Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (38 page)

Throughout
the long night, propped up in a chair on the port wing of the bridge, Commander
McGonagle continued to conn his ship, using the North Star ahead and the long
wake behind for direction. Shortly after dawn, 16½ hours after the attack, help
finally arrived. Rendezvousing with the
Liberty,
420 miles
east-southeast of Soudha Bay, Crete, were the American destroyers
Davis
and
Massey.

Helicopters
soon arrived and began lifting litters containing the most seriously wounded to
the deck of the
America,
still 138 miles away. There they were
transported by plane to Athens and then to the naval hospital in Naples. At the
completion of the transfer, after eighteen continuous hours on the bridge, the
weary skipper finally headed to what was left of his cabin. Despite his
injuries, he remained with the ship until she docked in Malta.

As the
wounded landed at Athens Airport, NSA civilians at USA 512J a short distance
away finished transcribing most of the tapes from the previous day's EC-121
ferret mission. They then sent the raw information back to NSA over the
agency's special channel, SPINTCOMM ("Special Intelligence
Communications"). Later, the civilians were instructed to pack up the
original tapes and send them by armed courier to NSA as soon as possible.

At NSA,
concern had shifted from the rescue of the crew to the possible loss of
sensitive documents from
Liberty's
ruptured signals intelligence spaces.
Boats from the destroyers were ordered to search around the
Liberty
for
two hours looking for classified papers that might be washing out from the
gaping, pear-shaped hole. Later, as the
Liberty
sailed slowly toward
Malta, a major concern was the possibility that Russian ships would attempt to
retrieve the flotsam. "Do whatever is feasible to keep any Soviet ships
out of
Liberty's
wake," the Sixth Fleet commander was told.
"Maintain observation of
Liberty's
wake and if possible find out
what sort of documents are being lost in the wake . . . take whatever steps may
be reasonable and appropriate to reduce possibility of compromise, noting that
a compromise could have both political and technical aspects."

Like a
shark sensing blood, a Soviet guided-missile destroyer did tag along with the
Liberty
for a while, but the two American destroyers and a fleet ocean tug trailed
Liberty
to recover any papers before the Russians had a chance to grab them. Along
the way, the tug used boathooks and grab nets to pick up the top secret
material. When the tug could not recover a document, it ran over it with the
propeller and then backed down over it to shred the paper into small pieces.
Despite this vigilance, the bodies of five technicians washed out of the hole
and were never recovered.

Another
concern at Fort Meade was the three NSA civilian Arabic linguists on the ship.
They had earlier been flown to Rota, where they joined the crew. One, Allen M.
Blue, had been killed; another, Donald L. Blalock, had been injured; and a
third, Robert L. Wilson, had survived unscathed. Marshall Carter ordered an NSA
official to meet the ship in Malta and provide maximum assistance in getting
Blalock and Wilson back to the United States as quickly and as
quietly
as possible.

Once the
Liberty
pulled into Malta on June 14, the effort to bury the incident continued at
full speed ahead. A total news blackout was imposed. Crewmembers were
threatened with courts-martial and jail time if they ever breathed a word of
the episode to anyone—including family members and even fellow crewmembers.
"If you ever repeat this to anyone else ever again you will be put in
prison and forgotten about," Larry Weaver said he was warned.

Now that
the ship was safely in dry dock, the grisly task of searching the NSA spaces,
sealed since the attack six days earlier, also began. "I took a crew . . .
down in the spaces to inventory the classified equipment and info," said
former senior chief Stan White. "The smell was so awful it can't be
described. We got the bodies out and then the pieces of bodies were picked up
and put in bags and finally the inventory. The sights and smells I am still
sometimes aware of today." Seaman Don Pageler also spent two and a half
days helping to search and clean out the cavernous compartment. At one point he
lifted a piece of equipment only to make a grim discovery. "Below it was
this guy's arm. ... I looked at the muscle structure and I knew whose arm it
was. I didn't know him well but I knew who he was."

In July
1967, the
Liberty
returned to Norfolk from Malta. There it languished
while NSA tried unsuccessfully to obtain $10.2 million from the Pentagon to
restore her to signals intelligence operational status. When that effort
failed, the
Liberty
was decommissioned, on June 28, 1968. In 1970 the
ship was turned over to the U.S. Maritime Administration and sold for
$101,666.66. In 1973 the ship came to an ignominious end in Baltimore's Curtis
Bay shipyard as welders' torches at last did what the Israeli attack hadn't.
She was cut up and sold for scrap.

On April
28, 1969, almost two years after the attack, the Israeli government finally
paid about $20,000 to each of the wounded crewmen. This compensation was
obtained, however, only after the men retained private counsel to negotiate
with Israel's lawyers in Washington. A substantial portion of the claim,
therefore, went to lawyers' fees. Ten months earlier, the Israelis had paid about
$100,000 to each of the families of those killed.

Finally,
the U.S. government asked a token $7,644,146 for Israel's destruction of the
ship, even though $20 million had been spent several years earlier to convert
her to a signals intelligence ship and another $10.2 million had gone for the
highly sophisticated hardware. Yet despite the modest amount requested, and the
agony its armed forces had caused, the Israeli government spent thirteen years
in an unseemly battle to avoid paying. By the winter of 1980, the interest
alone had reached $10 million. Israeli ambassador Ephraim Evron then suggested
that if the United States asked for $6 million—and eliminated the interest
entirely—his country
might
be willing to pay. President Jimmy Carter, on
his way out of office, agreed, and in December 1980 accepted the paltry $6
million.

In the
days following the attack, the Israeli government gave the U.S. government a
classified report that attempted to justify the claim that the attack was a
mistake. On the basis of that same report, an Israeli court of inquiry
completely exonerated the government and all those involved. No one was ever
court-martialed, reduced in rank, or even reprimanded. On the contrary, Israel
chose instead to honor Motor Torpedo Boat 203, which fired the deadly torpedo
at the
Liberty.
The ship's wheel and bell were placed on prominent
display at the naval museum, among the maritime artifacts of which the Israeli
navy was most proud.

Despite
the overwhelming evidence that Israel had attacked the ship and killed the
American servicemen deliberately, the Johnson administration and Congress covered
up the entire incident. Johnson was planning to run for president the following
year and needed the support of pro-Israel voters. His administration's actions
were disgraceful. Although Captain McGonagle was awarded the Congressional
Medal of Honor for his heroism in saving the ship and bringing it back to
safety, senior White House officials decided to keep the occasion as quiet as
possible. Because the medal, the nation's highest honor, is only rarely
awarded, it is almost always presented by the president in a high-profile White
House ceremony. But McGonagle's award was given by the secretary of the Navy in
a low-profile, hastily arranged gathering at the Washington Navy Yard, a
scrappy base on the banks of the smelly Anacostia River.

"I
must have gone to the White House fifteen times or more to watch the president
personally award the Congressional Medal of Honor to Americans of special
valor," said Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who became Chief of Naval
Operations within weeks of the attack. "So it irked the hell out of me
when McGonagle's ceremony was relegated to the obscurity of the Washington Navy
Yard and the medal was presented by the Secretary of the Navy. This was a
back-handed slap. Everyone else received their medal at the White House.
President Johnson must have been concerned about the reaction of the Israeli
lobby."

Later, a
naval officer connected with the awards told Jim Ennes, a lieutenant on the
ship, the reason. "The government is pretty jumpy about Israel," he
said. "The State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his
government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal. 'Certainly not!'
Israel said. But to avoid any possible offense, McGonagle's citation does not
mention Israel at all, and the award ceremony kept the lowest possible
profile."

In the
period immediately after the incident, several quick reviews were conducted by
the Navy and CIA, among other agencies. However, they dealt principally with
such topics as the failure of the Naval Communications System and how the crew
of the ship performed during the crisis. No American investigators ever looked
into the "why" question or brought the probe to Israel, the scene of the
crime. Investigators simply accepted Israel's bizarre "mistake"
report at face value. This was a document which included such statements as a
claim by the torpedo-boat crew that the
Liberty
—an ancient World War II
cargo ship then loitering at five knots—was attempting to escape at an
incredible thirty knots (the
Liberty's
top speed was seventeen
knots)—outracing even their torpedo boats. This was the reason, the report
said, for calling in the air force.

The
Israeli report then said that their observers checked in
Jane's Fighting
Ships
and misidentified the
Liberty
as
El Quseir,
an Egyptian
troop and horse transport. But
Jane's
gave the top speed of
El Quseir
as only fourteen knots; how could a ship supposedly doing thirty knots have
been mistaken for it?
Jane's
also contained details on the
Liberty,
the
same details that Commander Pinchas Pinchasy, at air force headquarters, had
used to positively identify the ship. (And Pinchasy had reported the
identification to Israeli naval headquarters.)

The
Israeli report also said that the whole reason for the attack was to stop the
Liberty,
with its few short-range machine guns, from bombarding the town of El
Arish, more than a dozen miles away. This was nonsense.

Nevertheless,
most of the U.S. investigations took the path of least resistance, the one onto
which they were pushed by the White House, and accepted the "mistake"
theory. Incredibly, considering that 34 American servicemen had been killed and
171 more wounded, and that a ship of the U.S. Navy had been nearly sunk (no
U.S. naval vessel since World War II had suffered a higher percentage [69
percent] of battle casualties), Congress held no public hearings. With an
election coming up, no one in the weak-kneed House and Senate wanted to offend
powerful pro-Israel groups and lose their fat campaign contributions.

But
according to interviews and documents obtained for
Body of Secrets,
the
senior leadership of NSA, officials who had unique access to the secret tapes
and other highly classified evidence, was virtually unanimous in their belief
that the attack was deliberate. They strongly believed that Israel feared what
the
Liberty
might have intercepted, and therefore ordered it killed
leaving no survivors.

Israel has
never wavered on one critical point: that no one ever saw a flag flying from
the
Liberty
during either the air or sea attack, despite the virtually
unanimous agreement among survivors that flags were flying during both periods.
"Throughout the contact," said the "mistake" report,
"no Israeli plane or torpedo boat saw an American or any other flag on the
ship."

But former
Chief Marvin Nowicki, the senior Hebrew linguist on the EC-121 flying above the
scene, knows what he heard. "As I recall, we recorded most, if not all, of
the attack," he said. "I heard a couple of references to the flag
during an apparent attack." Nowicki, who later received a Ph.D. in
political science and taught public administration at the college level, is an
enthusiastic supporter of Israel, who originally assumed his information would
help clear Israel. Instead, it convicts the government. If the Israelis did see
the flag, then the attack was coldblooded murder—like the hundreds of earlier
murders committed by Israelis that day at El Arish.

As soon as
the incident began, Marshall Carter appointed a small task force led by Walter
Deeley, a senior official in the Production Organization, the agency's Sigint
operations division. The task force was to keep track of all information
regarding the
Liberty
and prepare a report for the director. Unlike the
other probes, this one included all the signals intelligence details—the
intercept tapes from the EC-121, and interviews with the signals intelligence
survivors from the
Liberty.
Because of the enormous secrecy in which NSA
held its Sigint operations, and especially because the information involved its
most secret activity— eavesdropping on a close ally—the details were never
shared with anyone else. In the end, Walter Deeley came to the only possible
conclusion, given his knowledge of Israel's intelligence capabilities.
"There is no way that they didn't know that the
Liberty
was
American," he said, suggesting premeditated murder.