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USS Liberty Incident Part 2 | |
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Editor's Note:
This is the second installment of a 2-part article
regarding the USS Liberty incident.
Israeli Pilot: This is an American ship [USS Liberty].
Do you still want us to attack?
Israeli Ground Control: Yes, follow orders
This is a blockbuster article that has largely been ignored
by the MSM. But we are proud to offer it to you in the
hopes that the truth shall set us all free.
Here is the link to the first part of article:
USS Liberty incident Part 1
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Did US and Israel Lie about the 1967 USS Liberty Incident?
Part 2
-By John Crewdson, Chicago Tribune senior correspondent
The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes,
way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to
attack," Block said. "The pilots said, 'This is an American
ship. Do you still want us to attack?'
"And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow
orders.'"
Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem
Post transcript was not at all like what they remember
reading.
"There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the
same as what I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point,
for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications]
procedures, that simply isn't the way pilots and
controllers communicate."
Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida,
observed that "the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly
identified the ship as American and asked for further
instructions from ground control appears to be a missing
part of that Jerusalem Post article."
Arieh O'Sullivan, the Post reporter who made the
newspaper's transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes
he listened to contained blank spaces. He said he assumed
those blank spaces occurred while Israeli pilots were
conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to
communicate.
'But sir, it's an American ship!'
Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to
have read transcripts of the attack that they said left no
doubt the Israelis knew they were attempting to sink a U.S.
Navy ship.
Many ears were tuned to the battles being fought in and
around the Sinai during the Six-Day War, including those
belonging to other Arab nations with a keen interest in
the outcome.
"I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that
day," said a retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition
that he not be named discussing a clandestine informant.
"He thought history would change its course," the CIA
officer recalled. "Israel attacking the U.S. He was
certain, listening in to the Israeli and American comms
[communications], that it was deliberate."
The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon
during the Six-Day War, told friends and family members
that he had been shown English-language transcripts of
Israeli pilots talking to their controllers.
A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the
Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of
the pilots protesting, "But sir, it's an American ship --
I can see the flag!' To which the ground control responded,
'Never mind; hit it!'"
Porter, who asked that his recollections not be made public
while he was alive because they involved classified
information, also discussed the transcripts during a lunch
in 2000 at the Cosmos Club in Washington with another
retired American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore, the former
U.S. ambassador to Qatar.
Kilgore recalled Porter saying that he "saw the telex, read
it, and passed it right back" to the embassy official who
had shown it to him. He quoted Porter as recalling that the
transcript showed "Israel was attacking, and they know it's
an American ship."
Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut
during the Six-Day War, said that although he never saw
the transcript, he had "heard on a number of occasions
exactly the story that you just told me about what that
transcript contained."
He had later been told, Smith recalled, "that ultimately
all of the transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that
they were deep-sixed because the administration did not
wish to embarrass the Israelis."
Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such
transcripts existed comes from the Israelis themselves,
in a pair of diplomatic cables sent by the Israeli
ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to Foreign
Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.
Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that
a source the Israelis code-named "Hamlet" was reporting
that the Americans had "clear proof that from a certain
stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and
continued the attack anyway."
Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising
Eban, who is now dead, that the White House was "very
angry," and that "the reason for this is that the Americans
probably have findings showing that our pilots indeed knew
that the ship was American."
According to a memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms,
President Johnson's personal anger was manifest when he
discovered the story of the Liberty attack on an inside
page of the next day's New York Times. Johnson barked that
"it should have been on the front page!"
Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the cables in
his recent book "1967," said other cables showed that
Harman's source for the second cable was Arthur Goldberg,
then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The cables, which have been declassified by the Israelis,
were obtained from the Israeli State Archive and translated
from Hebrew by the Tribune.
Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at
the time of the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of
NSA transcripts.
Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts,
Kirby replied, "I sure did. I certainly did."
"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled,
"whatever that meant -- I guess the sights or something.
And then one of them said, 'Can you see the flag?' They
said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.' They said it several times,
so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's mind that they knew
it."
Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts
were "something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing
to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."
One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives
of the U.S. Army's intelligence school, then located at Ft.
Holabird in Maryland.
W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight
years as chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defense
Intelligence Agency, said the transcripts were used as
"course material" in an advanced class for intelligence
officers on the clandestine interception of voice trans-
missions.
"The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had
the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had
been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the
U.S. flag," Lang recalled in an e-mail.
"The flight commander was reluctant," Lang said in a
subsequent interview. "That was very clear. He didn't want
to do this. He asked them a couple of times, 'Do you really
want me to do this?' I've remembered it ever since. It was
very striking. I've been harboring this memory for all
these years."
Key NSA tapes said missing
Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the
communications of the Israeli pilots who were attacking
the Liberty, Kirby, the retired senior NSA official,
replied, "We sure did."
On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of
Israeli communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of
the recordings is of the attack itself.
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Indeed, the declassified documents state that no recordings
of the "actual attack" exist, raising questions about the
source of the transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher,
Block, Porter, Lang and Kirby.
The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as "the
aftermath" of the attack -- Israeli communications with two
Israeli helicopters dispatched to rescue any survivors who
may have jumped into the water.
Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prostinak, a
Hebrew linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering
propeller-driven aircraft specially equipped to gather
electronic intelligence.
But Prostinak said he was certain that more than three
recordings were made that day.
"I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three
on the Internet," he said. "No doubt in my mind, more than
three tapes."
At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured
Israeli communications "in which people were not just
tranquil or taking care of business as normal. We knew that
something was being attacked," Prostinak said. "Everyone we
were listening to was excited. You know, it was an actual
attack. And during the attack was when mention of the
American flag was made."
Prostinak acknowledged that his Hebrew was not good enough
to understand every word being said, but that after the
mention of the American flag "the attack did continue. We
copied [recorded] it until we got completely out of range.
We got a great deal of it."
Charles Tiffany, the plane's navigator, remembers hearing
Prostinak on the plane's intercom system, shouting, "I got
something crazy on UHF," the radio frequency band used by
the Israeli Air Force.
"I'll never forget it to this day," said Tiffany, now a
retired Florida lawyer. He also remembers hearing the
plane's pilot ordering the NSA linguists to "start taping
everything."
Prostinak said he and the others aboard the plane had been
unaware of the Liberty's presence 15,000 feet below, but
had concluded that the Israelis' target must be an American
ship. "We knew that something was being attacked,"
Prostinak said.
After listening to the three recordings released by the
NSA, Prostinak said it was clear from the sequence in
which they were numbered that at least two tapes that had
once existed were not there.
One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local
time, just after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo.
Prostinak said there was a preceding tape, A1104/A-01.
That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack,
which began with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak
said a second tape, which preceded one beginning at
3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard the same plane,
also appeared to be missing.
As soon as the EC-121 landed at its base in Athens,
Prostinak said, all the tapes were rushed to an NSA
facility at the Athens airport where Hebrew translators
were standing by.
"We told them what we had, and they immediately took the
tapes and went to work," recalled Prostinak, who after
leaving the Navy became chief of police and then town
administrator for the village of Lake Waccamaw, N.C.
Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition
that he not be named, said he believed there had been as
many as "five or six" tapes recording the attack on the
Liberty or its aftermath.
Andrea Martino, the NSA's senior media adviser, did not
respond to a question about the apparent conflict between
the agency's assertion that there were no recordings of
the Israeli attack and the recollections of those inter-
viewed for this article.
U.S. inquiry widely criticized
Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel
had been attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested
in asking as few questions as possible and answering them
in record time.
Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock
in Malta, the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm.
John McCain Jr., the commander of U.S. naval forces in
Europe and father of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chose
Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.
The court's charge was narrow: to determine whether any
shortcomings on the part of the Liberty's crew had
contributed to the injuries and deaths that resulted from
the attack. McCain gave Kidd's investigators a week to
complete the job.
"That was a shock," recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward
Boston, the inquiry's counsel, who said he and Kidd had
estimated that a thorough inquiry would take six months.
"Everyone was kind of stunned that it was handled so
quickly and without much hullabaloo," said G. Patrick
March, then a member of McCain's staff in London.
Largely because of time constraints, Boston said, the
investigators were unable to question many of the
survivors, or to visit Israel and interview any Israelis
involved in the attack.
Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy's former judge advocate
general, was asked to assess the American inquiry's report
before it was sent to Washington. But Staring said it was
taken from him when he began to question some aspects of
the report. He describes it now as "a hasty, superficial,
incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry."
Staring, who is among those calling for a full
congressional investigation on behalf of the Liberty's
survivors, observed in an interview that the inquiry
report contained several "findings of fact" unsupported
by testimony or evidence.
One such finding ignored the testimony of several inquiry
witnesses that the American flag was flying during the
attack, and held that the "available evidence combines to
indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8 June was in fact a
case of mistaken identity."
There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry's report.
It does not include, for example, the testimony of a young
lieutenant, Lloyd Painter, who was serving as officer of
the deck when the attack began. Painter said he testified
that an Israeli torpedo boat "methodically machine-gunned
one of our life rafts" that had been put over the side by
crewmen preparing to abandon ship.
Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after
leaving the Navy, charged that his testimony about the
life rafts was purposely omitted.
Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain's one-week deadline
expired, Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry "and
flew back to Washington, and I went back to Naples," the
headquarters of the 6th Fleet.
"Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from
his office," Boston recalled in an interview. "In that deep
voice, he said, 'Ward, they aren't interested in the facts.
It's a political issue and we have to put a lid on it.
We've been ordered to shut up.'
"It's time for the truth to come out," declared Boston, who
is now 84. "There have been so many cover-ups."
"Someday the truth of this will come out," said Dennis
Eikleberry, a NSA technician aboard the Liberty. "Someday
it will, but we'll all be gone."
James Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just
before the attack began, and later spent two months in a
body cast, is one of the more vocal survivors. Like the
others, Ennes is tired of waiting.
"We want both sides to stop lying," he said.
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