Part I -- Introduction
Largely through the
work of one researcher, BBC documentarian and author Peter Hounam, a shocking new
revisionist theory is abroad, opening windows onto the hidden history of the 1967
Arab-Israel war (a/k/a, the Six-Day War) as well as on the Israeli attack on
the U.S.S. Liberty, a spy ship. Hounam
published his exposé, Operation Cyanide,
in 2003,[1] asserting
that the U.S. and Israel colluded to provoke the war and to sink the Liberty in a false-flag attack, blaming
it on Egypt. The sinking of the Liberty
was to serve as President Johnson's pretext to publicly join Israel's war and
to strike a Cold War blow against U.S.S.R. support for Israel's Arab neighbors.
Hounam's book points
to the inconsistencies in the theory that the attack on the Liberty was a secret, independent
Israeli operation. According to this "consensus" theory -- the theory
held by Liberty survivors, their
families and supporters -- the Israelis intended to attack Syria the next day,
outmaneuvering U.S. objections to further Israeli attacks on Arab territory. Key
to this secret plan would have been the elimination of the Liberty's eavesdropping on their forthcoming military operation.
However, along with
information previously published in the 1980s by author Stephen Green,[2]
Hounam reveals that the U.S. had an array of surveillance platforms, making non-essential
the Liberty's intelligence collection
when it came to Israeli military operations the next day. Hounam insists that
the Israelis were well aware of redundant U.S. capabilities, and so had no discernible
rationale for their assault on the Liberty.
Hounam's subtitle, Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly
Caused World War III, references the even more incredible and unthinkable element
of his theory, namely that only the unlikely survival of the Liberty prevented President Johnson from
proceeding with his plan to initiate World War III by deploying a nuclear
weapon to destroy the Soviet air base outside of Cairo.
***
The Attack on the U.S.S. Liberty
In the early afternoon
of June 8, 1967, the fourth day of the Six-Day War, several off-duty crewmembers
of the USS Liberty were on deck,
enjoying the bright sun, and calm seas as the ship plied its slow, five-knot
progress, to and fro, off the Egyptian coast, not far from the Gaza border.
Although the Liberty was in a war
zone without the military escort they had requested, crewmembers were reassured
by sightings of the more than half-dozen Israeli overflights beginning in the
early morning hours. There was no doubt in the minds of Liberty crewmembers that the Israelis had identified their ship as
American.
Shortly before 2 p.m.
local time, Israeli Mirage III jets appeared on the Liberty's radar screen. Moments
later, all hell broke loose and the Liberty
was ferociously attacked with napalm canisters, 30 mm cannon and rockets
aiming to take out the ship's bridge, the fore and aft gun mounts, and
especially the
Liberty's antennae.
[3] Survivors
estimate 30 or more sorties were flown over the ship by a minimum of 12
attacking planes.
[4]
Israel's thirty-five
minute air attack was followed by the arrival of Israeli torpedo boats which
fired five torpedoes at the ship, the last one of which struck its target.[5]
That explosion was responsible for most of the Liberty's 34 deaths and 171 injuries, a 70 percent casualty rate out
of the 294 men aboard.
After the torpedo
attack, Israeli gunboats shot at crewmembers who were dousing the fires. Contrary
to international rules of engagement, the Israelis also shot up the Liberty's lifeboats, some of which had
already been deployed -- though none had yet been boarded, as the order to
abandon ship had fortunately been reversed.
Somehow the Liberty -- alone, defenseless --
initially cut off from communications, survived, but it was an extremely
close-run thing. The first piece of good fortune was that one of the Liberty's antennae, which had been out
of order and so didn't attract Israel's heat-sinking missiles, was repaired
under fire within ten minutes. Soon, an SOS reached the nearby Sixth Fleet,
despite the Israeli jamming of the Liberty's
radio channels by the attacking jets. Fortunately Liberty's radiomen found that the blocked channels were momentarily
open while the barrage of the jets' rockets was airborne.[6]
Ordinarily, the
torpedo that struck the Liberty
should have been sufficient to sink the ship. But, by good fortune, the starboard
side remained above the waterline since the ship listed on the side opposite the
thirty-nine foot hole blown open by the torpedo. A second piece of luck was
that the torpedo struck one of the ship's I-beams, allowing the interior
bulkhead walls to remain intact, keeping seawater restricted to a few forward
compartments. Had the seawater penetrated to the hot boilers, the resultant
explosion would have sunk the ship within minutes.[7]
Just as an approaching
Israeli helicopter, packed with armed commandos, hove into the Liberty's view, about to deliver the coup de grâce, the
attack was called off. [8] Evidently, it was the Liberty's SOS, which saved the ship probably because, after the
last shots had been fired, about an hour and fifteen minutes after the aerial
attack began,[9]
news of the Liberty's distress had
spread widely, making it problematic to attribute culpability to the Egyptians.
The unexpected
survival of the Liberty left both the
U.S. and the Israeli governments embarrassed. How was such an outrage to be
explained? Soon the Israelis officially
apologized, contending that they had attacked a U.S. ship in error, mistakenly
believing that they had been under threat from an Egyptian destroyer.Although few, if any, senior
members in either the U.S. or the Israeli governments believed that such an
attack could happen "in error," the U.S. quickly endorsed the Israeli
explanation. Both governments continue to maintain the official, friendly-fire
narrative to this day.
American witnesses who
could testify that the Israeli attack was no mistake were silenced by the U.S.
government's airtight gag order, which largely succeeded in squelching contrary
information. Liberty survivors were
admonished to refuse all interviews. Presumably to keep them from conferring on
their terrible, shared experience, Liberty's
crewmembers were soon separated into various naval commands. The hasty and
superficial U.S. investigation that immediately followed, conducted by the Navy
Board of Inquiry, produced a predetermined whitewash. Similarly, Israeli
investigations into the incident supported the official account -- as do
Israeli and U.S. spokespeople to this day.
The strict blanketing
of reliable information was broken about a dozen years later. Survivor, Jim M.
Ennes, Jr., the ship's electronic materials officer, managed to publish his
1979 book, Assault on the Liberty
despite the gag order still in effect. His account left little doubt that
Israel deliberately attacked a ship known to be that of its U.S. ally. Almost
singlehandedly, Ennes succeeded in reviving "the conversation" about
what really happened.
Ennes also made a
point of addressing the obvious question: Why would Israel deliberately try to
sink a U.S. ship? Ennes's theory became what could be called the "Ennes
consensus theory," which Liberty
survivors and their supporters even now uphold. Ennes wrote that Israel
intended to go ahead with its plan to attack Syria the next day despite President
Johnson's public opposition. To capture Syrian territory, they felt it
necessary to eliminate the Liberty's ability
to report Israeli battlefield movements to Washington.[10]
A recent restatement of this theory is Philip Geraldi's 2017
opinion piece on the 50th anniversary of the attack in which he summarizes
Ennes's view that the Israelis ruthlessly tried to sink his ship.
[11] Similarly, a 2010 talk by British writer,
Alan Hart, a critic of Zionism, offered key supporting details. Hart emphasized
President Johnson's warning to Israel to limit its war aims. According to Hart,
Johnson gave
Israel’s generals a conditional green light for war with Egypt. But Johnson warned that on
no account was Israel to widen the war for the purpose of grabbing Jordanian or
Syrian territory." Hart spelled out what he believed was
the Liberty's mission.
The idea behind the Liberty’s
deployment was that if it picked up messages indicating that Israel was re-deploying from the Sinai to
launch major offensives in the north, and against Syria in particular,
the evidence of Israeli intent and duplicity would be passed to Johnson, and
that he would then pick up the phone to [Israeli] Prime Minister [Levi] Eshkol
and say something like: “We
know what your generals are up to. You must order them to stop, and if you don’t
or can’t, I will.” [12]
(Emphasis added)
Undergirding this Ennes-Hart consensus
theory is the assumption that the Israelis acted independently and secretly,
apparently believing that the Liberty
was the sole source of U.S. real-time battlefield information. Secondly, Hart assumes that the U.S. was
opposed to allowing Israel to attack Syria the next day. Thirdly it takes for
granted what is still widely believed, that the Six-Day War was a wholly
independent Israeli operation, not necessarily welcomed, or even suspected by
the U.S. The Hounam-Green theory debunks all these assumptions.
Stephen Green's Contribution
Little new information
that would have countered Ennes's theory of Israel's motivation appeared until
shortly after the turn of the 21st century -- with a notable exception. In the
1980s, as noted above, Stephen Green published two books on U.S. Middle East
policy, motivated by what he saw as President Johnson's dramatic departure from
the policy of his three predecessors, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. According
to Green, until the Johnson administration, U.S. Mideast policy had prioritized
maintaining peace between Israel and its neighbors.
Green was distressed by
what he believed to be the Johnson administration's turn away from the U.S.'s "principled
objectivity" in dealing with Israel's conflicts, which he "transformed
into unreserved support of one side" --Israel's. "This departure in
American Middle East policy occurred during and immediately after the Six-Day War
in 1967."
[13]
Green emphasizes Johnson's most dramatic and destructive policies which
forfeited, at least temporarily, its previous role as "primary
mediator" of the Arab-Israeli conflict. These included
the initial steps Johnson took toward
becoming Israel's major arms supplier as well as supporting Israel's nuclear
program, ignoring the U.S.'s long-standing nuclear non-proliferation policy.[14]
Notably, Green scooped key elements of the Hounam's theory
in his
Taking Sides: American's Secret
Relations with a Militant Israel, making public
new and disquieting evidence of officially unacknowledged U.S.
operational involvement in the Six-Day War. Green unearthed detailed testimony by an
unnamed participant -- subsequently identified as Airman Gregory Reight[15]--
that in the course of the war, the U.S. provided Israel with tactical
air-reconnaissance support. Reight testified that he and other U.S. personnel
worked side-by-side with Israeli technicians. The sophisticated photographic
equipment required to interpret battlefield film was provided to Israel by the U.S.[16] The unstated but startling implication was
that Israel and the U.S. had colluded in month's-long preparation for war.
Green also uncovered U.S. foreknowledge of the attack on the
Liberty. Such news should have shocked
many of Green's readers but the author kept his discovery hidden in plain sight
by limiting it to one sentence. He wrote: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff knew
about the planned attack by Israel on the U.S.S.
Liberty before it occurred, and presumably informed the White
House."
[17]
Was Green aware that
the U.S. knew a day in advance that
the Liberty was to be attacked --
information that Ennes provided in his "Addendum to 2007 Edition
of Assault on the Liberty?[18] If Green did know, it's not clear what he
could or should have done with the information. Once exposed, it would have
been clear that the U.S. could have prevented the attack, but chose not to.
Evidently Green preferred not to highlight the Johnson administration's apparent
intention to allow the Liberty to be sacrificed,
because such treachery was too toxic, too unthinkable, to lay before readers in
1984 -- just as it is today.
Many of Green's readers
must have wiped from their awareness Green's single sentence asserting U.S.
foreknowledge. But Green's highly detailed ten-page exposé uncovering U.S. air-reconnaissance
assistance could not be easily dismissed, even as it conflicted with the common
understanding in the west of the Six-Day War as a wholly independent Israeli
initiative. Cognitive dissonance must
have been the mind-set of many readers unable to reconcile the opposing
theories: that the U.S. had no advance
knowledge of the war or its opposite: that the U.S. was a key player in the war itself and could have prevented the attack
on the Liberty.
Relevant revisionist
information appeared on the site of blogger David Martin, (a/k/a, DCDave). There he reviewed Philip
F. Nelson's
LBJ: From Mastermind to Colossus, Nelson's second book on the crimes of Lyndon Johnson.[19] In this book he included two long chapters on
the attack on the Liberty which were
in turn based on Philip Hounam's Operation
Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty
Nearly Caused World War III as well as Hounam's companion
documentary
Dead in the Water.
Hounam's book -- published in Britain but not the U.S. --
wholly supported the implications suggested by Green's findings, and much more.
In addition to repeating the testimony of Gregory Reight (though Hounam doesn't
mention or credit Green) he presented a great deal of mostly new witness
testimony that supported the theory that the U.S. was deeply involved
operationally in the Six-Day War and that the war was a U.S.-- not an Israeli
-- initiative. Hounam also took detailed testimony from another whistleblower
who was operationally involved in Israel's war, Joe Sorrels. Sorrels was a
communications expert who helped Israel suppress Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian
signals and transmit misleading messages to confuse Arab leaders and
commanders.
[20]
Hounam traces the background surrounding zealously
pro-Israeli President Johnson's decision join Israel's war and to create a
sacrificial lamb as a pretext to do so. In the context of rising domestic
opposition to his Vietnam War policies, the president's motivation was to gain
U.S. Zionist support for his 1968 re-election campaign and to score a Cold War
victory against Egypt's Soviet allies. Hounam's narrative reveals that the
question of why Israel attacked the Liberty
is really subsidiary to the strategic issue of U.S. initiation of the war
which would not have otherwise broken out.
Hounam recounts much of the information available from
public sources -- though generally downplayed at the time -- that President
Johnson, working through his pro-Zionist ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg,
acted to delay a cease-fire -- which the world body had been attempting to
secure from Day Two of the war. The U.S. thus made possible maximum Israeli conquest
of Arab territory feasible under the circumstances. Fatefully, Johnson also
gave Israel the required diplomatic cover to beat back world-wide demands that
Israel withdraw from the Arab territories it had conquered, much of which it
controls to this day.
From the evidence Hounam presented we can deduce that the
Israelis, unsurprisingly, were reluctant co-conspirators in the attack on the Liberty since they had nothing to gain.
Their only reason for attempting to sink the Liberty would have been political -- to accede to U.S. demands, since
it was clear they were winning the war handily before the end of Day One. Nor
did they need the headache of their military personnel understanding that their
country had attacked a U.S. ship. Indeed, it seems that one of their pilots
refused to follow orders to attack the Liberty
and returned to base. He was duly cashiered.
Hounam's book goes a
long way toward discrediting the illusion of Israel as a lone David, striking
down the mighty Arab Goliath. Hounam's evidence suggests that an independent Israel
would not, and could not have undertaken such a war against its Arab neighbors
in 1967; and would certainly not have independently dared to attack the Liberty.
Anomalies and Other Questions
In addition to providing a persuasive answer to the major
question surrounding the assault on the Liberty
-- why would Israel attack its ally's ship? -- Hounam's research provides coherent
answers to many of the anomalies and otherwise unanswered or unaddressed
questions surrounding the Israeli attack. For instance:
-- Why was the date the war began moved up ten days from its
original intended starting date and how did this affect the Liberty?
-- Why, three weeks before war broke out, was the Liberty rushed to the eastern
Mediterranean from its West African station when there was already another spy
ship, the U.S.N.S. Private Jose Valdez, already
in place?
--What are we to make of an alleged series of misrouted
messages to the Liberty that left the
Liberty vulnerable?
-- Why did Secretary McNamara and President Johnson recall
the rescue jets while the Liberty was
under attack?
-- Why were some of the jets sent to come to the aid of the Liberty carrying nuclear weapons?
--Why did the U.S. refuse to provide the Liberty with the armed escort it requested?
-- Why was the U.S. Embassy in Cairo warned that the city (or
its environs) would undergo a U.S. retaliatory attack? And why was the attack
cancelled?
***
Lyndon Johnson's Dark Legacy
Even before he died President Johnson's legacy as an
effective but irremediably damaged president seemed set in stone. Had it not
been for his disastrous Vietnam War policies, his ranking would have been high on
the roll of U.S. presidents. Even his
detractors will concede that his presidency marked "a peak of modern
liberalism" as Wikipedia has it. It has taken right-wing opponents the
better part of a century -- and the advent of a Donald Trump -- to find
themselves in a position to overturn the great bulk of his Great Society and
War on Poverty reforms in civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, voting rights and
more.
The U.S. and the world were particularly unlucky in that
Johnson had two formidable allies running critical U.S. government agencies empowered
to facilitate his terrible plans: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA chief
Allen Dulles. Without their indispensable participation in high crimes, LBJ might
not have been able to proceed as he did.
Even before books charging Lyndon Johnson with masterminding
the assassination of President Kennedy appeared in bookstores in the late 90s,
many people had determined by themselves that, besides the murder of JFK, Johnson
had also overseen the assassinations of the two other major political figures
on his watch, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Observers might have
reasoned that since Johnson controlled the investigations into those murders,
he must also have directed them.
One of the books pointing to LBJ's bloody hand which
appeared with the turn of the century was Barr McClellan’s
Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed J.F.K (2003).[21] Its
portrait of Johnson, the man and his life and career in Texas, supported
evidence of the dark side of his record in Washington as senator and
vice-president.
Then, in 2010, Phillip F. Nelson published LBJ, the Mastermind of JFK's
Assassination, the first of his trio of books on the crimes of Lyndon
Johnson. Nelson provides in-depth chapter and verse that for Johnson there were no red lines he didn't dare
cross when it came to his political ambition; nor did Johnson feel constrained
to follow the law when it came to amassing great personal wealth. In Mastermind, Nelson provided the evidence
that supported his theme that Johnson was the indispensable actor who had the
motive, means and opportunity to put down the men who stood in his way on a
national level just as he had done in Texas.
By the turn of the 21st century, due to the work of
revisionist investigators and authors,
[22]
we are beginning to see that Johnson's unshakable determination to prolong the Vietnam
War was only one appalling element of his utter ruthlessness. The case can now
be made that he was a monster; perhaps the most pernicious and destructive of
all U.S. presidents. It's almost too shocking to take in that one man was responsible
for the elimination of the leading lights of the progressive movement and the enduring
vacuum in the Democratic opposition. It's no surprise that such a vacuum has resulted
in the cynicism and alienation of the public from good government. The result has
been the remorseless devolution of the U.S.
-- well before Donald Trump -- into the dark well it currently resides,
seemingly ever moving further and faster from hope of recovery.
Nevertheless, even
those open to absorbing Green's and Hounam's evidence of U.S. responsibility for the Six-Day War and
the assault on the Liberty are likely
to have trouble wrapping their minds around Johnson's apparent intention to
employ nuclear weapons and contemplate WWIII, a plan that can be understood as suicidal.
The record suggests that, had the Liberty
not narrowly escaped its intended fate, President Johnson would have proceeded with a
plan that is likely to have cost him his own life -- and as likely as not, civilization
as we know it.
It's hard to imagine a
more stark difference between John F. Kennedy who stood alone against almost
his entire government trying to prevent WWIII and Lyndon Johnson who planned to start
it.
The
End
Ronald Bleier (rbleier@igc.org)
is an independent researcher based in NYC where he edits Bleier's Blog and his
DESIP website.
Note: This article is also posted on my DESIP website at:
http://desip.igc.org/desip/thesixdaywar.html
Part II of
this essay (forthcoming) summarizes the evidence provided by Green, Hounam and
Nelson, addressing many of the unanswered questions and anomalies of widely
accepted accounts.
It includes sections on:
-- Alternate U.S.
Surveillance Platforms
-- The U.S.
Operational Role in the Six-Day War
--LBJ Wants the Liberty Sunk
--Liberty Captain McGonagle's
Foreknowledge of an Attack on His Ship
[1]
Peter Hounam,
Operation Cyanide: Why the
Bombing of the USS Liberty
Nearly
Caused World War III (London, Satin Publications, Ltd., 2003).
[2]
For details on Green's contribution, see below.
[3]
Phillip F. Nelson,
LBJ: From Mastermind
to "The Colossus," The
Lies, Treachery and Treason Continue (Skyhorse Publishing, 2014), p. 382. See
Stephen Green,
Living By the Sword:
America and Israel in the Middle East (Battleboro, Vermont, Amana
Books,1988),
pp. 228-229.
[4]
Phillip F. Nelson, Remember the Liberty !Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas,
With Ernest Al Gallo, Ronald G. Kukal; and Phillip F. Tourney (Trine Day LLC,
Oregon, 2017) p. iv.
[5]
Phillip F. Nelson, Remember the Liberty! Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas, With Ernest Al Gallo,
Ronald G. Kukal and Phillip F. Tourney (Trine Day LLC, Oregon, 2017). p.63.
[6]
James M. Ennes Jr.,
Assault on the Liberty
: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an
American Intelligence Ship (New York: Random House, 1979),
[7]
Nelson,
LBJ: From Mastermind to "The
Colossus," p. 391. Nelson,
Remember
the Liberty!, p.63.
[8]
Peter Hounam, Operation Cyanide, p. 268. A long
article in the Chicago Tribune on the
Israeli attack in the Liberty -- unusual in that it supports Ennes's contention
that the attack was deliberate, contends that the Israeli helicopter offered help, not armed
commandos. According to Ennes's
eyewitness testimony, the Israeli helicopter, about 50 yards away, was close
enough so that the commandos in battle dress could be seen and their intent
surmised. On board the Liberty the order was heard: "Repel boarders,
they've come to finish us off" p. 96.
[9]
The attack began about 1:56 pm local time and ended at 3.12 pm. It did not last
for hours as some writers still aver. Ennes,
Assault on the Liberty, p. 215.
[10]
Ennes,
Assault on the Liberty, p.
212.
[11] Search for: Philip Giraldi, "Remembering the
U.S.S. Liberty," June 6, 2017.
[12] Alan Hart, "Why Really Was the USS Liberty Attacked by Israel?" 12
June 2010.
http://www.alanhart.net/why-really-was-the-uss-liberty-attacked-by-israel/
[13] Stephen Green, Living by the Sword:
America and Israel in the Middle East (Battleboro, Vermont, Amana
Books,1988) p. 2.
[14]
Stephen Green, Taking Sides, American's
Secret Relations with a Militant Israel (New York: William Morrow and Co,
1984)
p. 180.
[15]
Peter Hounam,
Operation Cyanide, p.
214.
[16]
Stephen Green, Taking Sides, pp. 204-209.
[17]
Stephen Green, Taking Sides, p. 241.
[19]
David Martin, a/k/a DC Dave,
"Lyndon Johnson, Sinister
Colossus” a review of Philip
F. Nelson's second book on the crimes of Lyndon Johnson: LBJ: From Mastermind of Colossus.
Thanks to my editor, Molly Nelson Haber, for
pointing me to DC Dave's website.
[20]
Peter Hounam,
Operation Cyanide, pp.
214-219.
[21]
Barr McClellan,
Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed J.F.K, (Hanover House, N.Y. 2003)
[22]
See for example, Roger
Stone’s
The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against
LBJ (2013,
gainst
LBJ (2013,
