A Cover-Up? Survivors of Israel’s Attack on US Ship Still Waiting for Answers 58 Years Later
A Zeteo special investigation gets a first-hand account of Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty from a survivor and examines why the truth remains so elusive.
“We were instructed that we could not talk about the attack, and if we did, we would be in major trouble. That was the major beginning of the cover-up in our eyes. The big part of the cover-up was already underway in Washington."
This is what Maurice Shafer, a survivor of an Israeli attack on an American ship nearly six decades ago, said in a testimonial delivered on a trip to Washington in 2006. Nearly 20 years later, Shafer is just as convinced the attack – and the ensuing US response – was all a cover-up.
Shafer remembers the incident as if it was yesterday. It was early June 1967. His ship, the USS Liberty, had been deployed to the Mediterranean near Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as tensions rose between Israel and neighboring Arab states ahead of what would become the Six-Day War.
“We knew there was something going on there, but didn't have the full details,” Shafer, a then-Morse Code operator and communications technician on the intelligence-collecting ship, tells me. “Doesn't matter what I was intercepting. I never knew what I was intercepting.”
Upon pulling into the area, Shafer recalls, the crew could see mayhem in the distance. “We could see smoke and all that stuff on the Egyptian coast.” But upon seeing military aircraft with the Star of David on them, Shafer says, the crew was comforted.
“[K]nowing that's your number one ally,… we felt safe then, and they knew we were there,” he tells me.
“You could wave at them,” Shafer adds, on the proximity of the planes. “They waved at you.”
On June 8, Shafer recalls, he and a crewmate were finishing up some work, while others sunbathed. Clear skies, a spectacular forecast.
And then calamity struck.
A jet flew over, at a very low altitude. It was firing “to kill all the people it could kill,” Shafer says. Then, out of the sun, another plane emerged. “A missile went through my buddy that was standing about 15 feet from me,” Shafer adds. It killed him instantly. The crew was able to get one message out to the USS Saratoga for help during the attack, which Shafer, at the time, said they believed to be the work of the “Arabs.”
But the attack continued. As Shafer and his comrades ran inside, the rockets began blowing holes through the metal “so the shrapnel would kill everybody inside.”
Meanwhile, torpedo boats bearing what looked like Israeli flags approached, Shafer says. “The people up top-side felt, ‘Wow, that’s cool, man they’re coming to help.’ And as soon as they got close, they opened fire on us with rockets and missiles. So here now we know who’s attacking us.”
“We were dead, dead in the water.”
Shafer was in the room when an Israeli torpedo dealt among the most fatal blows that day. “Twenty-five in the room I was in were killed instantly, or drowned, we don’t know for sure.”
“We only identified one [of those killed] by a single body part,” Shafer says.
The ship’s captain soon ordered preparations to abandon the ship. Life rafts were launched. But Shafer says the attackers shot those, too.
More than an hour later, the attacks stopped.
Wayne Stiles, a rescue helicopter co-pilot on the USS America, recalls the devastation he saw the following morning. His team flew around the ship twice, trying to find a spot where they could land, but everything was destroyed, antennas and superstructure were hanging down everywhere. His chopper hovered at about 20 feet, as they sent a crewman down to the deck to help bring the wounded up to them.
“I'm sitting there as the co-pilot. I'm not flying, and my job was to look out my side at the ship and see [that] the evacuation was going okay because the hoist was right outside of my window,” he tells me. As he watched what was happening, he looked toward the gun tub, a circular area surrounding one of the ship’s guns, and he saw "several inches" of what he describes as "blood – mixed with seawater, probably – but mostly blood just sloshing back and forth in the gun tub.”
All told, a severely damaged ship (821 shell holes in the hull alone), 34 dead, 171 injured, in just over an hour. That’s two-thirds of the crew, injured or killed. The deadliest assault on a US ship since World War II.
‘Mistaken Identity’ or US-Israeli ‘Cover-Up’?
In the aftermath of the attack, the Israeli government maintained it was a tragedy, a horrible mistake in which its forces mistakenly identified the US ship as an Egyptian one.
Israel apologized and agreed to pay a combined $18 million over the course of years to compensate the injured and the families of those killed, and to cover the damage to the ship.
Subsequent Israeli inquiries concluded that mistakes in analysis and breakdowns in the chain of communications led to the attack – especially given that Israeli planes hours earlier detected the Liberty as being a US ship. Former US Ambassador to Lebanon Dwight Porter reportedly recounted a particularly incriminating conversation between an Israeli pilot and the Israeli Air Force War Room:
Israeli pilot to IDF war room: This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?
IDF war room to Israeli pilot: Yes, follow orders.
Israeli pilot to IDF war room: But sir, it’s an American ship - I can see the flag!
IDF war room to Israeli pilot: Never mind; hit it.
Publicly, President Lyndon B. Johnson did not refute Israel’s claims. But privately, at least initially, US officials expressed their anger and skepticism.
Johnson allegedly initially told a Newsweek reporter that he believed Israel deliberately attacked the ship to prevent it from spying, but he later allegedly backed down upon pressure from Israeli officials.
Minutes from a June 9 National Security Council meeting noted that Clark Clifford, a trusted Johnson adviser, was concerned the administration was not being "tough enough" on Israel and said they should handle it as if the "Arabs or USSR had done it."
The minutes added that Clifford believed it was "inconceivable that it was [an] accident."
The notetaker included a notation next to Clifford’s comments: “President subscribed 100%.”
The following day, on June 10, Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote to the Israeli ambassador:
“At the time of the attack, the U.S.S Liberty was flying the American flag, and its identification was clearly indicated in large white letters and numerals on its hull. It was broad daylight and the weather conditions were excellent. Experience demonstrates that both the flag and the identification number of the vessel were readily visible from the air.
…
“Accordingly, there is every reason to believe that the U.S.S. Liberty was or should have been identified, or at least her nationality determined, prior to the attack. In these circumstances, the later military attack by Israeli aircraft on the U.S.S. Liberty is quite literally incomprehensible. As a minimum, the attack must be condemned as an act of military irresponsibility reflecting reckless disregard for human life.”
A June 13 CIA report echoed Rusk’s comments on the clear weather, and the visibility of the flag and the Liberty’s hull number, though it noted that the ship could “easily be mistaken” for a smaller Egyptian military vessel “by an overzealous pilot.”
Johnson, meanwhile, directed a Navy Court of Inquiry – perhaps the only focused governmental investigation on the attack in the decades since. It lasted just over a week, concluding on June 18 – and Johnson allegedly directed leadership to absolve Israel and to muzzle testimony.
Admiral Isaac Kidd was tasked with helping lead the inquiry. Shafer recalls Kidd taking “off his stars on his uniform, his stripes, so to speak,” before saying, “‘I'm just here as, like a father to you, or whatever, just to talk to you. So just kind of tell me what happened.’”
After they told him, Shafer says, Kidd “would put his bars back on,” signifying that he was speaking as an admiral again, and warned them: “‘I'm just telling you all that, if you ever talk about this in your lives, ever say a word about this, what you just told me, or anything, you'll either go to Leavenworth [military prison] or worse.’”
“What's ‘worse’ mean?” Shafer says. “What does ‘worse’ mean?”
The inquiry was not charged with attaining full accountability. “It was not the responsibility of the Court to rule on the culpability of the attackers,” the inquiry noted, as it judged the attack to have been an accident.
Meanwhile, Clifford – who years earlier was pivotal in pushing President Harry Truman to support the UN partition of Palestine and to lift an arms embargo on Israel – himself submitted a report one month later, in which he concluded that there was “no justification” for the Israeli military’s failure.
“The unprovoked attack on the Liberty constitutes a flagrant act of gross negligence for which the Israeli Government should be held completely responsible, and the Israeli military personnel involved should be punished.”
‘The Lid’
In the years since, there have been efforts to fill in the gaps. Several projects, including the 2002 BBC documentary: ‘Liberty: Dead in the Water,’ and the 2014 Al Jazeera documentary, ‘The Day Israel Attacked America,’ underscore the possibility that the attack was deliberate. The theories range from the attack possibly being “a daring ploy by Israel to fake an Egyptian attack on the American spy ship, and thereby provide America with a reason to officially enter the war against Egypt,” according to the BBC, to being part of an effort to prevent the US from picking up on an alleged Israeli massacre of Egyptian prisoners of war.
One theory posited in Joan Mellen’s 2018 book Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty suggests the attack was a coordinated effort to blame it on Egypt to spur regime change there. Another theory, in the 2001 James Bamford book Body of Secrets, attributed Johnson’s covering for Israel to allyship to Israel and the need to not turn off pro-Israel voters. In both books, Johnson is attributed as saying he did not care if the Liberty sank – he did not want to embarrass his allies.
One 2002 book written by the late Jay Cristol, a former federal judge and Navy officer, entitled The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship, concluded the attack was an accident.
The book received wide acclaim, including from Congress – a body that refused, even to this day, to ever formally and thoroughly investigate the attack. Several lawmakers at the time, including Republican Senator John McCain and several House representatives, spoke highly of the book, often expressing similar talking points about how it restored faith in the US-Israel relationship – or dispelled “one of the most persistent slanders against the State of Israel:” that the Israeli military intentionally attacked the Liberty, as current Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler said.
"After years of research for this book, Judge A. Jay Cristol has reached a similar conclusion to one my father reached in his June 18, 1967, endorsement of the findings of the court of inquiry,” McCain said in a review for the book. “I commend Judge Cristol for his thoroughness and fairness, and I commend this work." (McCain’s father was the Navy admiral who ordered the Navy Court of Inquiry investigation that survivors criticize as being limited. Cristol relied heavily on the inquiry).
Cristol's conclusions, however, were refuted by Ward Boston, who served as senior legal counsel for the Navy Court of Inquiry on the Liberty attack. He spoke out publicly in 2003, saying Cristol's book “twists the facts” and that the “insidious attempt to whitewash the facts” pushed him to correct the record.
“The late Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, president of the Court, and I were given only one week to gather evidence for the Navy’s official investigation into the attack, despite the fact that we both had estimated that a proper Court of Inquiry into an attack of this magnitude would take at least six months to conduct,” Boston recalled in a lengthy declaration.
Boston said that he and Kidd, who died in 1999, both believed the attack was “a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.” He affirmed what Shafer and others had said, that Israeli forces shot at the lifeboats, conducting a “war crime,” and said that McCain senior was adamant that they not contact the Israelis on the investigation.
“Admiral Kidd told me, after returning from Washington, D.C., that he had been ordered to sit down with two civilians from either the White House or the Defense Department, and rewrite portions of the court’s findings,” Boston said. “Admiral Kidd also told me that he had been ordered to ‘put the lid’ on everything having to do with the attack on USS Liberty. We were never to speak of it and we were to caution everyone else involved that they could never speak of it again.”
‘Get Away With Almost Anything’
Fifty-eight years later, the attack is a footnote, if that – despite the manner in which it has preceded the number of Americans Israel has killed and brutalized since.
A 1975 internal US military report on public affairs regarding the attack attributed the lack of a substantial public outcry to the fact that: “The press, as well as several prominent US Senators, had been quick to accept the explanation that the attack was one of those unfortunate mistakes ‘that invariably occur in war.’"
In 2003 – shortly after Cristol’s book was published – a Bush State Department spokesperson said he was “not really” familiar with the attack at all.
Indeed, even the Liberty’s fabled captain, William Loren McGonagle, received a medal of honor for his efforts, despite being severely wounded, to exercise “firm command of his ship” discreetly at a private ceremony. And his citation does not mention who he was defending against. Both aspects are highly unusual.
There have, though, been some voices in Washington who’ve sought to dig deeper into the attack.
In 2004, the late Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers introduced the findings of an inquiry into the attack, the US recall of support plans during the attack, and its “subsequent cover-up” into the congressional record.
Five years later, the late Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings took to the floor to speak on the attack: “After 34 years, the voices of Liberty’s dead and wounded seamen must finally be heard. Despite the continuing efforts to uncover the real truths about the attack, Martin Luther King Jr. said it best – ‘History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.’”
He added: “Although no amount of time can ever erase the memories of that tragic event or bring back those who perished, it is my hope that the wounds of their loved ones have begun to heal.”
And survivors like Shafer hold on to hope for the truth. “The rest of us could go sleep every night for the rest of our lives peacefully if we could just have the truth told.”
It’s more difficult to get accountability, Shafer explains, when many officials “except for the old fart that ran the Republican Senate” aren’t old enough to even know about the attack. “And the last thing they're thinking about today is the Liberty. So when you go and ask a question, they don't want to be bothered with that. If you write your senator or congressman, you get a form letter back that it was investigated and it was determined to be an accident. End of story. Period. Go away.”
Republican and Democratic leadership in both the House and Senate did not respond to requests for comment.
Such a dynamic, Stiles, the former helicopter pilot notes, leads to exhaustion. He spoke highly of advocates like Shafer but noted how long efforts have stretched. “Frankly, I'm tired of telling my story to people that don't give a damn,” Stiles says.
“These guys that survived that attack have been trying now for almost 60 years to get the US to do an investigation of Israel and to put the responsibility where it deserves to be. I mean, every year, two or three or four of them die, and they keep marching on.”
Shafer and other survivors are meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, this weekend to mark 58 years since the attack. The reunion has faced controversy this year over the invitation of some speakers who have espoused alt-right and antisemitic views. The Liberty Veterans Association, which Shafer is the executive director of, says they were unaware of the individuals' past comments. The most controversial speaker will no longer be at the event.
“If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.”
-George Ball, who served in the LBJ administration
Decades after Israel’s deadly attack, US support for the country remains ironclad. This is despite Israel carrying out a US-backed genocide over the past 20 months that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, displaced millions, and increasingly isolated the US from much of the rest of the world. All the while, the US has allowed Israel to brutalize – and even kill – several Americans.
In 1992, George Ball – former under-secretary of state and US ambassador to the United Nations under LBJ – wrote presciently on the pattern, in his book on US-Israel relations, The Passionate Attachment. “The ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack had far more effect on policy in Israel than in America,” he said.
“Israel's leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal. If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.”
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