Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (33 page)

As they
headed back, an Air Force C-130 flying listening post was heading out to
relieve them.

Down
below, in the Mediterranean, the
Liberty
continued its slow journey
toward the war zone as the crew engaged in constant general quarters drills and
listened carefully for indications of danger. The Navy sent out a warning
notice to all ships and aircraft in the area to keep at least 100 nautical
miles away from the coasts of Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Egypt. But the
Liberty
was on an espionage mission; unless specifically ordered to change course,
Commander McGonagle would continue steaming full speed ahead. Meanwhile, the
Soviet navy had mobilized their fleet. Some twenty Soviet warships with
supporting vessels and an estimated eight or nine submarines sailed toward the
same flashpoint.

On hearing
that war had started, Gene Sheck, an official in NSA's K Group section, which
was responsible for managing the various mobile collection platforms, became
increasingly worried about the
Liberty.
Responsibility for the safety of
the ship, however, had been taken out of NSA's hands by the JCS and given to
the Joint Reconnaissance Center. Nevertheless, Sheck took it upon himself to
remind NSA's representative at the JRC, John Connell, that during the Cuban
missile crisis five years earlier, the
Oxford
had been pulled back from
the Havana area. Then he asked if any consideration was being given to doing
the same for the
Liberty.
Connell spoke to the ship movement officer at
the JRC but they refused to take any action.

Although
analysts in K Group knew of the
Liberty's
plight, those in G Group did
not. Thus it was not until the morning of June 7 that an analyst rushed into
Frank Raven's office and asked incredulously, "For God's sake, do you know
where the
Liberty
is?" Raven, believing she was sitting off the
east end of Crete as originally planned, had barely begun to answer when the
analyst blurted out, "They've got her heading straight for the
beach!" By then the
Liberty
was only about ten hours from her
scheduled patrol area, a dozen miles off Egypt's Sinai Desert.

"At
this point," recalled Raven, "I ordered a major complaint [protest]
to get the
Liberty
the hell out of there! As far as we [NSA] were concerned,
there was nothing to be gained by having her in there that close, nothing she
could do in there that she couldn't do where we wanted her. . . . She could do
everything that the national requirement called for [from the coast of Crete].
Somebody wanted to listen to some close tactical program or some communications
or something which nobody in the world gave a damn about—local military base,
local commander. We were listening for the higher echelons. . . . Hell, you
don't want to hear them move the tugboats around and such, you want to know
what the commanding generals are saying."

The JRC
began reevaluating the
Liberty's
safety as the warnings mounted. The
Egyptians began sending out ominous protests complaining that U.S. personnel
were secretly communicating with Israel and were possibly providing military
assistance. Egypt also charged that U.S. aircraft had participated in the
Israeli air strikes. The charges greatly worried American officials, who feared
that the announcements might provoke a Soviet reaction. Then the Chief of Naval
Operations questioned the wisdom of the
Liberty
assignment.

As a result of these new concerns, the JRC sent out a message
indicating that the
Liberty's
operational area off the Sinai was not set
in stone but was "for guidance only." Also, it pulled the ship back
from 12½ to 20 nautical miles from the coast. By now it was about 6:30 P.M. in
Washington, half past midnight on the morning of June 8 in Egypt. The
Liberty
had already entered the outskirts of its operational area and the message
never reached her because of an error by the U.S. Army Communications Center at
the Pentagon.

About an
hour later, with fears mounting, the JRC again changed the order, now requiring
that
Liberty
approach no closer than 100 miles to the coasts of Egypt
and Israel. Knowing the ship was getting dangerously close, Major Breedlove in
the JRC skipped the normal slow message system and called Navy officials in
Europe over a secure telephone to tell them of the change. He said a confirming
message would follow. Within ten minutes the Navy lieutenant in Europe had a
warning message ready.

But rather
than issue the warning, a Navy captain in Europe insisted on waiting until he
received the confirmation message. That and a series of Keystone Kops foul-ups
by both the Navy and Army—which again misrouted the message, this time to
Hawaii
—delayed
sending the critical message for an incredible sixteen and a half hours. By
then it was far too late. More than twenty years had gone by since the foul-up
of warning messages at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, yet it was as if
no lesson had ever been learned.

At 5:14
A.M. on Thursday, June 8, the first rays of sun spilled softly over the Sinai's
blond waves of sand. A little more than a dozen miles north, in the choppy
eastern Mediterranean, the
Liberty
continued eastward like a lost
innocent, 600 miles from the nearest help and oblivious to at least five
warning messages it never received. The "Plan of the Day" distributed
throughout the ship that morning gave no hint of what was in store.
"Uniform of the Day" for officers was "tropical wash khaki"
and, for enlisted men, "clean dungarees." The soda fountain, crewmembers
were informed, would be open from 6:00 P.M. until 7:30 P.M.

Just after
sunup, Duty Officer John Scott noticed a flying boxcar making several circles
near the ship and then departing in the direction of Tel Aviv. Down in the NSA
spaces, Chief Melvin Smith apparently also picked up signals from the plane,
later identified as Israeli. Shortly after the plane departed, he called up
Scott and asked if he had had a close air contact recently. Scott told him he
had, and Smith asked which direction it had gone in. "Tel Aviv," said
Scott. "Fine, that's all I want to know," replied Smith. Scott
glanced up at the American flag, ruffling in a twelve-knot breeze, to check the
wind direction, and then scanned the vast desert a little more than a dozen
miles away. "Fabulous morning," he said without dropping the stubby
binoculars from his eyes.

But the
calmness was like quicksand—deceptive, inviting, and friendly, until too late.
As the
Liberty
passed the desert town of El Arish, it was closely
watched. About half a mile away and 4,000 feet above was an Israeli
reconnaissance aircraft. At 6:03 A.M. the naval observer on the plane reported
back to Israeli naval headquarters. "What we could see was the letters
written on that ship," he said. "And we gave these letters to the
ground control." The letters were "GTR-5," the
Liberty's
identification.
"GTR" stood for "General Technical Research"—a cover
designation for NSA's fleet of spy ships.

Having
passed El Arish, the
Liberty
continued on toward the Gaza Strip. Then,
about 8:30 A.M., it made a strange, nearly 180-degree turn back in the
direction of El Arish and slowed down to just five knots. The reason for this
maneuver was that the ship had at last reached Point Alpha, the point on the
map where it was to begin its back-and-forth dogleg patrol of the Sinai coast.

For some
time, Commander McGonagle had been worried about the ship's proximity to the
shore and about the potential for danger. He called to his cabin Lieutenant
Commander David E. Lewis, head of the NSA operation on the ship. "How
would it affect our mission if we stayed farther out at sea?" McGonagle
asked. "It would hurt us, Captain," Lewis replied. "We want to
work in the UHF [ultra-high-frequency] range. That's mostly line-of-sight
stuff. If we're over the horizon we might as well be back in Abidjan. It would
degrade our mission by about eighty percent." After thinking for a few
minutes, McGonagle made his decision. "Okay," he said. "We'll go
all the way in."

The
reconnaissance was repeated at approximately thirty-minute intervals throughout
the morning. At one point, a boxy Israeli air force Noratlas NORD 2501 circled
the ship around the starboard side, proceeded forward of the ship, and headed
back toward the Sinai. "It had a big Star of David on it and it was flying
just a little bit above our mast on the ship," recalled crewmember Larry
Weaver. "We really thought his wing was actually going to clip one of our
masts. . . . And I was actually able to wave to the co-pilot, a fellow on the
right-hand side of the plane. He waved back, and actually smiled at me. I could
see him that well. I didn't think anything of that because they were our
allies. There's no question about it. They had seen the ship's markings and the
American flag. They could damn near see my rank. The under way flag was
definitely flying. Especially when you're that close to a war zone."

By 9:30
A.M. the minaret at El Arish could be seen with the naked eye, like a solitary
mast in a sea of sand. Visibility in the crystal clear air was twenty-five
miles or better. Through a pair of binoculars, individual buildings were
clearly visible a brief thirteen miles away. Commander McGonagle thought the
tower "quite conspicuous" and used it as a navigational aid to
determine the ship's position throughout the morning and afternoon. The minaret
was also identifiable by radar.

Although
no one on the ship knew it at the time, the
Liberty
had suddenly
trespassed into a private horror. At that very moment, near the minaret at El
Arish, Israeli forces were engaged in a criminal slaughter.

From the
first minutes of its surprise attack, the Israeli air force had owned the skies
over the Middle East. Within the first few hours, Israeli jets pounded
twenty-five Arab air bases ranging from Damascus in Syria to an Egyptian field,
loaded with bombers, far up the Nile at Luxor. Then, using machine guns, mortar
fire, tanks, and air power, the Israeli war machine overtook the Jordanian
section of Jerusalem as well as the west bank of the Jordan River, and torpedo
boats captured the key Red Sea cape of Sharm al-Sheikh.

In the
Sinai, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers pushed toward the Suez
Canal along all three of the roads that crossed the desert, turning the burning
sands into a massive killing field. One Israeli general estimated that Egyptian
casualties there ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 killed, compared with 275 of his
own troops. Few were spared as the Israelis pushed forward.

A convoy
of Indian peacekeeper soldiers, flying the blue United Nations flag from their
jeeps and trucks, were on their way to Gaza when they met an Israeli tank
column on the road. As the Israelis approached, the UN observers pulled aside
and stopped to get out of the way. One of the tanks rotated its turret and
opened fire from a few feet away. The Israeli tank then rammed its gun through
the windshield of an Indian jeep and decapitated the two men inside. When other
Indians went to aid their comrades, they were mowed down by machine-gun fire.
Another Israeli tank thrust its gun into a UN truck, lifted it, and smashed it
to the ground, killing or wounding all the occupants. In Gaza, Israeli tanks
blasted six rounds into UN headquarters, which was flying the UN flag. Fourteen
UN members were killed in these incidents. One Indian officer called it
deliberate, cold-blooded killing of unarmed UN soldiers. It would be a sign of
things to come.

By June 8,
three days after Israel launched the war, Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai had
become nuisances. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to
watch them, and few vehicles to transport them to prison camps. But there was
another way to deal with them.

As the
Liberty
sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications,
Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically
butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up
about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then
opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert sand turned red. Then they
forced other prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves. "I saw a line
of prisoners, civilians and military," said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of
those who dug the graves, "and they opened fire at them all at once. When
they were dead, they told us to bury them." Nearby, another group of
Israelis gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to
cover them with sand.

In still
another incident at El Arish, the Israeli journalist Gabi Bron saw about 150
Egyptian POWs sitting on the ground, crowded together with their hands held at
the backs of their necks. "The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to
dig pits and then army police shot them to death," Bron said. "I witnessed
the executions with my own eyes on the morning of June eighth, in the airport
area of El Arish."

The
Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, who worked in the army's history
department after the war, said he and other officers collected testimony from
dozens of soldiers who admitted killing POWs. According to Yitzhaki, Israeli
troops killed, in cold blood, as many as 1,000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai,
including some 400 in the sand dunes of El Arish.

Ironically,
Ariel Sharon, who was capturing territory south of El Arish at the time of the
slaughter, had been close to massacres during other conflicts. One of his men
during the Suez crisis in 1956, Arye Biro, now a retired brigadier general,
recently admitted the unprovoked killing of forty-nine prisoners of war in the
Sinai in 1956. "I had my Karl Gustav [weapon] I had taken from the Egyptian.
My officer had an Uzi. The Egyptian prisoners were sitting there with their
faces turned to us. We turned to them with our loaded guns and shot them.
Magazine after magazine. They didn't get a chance to react." At another
point, Biro said, he found Egyptian soldiers prostrate with thirst. He said
that after taunting them by pouring water from his canteen into the sand, he
killed them. "If I were to be put on trial for what I did," he said,
"then it would be necessary to put on trial at least one-half the Israeli
army, which, in similar circumstances, did what I did." Sharon, who says
he learned of the 1956 prisoner shootings only after they happened, refused to
say whether he took any disciplinary action against those involved, or even
objected to the killings.