for years, their own government would reject their calls for a thorough investigation.

“They tried to lie their way out of it!” Lockwood shouts. “I don’t believe that for a minute! You just don’t shoot at a ship at sea without identifying it, making sure of your target!”

Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping.

Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency‘s position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots — communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.

The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel’s reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.

In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country’s chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had “become the center of considerable controversy and debate.” It was not the agency’s intention, it said, “to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material,” available at http://www.nsa.gov/liberty .

[...]

Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared on the horizon and circled the Liberty.

The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first day of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. America was Israel’s ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there. The ship’s mission was to monitor the communications of Israel’s Arab enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications. The Liberty felt safe.

Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore Arfsten, a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw the blue Star of David on the planes’ fuselages. At first, crew members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their ship.

[...]

Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian casualty. An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel, which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.

For most of those who survived the attack, the Six-Day War has become the defining moment of their lives.

Some mustered out of the Navy as soon as their enlistments were up. Others stayed in long enough to retire. Several went on to successful business careers. One became a Secret Service agent, another a Baltimore policeman.

Several are being treated with therapy and drugs for what has since been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. One has undergone more than 30 major operations. Another suffers seizures caused by a piece of shrapnel still lodged in his brain.

[...]

U.S. Navy jets were called back

An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio transmission, was “an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy,” a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.

[...] survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga, patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have arrived in time to prevent the torpedo attack — and save 26 American lives.

[...]

When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that “President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.”

[...]

The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel’s claim that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis’ explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed.

Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson’s intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was “inconceivable” that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

The attack “couldn’t be anything else but deliberate,” the NSA’s director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.

“I don’t think you’ll find many people at NSA who believe it was accidental,” Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an interview.

“I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were doing,” said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.

“So for me, the question really is who issued the order to do that and why? That’s the really interesting thing.”

[...]

Questions about what happened to the Liberty have been kept alive by survivors’ groups and their Web sites, a half-dozen books, magazine articles and television documentaries, scholarly papers published in academic journals, and Internet chat groups where amateur sleuths debate arcane points of photo interpretation and torpedo running depth

Meantime, the Liberty’s survivors and their supporters, including a distinguished constellation of retired admirals and generals, have persisted in asking Congress for a full-scale formal investigation.

“We deserve to have the truth,” Pat Blue said.

[...]

For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag at the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?

Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: “Every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag — and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and identification.”

[...]

The first reference occurred at 1:54 p.m. local time, two minutes before the Israeli jets began their first strafing run.

In the Post transcript, a weapons system officer on the ground suddenly blurted out, “What is this? Americans?”

“Where are Americans?” replied one of the air controllers.

The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.

Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis’ French-built Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel belonged.

“Apparently American,” the chief controller replied.

Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted compartments below the ship’s waterline.

[...]

The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.

“The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it,” Forslund recalled. “The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.

“The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors.”

Forslund said he clearly recalled “the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely.”

“He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots’ responses that it didn’t sink.”

Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read the transcripts. “Everybody saw these,” said Forslund, now retired after 26 years in the military.

Forslund’s recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots’ communications.

[...]

One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then serving with the Air Force Security Service’s 6924th Security Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.

“It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty,” Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. “Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to ‘complete the job’ and get out of there.”

Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern communications.

The transcripts Block remembered seeing “were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack,” Block said. “The pilots said, ‘This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?’

“And ground control came back and said, ‘Yes, follow orders.’”

[...]

Block [...] observed that “the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as American and asked for further instructions from ground control appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article.”

Arieh O’Sullivan, the Post reporter who made the newspaper’s transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes he listened to contained blank spaces. He said he assumed those blank spaces occurred while Israeli pilots were conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to communicate.

[...]

Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to have read transcripts of the attack that they said left no doubt the Israelis knew they were attempting to sink a U.S. Navy ship. [...] “I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day,” said a retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition that he not be named discussing a clandestine informant. [...] He was certain, listening in to the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was deliberate.”

[...]

The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their controllers.

A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting, “But sir, it’s an American ship — I can see the flag!’ To which the ground control responded, ‘Never mind; hit it!’” [...] “Israel was attacking, and they know it’s an American ship.”

[...]

Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the Six-Day War, said that although he never saw the transcript, he had “heard on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me about what that transcript contained.”

He had later been told, Smith recalled, “that ultimately all of the transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that they were deep-sixed because the administration did not wish to embarrass the Israelis.”

[...]

Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such transcripts existed comes from the Israelis themselves, in a pair of diplomatic cables sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.

Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that a source the Israelis code-named “Hamlet” was reporting that the Americans had “clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway.”

Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban, who is now dead, that the White House was “very angry,” and that “the reason for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American.”

[...]

Oliver Kirby, the NSA’s deputy director for operations at the time of the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.

Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied, “I sure did. I certainly did.”

“They said, ‘We’ve got him in the zero,’” Kirby recalled, “whatever that meant — I guess the sights or something. And then one of them said, ‘Can you see the flag?’ They said ‘Yes, it’s U.S, it’s U.S.’ They said it several times, so there wasn’t any doubt in anybody’s mind that they knew it.”

[...]

One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives of the U.S. Army’s intelligence school, then located at Ft. Holabird in Maryland.

W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight years as chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the transcripts were used as “course material” in an advanced class for intelligence officers on the clandestine interception of voice transmissions.

“The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag,” Lang recalled in an e-mail.

“The flight commander was reluctant,” Lang said in a subsequent interview. “That was very clear. He didn’t want to do this. He asked them a couple of times, ‘Do you really want me to do this?’ I’ve remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I’ve been harboring this memory for all these years.”

[...]

Key NSA tapes missing

Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired senior NSA official, replied, “We sure did.”

On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of Israeli communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of the recordings is of the attack itself.

The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as “the aftermath” of the attack — Israeli communications with two Israeli helicopters dispatched to rescue any survivors who may have jumped into the water.

Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prostinak, a Hebrew linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering propeller-driven aircraft specially equipped to gather electronic intelligence.

But Prostinak said he was certain that more than three recordings were made that day.

“I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the Internet,” he said. “No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes.”

At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured Israeli communications “in which people were not just tranquil or taking care of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked,” Prostinak said. “Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know, it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of the American flag was made.”

[...]

After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA, Prostinak said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.

One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prostinak said there was a preceding tape, A1104/A-01.

That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak said a second tape, which preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard the same plane, also appeared to be missing.

Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said he believed there had been as many as “five or six” tapes recording the attack on the Liberty or its aftermath.

Andrea Martino, the NSA’s senior media adviser, did not respond to a question about the apparent conflict between the agency’s assertion that there were no recordings of the Israeli attack and the recollections of those interviewed for this article.

[...]

U.S. inquiry widely criticized

Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel had been attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested in asking as few questions as possible and answering them in record time.

Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock in Malta, the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm. John McCain Jr., the commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe and father of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chose Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.

The court’s charge was narrow: to determine whether any shortcomings on the part of the Liberty’s crew had contributed to the injuries and deaths that resulted from the attack. McCain gave Kidd’s investigators a week to complete the job.

“That was a shock,” recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, the inquiry’s counsel, who said he and Kidd had estimated that a thorough inquiry would take six months.

[...]

Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy’s former judge advocate general, was asked to assess the American inquiry’s report before it was sent to Washington. But Staring said it was taken from him when he began to question some aspects of the report. He describes it now as “a hasty, superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry.”

Staring, who is among those calling for a full congressional investigation on behalf of the Liberty’s survivors, observed in an interview that the inquiry report contained several “findings of fact” unsupported by testimony or evidence.

[...]

There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry’s report. It does not include, for example, the testimony of a young lieutenant, Lloyd Painter, who was serving as officer of the deck when the attack began. Painter said he testified that an Israeli torpedo boat “methodically machine-gunned one of our life rafts” that had been put over the side by crewmen preparing to abandon ship.

Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after leaving the Navy, charged that his testimony about the life rafts was purposely omitted.

Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain’s one-week deadline expired, Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry “and flew back to Washington, and I went back to Naples,” the headquarters of the 6th Fleet.

“Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from his office,” Boston recalled in an interview. “In that deep voice, he said, ‘Ward, they aren’t interested in the facts. It’s a political issue and we have to put a lid on it. We’ve been ordered to shut up.’

“It’s time for the truth to come out,” declared Boston, who is now 84. “There have been so many cover-ups.”

[...]

How the attack unfolded

National Security Agency documents recount the hours leading up to, during and after the attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli forces that killed 34.

EVENTS OF JUNE 8, 1967

6 a.m. An Israeli reconnaissance plane spots an unidentified ship 70 miles west of Tel Aviv.

9 a.m. A second Israeli reconnaissance plane spots an unidentified ship 20 miles north of El-Arish. Liberty’s position is plotted on a map in green, designating a “neutral ship.”

10:55 a.m. A naval liaison officer at Israeli Air Force headquarters informs Israeli Naval Headquarters that the previously unidentified ship is an “audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy” named Liberty.

11 a.m. The acting chief of Israeli naval operations orders removal of Liberty from a plot table because he is no longer certain of its position.

11:30 a.m. The Israeli Navy receives an erroneous report that El-Arish is being shelled from the sea.

12:05 p.m. Three motor torpedo boats (MTBs) are ordered to proceed toward El-Arish.

THE ATTACK ON THE LIBERTY

1:56 p.m. Two Israeli Mirage III aircraft, followed by two Super Mystere aircraft, begin their attack on the Liberty.

2:14 p.m. The chief Israeli air controller in Tel Aviv tells the controller who is directing the attack on the Liberty that the ship is “apparently American.”

2:20 p.m. The Israeli naval commander orders the commander of the Torpedo Boat Division to attack the Liberty. At almost the same time, the Naval Operations Branch orders: “Do not attack. It is possible that the aircraft have not identified correctly.” The commander of the Torpedo Boat Division says he never got any order to cease the attack, although the deputy commander says he passed the message to the commander.

2:24 p.m. Liberty sights three MTBs 4-5 miles away and closing fast.

2:26 p.m. Liberty raises its largest American flag, the “Holiday colors.”

2:27 p.m. Three torpedo boats begin strafing the Liberty and launch their six torpedoes.

2:28 p.m. Five torpedoes miss the ship, but one strikes the Liberty’s right side, leaving a 39-foot hole.

THE AFTERMATH

2:29 p.m. Starting time for an NSA tape of Israeli communications after the attack. A previous tape, which presumably would have captured the air and torpedo attacks, is missing.

3:07 p.m. Israeli helicopters sent to rescue Liberty crewman from the sea arrive and “orbit” the heavily damaged vessel.

3:12 p.m. The helicopters’ communications with the ground are intercepted by an American aircraft circling high above the scene. One helicopter pilot reports that he sees an American flag flying from the Liberty’s mast.

3:16 p.m. An Israeli ground controller orders the helicopters to return to El Arish

Source: Chicago Tribune

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