USS Liberty incident
The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship,, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War. Both the Israeli and United States governments conducted inquiries and issued reports that concluded the attack was a mistake due to Israeli confusion about the ship's identity.
The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members, wounded 171 crew members, and severely damaged the ship. At the time, the ship was in international waters north of the Sinai Peninsula, about northwest from the Egyptian city of Arish.Israel apologized for the attack, saying that USS Liberty had been attacked in error after being mistaken for an Egyptian ship. Others, including survivors of the attack, dispute this account, and state that the attack was deliberate. Thomas Hinman Moorer, the 7th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused President Lyndon B. Johnson of having covered up that the attack was a deliberate act.
In May 1968, the Israeli government paid to the in compensation for the families of the 34 men killed in the attack. In March 1969, Israel paid a further $ to the men who had been wounded. In December 1980, it agreed to pay $ as the final settlement for material damage to the ship plus 13 years of interest.
USS ''Liberty''
was originally the light civilian cargo vessel Simmons Victory, a mass-produced, standard-design Victory ship, the follow-on series to the famous Liberty ships that supplied the Allies with cargo during World War II. It was acquired by the United States Navy and converted to an auxiliary technical research ship, a cover name for National Security Agency "spy ships" carrying out signals intelligence missions. It carried out five operations in waters off the west coast of Africa leading up to 1967.Attack on the ''Liberty''
Events leading to the attack
During the Six-Day War between Israel and several Arab nations, the United States maintained a neutral country status. Several days before the war began, USS Liberty was ordered to proceed to the eastern Mediterranean area to perform a signals intelligence collection mission in international waters near the north coast of Sinai, Egypt. After the war erupted, due to concerns about its safety as it approached its patrol area, several messages were sent to Liberty to increase its allowable closest point of approach to Egypt's and Israel's coasts from, respectively, to, and then later to for both countries, thereby reducing proximity. However, due to ineffective message handling and routing, these messages were not received until after the attack.According to Israeli sources, at the start of the war on 5 June, General Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Air Force chief of staff informed Commander Ernest Carl Castle, the American naval attaché in Tel Aviv, that Israel would defend its coast with every means at its disposal, including sinking unidentified ships. He asked the U.S. to keep its ships away from Israel's shore or at least inform Israel of their exact positions.
American sources said that no inquiry about ships in the area was made until after the attack on Liberty. In a message sent from U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk to U.S. Ambassador Walworth Barbour in Tel Aviv, Israel, Rusk asked for "urgent confirmation" of Israel's statement. Barbour responded: "No request for info on U.S. ships operating off Sinai was made until after Liberty incident." Further, Barbour stated: "Had Israelis made such an inquiry it would have been forwarded immediately to the chief of naval operations and other high naval commands and repeated to dept ."
With the outbreak of war, Captain William L. McGonagle of Liberty immediately asked Vice Admiral William I. Martin at the United States Sixth Fleet headquarters to send a destroyer to accompany Liberty and serve as its armed escort and as an auxiliary communications center. The following day, Admiral Martin replied: "Liberty is a clearly marked United States ship in international waters, not a participant in the conflict and not a reasonable subject for attack by any nation. Request denied." He promised, however, that in the unlikely event of an inadvertent attack, jet fighters from the Sixth Fleet would be overhead in ten minutes.
Meanwhile, at the United Nations on 6 June, U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg told the United Nations Security Council that vessels of the Sixth Fleet were several hundred miles from the conflict, in response to Egyptian complaints that the United States was supporting Israel in the conflict. When this statement was made, it was in fact true; Liberty, now assigned to the Sixth Fleet, was in the central Mediterranean Sea, passing between Libya and Crete. It would ultimately steam to about north of the Sinai Peninsula.
On the night of 7 June Washington time, early morning on 8 June, 01:10 Zulu or 03:10 local time, the Pentagon issued an order to Sixth Fleet headquarters to tell Liberty to come no closer than to Israel, Syria, or the Sinai coast. According to the Naval Court of Inquiry and the National Security Agency official history, the order to withdraw was not sent on the radio frequency that Liberty monitored for her orders until 15:25 Zulu, several hours after the attack, due to a long series of administrative and message routing problems. The Navy said a large volume of unrelated high-precedence traffic, including intelligence intercepts related to the conflict, were being handled at the time; and that this combined with a shortage of qualified radiomen contributed to the delayed transmission of the withdrawal message.
Visual contact
Official testimony combined with Libertys deck log establish that throughout the morning of the attack, 8 June, the ship was overflown, at various times and locations, by IAF aircraft. The primary aircraft type was the Nord Noratlas; there were also two unidentified delta-wing jets at about 09:00 Sinai time. Liberty crewmembers say that one of the Noratlas aircraft flew so close to Liberty that noise from its propellers rattled the ship's deck plating, and that the pilots and crewmembers waved to each other. It was later reported, based on information from IDF sources, that the over-flights were coincidental, and that the aircraft were hunting for Egyptian submarines that had been spotted near the coast.At about 05:45 Sinai time, a ship-sighting report was received at Israeli Central Coastal Command in respect of Liberty, identified by an aerial naval observer as "apparently a destroyer, sailing west of Gaza". The vessel's location was marked on a CCC control table, using a red marker, indicating an unidentified vessel. At about 06:00, the aerial naval observer, Major Uri Meretz, reported that the ship appeared to be a U.S. Navy supply ship; at about 09:00 the red marker was replaced with a green marker to indicate a neutral vessel. About the same time, an Israeli jet fighter pilot reported that a ship north of Arish had fired at his aircraft after he tried to identify the vessel. Israeli naval command dispatched two destroyers to investigate, but they were returned to their previous positions at 09:40 after doubts emerged during the pilot's debriefing. After the naval observer's Noratlas landed and he was debriefed, the ship he saw was further identified as USS Liberty, based on its "GTR-5" hull markings. USS Liberty marker was removed from CCC's Control Table at 11:00, due to its positional information being considered out of date.
At 11:24, the Israeli chief of naval operations received a report that Arish was being shelled from the sea. An inquiry into the source of the report was ordered to determine its validity. The report came from an air support officer in Arish. Additionally, at 11:27 the Israeli Supreme Command head of operations received a report stating that a ship had been shelling Arish, but the shells had fallen short. The Head of Operations ordered that the report be verified, and that it be determined whether or not Israeli Navy vessels were off the coast of Arish. At 11:45, another report arrived at Supreme Command saying two ships were approaching the Arish coast.
The shelling and ship reports were passed from Supreme Command to Fleet Operations control center. The chief of naval operations took them seriously, and at 12:05 torpedo boat Division 914 was ordered to patrol in the direction of Arish. Division 914, codenamed "Pagoda", was under the command of Commander Moshe Oren. It consisted of three torpedo boats numbered: T-203, T-204 and T-206. At 12:15, Division 914 received orders to patrol a position north of Arish. As Commander Oren headed toward Arish, he was informed by Naval Operations of the reported shelling of Arish and told that IAF aircraft would be dispatched to the area after the target had been detected. Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin was concerned that the supposed Egyptian shelling was the prelude to an amphibious landing that could outflank Israeli forces. Rabin reiterated the standing order to sink any unidentified ships in the area, but advised caution, as Soviet vessels were reportedly operating nearby. At 13:41, the torpedo boats detected an unknown vessel 20 miles northwest of Arish and off the coast of Bardawil. The ship's speed was estimated on their radars. The combat information center officer on T-204, Ensign Aharon Yifrah, reported to Oren that the target had been detected at a range of, that her speed had been tracked for a few minutes, after which he had determined that the target was moving westward at a speed of. These data were forwarded to the Fleet Operations control center.
The speed of the target was significant because it indicated that the target was a combat vessel. Moreover, Israeli forces had standing orders to fire on any unknown vessels sailing in the area at over, a speed which, at the time, could be attained only by warships. The chief of naval operations asked the torpedo boats to double-check their calculations. Yifrah twice recalculated and confirmed his assessment. A few minutes later, Commander Oren reported that the target, now from his position, was moving at a speed of on a different heading. Bamford, however, points out that Libertys top speed was far below 28 knots. His sources say that at the time of the attack Liberty was following her signal-intercept mission course along the northern Sinai coast, at about speed.
The data on the ship's speed, together with its direction, gave the impression that it was an Egyptian destroyer fleeing toward port after shelling Arish. The torpedo boats gave chase, but did not expect to overtake their target before it reached Egypt. Commander Oren requested that the Israeli Air Force dispatch aircraft to intercept. At 13:48, the chief of naval operations requested dispatch of fighter aircraft to the ship's location.
The IAF dispatched a flight of two Mirage III fighter jets codenamed Kursa flight which arrived at Liberty at about 14:00. The formation leader, Captain Iftach Spector, attempted to identify the ship. He radioed to one of the torpedo boats his observation that the ship looked like a military ship with one smokestack and one mast. He also communicated, in effect, that the ship appeared to him like a destroyer or another type of small ship. In a post-attack statement, the pilots said they saw no distinguishable markings or flag on the ship.
At this point, a recorded exchange took place between a command headquarters weapons systems officer, one of the air controllers, and the chief air controller questioning a possible American presence. Immediately after the exchange, at 13:57, the chief air controller, Lieutenant-Colonel Shmuel Kislev, cleared the Mirages to attack.