USS Liberty, the rest of the story
Reader comment on item: The Soviets' Six-Day War
in response to reader comment: USS Liberty?

Submitted by Mike DeCastro (United States), May 30, 2007 at 17:16

Oh, brother. Now this is getting comical. More myths and absurd stories about the attack on the USS Liberty. Well, how about one more?

Since someone brought it up and you mentioned there is a chapter in the book about it, I thought you would be interested in this from the military history perspective. For what it's worth, I had an interesting conversation with a former NSA guy about the actual reason the USS Liberty was so savagely attacked by Israel in 1967 and why the Commander-in-chief recalled the US Navy strike fighters and submarine that were sent to defend the Liberty.

Apparently, a US sub photographed and videotaped the entire attack and was ready to torpedo the Israeli gunboats. The sub could not take out the aerial assaulters, of course. That was going to be the job of the carrier launched strike fighters. Anyway, LBJ called them all back and the Liberty was ordered to steam out of the area at best speed after she was brutally shot to hell. The torpedoes killed the three NSA guys on-board, for example. The White House and State decided to cut its losses with the Liberty crew rather than engage the IDF.

This is not all that unusual. Liberty, BTW, was operating very close to Sinai's northern shores and that's one reason why the IDF thought for sure they had intercepts of the embarrassing transmissions. There are other material facts that expose Israel's cover-up, some have been well documented. Others not so. Like the fact that US satellite intel sent to Israel showed that Egypt's spy ship was in dry dock during the war. This would have embarrassed the Israeli excuse that they mistook Liberty for an Egyptian vessel. I guess the American flag and the American radio hails and mayday calls were not evidence enough. I think the fact that the US ambassador called the Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's office about the attack while it was still going on with detailed coordinates of its location to receive denials from the IDF while the attack continued for another hour, has been already reported.

Anyway, the reason Liberty was attacked is that IDF thought her crew had sigint intercepts of IDF radio chatter that indicated the IDF was executing Egyptian prisoners. Which the IDF was doing, in fact. The war was moving too fast to bother with handling POWs at that particular phase. This action was repeated again during the most brutal and desperate days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. IDF units were summarily executing every Egyptian and Syrian they encountered. You must understand that Israel was very nearly annihilated both in '67 and '73. It was SOP to execute POWs until we had the upper hand and then to hold them for the eventual prisoner exchanges. War is a brutal and ugly affair and when your back is against the sea, you do what you must to survive and defeat an enemy that out-guns you by an order of magnitude.

During the YK War, for example, only the Soviet Spetznaz Strela teams were spared, for obvious reasons. We needed fast intel to devise countermeasures against those SA-7s. They were killing too many fighter-bombers. Anyway, this was not such a closely guarded secret during that war as the national consensus, as I'm sure you recall, was "payback is harsh!"

Anyway, turns out that the Liberty did not have the sigint that the IDF thought it had. They simply missed the intercepts regarding the POW executions. But, the Soviets did have it and had passed that along to the Egyptians. So, the Liberty attack was a totally unnecessary action to cover up sigint that did not actually exist, at least not on the USS Liberty.

Truth? Or, dare? The source is credible based on other things we discussed. It would account for why the NSA and USN are still so POed at Israel and why Jonathan Pollard will continue to rot in a US prison. It will take a lot of contrition and mea culpas from Israel to wipe away that bloodstain. War's harsh.

Another interesting bit of historical trivia. I had heard stories that Liberty was hit because it intercepted sigint and then transmitted it to Ft. Mead using methods and codes that the Soviets could read, therefore opening a back door to the Egyptians about IDF activity. This also was denied with creditability. Liberty was processing intel on-board and then transmitted to Ft. Mead using unbreakable microwave or microburst flash transmissions. The first bounces narrow-beam microwaves off the moon and then back to receivers at Ft. Mead. Virtually impossible to intercept. The second method was and has never been broken by the Soviets/Russians or anyone else. Another myth bites the dust.

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