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USS Liberty: Historians Debate

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Editor's Note: The publication of James Bamford's Body of Secrets has sparked a vigorous debate among historians concerning the attack on the USS Liberty. Following are excerpts from one recent debate conducted by the members of H Diplo, a listserv run by the University of Michigan under the general heading, H Net (Humanities Network).

ERIC BERGERUD
Mr. Bergerud is a professor of history at Lincoln University in Oakland, California and the author of several books on military history.

The July 23 issue of The New Republic includes a blistering attack on James Bamford's recent account of the Liberty incident by an Israeli scholar Michael Oren. Oren is presently writing a book on the Six Day War. If Oren is right, Bamford committed astounding errors in research, and some of Oren's most damaging evidence comes from Bamford's most important sources. I doubt this will be the last word, but anyone interested in the tragedy should check this one out.

[Editor's Note: Click here to read Mr. Bamford's response to the New Republic review.]

EDWIN MOISE
Mr. Moise is professor of history at Clemson University and the author of a book about the Tonkin Gulf incident.

I have read the chapter on the Liberty incident in Bamford's book, and also Oren's article attacking Bamford. I find Bamford more persuasive.

An example of the reasons, starting with Oren's discussion of Bamford's handling of the testimony of Marvin Nowicki, who was aboard a U.S. intelligence aircraft that was listening to, and recording, Israeli radio communications during the incident."...spliced into Nowicki's account are bloodthirsty quotes from Israeli pilots, as if Bamford were in possession of the spy plane's tapes. But the quotes were snipped, out of context, from a transcript of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) communications made available to a 1987 Thames Television special on the Liberty. That very same transcript proved that the pilots went to great lengths to identify the ship and took considerable risks to rescue its survivors, whom they assumed were Egyptians."

Problems with this passage: 1) I cannot find any quotes from Israeli pilots spliced into Nowicki's account. 2) When Bamford does quote Israeli pilots (in other sections, not spliced into Nowicki's account), he gives source notes clearly indicating that he got these quotes from the Thames Television transcript, not by being in possession of the spy plane's tapes. 3) I don't believe the last sentence of the passage I have quoted.

A topic like the attack on the Liberty really calls for a super-careful author, and Bamford isn't one. (I have not gotten any reply to the e-mail I sent him more than three weeks ago, pointing out a couple of minor errors in other chapters of his book, and also requesting that in future printings of the book my name be given as Edwin Moise, not Edwin Morse.) I would be prepared to consider the possibility that Bamford may be very seriously wrong in his interpretation of the attack. But he is fairly convincing. Oren is far more careless with facts than Bamford is, and not at all convincing.

ERIC BERGERUD

I am not up to picking an argument with Prof. Moise or anyone else concerning the details of the Liberty incident. Perhaps Oren will have more detail when his book about the Six Day War comes out. Perhaps not.

Oren does raise very interesting questions concerning motive, however. Anyone trying to explain the Liberty tragedy has to come up with a logical answer to the obvious question of why Israel would attack an American vessel. The damage done to Israel could have been severe, so what did they hope to gain? If Oren is right (and this does strike me as correct) the theory that Tel Aviv was trying to hide the attack on the Golan does not fit the Liberty chronology. Bamford argued that the IDF was desperate to cover up a massive war crime - the ongoing execution of about 1,000 Egyptian POWs. This strikes me as very unlikely. I doubt an incident of this scale took place at all. And, if it did, why would Israel take such a desperate step to keep the US from learning about it? Did they think Washington was going to release the tapes confirming a massive war crime to the world press? Would IDF or Israeli leaders have time to make such considerations? I have serious doubts.

I admit that the chronology of events as I understand them makes things look very bad for the IDF. But there still does not seem to be an obvious motive for such a brazen attack if done intentionally. From where I sit, we must choose between two very unlikely scenarios. No historian likes that.

PIERO GLEIJESES
Mr. Gleijeses is professor of US Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS)

In response to the review of Bamford's book in the New York Times I wrote the following letter to the editor. It was not published, but the readers of this thread in H-diplo might find it relevant.

To the Editor:

In his review of James Bamford's Body of Secrets(April 29), Joseph Finder charges that the author sides"rather too credulously" with the" conspiracy theorists" who allege that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) knew that the Liberty was an American ship before attacking it in 1967, causing the deaths of thirty-four Americans.

In fact, Bamford is in good company.

In 1967, the US naval attache in Tel Aviv expressed utter"incredulity" at the Israeli claim that the IDF had confused the Liberty with the Egyptian ship El Queir. (Office of the Defense Attache to White House, June 18, 1967, LBJ Library)

Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was Chief of Naval Operations in 1967 and later chair of the JCS, agreed."To suggest that they [the IDF] couldn't identify the ship is ... ridiculous. ... Anybody who could not identify the Liberty could not tell the difference between the White House and the Washington Monument." (Washington Post, June 15, 1991, p. 14)

Johnson's biographer Robert Dallek writes that"the highest officials of the [Johnson] administration, including the President, believed it 'inconceivable' that Israel's 'skilled' defense forces could have committed such a gross error." (Flawed Giant, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 430-31)

Clark Clifford was asked by LBJ to chair a special investigation of the attack. His report, which is still classified, concluded that"it was impossible" that the Israelis had mistaken the Liberty for the El Queir."Having been for so long a staunch supporter of Israel," Clifford wrote in his memoirs,"I was particularly troubled by this incident. ...Somewhere inside the Israeli government, somewhere along the chain of command, something had gone terribly wrong -- and then had been covered up." (Counsel to the President, Random House, 1991, pp. 446-47) Perhaps Finder is mistaken when he suggests that Bamford's analysis was"skewed by his palpable distaste for the Israeli state."

ROBERT HANKS
Mr. Hanks is the manager of the H Diplo listserv.

In spite of the cult of precision bombing that pervades military thinking, there have been numerous examples of"friendly fire" or"mistaken identities" in modern military history.

These include:

  • notoriously inaccurate shell fire in the trenches during the First World War
  • American planes bombing their own troops in Normandy during the Second World War
  • Iraq hitting an American ship in the Persian Gulf with an Exocet missile in the mistaken belief that it was an Iranian vessel (this at a time when Iraq and the USA were still allies)
  • "friendly fire" by coalition bombers on American and British ground troops during the Persian Gulf war
  • the American bombing of the Chinese embassy during the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia Given the persistence of this problem, can we automatically rule out Israeli claims that the bombing of the USS Liberty was an accident? Until someone can definitively demonstrate what Israel stood to gain by attacking the neutral ship of a superpower while it was engaged in war, we should be guided by the principle of Occam's razor - namely, that the simplest explanation is usually the best one.

    ERIC BERGERUD

    I could add dozens of friendly fire incidents to the list provided by Mr. Hanks from every war the US has participated in during this century. Indeed, I have long concluded that absolutely anything can happen in the upside down world of military combat. And no military, regardless of quality, is immune.

    I found one detail of Oren's piece in the New Republic to be very interesting if true. He notes that IDF aircraft attacked at the request of the Israeli Navy and that they carried napalm and cannon. An earlier contributor played down the signicance of this, but Oren's point was actually a good one. If you want to sink a ship with air attack, you would use bombs. Napalm is a nasty weapon and would cause damage, but it wouldn't penetrate into the ship's innards which is what one would want if one meant to sink a vessel the size of Liberty. Strafing with cannon would kill crewmen but not sink a blue water vessel. Now the IDF had a plentiful supply of HE bombs - why wouldn't they have used then?

    What was the motive for Israel? At what level was the decision made? Anyone suggesting that the Israeli government ordered the destruction of a US ship must confront these issues.

    R. JOHN PRITCHARD
    Mr. Pritchard is an historian and international criminal lawyer who for more than 30 years has specialized in the misconduct of war and the history and jurisprudence of war crimes trials.

    In response to Eric Bergerud's observations, the length and closeness of the aerial reconnaissance that preceded the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, reconnaissance carried out over a period of hours by a variety of Israeli aircraft who circled the Liberty, on one occasion at an estimated altitude of 200 feet, makes it appear improbable that the vessel was mistaken for an Egyptian horsecarrier of half its size, nothing like the configuration of the Liberty, and known to be incapable of setting out to sea at all. The duration and persistence of the aerial and sea-borne attacks that were carried out at very close range in perfect visibility during daylight hours also makes it most improbable that the ship was unidentified when the configuration of the vessel, its huge hull numbers, its name on emblazoned on its stern, the unmistakable and very large holiday ensign that was hauled up as soon as the spanking new flag that had been flying was shot away in the initial attack, all suggest to me that the attack was not the result of mistaken identification. The survivors have told us that the attack was preceded by six hours of low-level aerial surveillance, that their ship was approached, circled or buzzed by photo-reconnaissance aircraft no less than thirteen times. There was no mist, no clouds, no smoke to impede their views on a bright day over calm seas, with enough breeze to make the flag flying on the vessel maximally visible to every eye and camera trained on the ship.

    Eric Bergerud is right that straffing the Liberty-- with 30mm cannon fire from attacking jets, 20mm cannon fire and heavy machine gun fire from the PT boats -- would not have led to the loss of the vessel unless it had caused an almighty explosion in the engineering spaces of the ship. However, the napalming of the bridge and decks which took place early in the attack, coupled with the firing of dozens of rockets into the ship (which was, afterall, never built to survive such damage), must be considered strong evidence of a determined intention to inflict mortal wounds upon the ship and her company. Eyewitnesses from the ship's company describe how the napalm appeared to be sucked into the eight-inch holes punched through the decks and superstructures by the rocket fire, increasing the devastation within the ship. The launching of torpedoes at the vessel, from PT boats that appeared on the scene only after the aerial attacks had ceased, provides further evidence of an intention to kill the ship. Blowing a 39-foot hole below the water amidships of an elderly liberty hull can hardly be explained as anything other than an intention to send the vessel to the bottom of the sea. The electronics of the ship and its superstructure were state-of-the-art high tech of the day, and there had been alterations in the crew's quarters and working spaces, of course, but the hull was that of a 22-year-old Second World War freighter.

    The failure of the IDF to use HE bombs is probative of nothing at all. The Israeli stocks of HE bombs suitable for attachment to the Mirages and Super Mysteres were not inexhaustible. Only luck and seamanship of a remarkably high order plus the eventual arrival of other ships that belatedly came to the rescue finally saved the day. The crewmen have speculated but do not know whether the troop-carrying chopper that the Israelis sent in at the end were tasked with killing survivors, extracting documents and electronic equipment, or were expected to supply medical assistance. My understanding is that the survivors thought the men they saw in the chopper looked like commandos armed to the teeth. If that's not so, then let's see compelling evidence to the contrary.

    And if the attack was the result of an honest mistake or of a series of honest mistakes, then why did the PT boats circle around the vessel pouring machine gun and cannon fire into survivors who came topside in response to orders to prepare to abandon ship as her list increased to within what I'm given to understand was within two or three degrees of capsizing? Why did they riddle the hull just above the water line in what appeared to be an intent to blow up the ship's engines and high-temperature boilers? Why did they pour gunfire into the ship's liferafts apart from the only one the crewmen managed to get over the side and which one of the PT boats hooked and dragged off with them as they departed, leaving the remaining survivors and dying to whatever fate might befall them as the fires continued to rage?

    Is it plausible to believe that an attack on a defenseless and neutral naval vessel, preceded by hours of surveillance and involving elements of at least two and probably three arms of the IDF must have taken place without the knowledge and consent of the highest levels of the Israeli military command and without the knowledge of any responsible members of the Israeli Government?

    I just don't find that credible. This message is written prior to the broadcast of the History Channel documentary this week. Perhaps it will shed completely new light on the incident. That would be most welcome.

    JOE MEADORS
    Mr. Meadors was a member of the crew of the Liberty at the time of the attack.

    Eric Bergerud wrote:

    "Napalm is a nasty weapon and would cause damage, but it wouldn't penetrate into the ship's innards which is what one would want if one meant to sink a vessel the size of Liberty. Strafing with cannon would kill crewmen but not sink a blue water vessel."

    To speak hypothetically for a moment, if the intent of an attacking force was to sink the ship, ensure there are no survivors and ensure that the attack was conducted without allowing any call for rescue to be sent from the ship, those are the armaments an attacking force would use.

    The rocket, cannon and machine gun fire from the initial wave of high-speed attacking jets would destroy antenna mounts and defensive capabilities.

    Slower aircraft would drop napalm on the ship to drive the crew belowdecks. The napalm runs would be followed by additional passes over the ship while firing with cannon, rockets and machine guns.

    Torpedo boats would attack with torpedoes, circle the ship while firing from close range upon anyone who ventured topside, deliberately destroy any life rafts the ship's crew had dropped over the side in anticipation of abandoning ship and then depart the scene immediately.

    To move this response out of the realm of the hypothetical and onto that of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, Lloyd Painter testified before the US Navy Court of Inquiry about his witnessing the deliberate machine gunning of the Liberty's life rafts in the water. When the US Navy released the Court of Inquiry Report to the public they did so after removing Painter's testimony from the record.


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    R Etting - 7/21/2003

    Researcher: Tapes show attack was accident
    Obtains transcripts in '67 Israeli strike on US spy ship

    By Peter Enav, Associated Press, 7/10/2003

    JERUSALEM -- Newly declassified transcripts back up Israel's claim that its attack on a US spy ship during the 1967 Middle East war was an accident, a Florida judge who has been investigating the case for 16 years said yesterday.

    Israel has always maintained it thought the USS Liberty was an Egyptian military supply ship when it ordered its forces to attack on June 8, 1967, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 171. But critics charge Israel knew the ship was American. Questions about the case have long dogged US-Israel relations.

    Miami Judge A. Jay Cristol received transcripts of transmissions from two Israeli helicopter pilots, sent to check for survivors after the attack. The pilots referred to the ship as Egyptian and were surprised to discover it was flying an American flag.

    The recordings, in Hebrew, were made by a US spy plane hovering over the site.

    Cristol told the Associated Press he received the transcripts after submitting a Freedom of Information request to the US National Security Agency, which had kept the recordings secret. After his request was denied, Cristol filed suit in federal court and forced their release.

    Agency spokesman Patrick Weadon confirmed Cristol had been sent the transcripts.

    ''We provided the tapes as part of the historical record,'' Weadon said. ''The agency takes no official position on what happened to the Liberty.''

    Cristol, who has written a book about the case, said, the tapes ''show both the helicopter pilots and their controller believed the Israeli Air Force had targeted an Egyptian ship.''

    A National Security Agency summary of the incident says the Israelis were confused over the stricken ship's identity more than an hour after the attack.

    Cristol provided the summary and full transcripts of the pilot and tower recordings to the Associated Press.

    Israel has long maintained the attack was the result of a tragic mistake during the heat of battle. Israel was at war with Egypt, Syria and Jordan at the time.

    An Israeli commission of inquiry concluded the Israeli Air Force believed the targeted ship was an Egyptian cargo vessel ferrying supplies to Egyptian troops fighting Israeli forces.

    However, some of the Liberty's survivors and some officials in the US defense establishment have rejected this view, contending that Israel deliberately targeted the ship to keep the United States from learning that Israel was planning to attack Syria as part of its strategy during the war.

    The Israeli daily Ha'aretz, which first reported the disclosures in yesterday's edition, quoted Cristol as saying the tape transcripts were the last classified intelligence about the Liberty.


    This story ran on page A16 of the Boston Globe on 7/10/2003.
    © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.


    jmeadors - 11/2/2001

    Mr. Weeks misstates my position.

    I never claimed that the question of motive need not be addressed.

    My comment was in response to the position of some that the question of motive must be addressed and resolved prior to any review or analysis of the attack itself.

    As to the circumstances under which a Purple Heart is awarded perhaps Mr. Weeks would do well to do a bit of research to determine what those circumstances are rather than misleading readers as he is often inclined to do.

    Warmest regards,

    Joe Meadors


    Mike weeks - 8/23/2001

    Of course the possible motive must be addressed. For without it, there's no reason for the GOI to have ordered an attack on the ship, knowing it was American. All possible motives advanced have not withstood research. This includes the latest switch on the part of James Bamfod, when he dropped the "Golan Heights" scenario (w/o explaining why of course), and copied the "massacre" story (w/o conducting any research beyond the initial news stories - which show that the claim of the a "massacre" were w/o foundation.)

    Mr. Meadors insists that the tactics must be discussed. Of course, but they are minor in comparison to the possible motive. Besides, the examples given by Mr. Meadors are simply not supported by the testimony, statements and other documents from the crew and others. Some examples:

    The over-stating of "Israelis" when mentioning recognizing, or not, the ship. Many components of the IDF were involved, and Meadors makes a far too general, sweeping statement.

    Meadors fails to acknowledge that the IAF had indeed attacked their own troops in prior days - despite any PR efforts he wishes to repeat.

    Meadors' later-years memories are in direct conflict of the sworn testimony of several crewmen, including the skipper regarding that no further further firing took place by the MTBs following the torpedo attack. The mention of the close-in MTB took place when a series of signals took place - after the attack. This all witnessed by several individuals located on the bridge.

    Meadors mis-states the status of the Purple Heart being awarded to those wounded. It has nothing to do with a foreign power being declared "enemy" (which, of course Israel was not), but of US military personnel being wounded by the actions of an "opposing armed force" in a "hositle" environment (see 141737Z JUN 67 from CINCUSNAVEUR to CNO.) It must be remembered that when the Liberty came under attack, it was not known the nationality of the attackers.

    It is submited that Mr. Meadors has a very bias and emotional view, understandable to a certain degree but it leads to inaccurate conclusions as well as a somewhat selective understanding of the incident.

    Mike Weeks



    jmeadors - 8/16/2001

    Two issues are routinely raised when discussing the attack on the USS Liberty.

    The first is the possibility that the attack was simply a case of "friendly fire."

    The second being a demand (for lack of a better word) that a rational explanation for the Israelis to conduct a deliberate attack be presented and unilaterally accepted prior to any discussion of the tactics used during the attack.

    Those who support the "friendly fire" theory insist that the Israeli military is so inept that they cannot tell the difference between a freshly painted, clearly marked US Navy ship and a 40-year-old, rusted-out Egyptian tramp steamer that bore no resemblance to the USS Liberty.

    They insist this of Israeli pilots who could distinguish between Israeli and Egyptian tanks on the battlefield.

    Further, they insist this of Israeli torpedo boat officers whom I personally saw sail to within 100 yards of the target they were attacking and steam very slowly up our port side only to pull back and continue the attack.

    Some claim that the awarding of the Purple Heart to the Liberty wounded does not rule out the possibility of Friendly Fire since the Purple Heart is awarded in those instances.

    What they fail to note is the fact that the Purple Heart is awarded to victims of friendly fire when the ordinance involved is directed at an enemy of the United States -- and that the US government made no modification that requirement vis-a-vis the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty.

    Perhaps because to do so would require them to admit that in authorizing the award of Purple Hearts to the Liberty wounded, the State of Israel was officially declared to be an enemy of the United States for June 8, 1967.

    I understand that the only other country in the Middle East that shares that distinction with Israel (i.e., having been officially declared to be an enemy of the US) is Iraq.

    As to the insistence that some have made (or, at least implied) that the question of motive be satisfactorily addressed and resolved prior to any discussion of the tactics employed by the attacking force, I respectfully submit that those are two, distinct issues that can be discussed separately.

    I further respectfully submit that those who insist on resolving the question of motive first are only doing so to avoid a discussion of the tactics involved by the forces who attacked the USS Liberty.

    Joe Meadors