The Liberty Incident Stuart Slade

One of the more controversial events of the 1960s was the israeli attack on the US Intelligence ship USS Liberty that was conducting intelligence operations off the Sinai coast when she was attacked by Israeli forces. Some of the controversy comes from allegations that the attack was deliberate and that the US colluded in it. In recent years, some of the signals pertaining to this tragedy have been released from the National Archives. This includes the Liberty's track chart and some intercepted Israeli messages. (ref-a)

The story of the attack on the USS Liberty started on June 2, 1967, when she left Rota in Spain for the Middle East. There, in addition to supplies, she had taken on three Marine Corps Arabic translators, augmenting the three NSA Russian-language experts already on board. At the time, she was operating under orders from the US Sixth Fleet to stay "outside an arc whose radius is 240 miles from [the Egyptian city of] Port Said." This is where the first error of judgement took place. Her handlers in the National Security Agency ignored the order and directed the ship to a point just outside Egypt's territorial waters, a mere 12.5 miles from Port Said. These orders were recently released by the National Archives and were apparently the result of a perceived need to intercept communications that were uninterceptable from the specified distance. The most significant of these were tactical dialogues between Egyptian officers and their Soviet advisers. At the time it was regarded as being essential to determine the depth of Soviet involvement in the Egyptian military operations (hence the embarkation of the additional translators).

On hearing of the decision by the NSA handlers, the US Navy sent a total of five subsequent cables from their European headquarters, instructing the USS Liberty to pull back to at least 100 miles. This is where the second glitch came in. Those messages (also released from the National Archives) were misrouted via the Philippines, and none reached the ship in time. In fact, the JCS' orders would not be received by the Liberty until June 9, by which time they would no longer be relevant. Whether the misrouting was an accident or an NSA effort to keep the ship on the close-in station longer remains unknown but there is strong circumstantial reason to believe that NSA had much to gain by such misrouting. The fact that the signals went via the Philippines is unchallenged; the interesting question is why and how.

Approaching the Sinai coast at dawn on June 6, the Liberty's skipper, Commander William L. McGonagle, was deeply concerned by the risk to his ship and requested a destroyer escort, only to be reminded by the commander of the Sixth Fleet that the "Liberty is a clearly marked United States ship in international waters ... and not a reasonable subject for attack by any nation." (National Archives) That's glitch number three. It should be noted that the naval war was not going well for Israel at this point. The failure of the Israeli navy's attacks on Egyptian and Syrian ports early in the war did little to assuage Israel's fears. There was a very real fear inthe Israeli command that Arab naval units (that outnumbered the Israeli fleet by 5:1) would launch attacks on the Israeli coast. Consequently, the IDF Chief of Staff, Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, informed the U.S. Naval Attach in Tel Aviv, Cmdr. Ernest Carl Castle, that Israel would defend its coast with every means at its disposal. Unidentified vessels would be sunk, Rabin advised; the United States should advise the Israelies of any ships operating in the area. The information provided by the US did not include the Liberty. While this was happening, Israel renewed its request that the United States assign a naval liaison officer to facilitate its communications with the US Navy. Previous to the outbreak of fighting, Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman had warned the White House that "if war breaks out, we would have no telephone number to call, no code for plane recognition, and no way to get in touch with the U.S. Sixth Fleet." The United States never approved the appointment of a liaison officer, nor did it inform Israel of the Liberty's arrival in the area. Thats glitch number four.

By June 8 the Liberty was patrolling between Port Said and Gaza, in a lane rarely used by commercial freighters and declared by Egypt as off-limits to neutral shipping. The track chart has also been released from the National Archives. It shows the Liberty starting from a position very close to the Egyptian coast and moving out to take up a racetrack pattern track off the Sinai coast. On June 8, just before six o'clock in the morning, an Israeli pilot reported finding a naval craft ("gray, bulky, with its bridge amidships") 70 miles west of Gaza. Note that Israeli pilots were not trained for maritime attack or recon and, like most pilots, a ship was a ship was a ship. Nevertheless although he did not report seeing a flag, he did make out the hull marking "GTR-5," which was enough for Israeli commanders to identify the ship as the USS Liberty and to mark it as a neutral vessel on their control board. Its worth noting that this was a manual plot, not a computerized system as we would use today for the same job. Manual control boards quickly become overloaded with data and have to be cleaned of old information regularly. (Ref b)

At eleven o'clock in the morning, the watch at Israeli naval headquarters changed. The new officers, following procedures for removing old information and assuming the Liberty had sailed away, cleaned the board. For Israeli forces, the Liberty had ceased to exist. Glitch number five and a biggie. This is the one that was the proximate cause of the disaster. The Israeli officers here were culpably negligent in that they should have made sure a known US warship was out of the conflict area, not just assumed it was so. Unfortunately, the Israelis back then made a big thing out of their contempt for the routines, practices and doctrines employed by more established armed forces. In fact, they derided such practices as being typical of hidebound reactionaries; the Israeli Military Forces didn't need all that nonsense about correct procedure. That attitude doomed Liberty.

Now the situation began to escalate very quickly. Less than a half-hour later, Israeli soldiers in the Sinai coastal town of El Arish heard a violent explosion. The cause was probably either a detonation in an ammunition dump or an expended munition cooking off. However, these were rear echelon soldiers, freshly recalled reservists and were on edge - which is a polite way of saying panicky. They assumed it was enemy action, artillery fire, and reported it as such. Glitch number six. Now we have the old wildfire scenario. Because the explosion was reported as artillery fire, people began to look for the source - which was unlikely to be on land due to the tactical circumstances. If you look for something hard enough, you'll find it even if it isn't there. So, when the Israelis saw a ship off the coast, they assumed it was the source of the artillery fire - a warship doing shore bombardment. Just to make life complex, both Egyptian and Israeli sources had reported shelling of the area by Egyptian warships the previous day. A check with the situation board showed no friendly units or neutral ships in the area so it had to be hostile. Glitch number seven. Again, sloppy, poorly-disciplined officers making assumptions they shouldn't. Another grievious fault for which they should be hung, drawn and quartered.

Rabin was seriously concerned that the shelling was a prelude to an amphibious landing that could outflank advancing Israeli troops. Since no fighter planes were available, the navy was asked to intercede, with the assumption that air cover would be provided later. More than half an hour passed without any response from naval headquarters in Haifa. The General Staff finally issued a rebuke: "The coast is being shelled and you - the navy - have done nothing." Capt. Izzy Rahav in the operations room, needed no more prodding. He dispatched three torpedo boats of the 914th squadron, code-named "Pagoda," to find the enemy vessel responsible for the bombardment and destroy it. The 914th consisted of three torpedo boats, the Peress, the Tahmass and the Yasoor. These were 60 ton craft built by France in the early 1950s (the last had entered service in 1956). They were armed with two 17.7 inch torpedo tubes, one 40 millimeter gun and four 20 millimeter weapons. They were powered by two Napier deltic diesels for a designed top speed of around 42 knots. By 1967, they were aging and had lost the top edge of their performance; their maximum speed was down to 36 knots in smooth water.

The commander of those craft, Commander Udi Erell, had rules of engagement that precluded him from engaging any ship doing less than 20 knots - which, in 1967 meant pretty well every merchant ship in the world. However, now we have the mentality of FAC guys coming in. They tend to be young, enthusiastic - and reckless. This commander interpreted "don't shoot at ships doing less than 20 knots" as "fire on any vessel going faster than 20 knots". Glitch 8 quickly followed by Glitch 9. FAC skippers don't really understand how much they get slowed down by even moderate seas when bigger ships don't. He was doing 35 knots but was only catching the target slowly. Ensign Aharon Yifrah, combat information officer aboard the flagship of these torpedo boats miscalculated their target's speed as 30 knots, not realizing sea conditions had slowed his real speed to around 25. Again we have the sloppy attitude of the Israeli Armed Forces entering the picture. A properly-kept track chart on the lead FAC would have shown something was not right with the picture. But keeping such charts is part of the administrivia that the Israelis affected to despise. Again, we also have to add in the attitude of the FAC commander. He WANTED that ship to be a legitimate target; the Israeli Navy was being overshadowed by the Army and Air Force and he wanted a victory. So he jumped to a wrong conclusion because that was a conclusion he wanted to jump to. Based on this false presumption, they prepared to attack. Ref - D

Now we have horrible coincidences joining errors of judgement and technical glitches. The Liberty reached the end of her patrol racetrack and turned onto bearing 238 - putting her course back toward Egypt. The FAC skippers saw this and assumed their target was running for home. Worried they would lose their prey, they reported to the sitrep room that their target was now fleeing for home.

Israeli naval commanders called up the air force and asked for help from whatever was available. What was available were two Mirages returning from a bombing strike, they were armed only with 30 millimeter cannons and air-to-air missiles and were very short on fuel. Had this been a deliberate attack they would have carried a warload better suited for attacking a ship. Making two passes at 3,000 feet, the formation commander reckoned that the ship was a "Z" or Hunt-class destroyer without the deck markings (a white cross on a red background) of the Israeli navy (which also operated both classes). The command pilot then spoke with air force commander Gen. Motti Hod, who asked him repeatedly whether he could see a flag. They failed to see either flags or markings on the ship. Not surprising, again these were pilots who were not trained for maritime operations and didn't have any knowledge of naval operations or ship recognition. History is replete with examples of such pilots grotesquely misidentifying ships; although this was an error, it cannot be held against the pilots.

After two low sweeps by the lead plane, at 1:58 p.m., the Mirages were cleared to attack. For want of anything more potent, they strafed the ship they saw. (by the way, its pure luck - good or ill - that they didn't shoot up the Israeli FAC - they just hit the first ship they saw). The first salvos caught the Liberty's crew in "stand-down" mode; several officers were sunning themselves on the deck, unaware of the Israeli jets bearing down on them. Before they could take shelter, rockets and 30-mm cannon shells stitched the ship from bow to stern, severing the antennas and setting oil drums on fire. Nine men were killed in the initial assault, and several times that number wounded, among them McGonagle.

Minutes later came a second group of planes, Super-Mysteres, equally ill-suited for a naval engagement. They had been diverted from a strike against Egyptian infantry positions and carried napalm (but had been diverted going out, not coming back so had a decent fuel reserve). They dropped their canisters and one set fire to the deck, enshrouding the ship in smoke. The air attacks lasted 14 minutes; by 2:20 the aircraft had finished with their assault.

It was at this junction that one Israeli pilot finally recognized Latin, not Arabic, letters on the hull. He made a desperate emergency call to the Israeli air controllers causing them to call off the action immediately. Now we have glitch ten. The Israeli communications system in 1967 was basically WW2 equipment that had been overhauled and modernized. It was already overloaded with running a fast-moving mobile war and , thanks to a breakdown in that communications system, the message to the Navy was caught in a backlog of calls waiting to go out. Classic case of too much flow down too small a pipeline. As a result, the order was very long delayed in reaching the navy; it finally made it to the FACs just after 4:00 pm. ref e

It is at this point that we have a minor mystery. One of the major claims is that the Israelies were jamming US radio frequencies in order to prevent calls from help getting out. If true, this would be powerful evidence to suggest that the attackw as deliberate. There are, however, serious problems with this assertion. Firstly, the Liberty was a specialist electronic warfare ship and carried advanced ECCM equipment; it is hard to see how she could have been closed down so comprehensively. Secondly, the Israeli capability in EW at this time was virtually non-existant; neither aircraft nor the torpedo boats carried any ECM equipment. Thirdly, the communications equipment on the Liberty was such that jamming equipment would have to be placed within a series of carefully-defined positions relative to the ship and fourthly, any jamming capable of taking down US Navy communications so comprehensively would have affected a wide area. No such jamming was reported anywhere else by anybody. This leaves only three possible explanations for the alleged jamming (1) The crewmen on Liberty who reported such jamming are lying, (2) the reports that crewmen made such claims are fabricated or (3) whatever happened wasn't jamming. If we discount (1) we are left with either fabrication or something else. The accusations made against the Israelies feature extensive fabrication so (2) is certainly possible but the most likely explanation is that the Liberty had already been strafed and napalmed with over 800 holes in her. The entire superstructure of the ship, from the main deck to the bridge, was aflame.The "jamming" was probably simply battle damage that had knocked out the ships wave guides and antennas.

There now followed a lull in the action that lasted for 24 minutes while the Israeli torpedo boats caught up with the Liberty. Think about the geometry of this. They are sailing out to attack a ship offshore that has just turned away from them. That means they are in a tail chase. Now the Liberty was rated at 17.7 knots - lets say she had cranked up her engines and was doing 16. The Israeli FAC are rated at 40 knots - meaning at best the closing speed is 24 knots. However, in any sort of rough sea its unlikely they were doing more than 30 knots and possibly were down to 25. So that gives us a closing speed of (at best) 16 knots and possibly as little as 8. However, at those speeds, the FAC are bouncing all over the place and are throwing up large clouds of spray. The vibration is intense and the noise is deafening. Incidently, these are not the modern 200 - 400 ton, 56-meter missile craft, they are 70 foot MTBs, 10 feet shorter than a US WW2 PT boat (albeit somewhat heavier that the 35 - 45 ton PT boats). Ref f

Now its reasonable to assume the Liberty had her stern to the FAC. Think about this. The Flag is at the stern, the ship is heading away from the FAC that are chasing her from astern. That means they are seeing the Flag (if they see it at all) edge-on from the rear. Their only hope of recognizing it is if it flutters from side to side. So to state the Israelies must have seen the Flag, we have to ask the two guys on the bridge to recognize a fluttering flag edge-on from a range of 4 to 8 miles from a 60 ton speedboat bouncing around in a cloud of spray while being shaken to pieces by two 4,000 shaft horsepower diesels running flat out. Now add in that the Liberty had been hit by a tank of napalm and was burning - in other words there were clouds of black smoke around her making visibility intermittant. Suddenly, it doesn't seem so easy does it? ref g

At this point the Israeli flagship signaled "AA" - "identify yourself." Due to damaged equipment, McGonagle could only reply in kind, AA, with a hand-held Aldis lamp. Now we have a weird coincidence - Udi Erell's father had been in command of a 1956 operation where the Israeli Navy had captured the Egyptian destroyer Ibrahim al-Awwal. This ship had tried to pose as a neutral ship when the israeli force closed in and had also replied to the interrogatory AA by responding with a repeat AA. There is little doubt Udi Erell was familiar with that story as family history and was sure that he now faced an enemy ship.

Now we have another glitch, number 11. One of the American sailors on board, disregarded Captain McGonagle's order not to fire on the approaching craft, and opened up with a deck gun. (ref h) Another machinegun opened fire by itself when fired cooked off its ready-use ammunition. Erell repeatedly requested permission from naval headquarters to return fire. Rahav finally approved.

The Israeli FAC skipper also jumped to the assumption that the ship in front of him was Egyptian (Glitch 12), consulted his intelligence manual, identified it as the Egyptian naval freighter El Quseir, This identification has been criticised on grounds that the El Quseir was smaller than the Liberty and lacked her distinctive antennas. In reality, the El Quseir was laid up in Alexandria and its asserted (without proof) that "the Israelies must have known that". Its also pointed out (quite correctly) that the Israeli FAC had a copy of JFS on board. Consulting a copy of the relevent edition of that publication, it does indeed list both Liberty and El Quseir - but includes photographs of neither. Rather pathetically, those who dispute the identification point out that the El Quseir was painted silver rather than the Liberty's Haze Gray. In reality, under the circumstances prevailing, telling the difference between dirty silver and shiny gray is very hard - especially since both would have taken on a blue tinge by reflection from the surrounding sea and sky. However, all thats irrelevent since we now have Glitch 13 - he wasn't trying to find out "which ship is this" he was looking for "which Egyptian Ship looks most like the one in front of me"

The FAC commander elected to fire torpedoes. Now lets look at those torpedoes. They are not modern 21 inch jobs. The FAC in question were armed with World War Two ex-Italian 17.7 inch torpedoes. These had a 440 pound warhead and had a speed of 30 knots to 8,000 meters (ref i) . Distinctly lacking in range speed and striking power. Also unguided; there is no way a torpedo like that is aimed at any specific part of the ship. At 2:45 the Israeli FAC fired five torpedoes at a range of 6,000 meters for a single hit at around 2:50. This killed 25 men almost all of them from the intelligence section.

The torpedo boats then closed in and from 3:00 onwards circled the ship, from the stern spraying it with 20 millimeter and 40 millimeter gunfire. When they reached the bows, the captain of one boat saw "GTR-5" on the hull. He immediately halted fire, extended help to the Liberty, and called for rescue helicopters. For the first time in the whole stupid story somebody did something right. Two Israeli Helicopters reached the Liberty and offered assistance. Erell, shouting through a bullhorn, also tried to communicate with the ship but Captain McGonagle refused to respond. Realizing, finally, that his assailants had been Israeli, he flagged the torpedo boats away and made a gesture that the Israelies describe as "obscene, but under the circumstances, understandable". By 5:05 p.m., the Israelis had broken off contact, and the Liberty, navigating virtually without systems, with 34 dead and 171 wounded aboard, staggered out to sea.

I must make it quite clear that I do not condone the Israeli conduct in this affair; their performance was lacking even the earliest signs of competance and their professional negligence was profoundly culpable. They screwed up royally and deserve all the blame that can be ladled over their brainless heads. But they didn't do it deliberately. 13 bad mistakes, errors of judgement and horrible coincidences. Its right to be enraged with the Israelis for their sloppy staffwork, lax procedures and inattention to detail caused them to launch an attack against a neutral ship. It is indeed with them that the ultimate blame lies for it is the Israeli disregard for careful procedure and their deliberate neglect of proper administration that caused the disaster. Their arrogant assumption that they alone had the secret of how to run a modern war and nobody else knew any part of it was largely to blame for the tragedy. Martin Van Creveld describes the Israeli attitude to proper procedure and to administrative advice as being arrogant bordering on boorish and frequently deliberately bullying, rude and offensive. (ref j) The US Navy also has some share of the blame for there should have been a liaison officer to provide a direct point of contact. Even after she was hit, the Americans had difficulty locating the Liberty, the JCS placing it at "60-100 miles north of Egypt." If neither the US Navy nor even the President of the United States could know where the Liberty was, it seems unreasonable to expect that the Israelis, in the thick of battle, should have been able to locate it. The NSA must carry its share for keeping the ship dangerously close to the enemy coast and ignoring navy advice.

Was there a conspiracy? There was certainly a cover-up but it was of incompetence and misjudgement rather than collusion. If the NSA had a hand in misrouting the movement orders, that also was covered up. The gaping hole in the whole Israeli deliberate attack/US cover-up hypothesis reamins unaddressed. Why? Attempts to provide a rationale behind any such deliberate attack have all been easily and comprehensively discredited. But, in truth, the Israeli culpability is so great that it doesn't need a far-fetched conspiracy to increase it further. The incredibly amateurish behavior of their command structure (and their arrogant refusal to accept that they had things to learn) is explanation enough and damning enough. In a weird way, the Israelies could be considered less culpable if they had performed a deliberate attack; then, at least, they would have been acting in the interests of their state rather than through sheer blundering ineptitude.

A year later the destroyer Eilat was sunk by the same combination of blundering incompetence, stupidity and arrogance (three Egyptian missiles had something to do with it as well). (ref k) . Indeed, for those investigating the attack on Liberty, the command disasters involved in the sinking of the Eilat should be required reading. The same factors of boorish arrogance, incompetence, inadequate command control, defective equipment and long-delayed communications make their miserable appearnace.

Six years after the Liberty incident, another Israeli Navy warship, the Miznak went into action. She was on her way to assist Hanit that had run aground on a sandbar off the Sinai coast. The captain (Captain Barkai) gave orders for the Miznak to keep out of a 45 kilometer circle around Port Said due to the danger of missile attack. He then went to his cabin and slept. The second in command (Udi Erell) was duty officer in the CIC. He was dozing in the CIC Ops Chair when he was struck by the silence in room. The Ops crew were asleep. Worse, the Miznak was heading on a straight line for Port said and was already well within the 45 kilometer danger zone. EW was off, the radar watch was asleep, helm was asleep. And the instruments were telling the crew that Egyptian missile craft were coming out of port. Commander Erell literally kicked the CIC crew into wakefulness as Captain Moshe Tabak, the group commander sent an in-clear radio warning of an impending attack (in clear because Miznak had not responded to coded radio signals - cypher room was asleep as well). Udi Erell slammed the throttles forward personally and swung the boat through 180 degrees. As he did so he saw the launch signature of P-15 missiles on the horizon. Four P-15s had been fired by two Project 183R (Komar) FAC-M and were already on their way. One went into the sea when its gyros tumbled, a second went into the sea far astern, the third overshot and landed in the sea three miles ahead of Miznak and the fourth exploded in the sea 100 meters aft of Miznak. (ref l)

Why is this incident so significant? Note the name of the operations officer on Mizhak - Udi Erell. In 1967 he had commanded a squadron of three FAC. Six years later, in 1973, he had been demoted to the ops officer of one such craft. Yet Udi Erell is the son of Shlomo Erell, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Navy. Despite being VIP's son, the Israeli Navy really busted Udi Erell's chops. If it was a conspiracy they'd have found somebody else less well-connected to be the scapegoat.

References:

Ref a - Documents relating to the Liberty incident - papers released from the National Archives. This includes the Liberty track chart, transcripts of the Liberty signal log, intercepts of Israeli signals and statements by crew and captain. In short, the bulk of the declassified US official documentation.

Ref b The Sword and the Olive by Martin van Creveld. This places great stress on the total obsolescence of the Israeli C3I system and the very poor command structure of the Israeli armed forces.

Ref c Information from the Israeli side taken from evidence given at enquiries on the Liberty attack.

Ref d Boats of Cherbourg by Abraham Rabinovitch details the Israeli Navy;s appalling discipline and sloppy incompetance. The comments are all the more devastating because the author doesn't realize the impact of the matters he's relating.

ref f Again, The Sword and The Olive details the hopelessly bad command structure of the Israeli Armed Forces.

Ref f Janes Fighting Ships 1966 - 67. 3 of Israel's FAC were old RN boats built in 1942, six were French built in 1950 and the most modern were three built in Italy in 1956

ref g This is a point anybody with a speedboat can check for themselves.

ref h Captain McGonagle's statement to the Liberty Enquiry. National Archives.

ref i Bagnasco Submarines of WW2 for details of these torpedoes.

Ref j The Sword and the Olive by Martin van Creveld. It should be noted that four of Van Creveld's sons have served in the IDF.

ref k Boats of Cherbourg by Abraham Rabinovitch The sheer incompetence surrounding the sinking of the Eilat is breathtaking - but another story. I believe that a US or UK skipper losing his ship in such a manner would be charged with manslaughter.

Ref l Boats of Cherbourg by Abraham Rabinovitch (again). The Miznak story defies belief. Its impossible to conceive of any professional navy (or most amateur ones) behaving in such a manner. The story is given veracity by Rabinovitchs treatment of the events - his cast being it showed how hard the Israeli Navy was fighting. Van Creveld shows in The Sword and the Olive that even by 1973, the basic problems with the IDF command structure had not been fixed.