Naval officer inspects some of the damage to the USS Liberty from the Israeli attack. Wikimedia.

Last week, the New York Times discussed the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty nearly 60 years ago, and once again failed to charge the Israeli government with conducting one of the best planned “accidents” in history.  The Times’ account was the standard mainstream media account of “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” and failed to identify the reason for the Israeli attack against the ship during the six-day war of 1967.

At the time of the attack, I was serving on the CIA’s task force for the war, and can assure readers that the attack was intentional and can offer the obvious reason for the attack.  The Liberty was a U.S. intelligence vessel in international waters that was seconded to the National Security Agency; it was both slow-moving and lightly armed.  It brandished a five-foot-by-eight-foot Stars and Stripes in the midday sun.  It didn’t resemble a ship in any other navy, let alone a ship in the pathetic Egyptian navy.

The Israeli attack took place after six hours of intense, low-level reconnaissance conducted by unmarked Mirage jets that ultimately fired cannons and rockets. Israeli pilots who conducted the attack and identified the ship as an American intelligence collector were assured by Israeli commanders to proceed. Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded.  The boats machine-gunned the life rafts that survivors dropped in an effort to abandon the ship.  The Israelis even attacked a Soviet ship that was trying to conduct rescue maneuvers,

Several days before the attack, the Israelis warned the Pentagon to move the Liberty so that it could no longer intercept Israeli messages that detailed Israeli military operations against several Arab nations.  The ship was intercepting these messages, and the CIA task force was thus able to inform the White House and the National Security Council of Israeli operations in great detail.  Israel wanted to stop this intercept activity.  The Pentagon message to the Liberty was delayed and then misrouted, which is why the ship remained in place.

The Israelis not only lied about the Liberty, but they lied in explaining the start of their war as a “preemptive” attack.  It was not preemptive!  There were no Egyptian plans to attack, and the best Egyptian combat forces were in Yemen dealing with the civil war.  The Israelis lied to President Lyndon Johnson when they claimed Egyptian units had initiated attacks on Israeli settlements.  They lied about a so-called Egyptian squadron moving toward Israel.  The CIA knew from satellite intelligence that Egyptian planes in Egypt were parked on airfields wingtip-to-wingtip, which pointed to no plans to attack as well as the reason for the success of Israeli bombing operations.

Unfortunately, national security advisor Walt Rostow believed that he had assurances from the Israeli ambassador that Israel would never attack first, so he was hostile to CIA’s intelligence.  Fortunately, CIA director Richard Helms supported our intelligence assessments and we were in a position to tell truth to power.  Many recent directors, such as Bill Casey, Bob Gates, Mike Pompeo, and John Ratcliffe, were unwilling to do so and often politicized the intelligence to support the White House.

The NYT wrote its piece in order to explain a meaningless intramural squabble among MAGANs about the origins of the attack.  The NYT front-page piece was only concerned with the possibility of a wedge issue within the MAGA movement.  It cited former vice president Mike Pence, who argued that the issue was about “people looking for something to blame on the Jews.”  Nonsense.

The fact of the matter is that the Israelis got away with the murder of 34 American sailors and serious injuries to more than170 sailors.  The NSA investigation of the disaster remains classified to this day.