LIBERTY, USS

U.S. ship attacked by Israel.

On 8 June 1967 the electronic surveillance ship USS Liberty was 14 nautical miles north of al-Arish, Egypt, gathering intelligence data when it was attacked by three Israeli combat aircraft, and later by three torpedo boats, one of which launched a torpedo that demolished the Liberty 's communications room and killed twenty-five technicians. A Mayday message from the ship drew rescue aircraft from the carrier USS America, and Israel halted the attack. In all, 34 crew members were killed and 171 wounded.

Israel's attack has never been satisfactorily explained. The Liberty was displaying the U.S. flag very prominently and the attack continued after the ship had been identified by Israeli pilots whose conversations were monitored by a U.S. surveillance aircraft. Israel swiftly apologized for what it called "a tragic error." Although a U.S. inquiry found no evidence that the attack was premeditated, military experts concluded that it could not reasonably be attributed to error, and that Israel must have felt that the information being gathered by the Liberty could be so damaging that it accepted the risk of incurring the anger of the United States. Two possible explanations are (a) that Israel was "cooking" (intercepting and altering) messages between Egypt and Jordan in hopes of drawing Jordan into the war so that Israel could occupy the West Bank, and (b) that Israel wanted to conceal the true extent of its dramatic victory over Egypt in order to delay the imposition of a cease-fire. Israel paid $7 million in damages to the families of the U.S. crewmen but never admitted culpability. Controversy about the incident, which was frequently cited in the propaganda war between Israel and its critics, continued to rage for decades afterwards.

Bibliography

Bamford, James. Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency: From the Cold War through the Dawn of a New Century. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Dupuy, Trevor N. Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

Ennes, James M., Jr. Assault on the Liberty: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship. New York: Random House, 1979.

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