Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty – The full story
True and tragic is that President Johnson knowingly took sides with Israel out of fear of offending Zionism and risking the loss, for himself and his party, of Jewish votes and Jewish campaign funds. And that required him to “miss the boat badly” by putting Zionism’s interests before America’s interests in the Middle East.
The man who had seen it all coming and tried to stop it happening before it was too late was the first U.S. Secretary of Defence, James Forrestal. As we have also seen, President Eisenhower shared Forrestal’s concerns, and for his two terms in office did insist that America’s interests should have priority over Zionism’s interests. And it is reasonable to speculate that a second-term President Kennedy would have followed Eisenhower’s lead. The problem by the time Lyndon Johnson became the leader of the so-called Free World can be simply stated – there was nobody with real influence on U.S. policy who was prepared to argue seriously for putting America’s own best interests first.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk and others knew that support for Zionism right or wrong was bound to have catastrophic consequences for America, eventually. But they also knew they could not buck their pork-barrel system.
Since this book was first published more information has come to light, much but not all of it from Liberty survivors, about who knew what when the spy ship was attacked.
It includes the fact that American intelligence agencies had taped intercepts of Israeli pilots telling ground control that their target was an America ship and asking if they were still required to attack it. The answer was, “Yes, follow orders.” Ray McGovern, 27 years with the CIA under seven presidents and the man who briefed some of them every morning, has confirmed that the NSA destroyed many tapes which proved the Israelis were lying when they said it was an “unfortunate accident” and a “case of mistaken identity”.
In this book I’ll leave the last word on why the Liberty was attacked to a senior IDF officer in conversation with Liberty survivor Don Paegler.
His task after the Israeli attack was to collect and try to re-assemble the bodies of those blown to pieces by Israeli bombs and torpedoes. Don’s own account, which he e-mailed to me, included this:
“The torpedo hit were I worked in the research spaces (commonly called the spook shack). I had top secret crypto security clearance, and when we reached Malta after the attack and put the ship in dry-dock, I was one of the first to go down to the torpedoed spaces to clean-up. Within the first 15 to 20 minutes, I picked up a piece of equipment. Under it was an arm. Although it had been soaked in salt water for a week, I knew whose arm it was. Phil Tiedke was a body builder and I could tell by the muscle structure it was his. It was like having an out of body experience. One of the men said, ‘You have to find the rest of the pieces of his body and make sure they all get in the same body bag.’ Another said, ‘They’re all blown apart, just put it in a bag and get on with it.’ Of the two days I spent down there cleaning up that is all I remember. .. When I arrived in Norfolk I was debriefed. I was told: ‘You have the highest security clearance anyone can get in this country. Never speak about this to anyone including your family.’”
There reason why Don decided to speak out was to do with his health. The post-traumatic stress caused by keeping the truth bottled up inside him had become a life threatening phenomenon. He put it this way:
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