Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (34 page)

Later in
his career, in 1982, Sharon would be held "indirectly responsible"
for the slaughter of about 900 men, women, and children by Lebanese Christian
militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps following Israel's invasion of
Lebanon. Despite his grisly past, or maybe because of it, in October 1998 he
was appointed minister of foreign affairs in the cabinet of right-wing prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sharon later took over the conservative Likud
Party. On September 28, 2000, he set off the bloodiest upheaval between Israeli
forces and Palestinians in a generation, which resulted in a collapse of the
seven-year peace process. The deadly battles, which killed over 200
Palestinians and several Israeli soldiers, broke out following a provocative visit
by Sharon to the compound known as Haram as-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims
and Temple Mount to Jews. Addressing the question of Israeli war crimes, Sharon
said in 1995, "Israel doesn't need this, and no one can preach to us about
it—no one."

Of the
1967 Sinai slaughter, Aryeh Yitzhaki said, "The whole army leadership,
including [then] Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Chief of Staff [and later
Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin and the generals knew about these things. No one
bothered to denounce them." Yitzhaki said not only were the massacres
known, but senior Israeli officials tried their best to cover them up by not
releasing a report he had prepared on the murders in 1968.

The
extensive war crimes were just one of the deep secrets Israel had sought to
conceal since the start of the conflict. From the very beginning, an essential
element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war
behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies. Lies about the Egyptian threat,
lies about who started the war, lies to the American president, lies to the UN
Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public. Thus, as the American
naval historian Dr. Richard K. Smith noted in an article on the
Liberty
for
United States Naval Institute Proceedings,
"any instrument which
sought to penetrate this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal
'fog of war' would have to be frustrated."

Into this
sea of lies, deception, and slaughter sailed the USS
Liberty,
an
enormous American spy factory loaded with $10.2 million worth of the latest
eavesdropping gear. At 10:39 A.M., the minaret at El Arish was logged at
seventeen miles away, at bearing 189 degrees. Sailing at five knots, the
Liberty
was practically treading water.

By 10:55
A.M., senior Israeli officials knew for certain that they had an American
electronic spy in their midst. Not only was the ship clearly visible to the
forces at El Arish, it had been positively identified by Israeli naval
headquarters.

The
Israeli naval observer on the airborne reconnaissance mission that had earlier
observed the
Liberty
passed on the information to Commander Pinchas
Pinchasy, the naval liaison officer at Israeli air force headquarters. "I
reported this detection to Naval Headquarters," said Pinchasy, "and I
imagine that Naval Headquarters received this report from the other channel,
from the Air Force ground control as well." Pinchasy had pulled out a copy
of the reference book
Jane's Fighting Ships
and looked up the
"GTR-5" designation. He then sent a report to the acting chief of
naval operations at Israeli navy headquarters in Haifa. The report said that
the ship cruising slowly off El Arish was "an electromagnetic
audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy, named
Liberty,
whose marking
was GTR-5."

Not only
did the ship have "GTR-5" painted broadly on both sides of its bow
and stern, it also had its name painted in large, bold, black letters:
"U.S.S. LIBERTY."

Although
no one on the
Liberty
knew it, they were about to have some company.

"We
were 'wheels in the well' from Athens about mid-morning," said Marvin
Nowicki, who was aboard the EC-121 headed back to the war zone. In the rear NSA
spaces, the crew strapped on their seat belts. It was an everyday routine. The
VQ-2 squadron would fly, on average, six to twelve missions per month against
Israel and the Arab countries of the Middle East. Exceptions took place when
higher-priority Soviet targets came up, for example when the Soviet fleet
conducted exercises in the Mediterranean or Norwegian Sea. Nowicki himself accumulated
over 2,000 hours in such spy planes over his career.

Back at
Athens Airport, the 512J processing center had been beefed up to help analyze
the increasing flow of intercepts. Three NSA civilian Hebrew linguists had
arrived and were attacking the backlog of recording tapes. The pile had grown
especially large because the Air Force had no Hebrew linguists for their C-150
Sigint aircraft. "As it turns out," said Nowicki, "they were blindly
copying any voice signal that sounded Hebrew. They were like vacuum cleaners,
sucking every signal onto their recorders, with the intercept operators not
having a clue as to what the activity represented."

In charge
of the half-dozen Elint specialists aboard the EC-121, searching for radar
signals and analyzing their cryptic sounds, was the evaluator, who would
attempt to make sense of all the data. Elsewhere, several intercept operators
were assigned to monitor VHF and UHF radio-telephone signals. In addition to Chief
Nowicki, who could translate both Hebrew and Russian, there were two other
Hebrew and two Arabic linguists on board.

Soon after
wheels-up from Athens, a security curtain was pulled around the "spook
spaces" to hide the activity from members of the flight crew who did not
have a need to know. In front of the voice-intercept operators were twin
UHF/VHF receivers, essential because the Israelis mostly used UHF transceivers,
while the Arabs used Soviet VHF equipment. To record all the traffic, they had
a four-track voice recorder with time dubs and frequency notations. Chief
Nowicki, the supervisor, had an additional piece of equipment: a spectrum
analyzer to view the radio activity in the form of "spikes" between
100 to 150 megahertz and 200 to 500 megahertz. It was very useful in locating
new signals.

About
noon, as they came closer to their orbit area, the activity began getting
hectic. Fingers twisted large black dials, sometimes quickly and sometimes
barely at all. "When we arrived within intercept range of the battles
already in progress," Nowicki recalled, "it was apparent that the
Israelis were pounding the Syrians on the Golan Heights. Soon all our recorders
were going full blast, with each position intercepting signals on both
receivers."

In
addition to recording the voices of the Israeli and Egyptian troops and pilots,
the linguists were frantically writing down gists of voice activity on logs and
shouting to the evaluator what they were recording. The evaluator in turn would
then direct his Elint people to search for corresponding radar activity. At
other times, the Elint operators would intercept a radar signal from a target
and tip off the linguists to start searching for correlating voice activity. A
key piece of equipment was known as Big Look. It enabled the Elint operators to
intercept, emulate, and identify the radar signals, and to reverse-locate
them—to trace them back to their source.

Sixty
miles north of Tel Aviv, atop Mount Carmel, Israel's naval command post
occupied a drab former British Royal Air Force base built in the 1920s. Known
as Stella Maris, it contained a high-ceilinged war room with a large map of
Israel and its coastal areas on a raised platform. Standing above it, senior
naval officials could see the location of ships in the area, updated as air
reconnaissance passed on the changing positions of various ships. Since dawn
that morning, the
Liberty
had been under constant observation.
"Between five in the morning and one in the afternoon," said one
Liberty
deck officer, "I think there were thirteen times that we were
circled."

About noon
at Stella Maris, as the
Liberty
was again in sight of El Arish and while
the massacres were taking place, a report was received from an army commander
there that a ship was shelling the Israelis from the sea. But that was
impossible. The only ship in the vicinity of El Arish was the
Liberty,
and
she was eavesdropping, not shooting. As any observer would immediately have
recognized, the four small defensive 50mm machine guns were incapable of reaching
anywhere near the shore, thirteen miles away, let alone the buildings of El
Arish. In fact, the maximum effective range of such guns was just 2,200 yards,
a little over a mile. And the ship itself, a tired old World War II cargo
vessel crawling with antennas, was unthreatening to anyone—unless it was their
secrets, not their lives, they wanted to protect.

By then
the Israeli navy and air force had conducted more than six hours of close
surveillance of the
Liberty
off the Sinai, even taken pictures, and must
have positively identified it as an American electronic spy ship. They knew the
Liberty
was the only military ship in the area. Nevertheless, the order
was given to kill it. Thus, at 12:05 P.M. three motor torpedo boats from Ashdod
departed for the
Liberty,
about fifty miles away. Israeli air force
fighters, loaded with 30mm cannon ammunition, rockets, and even napalm, then
followed. They were all to return virtually empty.

At 1:41
P.M., about an hour and a half after leaving Ashdod, the torpedo boats spotted
the
Liberty
off El Arish and called for an immediate strike by the air
force fighters.

On the
bridge of the
Liberty,
Commander McGonagle looked at the hooded green
radar screen and fixed the ship's position as being 25½ nautical miles from the
minaret at El Arish, which was to the southeast. The officer of the deck,
Lieutenant (junior grade) Lloyd Painter, also looked at the radar and saw that
they were 17½
 
miles from land. It was shortly before two o'clock in the
afternoon.

McGonagle
was known as a steamer, a sailor who wants to constantly feel the motion of the
sea beneath the hull of the ship, to steam to the next port as soon as possible
after arriving at the last. "He longed for the sea," said one of his
officers, "and was noticeably restless in port. He simply would not
tolerate being delayed by machinery that was not vital to the operation of the
ship." He was born in Wichita, Kansas, on November 19, 1925, and his voice
still had a twang. Among the first to join the post—World War II Navy, he saw
combat while on a minesweeper during the Korean War, winning the Korean Service
Medal with six battle stars. Eventually commanding several small service ships,
he had taken over as captain of the
Liberty
about a year earlier, in April
1966.

A Chief of
Naval Operations once called the
Liberty
"the ugliest ship in the
Navy," largely because in place of powerful guns it had strange antennas
protruding from every location. There were thin long-wire VLF antennas, conical
electronic-countermeasure antennas, spiracle antennas, a microwave antenna on
the bow, and whip antennas that extended thirty-five feet. Most unusual was the
sixteen-foot dish-shaped moon-bounce antenna that rested high on the stern.

Despite
the danger, the men on the ship were carrying on as normally as possible. Larry
Weaver, a boatswain's mate, was waiting outside the doctor's office to have an
earache looked at. Muscular at 184 pounds, he exercised regularly in the ship's
weight room. Planning to leave the Navy shortly, he had already applied for a
job at Florida's Cypress Gardens as a water skier. With the ability to ski
barefoot for nine miles, he thought he would have a good chance.

As for
Bryce Lockwood, the
Marine senior Russian linguist who had been awakened
in the middle of a layover in Rota, Spain, and virtually shanghaied, his wife
and daughter had no idea where he was. Having boarded the ship on such short
notice, Lockwood had gone to the small ship's store to buy some T-shirts and
shorts. While waiting to go on watch, he was sitting on his bunk stamping his
name in his new underwear.

On the
stern, Stan White was struggling with the troublesome moon-bounce antenna. A
senior chief petty officer, he was responsible for the complicated repair of
the intercept and cipher gear on board. The giant dish was used to communicate
quickly, directly, and securely with NSA back at Fort Meade, and for this
purpose both locations had to be able to see the moon at the same time. But
throughout the whole voyage, even back in Norfolk, the system was plagued with
leaking hydraulic fluid. Now another critical part, the klystron, had burned
out and White was attempting to replace it.

Below deck
in the Research Operations Department, as the NSA spaces were known, Elint
operators were huddled over round green scopes, watching and listening for any
unusual signals. Charles L. Rowley, a first-class petty officer and a
specialist in technical intelligence collection, was in charge of one of the
Elint sections. "I was told to be on the lookout for a different type of
signal," he said. "I reported a signal I thought was from a
submarine. ... I analyzed it as far as the length of the signal, the mark and
space on the bods, and I could not break it, I didn't know what it was, I had
no idea what it was . . . and sent it
in to NSA." But NSA had an
unusual reaction: "I got my butt chewed out. They tried to convince me
that it was a British double-current cable code and I know damn good and well
that it wasn't." In fact, the blackness deep beneath the waves of the
eastern Mediterranean was beginning to become quite crowded.