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Facts about the ship herself can be found in the article USS Liberty (AGTR-5).
USS Liberty was an American intelligence ship which was attacked in international waters near the Sinai Peninsula, north of El Arish, by Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967 during the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab States. In all, 34 American servicemen were killed and 172 wounded in the attack.
Israel maintains, and the US government has formally accepted, that the incident was entirely due to error. Israel contends it was assured by the United States that no US ships were in the area, and that its air and naval forces wrongly identified the Liberty at various stages as a Russian intelligence ship providing information to the Arabs or as the Egyptian vessel "El Quseir," which is a horse carrier one-fourth the size of the Liberty.
The United States and Israel exchanged diplomatic notes after several inquiries, and the US accepted an indemnity of $13 million.
Surviving crew members, as well as a number of Western observers and former US government officials (including then CIA director Richard Helms), assert that the attack was premeditated and deliberate and that Israel knew the ship was American.
This incident stands as the only peacetime attack on a US naval vessel not investigated by Congress . The survivors want a full Congressional hearing; they hold that a proper investigation has never taken place and that all previous reports are incomplete, mention the incident in passing, and are intended to exonerate Israel. Among the theories presented as to why Israel carried out this action is that Israel may have been trying to get the US involved in the conflict on Israel's side, by convincing the US that Egypt was the aggressor.
USS Liberty (AGTR-5) was originally the 7725-ton civilian cargo ship Simmons Victory. She was acquired by the United States Navy, converted to an auxiliary technical research ship, and began her first deployment in 1965, to waters off the west coast of Africa. She carried out several more operations during the next two years. During the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab nations, she was sent to collect electronic intelligence in the eastern Mediterranean.
On the day the Six-Day War began, Israel had asked that the United States move its ships away from the Sinai coast or notify Israel of their locations. The United States had responded that it had no naval vessels in the area. Messages had been sent to Liberty warning it to come no closer than 100 miles to the Sinai coast. These messages were not received.
During the day preceding the attack, the ship was flown over by several aircraft. Their exact number and type is disputed; some of them are said to be Nord Noratlas "boxcars", a photograph presents a C-47 Dakota and yet other reports speak about Mirage III jet fighters. At least some of those fly-bys were from a close range. Many Liberty crewmen have given testimony that one of the aircraft flew so close to Liberty that her propellers rattled the deck plating of the ship and her pilots waved to the crew of the Liberty and her crewmen waved back.
The ship left the coast of Israel in the morning hours of June 8, 1967 and traveled westwards towards the coast of the Sinai Peninsula to monitor the fighting which was taking place. On the afternoon of that day the ship was steaming at about 5 knots (9 km/h) on the boundary of international and coastal waters approximately 13 miles (21 km) off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula near El-Arish.
The Israeli military had standing orders to attack any unidentified vessel near the shore. At about 2 p.m., Liberty was attacked by several aircraft, most probably two or three Mirage IIIs carrying cannon and rockets followed by Dassault Mysteres carrying napalm.
About twenty minutes after the attack of the aircraft, the ship was approached by three torpedo boats bearing Israeli flags and identification signs. Initially, Captain McGonagle, who perceived that the torpedo boats ordered a machine gun to engage the boats. After recognizing the Israeli standard and seeing apparent morse code signaling attempts by one of the boats (but being unable to see what was being sent, due to the smoke of the fire started by the earlier aircraft attack), McGonagle gave the order to hold fire. This order was apparently misunderstood in the confusion, and two heavy machine guns opened fire. Subsequently the Israeli boats opened fire and launched two torpedoes at Liberty (five, according to the 1982 IDF History Department report). One hit Liberty on the starboard side, forward of the superstructure, creating a large hole and causing the majority of the casualties for the incident. The torpedo boats may have approached Liberty and shot at crewmen on deck (see below for disputed details).
Eventually the torpedo boats withdrew from the area. The Israelis were afraid at first that they had attacked a Soviet ship, which might bring the Soviet Union into the war. When the ship was confirmed to have been American, the torpedo boats returned to offer help; it was refused by the American ship. About three hours after the attack, Israel informed the US embassy in Tel Aviv about the incident and provided a helicopter to fly a US naval attaché to the ship.
Though severely damaged, Liberty's crew kept her afloat, and she was able to leave the area under her own power. She was escorted to Malta by units of the US Sixth Fleet and was there given interim repairs. After these were completed in July 1967, Liberty returned to the United States. She was decommissioned in June 1968 and struck from the Naval Vessel Register. Liberty was transferred to MARAD in December 1970 and sold for scrap in 1973.
The events surrounding the attack, even very simple elements such as its duration, are a subject of fierce controversy. Among the disputed facts:
Three subsequent Israeli reports concluded that the attack was conducted because Liberty was confused with an Egyptian vessel and because of failures of communications between Israel and the US. The three Israeli commissions were:
The Israeli government admitted that three crucial errors were made: the refreshing of the status board (nullifying the ship's classification as American), the erroneous identification of the ship as an Egyptian vessel, and the lack of notification from the returning aircraft informing Israeli headquarters of markings on the front of the hull (markings that would not be found on an Egyptian ship). As the general root of these problems, Israel blames the combination of alarm and tiredness experienced by the Israeli troops at that point of the war.
On December 17, 1987, the issue was officially closed by the exchange of diplomatic notes between the US and Israel. Israel also eventually paid nearly US $13 million in humanitarian reparations to the United States and in compensation to the families of the victims.
Israel denied any accusations that the attack was deliberate due to the following arguments:
At least some of the survivors of Liberty have often claimed that the attack was premeditated. In particular, Jim Ennes, a junior officer on Liberty's bridge at the time of the attack, has published a book titled "Assault on the Liberty". Like virtually all accounts of the "Liberty" incident, it has come under heavy criticism by those disagreeing with its point of view.
Ennes and Joe Meadors, another survivor of the attack, run a web site that was built "with support and encouragement from the USS Liberty Veterans Association." Meadors states that the classification of the attack as deliberate is the official policy of the association, to which all known survivors belong. Other survivors run several additional websites.
Several books and a BBC documentary try to prove that USS Liberty was attacked on purpose. They are backed in this position by some representatives of the US intelligence community. Critics claim that many of them include incorrect assumptions and use fuzzy reasoning. As examples, they bring the claim that the ship was attacked to prevent the U.S. from knowing about the forthcoming attack in the Golan Heights, and applying a quote describing the execution of 5 Palestinian guerillas wearing Egyptian uniforms (an act allowed under rules of war) to "prove" the mass murder of 150 Egyptians. However, other killings of Egyptian captives were also reported in mainstream media sources (e.g. TIME, Oct. 2 1995), including an incident in which Retired General Arieh Biro admitted shooting prisoners, and the discovery in the Sinai of mass graves containing about 90 civilians and soldiers. When evaluating the merits of this theory, one must balance Israel's need to keep a possible war crime secret, versus the probably more serious consequences of attacking an ally.
For years some people have claimed that audio tapes existed of the Israeli pilots identifying the ship as American before they attacked. There are other conspiracy claims that the Liberty radio compartment made such interceptions and that the U.S. submarine Amberjack had gathered damning evidence during the attack by means of its periscope.
On July 2, 2003, as a result of US Florida Judge Jay Cristol lawsuit using the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Agency made two significant admissions: that there had been no radio intercepts made by USS Liberty, and that there had been no radio intercepts made by the US submarine Amberjack. The National Security Agency released copies of the recordings it made from an
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