By John Crewdson
Tribune senior correspondent
October 2, 2007
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 .
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the
attack on the Liberty "a tragic and terrible accident, a case of
mistaken identity, for which Israel has officially apologized."
Israel also paid reparations of $6.7 million to
the injured survivors and the families of those killed in the attack,
and another $6 million for the loss of the Liberty itself.
But
for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis'
apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.
One
is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Washington's
Farragut Square park on "a beautiful June afternoon" when
she was a 22-year-old secretary for a law firm.
Blue heard
somebody's portable radio saying a U.S. Navy ship had been torpedoed
in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue's husband of
two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been hurriedly
dispatched overseas.
As she listened to the news report, "it
just all came together." Soon afterward, the NSA confirmed that
Allen Blue was among the missing.
"I never felt young
again," she said.
Aircraft on the horizon
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.
After Bryce Lockwood left the Marines, he worked
construction, then tried selling insurance. "I'd get a job and
get fired," he said. "I had a hell of a time getting my
feet on the ground."
With his linguistic background,
Lockwood could have had a career with the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI.
But he was too angry at the U.S. government to work for it. "Don't
talk to me about government!" he shouts.
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.
The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that
information had simply gotten lost, never passed along to the ground
controllers who directed the air attack nor to the crews of the three
Israeli torpedo boats who picked up where the air force left off,
strafing the Liberty's decks with their machine guns and launching a
torpedo that blew a 39-foot hole in its starboard side.
To
a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel's
explanation.
Nor, the 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.
J.Q. "Tony" Hart, then a
chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco
that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet,
remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis,
commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the jets
home.
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."
McNamara, who is now 91,
told the Tribune he has "absolutely no recollection of what I
did that day," except that "I have a memory that I didn't
know at the time what was going on."
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."
The answer, if
there is one, will probably never be known. Gen. Moshe Dayan, then
the country's minister of defense; Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime
minister; and Golda Meir, his successor, are all dead.
Many of
those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have suggested
that the Israelis feared the ship might intercept communications
revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S. opposed. But no
one has ever produced any solid evidence to support that theory, and
the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA's deputy director, Louis Tordella,
speculated in a recently declassified memo that the attack "might
have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who
wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his
activities."
Was the U.S. flag visible?
Though the
attack on the Liberty has faded from public memory, Michael Oren, a
historian and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem,
conceded that "the case of the assault on the Liberty has never
been closed."
If anything, Oren said, "the
accusations leveled against Israel have grown sharper with time."
Oren said in an interview that he believed a formal investigation by
the U.S., even 40 years later, would be useful if only because it
would finally establish Israel's innocence.
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?
The
survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the Liberty
was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the attack,
except for a brief period in which one flag that had been shot down
was replaced with another, larger flag -- the ship's "holiday
colors" -- that measured 13 feet long.
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 Israeli court
of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved the Israeli
military of criminal culpability, came to precisely the opposite
conclusion.
"Throughout the
contact," it declared, "no American or any other flag
appeared on the ship."
The attack, the court said,
had been prompted by a report, which later proved erroneous, that a
ship was shelling Israeli-held positions in the Sinai Peninsula. The
Liberty had no guns capable of shelling the shore, but the court
concluded that the U.S. ship had been mistakenly identified as the
source of the shelling.
Yiftah Spector, the first Israeli
pilot to attack the ship, told the Jerusalem Post in 2003 that when
he first spotted the Liberty, "I circled it twice and it did not
fire on me. My assumption was that it was likely to open fire at me
and nevertheless I slowed down and I looked and there was positively
no flag."
But the Liberty crewmen interviewed by the
Tribune said the Israeli jets simply appeared and began shooting.
They also said the Liberty did not open fire on the planes because it
was armed only with four .50-caliber machine guns intended to repel
boarders.
"I can't identify it, but in any case it's a
military ship," Spector radioed his ground controller, according
to a transcript of the Israeli air-to-ground communications published
by the Jerusalem Post in 2004.
That transcript, made by a Post
reporter who was allowed to listen to what the Israeli Air Force said
were tapes of the attacking pilots' communications, contained only
two references to "American" or "Americans," one
at the beginning and the other at the end of the attack.
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.
Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk
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.'"
Gotcher and
Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not
at all like what they remember reading.
"There is simply
no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw,"
Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with
air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way
pilots and controllers communicate."
Block, now a child
protection caseworker in Florida, 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.
'But
sir, it's an American ship!'
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.
Many ears were tuned to the battles
being fought in and around the Sinai during the Six-Day War,
including those belonging to other Arab nations with a keen interest
in the outcome.
"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 thought history would change its course,"
the CIA officer recalled. "Israel attacking the U.S. 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!'"
Porter, who asked that his recollections not be
made public while he was alive because they involved classified
information, also discussed the transcripts during a lunch in 2000 at
the Cosmos Club in Washington with another retired American diplomat,
Andrew Kilgore, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar.
Kilgore
recalled Porter saying that he "saw the telex, read it, and
passed it right back" to the embassy official who had shown it
to him. He quoted Porter as recalling that the transcript showed
"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."
According to a
memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms, President Johnson's
personal anger was manifest when he discovered the story of the
Liberty attack on an inside page of the next day's New York Times.
Johnson barked that "it should have been on the front
page!"
Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the
cables in his recent book "1967," said other cables showed
that Harman's source for the second cable was Arthur Goldberg, then
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The cables, which have
been declassified by the Israelis, were obtained from the Israeli
State Archive and translated from Hebrew by the Tribune.
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."
Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the
transcripts were "something that's bothered me all my life. I'm
willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."
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 said 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.
Indeed,
the declassified documents state that no recordings of the "actual
attack" exist, raising questions about the source of the
transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher, Block, Porter, Lang and
Kirby.
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."
Prostinak acknowledged that his Hebrew was not
good enough to understand every word being said, but that after the
mention of the American flag "the attack did continue. We copied
[recorded] it until we got completely out of range. We got a great
deal of it."
Charles Tiffany, the plane's navigator,
remembers hearing Prostinak on the plane's intercom system, shouting,
"I got something crazy on UHF," the radio frequency band
used by the Israeli Air Force.
"I'll never forget it to
this day," said Tiffany, now a retired Florida lawyer. He also
remembers hearing the plane's pilot ordering the NSA linguists to
"start taping everything."
Prostinak said he and the
others aboard the plane had been unaware of the Liberty's presence
15,000 feet below, but had concluded that the Israelis' target must
be an American ship. "We knew that something was being
attacked," Prostinak said.
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.
As soon as the
EC-121 landed at its base in Athens, Prostinak said, all the tapes
were rushed to an NSA facility at the Athens airport where Hebrew
translators were standing by.
"We told them what we had,
and they immediately took the tapes and went to work," recalled
Prostinak, who after leaving the Navy became chief of police and then
town administrator for the village of Lake Waccamaw, N.C.
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.
"Everyone
was kind of stunned that it was handled so quickly and without much
hullabaloo," said G. Patrick March, then a member of McCain's
staff in London.
Largely because of time constraints, Boston
said, the investigators were unable to question many of the
survivors, or to visit Israel and interview any Israelis involved in
the attack.
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.
One such finding ignored the testimony
of several inquiry witnesses that the American flag was flying during
the attack, and held that the "available evidence combines to
indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8 June was in fact a case of
mistaken identity."
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."
"Someday the truth of this will
come out," said Dennis Eikleberry, a NSA technician aboard the
Liberty. "Someday it will, but we'll all be gone."
James
Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just before the attack
began, and later spent two months in a body cast, is one of the more
vocal survivors. Like the others, Ennes is tired of waiting.
"We
want both sides to stop lying," he said.
- - -
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
Sources: National Security Agency documents, Tribune
reporting
Chicago Tribune
----------
jcrewdson@tribune.com
Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune