Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty – The full story
At about 2200 hours the Liberty’s sophisticated radar-sensing equipment detected Israeli jets circling the ship. That was not surprising given where the vessel was. The surprise was that fire-control radar was being directed at it. The Israeli jets were homing their rockets as though for an attack.
The small group gathered around the Liberty’s radar screen playfully employed the ship’s electronic countermeasure (ECM) to “spoof” the Israeli pilots. The Liberty’s ECM equipment was of the latest and most sophisticated type and enabled the ship to distort its radar image and send it back to the Israeli planes – making the Liberty appear to be much smaller and then much bigger than it was. First Class Petty Officer Charles Rowley was subsequently to recall that no one took the contact seriously. The Israelis, it was assumed, were only playing games.
They were not; and there was a link between the directing of fire-control radar at the Liberty and what had happened an hour or so earlier. The Office of the U.S. Defence Attaché in Tel Aviv had sent a startling message to the U.S. Army Communications Centre in Washington. By telegram in code the message was that the IDF was planning to attack the Liberty if the ship continued to move closer to the Israeli coast!
It can be assumed that it was only a matter of minutes before everybody in Washington who needed to know did know about Dayan’s threat. (Everybody in Washington’s war loop knew that it was Dayan’s war).
In retrospect two things seem to me to be obvious.
The first is that Dayan ordered the leaking (to the U.S. Defence Attaché) of his intention to attack the Liberty in the hope that the threat alone would cause the controlling American authorities to abort the spy ship’s mission, and thus remove the need for it to be attacked.
The second is that Dayan ordered the jets which circled the Liberty at 2200 hours to direct fire-control radar at the vessel to underline the fact that he was not bluffing – that the spy ship would be attacked if it did not move away. Dayan was assuming that the Liberty would report to its controllers in Washington the fact that Israeli jets had gone through the motions of preparing to attack the vessel.
As it happened the Liberty did not report its 2200 hours contact because of the assumption that the Israeli pilots were playing games. But the Liberty’s failure to report the incident was of no consequence because the report of the U.S. Defence Attaché had weight enough on its own. Washington knew that Israel’s one-eyed warlord was not a man who made empty threats.
There can surely be no dispute about what President Johnson ought to have done given that the lives of 286 Americans on board the Liberty were at stake. He ought to have telephoned Prime Minister Eshkol and said that an Israeli attack on the Liberty would be regarded as a declaration of war on the United States of America, and would provoke an appropriate U.S. response.
But for obvious domestic political reasons Johnson was not going to do that. Instead, and no doubt at the urging of Walt Rostow and others with influence who were for Zionism right or wrong, the President approved the sending of an order for the Liberty to get away from Israel as fast as possible. Over the course of two and a half hours, three frantic messages to that effect were sent, each rated “Pinnacle”, which meant highest priority. Incredibly, none were received by the Liberty.
To this day the U.S. Navy has not offered an explanation, so those of us who don’t like mysteries have to speculate. There are, I think, only two possible explanations.
One is that the messages were inadvertently misrouted and delayed in the convoluted channels and procedures of the Defence Department’s worldwide communications system. That supposes an astonishing degree of inefficiency and incompetence. (The subsequent TOP SECRET Naval Board of Inquiry – “Review of Proceedings on the Attack on the U.S.S. Liberty” – asserted that nobody in the Defence Department was to blame for anything).
The other possible explanation is that somebody in high authority was enraged by President Johnson’s surrender to Dayan for domestic political reasons, and took the necessary steps to see to it that the messages were not transmitted to the Liberty – because he believed that the spy ship’s mission was vital; in turn because he believed that the peace of the world might be at stake if Israel attacked Syria and provoked a Soviet response. This explanation supposes that there was in the Johnson administration one hell of a fight between those who supported Zionism right or wrong – even when doing so was not in America’s best interests, and those who put America’s own interests first.
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