City Of Angleton Water Department: Fill & Download for Free

This is a well known incident, which did actually happen. But the interesting questions about it are:How did it happen?Why it is still being rehashed 50 years after the fact?One explanation is that it was a ‘friendly fire’ accident of the sort that happen in every war ( see List of friendly fire incidents and Tim Benton's answer to Is the story of the USS Liberty Hamas propaganda? for a discussion of this explanation.).Another explanation is that Israel attacked the Liberty because it was a spy ship that was relaying information about the movement of IDF troops to Israel’s enemies during the Six Day war (in spite of the US being Israel’s nominal ally) which Israel knew because it spies of its own in Egypt and in MI6.In his book The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People, John Loftus (an Irish American Catholic who is a former US intelligence officer who had top secret clearance to CIA and NSA files) provides the most convincing and detailed account that I’ve ever read about what actually happened.His explanation is the only one that reconciles the all the seemingly conflicting circumstantial evidence provided by the various parties such astestimony by the survivors of the attack that the ship was strafed with machine gun fire, that its deck was napalmed, that it was struck with one torpedo, but that the ship was not sunk (although the IDF, which had just taken out the entire Egyptian air force, could have easily taken out one lightly armed radio ship - as it should well have done if it in fact believed it to be an Egyptian ship)The transcripts of radio messages by Israeli pilots showing they knew it was an American ship when they attacked itThe fact that relatively few members of the crew were killedThe fact that although a US aircraft carrier was minutes away, the US did not support one of its ships under attack after the ship radioed for helpThe behavior of the Egyptian and Israeli governments during the ceasefire negotiations (they each completely reversed their respective positions after the attack on the ship)The subsequent cover up of the incident by both the US and Israeli governmentsThe almost complete reversal of the US position with respect to Israel AFTER the war which otherwise does not make sense (i.e after the war Israel became a primary US ally in the Middle East)TLDR; Loftus’s conclusions, which reconcile all the above, were that:The Liberty had nothing to do with evacuating civilians, observing Soviet radar systems in Egypt, or even monitoring Arab communications; it was there to spy on Israel.Israel did not attack the Liberty to prevent the US from finding out about Israel’s plans to invade the Golan because Israel had discussed every major facet of the impending campaign was discussed in advance, including the strike against Syria.²³Israel attacked the Liberty because it was mapping the location of every Israeli division and tank, and Israel knew that the US was transmitting information about Israel’s plans to the Arabs in order to curry favor with them to preserve access to oil.Israel knew about this because it had spies in both Egypt and the British foreign intelligence service whose base in Cyprus was relaying the informationThe Israeli Cabinet itself approved the attack because it could not allow the US to continue transmitting this intelligence to its enemies in time of war.However the cabinet asked for a plan that would result in minimum casualties to the US sailors on the ship, which explains why the IDF did not just sink the shipThe US administration couldn’t afford to have the ties between ‘big oil’ and the government exposed (which they might have been had the incident been investigated more thoroughly, and that explains its motives for covering up the incident)Both the Israeli pilots and the US sailors involved in the incident knew ‘the what’ but not ‘the why’ of what happenedThe author discusses this incident in minutes 47–48 in the video below:However, the story that he tells in this fascinating book is so incredible that the only way to really do it justice is to quote the chapter of the book that discusses it. (Emphasis mine).There are many contradictory accounts of this “error,” but first, here is the official Israeli version.⁵ On June 8 Israeli reconnaissance spotted an unknown freighter steaming northward from the direction of Egypt approaching the Israeli coast. The photos showed what appeared to be an American vessel, but the U.S. embassy formally denied that claim. The Israelis concluded that the Arabs were trying to masquerade one of their warships as an American vessel. According to the Israeli version, one of their junior officers did recognize the photo of the USS Liberty in Jane’s Fighting Ships. Through a breakdown in communications, however, the attack planes had already taken off before word passed up the chain of command.⁶ At 2:00 P.M. a pair of Israeli fighter planes strafed the vessel with machine guns and small rockets, but the ship kept coming. Another flight dropped napalm, while three Israeli motorboats fired torpedoes. During the smoke of battle, one of the motorboats hooked one of the enemy life-rafts and pulled it on board. To their horror, the Israeli sailors saw the words “USS Liberty” stenciled on the rubber wreckage and called off the attack.They had been shooting at an American ship. The Israeli cabinet responded quickly, and honestly. By 4:00 P.M. they reported the tragic mistake to the American government. Although the Liberty was not supposed to be near the combat zone in the first place, the government of Israel offered its apologies and promised to pay reparations for the damage. The U.S. government agreed that it was an honest mistake in time of war, but still made Israel pay compensation to the Liberty’s crew, thirty-four of whom had been killed in the attack.⁷The official American version of the Liberty incident supported the Israeli story. The Americans accepted that it was a case of mistaken identity” and that the Israelis had thought it was the Egyptian ship the El Ksair.⁸ The United States and Israel were allies and would never deliberately attack each other. The United States accepted that the Israelis never would have knowingly fired on a ship flying the American flag. The Liberty attack was a horrible error.There is, however, another American version—one that is somewhat different, to say the least. That story is told best by the surviving crew. Lieutenant James M. Ennes, Jr., an officer on board the Liberty that fateful summer day, has even written a book about it.⁹ According to Ennes, his ship had been ordered to patrol near the combat zone, but was still in international waters at the time of the attack.If anyone interfered with the Liberty’s right of free passage on the high seas, help was available from a U.S. aircraft carrier stationed farther offshore in the eastern Mediterranean. American fighter planes would be overhead the Liberty within minutes of a distress call. Not that there was much danger. The Israelis had knocked out the entire Egyptian and Syrian air forces in the first two days of the war. The Israeli air force was the only one left in the sky, and it had been following the Liberty from the moment it arrived off the Israeli coast at 6:00 A.M.All morning there had been overflights by Israeli reconnaissance, nine passes in all. One of them flew less than two hundred feet from the ship, so close you could see the pilots and give them a friendly wave. No one could mistake the Liberty for an enemy ship with its American flag flying and its U.S. Navy identifiers gleaming in large white numbers on the hull. The number of fly-bys was unusual, but the crew thought that the Israelis were just keeping a constant eye on their position to make sure that a friendly ship did not sail into harm’s way. There was a war on, after all, but the Liberty was minding its own business. It was really nothing more than a floating radio set, very lightly armed, and a threat to no one.At 2:00 P.M. another flight of Israeli Mirage jets appeared on the radar screen. A few people on the bridge watched their approach with idle curiosity. Suddenly the Israeli aircraft opened fire and strafed the deck of the Liberty with machine-gun fire and rockets. People were screaming, running for cover. The Israelis left as quickly as they had come. They must have realized their mistake and broken off the attack. For a few seconds there was silence and then the sound of wounded men calling for help.The rockets and gun rounds had chewed up the deck and everyone on it. Some of the radio antennas had been badly damaged, but the Liberty still managed to get an emergency message to the Sixth Fleet that it was under attack and needed immediate air cover.While they waited for the U.S. planes, another huge American flag was hung on the Liberty to prevent any further possibility of misidentification. Instead of the promised American fighter support, however, Israeli Mystère jets were spotted on the horizon. Everyone took cover. The Israeli planes fired rockets at the Liberty and dropped napalm, which is a kind of jellied gasoline that burns everything it touches. Some components of the Liberty’s radar dishes and antennas were made from aluminum. The only problem is that aluminum does not melt, it burns when it is hit with napalm.Walls of flames rolled over the Liberty. As soon as the jets left, the crew rushed out to try to control the fires. Where was the American fighter support? They should have been over the Liberty minutes ago. What else could go wrong? That was when they saw the three speedboats approaching from the Israeli coast. They were not rescue craft, they were torpedo boats. One torpedo struck the starboard side of the Liberty, and the stricken vessel tilted ten degrees over, its steering gone, portions of the deck still burning.Luckily, the watertight compartments below decks had contained the torpedo damage. The ship would not sink, but that was the least of the problems. The captain of the Liberty realized that something had gone terribly wrong, and the ship was alone. There was no American air cap to protect it, and it had become a floating target for the Israelis. Although the upper structures of the ship had been badly hit, almost 90 percent of the crew had been belowdecks and were still alive.After the Israeli torpedo boats picked up his crew and realized they were Americans, his ship finally would be safe. The problem was that the Israeli boats were slowly circling the Liberty, firing at anyone who stuck his head out of a hatch. The three rubber rafts they did manage to toss over the side were ripped to shreds almost before they hit the water. Finally the Israelis left for good.Out of the 293 crewmen aboard the Liberty, only thirty-four had died. The crew thought it was a miracle that so many had survived. Of course, few of the crew believed the Israeli government’s apology that it was all a case of mistaken identification. Nor did they believe the American government was telling the whole story. When the crew of the Liberty were finally rescued, they found out that their fighter cover had been ordered out and then canceled by “higher authority.”¹⁰Incredible as it may seem, the U.S. government had deliberately left one of its own ships defenseless while knowing it was under attack. Several of the officers and crew were interviewed by Navy admirals and then sworn to secrecy about the entire Liberty incident, in the interests of “national security.”¹¹ The crew described the report of the navy’s official Board of Inquiry as a farce.Years later some members of the crew had their own theory about what had happened. The day the Liberty arrived off the coast of Israel was the very day the Israelis were planning to invade the Golan Heights, the Syrian chain of hilltops that loom over the valleys of northern Israel like a shadow of death. Ever since 1948 the Syrians had bombarded the Jewish settlements below, and now the Israelis wanted to end this, by stealing another country’s mountain range before the Americans could find out and stop them in the UN. That is why they attacked the Liberty, or so several of the crew believe.The Israelis wanted the seizure of the Golan Heights to be a fait accompli before the Americans got wind of their plans.¹² What the crew members do not understand is why their own navy covered it up and let the Israelis get away with it by pretending the attack was a mistake.One of the “old spies,” Bill Eveland, put forward an interesting explanation of the official U.S. cover-up in his book on American Middle Eastern policies. As previously discussed, Eveland was one of the nation’s spies against the Jews and was very hostile to Israel. He did not care too much, either, for Israel’s co-opted double agent in the CIA, James Jesus Angleton. According to his account, there was “a pattern pointing to American connivance in Israel’s 1967 attack on Egypt.”Angleton was allegedly at the center of the plot, and partly as a result of his connections with Israeli intelligence, the Liberty suffered its fate. Eveland believes that Angleton took advantage of President Johnson’s known anger at Nasser’s bellicose stance. Angleton wanted Nasser destroyed, so that the Arabs would be forced to negotiate peace with Israel. So did Angleton’s liaison at the Israeli embassy in Washington. According to this version, Angleton went outside of official channels and used his liaison to encourage the Israelis to attack Nasser.Remembering American duplicity in 1956, the Israelis were reluctant unless they received approval from President Johnson himself.¹³ As the crisis deteriorated, Johnson “authorized Angleton” to tell his Israeli contact that “the U.S. would prefer Israeli efforts to lessen the tension but would not intervene to stop an attack on Egypt.” Johnson was adamant that Israel must not attack Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon. The Pentagon, briefed on Angleton’s discussions with the Israelis and concerned that the war might give the Soviets the pretext to intervene, sent the Liberty to monitor the fighting. According to Eveland, the generals were afraid that Israel would use the atomic weapons that the CIA had helped it procure, and the Liberty was sent to ensure that the United States could warn both the Israelis and the Soviets that it would retaliate if either country used nuclear warfare.¹⁴ According to Eveland’s one-sided account, the Liberty discovered that Israel had broken its promise and had no intention of limiting the attack to Egypt. The Israelis were sending disinformation by radio to Jordan and Syria to encourage the belief that Nasser’s forces were winning, and it was time for those nations to join the victorious side.Eveland insists that the Israelis tricked the Arabs into attacking but then discovered that the Liberty had uncovered their deception. According to Eveland, the reason the ship was attacked was to conceal the Israeli disinformation strategy. The U.S. government decided to bury the whole thing because the Jews threatened to expose all the details of Angleton’s covert involvement in planning the war to the Soviets and the Arabs.¹⁵ A few historians support Bill Eveland’s theory, at least to some extent. The highly respected British espionage writer Richard Deacon put forward a similar version of the Liberty incident in his book on the Israeli secret service, but made a more plausible case.This version comes a little closer to the truth, but Deacon was misled by his sources on several important matters. Deacon agrees with Eveland that Israeli and American intelligence had struck a secret deal for a limited war between Israel and Egypt, as long as Jordan and Syria were not attacked.¹⁶ Then, according to Deacon’s explanation, the U.S. State Department got in the way. The Mossad discovered that the State Department had invited an Egyptian agent to Washington to negotiate some sort of deal and feared that its agreement with the CIA was about to be betrayed.For its part, the CIA feared that the Israelis would renege on their promise not to attack Jordan and Syria and thereby provoke the Soviets into entering the conflict, another point on which Deacon agrees with Eveland. In order to monitor the situation, the Liberty was sent to listen in to all the radio traffic.¹⁷ Deacon further agrees that it was the Israelis’ clever use of radio deception that ultimately caused the ship’s destruction. The Israelis had broken the Arabs’ ciphers and codes, enabling them to feed false messages to the enemy. The phony messages led the Jordanians to believe that the war was going well for Nasser, when, in fact, the Egyptians already had been effectively knocked out of the battle.Such signals deception was bound to make King Hussein think about joining in on the victorious side. It was then, Deacon asserts, that things started to go badly wrong for the Israelis: on the night of 7 June the Mossad … knew that their deception plan had been spotted by the Americans. The Israeli Ambassador was called to the State Department and told that the Israeli attack must be halted forthwith as a cease-fire was to be ordered by the United Nations. … When the Ambassador protested, he was informed in diplomatic language, that the United States knew that Jordan had been lured into fighting by signal deception. It was obvious that, if Liberty continued with her transmissions, it could be disastrous for Israel as they would be able to reveal that the Israelis were in violation of a UN cease-fire order.¹⁸According to Deacon, the Israelis ordered that the ship, which was a threat to the Jews’ plans, must be put out of action, “whatever flag it was flying.” The Israelis feared “there could be leakages from the State Department to the United Nations and, even worse, the latter, whose administrators were already biased against Israel, could pass on information to the Egyptians.” The Israelis were not stupid. They knew that the State Department’s Middle Eastern policies had a pronounced anti-Semitic tilt.¹⁹ Further, it was not idle speculation that Israel’s secrets might end up in Egyptian hands.According to our sources in the American intelligence community who talked to us about he Liberty incident, passing Israeli secrets to the Egyptians was the whole idea of stationing the ship off the Sinai coast. They believe that all the published versions of the Liberty incident—the crew’s, the Israelis’, the U.S. government’s, Eveland’s and Deacon’s—are wrong.²⁰ When the authors described what we already knew from Western sources, several Israelis reluctantly provided corroboration of the best-kept secret of the Six Day War.²¹ Contrary to the Israeli government’s categorical denials, the assault on the Liberty had been deliberate, but it was an act of self-defense. The “old spies” are adamant that the Liberty crew only knows the what, not the why, of what happened.Similarly, although Eveland and Deacon exposed the fact that the Israelis knew what they were doing when they attacked the ship, they did not know the real reason. Even U.S. Naval Intelligence did not piece together what had happened until years later, and they had to get most of the answers from the British, who got them from the NSA. This is the real version of the Liberty incident, as told by our sources among the former intelligence officers who were there on both sides of the battle.²²In the weeks preceding the 1967 war, the Israeli embassy in Washington fully briefed the CIA and the White House on its strategy to preempt the Arab invasion. Once before the Israelis had launched a preemptive strike in the Sinai without Washington’s explicit approval. The 1956 Suez debacle still rankled in everyone’s memory. This time the Israelis wanted to make sure that they had not crossed wires with their most important, perhaps only, ally in the world. Every major facet of the impending campaign was discussed in advance, including the strike against Syria.²³ Our sources insist that the U.S. government knew that the Israelis were going to attack the Golan Heights weeks before it happened and gave them the green light. Syria was in the Soviet camp and no particular friend of the United States. Jordan was another matter.According to the “old spies” we interviewed on this point, a CIA agent in Amman, Jordan, leaked word to Jordan’s King Hussein about the secret Israeli briefing. Everyone likes to tell good news: The Israelis would counterattack only in the north and south against Egypt and Syria. Under American pressure, the Israelis had agreed not to send troops into the West Bank. As long as Jordan did not attack Israel from the east, King Hussein could stay out of the war and keep the provinces of Judea, Samaria, and the old city of Jerusalem, which the Jordanian army had stolen from Palestine back in 1948.²⁴It was a good deal for Jordan, but not good enough. King Hussein was under pressure from he Arab world to join in the attack against Israel. It would be a little embarrassing for him to sit back and do nothing while the Egyptian and Syrian armies came hundreds of miles to fight the Jews. From one point in Jordanian territory in the West Bank, it was less than a ten-mile drive across Israel to the ocean. A Jordanian armored column could cut the country in half. The king had to do something to appease his Arab brothers, so he sent Jordanian troops to attack from Syria, while promising the CIA that not a single Jordanian soldier would attack Israel from the West Bank. Hussein slyly omitted his plan to place Jordanian troops under Nasser’s control.The CIA passed the word on to Israel not to worry about an attack on its highly vulnerable eastern flank. Through one of their spies, the Israelis quickly found out about the CIA deal with King Hussein, and they were furious. It may not have made a lot of difference to the CIA if Jordanian troops were fighting on the northern front, but it made a lot of difference to the Jews. But this was nothing compared to what the Jews found out next.²⁵ When the Israelis discovered that the Americans also had made a deal with the Egyptians, they became even more furious at the CIA.To be fair, our sources in the intelligence community acknowledge that, by and large, the CIA was just a messenger boy. The real decisions were being made in the White House. Aramco and the other big players in the oil business were extremely concerned that American aid to Israel would alienate the Arab oil producers. It was not enough to withhold military assistance in the coming war. Everyone in the Moslem world knew that the United States was still neutral in favor of Israel. The oil men wanted some under-the-table help for the Arabs.²⁶ President Lyndon Johnson had been in the “erl bidness” himself down in Texas and knew how the game was played. The oil producers got to LBJ or someone very close to him in the White House. Our sources were never able to find out who.The oil men asked if the president could throw the Arabs a bone, some sort of secret assistance that the public would never find out about but would make the Arab leadership grateful. The point was to keep the oil flowing no matter what happened in the 1967 war.²⁷ The White House approved a contingency plan to send the Arabs a little intelligence about the Israeli Defense Forces, not too much, nothing that would tip the balance of war. Just a little something to let the Arab leaders think that the Americans were secretly on their side, no matter what was said about Israel in public.Unfortunately, the small-scale contingency plan escalated. No one planned it that way. Only a handful of staffers in the White House, the National Security Agency, and the CIA knew what had happened, and they all pointed the finger at each other.²⁸ Even though the Dulles brothers had been in charge of policy in Washington for years, the real successes of American covert action had been very limited in the Middle East. Apart from the 1949 Syrian coup and installing the shah of Iran in 1953, the CIA had not had much luck in rolling back communism and keeping the Middle East safe for the oil companies. Egypt had been particularly disappointing, given the extraordinary amount of attention that Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt and Miles Copeland had put in.Instead of becoming a tame puppet, Nasser was drifting more and more into the Soviet camp. A decade before the 1967 war, Roosevelt had sent CIA agents to bribe Nasser. As discussed in Chapter 10, Roosevelt used the “revolving door” and at one stage left the CIA to become vice president of Gulf Oil for government relations. Whether at the CIA or at Gulf, he worked closely with Copeland in anti-Israel operations. His CIA agents even built Nasser a sophisticated communications tower in downtown Cairo. Nasser laughed as he took the CIA’s money, called the tower “Kermit’s phallic symbol,” and kept on bringing in more and more Soviet advisers. Something more was needed to impress him. Exit the CIA, enter the National Security Agency, the U.S. government’s signals intelligence agency.A few days before the war broke out, the USS Liberty was detached from navy control and placed under the authority of the National Security Agency. The ship was ordered to pick up two Hebrew translators (non-Jewish NSA employees) from Spain and head for the eastern Mediterranean.²⁹ The whole operation, to spy on Israel and betray its secrets, was clearly planned in advance.When, on June 4, 1967, the CIA courier first passed on the news that the Americans were willing to provide secret intelligence about Israel, the Egyptian military was less than impressed. It had been passed “chickenfeed” before. Perhaps without authorization, the courier insisted that this time the offer was bona fide, approved by the president himself. Whatever the Egyptians wanted, they could have. But they just laughed. They had an entire air force that could fly over Israel and collect all the intelligence they wanted. Soon there would be no Israel anyway.That evening King Hussein called Nasser to say that the CIA had just alerted him that the Israelis would attack in the morning.³⁰ Again, Nasser laughed off the CIA’s betrayal of Israel’s plans. The Egyptians stopped laughing on the morning of June 5. The Israelis wiped out virtually their entire air force in one strike. Then they destroyed the Syrian air force. Without air reconnaissance, Arab intelligence was blind. Within forty-eight hours the Israelis had captured the Gaza Strip, sent the Egyptian army in a rout back down the Sinai Peninsula, taken the West Bank from Jordan, and, for the first time in two thousand years, returned to their ancient capital of Jerusalem. King Hussein screamed at the CIA that he had been betrayed. The CIA had promised that the Jews would not attack him.This was not the time to remind him about the Jordanian troops under Egyptian command in the north or about the shooting that they had started at Jerusalem before Israel had fired one shot at Jordan, to say nothing of the Jordanian air attack on Israel before the war even started. Kings can get very selective about the rules.³¹The Egyptian generals were considerably easier to get along with. They desperately needed intelligence now and begged the CIA for its promised assistance. It was not long in coming. On June 8, the morning of the fourth day of the Six Day War, the USS Liberty arrived off the Sinai coast. Although its crew did not know it, it was the only hope the Egyptian army had of retrieving anything from one of the quickest and most decisive military victories in history.The Liberty was more than a floating radio set. It was a giant magnet for electronic intelligence and could do much more than simply eavesdrop on radio communications. Anyone could do that. The nation of Israel is so tiny that the U.S. embassy in Beirut could monitor all the radio traffic in the entire country. The embassy even taped the Israeli pilots talking back and forth when they hit the Liberty. For that matter, the Egyptian embassy in Jordan could listen to radio traffic, and it was a good deal closer than the Liberty. So what was the Liberty doing there?Our sources among the “old spies” have an interesting explanation.³² They believe the Liberty was making a war map. Every time an Israeli soldier squawked on his walkie-talkie, the ship recorded his voice and indexed it with the direction and the strength of the signal. The same thing happened with tank radios, headquarters’ telephones, even coded cable traffic. The ship swept up everything in the airwaves while noting the location of every speck of electronic dust in Israel. This is called a raw intelligence take.The Liberty was one of the most sophisticated spy ships in the world at that time. Even so, it was not big enough to process all the electronic garbage it collected. Processing intelligence requires banks of computers and teams of analysts. All the ship did was record the garbage, compress it electronically, and transmit it to a land station. What happened next was none of its concern. The crew members did not know it, but the land station was located on the island of Cyprus. That was the clever part. The navy’s paper trail would show that no American computer had even begun to process the Liberty’s troop movement data at the time of the attack. If asked under oath, the few officers involved in the scheme could swear that the ship never gave any Israeli secrets to the Arabs. They would be telling the truth, as far as it went.The British secret service has one of the largest electronic listening posts in the world on the island of Cyprus. It had little difficulty in downloading the transmissions from the Liberty. All of Israel’s electronic garbage was sifted by an enormous computer that began to make sense of the random noise. One section of the British computer began to decode Israel’s cable traffic. Another went to work on plotting the military radio transmissions, while still another began to sort the telephone calls intercepted from microwave relay towers across Israel.³³First, the frequencies and locations of the major Israeli headquarters were identified, then the smaller regiments and battalions, then the individual units. A great deal of preparatory work had been done before the war began. Spectrographic analysis of known voiceprints enabled the computer to identify each Israeli commander as soon as he spoke on the radio or telephone. The voice was matched to a name and unit number and then the unit’s location was placed on an electronic war map that was updated constantly in Cyprus from the Liberty’s input.³⁴The British were about to make good on the promise they had made to the Arabs after the Suez debacle in 1956, when they had abandoned their Israeli ally and told the Saudis that they would support the Arab case on Palestine. In 1967 the plan was for the British to hand the final product of the Liberty’s intelligence haul to the Egyptians.The finished war map was a detailed order of battle intelligence report, or OB. It is the most useful information generals can have in time of war. Using such a map, they can send their troops wherever the enemy is weakest and exploit an undefended region with an attack that penetrates the enemy’s rear areas and cuts off its supply lifeline. Our sources insist that, with the Liberty’s assistance, the Arabs might have been able to turn the war around to some extent or at least force an honorable stalemate.³⁵For the first time they would know as much as or more than the Israeli generals did themselves about the movements of the Israeli army. The Arab generals would have details of every Israeli counterstrategy from the moment it began. They would have every Israeli battle order in close to real time. Just as the Israelis were beginning to pull some of their mobile reserves out of the Sinai for the Golan assault in the north, the Liberty was letting the Egyptians know the location of each hole in the southern front. As soon as the Israeli army turned its attention to the north, the Egyptians could launch low-level, but irritating, attacks on Israeli settlements and military formations in the south. “You have to understand what this means,” said one of our sources. “The Government of Israel was already pissed off about the CIA leaks to the Jordanians. But that was nickel-and-dime stuff. This was as serious as lung cancer. As long as the Liberty was transmitting, every Israeli troop movement would be known to the Arabs within an hour, maybe within minutes. It meant that Israel could lose the war.”³⁶Other sources do not put the threat this high, although they do agree that, at the very least, the Egyptians could drag the war out to a stalemate with the help of the ship’s intelligence.³⁷ As best as can be determined, the purpose of playing the Liberty pawn was to help even the score on the chessboard. Despite Arab radio broadcasts announcing their triumphant victories, by the morning of June 8 nothing could stop the Israeli army from marching on Cairo, Egypt, Damascus, Syria, or Amman, Jordan. The united Arab armies were in ashes. But with the sly help of British-American intelligence, the tables could be turned to some extent giving the Arabs time to gain a diplomatic victory from the certainty of military defeat.One of our American sources, after conferring with several others, described for us how the Israeli military planners saw the potential of the Liberty’s intelligence. Here is a brief paraphrase of what our source says the Israelis believed could have happened if they had not taken the ship out: After forcing the Egyptian army to retreat across the Sinai, the Israelis would have launched the Golan assault on the morning of June 8, as planned, and committed their southern mobile reserves to the northern campaign.Most of the Israel Defense Forces’ units en route to the Golan would have been withdrawn past Gaza where the Liberty was listening. Once Israel was committed to a two-front war, everything would go wrong. On June 9 small elements of the surviving Egyptian brigades would thread their way through the holes in the southern front left by the withdrawal of the IDF. To the horror of the Israelis, the Egyptian reconnaissance forces would have been able to maneuver in the Sinai, eluding the few remaining Israeli forces.That would not have been surprising since the Egyptians would have had a map of all Israeli troop movements, courtesy of the Liberty. The cat-and-mouse game in the Sinai would have gone on for several more days, with Egyptian hit-and-run units inflicting damage on Israeli civilian settlements in the Negev Desert. Sooner or later the Israeli politicians would start screaming at the generals that they must withdraw their armored reserves from the Golan, to protect the civilians in the south. A week into the war, the Egyptian reconnaissance forces would have continued to sneak back and forth through Israeli lines at will. The Liberty could constantly monitor the arrival of Israeli forces from the northern front and map their deployment.It would have been as if the Egyptians were reading the minds of the Israeli generals, concentrating their forces where the Israelis were weakest. The new Egyptian hit-and-run tactics would have done a lot of damage to the spread out Israeli units by virtue of the Liberty’s superior intelligence. The more troops the Israelis pulled out of the Golan, the better the odds became for the Syrians. A two-front war is a no-win situation, especially when the enemy has a map of all your troops.³⁸ One well-informed Jewish source disputes, in part, our CIA source’s version, noting that, whatever the original plan, no ground units from the Sinai were in fact diverted to the Golan. This source asserts that the Egyptians intended to use the Liberty’s intelligence to exploit gaps between Israel’s three Sinai divisions after the diversion of Israel’s air force—not land forces—to the Golan campaign.All of our sources agree that, if the Liberty had continued to support the Arabs, there would have been a longer conflict involving greater Jewish casualties instead of a quick Israeli victory. When both sides were bloody enough, the United States and Britain would step in as the peacemakers. The Israelis would be enormously grateful; so would the Arab leaders, but for different reasons. The Liberty’s intelligence could snatch a face-saving stalemate from the jaws of defeat.Pax Americana, the oil would flow. Of course, the impertinent Israelis would have to give back Jerusalem to King Hussein. This was a worst-case scenario for the Israeli military leaders, and in light of the devastating losses taken by the Arabs in the first three days, it may never have come to pass. But the Jews could not take any risks.The history books contain certain intriguing references that tend to corroborate our CIA source’s scenario. Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, recorded that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan initially opposed “any proposal to storm the [Golan] Heights” because he feared that Israel’s forces “were becoming overextended.”³⁹ Eban was at the United Nations in New York the day the Liberty was attacked. Twenty-five years later he recalled that before the Israelis launched their attack against the ship at 2:00 P.M. Israeli time, the Egyptians resisted “any cease-fire resolution unless it was accompanied by Israeli withdrawal.” A few hours later, after news of the attack had reached New York, the Egyptian ambassador, El-Kony, was in tears after he “was told by Cairo to get a cease-fire as soon as possible.”⁴⁰Apparently Dayan, concerned that the Egyptians might make some sort of comeback in the Sinai, would not agree to move on the Golan until the Liberty was put out of action. On the other hand, the Egyptians, supported by the Soviets, resisted all suggestions of a cease-fire until after the Liberty had been attacked. A day earlier, on June 7, Israel had been prepared to accept the same terms and conditions finally forced on the Egyptians.Finally, it is true that one Egyptian commander, General Saad Shazli, had evaded the Israeli encirclement in the Sinai, where he had been stationed right on the Israeli border with orders to cut off the port of Eilat from the rest of Israel. The Israeli military planners, realizing that the elusive Shazli may have been in a position to utilize the Liberty’s intelligence to force his way eastward through their lines, could have been concerned enough to believe that the worst-case scenario posed certain real dangers. As it happened, Shazli was retreating back to Egypt at the time of the attack on the Liberty, but the Israelis were neither sure of his whereabouts nor whether he intended to launch a counterattack.⁴¹ On balance, we think that the Egyptians were not in a position realistically to take full advantage of the ship’s intelligence and that our source who called the situation “as serious as lung cancer” has exaggerated the actual military threat.But it is clear that the Israelis could not, and did not, know that at the time. They had to be sure that the potentially lethal betrayal of their battle strategy and deployment of forces by the United States would not undo all the gains they had made. Here is what the “old spies” say happened next. According to our sources, Israeli intelligence had discovered the Liberty’s espionage mission before it even arrived off the coast, although there is some disagreement about how they did so. Later on the Egyptians executed someone whom they claimed was an Israeli mole inside their headquarters.On the other hand, there has been considerable speculation about an Israeli agent inside British intelligence.⁴² It does appear that, by whatever means, the Israelis were prewarned about the ship’s real mission. By the time the Liberty arrived off the eastward through their lines, could have been concerned enough to believe that the worst-case scenario posed certain real dangers. As it happened, Shazli was retreating back to Egypt at the time of the attack on the Liberty, but the Israelis were neither sure of his whereabouts nor whether he intended to launch a counterattack.⁴¹ On balance, we think that the Egyptians were not in a position realistically to take full advantage of the ship’s intelligence and that our source who called the situation “as serious as lung cancer” has exaggerated the actual military threat. But it is clear that the Israelis could not, and did not, know that at the time.They had to be sure that the potentially lethal betrayal of their battle strategy and deployment of forces by the United States would not undo all the gains they had made.By the time the Liberty arrived off the coast at 6:00 A.M., the Israelis were waiting. At first light on the morning of June 8, they sent a reconnaissance flight to map the ship’s position. Shortly afterward a “flying boxcar” crammed with electronic information-gathering equipment flew over the Liberty. There was no doubt that the order of battle information being processed at the British base in Cyprus originated with this American ship.⁴³ The Israeli forces were supposed to cross the forward battle line at the Golan Heights at 11:30 A.M. on June 8.An emergency session of the Israeli war cabinet was called for early morning, as soon as the flying boxcar returned with the tapes of the Liberty’s transmissions.⁴⁴ One source claimed that some other kind of tape was played, and suggested that Israeli intelligence had tapped a CIA phone or even the British computer in Cyprus.⁴⁵ Whatever the source of the information about the Liberty, the Israeli cabinet was absolutely convinced that the government of the United States was secretly betraying its ally, the only democracy in the Middle East, in order to curry favor with Arab dictators who were friends of the Soviets.The Israeli army was asked to give the cabinet an estimate of what would happen if it went ahead with the Golan Heights operation as scheduled. The initial estimate was 25,000 Israeli dead, higher if the Liberty continued to help the Arabs.⁴⁶ The level playing field sought by the Americans was a minefield for the Israelis. There are 1 billion Moslems in the world. There were less than 3 million Jews in Israel. Any war of attrition always favored the Arabs. The cabinet members postponed the Golan Heights operation for twenty-four hours while they considered their options. There were really very few. A diplomatic protest would do no good. The Americans would deny everything, the UN would stall, and meanwhile more Israeli soldiers would be killed. The Israelis would be challenged to come up with proof, and they could not do that without exposing their own intelligence agents, in both the Western and the Arab camps.It came down to a choice between 25,000 of their own dead or attacking one American ship. One fighter-bomber loaded with high-explosive ordinance could blow the Liberty to splinters. Cabinet members asked if there was any option other than drowning nearly 300 American sailors, for no matter what the American politicians had done to them, Israel had always been friends with the American people.A plan to put the ship out of commission with a minimum loss of life was requested. Somehow, the Israelis had obtained a copy of the ship’s building plans,⁴⁷ and the Liberty’s fireproof and waterproof compartments gave the IDF staff an idea. The general staff reported their minimum-damage plan to the cabinet. During the first run, the aircraft would fire only light rockets at the antenna masts and strafe the deck. That would send the crew scurrying safely below decks to their battle stations. As soon as they were buttoned up, the second run would drop napalm to burn off the antennas and communications gear without breaching the structural integrity of the fireproof hull where the crew was hiding.⁴⁸The one problem was the electronic intelligence center belowdecks in hold number 3. One carefully aimed torpedo could take that out without sinking the ship, but whoever was in that compartment would die. The Israeli military staff estimated that American casualties could be kept to a few dozen. Most of the crew, maybe 80 to 90 percent, would survive. It was the best they could do.⁴⁹ The cabinet members gave the order to disable the Liberty with minimum loss of American life. Because they could no longer trust their own telephones, they sent a courier to the nearest Israeli air squadron to ask for volunteers.Half the squadron refused to fly, because they had friends or relatives in the United States. “They just could not bring themselves to shoot at the American flag,” said one of our Israeli sources. The ones who did fly were heartsick. Two of the pilots later had nervous breakdowns. The Americans on the ship were not the only victims of the Liberty incident. Two American-born Israelis volunteered to fly in the squadron.⁵⁰ The air crews needed only a little while to unload the heavy-explosive ordinance and replace it with napalm canisters. It took longer to get the torpedo boats briefed and under way. Everything had to be coordinated for 2:00 P.M. so that the planes and torpedo boats arrived at exactly the right times, one after the other, like a ballet sequence. If the napalm was dropped too early, crew members might still be on deck. The Israeli torpedo could not be fired until the Liberty’s crew had sufficient time to close all the watertight doors.In the meantime, a reconnaissance plane would make one last pass over the Liberty to confirm its identity and position. Only then would headquarters give the attack order to launch the fighter squadron. The reconnaissance pilots made their report in code, using a scrambling device. Tel Aviv used the same precautions when giving the attack order, as it knew U.S. intelligence was listening. The lead pilot on the strafing run would not break radio silence until he had made visual contact. He was to announce, en clair, when the ship was in sight.As soon as the attack was under way, a senior official of Israeli intelligence paid a surprise call on his CIA counterpart. He told him what they were doing to the Liberty at that moment, and why. Before the second Israeli run even arrived over the ship, the CIA had told the navy to call off air support for the Liberty.⁵¹ Although upon hearing news of the attack, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff at first wanted to launch a “quick, retaliatory air strike on the Israeli naval base which launched the attack,”⁵² this idea was quickly rejected.There would be no retaliation of any kind. Why were the U.S. fighter planes, which had taken off while the debate was still under way, ordered back to the carrier and the retaliation strike abandoned? The Israelis had proof that the U.S. government had committed an act of war against Israel by betraying its military secrets to the enemy in the middle of a war in which Israel’s very survival was at stake.The Israelis had sources in the Arab world that the CIA didn’t even know about. The CIA’s low-risk strategy had blown up in its face, along with any hope of plausible deniability. The White House certainly was not happy, but it did not take long to work up a cover story. The American intelligence officers begged the Israelis to pretend that the attack on the Liberty was a mistake. To make it look good, Israel would be quietly reimbursed for whatever compensation it paid to the surviving crew members and the families of the dead. By 4:00 P.M. that afternoon, the deal was cut.⁵³According to our sources in the intelligence community, the governments of Israel and the United States have spent the next twenty-seven years lying about the Liberty incident.⁵⁴ There is a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence to show that this version of the affair is correct. There is, moreover, convincing and direct evidence to demonstrate that the official versions told by both governments are false.In the last quarter of a century, more disinformation has been spread about the Liberty incident than any other episode in U.S.-Israeli relations. The cover-up continued with stories planted in the press during 1991 and 1992. The fact that both the United States and Israeli governments continued to lie about the incident a quarter of a century later is testimony to the sensitivity felt by them both about what really happened.Let us examine the lies, one by one. The first lie had to do with the Liberty’s mission. What was it doing off the coast of Israel? Immediately after the attack, a U.S. diplomat in Egypt said that “we had better get our cover story out fast, and it had better be good.”⁵⁵ Within hours the Pentagon had released a media statement claiming that the Liberty had been stationed there to facilitate communications in case American citizens had to be evacuated from Egypt or Israel.It was a pretty thin story and was attacked almost immediately by the American press. In order to deflect accusations that the Liberty was spying on Israel, the Pentagon quickly floated a rumor that the ship was observing newly installed Soviet radar systems, which implied that it was spying on Egypt.⁵⁶ The problem with the spying-on-Egypt story was that the Liberty was so close to the Israeli coast that its crew literally could see buildings on the Gaza shore only twelve miles away.A few attempts were made to lie about the ship’s position, such as the claim that it was “73 miles off the Sinai desert,” but that lie was contradicted by an admission that it had been stationed “as much as 13.5 nautical miles” off the coast in international waters, and was never “closer than 12.5 miles” from Israel.⁵⁷ So much for the spying-on-Egypt theory. The navy retreated to its original cover story. The Liberty was merely a relay station for evacuee messages, and it had to be stationed exactly where it was for “technical reasons.”It was suggested that the radios in the U.S. embassies were weak, or that batteries were low, so the ship had to get in close to hear them.⁵⁸ The problem with this story is that Alexandria, Egypt, was the only place in the Middle East from where Americans might have had to be evacuated. There the U.S. consulate had been burned and Americans had been attacked by angry mobs. Yet as soon as this attack was reported, the Liberty steamed in the opposite direction, toward Israel. There were no angry Arab mobs in Tel Aviv, nor was there any immediate risk that Israel would have to be evacuated. The Israelis were clearly winning the war. Anyway, the phone lines were still working at all the U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East, each of which had a radio transmitter powerful enough to reach Washington, D.C., not to mention an adjacent country.The State Department had years of experience in relaying messages from hostile countries without any help from the U.S. Navy. In fact, there was so little concern about evacuating American citizens during the Six-Day War that the U.S. Navy had pulled the entire Sixth Fleet away from Egypt and Israel. The closest carrier with evacuation helicopters was the America, stationed 400 miles away off the coast of Cyprus. The navy had been ordered to forget about evacuees and keep all its ships far away from the Middle East to avoid antagonizing the Arabs.On June 6 President Nasser and King Hussein had sought to divert attention from their embarrassing losses on the first day of the war by blaming the British and American navies. The Arabs claimed that it was not the Israelis who smashed their air forces, but U.S. and British pilots flying off aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. Remembering that a similar conspiracy had occurred in 1956, the nonaligned countries believed Nasser’s cynical lie and began to break diplomatic relations and impose an oil embargo against the United States and Great Britain. Both nations made vociferous denials in the UN of any assistance whatsoever to Israel. The closest British carrier was 1,000 miles away.In fact, only one U.S. reconnaissance plane had taken off on Monday, June 5, but it had been ordered to stay 100 miles away from the coast. Since then every plane and ship in the U.S. Navy had been ordered to stay as far away as possible from the Arab-Israeli war. Of course, one ship never had been pulled back. The press wanted to know why the Liberty remained twelve miles off the coast on June 8. For the first several weeks after the attack, the navy stuck to the relay-evacuation-messages story, but then on June 29 it admitted that it did not know why the Liberty remained behind.Both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Admiral of the Sixth Fleet had ordered the ship to pull out, but apparently it had never received the messages.⁵⁹ The missing-message explanation immediately raised questions about the previous lie that the Liberty was to play a vital role as a radio relay station. If it could not even hear its own admirals broadcasting from a powerful aircraft carrier, how could it pick up a group of evacuees with weak radios and low batteries? The navy countered with the admission that somehow the messages were never sent to the Liberty. There had been an embarrassing foul-up in communications. It was strikingly similar to the Navy’s explanation of how it had misrouted the “low-priority” warning message to Pearl Harbor. The orders to pull the Liberty out of the combat zone had inadvertently been given a low priority. The routine messages were then bounced around from Washington to the Philippines and ended up “back on a desk at Fort Meade.”⁶⁰Deacon hints at an Israeli spy in the CIA, but concludes that this was improbable.⁶¹ Of course, there was an Israeli mole in the CIA, but Angleton played no part in this charade of the misrouted messages. We now know that the low-priority story was a half-truth wrapped in a double lie. The pull-back messages were not sent low priority, and they were in fact received by the Liberty. It is true that a desk at Fort Meade, home of the United States’ ultra-secret service for electronic espionage, was involved, but the pull-back message was not lost there. In fact, Fort Meade told someone on the Liberty to ignore all orders from the Joint Chiefs. The ship was not under the command of the navy on June 8, 1967. It was assigned to the National Security Agency.⁶² First, the low-priority orders to pull out were actually sent on the highest priority, code-named “Pinnacle.”We now know from the declassified files that both the Sixth Fleet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were trying desperately to order the Liberty away from Israel. At least three high-priority messages were sent, the last only a short time before the attack.⁶³ It is incredible that for two days none of the navy’s messages got through to the Liberty’s communications center. The ship had radio receivers so powerful that it could pick up a transmission from a field radio inside a tank forty miles away. Even the navy admitted that the ship was perfectly equipped to monitor communications in the Arab-Israeli war. Of course the ship could hear orders from its own headquarters. It was designed as an electronic listening post. The Liberty could receive radio messages better than any ship in the world at that time. There is no doubt that the ship’s radio was working. Even after the Israeli attack blew away all of its masts and antennas, its communications gear was so powerful that Commander William McGonagle could still broadcast a request for assistance to the Sixth Fleet.Sending a radio message is much harder than receiving one. Even if the radio had been out of order, the Liberty also was equipped with multiple transmitters, teletypes, and satellite dishes. It had a Trsscom system for bouncing signals off the moon back to the other side of the planet. It had an early form of the ELF system for sending long-range messages to U.S. submarines. It had synchronized dishes to match the orbit of communications satellites in outer space. In fact, it was the one ship in the U.S. Navy that could stay in touch with anyone, anywhere, anytime. The problem was that the Liberty was not taking orders from the navy at the time it was attacked.The navy was furious and leaked part of the story to The New York Times, which published an editorial denouncing the interference with the chain of command. The story did not blame a faulty radio, but pointed out that the ship was not under the command of either the Sixth Fleet or the Navy commander in chief for Europe.The blame was put on “the Pentagon” for leaving it in a danger area.⁶⁴ This story does not work either. The Pentagon is under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we know now, from their declassified messages, that they were sending pull-back orders independently of the Sixth Fleet.⁶⁵ The fact is that no one in either the Pentagon or the navy could send orders through the Liberty’s communications center. None of the ship’s officers could even set foot in that area.Commander McGonagle did not know it at the time, but the real masters of his ship were the civilian spies of the NSA. On June 2, 1967, three days before the Six Day War erupted, the Liberty had been taken over by a special three-man civilian crew from the NSA, picked up at Rota, Spain. The senior officer among them was known to the ship’s crew simply as “the Major,” and only he and his men had access to the supersensitive communications areas in the hull.⁶⁶ This confirms what our sources among the “old spies” told us: The ship was on a secret mission for the NSA, about which the navy neither had understanding nor control.⁶⁷We now know a little more about the civilians who came aboard the ship in Spain. They were experts in Hebrew.⁶⁸ The Liberty had nothing to do with evacuating civilians, observing Soviet radar systems in Egypt, or even monitoring Arab communications; it was there to spy on the Jews. That was its only mission. On-the-record confirmation comes from a former NSA officer who had been stationed in Turkey during the Six Day War. While the navy could not communicate with the Liberty, the NSA was receiving a great deal of intelligence from the ship and relaying summaries back and forth to other NSA stations in Crete and Turkey. It is clear, from this officer’s firsthand account, that the NSA was using the ship to spy only on the Jews.⁶⁹ It should be noted that this Turkish NSA report later was corroborated by The New York Times, using its own sources.⁷⁰ While confirming much of the version of the Liberty affair given by our intelligence sources, the young NSA officer in Turkey was simply too far out of the loop to know why the ship’s mission was so sensitive to the White House.It had nothing to do with uncovering Israeli strategic planning. In the first place, both the CIA and the White House already had been briefed in full about Israeli strategy. They knew full well that the advance to Cairo was only a feint and that the Israelis were planning to move north to the Golan Heights. In any event, the Liberty was in the wrong place for eavesdropping on an Israeli move into Syria.Although it could listen in on the entire theater of operations, the ship would have been much better positioned off the coast north of Tel Aviv, near the Lebanese border, if the attack on Syria was its target. Instead, it was over a hundred miles farther south, below Tel Aviv, off the Gaza Strip. What was it doing there, so far from the action on June 8? The position was not accidental. The ship was given specific orders. It left its station off the Egyptian coast and sailed all through the night of June 7 in order to reach this position. Then it stopped and sailed in slow circles for the rest of the day, as close to the Gaza shore as possible without crossing the twelve-mile limit. But why? What was the Liberty listening for? Certainly not the Syrians, and there had been no major Egyptian forces there for several days. The only ones left to listen to were the Israelis.On June 8 the mobile reserves and support units of the Israeli army on the southern front were scheduled to pull out of the Sinai, travel northward past Gaza, and prepare for the assault on the Golan Heights. The only reason the Liberty would have come in so close to shore by the Gaza Strip was to monitor the transmissions of Israeli squad and tank radios, which virtually were impossible to intercept without the powerful listening devices on board the ship. These were the only low-range, battery-powered units that it could have been listening to. This was the type of information the Egyptian army needed most: intelligence on the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the Sinai. As each unit moved north past Gaza, the ship tracked it, identified it, and placed it on the war map.The only possible purpose for such close monitoring of the Israeli troop withdrawal was to tell Nasser where the holes were in the remaining Israeli forces. It seems that the “old spies” were right. The Liberty was the Arabs’ best hope. While the Israelis were stripping their forces in the Sinai, whether ground or air, or both, for an attack in the north, the Arabs were planning a counterattack in the south in an effort to retake Gaza. The American ship was there to keep track of the exhausted and undermanned units and show the Arabs where Israel’s weak points were located on the southern front. Military historians have wondered for years why Nasser kept fighting and refused the UN offer of a cease-fire. Actually, he was waiting for the overextended Israelis to open the northern front. He was waiting for the Liberty’s order of battle intelligence to reveal precisely the exact locations of the remaining Israeli forces in the Sinai.With the help of the ship’s war map, Nasser might be able to bloody the Israelis where their forces were weakest and perhaps restore the status quo in the Sinai. There is another piece of evidence, albeit circumstantial, to corroborate our sources’ revelations about the Liberty’s real mission. For two days prior to the Israeli attack on the ship, Arab propaganda had been screaming that the U.S. Navy was secretly aiding the Israelis with planes from their aircraft carriers. Yet when an American spy ship was discovered just twelve miles off the Gaza coast, after the worst military defeat in Egyptian history, not a single Arab leader even alleged that Israel had been receiving American intelligence assistance against Arab forces in the south. It seems the Arabs knew whose side the Liberty was on.So did the Israelis, who have now confirmed that one of the Egyptian majors in charge of signals intelligence in the Sinai during the 1967 war was a long-term Israeli spy.⁷¹ Israel knew that orders had been given to prepare for a counterattack in the Sinai in the early hours of June 8. It has also acknowledged that it had broken the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian codes as well.⁷² That was not what worried the White House. As the Israelis themselves revealed two days after the Liberty incident, they also had intercepted the telephone links between Cairo and Amman. Much to Nasser’s chagrin, Israeli radio broadcasts presented the Arabs with an actual recording of Nasser and King Hussein conspiring to falsely accuse U.S. and British aircraft carriers of helping the Israelis destroy Arab air bases.⁷³ The Israelis, however, never played the tapes of Nasser discussing the covert assistance he had been promised from the Americans. The White House was reeling from the threats of an oil embargo and diplomatic isolation in the Arab world that resulted from Nasser’s propaganda. June 7 was when the secret offer of the war map was made and the Liberty diverted to the Gaza shoreline. That was what the Israelis heard when they tapped Nasser’s phone line.⁷⁴Perhaps some people cannot believe that the United States would ever betray Israel by giving intelligence to the Arabs in time of war. Yet the Liberty was not the only example during the 1967 Six Day War. For example, two British historians reported a conversation that occurred on June 4, 1967, between King Hussein and a CIA agent in Jordan, who warned the king that Israel would attack Egypt the very next day. Hussein, of course, phoned Nasser immediately to tip him off.⁷⁵ As we now know, Israeli intelligence had tapped the phone line between Hussein and Nasser. They had tape-recorded proof that the U.S. government had betrayed Israel’s battle plans to the Arabs. It was a miracle that Nasser was so arrogant as to ignore the CIA’s tip.Even before the first Israeli airplane took off the next morning, the Israeli government knew that all the war plans it had cleared with the CIA were being given to their Arab enemies. The Israelis also knew in advance of the Liberty’s mission. On the day before the ship arrived at Gaza, the NSA “Major” informed Commander McGonagle that the Liberty had picked up Israeli transmissions that caused him “concern.”⁷⁶ An Israeli air patrol was waiting at first light when the ship arrived off the Gaza coast. For the next four hours, the Israelis tried to jam the ship’s frequencies, to no effect. The Liberty’s equipment was much too sophisticated to be stopped in that fashion. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the Liberty was continuing to spy on Israeli battle communications. At 12:30 P.M. Israeli time the ship intercepted a discussion from an Israeli reconnaissance plane, positively identifying the ship as American. It took about half an hour to decode and translate Tel Aviv’s response. The U.S. ambassador in Beirut, Dwight Porter, was later shown a transcript of the exchange. For twenty-five years Porter never mentioned this tape intercept until someone, presumably in the Bush administration, tipped off two columnists for The Washington Post.The Israelis regarded Rowland Evans and Robert Novak as front men for White House disinformation against Israel during the Reagan-Bush terms.⁷⁷ Between 1988 and 1991 they had run at least seven stories that were later proven to be false, according to a count made by Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.⁷⁸ This was before the contretemps of 1992, when Evans and Novak falsely accused Israel of selling U.S. missile technology to the Chinese, a story that was completely discredited after a thorough investigation by the Department of Defense.On November 6, 1991, Evans and Novak took on the Liberty incident. They were told that Ambassador Porter had seen a transcript of a conversation between the Israeli fighter pilots who attacked the Liberty, knowing it was an American ship. Two days later the Israeli government issued its rebuttal statement to columnist A. M. Rosenthal of The New York Times, saying that no such message had been sent or received. Hirsh Goodman, a respected Israeli journalist, reported a few weeks later that he had listened to the tape of the fighter pilots’ conversation from fifteen minutes before the attack and for several hours afterward. Goodman insisted that Evans and Novak were completely wrong. The fighter pilots never once mentioned that they had identified their target as an American ship.⁷⁹The truth is that both the U.S. and Israeli governments had planted false information in the press. The exchange that Ambassador Porter had read was not an intercept of the fighter pilots, who attacked at 2:00 P.M. It was a transcript of the coded broadcast made by the last reconnaissance flight at 1:30 P.M. The Israeli government, seizing on Evans and Novak’s error, released only the fighter pilots’ tape beginning at 1:43 P.M. They deceived their own friends in the press by concealing the earlier reconnaissance tape.⁸⁰ That reconnaissance flight identified the Liberty as an American ship and received Tel Aviv’s coded confirmation that the attack would proceed.It appears that this was the message decoded by the Liberty and later read by Ambassador Porter.⁸¹ At approximately 1:59 P.M., a minute before the attack, the NSA communications center finished unscrambling Tel Aviv’s reply and alerted the bridge that the next flight of incoming Israeli planes was not a reconnaissance mission. The planes were going to attack.⁸² Lieutenant Commander Philip M. Armstrong was the officer on the bridge. Although both he and the NSA crew died during the attack, it is clear from several eyewitnesses that Armstrong sounded the call to General Quarters before the first shot was fired.Shortly after the Liberty incident, three crewmen told The New York Times that they were running to their battle stations just before the Israeli planes appeared, having received the call to battle stations from the executive officer just before the attack began.⁸³ Why, after nine peaceful overflights, did the Liberty realize that the next group of Israeli planes would attack? Why were crew members at their battle stations before the first attack plane even arrived? They had not been called to General Quarters on any of the other passes that morning. How did the Liberty know that the next plane to come over would be hostile, unless it had intercepted the conversation from the previous reconnaissance flight?The only possible answer is the one suggested by our sources in the intelligence community: The NSA “Major” decoded the earlier reconnaissance tape and warned the executive officer to expect an attack.⁸⁴ It seems that someone in the United States played a trick on Evans and Novak and switched the source attribution: the coded reconnaissance tape for the fighter pilot tape. Someone in Israeli intelligence caught on to the deception and played a trick of his own. Hirsh Goodman was allowed to listen to the tapes beginning at 1:43 P.M. only, after the incriminating reconnaissance conversation was over. Neither side in the press war realized it had been used.There was a purpose behind this American disinformation. The source of the tapes had to be switched to disguise the method of interception. The fighter planes did not have room for sophisticated scrambling and coding equipment. Their conversation was broadcast over open frequencies that the U.S. embassy in Beirut could plausibly have recorded, without admitting espionage. As previously mentioned, the earlier reconnaissance flight was made by a flying boxcar jammed with top-secret Israeli coding equipment.The Americans could not admit they had intercepted that conversation without admitting that the Liberty was spying on Israel and had broken its most secure codes. That is why Evans and Novak were misled. Confirmation of the code breaking might have opened an inquiry that would have discovered that the ship’s mission was to spy on the United States’ ally and help Israel’s enemies in the midst of a war that could bring about the Jewish state’s destruction. There has never been an independent inquiry to put the matter to rest. In order to head off a congressional probe, President Johnson asked Clark Clifford, a renowned Washington lawyer, to investigate the Liberty affair. However, he was told to limit his research to the information produced by the navy. Thanks to the Evans and Novak disinformation, few knew, until now, that the original tape of the Israeli order to attack an American ship came from the records of the NSA and not from the U.S. embassy in Beirut.To his credit, Clifford admitted in 1991 that he does not know what really happened to this very day, either who authorized the attack or why.⁸⁵ Buried in the files of the NSA are the records of transmissions to British intelligence during the Liberty incident, along with the data collected by the ship to assemble Nasser’s war map on the southern front.⁸⁶It is no secret that the Israelis identified the Liberty as an American ship before the attack. The secret is that Israel attacked an American ship in self-defense. Almost a quarter of a century later, the White House still must lie about the incident. The reason is simple: If the Israelis told all they knew about American aid to the Arabs, Congress might start poking around the oil companies. There are far too many skeletons in that closet. The Israelis had Lyndon Johnson over the barrel, a barrel of oil. As a result of the Liberty incident, the White House gave Wally Barbour, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, a new set of marching orders. No further intelligence was to be gathered on the Dimona nuclear reactor, nor were joint anti-Israeli operations to be run with the British and Canadian secret services. Israel was to be the main ally of the United States in the Middle East and was now more important than Arab oil.⁸⁷ No one really believed it.But, in public at least, the United States and Israel were allies again, but only for a little while. As the Jews would find out during the next war, American intelligence continued to back the Arabs in defiance of the “new policy.” Six years later, in 1973, the NSA got their payback for the Liberty, by waiting until the very last moment before telling Israel that the Arabs were planning a surprise attack on Yom Kippur. The warning came too late to avert a tragedy, and Israel barely survived the sneak attack. According to one NSA employee: I learned of the planned October 6, 1973, invasion of Israel by Syria and Egypt—30 hours before the US notified Israel. Upper echelon [National Security] Agency personnel knew of the planned attack hours, if not days, prior to that. Not passing the information along in time resulted in the unnecessary deaths and maiming of thousands of young Israelis. … Now I live haunted by the possibility that, somehow, I could have … saved some measure of the anguish that became known as the Yom Kippur war.⁸⁸ Whatever intelligence “benefits” accrued to Israel from the Liberty incident, they were very short-lived.The Soviets were the only ones really to profit from the 1967 war. As soon as the Israeli victory seemed clear, the Saudis and Libya announced an oil embargo against the United States and Great Britain for the alleged help they provided during the war.⁸⁹ Nasser closed the Suez Canal. Oil prices began to skyrocket. Lyndon Johnson did not care, as the embargo caused the price of Texas oil to increase as well. The British, however, had a problem. They would have to beg the Soviets for oil. Only a week after the war, The New York Times reported that British oil importers had asked their government for permission to buy Soviet oil and that London was considering lifting its embargo on such imports.⁹⁰ At the same time that the Soviets were defending their Arab allies in the UN, they were stabbing them in the back by undercutting the power of the oil embargo. Soviet salesmen scoured Europe opening new markets for their own oil exports. As one editorial said in the immediate aftermath of the war: “When it comes to oil … the Russians are not customers, but competitors.”⁹¹ There was a new player in the Middle East, and the Soviets now were ready to compete with the United States. Within a few short years, some in Washington would view the Communist menace as so strong that the entire balance of power had shifted in Moscow’s favor. Far from being more important than Arab oil, Israel was more expendable than ever, even as the threat of a chemical and biological holocaust loomed large over the Jews.Source: The Secret war Against the Jews, by John Loftus, Chapter 12The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People: John Loftus, Mark Aarons: 9780312156480: Amazon.com: BooksEither way, ‘friendly fire accident or deliberate attack, I would say that the constant rehashing of this incident by Hamas and other anti-Israel groups is a form of anti-Israel propaganda (particularly in light of the above).Assuming it was a friendly fire incident and comparing it to the treatment of other such incidents, I, for one, haven’t seen endless questions on Quora about any of the many other such incidents. For example, in 1950 eight P-51 Mustangs of No. 77 Squadron RAAF strafed and destroyed a train carrying thousands of American and South Korean soldiers who were mistaken for a North Korean convoy, resulting more than 700 casualties - see List of friendly fire incidents - Wikipedia. Have you ever even heard of that?On the other hand assuming it was a deliberate attack, in comparison what do you suppose the US would have done in 1967 if it had discovered an Israeli spy ship a few miles of the coast of Viet Nam, transmitting intelligence on US moves to the Viet Cong?

Eight cities in Texas have issued a disaster declaration for the locals after a brain-eating amoeba was found in the water being supplied through the taps.An advisory was issued by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that stated that Naegleria fowleri — a brain-eating amoeba — was found in the water supplied to the households by the Brazosport Water Authority.The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality at the direction of the Governor's Office is working with Brazosport Water Authority to resolve the issue as quickly as possible," the advisory read.The affected cities are Lake Jackson, Freeport, Angleton, Brazoria, Richwood, Oyster Creek, Clute and Rosenberg, Texas, along with the Dow Chemical plant in Freeport and the Clemens and Wayne Scott Texas Department of Criminal Justice corrections facilities.

Here in the State of Texas the Department of Public Safety (DPS) is the equivalent of the DMV in other states.The problem is that due to laws by our part-time Legislature many of the DPS Offices are extremely busy. Depending on the time of day or week the wait time can be between 2–3 hours. Toward the end of the Summer 2018 our Governor proposed a plan to close and consolidate DPS Offices into larger service centers.I live in a city south of Houston and the nearest DPS office prior to closure was twenty minutes away and on average had a 15 minute wait for anything. Because it was not busy enough it was one of the offices on the Governor's list.The new “improved” DPS Service Center was moved to Angleton, about 35 minutes south of me. I could drive into Houston, but that is still nearly a 45 minute drive. I have made a trip to the Angleton Service Center and waited 90 minutes to get assistance at noon on a Wednesday. The Houston Service Center has a minimum of on hour wait time on any given day. Neither is open on Saturday or Sunday.Now let's consider you are poor and in need of one of the approved State IDs. Let's also assume that you work Mon-Fri 8am-6pm and you get 1 hour for lunch. If you lived and worked in my area when would you be able to get an ID?You have 1 hour to drive 35 minutes get your ID and drive another 35 mins back to work. Just the drive makes you late returning from lunch. Don't even consider walking in, waiting in line and getting the ID.Sure you could just let your boss know you will b going get an ID and will be late. You don't know how late because you can't guess what the wait time is like but you will be late. Your boss has no problem, take your time, he'll shift work around and have your co-workers pickup the slack.Problem is you are poor. You make $18/hr and have three kids to feed. Assuming you miss only 1.5 hours due to using your lunch to drive you just lost $27. That could be the cost of a meal for the family or could mean you have to cut other expenses to stay above water. But what if the wait is 3hrs or more. Now it starts having a greater and greater impact on your ability to provide for your family. Is being able to vote worth to miss a meal for the family? I am not counting the lunch you missed getting the ID.The reason it becomes racial discrimination is because a disproportionate portion of the minority population lives in poverty.