Sunday Sermonette -- Killing All The Witnesses, USS Liberty

Sunday Sermonette -- Killing All The Witnesses, USS Liberty

The attack came in three waves.

First Israeli jets strafed and bombed the American flag waving

USS Liberty. Then torpedo boats came in, blowing a

39-foot hole in the starboard side.

But an Israeli torpedo boat, as testified, had

"methodically machine-gunned one of our life rafts".

The third wave had been designed to finish the job.

After the American flag waving USS Liberty was sunk

witnesses would have gone over the sides and

been floating in the water. To pick them off as they

swam is best done by helicopter.

The official Israeli report says the helicopters were

sent as a "rescue mission".

When the Israeli helicopters arrived the ship was still

afloat thus their task was aborted.

There are new revelations about the Israeli attack

upon the American flag waving USS Liberty. This

report does not cover the aspect of the helicopters,

it does make clear that the Israelis knew full well

who they were trying to sink.

The article is lengthy, if you want to jump

to the meat I suggest you go to where it says:

["We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said. ]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday/chi-liberty_tuesoct02,0,1050179.story?coll=chi_business_ugc

chicagotribune.com

Special report

New revelations in attack on American spy ship

Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of

deadly '67 incident

By John Crewdson

Tribune senior correspondent

October 2, 2007

Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert,

recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister,

is shouting into the phone.

"I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething

with anger!"

Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on

station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets

flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually

defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would

become known as the Six-Day War.

For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with

incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then

attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots

who had confused the U.S. Navy's most distinctive ship with an

Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a

dissimilar profile. And they're also incredulous that, for years,

their own government would reject their calls for a thorough

investigation.

"They tried to lie their way out of it!" Lockwood shouts. "I don't

believe that for a minute! You just don't shoot at a ship at sea

without identifying it, making sure of your target!"

Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors

located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack

without shouting or weeping.

Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government

documents and the recollections of former military personnel,

including some quoted in this article for the first time, which

strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position

that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli

pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing

them,

that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval

vessel.

The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare

Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed

the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty

and seriously flawed investigation.

In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last

June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's

chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker,

acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable

controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said,

"to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can

be

drawn from a thorough review of this material," available

athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty .

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the attack

on the Liberty "a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken

identity, for which Israel has officially apologized." Israel also

paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the

families of those killed in the attack, and another $6 million for

the

loss of the Liberty itself.

But for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis'

apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.

One is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Washington's

Farragut Square park on "a beautiful June afternoon" when she was a

22-

year-old secretary for a law firm.

Blue heard somebody's portable radio saying a U.S. Navy ship had been

torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue's

husband of two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been

hurriedly dispatched overseas.

As she listened to the news report, "it just all came together." Soon

afterward, the NSA confirmed that Allen Blue was among the missing.

"I never felt young again," she said.

Aircraft on the horizon

Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared

on the horizon and circled the Liberty.

The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first

day

of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground.

America

was Israel's ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there.

The

ship's mission was to monitor the communications of Israel's Arab

enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications.

The

Liberty felt safe.

Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men

stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore

Arfsten,

a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw

the blue Star of David on the planes' fuselages. At first, crew

members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their

ship.

Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian

casualty.

An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel,

which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the

combined

armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.

For most of those who survived the attack, the Six-Day War has become

the defining moment of their lives.

Some mustered out of the Navy as soon as their enlistments were up.

Others stayed in long enough to retire. Several went on to successful

business careers. One became a Secret Service agent, another a

Baltimore policeman.

Several are being treated with therapy and drugs for what has since

been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. One has undergone

more than 30 major operations. Another suffers seizures caused by a

piece of shrapnel still lodged in his brain.

After Bryce Lockwood left the Marines, he worked construction, then

tried selling insurance. "I'd get a job and get fired," he said. "I

had a hell of a time getting my feet on the ground."

With his linguistic background, Lockwood could have had a career with

the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. But he was too angry at the U.S.

government to work for it. "Don't talk to me about government!" he

shouts.

U.S. Navy jets were called back

An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their

naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that

the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more

than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio

transmission, was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the

U.S. Navy," a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.

The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply

gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who

directed

the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats

who

picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty's decks

with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot

hole in its starboard side.

To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel's

explanation.

Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th

Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga,

patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled

at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have

arrived

in time to prevent the torpedo attack -- and save 26 American lives.

J.Q. "Tony" Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy

relay station in Morocco that handled communications between

Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense

Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence

Geis, commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the

jets home.

When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed

help,

Hart said, McNamara retorted that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not

going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."

McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has "absolutely no

recollection of what I did that day," except that "I have a memory

that I didn't know at the time what was going on."

The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel's claim

that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But

internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson

Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the

mistake had occurred was not believed.

Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from

Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson's

intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a

National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was

"inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

The attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," the NSA's

director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.

"I don't think you'll find many people at NSA who believe it was

accidental," Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an

interview.

"I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were

doing," said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security

Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern

and South Asian affairs.

"So for me, the question really is who issued the order to do that

and

why? That's the really interesting thing."

The answer, if there is one, will probably never be known. Gen. Moshe

Dayan, then the country's minister of defense; Levi Eshkol, the

Israeli prime minister; and Golda Meir, his successor, are all dead.

Many of those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have

suggested that the Israelis feared the ship might intercept

communications revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S.

opposed. But no one has ever produced any solid evidence to support

that theory, and the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA's deputy director,

Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the

attack "might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai

Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his

activities."

Was the U.S. flag visible?

Though the attack on the Liberty has faded from public memory,

Michael

Oren, a historian and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in

Jerusalem,

conceded that "the case of the assault on the Liberty has never been

closed."

If anything, Oren said, "the accusations leveled against Israel have

grown sharper with time." Oren said in an interview that he believed

a

formal investigation by the U.S., even 40 years later, would be

useful

if only because it would finally establish Israel's innocence.

Questions about what happened to the Liberty have been kept alive by

survivors' groups and their Web sites, a half-dozen books, magazine

articles and television documentaries, scholarly papers published in

academic journals, and Internet chat groups where amateur sleuths

debate arcane points of photo interpretation and torpedo running

depth.

Meantime, the Liberty's survivors and their supporters, including a

distinguished constellation of retired admirals and generals, have

persisted in asking Congress for a full-scale formal investigation.

"We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said.

For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be

reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag

at

the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?

The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the

Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the

attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been

shot

down was replaced with another, larger flag -- the ship's "holiday

colors" -- that measured 13 feet long.

Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: "Every official

interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that

indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag -- and, further, the

weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and

identification."

The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved

the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to precisely the

opposite conclusion.

"Throughout the contact," it declared, "no American or any other flag

appeared on the ship."

The attack, the court said, had been prompted by a report, which

later

proved erroneous, that a ship was shelling Israeli-held positions in

the Sinai Peninsula. The Liberty had no guns capable of shelling the

shore, but the court concluded that the U.S. ship had been mistakenly

identified as the source of the shelling.

Yiftah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ship, told the

Jerusalem Post in 2003 that when he first spotted the Liberty, "I

circled it twice and it did not fire on me. My assumption was that it

was likely to open fire at me and nevertheless I slowed down and I

looked and there was positively no flag."

But the Liberty crewmen interviewed by the Tribune said the Israeli

jets simply appeared and began shooting. They also said the Liberty

did not open fire on the planes because it was armed only with four .

50-caliber machine guns intended to repel boarders.

"I can't identify it, but in any case it's a military ship," Spector

radioed his ground controller, according to a transcript of the

Israeli air-to-ground communications published by the Jerusalem Post

in 2004.

That transcript, made by a Post reporter who was allowed to listen to

what the Israeli Air Force said were tapes of the attacking pilots'

communications, contained only two references to "American" or

"Americans," one at the beginning and the other at the end of the

attack.

The first reference occurred at 1:54 p.m. local time, two minutes

before the Israeli jets began their first strafing run.

In the Post transcript, a weapons system officer on the ground

suddenly blurted out, "What is this? Americans?"

"Where are Americans?" replied one of the air controllers.

The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.

Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by

machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis' French-built

Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the

attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel

belonged.

"Apparently American," the chief controller replied.

Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo

from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and

specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted

compartments below the ship's waterline.

Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk

The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance

to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the

sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve

Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air

Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic

planning office in the Air Force.

"The ground control station stated that the target was American and

for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did

confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.

"The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink

the target and ensure they left no survivors."

Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the

controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target

quickly

and completely."

"He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was

frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."

Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read

the transcripts. "Everybody saw these," said Forslund, now retired

after 26 years in the military.

Forslund's recollections are supported by those of two other Air

Force

intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who

say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots'

communications.

One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then

serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security

Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.

"It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly

at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the

time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic

and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."

Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete,

Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of

more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern

communications.

The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond

Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said.

"The pilots said, 'This is an American ship. Do you still want us to

attack?'

"And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"

Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post

transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.

"There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as

what

I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with

air-

to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way

pilots and controllers communicate."

Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that

"the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as

American and asked for further instructions from ground control

appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article."

Arieh O'Sullivan, the Post reporter who made the newspaper's

transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes he listened to contained

blank spaces. He said he assumed those blank spaces occurred while

Israeli pilots were conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to

communicate.

'But sir, it's an American ship!'

Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to have read

transcripts of the attack that they said left no doubt the Israelis

knew they were attempting to sink a U.S. Navy ship.

Many ears were tuned to the battles being fought in and around the

Sinai during the Six-Day War, including those belonging to other Arab

nations with a keen interest in the outcome.

"I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day," said a

retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition that he not be named

discussing a clandestine informant.

"He thought history would change its course," the CIA officer

recalled. "Israel attacking the U.S. He was certain, listening in to

the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was

deliberate."

The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the

Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown

English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their

controllers.

A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-

Arabian

Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting,

"But

sir, it's an American ship -- I can see the flag!' To which the

ground

control responded, 'Never mind; hit it!'"

Porter, who asked that his recollections not be made public while he

was alive because they involved classified information, also

discussed

the transcripts during a lunch in 2000 at the Cosmos Club in

Washington with another retired American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore,

the

former U.S. ambassador to Qatar.

Kilgore recalled Porter saying that he "saw the telex, read it, and

passed it right back" to the embassy official who had shown it to

him.

He quoted Porter as recalling that the transcript showed "Israel was

attacking, and they know it's an American ship."

Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the

Six-

Day War, said that although he never saw the transcript, he had

"heard

on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me

about

what that transcript contained."

He had later been told, Smith recalled, "that ultimately all of the

transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that they were deep-sixed

because the administration did not wish to embarrass the Israelis."

Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such transcripts existed

comes from the Israelis themselves, in a pair of diplomatic cables

sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to

Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.

Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that a source

the Israelis code-named "Hamlet" was reporting that the Americans had

"clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the

identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway."

Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban, who is

now dead, that the White House was "very angry," and that "the reason

for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that

our

pilots indeed knew that the ship was American."

According to a memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms, President

Johnson's personal anger was manifest when he discovered the story of

the Liberty attack on an inside page of the next day's New York

Times.

Johnson barked that "it should have been on the front page!"

Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the cables in his recent

book "1967," said other cables showed that Harman's source for the

second cable was Arthur Goldberg, then U.S. ambassador to the United

Nations.

The cables, which have been declassified by the Israelis, were

obtained from the Israeli State Archive and translated from Hebrew by

the Tribune.

Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of

the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.

Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied,

"I sure did. I certainly did."

"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled, "whatever

that meant -- I guess the sights or something. And then one of them

said, 'Can you see the flag?' They said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.'

They said it several times, so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's

mind that they knew it."

Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts were

"something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing to swear on a

stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."

One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives of the

U.S.

Army's intelligence school, then located at Ft. Holabird in Maryland.

W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight years as

chief

of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said

the transcripts were used as "course material" in an advanced class

for intelligence officers on the clandestine interception of voice

transmissions.

"The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship

in

view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that

it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag," Lang recalled in an e-

mail.

"The flight commander was reluctant," Lang said in a subsequent

interview. "That was very clear. He didn't want to do this. He asked

them a couple of times, 'Do you really want me to do this?' I've

remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I've been harboring

this memory for all these years."

Key NSA tapes said missing

Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of

the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired

senior NSA official, replied, "We sure did."

On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of Israeli

communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of the recordings is of

the attack itself.

Indeed, the declassified documents state that no recordings of the

"actual attack" exist, raising questions about the source of the

transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher, Block, Porter, Lang and

Kirby.

The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as "the

aftermath"

of the attack -- Israeli communications with two Israeli helicopters

dispatched to rescue any survivors who may have jumped into the

water.

Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prostinak, a Hebrew

linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering propeller-driven

aircraft specially equipped to gather electronic intelligence.

But Prostinak said he was certain that more than three recordings

were

made that day.

"I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the

Internet," he said. "No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes."

At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured Israeli

communications "in which people were not just tranquil or taking care

of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked,"

Prostinak said. "Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know,

it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of

the

American flag was made."

Prostinak acknowledged that his Hebrew was not good enough to

understand every word being said, but that after the mention of the

American flag "the attack did continue. We copied [recorded] it until

we got completely out of range. We got a great deal of it."

Charles Tiffany, the plane's navigator, remembers hearing Prostinak

on

the plane's intercom system, shouting, "I got something crazy on

UHF,"

the radio frequency band used by the Israeli Air Force.

"I'll never forget it to this day," said Tiffany, now a retired

Florida lawyer. He also remembers hearing the plane's pilot ordering

the NSA linguists to "start taping everything."

Prostinak said he and the others aboard the plane had been unaware of

the Liberty's presence 15,000 feet below, but had concluded that the

Israelis' target must be an American ship. "We knew that something

was

being attacked," Prostinak said.

After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA,

Prostinak

said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that

at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.

One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just

after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prostinak said there was a

preceding tape, A1104/A-01.

That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began

with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak said a second tape, which

preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard

the same plane, also appeared to be missing.

As soon as the EC-121 landed at its base in Athens, Prostinak said,

all the tapes were rushed to an NSA facility at the Athens airport

where Hebrew translators were standing by.

"We told them what we had, and they immediately took the tapes and

went to work," recalled Prostinak, who after leaving the Navy became

chief of police and then town administrator for the village of Lake

Waccamaw, N.C.

Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition that he

not

be named, said he believed there had been as many as "five or six"

tapes recording the attack on the Liberty or its aftermath.

Andrea Martino, the NSA's senior media adviser, did not respond to a

question about the apparent conflict between the agency's assertion

that there were no recordings of the Israeli attack and the

recollections of those interviewed for this article.

U.S. inquiry widely criticized

Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel had been

attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested in asking as few

questions as possible and answering them in record time.

Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock in Malta,

the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm. John McCain Jr.,

the

commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe and father of Sen. John

McCain (R-Ariz.), chose Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.

The court's charge was narrow: to determine whether any shortcomings

on the part of the Liberty's crew had contributed to the injuries and

deaths that resulted from the attack. McCain gave Kidd's

investigators

a week to complete the job.

"That was a shock," recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, the

inquiry's counsel, who said he and Kidd had estimated that a thorough

inquiry would take six months.

"Everyone was kind of stunned that it was handled so quickly and

without much hullabaloo," said G. Patrick March, then a member of

McCain's staff in London.

Largely because of time constraints, Boston said, the investigators

were unable to question many of the survivors, or to visit Israel and

interview any Israelis involved in the attack.

Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy's former judge advocate general,

was asked to assess the American inquiry's report before it was sent

to Washington. But Staring said it was taken from him when he began

to

question some aspects of the report. He describes it now as "a hasty,

superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry."

Staring, who is among those calling for a full congressional

investigation on behalf of the Liberty's survivors, observed in an

interview that the inquiry report contained several "findings of

fact"

unsupported by testimony or evidence.

One such finding ignored the testimony of several inquiry witnesses

that the American flag was flying during the attack, and held that

the

"available evidence combines to indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8

June was in fact a case of mistaken identity."

There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry's report. It does

not

include, for example, the testimony of a young lieutenant, Lloyd

Painter, who was serving as officer of the deck when the attack

began.

Painter said he testified that an Israeli torpedo boat "methodically

machine-gunned one of our life rafts" that had been put over the side

by crewmen preparing to abandon ship.

Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after leaving

the Navy, charged that his testimony about the life rafts was

purposely omitted.

Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain's one-week deadline expired,

Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry "and flew back to

Washington, and I went back to Naples," the headquarters of the 6th

Fleet.

"Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from his

office," Boston recalled in an interview. "In that deep voice, he

said, 'Ward, they aren't interested in the facts. It's a political

issue and we have to put a lid on it. We've been ordered to shut up.'

"It's time for the truth to come out," declared Boston, who is now

84.

"There have been so many cover-ups."

"Someday the truth of this will come out," said Dennis Eikleberry, a

NSA technician aboard the Liberty. "Someday it will, but we'll all be

gone."

James Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just before the

attack began, and later spent two months in a body cast, is one of

the

more vocal survivors. Like the others, Ennes is tired of waiting.

"We want both sides to stop lying," he said.

----------

jcrewd...@tribune.com

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

On this Thanksgiving day let us say Grace and

give thanks that we live in a country free of

foreign entanglements.

"The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink

the target and ensure they left no survivors."

On Nov 18, 12:26 pm, Jag_...@hotmail.com wrote:

> Sunday Sermonette -- Killing All The Witnesses, USS Liberty

>

> The attack came in three waves.

> First Israeli jets strafed and bombed the American flag waving

> USS Liberty. Then torpedo boats came in, blowing a

> 39-foot hole in the starboard side.

>

> But an Israeli torpedo boat, as testified, had

> "methodically machine-gunned one of our life rafts".

>

> The third wave had been designed to finish the job.

> After the American flag waving USS Liberty was sunk

> witnesses would have gone over the sides and

> been floating in the water. To pick them off as they

> swam is best done by helicopter.

>

> The official Israeli report says the helicopters were

> sent as a "rescue mission".

>

> When the Israeli helicopters arrived the ship was still

> afloat thus their task was aborted.

>

> There are new revelations about the Israeli attack

> upon the American flag waving USS Liberty. This

> report does not cover the aspect of the helicopters,

> it does make clear that the Israelis knew full well

> who they were trying to sink.

>

> The article is lengthy, if you want to jump

> to the meat I suggest you go to where it says:

>

> ["We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said. ]

>

> http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday...

>

> chicagotribune.com

> Special report

> New revelations in attack on American spy ship

> Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of

> deadly '67 incident

> By John Crewdson

>

> Tribune senior correspondent

>

> October 2, 2007

>

> Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert,

> recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister,

> is shouting into the phone.

>

> "I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething

> with anger!"

>

> Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on

> station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets

> flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually

> defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would

> become known as the Six-Day War.

>

> For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with

> incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then

> attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots

> who had confused the U.S. Navy's most distinctive ship with an

> Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a

> dissimilar profile. And they're also incredulous that, for years,

> their own government would reject their calls for a thorough

> investigation.

>

> "They tried to lie their way out of it!" Lockwood shouts. "I don't

> believe that for a minute! You just don't shoot at a ship at sea

> without identifying it, making sure of your target!"

>

> Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors

> located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack

> without shouting or weeping.

>

> Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government

> documents and the recollections of former military personnel,

> including some quoted in this article for the first time, which

> strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position

> that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli

> pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing

> them,

> that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval

> vessel.

>

> The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare

> Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed

> the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty

> and seriously flawed investigation.

>

> In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last

> June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's

> chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker,

> acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable

> controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said,

> "to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can

> be

> drawn from a thorough review of this material," available

> athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty.

>

> An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the attack

> on the Liberty "a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken

> identity, for which Israel has officially apologized." Israel also

> paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the

> families of those killed in the attack, and another $6 million for

> the

> loss of the Liberty itself.

>

> But for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis'

> apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.

>

> One is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Washington's

> Farragut Square park on "a beautiful June afternoon" when she was a

> 22-

> year-old secretary for a law firm.

>

> Blue heard somebody's portable radio saying a U.S. Navy ship had been

> torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue's

> husband of two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been

> hurriedly dispatched overseas.

>

> As she listened to the news report, "it just all came together." Soon

> afterward, the NSA confirmed that Allen Blue was among the missing.

>

> "I never felt young again," she said.

>

> Aircraft on the horizon

>

> Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared

> on the horizon and circled the Liberty.

>

> The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first

> day

> of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground.

> America

> was Israel's ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there.

> The

> ship's mission was to monitor the communications of Israel's Arab

> enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications.

> The

> Liberty felt safe.

>

> Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men

> stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore

> Arfsten,

> a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw

> the blue Star of David on the planes' fuselages. At first, crew

> members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their

> ship.

>

> Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian

> casualty.

> An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel,

> which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the

> combined

> armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.

>

> For most of those who survived the attack, the Six-Day War has become

> the defining moment of their lives.

>

> Some mustered out of the Navy as soon as their enlistments were up.

> Others stayed in long enough to retire. Several went on to successful

> business careers. One became a Secret Service agent, another a

> Baltimore policeman.

>

> Several are being treated with therapy and drugs for what has since

> been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. One has undergone

> more than 30 major operations. Another suffers seizures caused by a

> piece of shrapnel still lodged in his brain.

>

> After Bryce Lockwood left the Marines, he worked construction, then

> tried selling insurance. "I'd get a job and get fired," he said. "I

> had a hell of a time getting my feet on the ground."

>

> With his linguistic background, Lockwood could have had a career with

> the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. But he was too angry at the U.S.

> government to work for it. "Don't talk to me about government!" he

> shouts.

>

> U.S. Navy jets were called back

>

> An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their

> naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that

> the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more

> than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio

> transmission, was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the

> U.S. Navy," a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.

>

> The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply

> gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who

> directed

> the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats

> who

> picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty's decks

> with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot

> hole in its starboard side.

>

> To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel's

> explanation.

>

> Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th

> Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga,

> patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled

> at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have

> arrived

> in time to prevent the torpedo attack -- and save 26 American lives.

>

> J.Q. "Tony" Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy

> relay station in Morocco that handled communications between

> Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense

> Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence

> Geis, commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the

> jets home.

>

> When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed

> help,

> Hart said, McNamara retorted that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not

> going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."

>

> McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has "absolutely no

> recollection of what I did that day," except that "I have a memory

> that I didn't know at the time what was going on."

>

> The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel's claim

> that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But

> internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson

> Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the

> mistake had occurred was not believed.

>

> Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from

> Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson's

> intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a

> National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was

> "inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

>

> The attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," the NSA's

> director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.

>

> "I don't think you'll find many people at NSA who believe it was

> accidental," Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an

> interview.

>

> "I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were

> doing," said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security

> Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern

> and South Asian affairs.

>

> "So for me, the question really is who issued the order to do that

> and

> why? That's the really interesting thing."

>

> The answer, if there is one, will probably never be known. Gen. Moshe

> Dayan, then the country's minister of defense; Levi Eshkol, the

> Israeli prime minister; and Golda Meir, his successor, are all dead.

>

> Many of those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have

> suggested that the Israelis feared the ship might intercept

> communications revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S.

> opposed. But no one has ever produced any solid evidence to support

> that theory, and the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA's deputy director,

> Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the

> attack "might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai

> Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his

> activities."

>

> Was the U.S. flag visible?

>

> Though the attack on the Liberty has faded from public memory,

> Michael

> Oren, a historian and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in

> Jerusalem,

> conceded that "the case of the assault on the Liberty has never been

> closed."

>

> If anything, Oren said, "the accusations leveled against Israel have

> grown sharper with time." Oren said in an interview that he believed

> a

> formal investigation by the U.S., even 40 years later, would be

> useful

> if only because it would finally establish Israel's innocence.

>

> Questions about what happened to the Liberty have been kept alive by

> survivors' groups and their Web sites, a half-dozen books, magazine

> articles and television documentaries, scholarly papers published in

> academic journals, and Internet chat groups where amateur sleuths

> debate arcane points of photo interpretation and torpedo running

> depth.

>

> Meantime, the Liberty's survivors and their supporters, including a

> distinguished constellation of retired admirals and generals, have

> persisted in asking Congress for a full-scale formal investigation.

>

> "We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said.

>

> For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be

> reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag

> at

> the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?

>

> The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the

> Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the

> attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been

> shot

> down was replaced with another, larger flag -- the ship's "holiday

> colors" -- that measured 13 feet long.

>

> Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: "Every official

> interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that

> indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag -- and, further, the

> weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and

> identification."

>

> The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved

> the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to precisely the

> opposite conclusion.

>

> "Throughout the contact," it declared, "no American or any other flag

> appeared on the ship."

>

> The attack, the court said, had been prompted by a report, which

> later

> proved erroneous, that a ship was shelling Israeli-held positions in

> the Sinai Peninsula. The Liberty had no guns capable of shelling the

> shore, but the court concluded that the U.S. ship had been mistakenly

> identified as the source of the shelling.

>

> Yiftah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ship, told the

> Jerusalem Post in 2003 that when he first spotted the Liberty, "I

> circled it twice and it did not fire on me. My assumption was that it

> was likely to open fire at me and nevertheless I slowed down and I

> looked and there was positively no flag."

>

> But the Liberty crewmen interviewed by the Tribune said the Israeli

> jets simply appeared and began shooting. They also said the Liberty

> did not open fire on the planes because it was armed only with four .

> 50-caliber machine guns intended to repel boarders.

>

> "I can't identify it, but in any case it's a military ship," Spector

> radioed his ground controller, according to a transcript of the

> Israeli air-to-ground communications published by the Jerusalem Post

> in 2004.

>

> That transcript, made by a Post reporter who was allowed to listen to

> what the Israeli Air Force said were tapes of the attacking pilots'

> communications, contained only two references to "American" or

> "Americans," one at the beginning and the other at the end of the

> attack.

>

> The first reference occurred at 1:54 p.m. local time, two minutes

> before the Israeli jets began their first strafing run.

>

> In the Post transcript, a weapons system officer on the ground

> suddenly blurted out, "What is this? Americans?"

>

> "Where are Americans?" replied one of the air controllers.

>

> The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.

>

> Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by

> machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis' French-built

> Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the

> attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel

> belonged.

>

> "Apparently American," the chief controller replied.

>

> Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo

> from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and

> specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted

> compartments below the ship's waterline.

>

> Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk

>

> The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance

> to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the

> sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve

> Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air

> Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic

> planning office in the Air Force.

>

> "The ground control station stated that the target was American and

> for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did

> confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.

>

> "The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink

> the target and ensure they left no survivors."

>

> Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the

> controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target

> quickly

> and completely."

>

> "He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was

> frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."

>

> Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read

> the transcripts. "Everybody saw these," said Forslund, now retired

> after 26 years in the military.

>

> Forslund's recollections are supported by those of two other Air

> Force

> intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who

> say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots'

> communications.

>

> One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then

> serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security

> Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.

>

> "It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly

> at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the

> time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic

> and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."

>

> Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete,

> Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of

> more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern

> communications.

>

> The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond

> Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said.

> "The pilots said, 'This is an American ship. Do you still want us to

> attack?'

>

> "And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"

>

> Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post

> transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.

>

> "There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as

> what

> I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with

> air-

> to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way

> pilots and controllers communicate."

>

> Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that

> "the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as

> American and asked for further instructions from ground control

> appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article."

>

> Arieh O'Sullivan, the Post reporter who made the newspaper's

> transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes he listened to contained

> blank spaces. He said he assumed those blank spaces occurred while

> Israeli pilots were conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to

> communicate.

>

> 'But sir, it's an American ship!'

>

> Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to have read

> transcripts of the attack that they said left no doubt the Israelis

> knew they were attempting to sink a U.S. Navy ship.

>

> Many ears were tuned to the battles being fought in and around the

> Sinai during the Six-Day War, including those belonging to other Arab

> nations with a keen interest in the outcome.

>

> "I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day," said a

> retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition that he not be named

> discussing a clandestine informant.

>

> "He thought history would change its course," the CIA officer

> recalled. "Israel attacking the U.S. He was certain, listening in to

> the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was

> deliberate."

>

> The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the

> Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown

> English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their

> controllers.

>

> A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-

> Arabian

> Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting,

> "But

> sir, it's an American ship -- I can see the flag!' To which the

> ground

> control responded, 'Never mind; hit it!'"

>

> Porter, who asked that his recollections not be made public while he

> was alive because they involved classified information, also

> discussed

> the transcripts during a lunch in 2000 at the Cosmos Club in

> Washington with another retired American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore,

> the

> former U.S. ambassador to Qatar.

>

> Kilgore recalled Porter saying that he "saw the telex, read it, and

> passed it right back" to the embassy official who had shown it to

> him.

> He quoted Porter as recalling that the transcript showed "Israel was

> attacking, and they know it's an American ship."

>

> Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the

> Six-

> Day War, said that although he never saw the transcript, he had

> "heard

> on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me

> about

> what that transcript contained."

>

> He had later been told, Smith recalled, "that ultimately all of the

> transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that they were deep-sixed

> because the administration did not wish to embarrass the Israelis."

>

> Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such transcripts existed

> comes from the Israelis themselves, in a pair of diplomatic cables

> sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to

> Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.

>

> Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that a source

> the Israelis code-named "Hamlet" was reporting that the Americans had

> "clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the

> identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway."

>

> Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban, who is

> now dead, that the White House was "very angry," and that "the reason

> for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that

> our

> pilots indeed knew that the ship was American."

>

> According to a memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms, President

> Johnson's personal anger was manifest when he discovered the story of

> the Liberty attack on an inside page of the next day's New York

> Times.

> Johnson barked that "it should have been on the front page!"

>

> Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the cables in his recent

> book "1967," said other cables showed that Harman's source for the

> second cable was Arthur Goldberg, then U.S. ambassador to the United

> Nations.

>

> The cables, which have been declassified by the Israelis, were

> obtained from the Israeli State Archive and translated from Hebrew by

> the Tribune.

>

> Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of

> the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.

>

> Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied,

> "I sure did. I certainly did."

>

> "They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled, "whatever

> that meant -- I guess the sights or something. And then one of them

> said, 'Can you see the flag?' They said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.'

> They said it several times, so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's

> mind that they knew it."

>

> Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts were

> "something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing to swear on a

> stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."

>

> One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives of the

> U.S.

> Army's intelligence school, then located at Ft. Holabird in Maryland.

>

> W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight years as

> chief

> of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said

> the transcripts were used as "course material" in an advanced class

> for intelligence officers on the clandestine interception of voice

> transmissions.

>

> "The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship

> in

> view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that

> it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag," Lang recalled in an e-

> mail.

>

> "The flight commander was reluctant," Lang said in a subsequent

> interview. "That was very clear. He didn't want to do this. He asked

> them a couple of times, 'Do you really want me to do this?' I've

> remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I've been harboring

> this memory for all these years."

>

> Key NSA tapes said missing

>

> Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of

> the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired

> senior NSA official, replied, "We sure did."

>

> On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of Israeli

> communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of the recordings is of

> the attack itself.

>

> Indeed, the declassified documents state that no recordings of the

> "actual attack" exist, raising questions about the source of the

> transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher, Block, Porter, Lang and

> Kirby.

>

> The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as "the

> aftermath"

> of the attack -- Israeli communications with two Israeli helicopters

> dispatched to rescue any survivors who may have jumped into the

> water.

>

> Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prostinak, a Hebrew

> linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering propeller-driven

> aircraft specially equipped to gather electronic intelligence.

>

> But Prostinak said he was certain that more than three recordings

> were

> made that day.

>

> "I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the

> Internet," he said. "No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes."

>

> At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured Israeli

> communications "in which people were not just tranquil or taking care

> of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked,"

> Prostinak said. "Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know,

> it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of

> the

> American flag was made."

>

> Prostinak acknowledged that his Hebrew was not good enough to

> understand every word being said, but that after the mention of the

> American flag "the attack did continue. We copied [recorded] it until

> we got completely out of range. We got a great deal of it."

>

> Charles Tiffany, the plane's navigator, remembers hearing Prostinak

> on

> the plane's intercom system, shouting, "I got something crazy on

> UHF,"

> the radio frequency band used by the Israeli Air Force.

>

> "I'll never forget it to this day," said Tiffany, now a retired

> Florida lawyer. He also remembers hearing the plane's pilot ordering

> the NSA linguists to "start taping everything."

>

> Prostinak said he and the others aboard the plane had been unaware of

> the Liberty's presence 15,000 feet below, but had concluded that the

> Israelis' target must be an American ship. "We knew that something

> was

> being attacked," Prostinak said.

>

> After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA,

> Prostinak

> said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that

> at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.

>

> One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just

> after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prostinak said there was a

> preceding tape, A1104/A-01.

>

> That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began

> with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak said a second tape, which

> preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard

> the same plane, also appeared to be missing.

>

> As soon as the EC-121 landed at its base in Athens, Prostinak said,

> all the tapes were rushed to an NSA facility at the Athens airport

> where Hebrew translators were standing by.

>

> "We told them what we had, and they immediately took the tapes and

> went to work," recalled Prostinak, who after leaving the Navy became

> chief of police and then town administrator for the village of Lake

> Waccamaw, N.C.

>

> Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition that he

> not

> be named, said he believed there had been as many as "five or six"

> tapes recording the attack on the Liberty or its aftermath.

>

> Andrea Martino, the NSA's senior media adviser, did not respond to a

> question about the apparent conflict between the agency's assertion

> that there were no recordings of the Israeli attack and the

> recollections of those interviewed for this article.

>

> U.S. inquiry widely criticized

>

> Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel had been

> attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested in asking as few

> questions as possible and answering them in record time.

>

> Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock in Malta,

> the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm. John McCain Jr.,

> the

> commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe and father of Sen. John

> McCain (R-Ariz.), chose Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.

>

> The court's charge was narrow: to determine whether any shortcomings

> on the part of the Liberty's crew had contributed to the injuries and

> deaths that resulted from the attack. McCain gave Kidd's

> investigators

> a week to complete the job.

>

> "That was a shock," recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, the

> inquiry's counsel, who said he and Kidd had estimated that a thorough

> inquiry would take six months.

>

> "Everyone was kind of stunned that it was handled so quickly and

> without much hullabaloo," said G. Patrick March, then a member of

> McCain's staff in London.

>

> Largely because of time constraints, Boston said, the investigators

> were unable to question many of the survivors, or to visit Israel and

> interview any Israelis involved in the attack.

>

> Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy's former judge advocate general,

> was asked to assess the American inquiry's report before it was sent

> to Washington. But Staring said it was taken from him when he began

> to

> question some aspects of the report. He describes it now as "a hasty,

> superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry."

>

> Staring, who is among those calling for a full congressional

> investigation on behalf of the Liberty's survivors, observed in an

> interview that the inquiry report contained several "findings of

> fact"

> unsupported by testimony or evidence.

>

> One such finding ignored the testimony of several inquiry witnesses

> that the American flag was flying during the attack, and held that

> the

> "available evidence combines to indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8

> June was in fact a case of mistaken identity."

>

> There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry's report. It does

> not

> include, for example, the testimony of a young lieutenant, Lloyd

> Painter, who was serving as officer of the deck when the attack

> began.

> Painter said he testified that an Israeli torpedo boat "methodically

> machine-gunned one of our life rafts" that had been put over the side

> by crewmen preparing to abandon ship.

>

> Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after leaving

> the Navy, charged that his testimony about the life rafts was

> purposely omitted.

>

> Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain's one-week deadline expired,

> Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry "and flew back to

> Washington, and I went back to Naples," the headquarters of the 6th

> Fleet.

>

> "Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from his

> office," Boston recalled in an interview. "In that deep voice, he

> said, 'Ward, they aren't interested in the facts. It's a political

> issue and we have to put a lid on it. We've been ordered to shut up.'

>

> "It's time for the truth to come out," declared Boston, who is now

> 84.

> "There have been so many cover-ups."

>

> "Someday the truth of this will come out," said Dennis Eikleberry, a

> NSA technician aboard the Liberty. "Someday it will, but we'll all be

> gone."

>

> James Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just before the

> attack began, and later spent two months in a body cast, is one of

> the

> more vocal survivors. Like the others, Ennes is tired of waiting.

>

> "We want both sides to stop lying," he said.

>

> ----------

>

> jcrewd...@tribune.com

>

> Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune