USS Liberty

The weather off the Sinai coast on June 8, 1967 was clear, with visibility for miles. The USS Liberty was in international waters about fourteen miles out, flying a large American flag, her hull painted with the letters GTR-5 in numerals several feet high. Israeli reconnaissance aircraft had been passing over her for hours.

At two in the afternoon, unmarked Mirage III fighters came in low and opened up with cannon, rockets and napalm. They strafed the ship for twenty-five minutes. Then Israeli torpedo boats arrived and put five torpedoes in the water. One of them struck the Liberty amidships, in the compartments where the intelligence work was done, and killed twenty-five men where they stood.

The attack lasted about two hours. Thirty-four American sailors were killed and 171 wounded, better than two-thirds of a crew of 294. It remains the deadliest attack on a U.S. Navy vessel by a foreign power since the Second World War, and the country responsible was one the United States was arming.

What the ship was

The Liberty was a converted Victory-class cargo hull, redesignated a technical research vessel, which was the Navy’s term for a floating listening post. She worked to the National Security Agency’s tasking, and in June 1967 she was off the Sinai monitoring the communications of a war then three days old.

She was not hidden and was not trying to be. That is the fact the official explanation has to survive.

Two details that resist the accident theory

Two things happened during those two hours that are hard to reconcile with a case of mistaken identity.

The first is the jamming. When the Liberty’s radiomen tried to call for help, they found their transmissions blocked, not only on U.S. Navy tactical frequencies but on the international maritime distress frequencies at the same time. Jamming a specific set of frequencies requires knowing in advance which frequencies to jam.

The second is what happened after the torpedo hit. Crewmen put life rafts over the side, and the torpedo boats machine-gunned them in the water. The survivors described it, and the Naval Court of Inquiry’s classified annex recorded it.

The recall

The part of this story that belongs to Washington rather than to Tel Aviv is what happened on the American carriers.

Twice during the attack the Sixth Fleet launched aircraft to help. Twice they were called back before they arrived.

Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, who had ordered the launches, later described the second recall to Lieutenant Commander David Lewis, the Liberty’s senior Naval Security Group officer. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had ordered the aircraft returned. Geis, disbelieving, asked for confirmation. President Johnson came on the line and confirmed it himself, saying that he did not care if the ship sank, because he would not embarrass an ally.

Captain Joe Tully, commanding the carrier Saratoga, corroborated the recall. So did Geis. No American rescue mission had ever before been called off while an American ship was under attack.

The first vessel to offer the Liberty assistance was a Soviet destroyer. The offer was declined.

The inquiry

Israel said it had mistaken the Liberty for the Egyptian horse transport El Quseir. Washington accepted the explanation within days, without independently investigating the circumstances.

A Naval Court of Inquiry was convened under Admiral Isaac Kidd. Kidd and his chief counsel, Captain Ward Boston, estimated a proper investigation would take six months. Admiral John McCain Jr., commanding U.S. naval forces in Europe, gave them one week. According to participants the court was directed to establish whether any failing by the Liberty’s crew had contributed to the casualties, not to determine who was culpable for the attack, and investigators declined to hear testimony that it had been deliberate.

Thirty-six years later, Ward Boston signed an affidavit and it was entered into the Congressional Record. He wrote that Johnson and McNamara had ordered the court to “conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” He went further:

“Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack, which killed 34 American sailors and injured 172 others, was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew. I am certain that the Israeli pilots that undertook the attack, as well as their superiors who had ordered the attack, were aware that the ship was American.”

He also said the record itself had been tampered with. Because of the speed demanded of them, he had hand-corrected and initialled a substantial number of pages of the transcript. Examining the version later released to the public, he found none of his corrections and none of his initials.

This is the strongest evidence in the case and its limits should be stated. Boston swore to what he and Kidd believed and to what he was told. Kidd died in 1999 and never confirmed or denied it. The affidavit is sworn testimony from the Navy’s own chief counsel, not a journalist’s source, and it has never been rebutted by anyone in a position to know. It also cannot be corroborated by the man at its centre.

What followed

Israel paid about $12 million across three settlements, for the dead and wounded, for the ship, and for personal property. No Israeli officer or official was charged or court-martialed.

Captain William McGonagle, who kept command of his ship despite serious wounds, was awarded the Medal of Honor. It is normally hung by the President at the White House. McGonagle received his from the Secretary of the Navy at the Washington Navy Yard, in a quiet ceremony, and the citation does not name the country that attacked him.

Surviving crewmen said they were warned against talking, on pain of court-martial, imprisonment “or worse.”

Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1970 to 1974, chaired an independent commission of inquiry in 2003 and wrote this about the recall:

“Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s cancellation of the Navy’s attempt to rescue the Liberty, which I personally confirmed from the commanders of the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga, was the most disgraceful act I witnessed in my entire military career. To add insult to injury, Congress, to this day, has failed to hold formal hearings on Israel’s attack on this American ship. No official investigation of Israel’s attack has ever permitted the testimony of the surviving crew members.”

That last sentence is still true. In fifty-nine years there has been no congressional hearing at which a survivor of the USS Liberty was permitted to testify on the record. A classified congressional report on the attack remains unreleased, and is the subject of an active federal lawsuit; the journalist who brought it says his research suggests the report may contain testimony that Israeli officials discussed attacking the Liberty the day before it happened.

Why it matters

Every other case in this archive turns on documents, and this one does too, but the document is unusual. It is not a leak, not a foreign intelligence file, not an anonymous account. It is a sworn affidavit from the chief attorney of the United States Navy’s own court of inquiry, filed in the Congressional Record, stating that a President and a Secretary of Defense instructed that court to reach a false conclusion about the killing of thirty-four American sailors.

Whether the Israeli pilots knew what they were shooting at is a question the two governments still answer differently, and the evidence assembled here favors one answer without formally settling it. What is not in question is the American half. Aircraft were sent to help Americans under fire and were called back so that an ally would not be embarrassed. The inquiry was given a week. The Medal of Honor was handed over in a side room. The survivors were told to keep quiet, and nobody in Congress has ever asked them, under oath, what they saw.

Sources

• Captain Ward Boston, JAGC, USN (ret.), Sworn Affidavit, October 9, 2003 — published in the Congressional Record; reported by Associated Press (Jennifer C. Kerr, October 23, 2003)
• Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, USN (ret.), “A Legacy of Betrayal,” 2004 — Moorer served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1970–1974
• USS Liberty Veterans Association, “Facts Presented by the United States of America,” ussliberty.org — compiles sworn statements from crew members and officials
• National Security Agency, “Attack on a Sigint Collector, the USS Liberty” (1981 cryptologic history, declassified 2003/2007) — released following a FOIA lawsuit by A. Jay Cristol
• U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume XIX: Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967 — history.state.gov
• U.S. Army War College, Strategy Research Project, “Attack on the USS Liberty: A Stab at the Truth” — apps.dtic.mil
• Military.com, “The USS Liberty FOIA Lawsuit and the Fight Over a Secret 1967 Report,” March 11, 2026