Update: What Do We Know About The Israeli Attack On The USS Liberty During the 1967 Six Day War
John Loftus, along with Mark Aarons, in their book The Secret War Against the Jews suggest that the attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli forces in 1967 was not an accident but part of a broader context of espionage and geopolitical strategy during the Six-Day War.
Loftus and Aarons wrote, based on interviews with intelligence sources in the U.S. and elsewhere, that the USS Liberty, a signal intelligence ship, did not just appear in international waters off the Sinai coast during a war for some innocent intelligence gathering. It was on a spying mission, to aid Arab nations by providing them with intelligence it collected to be sent to British electronic listening posts in Cyprus as part of a broader U.S. and British strategy to curry favor with the Arab world at Israel's expense. Part of the years-long betrayal by the U.S. intelligence agencies against Israel.
They argue that Israel attacked the Liberty knowing it was an American ship. The reason was to prevent any intelligence gathered by the Liberty from being used against Israel during the war. Israel made a calculated decision to attack the ship to ensure that its military operations, particularly in the Golan Heights, remained secret, thereby preventing U.S. intervention or pressure due to real-time intelligence being passed to hostile nations.
The book frames the incident within a larger narrative of covert operations where major powers, including the U.S., were not just passive observers but active participants in the regional conflict, sometimes playing both sides. The secret war against the Jews was not a temporary glitch in U.S. policy but part of a long-standing system of betrayal while on the surface professing support to the Jewish state as its great ally. The attack on the Liberty constituted Israel's response to what it perceived as duplicity or at least very unwelcome surveillance during a critical moment in the war.
Official investigations, both by the U.S. and Israel, have typically labeled the incident as a case of mistaken identity, where Israeli forces misidentified the Liberty as an Egyptian ship. However, Loftus and Aaron's account provides an alternative explanation for this event which to this day is surrounded with many unanswered questions and dissatisfaction with the official accounts.
Loftus and Aaron's explanation is controversial and certainly not universally accepted. Was the attack deliberate with full knowledge of the ship's identity? Loftus and Aarons answer yes. But it seems unlikely as Roger Stone suggests that LBJ colluded with the Israelis in an effort to sink the Liberty, creating a false flag to blame Egypt for sinking the vessel (the vessel didn’t sink) which would provide cover for the U.S. to attack Egypt and remove Nassar. Really? Israel had already destroyed the Egyptian airforce and pushed back the Egyptian army, but was in serious trouble with the Syrians and was planning to invade the Golan Heights where Syria had been raining missles down on Israeli towns for years. As well, Israel was under attack by the Jordanians who had been deceived into entering the war agaisnt Israel. Israel simply did not want to risk having their ongoing military plans revealed to their enemies in what became known as The Six Day War. Why would Israel need to collude with LBJ and U.S. intelligence to create a false flag event which is what Stone suggests? It didn’t need to.
Loftus and Aaron’s massively documented account seems the most likely explanation. Within the historical context of the secret war against the Jews which had already been going on for years, the intelligence ship was collecting radio transmissions from Israel and the Israelis were worried that the US and British would be sharing this information in order to sabotage Israel’s efforts to defend its north from Syria in the Golan Heights: “According to our sources in the American intelligence community who talked with 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 governments…[and other published analyses]—were wrong.” To save embarrassment to itself and its duplicitous U.S. ‘ally’, Israel later agreed to a coverup with the LBJ administration. When it comes down to it, it was all about the fact that the Arabs had the oil and Israel had none and this became another dirty chapter in the ‘Great Game’ between the West and the Soviet Union in the Middle East. In the end, speculations will persist, Israel will likely continue to be demonized by many, and despite the ongoing debate and speculation the likely truth of the USS Liberty incident and The Secret War Against The Jews will probably remain generally unknown.
UPDATE
Upon doing some further research, I found this article by Israeli Historian Michael Oren, who wrote a comprehensive book on The Six Day War entitled
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.
The article published in 2000 is entitled The 'USS Liberty': Case Closed subtitled June 8, 1967: Why did the IDF open fire on an American spy ship? and is definitely worth reading if you are interested in the USS Liberty case. The well-documented article is worth quoting for it’s conclusion which I include below:
The USS Liberty was decommissioned in 1968 and later sold for scrap. That same year, William McGonagle received the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry displayed during the attack, and Israel paid over $6 million in restitution to the families of those wounded and killed. An additional $6 million in damages was paid under a 1980 agreement in which Israel and the United States consented “not to address the issue or motive or reopen the case for any reason.” But the case remained open nonetheless. While the controversy surrounding similar incidents would subside—the Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark in 1987 and the downing of an Iranian jetliner by the USS Vincennes in 1988 come to mind—the bitterness over the Liberty incident endured. The release of hitherto classified papers on the incident, however, now enables us to dispel spurious theories about the incident, and to conclude that Israel’s assault upon the USS Liberty was a tragic error, and nothing more. In light of the new documents, it is now possible to reconstruct the chain of mishaps on the part of both sides that led to the unintended Israeli attack.
The incident began with the ill-conceived decision to send the Liberty to the crisis-torn Middle East, a mere half-mile beyond Egyptian waters, in an area not used by commercial shipping and which Nasser had declared off-limits to neutral vessels. The Americans did not accede to Chief of Staff Rabin’s request for the identification of all U.S. ships in the area or Ambassador Harman’s request for a strategic liaison between Israel and the Sixth Fleet. The Liberty’s dispatchers, meanwhile, overrode naval orders to keep the ship in Spain, and then failed to inform the U.S. attaché in Tel Aviv of its presence near the war zone. These mistakes were compounded by the navy’s communications system, which delayed by as much as two days orders to the Liberty to withdraw 100 miles from the coast. Even after it was hit, the Americans had difficulty locating the Liberty, the JCS placing it at “60-100 miles north of Egypt.” If neither Castle, nor CINCEUR, nor even the President of the United States could know where the Liberty was, it seems unreasonable to expect that the Israelis, in the thick of battle, should have been able to locate it.
The Israelis, too, committed their own share of fateful errors, as the Yerushalmi report points out: The erroneous reports of bombardment at El-Arish, the failure to replace the Liberty’s marker on the board after it had been cleared, the over-eagerness of naval commanders, and worst of all, Ensign Yifrah’s miscalculation of the ship’s speed. Though Yerushalmi’s report suggested reasons for these errors—inflexible naval procedures, the inaccuracy of speed-measuring devices—one is still left with a sense of poor organization and sloppy execution. Moreover, there were breakdowns in communications between the Israeli navy and air force stemming from inadequate command structure and the immense pressures of a multi-front war. To these factors must be added Israel’s general sensitivity about its coastal defenses, and the exhaustion of its pilots after four days of uninterrupted combat. Yet none of these amount to the kind of gross negligence of which the Israelis have been accused.
And then there were “bad breaks” that are unfortunately commonplace in war: The U.S. planes that were called back because of their nuclear payload (their mere presence might have warded off the torpedo boats); the Liberty’s inability to signal the approaching Israeli boats, and the machine gunner who fired on them; and the smoke that hid the identities of both the attackers and the attacked.
All of these elements combined to create a tragic “friendly fire” incident of the kind that claimed the lives of at least fifty Israeli soldiers in the Six Day War, and caused 5,373 American casualties in Vietnam in 1967 alone. Obviously, these findings can do little to lessen the suffering of those American servicemen who were wounded in the incident, nor can they be expected to offer comfort to the families of the dead. But they should at least permit us to bring to a close what has for a generation remained one of the most painful chapters in the history of America’s relationship with the State of Israel.