The Attack on the Liberty

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2009 by James M. Scott

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-6605-5

  ISBN-10: 1-4391-6605-6

  Visit us on the Web:

  http://www.SimonandSchuster.com

  For my father, John Scott, who lived to tell about it.

  And in memory of the thirty-four, who didn’t.

  William B. Allenbaugh

  Philip McC. Armstrong, Jr.

  Gary R. Blanchard

  Allen M. Blue

  Francis Brown

  Ronnie J. Campbell

  Jerry L. Converse

  Robert B. Eisenberg

  Jerry L. Goss

  Curtis A. Graves

  Lawrence P. Hayden

  Warren E. Hersey

  Alan Higgins

  Carl L. Hoar

  Richard W. Keene, Jr.

  James L. Lenau

  Raymond E. Linn

  James M. Lupton

  Duane R. Marggraf

  David W. Marlborough

  Anthony P. Mendle

  Carl C. Nygren

  James C. Pierce

  Jack L. Raper

  Edward E. Rehmeyer, III

  David Skolak

  John C. Smith, Jr.

  Melvin D. Smith

  John C. Spicher

  Alexander N. Thompson, Jr.

  Thomas R. Thornton

  Philippe C. Tiedtke

  Stephen S. Toth

  Frederick J. Walton

  Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea!

  —NAVY HYMN

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  EPILOGUE

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT

  THE ATTACK ON THE LIBERTY

  PROLOGUE

  I know what a slaughterhouse looks like. That’s what this was.

  —PETTY OFFICER 3RD CLASS GARY BRUMMETT

  Captain William L. McGonagle mustered his men.

  On June 8, 1997, the skipper gathered with his remaining crew in front of grave #1817 in section 34 of Arlington National Cemetery. Beneath the single granite headstone rested the unidentified remains of six of McGonagle’s men. Eight others lay in individual graves amid manicured lawns and rolling hills of the nation’s military cemetery on the banks of the Potomac River.

  McGonagle had commanded the U.S.S. Liberty, a spy ship the Israelis strafed and torpedoed in what the Washington Post later described as “one of the most bloody and bizarre peacetime encounters in U.S. naval history.” On this humid morning—the thirtieth anniversary of that dreadful day—McGonagle finally was ready to speak.

  This marked the first time in decades some of these men had seen their reclusive captain. He had shied away from interviews and the controversy that still dogged the Liberty years after metal cutters reduced it to scrap in a Baltimore shipyard. Now seventy-one, McGonagle took stock of his men through Coke-bottle glasses. His sandy hair was gray and thinning, his trademark tan faded. The Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for heroism, dangled from his neck.

  His silence over the years mirrored his style as captain. He rarely mingled with his men. Even in his downtime on board the Liberty, he had retreated alone to the officers’ wardroom to watch Doris Day movies. McGonagle’s reserved demeanor stemmed in part from his biblical reverence for Navy regulations. He drilled his sailors daily and demanded swabbed decks and sparkling latrines. His men nicknamed him “Shep”—a reference to a loyal dog in a country song, but a fitting description.

  The captain greeted his crew among the gravestones with a slow drawl and a nasal accent that reflected his Kansas roots. His family had weathered the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, ultimately migrating to Southern California, where his father had traded in a job as a sharecropper for one as a janitor. McGonagle got his first toothbrush when he was twelve, his first pair of shoes at fourteen. When a Navy recruiter showed up at his high school near the end of World War II, he skipped a chemistry exam to enlist.

  McGonagle’s refusal to talk about the Liberty made some of his men hate him. But his efforts to suppress the attack that left two-thirds of his sailors dead or wounded failed. The Liberty festered inside him, much like the piece of shrapnel lodged for decades between his ribs. Then one day the twisted piece of metal popped out and snagged on his washcloth in the shower. He doubled over in agony when he yanked it out.

  Dressed in starched Navy whites, McGonagle was dying. Within months, doctors would remove a portion of his cancerous left lung, leaving him mostly wheelchair bound. In twenty-two months, a team of six horses would deliver McGonagle’s flag-draped remains to a hilltop grave overlooking the spot where he now stood. This would be his last chance to address his men about what had happened that sunny afternoon three decades earlier in the eastern Mediterranean.

  He didn’t disappoint them.

  On June 8, 1967, the Israeli Air Force and Navy pounded the Liberty as the ship trolled alone in international waters off the coast of the Gaza Strip, eavesdropping on the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The attack killed thirty-four American sailors and injured 171 others in the most deadly assault on an American ship since the U.S.S. Indianapolis was torpedoed in the waning days of World War II.

  The specter of the Liberty has haunted the U.S. Navy and intelligence community for decades. The underlying question the attack raised in 1967 still resonates: How do politics and diplomacy impact battlefield decisions? In the case of the Liberty, the White House, afraid of offending Israel’s domestic backers at a time when it needed support for its Vietnam policy, looked the other way. Likewise, Congress failed to formally investigate the attack or hold public hearings. No one was ever punished.

  Vital lessons went unheeded, including the flawed logic of sending unarmed spy ships alone into hostile waters with only the American flag for protection. Seven months after the attack on the Liberty, communist North Korea seized the spy ship U.S.S. Pueblo in international waters, resulting in what some analysts argue was the worst intelligence breach in modern history.

  The attack on the Liberty began when Israeli fighter jets hammered the ship with rockets and cannons. Napalm turned the deck into a 3,000-degree inferno. Torpedo boats soon followed, ripping a hole thirty-nine feet wide and twenty-four feet tall in the ship’s steel skin. The approximately hour-long attack spared no one. Stretcher bearers were shot, sailors burned, liferafts sunk.

  Armor-piercing bullets zinged through the ship’s bulkheads and shattered coffee mugs, lodged in navigation books, and rolled about on the deck floors. Investigators later counted 821 shell holes, some created with American-made munitions used by Israeli forces. “
There wasn’t any place that was safe,” one of the officers later recalled. “If it was your day to get hit, you were going to get hit.”

  For nearly seventeen hours, McGonagle and his men fought to save the ship. The injured and dying crowded the mess deck, where corpsmen converted lunch tables to gurneys. Transfusions were given arm to arm. Uninjured sailors learned to stitch up wounds. The ship’s lone doctor performed surgery by the light of a battle lantern.

  On the bridge, McGonagle, suffering a concussion, his leg peppered with shrapnel, steered the Liberty out to sea as it spewed classified documents and oil from the torpedoed hole. With the navigation system largely destroyed, McGonagle studied the ship’s wake and ordered turns of the rudder. That evening, he steered by the stars. Crewmen on the bow aimed signal lights skyward, hoping to alert American rescue planes and helicopters to the Liberty’s position. None came.

  Halfway around the world, the unknowing American public celebrated Israel’s stunning victory over its Arab neighbors in what later became known as the Six-Day War—a welcome reprieve from the grind of the Vietnam War and race riots that left American cities in flames. Israel apologized within hours of the attack, blaming it on a series of tactical blunders that culminated in its forces mistakenly concluding that the Liberty was an Egyptian horse and troop transport ship. The White House eagerly accepted the apology.

  The Navy barred its investigators from traveling to Israel to interview pilots and torpedo boat skippers. The inquiry lasted just eight days—less time than it took to bury some of the dead. The Navy’s top-secret final report proved a muddled mess with typos, misspellings, and contradictory findings.

  The declassified summary released to the press on June 28, 1967, concluded that the attack by Israeli forces was most likely an accident, but it also ruled that it had insufficient information to determine reasons for the assault. The investigation seemed engineered to protect Israel, stating that witnesses reported that the Liberty’s flag might have been difficult to see, even though that statement contradicted the testimony of every officer and crewmember aboard the ship.

  Chief of Naval Operations Admiral David McDonald seethed when he read the findings prepared for the public. The report left him “with the feeling that we’re trying our best to excuse the attackers.” “Were I a parent of one of the deceased this release would burn me up,” he wrote in an angry handwritten memo. “I myself do not subscribe to it.”

  The media didn’t either. The Washington Post slammed the Navy’s investigation as “not good enough.” The Chicago Tribune proclaimed it generated “more fog and unanswered questions than clarification.” “Did the attackers, in fact, know that the Liberty was an American ship?” asked the Evening Star, another Washington daily. “It seems to us they must have known.”

  Deaf ears greeted the handful of congressmen who rallied for action.

  “Whatever is the reason for the attack, it was an act of high piracy,” declared Representative Craig Hosmer of California on the floor of the House. “Those responsible should be court-martialed on charges of murder, amongst other counts.”

  “I can’t tolerate for one minute that this was an accident,” Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa told fellow members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I can’t accept these explanations that so glibly come out of Tel Aviv.”

  “How could this be treated so lightly in this the greatest Capitol in all the world?” asked Representative Thomas Abernethy of Mississippi. “The world has been standing by looking at us now for days since the Liberty was pounced upon. What do we do? What do we say?”

  The United States said nothing.

  Neither did McGonagle.

  For the men gathered in Arlington, the Liberty had become an albatross. Some crewmembers battled through years of physical therapy and surgeries. Emotional trauma drove others to alcoholism and divorce court. One crewmember, who nearly drowned in the ship’s flooded bowels, still woke up some nights under his bed, banging on the bottom of the box spring, pleading for someone to let him out.

  McGonagle also couldn’t let go. He refused to throw out notes that detailed with clinical precision how each of his men died: “Blast injury to brain,” “Multiple bullet and shrapnel wounds,” “Basal skull fracture.” He also clung to copies of the letters he wrote to the wives and parents of the dead, letters he wept over as he composed them in a hotel room in Malta days after the attack.

  Over the years, many of President Lyndon Johnson’s former advisers—including the directors of the CIA, NSA, and State Department—acknowledged what many in the intelligence community secretly believed for years: the attack was no accident. But McGonagle would not live long enough to learn some of the darker secrets, including how senior American officials had contemplated sinking his ship at sea to block reporters from photographing the damage and sparking public outrage against Israel.

  Still, McGonagle remained silent. He refused to join the Liberty’s survivors association, whose members begged Congress to investigate the attack. When asked to attend the 1987 reunion marking the attack’s twenty-year anniversary, he drafted a six-page letter to one of his former chief petty officers, telling him that the association might not like what he had to say. The implication was not lost on the sailors. Their captain, who had steered the men to safety using only the North Star, had abandoned them.

  One of his officers wrote him hate mail.

  In Arlington that June morning, surrounded by a sea of white tombstones, McGonagle had reached the end of a personal journey. For years he had wrestled with his responsibility to protect his men and his oath to serve the Navy, which had plucked him from the poverty of the Coachella Valley date fields and declared him a hero.

  Unbeknownst to his men, McGonagle had quietly conducted his own inquiry. He hammered out letters over the years to the Navy, the State Department, and the National Archives, demanding files on the attack. He pored through records from the Navy’s court of inquiry and sifted through yellowed memos, diaries, and telegrams at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Texas.

  His questions were many. Why were the fighter jets that had been sent to help the Liberty suddenly recalled? Why did it take almost seventeen hours for help to arrive? If he was a hero the nation was to be proud of, why had President Johnson shunned him, refusing to present his Medal of Honor at the White House, as is customary?

  McGonagle also examined Israel’s story. He questioned how pilots and torpedo boat commanders from one of the world’s top militaries confused the Liberty with an aged Egyptian transport ship a fraction of its size. Why didn’t the Israelis fire warning shots across the bow or try to stop the Liberty before torpedoing it? How had the attackers on a clear afternoon failed to spot the American flag or freshly painted hull markings in an assault that raged for approximately an hour?

  After all these years, McGonagle now had something to say.

  The eager teenage boys who had scrubbed decks and chipped paint had turned gray and soft bellied. Some had grown children and spouses in tow, all crowded among the headstones. A warm breeze rustled the trees as McGonagle clutched the podium. Old Shep, their wayward captain, had returned.

  “For many years I had wanted to believe that the attack on the Liberty was pure error. It appears to me that it was not a pure case of mistaken identity,” McGonagle told his men. “I think that it’s about time that the state of Israel and the United States government provide the crewmembers of the Liberty, and the rest of the American people, the facts of what happened.”

  CHAPTER 1

  I got my orders today! They weren’t anything like what I put in for. I got a ship, the USS Liberty.

  —ENSIGN JOHN SCOTT, LETTER TO HIS PARENTS

  Commander William McGonagle paced the bridge of the U.S.S. Liberty dressed only in his boxer shorts, white T-shirt, and slippers. The skipper, who normally refused to be seen out of full uniform, felt anxious this Wednesday morning. It was 4:30 A.M. on May 24, 1967, and the skipper could
see little through the darkness that settled over the Ivory Coast port. McGonagle ordered the officers and crew awakened. The ship’s loudspeaker soon crackled: “Reveille! Reveille! All hands heave out and trice up.” Exhausted officers, many of whom had just gone to bed after a late-night party, stumbled out of staterooms, tucking in shirts, fastening belts, and tying shoelaces to prepare for the unexpected sea duty. The main lights in the passageways flickered on and the corridors filled with voices of tired sailors en route to duty stations. McGonagle directed his officers to prepare for departure. The skipper usually would be asleep in his stateroom at this hour, but a new set of orders had rolled off the ship’s teletype approximately forty-five minutes earlier, demanding the Liberty immediately set sail. In his haste to obey, McGonagle didn’t feel he had time to dress.

  The Liberty, squeezed between two ships at the end of a concrete pier in Abidjan, now buzzed. Down in the engine room, sailors stoked the ship’s boilers. Cooks in the mess deck and wardroom brewed coffee by the gallon for the nearly three hundred officers and crewmembers. Deckhands outside in the humid African morning secured the shore boats and readied mooring lines. The Liberty had arrived in Abidjan on a rainy morning just forty-eight hours earlier, its first port of call in a planned four-month cruise along the west coast of Africa. McGonagle had intended to spend a few days loading crates of vegetables, fruits, and provisions before steaming on to Angola, Liberia, and Gabon. Many of the crewmembers, restless after three weeks at sea, had hit the bars, beaches, and even a bowling alley. Others enjoyed a three-hour safari in the embassy’s propeller-driven DC-3, which buzzed over elephants, water buffalo, and local villages. The Liberty’s change of orders had come so quickly that many of the men still downed beers in Abidjan’s bars. The skipper dispatched one of his officers in the ship’s pickup truck to gather them. The sun would be up soon: McGonagle needed to move.