The Day Israel "ATTACKED AMERICA" USS Liberty (US Navy ship)
Israel ordered the attack on the US Navy ship. 34 US servicemen and civilian analysts were MURDERED, another 171 were wounded. Listen to the officers and sailors aboard that ship account for what they say was a DELIBERATE ATTACK OF MURDER!!! The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you know nothing about. WHY HAS THIS STORY NEVER BEEN TOLD ON AMERICAN TELEVISION...
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00:00Early June 1967, the six-day war in the Middle East between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria
00:28is underway. A spy ship, very lightly armed but bristling with antennae, steams into the
00:34Mediterranean to eavesdrop on the conflict. It is patrolling in international waters off
00:42the Egyptian coast. At two in the afternoon on June the 8th, with the war reaching its
00:48climax, Israeli jets and motor torpedo boats launch an unprovoked attack on the ship. They
00:55drop napalm and strafe its decks with rockets, cannon fire and armored piercing rounds before
01:00trying to sink it with torpedoes. We had no way to defend ourselves and it was just, we're just
01:15slaughtered. And they shot up the life rafts that were put into the water and they shot the ones
01:20that were still on board the ship. Bullet holes, shell holes, everywhere, blood. The
01:30folk soul, the front part of this ship, was just red with blood. Throughout the attack,
01:41the ship flies the Stars and Stripes, the flag of Israel's closest ally, the United States of
01:46America. Its name, the USS Liberty, is freshly painted on its stern and the bow carries the
01:53distinctive numbers of an American naval vessel. Out of a crew of just under 300, there were 34
02:01killed and 172 injured in varying degrees to life-threatening, life-debilitating injuries.
02:09So that was more than two-thirds of the crew.
02:21This audio tape, which has never been broadcast before, was recorded in real time by the Israeli
02:27military during the assault. The woman's voice in the background is counting down the seconds.
02:32It proves that Israeli commanders knew all along that they were attacking an American ship.
02:39For the first time, this and other evidence allows us to reveal the true story of what
02:57happened that day and what came after. When a deadly assault by one ally on another was
03:04covered up and an American president was manipulated by the secret agents of a foreign
03:09power, events that have shaped U.S.-Israeli relations ever since.
03:28The United States Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C., June the 8th, 2014.
03:36Every year, on the anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty, survivors, relatives, and supporters gather together.
03:44It's a remembrance of those who were killed that day, the 34. I'm Dave Lucas. I was in charge of the deck force.
03:53I was 25. My first child was born when I was one day out on that cruise. As long as there are survivors
04:01and maybe children of survivors, I think this will probably be an annual event.
04:06The names of the 34 killed are read out, punctuated by the tolling of a Navy bell and the playing of taps,
04:28the traditional military funeral lament.
04:42It's important to not forget what happened and to continue to try to find out why it happened and who made it happen.
04:51In the summer of 1967, America was in turmoil. An incendiary mixture of racial discrimination and extreme poverty
05:04exploded into a summer of rioting in cities across the country. But one issue dominated.
05:13The Vietnam War. In all, 10,000 troops would die that year. The Americans were trapped. They couldn't leave, and they could win.
05:29In the Middle East, too, war looked inevitable. There was growing tension between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
05:39Armies were mobilizing. Israel promised the White House they would not attack first.
05:45But on the 5th of June, they jammed radar sets at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv,
05:50so the Americans couldn't detect their jets taking off to launch a surprise assault on Egypt.
05:57Meanwhile, the USS Liberty was sailing across the Mediterranean into the war zone.
06:06Liberty was a state-of-the-art intelligence-gathering vessel of the time, and what we did is we were a listening ship.
06:13My name is Lloyd Painter. I was a research officer. We could receive any signal that was out there, low band, high band, anything,
06:22intercepting it, recording it, and we did have on board some translators who could have an immediate translation of what was going on.
06:29We would actually bounce signals off the moon back to NSA.
06:32We were spies. I'm Jim Cavanaugh. I was a communication technician aboard the USS Liberty, and I intercepted Morse code.
06:40We're spies. I mean, we're intercepting messages from embassies, military bases, police, anything and everything that we could get
06:51to ensure that the United States was comfortable with what was going on in the world and no one was conspiring against us.
06:59Basically, it was to protect our interests.
07:08This was the Cold War.
07:10American President Lyndon Johnson knew that the Russians already had substantial military influence in Egypt.
07:17He needed to find out what they were going to do next to make sure that a local conflict did not become a world war,
07:24with the USA backing Israel and Russia siding with the Arab cause.
07:30I was assigned as a Russian linguist aboard the ship.
07:34I'm Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired.
07:38The Israelis, our primary purpose was to intercept communications of the Russian spy aircraft as it were at Alexandria, Egypt,
07:47and that was our job was to find them. We were not targeted against the Israelis.
07:53Life was very relaxing. One of the nice things about the Liberty is we had air conditioning,
07:57because we had communications equipment, so we were cool in the hot days.
08:01It was a very laid back, very clean ship. It was spotless. The morale was pretty high. I mean, very high.
08:08By the time the Liberty arrived off the coast of Egypt on the 8th of June, the war had just two days left to run.
08:15Israel had seized the old city of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
08:21Jordanian forces were beaten, and Egypt was conceding defeat. Only Syria held out.
08:30The airwaves were dead. The only voices we did get were those of Israeli or Hebrew was what we were hearing.
08:37My name is Bob Wilson. I worked for NSA on June the 8th, 1967,
08:45when what we were trying to monitor, find something coming from the direction of Egypt. There just was nothing.
08:52They owned the skies and the ground and everything. I don't think there was anything moving at that time that they didn't know about.
08:59I was listening to the chatter the night before. They knew it was an American ship that came into the area. They knew who we were.
09:075.15 a.m., first light. The ship's log recorded an Israeli photoreconnaissance plane flying over the Liberty.
09:14It was easily identifiable as a Noratlas aircraft, and those are photoreconnaissance aircraft.
09:20Israeli records obtained by Al Jazeera show that their reconnaissance plane reported the Liberty as an American spy ship, hull number GTR-5.
09:30Well, I was on the bridge. I'm John Scott. I was the damage control officer.
09:36I circled the ship, kind of in a broad circle, and headed back towards Israel.
09:43Israeli planes then continued to fly over the Liberty all morning.
09:48And they would do half-moon passes over us, and we saw that they were Israeli.
09:53They were slowly lumbering over our ship, and we were waving at them, they were waving at us.
09:57They were sophisticated, almost as sophisticated as we were as far as surveillance and technology.
10:03They had everything. We supplied them with all the technology, to this day.
10:08And I felt that we were in great shape because they knew who we were.
10:12They're our friends. We felt safe. Actually, it was a secure feeling to see them.
10:16There was one other thing which made the crew feel safe.
10:19We had an American flag flying the standard, and then we put up the holiday colors, which is a huge American flag.
10:26And it was a bright, sunny day with the wind blowing, I don't know, 5 or 10.
10:31On the real-time audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera, at 1.53 p.m., the pilots asked their base control about the ship.
10:40The USS Liberty was the only ship of any size in the area.
10:58The American 6th Fleet, including two aircraft carriers, was 500 miles away.
11:05Oh, it was a great day.
11:08Hello, I'm Jim Smith. I was a damage controlman in engineering.
11:12I mean, I'm 20 years old at the time.
11:15I come from a small town, used to throw hay bales in the summertime for a buck an hour.
11:20Sun was shining, blue sky, clouds, nice, people sunbathing on the deck.
11:26We had lunch, and five minutes later, maybe, here came the jets,
11:30and nobody really knew what was happening until they started firing.
11:40The captain said to me, alert the forward gun mounts, we're under attack.
11:44And I tried to raise the two sailors in the forward gun mounts.
11:48I looked out, and they were blown to pieces by the rocket.
11:52When the attack started, and we realized that we needed help, we tried to communicate with the 6th Fleet.
11:58They were jamming both our distress frequencies and our tactical frequencies.
12:03The tactical frequencies is all right, but the international distress frequencies is a violation of international law to jam them,
12:08and the Israelis were jamming them.
12:10And we could not get a signal across.
12:13Here's the question I have to ask.
12:16Who would know the frequencies other than an ally?
12:20And who was the ally in the war?
12:22It wasn't Egypt. It was Israel.
12:25They would know, and only they would know in this conflict, what our frequencies would be.
12:45Cut off from the outside world, the crew on the Liberty was defenseless.
12:50We had four .50 caliber machine guns on board that were basically there to repel any borders that might come by.
12:57A pirate situation.
13:00Certainly weren't designed to bring down jet aircraft that were hammering at us.
13:04But you can't shoot a jet going 600 miles an hour with a .50 caliber machine gun.
13:08It doesn't work.
13:10It was just a surreal scene.
13:12People who had been standing there earlier, joking and laughing, were now dead, dying,
13:16and with the walking dead and wounded.
13:19It was just unreal.
13:21Gasoline barrels stored on the deck of the ship burst into flames.
13:25The crew rushed to try to put out the fires.
13:29I was watching the aircraft as they circled around,
13:32and when they got to coming back towards the ship, I'd just holler at them,
13:36down, they'd fire, circle back around, we'd jump back up and keep fighting fire.
13:41The rocket noise is horrendous when a rocket explodes.
13:45You can't escape a rocket. I don't care where you go.
13:50What the crew didn't know was that at 3 minutes past 2,
13:54the Israeli pilots were ordered to use a new, much deadlier weapon.
14:00The biggest problem, I guess, from that was the napalm, which they dropped from the airplane.
14:15The napalm had burned, scorched, almost the entire front part of the ship, the bridge area.
14:22The whole top side of the ship had been set on fire, and it was all charred.
14:26It was no longer navy gray.
14:28You have to stop the fires, stop the flooding, to keep that ship afloat.
14:32That's your home. You've got nowhere else to go.
14:34You can't pack up and go down the road, because there is no down the road.
14:38Up above, the Israeli military argued about what should happen next,
14:42and who should sink the Liberty.
14:46I remember thinking I was in pretty good shape then.
14:49I said, I think I could swim it to the shore.
14:52And then I thought, sharks. And I thought a lot of things, all quickly, you know.
15:02At 11 minutes past 2, the Israeli pilots were ordered to leave the ship.
15:07They were ordered to leave the ship.
15:09They were ordered to leave the ship.
15:12What?
15:13At 11 minutes past 2, with the Israeli jets running out of ammunition,
15:18the pilots were instructed to fly down and confirm the identity of the ship.
15:33It was now 12 minutes past 2,
15:35and the Israeli control tower knew for certain this was an American ship,
15:40the same one its forces had first identified at 5.15 a.m. that morning,
15:44and then buzzed again during seven additional reconnaissance flights throughout the day.
15:54The jets then pulled out.
15:56But three Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats were already on their way.
16:04The USS Liberty was a spy ship.
16:07In the event of an attack, it was standard procedure for the spies on board to destroy everything,
16:13just in case it fell into enemy hands.
16:16Everyone was destroying material.
16:18Everyone was stripping information off of computers,
16:23ripping computers open, pulling information out.
16:26That's something you just don't want to hear aboard a ship.
16:28You've done all this work, collected this intelligence and processed it,
16:33and now you have to destroy it.
16:35You just didn't want the enemy to get a hold of anything classified.
16:39At 2.35, the Israeli motor boats fired five torpedoes.
16:44Four missed, but one hit.
16:47The torpedoes hit the target.
16:53The target is the Egyptian ship.
16:573.35?
16:59I don't know. I don't know.
17:01They hit the torpedoes.
17:04It had been over nine hours since the Israeli military first identified the Liberty.
17:10Israeli planes had flown over it repeatedly,
17:13but 10 minutes earlier, their control tower had confirmed it yet again as an American ship.
17:1925 Americans were about to die in a single moment.
17:27This is what it looks like when a torpedo hits a ship the size of the Liberty.
17:33The torpedo threw us up in the air like a roller coaster.
17:37It felt like one coming down.
17:39Dead silence, lights all off, smoke and haze everywhere.
17:42I went back to the drinking fountain and filled it with blood,
17:46reached down to get a drink, and a black man stared back at me.
17:56And when it fell back to get right, it just kept getting wrong.
18:00It kept sinking and sinking and sinking.
18:02We just waited, all of us waited, thinking that this was it.
18:05We were going down.
18:07And I figured that was the end of life for me.
18:12The torpedo had blown a huge hole in the hull, 39 feet by 24,
18:17killing 25 Americans in a single hit.
18:21The torpedo hit the room that I was in, and it was just luck.
18:25This guy died, this one lived, that guy died.
18:28It was how much shrapnel was coming in your direction.
18:31You know, the old-fashioned typewriters, I had the letter H sticking out of my left foot.
18:37I had, I don't know, 80 pieces of shrapnel in my lower extremities,
18:43and the place filled up with water that fast.
18:50Totally black, totally filled with powder and oil.
18:58It was like you were gagging, and you only had about 8 or 10 inches of space
19:07where you could catch your breath.
19:10The only way I could go in that direction was to drop down and swim underwater,
19:14four or five strokes, come back up, and then frantically catch your breath
19:19and try to find something else to hold on to.
19:23I got pulled through the hatch and onto the deck.
19:28Others were not so lucky.
19:31My friend Ronnie Campbell had a desk right there,
19:36and I remember Ronnie saying,
19:38you fellows can do what you want, just I'm going to write a letter home,
19:41and he stuck a piece of paper in his mill, his typewriter, and began typing,
19:45Dear Eileen, you won't believe what's happening to us.
19:48And just seconds after that, the torpedo struck and killed both the two Marines,
19:55killed my friend Ronnie Campbell.
19:59And my job was to try to get probably 20 or 30 wounded sailors
20:03out to the main deck and to the life rafts.
20:06So I went up and looked out myself before I tried to get anyone up,
20:11and that's when I observed a motor torpedo boat, Israeli,
20:14plainly marked with the Star of David, machine-gunning our life rafts.
20:22The crew of the Liberty were now trapped on board their own ship
20:25with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
20:29The torpedo boats came in closer and began to machine-gun the ship
20:35using armor-piercing projectiles.
20:37The armor-piercing, the shells that they were using were leaving holes
20:40that weren't that big around in the metal plating,
20:43just peeled it out like it was orange peel.
20:49At close range, the armor-piercing rounds
20:51ripped through the steel hull of the ship.
20:53Nowhere was safe.
20:56This bullet was retrieved from one of the navigational books
21:00at the rear portion of the bridge.
21:02It had penetrated the skin of the ship, gone through at least one other book,
21:06and then stopped in the second book.
21:09This is part of an armor-piercing shell.
21:12The outer portion, or jacket, makes the hole that this then goes through.
21:16And a bullet like this had hit Seaman Francis Brown and killed him.
21:22He died right on the spot.
21:24Just fell to the floor dead.
21:26He was just barely 18.
21:29There weren't enough helmets to go around for everyone.
21:32It was like sitting in a cardboard box
21:34and having somebody shoot through it.
21:36The bullets were just coming everywhere.
21:43Throughout the attack,
21:45the Liberty had been silent to the outside world.
21:48All its aerials were either smashed or jammed.
21:52We had one whip antenna which hadn't worked the entire cruise,
21:56and it had a bullet hole in it.
21:58One of the radio men had taken a reel of coaxed cable
22:02and ran it from one of the transmitters back there to that whip antenna
22:07and took some shrapnel in the process.
22:11He got out in Mayday.
22:13Firefox, Firefox, this is Rockstar.
22:16This is Rockstar.
22:18He got out in Mayday.
22:20Firefox, Firefox, this is Rockstar, Rockstar.
22:23Under attack by unidentified surface and naval air units.
22:27Require immediate assistance.
22:30The American 6th Fleet was 500 miles away and picked up the signal.
22:34So did the Israeli armed forces.
22:37The attack stopped shortly afterwards.
22:41The American aircraft carriers were in the middle of a nuclear weapons drill
22:45and had to rearm with conventional bombs before they could take off.
22:49Once the Israelis knew the U.S. jets were in the air,
22:53they summoned the American naval attache
22:55and told him there had been a terrible mistake.
23:01The American planes were recalled.
23:04As they returned, Israeli helicopters flew out to the Liberty.
23:08This one had some personnel from the Israeli government
23:15and the U.S. naval attache.
23:18It dropped a brown paper sack on the deck in the fore part of the ship,
23:25weighted down with an orange, had a business card in it.
23:29It landed right next to the severed leg of one of the deck personnel.
23:35And the note said,
23:41Do you have casualties?
23:47Pretty obvious that there were casualties.
23:50I mean, there's still body parts
23:54and blood streaming down the bulkheads.
23:59So his message, do you have casualties,
24:02was kind of out of place.
24:06One of the sailors carried that sack back to the captain,
24:11and the captain took out the note and read it,
24:15looked up at the helicopter and popped the social finger at him.
24:33June 8, 1967, the height of the Six-Day War.
24:37The USS Liberty, an American spy ship,
24:40had just been attacked by Israeli jets and torpedo boats
24:43while in international waters off Egypt.
24:46Badly damaged, two-thirds of its crew were dead or wounded.
24:57As soon as the news reached Washington,
24:59the attack on the Liberty instantly triggered a domestic political crisis.
25:03According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act,
25:07one solution suggested in American government circles
25:10was to sink the Liberty so journalists could not photograph it
25:14and inflame public opinion against the Israelis.
25:18The NSA rejected this idea with an impolite comment.
25:24Handling the media became the top priority.
25:28I was taken to my home in White Oak, Maryland.
25:31My name is Patricia Blue Rishakis,
25:34and my husband was killed on the Liberty.
25:38And by the time I got there,
25:41there were any number of people from the National Security Agency there.
25:46They were there to make sure that I didn't speak to anyone from the press,
25:52and I didn't.
25:54They stayed night and day.
25:56Back in the Mediterranean, the Liberty was now listing at 10 degrees,
26:00a massive hole in the hull above and below the waterline.
26:07The planes that they said they were sending to us never arrived.
26:10What I was afraid of, and I think most of us, was that we were going to sink.
26:13Well, the mess decks was pretty much littered with the wounded.
26:18It looks like something out of a horror movie,
26:20with people standing around or lying, wounded and dead and stunned.
26:25Heads missing, parts of their bodies.
26:27The Liberty had only one doctor on board, with very limited medical resources.
26:32There was not a table that wasn't being used with a body on it,
26:35or a wounded body on it.
26:37The doctor fixed compound fractures and treated bullet and shrapnel wounds,
26:41while blood transfusions were given arm to arm.
26:48It was...
26:51It was real bad.
26:53And the doctor said to him,
26:55you want me to operate?
26:57He said, you're probably going to die if I do it,
26:59and you'll certainly die if I don't.
27:01And he said, go ahead, doctor.
27:03And so when the doctor operated,
27:05we held him as tight as we could.
27:08It was horrible pain, I'm sure, for him.
27:10And all of a sudden, he went limp and he died right there.
27:16I don't want to ever see anything like that again.
27:24Captain McGonigal received a pretty bad leg injury, lost a lot of blood.
27:29He was navigating by the stars.
27:31We had a little bit of power and tons of water in our belly,
27:35which meant the ship waved back and forth all night long.
27:39The next day, American ships arrived
27:41to take the injured and the dead off the Liberty.
27:43The American government now made sure
27:45that no journalists could get anywhere near the crew.
27:49When they took the severely wounded to various parts,
27:52they actually posted guards on their rooms
27:55so that no one could be interviewed by the press.
27:58The total press blackout was in effect.
28:01Back in Washington, the government ensured
28:03there was little information for the press,
28:06while politics went on behind closed doors.
28:10I was told to go operationally to the 7th floor.
28:15Well, my name is Bill Woyt.
28:17I was in charge of the Arab-Israel desk.
28:20I sit in because the Secretary of State himself, Dean Rusk,
28:25had summoned Ambassador Harmon of Israel to come in urgently.
28:32And so I sat through the meeting taking notes,
28:36and in a loud voice, the Secretary was really demanding
28:42some explanation for why and what had happened.
28:46The Ambassador himself seemed to be ignorant of the incidents.
28:52He immediately said,
28:54I can't believe what you're telling me.
28:57It would be impossible. It would be unheard of.
29:00It was especially tough for Lyndon Johnson,
29:03to date the most pro-Israeli American president in history.
29:08Johnson was in a very tough mood.
29:11I'm Tom Hughes.
29:13I was Director in the State Department,
29:15Director of Intelligence and Research
29:17at the time of the Liberty incident in 1967.
29:21Attack on the Liberty, Johnson himself
29:23briefed Newsweek magazine off the record
29:25that the Israelis had attacked, and the reason they'd attacked
29:28was that they thought this was an intelligence ship
29:31that was intercepting perhaps Israeli
29:33as well as Egyptian communications.
29:37But then everything changed.
29:40The fact that Johnson himself was the leaker
29:43and briefer of Newsweek was soon leaked.
29:47And this alarmed, of course, the Israeli Embassy
29:50and their leading friends in the Jewish organizations.
29:54The Israeli Embassy regarded this as a major problem,
30:00and that what Johnson had told Newsweek
30:06practically amounted to blood libel.
30:09Declassified Israeli documents show they were going to threaten
30:13President Johnson with blood libel, gross anti-Semitism,
30:17and that would end his political career.
30:21Blackmail.
30:23This is Admiral Bobby, our inland U.S. Navy retired.
30:28I'm a former Director of the National Security Agency.
30:32But they know if he is thinking about running again,
30:35he's going to need money for his campaign.
30:39So alleging that he's blood libeling
30:43is going to arouse the Jewish donors.
30:48The Israeli government hired teams of lawyers,
30:51some of whom were close friends of Lyndon Johnson,
30:54and began an all-out offensive.
30:57They leant on the media to kill critical stories
31:00that presented others in favor of Israel.
31:03There was a campaign mounted to see what could be done
31:08about returning Johnson to his normal, predictable pro-Israeli position.
31:15At the time, Johnson was still undecided
31:18as to whether to run for president the following year.
31:21Efforts were to be made to remind the president
31:24of the delicacy of his own position,
31:27that he personally might lose support
31:32for his run for re-election in 1968.
31:36Israeli tactics were clever.
31:38They identified Johnson's soft spot, the war in Vietnam,
31:41and gave him two extraordinary gifts,
31:44neither of which were made public at the time.
31:47The first was political.
31:49One of Johnson's complaints about Israel
31:51was that many of the Jewish organizations
31:53and the heads of leaders in the Jewish community
31:56were opposing him on Vietnam,
31:58and they were suddenly becoming more silent on Vietnam
32:01as the liberty crisis moved.
32:04So he also knew that there was a move back in his favor
32:08if he was moderate on Israel.
32:12There was a second gift, much more secret,
32:15but vital to the American president.
32:18The dreadful death toll in Vietnam
32:20was dominating the domestic news agenda.
32:23The North Vietnamese had Russian surface-to-air missiles,
32:26which were bringing down American aircraft on a daily basis.
32:31The American military attaché in Israel
32:34got a surprise visit from a senior Israeli intelligence officer.
32:39Took some helicopters and went across the North Red Sea
32:43to the surface-to-air missile sites
32:46and not only captured them but took back everything,
32:50the launchers, the missiles,
32:52the maintenance manuals, the rest of it.
32:55And then he went to the U.S. Embassy, to the air attaché,
32:59and said, I think I have something you might be interested in.
33:03And, of course, those were the same missiles
33:06that our aircraft flying over North Vietnam
33:09were encountering day to day.
33:12And countermeasures was a huge issue.
33:15So grateful was the American government
33:18that gave Israel two gifts in return.
33:20They resupplied them with the weapons they had just lost in the war,
33:24and the liberty inquiry run by the Department of Defense, the DoD,
33:28was watered down.
33:30All that's influenced by what have we benefited from,
33:34from the captured SA-2 missile sites.
33:38Soon Johnson did respond and took a much more lenient line
33:43and wished that the whole incident
33:45could be put behind us as soon as possible.
33:47Johnson's softer approach to Israel
33:49was immediately reflected in the American Navy inquiry,
33:52which was now underway on board the Liberty.
33:56We began to realize that a cover-up was descending upon us.
34:01A lot of people that were in a key position to offer testimony
34:05were not given that opportunity.
34:07I testified to the machine gunning of life rafts,
34:11to the captain's state of mind,
34:14and those two issues in particular were totally omitted.
34:18Lloyd Painter was not the only officer to have his testimony ignored.
34:24I saw what looked like unburned Vaseline,
34:27and I scraped a little bit of it off and put it in the jar
34:30and sealed the cap on.
34:33And I presented it to the court of inquiry,
34:35and that's the last I saw of that jar.
34:37There was no mention of napalm, and I'm sure that's what it was.
34:40They didn't want to hear any of that.
34:42I didn't know that at the time.
34:44I didn't know until many months later that none of that had been recorded.
34:47Looking back on it, it was a total sham.
34:49The U.S. Court of Inquiry reported in just 20 days.
34:52It was a rushed job, full of spelling mistakes,
34:55much key evidence ignored, no Israelis interviewed,
34:58and it exonerated them from blame.
35:01I read the court of inquiry and realized that my statements
35:04had been stricken from the record and never recorded.
35:07So I knew then for certain that the cover-up was massive.
35:11The Israelis then rushed out their own report,
35:13which concluded that the whole affair was a series of mistakes
35:17and that no one was to blame.
35:19The only dissenting voice was that of the Israeli ambassador in Washington.
35:23He sent a secret telegram back home arguing that Israel was clearly guilty.
35:28He cited the audio tape of the attack,
35:31the existence of which was known to top Israeli officials,
35:35and mentioned the crucial 20-minute gap
35:37that followed the Liberty's identification
35:39and the launch of the torpedoes against her.
35:42He said they should own up to what they had done
35:45and put the guilty on trial.
35:47His advice was ignored.
35:49The focus now was to repair the damage to American-Israeli relations.
35:54The Israelis have always been very skillful
35:58at tracking what the U.S. government is doing, saying, thinking,
36:04and effort to influence it.
36:06And they're by no means the only country that does it.
36:09Many do. They're just more effective at it than most.
36:12And the great advantage they have as compared to other countries
36:16is their influence in the Congress.
36:18Around the time of the attack,
36:20the Washington Post had noted that the Jewish lobby
36:23could help determine the outcome of 169 of the 270 electoral votes
36:28needed to win the White House.
36:31The big emotive words about the attack
36:33disappeared from press releases at the Pentagon,
36:37and a much more bland and neutral-sounding discourse occurred.
36:46And this was true of the private briefings
36:49that official people in the Pentagon made about the incident.
36:53But whatever was said to journalists,
36:55every U.S. intelligence head believed the attack was intentional.
36:59One of them wrote,
37:00A nice whitewash for a group of ignorant, stupid, and inept XXX.
37:07The Jewish community has always been more generous
37:11than many of their other counterparts
37:13in supporting financially elections,
37:17political causes in the process.
37:19That does translate into influence.
37:22Many of Johnson's closest friends and advisers were pro-Israeli,
37:26and they reported back to Tel Aviv on his every move.
37:30The Israeli story constantly shifted
37:32to counter whatever new intelligence the White House received.
37:36So sensitive were these communications
37:38that the Israelis used code names
37:40to protect the identity of their White House agents.
37:43But for the first time, the members of the ring can be named.
37:48Hamlet was a million-dollar fundraiser for the Democrats.
37:52When he rang, Johnson took his calls.
37:55He was Abe Feinberg.
37:59Menashe was Arthur Goldberg,
38:01the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
38:04Harari was David Ginsburg, a high-profile Washington lawyer
38:08who also represented the Israeli embassy.
38:11Ilan was Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas.
38:17Lyndon Johnson had dinner with him on the eve of the Six-Day War.
38:22The strategy worked.
38:24The U.S.-Israeli relationship proved to be stronger
38:27than the killing and injuring of more than 200 Americans.
38:33The American-Israeli relationship was very much at stake,
38:37and it was brought back from the precipice.
38:42The crucial intelligence came
38:44from the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg.
38:48He warned Tel Aviv that the United States had the audio tape
38:52that revealed Israeli pilots knew it was an American ship
38:56before they attacked.
39:01The tape was quietly buried.
39:06I think a conscious decision was made
39:09to sweep it under the rug, to put it behind.
39:12My reading is that the U.S. government had made a decision
39:17to accept the apology and reject the rationale,
39:22but don't push it further.
39:38With the politics sorted,
39:40the only remaining issue was the fate of the USS Liberty,
39:44badly damaged and now in Malta for extensive repairs.
39:48The torpedo hole was massive and was revealed to be much bigger
39:52once they got the ship into dry dock and drained it of water.
39:56The sealed compartment was a water-filled tomb,
40:00full of bodies, body parts and top-secret equipment.
40:06You could smell death and you could smell oil.
40:09That's what I remember.
40:11The air hit the bodies, they began to deteriorate rapidly.
40:14You do what you have to do.
40:16They were your shipmates, still are.
40:19The Navy was more concerned with equipment parts than they were body parts.
40:23But when I went down, I knew that you couldn't separate the two.
40:27We had to start shoveling up the parts, 168 bags worth.
40:33Elsewhere, the make-up artists were getting to work.
40:37We were in the dry dock about six weeks.
40:40We had 300 Maltese workers.
40:42They were working two shifts a day and I think seven days a week.
40:45They were cutting out the shell holes, welding plates over that,
40:49and fabricating metal to cover the torpedo hole.
40:54And then in one day, they painted the entire ship.
40:57We looked like nothing ever happened.
40:59We took it across the Atlantic.
41:01It was like being in a cemetery, but when we pulled into port, we looked good.
41:04This press and everything were there,
41:06and we looked like basically nothing really happened.
41:09So it was great for the press to downplay what really happened to us.
41:16While the survivors met the widows and friends,
41:19the 168 bags of body parts and top-secret equipment
41:23were quietly taken to an incinerator and burnt.
41:27A year later, and the Liberty Captain William McGonagall
41:31was given the Medal of Honor, America's highest award for gallantry.
41:35The tradition has always been
41:37that it is presented by the president in the White House.
41:42I look at these two gallant Marines,
41:46and I see America.
41:50Captain McGonagall never heard words like these from his commander-in-chief.
41:54There was no television coverage for him
41:56as he received his medal in a quiet ceremony in the Navy Yard.
42:00President Johnson was just four miles away at the time.
42:03He stayed in the White House to hand out diplomas to schoolchildren.
42:08The reason was revealed in this internal memo,
42:11which advised President Johnson
42:13that due to the nature and sensitivity of these awards,
42:17they should be given by the Department of Defense, not by him.
42:21The advice was clear.
42:23No press release regarding them should be made.
42:28When I received my Purple Heart
42:31in a secret ceremony in the captain's office,
42:34I was admonished, threat of court-martial,
42:37don't ever tell anyone where you got this.
42:39Don't ever tell anyone how you got this medal.
42:44The following year, American aid to Israel increased fourfold,
42:49and President Johnson agreed a treaty
42:52classified above top secret with Israel
42:55for the mutual exchange of intelligence,
42:58an arrangement which is still in place today,
43:01codenamed Stone Ruby.
43:17One of the things that bothers me is
43:20there wasn't a nice explanation of what went on.
43:23No one wants to talk about the why.
43:28The big secret the Israelis wanted to protect was their next move.
43:32They had told the Americans that this was to be a limited war
43:35and not a land grab.
43:37But on June 8, 1967, their forces were poised to attack
43:40and seize the Golan Heights and invade Syria,
43:43something they wished to keep from the White House until they'd done it.
43:49Successive American administrations,
43:51both Republican and Democrat, had refused to deal with the liberty.
43:55Even the issue of war crimes against unarmed Americans
43:58has never been addressed.
44:00There was a war crimes report
44:02filed by the Liberty Veterans Association
44:05to address the issues of such war crimes as firing on life rafts.
44:13That was never answered properly.
44:16I don't think it was answered, period.
44:18The people who were responsible for attacking the Liberty
44:21were, by and large, the military individuals in the war room.
44:25I don't know how many. Four, eight, ten.
44:30Those were the people who came up with the plan.
44:33Those were the individuals who were responsible for the attack.
44:36The pilots, the motor torpedo boat personnel, they were ordered.
44:41You don't follow orders, go to jail.
44:44So they have to follow through.
44:46It wasn't the Israeli people who ordered that attack.
44:50It wasn't the average Jewish person who ordered that attack.
44:54We really need to exonerate the average Jewish person, Israeli, from this
45:01and go towards those individuals who are responsible for the attack.
45:05No one was really willing to take this on.
45:08Not the State Department, the White House, not the Congress.
45:14It's in everybody's best interest to just let this go,
45:19and that's exactly what they did.
45:21But by doing that, they left a lot of pain for the survivors
45:27and for the families because there was a lot of broken families,
45:32broken marriages, alcoholism, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder.
45:40So those crew members suffered a lot, but so did the families.
45:46The hardest part was the reaction of our own government toward us.
45:50And we were actually, the fingers were pointed at us.
45:54And the Israelis, they were never questioned as to why they did it.
46:00They only questioned us.
46:02The families still want answers from their government, which remains silent.
46:07For many, some memories never fade.
46:10We had a wonderful time just being together.
46:13I met Alan at a party.
46:16We spent a lot of time talking throughout the evening.
46:19And at the end of the evening, he said to me,
46:23are you busy tomorrow afternoon?
46:26And I said, well, no.
46:29And he said, do you think we could get married?
46:33Then I was told that he was among the dead.
46:37It was absolutely the worst moment of my life.
46:43There's not a day that doesn't go by where I don't think about those guys.
46:47I mean, I went through hell, but they left the earth.
46:51When I'm walking up to the mass grave,
46:54I still feel a connection with those people.
46:57Hard to explain, but it's still there.
47:00So I want to remember that connection as long as I can.
47:05What we shared, what we felt.
47:08It took 13 years of haggling before both sides
47:11finally agreed a compensation deal for the ship.
47:14By 1980, the bill plus interest was just over $17 million.
47:19Israel offered six.
47:22The Americans accepted, then sold the liberty.
47:25The deal was signed, and the ship was returned to the United States.
47:29It was the first time in the history of the United States
47:33Israel offered six.
47:35The Americans accepted, then sold the liberty for $100,000 scrap.
47:41The settlement for the victims was quicker,
47:44but many are still unhappy with it today.
47:51I did not feel it was a fair settlement.
47:53I would have fought it.
47:55But I was so sad and broken.
48:00I just didn't have the energy to take on that fight.
48:04And it wasn't a fight that I thought I could win.
48:07The State Department were very eager
48:12for the survivors to make that settlement.
48:16They sent a check for the amount, and that was that.
48:22The American government came up with a formula
48:25for the Israelis to compensate the widows and children for their loss.
48:29This included a payment for shock and mental anguish.
48:32The widows got $25,000,
48:35with $10,000 for each of their children over five.
48:38An American government lawyer doubted that children under five
48:42could sufficiently comprehend the event to suffer shock and grief.
48:47The U.S. proposed they should therefore receive nothing,
48:52an offer the Israelis accepted.
48:56Since the attack on the Liberty,
48:59the USA and Israel have grown ever closer.
49:02At the time, George Ball, the U.S. Undersecretary of State,
49:06noted that it seemed clear to the Israelis
49:09that as American leaders did not have the courage to punish them
49:13for the blatant murder of American citizens,
49:16they would let them get away with anything.
49:25© transcript Emily Beynon