Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (39 page)

NSA
Director Carter agreed. "There was no other answer than that it was
deliberate," he told the author in a 1980 interview, although he asked
that the information be kept off the record at the time. Carter has since died.

NSA's
deputy director, Dr. Louis Tordella, also believed that the Israeli attack was
deliberate and that the Israeli government was attempting to cover it up.
According to highly classified and long-hidden NSA documents obtained for
Body
of Secrets,
Tordella not only put his belief in an internal memorandum for
the record but also expressed his view to Congressman George Mahon (D-Texas) of
the House Appropriations Committee. "Mr. Mahon probed several times to
discover the reason for the Israeli attack," wrote Tordella on June 20,
1967, nearly two weeks after the incident.
"
I
told him we
simply did not know from either open or intelligence sources but that, by now,
there probably was a fair amount of denial and cover-up by the Israelis for the
sake of protecting their national position. He asked my private opinion of the
attack and I said that, for what it was worth, I believed the attack might have
been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly
suspected that the
Liberty
was monitoring his activities.

"He
asked if a mistake of this sort was common or should be expected,"
Tordella continued. "I told him that I thought a ship the size of the
Liberty
was unlike and much larger than Egyptian ships and that an obviously
cargo-type vessel should not reasonably be mistaken by competent naval forces
or air pilots for an Egyptian man-of-war. At best I estimated that the
attacking ships and planes were guilty of gross negligence and
carelessness." So angry was Tordella over the attack and cover-up that he
scrawled across the top of the Israeli "mistake" report: "A nice
whitewash."

Finally,
U.S. Air Force Major General John Morrison, at the time the deputy chief—and
later chief—of NSA's operations, did not buy the Israeli "mistake"
explanation, either. "Nobody believes that explanation," he said in a
recent interview with the author. "The only conjecture that we ever made
that made any near sense is that the Israelis did not want us to intercept
their communications at that time." When informed by the author of the
gruesome war crimes then taking place at El Arish, Morrison saw the connection.
"That would be enough," he said. "Twelve miles is nothing. . . .
They wouldn't want us to get in on that." He added: "You've got the
motive. . . . What a hell of a thing to do."

Even
without knowledge of the murders taking place nearby in the desert, many in
NSA's G Group, who analyzed the intercepts sent back by both the
Liberty
and
the EC-121, were convinced that the attack was no mistake. And among the
survivors of the
Liberty,
the conviction is virtually unanimous.
"The Israelis got by with cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Americans
on June 8, 1967," said Phillip F. Tourney, president of the USS
Liberty
Veterans Association, in July 2000. "There is widespread cynicism that
our elected officials will not go up against the powerful Israeli lobby out of
fear. . . . This cover-up must be investigated, now."

For more
than thirty years, Captain William L. McGonagle refused to say a single word on
the issue of whether the killing of his crew was done with foreknowledge or by
mistake. Finally, dying of cancer in November 1998, he at last broke his long silence.
"After many years I finally believe that the attack was deliberate,"
he said. "I don't think there has been an adequate investigation of the
incident. . . . The flag was flying prior to the attack on the ship."
McGonagle died less than four months later, on March 3, 1999, at the age of
seventy-three.

Even
without the NSA evidence, many people in the administration disbelieved the
Israeli "mistake" report. "Frankly, there was considerable
skepticism in the White House that the attack was accidental," said George
Christian, Johnson's press secretary at the time. "I became convinced that
an accident of this magnitude was too much to swallow. If it were a deliberate
attack the question remains, of course, of whether it was a tactical decision
on the part of elements of the Israeli military or whether it was ordered by
high officials."

Another
NSA review, conducted fifteen years later and classified Top Secret/Umbra,
ridiculed the decision by the Israeli court of inquiry that accepted the
"mistake" theory and exonerated all Israeli officials.
"Exculpation of Israeli nationals," it said, "apparently not
being hindmost in the court's calculations." Next the review accused the
Israeli fighter pilots of outright perjury:

Though the
pilots testified to the contrary, every official interview of numerous
Liberty
crewmen gives consistent evidence that indeed the
Liberty was
flying
an American flag—and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to assure its
easy observance and identification. These circumstances—prior identification of
the
Liberty
and easy visibility of the American flag—prompted the
Department of State to inform the Israeli Government that "the later
military attack by Israeli aircraft on the USS
Liberty
is quite
literally incomprehensible. As a minimum, the attack must be condemned as an
act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life."
(Emphasis in original.)

The
pilots, said the report, were not the only ones lying: the story told by the
torpedo-boat crewmen who blew up the ship—after missing with their first four
torpedoes—was also unbelievable. The torpedo-boat crew claimed that they had
mistaken the
Liberty
for an Egyptian troop transport,
El Quseir.
At
the time of the attack, the Egyptian ship was rusting alongside a pier in the
port of Alexandria, 250 miles from where the
Liberty
was attacked, and
along that pier
El Quseir
remained throughout the war. The location of
every Egyptian ship would have been a key piece of intelligence before Israel
launched its war. According to the long-secret 1981 NSA report:

The fact
that two separate torpedo boat commanders made the same false identification
only raises the question of the veracity of both commanders. The
El-Kasir
[El Quseir]
was approximately one-quarter of the
Liberty's
tonnage,
about one-half its length, and offered a radically different silhouette. To
claim that the
Liberty
closely resembled the
El-Kasir
was most
illogical. The Department of State expressed its view of the torpedo attack in
these words:

"The
subsequent attack by Israeli torpedo boats, substantially after the vessel was
or should have been identified by Israeli military forces, manifests the same
reckless disregard for human life. The silhouette and conduct of USS
Liberty
readily distinguished it from any vessel that could have been considered
hostile. ... It could and should have been scrutinized visually at close range
before torpedoes were fired."

Finally
the NSA report, fifteen years after the fact, added:

A
persistent question relating to the
Liberty
incident is whether or not
the Israeli forces which attacked the ship knew that it was American . . . not
a few of the
Liberty's
crewmen and [deleted but probably "NSA's G
Group"] staff are convinced that they did. Their belief derived from
consideration of the long time the Israelis had the ship under surveillance
prior to the attack, the visibility of the flag, and the intensity of the attack
itself.

Speculation
as to the Israeli motivation varied. Some believed that Israel expected that
the complete destruction of the ship and killing of the personnel would lead
the U.S. to blame the UAR [Egypt] for the incident and bring the U.S. into the
war on the side of Israel . . . others felt that Israeli forces wanted the ship
and men out of the way.

"I
believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the
Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the
Liberty
was monitoring
his activities," said Tordella. His statement was amazingly astute, since
he likely had no idea of the war crimes being committed on the Sinai at the
time, within easy earshot of the antenna groves that covered the
Liberty's
deck.

On the
morning of June 8, the Israeli military command received a report that a large
American eavesdropping ship was secretly listening only a few miles off El
Arish. At that same moment, a scant dozen or so miles away, Israeli soldiers
were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds, a fact that the
entire Israeli army leadership knew about and condoned, according to the army's
own historian. Another military historian, Uri Milstein, confirmed the report.
There were many incidents in the Six Day War, he said, in which Egyptian
soldiers were killed by Israeli troops after they had raised their hands in
surrender. "It was not an official policy," he added, "but there
was an atmosphere that it was okay to do it. Some commanders decided to do it;
others refused. But everyone knew about it."

Israel had
no way of knowing that NSA's Hebrew linguists were not on the ship, but on a
plane flying high above. Nevertheless, evidence of the slaughter might indeed
have been captured by the unmanned recorders in the NSA spaces. Had the torpedo
not made a direct hit there, the evidence might have been discovered when the
tapes were transmitted or shipped back to NSA. At the time, Israel was loudly
proclaiming—to the United States, to the United Nations, and to the world—that
it was the victim of Egyptian aggression and that it alone held the moral high
ground. Israel's commanders would not have wanted tape recordings of evidence
of the slaughters to wind up on desks at the White House, the UN, or the
Washington
Post.  
Had the jamming and unmarked fighters knocked out all communications
in the first minute, as they attempted to do; had the torpedo boat quickly sunk
the ship, as intended; and had the machine gunners destroyed all the life rafts
and killed any survivors, there would have been no one left alive to tell any
stories.

That was
the conclusion of a study on the
Liberty
done for the U.S. Navy's
Naval
Law Review,
written by a Navy lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Walter L.
Jacobsen. "To speculate on the motives of an attack group that uses
unmarked planes and deprives helpless survivors of life rafts raises disturbing
possibilities," he wrote, "including the one that the
Liberty
crew
was not meant to survive the attack, and would not have, but for the incorrect
6th Fleet radio broadcast that help was on its way—which had the effect of
chasing off the MTBs [motor torpedo boats]."

Since the
very beginning, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, appointed Chief of Naval Operations
shortly after the attack, has also been convinced that the assault was
deliberate. "I have to conclude that it was Israel's intent to sink the
Liberty
and leave as few survivors as possible," he said in 1997, on the
thirtieth anniversary of the assault. "Israel knew perfectly well that the
ship was American."

And in a
CIA report received by that agency on July 27, 1967, a CIA official quotes one
of his sources, who seems to be an Israeli government official:

[Regarding
the] attack on USS
LIBERTY
by Israeli airplanes and torpedo boats . . .
He said that, "You've got to remember that in this campaign there is
neither time nor room for mistakes," which was intended as an obtuse
reference that Israel's forces knew what flag the
LIBERTY
was flying and
exactly what the vessel was doing off the coast. [Deletion] implied that the
ship's identity was known six hours before the attack but that Israeli
headquarters was not sure as to how many people might have access to the
information the
LIBERTY was
intercepting. He also implied that
[deletion] was no certainty on controls as to where the intercepted information
was going and again reiterated that Israeli forces did not make mistakes in
their campaign. He was emphatic in stating to me that they knew what kind of
ship the USS
LIBERTY was
and what it was doing offshore.

The CIA
called the document "raw intelligence data," and said it was one of
"several which indicated a possibility that the Israeli Government knew
about the USS
Liberty
before the attack."

In fact,
another CIA report, prepared in 1979, indicates that Israel not only knew a
great deal about the subject of signals intelligence during the 1967 war, but
that Sigint was a major source of their information on the Arabs. "The
Israelis have been very successful in their Comint and Elint operations against
the Arabs," said the report. "During the Six-Day War in 1967, the
Israelis succeeded in intercepting, breaking, and disseminating a tremendous
volume of Arab traffic quickly and accurately, including a high-level
conversation between the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the UAR and King
Hussein of Jordan. Over the years the Israelis have mounted cross-border
operations and tapped Arab landline communications for extended periods. The
Israelis have also on occasion boobytrapped the landlines."