USS Liberty Incident - Ongoing Controversy and Unresolved Questions

Ongoing Controversy and Unresolved Questions

There are intelligence and military officials who dispute Israel's explanation.

Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the incident, wrote:

I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.

Retired naval Lieutenant Commander James Ennes, a junior officer (and off-going Officer of the Deck) on Liberty's bridge at the time of the attack, authored a book titled Assault on the Liberty describing the incident during the Six Day War in June 1967 and claiming, among other things, it was deliberate. Ennes and Joe Meadors, also survivors of the attack, run a website about the incident. Meadors states that the classification of the attack as deliberate is the official policy of the USS Liberty Veterans Association, to which survivors and other former crew members belong. Other survivors run several additional websites. Citing Ennes's book, Lenczowski notes: Liberty's personnel received firm orders not to say anything to anybody about the attack, and the naval inquiry was conducted in such a way as to earn it the name of "coverup".

In 2002, Captain Ward Boston, JAGC, U.S. Navy, senior counsel for the Court of Inquiry, claimed that the Court of Inquiry's findings were intended to cover up what was a deliberate attack by Israel on a ship it knew to be American. In 2004, in response to the publication of Jay Cristol’s book The Liberty Incident, which Boston claimed was an "insidious attempt to whitewash the facts" he prepared and signed an affidavit in which he claimed that Admiral Kidd had told him that the government ordered Kidd to falsely report that the attack was a mistake, and that he and Kidd both believed the attack was deliberate. On the issue Boston wrote, in part:

The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack, which killed 34 American sailors and injured 172 others, was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew. Each evening, after hearing testimony all day, we often spoke our private thoughts concerning what we had seen and heard. I recall Admiral Kidd repeatedly referring to the Israeli forces responsible for the attack as 'murderous bastards.' It was our shared belief, based on the documentary evidence and testimony we received first hand, that the Israeli attack was planned and deliberate, and could not possibly have been an accident.

Cristol wrote about Boston's professional qualifications and integrity, on page 149 of his book:

Boston brought two special assets in addition to his skill as a Navy lawyer. He had been a naval aviator in World War II and therefore had insight beyond that of one qualified only in the law. Also, Kidd knew him as a man of integrity. On an earlier matter Boston had been willing to bump heads with Kidd when Boston felt it was more important to do the right thing than to curry favor with the senior who would write his fitness report.

Cristol believes that Boston is not telling the truth about Kidd's views and any pressure from the U.S. government. A. Jay Cristol, who also served as an officer of the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General, suggests that Boston was responsible in part for the original conclusions of the Court of Inquiry, and that by later declaring that they were false he has admitted to "lying under oath." Cristol also notes that Boston's claims about pressure on Kidd were hearsay, and that Kidd was not alive to confirm or deny them. He also notes that Boston did not maintain prior to his affidavit and comments related to it that Kidd spoke of such instructions to him or to others. Finally, he provides a handwritten 1991 letter from Admiral Kidd that, according to Cristol, "suggest that Ward Boston has either a faulty memory or a vivid imagination".

The Anti-Defamation League supports Cristol's opinion:

... according to his own account, Boston's evidence of a cover-up derives not from his own part in the investigation but solely on alleged conversations with Admiral Kidd, who purportedly told him he was forced to find that the attack was unintentional. Kidd died in 1999 and there is no way to verify Boston's allegations. However, Cristol argues that the 'documentary record' strongly indicated that Kidd 'supported the validity of the findings of the Court of Inquiry to his dying day.'

However, according to James Ennes, Admiral Kidd urged him and his group to keep pressing for an open congressional probe.

The following arguments, found in official reports or other sources, were published to support that the attack was due to mistaken identity:

• Accidents do occur in wartime. According to journalist Ze'ev Schiff, the day before the attack on the Liberty, Israeli aircraft had bombed an Israeli armored column south of the West Bank town of Jenin, demonstrating such mistakes do happen.
• The incident took place during the Six Day War when Israel was engaged in battles with two Arab countries and preparing to attack a third, creating an environment where mistakes and confusion were prevalent. For example, at 11:45, a few hours before the attack, there was a large explosion on the shores of El-Arish followed by black smoke, probably caused by the destruction of an ammunition dump by retreating Egyptian forces. The Israeli army thought the area was being bombarded, and that an unidentified ship offshore was responsible. (According to U.S. sources, Liberty was 14 nmi (16 mi; 26 km) from those shores at the time of the explosion.)
• As the torpedo boats rapidly approached, Liberty opened fire on them. This was after the aerial attacks. At the inquiry, Commander McGonagle expressed that the torpedo boats appeared to be approaching in an attack formation. Thus, he sent a person to the forward machine gun to fire at them. After several shots were fired, McGonagle ordered cease fire. Then a machine gun on 03 level sounded like it was firing, but nobody was seen at the gun. McGonagle said that he felt sure the torpedo boat captains believed they were under fire from the Liberty. Ensign Lucas, the ship's gunnery officer who left the bridge shortly after the beginning of the air attack and then returned during the torpedo boat attack, testified that he gave permission for manned firing of the 03 level machine gun after the torpedo boats began firing at Liberty. Then, later when the gun was unmanned, heat from a nearby fire apparently caused machine gun rounds at the 03 level gun to explode.
• Admiral Shlomo Erell, former head of the Israeli Navy in 1967, states that no successful argument of benefit has been presented for Israel purposely attacking an American warship, especially considering the high cost of predictable complications that would follow after attacking a powerful ally, and the fact that Israel notified the American embassy immediately after the attack.

Several books and the BBC documentary USS Liberty: Dead in the Water argued that Liberty was attacked in order to prevent the U.S. from knowing about the forthcoming attack in the Golan Heights, which would violate a cease-fire to which Israel's government had agreed. However, Syria did not accept the cease fire until June 9, after the attack on Liberty. Russian author Joseph Daichman, in his book "History of the Mossad" states Israel was justified in attacking the Liberty. Israel knew that American radio signals were intercepted by the Soviet Union and that the Soviets would certainly inform Egypt of the fact that, by moving troops to the Golan Heights, Israel had left the Egyptian border undefended.

Lenczowski notes that while the Israeli decision to “attack and destroy” the ship “may appear puzzling”, the explanation seems to be found in Liberty's nature and its task to monitor communications on both sides in the war zone. He writes, “Israel clearly did not want the U.S. government to know too much about its dispositions for attacking Syria, initially planned for June 8, but postponed for 24 hours. It should be pointed out that the attack on the Liberty occurred on June 8, whereas on June 9 at 3 AM, Syria announced its acceptance of the cease-fire. Despite this, at 7 AM, that is, four hours later, Israel’s minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, “gave the order to go into action against Syria.” He further writes that timely knowledge of this decision and preparatory moves toward it “might have frustrated Israeli designs for the conquest of Syria’s Golan Heights” and, in the sense of Ennes’s accusations, provides “a plausible thesis that Israel deliberately decided to incapacitate the signals-collecting American ship and leave no one alive to tell the story of the attack.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Barbour, had reported on the day of the Liberty attack that he "would not be surprised" by an Israeli attack on Syria, and the IDF Intelligence chief told a White House aide then in Israel that "there still remained the Syria problem and perhaps it would be necessary to give Syria a blow."

The 1981 book Weapons by Russell Warren Howe asserts that Liberty was accompanied by the Polaris ballistic missile-armed armed Lafayette-class submarine USS Andrew Jackson, which filmed the entire episode through its periscope but was unable to provide assistance. According to Howe: "Two hundred feet below the ship, on a parallel course, was its 'shadow'—the Polaris strategic submarine Andrew Jackson, whose job was to take out all the Israeli long-range missile sites in the Negev if Tel Aviv decided to attack Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad. This was in order that Moscow would not have to perform this task itself and thus trigger World War Three."

James Bamford, a former ABC News producer, in his 2001 book Body of Secrets, proposes a different possible motive for a deliberate attack: to prevent the discovery of a massacre of 300 to 400 Egyptian prisoners of war by the IDF that was taking place around the same time in the nearby town of El-Arish.

The press release for the BBC documentary film Dead in the Water states that new recorded and other evidence suggests the attack was a "daring ploy by Israel to fake an Egyptian attack" to give America a reason to enter the war against Egypt. Convinced that that attack was real, President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson launched nuclear-armed planes targeted against Cairo from a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. The planes were recalled only just in time, when it was clear the Liberty had not sunk and that Israel had carried out the attack. An information source for the aircraft being nuclear-armed, James Ennes, later stated that he was probably wrong in his original book. According to Ennes, the planes were not nuclear-armed, but most likely armed with Bullpup missiles. The video also provides hearsay evidence of a covert alliance of U.S. and Israel intelligence agencies.

Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a critic of the official United States Government version of events, chaired a non-governmental investigation into the attack on the USS Liberty in 2003. The committee, which included former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia James E. Akins, held Israel to be culpable and suggested several theories for Israel's possible motives, including the desire to blame Egypt and bring the U.S. into the Six Day War.