Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty – The full story
If Dayan was to get away with it, the Liberty had to be totally destroyed with no survivors to tell the tale. And the key to complete success when the attack was launched would be taking out the Liberty’s transmitting facilities before it could get off a call for help to the American Sixth Fleet which was not too far away. If the Liberty did succeed in transmitting an S.O.S. when it was being attacked, there was at least the possibility that fighter planes from the Sixth Fleet would be ordered to take on the attackers. The prospect of an aerial dog-fight between U.S. and Israeli warplanes was unthinkable. But that was what Dayan would be risking if his attack planes failed to take out the Liberty’s transmitting facilities with their first rockets. The Noratlas’s prime task was to get the pictures that would enable Israeli pilots to attack the Liberty’s communications facilities with, literally, pin-point accuracy on their first run.
At 0720 hours Lieutenant James Ennes replaced Scott as the Officer of the Deck. By now everybody on the Liberty was well aware that their ship was being examined very, very carefully. The first thing Ennes did was to order a new flag (measuring five feet by eight feet) to be run up the main mast. The old one had been badly sooted on the journey from Rota.
At 0900 hours, in accordance with its original operating orders, the Liberty made a sharp right-hand turn and reduced speed to five knots. The ship was doubling back in a westerly direction roughly parallel to the Egyptian coast north of El Arish. As Ennes ordered the turn, the Liberty was 25 miles from Gaza and less than 30 miles from the nearest point on the Israeli coast. The ship was now perfectly placed to listen to IDF movement orders – orders for many Israeli units in Sinai to turn around and move north, to assist with the consolidation of Israel’s capture of the West Bank and, more importantly, an attack on Syria. (I was in Sinai at the time reporting for ITN, and I saw some of the Israel tanks that had smashed through Egypt’s defences being loaded onto huge lorry-drawn trailers for transportation northwards).
As the Liberty was turning, a single jet aircraft was watching from a distance. Then, at 1000 hours, two delta-winged jets armed with rockets circled the ship three times. On this occasion the planes came close enough for Ennes and other officers on the bridge to see the pilots in their cockpits through binoculars. The odd thing, or so the Americans on the Liberty’s bridge thought, was that the two planes did not seem to have any markings.
In retrospect, it is obvious that the 1000 hours visit was something of a trial run, to enable the pilots to take a view on whether or not the first set of pictures taken by the Noratlas would enable them to attack the Liberty’s communications facilities with pin-point accuracy.
Events suggest that the two pilots who were to lead the attack were not happy and wanted more photographs to enable them to guarantee such pinpoint accuracy. After their report, the Noratlas made three more over flights: at 1030 hours – this time passing directly over the Liberty at a very low level, probably not more than 200 feet: at 1126 hours; and 1220 hours.
At 1310 hours, with lunch over, the crew of the Liberty conducted a series of drills including fire, damage control and gas attack. That took 40 minutes. Captain McGonagle then addressed the ship’s officers and crew. In the normal course of events he would have confined himself to complimenting them (or not) on the job done in the drills. But on this particular afternoon, the fourth of the war – they could see the smoke of battle on the shoreline, he knew that his men were in need of reassurance. After the Noratlas’s fourth reconnaissance over-flight there had been mutterings of fear. The Israelis had obviously identified the Liberty several times over. What, really, did they want?
McGonagle addressed the concern of his ship’s company by stressing that they had been under surveillance by “friendly” forces. Given that and the fact that they (the friendly forces) could not have failed to identify the Liberty, the captain was implying that his men should dismiss from their minds the possibility of an attack. He was saying – without saying – that the Israelis could not attack the Liberty without knowing it was the Liberty they were attacking.
At 1405 hours the “friends” returned, led by three Mirages each armed with 72 rockets and two 30-mm cannons. This time there was no circling. At high speed they came straight for the Liberty, so fast that between the time they appeared as blips on the ship’s radar and the start of their attack, Ennes and others on the bridge barely had time to grab and focus their binoculars.
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