Recorded Octo­ber 8, 2006
REALAUDIO

In recent pro­grams, Mr. Emory has high­lighted resur­gence in anti-Semitism, par­tic­u­larly in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon War. A fre­quently dis­cussed topic in that con­text is the Israeli air and naval attack on a U.S. elec­tronic spy ship, the U.S.S. Lib­erty dur­ing the 1967 Six Day War. This broad­cast presents the most cred­i­ble account to date of that inci­dent. Mis­re­ported as “an acci­dent” (the attack was delib­er­ate) or a strat­a­gem to draw the United States into the war, the attack on the Lib­erty was an out­growth of clan­des­tine U.S. pol­icy in the Mid­dle East. Offi­cially an ally of Israel, the U.S. has long played on “both sides of the street”—secretly sup­port­ing the Arabs to a large extent, due to the influ­ence of the petro­leum indus­try on Amer­i­can pol­i­tics and the Arab con­trol over much of the world’s oil. Because of this janus-faced pol­icy, the Amer­i­can intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment bowed to oil indus­try pres­sure to curry favor with the Arab nations dur­ing the over­whelm­ing 1967 vic­tory of the Israeli forces. Sta­tioned off the Sinai coast, the U.S.S. Lib­erty uti­lized sophis­ti­cated NSA elec­tron­ics to mon­i­tor and map Israeli mil­i­tary activ­ity, cre­at­ing a detailed “Order of Bat­tle” or OB report. An agree­ment was reached by the Texas-based, petroleum-associated Amer­i­can Pres­i­dent (Lyn­don Baines John­son) to give this OB report to the Egypt­ian armed forces, imper­il­ing Israeli units deployed in the Sinai. Learn­ing of this gam­bit, the Israelis planned an attack by com­bined sea and air­borne units that was designed to dis­able the Lib­erty’s elec­tronic sur­veil­lance capa­bil­ity, while min­i­miz­ing the loss of life among the crew. Both the Israeli and Amer­i­can accounts of the inci­dent are false, by agree­ment. In exchange for silence about U.S. spy­ing on Israel, the Israelis have per­pet­u­ated the offi­cial lie that the attack was an accident.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: U.S. intel­li­gence betrayal of Israel’s nuclear secrets to the Arabs; the role of that betrayal in caus­ing the Six Day War; the Lib­erty’s betrayal of Israeli elec­tronic sig­nals decep­tion against Jor­dan dur­ing the war; detailed analy­sis of the attack itself, includ­ing the unusual choice of weaponry and sequenc­ing of the deploy­ment against the Lib­erty; the role of British intel­li­gence in betray­ing Israeli secrets to the Arabs; analy­sis of the behav­ior dur­ing the Lib­erty inci­dent of U.S. ambas­sador to Israel Wally Bar­bour (a right wing Demo­c­rat, oil politi­cian and father of G.O.P. gov­er­nor of Mis­sis­sippi Haley Barbour.)

1. Begin­ning with the his­tor­i­cal event within which the Lib­erty inci­dent occurred, the pro­gram presents an overview of aspects of that con­flict that have not received much (if any) atten­tion. Accord­ing to Lof­tus’ and Aarons’ sources, petroleum-related inter­ests in the U.S. and Britain played a dou­ble game: pre­tend­ing to be on Israel’s side while secretly cur­ry­ing favor with the Arabs. Learn­ing that Israel would not have a nuclear weapon per­fected before the end of 1967, the U.S. and Britain betrayed this infor­ma­tion to the Arabs, enabling them to plan an attack with con­ven­tional weapons before Israel could “go nuclear.” When Israel informed the U.S. of a plan to launch a pre­emp­tive attack, the U.S. and Britain promptly betrayed that infor­ma­tion to the Arabs. Dur­ing the con­flict, U.S. and British intel­li­gence mon­i­tored Israeli com­mu­ni­ca­tions (using the NSA equip­ment on the U.S.S. Lib­erty) and gave this infor­ma­tion to the Arabs, enabling them to con­struct an “OB” (“Order of Bat­tle”) report on Israeli mil­i­tary units in the Sinai. It was this betrayal (even­tu­ally dis­cov­ered by the Israelis) that led to the attack on the Lib­erty. That pre­cisely chore­o­graphed strike neu­tral­ized the Liberty’s elec­tron­ics, pre­serv­ing the secrecy and integrity of Israeli mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. “ . . . . For the first time in two thou­sand years, Jews around the world swelled their chests with pride [after the Six Day War]. When an Amer­i­can ship, the USS Lib­erty, was acci­den­tally dam­aged in the con­flict, Pres­i­dent John­son gra­ciously accepted the imme­di­ate apol­ogy of the gov­ern­ment of Israel. Despite some Amer­i­can casu­al­ties, the United States and Israel remained firm friends. Our sources say that there is more to the story than that, much more. The U.S. and British gov­ern­ments, while pre­tend­ing to be on Israel’s side, were giv­ing all of Israel’s secrets to the Arabs. In many ways, it was the West­ern spies who indi­rectly started the war. In this chap­ter we exam­ine the fol­low­ing alle­ga­tions: West­ern intel­li­gence informed the Arabs that Israel would not have a nuclear defense shield fin­ished in 1967, thus leav­ing a win­dow of oppor­tu­nity for attack; Real­iz­ing the dan­ger of a massed Arab attack, the Israelis informed the United States of their inten­tion to launch a pre­emp­tive strike, which the CIA promptly betrayed to the Arabs; U.S. intel­li­gence attempted to curry favor with the Arab oil pro­duc­ers by giv­ing the pre­cise details of Israel’s order of bat­tle to the Arabs dur­ing the war; Israeli intel­li­gence dis­cov­ered the Amer­i­can betrayal and attacked the U.S. ship, the Lib­erty, which was gath­er­ing elec­tronic infor­ma­tion on Israeli troop move­ments and send­ing it to British intel­li­gence, which in turn relayed it to the Arabs; Both the Amer­i­can and Israeli gov­ern­ments agreed to sup­press the truth about the Lib­erty inci­dent from the pub­lic.”
(The Secret War Against the Jews: How West­ern Espi­onage Betrayed the Jew­ish Peo­ple; John Lof­tus and Mark Aarons; Copy­right 1994 [SC]; St. Martin’s Press; ISBN 0–312-15648–0; p. 259.)

2. An inter­est­ing side­light to the dis­cus­sion con­cerns Israel’s affin­ity for Pres­i­dent Kennedy. In The Guns of Novem­ber, AFA#’s 11, 12, 13, 15, 37—avail­able from Spitfire–as well as FTR#’s 120, 188, Mr. Emory set forth the numer­ous and pro­found Nazi con­nec­tions to the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy. Under the cir­cum­stances, one won­ders if Kennedy’s sup­port for Israel might have influ­enced the actions of the con­spir­a­tors. “Israel mourned the loss of Pres­i­dent Kennedy deeply. Before he died, Kennedy had blunted Nasser’s mis­sile threat, made the first arms ship­ment from the U.S. gov­ern­ment, and backed Israel repeat­edly in the United Nations. The Israelis did not know what to make of his suc­ces­sor, Lyn­don Baines John­son. In pub­lic, John­son had been an ardent sup­porter of Israel. In pri­vate, how­ever, they feared that he was, and would always remain, an oil man. In fact, the Israelis did not trust John­son at all. After the Suez deba­cle, they would never trust any Amer­i­can with the lives of their cit­i­zens. They launched a crash pro­gram to com­plete their first atomic war­head.” (Ibid.; p. 260.)

3. Next, the pro­gram high­lights some fea­tures of the devel­op­ment of the Israeli bomb. “Dur­ing the early 1960’s, the Kennedy admin­is­tra­tion watched the con­struc­tion of the Israeli nuclear reac­tor at Dimona with some con­cern and increased the num­ber of Amer­i­can spies in Israel. Kennedy offered Israel a deal. If it would stop its nuclear project, the United States would pro­vide $600 mil­lion for a nuclear-powered water desalin­iza­tion plant. The Israelis refused. They knew that sooner or later, one of the Arab states would start man­u­fac­tur­ing poi­son gas and germ war­fare weapons. The threat of a nuclear weapon would be the only thing that could deter the Arabs from start­ing another holo­caust. After Kennedy died, John­son watched the reac­tor at Dimona go into full pro­duc­tion with French assis­tance. The Jews had atomic energy, but they did not yet have an atomic bomb. Although Sey­mour Hersh’s excel­lent book [The Samp­son Option] cov­ers this sub­ject in some detail, there are a few key details he missed. As will be seen in the next chap­ter, the Israelis had used their win­dow inside West Ger­man intel­li­gence dur­ing the 1960’s to obtain Argen­tine ura­nium and South African test­ing facil­i­ties. The Israelis were using both the Ger­man and the French A-bomb pro­grams to fur­ther their own pur­poses.” (Idem.)

4. In 1967, Israel was at least a year away from devel­op­ing a func­tional nuclear device, a fact that ele­ments of U.S. and British intel­li­gence betrayed to the British. “What Hersh also did not know is that the CIA had sev­eral agents work­ing in Israel under var­i­ous cover assign­ments. One of them con­firmed to us that in the spring of 1967, the Israelis had the poten­tial to make a nuclear war­head but had not suc­ceeded yet. They were at least a year away from mak­ing a work­ing pro­to­type. Dur­ing that time the Jews still would be vul­ner­a­ble to sur­prise attack. Some­how this infor­ma­tion found its way from the CIA to the Arabs. Some of our sources among the ‘old spies’ say that it was Miles Copeland’s hand­i­work; oth­ers say that it was the long arm of British intel­li­gence, aided by NSA tech­nol­ogy. As we shall see, the NSA rou­tinely shared Israel’s secrets with the British, who just as fre­quently passed them on to the Arabs.” (Idem.)

5. After the betrayal of the sta­tus of Israel’s nuclear devel­op­ment, the Arabs, act­ing on that intel­li­gence, planned an anni­hi­lat­ing attack on Israel. “Who­ever was respon­si­ble, the leak of the Israeli atomic sched­ule set off a race against time. The Arabs had one last period of oppor­tu­nity to smash the Jew­ish state with con­ven­tional weapons. The Israelis had less than a year to try to fin­ish one weapon before the united Arab armies launched their attack. In fact, it would take Israeli sci­en­tists much longer than they had esti­mated to get the A-bomb. The Amer­i­can intel­li­gence reports that Israel could not pre­pare a nuclear defense shield in 1967 gave the Arabs some breath­ing room to plan their next bat­tle against the Jews. In the spring of that year, Nasser was tem­porar­ily occu­pied fight­ing a war in Yemen, where he was test­ing chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons in prepa­ra­tion for his final solu­tion of the Jew­ish prob­lem.” (Ibid.; pp. 260–261.)

6. “Accord­ing to Nasser’s orig­i­nal timetable, he would launch the final attack on Israel in late 1967. The cooler fall weather would greatly facil­i­tate an armored inva­sion. The Soviet tanks had no air con­di­tion­ing and were ovens in the sum­mer. A fall attack also would give him the time to pull his 50,000 men and their heavy armor out of Yemen and move them into the Sinai. Israel would be crushed long before its first war­head was com­pleted. As the sum­mer of 1967 approached, it was clear that war was com­ing again to the Mid­dle East. The tiny nation of Israel was not even twenty years old but appeared headed for extinc­tion by its pow­er­ful neigh­bors, which sur­rounded it on nearly all fronts. Pres­i­dent Gamal Abdel Nasser, the rad­i­cal nation­al­ist who ruled Egypt, had begun with mas­sive radio pro­pa­ganda cam­paign call­ing on the Arab nations to unite in the destruc­tion of the Jews. The pow­er­ful Egypt­ian army, mas­sively equipped by the Soviet Union, had begun its slow, pon­der­ous move­ment over the Sinai Desert toward Israel. Israeli intel­li­gence sus­pected that Syria and Jor­dan were prepar­ing to launch simul­ta­ne­ous sneak attacks from the north and east, as soon as the Egyp­tians had every­thing in place in the south. Egypt­ian artillery moved to close the Red Sea to sink any ves­sel fly­ing the Israeli flag and block­aded the Israeli port of Eilat. This was a clear vio­la­tion of inter­na­tional law, but the UN did noth­ing, except accede to Nasser’s request and order its Emer­gency Force out of harm’s way in prepa­ra­tion for the assault.” (Ibid.; p. 261.)

7. Note that the United States, while rec­og­niz­ing that Egypt’s block­ade was an act of war, refused to assist Israel. Nei­ther did the United Nations. Israel launched a pre­emp­tive attack that smashed the Egypt­ian armies and drove them back across the Sinai. “The Amer­i­cans agreed that Egypt­ian inter­fer­ence with Israeli ship­ping on inter­na­tional waters was an offi­cial act of war. Even Nasser had acknowl­edged as much back in 1956 as a con­di­tion for Israel’s with­drawal after the Suez cam­paign; in 1967 the United States offered its sym­pa­thy but refused to pro­vide any mil­i­tary assis­tance what­so­ever. Pres­i­dent John­son turned his back. The Israelis told their Amer­i­can ally that if it would not help, it should keep its planes and ships away from the com­bat area, and Israel would fight by itself. One of the most widely reported, but least under­stood, bat­tles in the secret war against the Jews was about to begin: one of the few espi­onage bat­tles in the war to be fought entirely at sea. By early June 1967, the Israelis knew that Nasser’s inva­sion could come at any time. On June 5, Israel launched a pre­emp­tive attack before the Egypt­ian army could fin­ish its buildup and reach its bor­ders. The first three days of tank bat­tles saw the tiny Israeli army push­ing the Egyp­tians back across the Sinai, away from Israel, and the destruc­tion of the Arab air forces. It was a heroic achieve­ment that was marred by one unfor­tu­nate mis­take, or so the Israeli gov­ern­ment says. The ‘unfor­tu­nate mis­take’ was the attack on the USS Lib­erty sta­tioned off the Sinai Coast. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 261–262.)

8. Sta­tioned off the Sinai coast, the Lib­erty had already pen­e­trated an Israeli elec­tronic war­fare decep­tion that had lured Jor­dan into the con­flict. At this point in the war, the Israelis real­ized that some­thing had to be done about the Lib­erty. “. . . The Israelis had bro­ken the Arabs’ ciphers and codes, enabling them to feed false mes­sages to the enemy. The phony mes­sages led the Jor­da­ni­ans to believe that the war was going well for Nasser, when, in fact, the Egyp­tians already had been effec­tively knocked out of the bat­tle. Such sig­nals decep­tion was bound to make King Hus­sein think about join­ing in on the vic­to­ri­ous side. It was then, [British mil­i­tary author] Dea­con asserts, that things started to badly wrong for the Israelis: ‘ . . . On the night of June 7, the Mossad . . . knew that their decep­tion plan had been spot­ted by the Amer­i­cans. The Israeli attack must be halted forth­with as a cease-fire was to be ordered by the United Nations. . . . When the Ambas­sador protested, he was informed in diplo­matic lan­guage, that the United States knew that Jor­dan had been lured into fight­ing by sig­nal decep­tion. It was obvi­ous that, if Lib­erty con­tin­ued with her trans­mis­sions, it could be dis­as­trous for Israel as they would be able to reveal that the Israelis were in vio­la­tion of a UN cease-fire order.’ Accord­ing to Dea­con, the Israelis ordered that the ship, which was a threat to the Jews’ plans, must be put out of action, ‘what­ever flag it was fly­ing.’ The Israelis feared ‘there could be leak­ages from the State Depart­ment to the United Nations and, even worse, the lat­ter, whose admin­is­tra­tors were already biased against Israel, could pass on infor­ma­tion to the Egyp­tians.’ The Israelis were not stu­pid. They knew that the State Department’s Mid­dle East­ern poli­cies had a pro­nounced anti-Semitic tilt.” (Ibid.; pp. 266–267.)

9. The pri­mary mis­sion of the Lib­erty was to com­mu­ni­cate Israel’s bat­tle­field secrets to the Egyp­tians. “Fur­ther, it was not idle spec­u­la­tion that Israel’s secrets might end up in Egypt­ian hands. Accord­ing to our sources in the Amer­i­can intel­li­gence com­mu­nity who talked to us about the Lib­erty inci­dent, pass­ing Israeli secrets to the Egyp­tians was the whole idea of sta­tion­ing the ship off the Sinai coast. They believe that all the pub­lished ver­sions of the Lib­erty incident—the crew’s, the Israelis’, the U.S. government’s, [“ex”-CIA offi­cer] Eveland’s and Deacon’s—are wrong. When the authors described what we already knew from East­ern sources, sev­eral Israelis reluc­tantly pro­vided cor­rob­o­ra­tion of the best-kept secret of the Six Day War. Con­trary to the Israeli government’s cat­e­gor­i­cal denials, the assault on the Lib­erty had been delib­er­ate, but was an act of self-defense.” (Ibid.; p. 267.)

10. Not even the sur­viv­ing mem­bers of the Lib­erty’s crew were “in” on the gam­bit. This is impor­tant to remem­ber, because sur­viv­ing mem­bers of the crew have been doing media appear­ances in which they (sadly) parade their igno­rance of the real­ity of the inci­dent. “The ‘old spies’ are adamant that the Lib­erty crew only knows the what, not the why, of what hap­pened. Sim­i­larly, although Eve­land and Dea­con exposed the fact that the Israelis knew what they were doing when they attacked the ship, they did not know the real rea­son. Even U.S. Naval Intel­li­gence did not piece together what had hap­pened until years later, and they had to get most of the answers from the British, who got them from the NSA. This is the real ver­sion of the Lib­erty inci­dent, as told by our sources among the for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cers who were there on both sides of the bat­tle. In the weeks pre­ced­ing the 1967 war, the Israeli embassy in Wash­ing­ton fully briefed the CIA and the White House on its strat­egy to pre­empt the Arab inva­sion. Once before the Israelis had launched a pre­emp­tive strike in the Sinai with­out Washington’s explicit approval. The 1956 Suez deba­cle still ran­kled in everyone’s mem­ory. This time the Israelis wanted to make sure that they had not crossed wires with their most impor­tant, per­haps only, ally in the world. Every major facet of the impend­ing cam­paign was dis­cussed in advance, includ­ing the strike against Syria.” (Idem.)

11. “Our sources insist that the U.S. gov­ern­ment knew that the Israelis were going to attack the Golan Heights weeks before it hap­pened and gave them the green light. Syria was in the Soviet camp and no par­tic­u­lar friend of the United States. Jor­dan was another mat­ter. Accord­ing to the ‘old spies’ we inter­viewed on this point, a CIA agent in Amman, Jor­dan, leaked word to Jordan’s King Hus­sein about the secret Israeli brief­ing. Every­one likes to tell good news: the Israelis would coun­ter­at­tack only in the north and south against Egypt and Syria. Under Amer­i­can pres­sure, the Israelis had agreed not to send troops into the West Bank. As long as Jor­dan did not attack Israel from the east, King Hus­sein could stay out of the war and keep the provinces of Judea, Samaria, and the old city of Jerusalem, which the Jor­dan­ian army had stolen from Pales­tine back in 1948.” (Ibid.; pp. 267–268.)

12. Jor­dan was plan­ning to attack Israel from Syr­ian ter­ri­tory. Note that Israel was plan­ning to attack the Golan Heights (held by Syria). It was the Israeli plan to with­draw units from the Sinai for the Golan offen­sive that was imper­iled by the Lib­erty’s elec­tronic eaves­drop­ping. “It was a good deal for Jor­dan, but not good enough. King Hus­sein was under pres­sure from the Arab world to join in the attack against Israel. It would be a lit­tle embar­rass­ing for him to sit back and do noth­ing while the Egypt­ian and Syr­ian armies came hun­dreds of miles to fight the Jews. From one point in Jor­dan­ian ter­ri­tory in the West Bank, it was less than a ten-mile drive across Israel to the ocean. A Jor­dan­ian armored col­umn could cut the coun­try in half. The king had to do some­thing to appease his Arab broth­ers, so he sent Jor­dan­ian troops to attack from Syria, while promis­ing the CIA that not a sin­gle Jor­dan­ian sol­dier would attack Israel from the West Bank. Hus­sein slyly omit­ted his plan to place Jor­dan­ian troops under Nasser’s con­trol. The CIA passed the word on Israel not to worry about an attack on its highly vul­ner­a­ble east­ern flank.” (Ibid.; p. 268.)

13. In addi­tion to the Jor­dan­ian deal, the U.S. was plan­ning to betray the Israeli with­drawal of selected units from the Sinai to the Egyp­tians. This gam­bit was exe­cuted by LBJ, in coop­er­a­tion with the oil indus­try that was, and is, pro-Arab. “Through one of their spies, the Israelis quickly found out about the CIA deal with King Hus­sein, and they were furi­ous. It may not have made a lot of dif­fer­ence to the CIA if Jor­dan­ian troops were fight­ing on the north­ern front, but it made a lot of dif­fer­ence to the Jews. But this was noth­ing com­pared to what the Jews found out next. When the Israelis dis­cov­ered that the Amer­i­cans also had made a deal with the Egyp­tians, they became even more furi­ous at the CIA. To be fair, our sources in the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity acknowl­edge that, by and large, the CIA was a just a mes­sen­ger boy. The real deci­sions were being made in the White House. Aramco and the other big play­ers in the oil busi­ness were extremely con­cerned that Amer­i­can aid to Israel would alien­ate the Arab oil pro­duc­ers. It was not enough to with­hold mil­i­tary assis­tance in the com­ing war. Every­one in the Moslem world knew that the United States was still neu­tral in favor of Israel. The oil men wanted some under-the-table help for the Arabs.” (Idem.)

14. “Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John son had been in the ‘erl bid­ness’ him­self down in Texas and knew how the game was played. The oil pro­duc­ers got to LBJ or some­one very close to him in the White House. Our sources were never able to find our who. The oil men asked if the pres­i­dent could throw the Arabs a bone, some sort of secret assis­tance that the pub­lic would never find out about but would make the Arab lead­er­ship grate­ful. The point was to keep the oil flow­ing no mat­ter had hap­pened in the 1967 war. The White House approved a con­tin­gency plan to send the Arabs a lit­tle intel­li­gence about the Israeli Defense Forces, not too much, noth­ing that would tip the bal­ance of war. Just a lit­tle some­thing to let the Arab lead­ers think the Amer­i­cans were secretly on their side, no mat­ter what was said about Israeli in pub­lic. Unfor­tu­nately, the small-scale con­tin­gency plan esca­lated. No one planned it that way. Only a hand­ful of staffers in the White House, the National Secu­rity Agency, and the CIA knew what had hap­pened, and they all pointed the fin­ger at each other. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 268–269.)

15. In order to please the Arabs and betray Israel, the Lib­erty was gath­er­ing vast amounts of raw elec­tronic intel­li­gence about Israel’s armed forces. “ . . . The Egypt­ian gen­er­als were con­sid­er­ably eas­ier to get along with. They des­per­ately needed intel­li­gence now and begged the CIA for its promised assis­tance. It was not long in com­ing. On June 8, the morn­ing of the fourth day of the Six Day War, the USS Lib­erty arrived off the Sinai coast. Although its crew did not know it, it was the only hope the Egypt­ian army had of retriev­ing any­thing from one of the quick­est and most deci­sive mil­i­tary vic­to­ries in his­tory. The Lib­erty was more than a float­ing radio set. It was a giant for elec­tronic intel­li­gence and could do much more than sim­ply eaves­drop on radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Any­one could do that. The nation of Israel is so tiny that the U.S. embassy in Beirut could mon­i­tor all the radio traf­fic in the entire coun­try. The embassy even taped the Israeli pilots talk­ing back and forth when they hit the Lib­erty.” (Ibid.; p. 270.)

16. Using the raw elec­tronic intel­li­gence gath­ered by the Lib­erty, a British lis­ten­ing sta­tion in Cyprus was help­ing to develop a detailed bat­tle­field map of Israeli forces in the Sinai. “So what was the Lib­erty doing there? Our sources among the ‘old spies’ have an inter­est­ing expla­na­tion. They believe the Lib­erty was mak­ing a war map. Every time an Israeli sol­dier squawked on his walkie-talkie, the ship recorded his voice and indexed it with the direc­tion and the strength of the sig­nal. The same thing hap­pened with tank radios, head­quar­ters’ tele­phones, even coded cable traf­fic. The ship swept up every­thing in the air­waves while not­ing the loca­tion of every speck of elec­tronic dust in Israel. This is called a raw intel­li­gence take. The Lib­erty was one of the most sophis­ti­cated spy ships in the world at that time. Even so, it was not big enough to process all the elec­tronic garbage it col­lected. Pro­cess­ing intel­li­gence requires banks of com­put­ers and teams of ana­lysts. All the ship did was record the garbage, com­press it elec­tron­i­cally, and trans­mit it to a land sta­tion. What hap­pened next was none of its con­cern. The crewmem­bers did not know it, but the land sta­tion was located on the island of Cyprus. That was the clever part. The navy’s paper trail would show that no Amer­i­can com­puter had even begun to process the Lib­erty’s troop move­ment data at the time of the attack. If asked under oath, the few offi­cers involved in the scheme could swear that the ship never gave any Israeli secrets to the Arabs. They would be telling the truth, as far as it went. The British secret ser­vice has one of the largest elec­tronic lis­ten­ing posts in the world on the island of Cyprus. It had lit­tle dif­fi­culty in down­load­ing the trans­mis­sions from the Lib­erty. All of Israel’s elec­tronic garbage was sifted by an enor­mous com­puter that began to decode Irael’s cable traf­fic. Another went to work on plot­ting the mil­i­tary radio trans­mis­sions, while still another began to sort the tele­phone calls inter­cepted from microwave relay tow­ers across Israel.” (Ibid.; pp. 270–271.)

17. Note that the British were actively col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Arabs as well. Dur­ing the 2006 Lebanon War, the BBC (which is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with British intel­li­gence) per­formed an anal­o­gous func­tion on behalf of the Arabs, shame­lessly pre­sent­ing a fun­da­men­tally dis­torted pic­ture of the war. “First, the fre­quen­cies and loca­tions of major Israeli head­quar­ters were iden­ti­fied, then the smaller reg­i­ments and bat­tal­ions, then the indi­vid­ual units. A great deal of prepara­tory work had been done before the war began. Spec­tro­graphic analy­sis of known voice­prints enabled the com­puter to iden­tify each Israeli com­man­der as soon as he spoke on the radio or tele­phone. The voice was matched to a name and unit num­ber and then the unit’s loca­tion was placed on an elec­tronic war map that was updated con­stantly in Cyprus from the Lib­erty’s input. The British were about to make good on the promise they had made to the Arabs after the Suez deba­cle in 1956, when they had aban­doned their Israeli ally and told the Saudis that they would sup­port the Arab case on Pales­tine. In 1967, the plan was for the British to hand the final prod­uct of the Lib­erty’s intel­li­gence haul to the Egyp­tians. The fin­ished war map was a detailed order of bat­tle intel­li­gence report, or OB. It is the most use­ful infor­ma­tion gen­er­als can have in time of war. Using such a map, they can send their troops wher­ever the enemy is weak­est and exploit an unde­fended region with an attack that pen­e­trates the enemy’s rear areas and cuts off its sup­ply life­line.” (Ibid.; p. 271.)

18. “Our sources insist that, with the Lib­erty’s assis­tance, the Arabs might have been able to turn the war around to some extent or at least force an hon­or­able stale­mate. For the first time they would know as much as or more than the Israeli gen­er­als did them­selves about the move­ments of the Israeli army. The Arab gen­er­als would have details of every Israeli coun­ter­strat­egy from the moment it began. They would have every Israeli bat­tle order in close to real time. Just as the Israelis were begin­ning to pull some of their mobile reserves out of the Sinai for the Golan assault in the north, the Lib­erty was let­ting the Egyp­tians know the loca­tion of each hole in the south­ern front. As soon as the Israeli army turned its atten­tion to the north, the Egyp­tians could launch low-level, but irri­tat­ing, attacks on Israeli set­tle­ments and mil­i­tary for­ma­tions in the south. ‘You have to under­stand what this means,’ said one of our sources. ‘The Gov­ern­ment of Israel was already pissed off about the CIA leaks to lung can­cer. As long as the Lib­erty was trans­mit­ting, every Israeli troop move­ment would be known to the Arabs within an hour, maybe within min­utes, It meant that Israel could lose the war.’ . . . ” (Ibid.; pp. 271–272.)

19. In light of the sit­u­a­tion, the Israeli polit­i­cal lead­er­ship con­cluded that dis­abling the ship was the only prac­ti­cal solu­tion under the cir­cum­stances. Uti­liz­ing a copy of the ship’s build­ing plans, an attack was planned to dis­able the ship with a min­i­mum of loss of life. “. . . It came down to a choice between 25,000 of their own dead or attack­ing one Amer­i­can ship. One fighter-bomber loaded with high-explosive ordi­nance could blow the Lib­erty to splin­ters. Cab­i­net mem­bers asked if there was any option other than drown­ing nearly 300 Amer­i­can sailors, for no mat­ter what the Amer­i­can politi­cians had done to them, Israel had always been friends with the Amer­i­can peo­ple. A plan to put the ship out of com­mis­sion with a min­i­mum loss of life was requested. Some­how, the Israelis had obtained a copy of the ship’s build­ing plans, and the Lib­erty’s fire­proof and water­proof com­part­ments gave the IDF an idea. The gen­eral staff reported their minimum-damage plan to the cab­i­net. Dur­ing the first run, the air­craft would fire only light rock­ets at the antenna masts and strafe the deck. That would send the crew scur­ry­ing safely belowdecks to their bat­tle sta­tions. As soon as they were but­toned up, the sec­ond run would drop napalm to burn off the anten­nas and com­mu­ni­ca­tions gear with­out breach­ing the struc­tural integrity of the fire­proof hull where the crew was hid­ing.” (Ibid.; p. 275.)

20. “The one prob­lem was the elec­tronic intel­li­gence cen­ter below decks in hold num­ber 3. One care­fully aimed tor­pedo could take that out with­out sink­ing the ship, but who­ever was in that com­part­ment would die. The Israeli mil­i­tary staff esti­mated that Amer­i­can casu­al­ties could be kept to a few dozen. Most of the crew, maybe 80 to 90 per­cent, would sur­vive. It was the best they could do. The cab­i­net mem­bers gave the order to dis­able the Lib­erty with min­i­mum loss of Amer­i­can life. Because they could no longer trust their own tele­phones, they sent a courier to the near­est Israeli air squadron to ask for vol­un­teers. Half the squadron refused to fly, because they had friends or rel­a­tives in the United States. ‘They just could not bring them­selves to shoot at the Amer­i­can flag,’ said one of our Israeli sources. The ones who did fly were heart­sick. Two of the pilots later had ner­vous break­downs. The Amer­i­cans on the ship were not the only vic­tims of the Lib­erty inci­dent. Two American-born Israelis vol­un­teered to fly in the squadron.” (Ibid.; pp. 275–276.)

21. “The air crews needed only a lit­tle while to unload the heavy-explosive ordi­nance and replace it with napalm can­is­ters. It took longer to get the tor­pedo boats briefed and under way. Every­thing had to be coor­di­nated for 2:00 p.m. so that the planes and tor­pedo boats arrived at exactly the right times, one after the other, like a bal­let sequence. If the napalm was dropped too early, crewmem­bers might still be on deck. The Israeli tor­pedo could not be fired until the Lib­erty’s crew had suf­fi­cient time to close all the water­tight doors. In the mean­time, a recon­nais­sance plane would make one last pass over the Lib­erty to con­firm its iden­tity and posi­tion. Only then would head­quar­ters give the attack order to launch the fighter squadron. The recon­nais­sance pilots made their report in code, using a scram­bling device. Tel Aviv used the same pre­cau­tions when giv­ing the attack order, as it knew U.S. intel­li­gence was lis­ten­ing. The lead pilot on the straf­ing run would not break radio silence until he had made visual con­tact. He was to announce, en clair, when the ship was in sight. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 276.)

22. “ . . . All morn­ing there had been over­flights by Israeli recon­nais­sance, nine passes in all. One of them flew less than two hun­dred feet from the ship, so close you could see the pilots and give them a friendly wave. No one could mis­take the Lib­erty for an enemy ship with its Amer­i­can flag fly­ing and its U.S. Navy iden­ti­fiers gleam­ing in large white num­bers on the hull. The num­ber of fly-bys was unusual, but the crew thought that the Israelis were just keep­ing a con­stant eye on their posi­tion to make sure than a friendly ship did not sail into harm’s way. There was a war on, after all, but the Lib­erty was mind­ing its own busi­ness. It was really noth­ing more than a float­ing radio set, very lightly armed, and a threat to no one.” (Ibid.; p. 263.)

23. “At 2:00p.m. another flight of Israeli Mirage jets appeared on the radar screen. A few peo­ple on the bridge watched their approach with idle curios­ity. Sud­denly the Israeli air­craft opened fire and strafed the deck of the Lib­erty with machine-gun fire and rock­ets. Peo­ple were scream­ing, run­ning for cover. The Israelis left as quickly as they had come. They must have real­ized their mis­take and bro­ken off the attack. For a few sec­onds there was silence and then the sound of wounded men call­ing for help. The rock­ets and gun rounds had chewed up the deck and every­one on it. Some of the radio anten­nas had been badly dam­aged, but the Lib­erty still man­aged to get an emer­gency mes­sage to the Sixth Fleet that it was under attack and needed imme­di­ate air cover. While they waited for the U.S. planes, another huge Amer­i­can flag was hung on the Lib­erty to pre­vent any fur­ther pos­si­bil­ity of misiden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Instead of the promised Amer­i­can fighter sup­port, how­ever, Israeli Mys­tere jets were spot­ted on the hori­zon. Every­one took cover. The Israeli planes fired rock­ets at the Lib­erty and dropped napalm, which is a kind of jel­lied gaso­line that burns every­thing it touches. Some com­po­nents of the Lib­erty’s radar dishes and anten­nas were made from alu­minum. The only prob­lem is that alu­minum does not melt, it burns when it is hit with napalm.” (Ibid.; pp. 263–264.)

24. “Walls of flames rolled over the Lib­erty. As soon as the jets left, the crew rushed out to try to con­trol the fires. Where was the Amer­i­can fighter sup­port? They should have been over the Lib­erty min­utes ago. What else could go wrong? That was when they saw the three speed­boats approach­ing from the Israeli coast. They were not res­cue craft, they were tor­pedo boats. One tor­pedo struck the star­board side of the Lib­erty, and the stricken ves­sel tilted ten degrees over, its steer­ing gone, por­tions of the deck still burn­ing. Luck­ily, the water­tight com­part­ments below decks had con­tained the tor­pedo dam­age. The ship would not sink, but that was the least of the prob­lems.” (Ibid.; p. 264.)

25. “The cap­tain of the Lib­erty real­ized that some­thing had gone ter­ri­bly wrong, and the ship was alone. There was no Amer­i­can air cap to pro­tect it, and it had become a float­ing tar­get for the Israelis. Although the upper struc­tures of the ship had been badly hit, almost 90 per­cent of the crew had been belowdecks and were still alive. After the Israeli tor­pedo boats picked up his crew and real­ized they were Amer­i­cans, his ship finally would be safe. The prob­lem was that the Israeli boats were slowly cir­cling the Lib­erty, fir­ing at any­one who stuck his head out of a hatch. The three rub­ber rafts they did man­age to toss over the side were ripped to shreds almost before they hit the water. Finally the Israelis left for good. Out of the 293 crew­men aboard the Lib­erty, only thirty-four had died. The crew thought it was a mir­a­cle that so many had sur­vived.” (Idem.)

26. “Of course, few of the crew believed the Israeli government’s apol­ogy that it was all a case of mis­taken iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Nor did they believe the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment was telling the whole story. When the crew of the Lib­erty were finally res­cued, they found that their fighter cover had been ordered out and then can­celed by ‘higher author­ity.’ Incred­i­ble as it may seem, the U.S. gov­ern­ment had delib­er­ately left one of its own ships defense­less while know­ing it was under attack. Sev­eral of the offi­cers and crew were inter­viewed by Navy admi­rals and then sworn to secrecy about the entire Lib­erty inci­dent, in the inter­ests of ‘national secu­rity.’ The crew described the report of the navy’s offi­cial Board of Inquiry as a farce. . . .” (Idem.)

27. After being informed by the Israelis about the attack, the CIA pre­vailed on the Navy to can­cel the air cover for the Lib­erty. “ . . . As soon as the attack was under way, a senior offi­cial of Israeli intel­li­gence paid a sur­prise call on his CIA coun­ter­part. He told him what they were doing to the Lib­erty at that moment, and why. Before the sec­ond Israeli run even arrived over the ship, the CIA had told the navy to call off air sup­port for the Lib­erty. Although upon hear­ing news of the attack, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff at first wanted to launch a ‘quick, retal­ia­tory air strike on the Israeli naval base which launched the attack,’ this idea was quickly rejected. There would be no retal­i­a­tion of any kind. Why were the U.S. fighter planes, which had taken off while the debate was still under way, ordered back to the car­rier and the retal­i­a­tion strike aban­doned? The Israelis had proof that the U.S. gov­ern­ment had com­mit­ted an act of war against Israel by betray­ing its mil­i­tary secrets to the enemy in the mid­dle of a war in which Israel’s very sur­vival was at stake. The Israelis had sources in the Arab world that the CIA didn’t even know about. The CIA’s low-risk strat­egy had blown up in its face, along with any hope of plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­ity.” (Ibid.; pp. 276–277.)

28. “The White House cer­tainly was not happy, but it did not take long to work up a cover story. The Amer­i­can intel­li­gence offi­cers begged the Israelis to pre­tend that the attack on the Lib­erty was a mis­take. To make it look good, Israel would be qui­etly reim­bursed for what­ever com­pen­sa­tion it paid to the sur­viv­ing crewmem­bers and the fam­i­lies of the dead. By 4:00p.m. that after­noon, the deal was cut. Accord­ing to our sources in the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity, the gov­ern­ments of Israel and the United States have spent the next twenty-seven years lying about the Lib­erty inci­dent. There is a sub­stan­tial amount of cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence to show that this ver­sion of the affair is cor­rect. There is, more­over, con­vinc­ing and direct evi­dence to demon­strate that the offi­cial ver­sions told by both gov­ern­ments are false. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 277.)

29. The U.S. ambas­sador to Israel at the time of the inci­dent was Wally Bar­bour, a right-wing Demo­c­rat and mem­ber of the petro­leum= polit­i­cal lobby. His son is the G.O.P. gov­er­nor of Mis­sis­sippi Haley Bar­bour. Haley Barbour’s New Bridge Strate­gies is sub­con­tract­ing with an Al Taqwa-related com­pany in Iraq. (For more about this, see FTR#433.) As will be seen in FTR#573, Barbour’s PR firm rep­re­sents the Alfa con­sor­tium in the United States. Alfa is part of the inter­na­tional crim­i­nal milieu that inter­sects with the per­pe­tra­tors of the 9/11 attacks. “ . . . As a result of the Lib­erty inci­dent, the White House gave Wally Bar­bour, the U.S. ambas­sador to Israel, a new set of march­ing orders. No fur­ther intel­li­gence was to be gath­ered on the Dimona nuclear reac­tor, nor were joint anti-Israeli oper­a­tions to be run with the British and Cana­dian secret ser­vices. Israel was to be the main ally of the United States in the Mid­dle East and was now more impor­tant than Arab oil. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 285.)