Six Days (38 page)

Washington DC, 0950 (1750 Egypt, 1650 Israel)

Walt Rostow dictated a message for President Johnson, warning there was a ‘flash report … a US elint [electronics intelligence] ship, the LIBERTY, has been torpedoed in the Mediterranean … we have no knowledge of the submarine or surface vessel which committed this act.' An hour or so later the US defence attaché in Tel Aviv told them Israel had carried out the attack. Drily, the last line of Rostow's note to Johnson said that the ‘Tel Aviv message appears to be apology for mistaken action'.

After the initial SOS, radio operators in the Sixth Fleet could not get through to the
Liberty.
The fleet prepared to take action. Pilots were mustered in their briefing room. The assumption was that the ship was being attacked by Soviet forces. The pilots were told the
Liberty
was right on the edge of the Egyptian twelve-mile limit. Rules of engagement were issued. They ordered them to ‘use force including destruction as necessary to control the situation. Do not use more force than required. Do not pursue any unit toward land for reprisal purposes … counter-attack is to protect
Liberty
only.'

Washington DC, 1013

The commander of the Sixth Fleet reported to Washington that he was launching four armed A-4 bombers from the USS
America
and four A-1s with fighter cover from USS
Saratoga.
Two destroyers were also ordered to get to the
Liberty
at full speed. USS
America
's ready aircraft, A-4 bombers, were armed with nuclear weapons. They were recalled soon after they were launched. The fleet commander asked permission to send other, conventionally armed aircraft. Permission was refused. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came on the line from Washington to give the order.

Cairo, 1845; Washington DC, 1045

In the US Embassy in Cairo it was about the worst news they could get. They assumed the
Liberty
had been feeding information to the Israelis. After the allegations of collusion with Israel on air strikes, Ambassador Nolte already felt that every American in town was in danger from the Cairo mob. Tersely, he cabled: ‘We had better get out our story on the torpedoing of USS
Liberty
fast and it had better be good.' The Egyptians seized on the attack as evidence that they had been right all along. On Cairo Radio Ahmed Said accepted Israel's story that the destruction of the
Liberty
had been an accident, because it proved one thing: ‘Arabs … we are fighting against the USA.'

Washington DC, 1645

In the Situation Room at the White House a soldier called Baker scrawled the latest information on the
Liberty
from the National Military Command Center on a telephone pad. ‘10 killed, about 100 wounded – (1 doctor aboard, just hasn't been able to complete rounds on all) 15–25 wounded seriously (so far) Liberty should rendevouz [sic] with elements 6th Fleet around midnight EDT.'

The next morning the NSC Special Committee met in angry mood to discuss what happened to the
Liberty.
Clark Clifford, a Washington lawyer who had been a presidential adviser since the 1940s, was concerned that the US was not being tough enough on Israel. It was an ‘egregious' attack. It was, he told them, ‘inconceivable that it was an accident'. There were three strafing passes and three torpedo boats in attendance. The Israelis responsible should be punished. In the sheaf of handwritten notes torn from a legal pad that records the meeting, ‘President subscribed 100%' is noted in the margin. Ambassador Lucius Battle thought the attack ‘incomprehensible'. Secretary of State Rusk said the US should ‘do what is normal'. Israel needed to pay reparations, punish those responsible and ensure there was no repetition of the attack. Dean Rusk always believed the
Liberty
had been attacked in the full knowledge that it was an American ship. Before he died, he said that ‘the sustained attack to disable and sink
Liberty
precluded an assault by accident or by some trigger-happy local commander … I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.'

Letters of apology from the Israeli diplomats started to arrive for the president. Ambassador Avraham Harman expressed ‘heartfelt sorrow at the tragic accident for which my countrymen were responsible … I write to you in desolation.' Abba Eban was ‘deeply mortified and grieved by the tragic accident'. Secretary of State Rusk replied tersely that the attack was ‘quite literally incomprehensible, an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life'. Israel's first response to Rusk's note was considered by the Americans to be so aggressive that they told the Israelis that they wanted it withdrawn and rewritten ‘in a more moderate vein'. It contained statements ‘they might find it hard to live with if the text some day became public'. It is still secret.

*   *   *

Israel accepted full responsibility for what had happened, insisting that regrettable but honest mistakes, made in the heat of battle, came together to cause the incident. It started, they said, with a series of what turned out to be false reports from the navy and air force that Israeli positions in Al-Arish were being shelled from the sea. Then, somehow they lost track of the
Liberty
after it had been positively identified as American earlier in the day. Mistakenly, they thought the ship was travelling at thirty knots, not five knots, leading to the wrong conclusion that it was an enemy warship. It was then mistaken for the Egyptian transport
Quseir.

A fierce controversy about the
Liberty
still goes on, fuelled by the fact that many documents about what happened have still not been declassified. Some of Israel's supporters have dismissed claims made by the survivors of the attack as sad delusions of traumatised ex-servicemen. Clark Clifford, who was one of Israel's staunchest supporters in US administrations from the 1940s to the 1970s, wrote a report on the incident for Johnson that was kept secret for thirty-four years. On the face of it, it upheld the Israeli position that there had been a series of terrible of mistakes, though Clark put it more strongly, condemning ‘gross and inexcusable failures … the unprovoked attack on the
Liberty
constitutes a flagrant act of gross negligence for which the Israeli government should be completely responsible, and the Israeli military personnel involved should be punished.' But Clark's analysis of Israel's explanations raises more questions than it answers. He did not have any evidence that top people in the Israeli government knew an American ship was being attacked. But, he implies, that did not mean that they did not know. ‘To disprove such a theory would necessitate a degree of access to Israeli personnel and information which in all likelihood can never be achieved.' This was more than a Washington lawyer choosing his words carefully. In his memoirs he wrote that it was ‘unlikely that the full truth will ever come out. Having been for so long a staunch supporter of Israel, I was particularly troubled by this incident; I could not bring myself to believe that such an action could have been authorized by Levi Eshkol. Yet somewhere inside the Israeli government, somewhere along the chain of command, something had gone terribly wrong – and then had been covered up. I never felt the Israelis made adequate restitution or explanation for their actions.'

In July 1967, three days after Clark's report was delivered to Johnson, an inquiry by an Israeli military judge, Colonel Yeshayahu Yerushalami decided there were no grounds for disciplinary action against the Israeli officers connected with the attack on the
Liberty.
His report reads like a legal closing of ranks, the product of a system going through the motions to satisfy its obligations to the United States rather than one driven by a desire to get to the bottom of what really happened. Yerushalami's report had a generous, even elastic interpretation of ‘reasonable' behaviour from a soldier in wartime. For example, the divisional commander who directed the torpedo attack from one of the boats, told the judge that he had not received an order at 1420 stating, ‘Do not attack. It is possible that the aircraft have not identified correctly.' Yerushalami observed that the order was entered into the log book of the divisional commander's vessel and into the war diary of the Naval Operations Branch. His deputy commander testified that he received the order and passed it to him. Yet the torpedo attack went ahead.

*   *   *

As well as Rusk and Clifford, many other senior American officials did not buy Israel's explanations. Richard Helms, the director of Central Intelligence in 1967, believed the attack was intentional: ‘No excuse can be found for saying it was just a mistake.' Lucius Battle, an assistant secretary of state in the Johnson administration, concluded there was a cover-up. Admiral Thomas Moorer, who later became chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that responsibility for the cover-up should be shared between the US government and the Israelis. He could not accept the Israeli claim of mistaken identity: ‘I have flown for many years in both war and peace on surveillance flights over the ocean, and my opinion is supported by a full career of locating and identifying ships at sea.'

Many of their doubts are based on the fact that the IDF seemed so efficient in everything else it did that it was inconceivable that it could make such a grotesque series of ‘mistakes' in broad daylight. Perhaps their view of the IDF in 1967 was wrong. It was daring, well organised and highly motivated. It was also used to fighting appallingly prepared and ill-led armies, which allowed it to get away with mistakes when they were made. Israeli fire discipline is another factor. It has always been sloppy. A serviceman on one of the motor torpedo boats that attacked the
Liberty
now accepts they were ‘inexperienced and probably a little trigger happy and it was a war zone'.

Still, if Israel did in fact know what it was doing when it destroyed an American ship, as so many veterans of the Johnson administration believed, why did it do what it did? Some theories revolve around the theme of collusion between Israel and the United States. They speculate that pro-Israel elements in the United States military had plotted with Israelis to create an incident that could draw the US into the war. Greg Reight, a former US air force man, claimed on a BBC documentary that he was part of a US photo-reconnaissance team that flew covert missions on behalf of the Israelis from a base in the Negev desert. The crews wore uniforms without badges and ‘there was a hurry-up paint job done to the aircraft so they would be like Israeli aircraft'. If his allegations are true, it means that Nasser's accusations of collusion between Israel and the US were correct.

For Assistant Secretary of State Lucius Battle the most likely explanation is that Israel feared the
Liberty
was ‘listening in to some conversations and other things that were going on that they didn't want us to know about … they had been engaged in some pretty outlandish stuff in the course of the war. I don't think they wanted us to know the detail of that.'

Kuwait

As the size of the defeat became clearer, Arab leaders started to feel vulnerable. The Amir of Kuwait seemed dazed when he received G. C. Arthur, the British ambassador. Arthur asked him for the latest on the fate of the Kuwaiti troops who had been sent to Egypt. ‘He said he had no idea. He did not seem to care.' Instead, he ‘kept asking what I thought would happen to King Hussein.' The Saudi ruling family had similar fears. The Amir said he did not believe that the British and the Americans had intervened on Israel's behalf. Perhaps he was starting to feel the need for Britain's well-established role as guarantor of his family's power. Kuwait had a big and hard-working Palestinian population. In the 1950s it included Yasser Arafat, who founded his faction Fatah there in 1957. Wealthy native Kuwaitis needed them but the Palestinians made them nervous. Before the fighting started, a serious suggestion was made in the National Assembly that Kuwait's contribution to the war effort could be to conscript its Palestinians and to send them into battle. British diplomats asked who would run the country in their absence. Twenty-four years later, after the Gulf War in 1991, the Kuwaitis seized their chance to expel thousands of Palestinians who had spent their lives in Kuwait, because of Yasser Arafat's support for Saddam Hussein.

Tel Aviv, 1900

General David Elazar, head of Israel's Northern Command, was ‘beside himself with anger and frustration'. On Thursday evening he went to Tel Aviv to see Rabin, to press yet again for the order to do to Syria what was being done to Egypt and Jordan. Elazar could not believe that Syria, Israel's most bitter enemy before the war, had not been attacked. It was now or never. If Syria was not dealt with, the war was over. Prime Minister Eshkol summoned the cabinet defence committee. They had to decide. Eshkol and most of the cabinet were in favour. Moshe Dayan argued the case against attacking Syria in what he called ‘the most extreme terms'. If Israel attacked Syria, he told them, it risked a war with the Soviet Union. Moscow would protect its friends in Damascus. A less than veiled threat had been made by the Soviet ambassador Sergei Chuvakhin on 6 June. He told the West German ambassador in Tel Aviv that Israel should stop its attacks immediately. If the Israelis, ‘drunk with success', did not, ‘the future of this little country will be a very sad one'. The West German, worried, passed the information straight to the Israelis, with a warning not to do anything more than seize the high ground near the border. America's ambassador Barbour thought the West Germans were getting over anxious. He thought the Israelis would penetrate twenty-five kilometres into Syria.

Much to Dayan's irritation, a deputation from the thirty-one front-line Jewish settlements close to the border with Syria was ushered into the cabinet room. They had been lobbying hard for war with Syria and now had the chance to argue their case in person. Dayan pretended they were not there. He ‘went to sit in the back of the room, put his feet up and fell asleep'. Yaakov Eshkoli, one of the kibbutz leaders, could see it would be risky to attack Moscow's closest ally in the region. But it was a risk worth taking. He told the cabinet that if the IDF did not push the Syrians out of the Heights that overlooked their settlements, he would tell all his people to pack their bags and leave. Levi Eshkol, the prime minister, and most of the other elderly men around the cabinet table were Zionists who had come to Palestine when they were young men fresh out of Eastern Europe. Many of them had spent their lives pushing out the frontier of the Jewish settlement by establishing pioneering communities in hostile areas that they made their own. The settlers' words hit home. Eshkoli saw some of the ministers wiping away tears after he and the others had spoken emotionally about how their families had been forced by shelling to spend days in shelters. But Dayan refused to allow an attack on Syria. He was not persuaded by the settlers, who he said later were just interested in grabbing good farmland.