During the 1967 Six Day War the Israeli air force attacked a US sigint ship, Liberty, which was monitoring the radio traffic of the war. The official story, that it was an unfortunate mistake in the ‘fog of war’, began to come apart after an article, ‘Mayday! Mayday! The attack on the USS Liberty’, by a British writer, Anthony Pearson, appeared in Penthouse in 1976 (Vol. 11, no. 3). (Back in the 1970s the US porno mags were virtually the only major media to publish what we now call parapolitics.) Pearson’s article became a 1978 book, Conspiracy of Silence, which I lent and lost, a few copies of which are available at the amazing second-hand book site < www.abebooks.com/ >. The story has been sporadically reexamined, most recently and most thoroughly by the British film-maker Chris Mitchell, whose documentary on the subject was broadcast, without a whisper of publicity, on 10 June 2002, on BBC4, repeated in May 2003 and, most recently, on BBC2, on 4 June 2003.
Mitchell’s long, detailed study suggests that the attack was an attempt by the Israelis to get Egypt blamed for it in the hope of dragging the US into the war on the Israeli side.
The subject arose on the Website of American neo-con Daniel Pipes < http://www.danielpipes.org/comments /4147 > which carried the following comments by a retired journalist, David Smith.
‘Mr. Pipes says of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty: “conspiracy theories pointing to a purposeful Israeli attack arose quickly and have persisted through the years.”
About twenty years ago I did a story for the Associated Press on the Liberty incident that was published by the Los Angeles Times and a large number of other US newspapers. I spoke to the following officials (their titles correspond to the positions they occupied at the time of the Liberty incident) and they all told me that the Israeli attack was deliberate, not an accident:
- Secretary of State Dean Rusk
- Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer
- CIA Director Richard Helms
- NSA Deputy Director Louis Tordella.
I am no authority on conspiracy theories, but there seem to be three possibilities here. A) Rusk, Moorer, Helms and Tordella were all propagators of a conspiracy theory. B) They were all dupes of a conspiracy theory. C) There is no valid conspiracy theory.
I am retired now, but I have always considered it my business to report facts, not to disentangle conspiracy theories, so I will leave that task to others…..
I also talked on the phone to Admiral Isaac Kidd, who headed the naval court of inquiry into the Liberty attack. I told him what Rusk and the others had said and asked if he had any opinion on Israeli culpability. He said, “The giants of that time can speak out. I know when to keep my mouth shut.” ‘