NAVY CAPTAIN, OTHER OFFICIALS CALL FOR INVESTIGATION OF

ISRAEL'S ATTACK ON USS LIBERTY

By Delinda C. Hanley
Nearly every former senior government and military official
who has examined Israel's 1967 attack on the USS LIBERTY agrees
it was deliberate. Now, thanks to the publication of Judge A.
Jay Cristol's book, THE LIBERTY INCIDENT: THE 1967 ATTACK ON A
U.S. NAVY SPY SHIP, they are going public. Cristol's book tour
included a December 2002 presentation at the Naval Historical
Center in Washington, DC, where he touted his version of the
attack which, based primarily on Israeli sources, he says was
unintentional. Ironically, it looks like what actually was unintentional is that Cristol's efforts to quell the debate have
had exactly the opposite effect.
Reading reports of Cristol's whitewash of the devastating
attack, which killed 34 American crewmen and wounded 172 others,
was the last straw for Captain Ward Boston, senior legal counsel
for the Navy's Court of Inquiry. Commander-in-Chief Naval Forces
Europe, Boston and the late Rear Admiral Isaac "Ike" Kidd were
given just one week by Admiral John McCain (father of Sen. John
McCain) to investigate the attack and gather testimony from
survivors still on board the crippled ship. Captain Boston asked
each witness to tell his story for a court stenographer.
"There is no question in my mind that those goddamned bastards
tried to kill everyone on board," Boston told the WASHINGTON REPORT.
"I was the counsel. I put witnesses on. I talked to kids never
exposed to combat who'd seen their friend's head blown off. Kids
who were crying as they told me what they'd gone through. Those
boys who had their heads blown away were not out fighting [the
Israelis]. They were sunbathing. They weren't even given a
chance to get to their machine guns."
Boston also watched the bodies of the dead carried out of
the hold, and saw boys throw up as they retrieved body parts
and mopped up after the shelling and torpedo attack. He recalled
seeing the shot-up U.S. flags that had clearly marked the ship
as an American vessel. Boston flatly dismisses the claims of
Cristol and Israel that Israeli fighter pilots mistook the
electronically advanced spy ship, complete with an 18-foot-wide
satellite dish, a microwave dish, and antennae, for the EL
QUSEIR, a 1920s-era Egyptian horse transport ship.
The Navy captain heard survivors' testimonies that the
Israelis even shot up the LIBERTY's lifeboats after they were
lowered into the waters to save the crew. That testimony was
excised from the official record at some point after it left

Boston's hands. (The tattered rafts now are proudly displayed

in an Israeli museum.) Boston recalls shaking hands with
LIBERTY skipper Commander William McGonagle, who had a big hole
in his leg. "He thanked me later for that handshake," Boston
recalled, "because it made some shrapnel pop out of his hand."
When Boston suggested going to Tel Aviv to have the Israelis
tell their side of the story, he was told, "You can't do it.
Come on home and present the evidence you have."
Armed with a gun to protect the evidence, which he had
attached to himself with handcuffs, Admiral Kidd, along with
Captain Boston took the records to London. As the week allotted
for gathering testimony came to an end, the team gathered 20
people to type up the report, which ended up being three inches
thick. After all the evidence painstakingly collected was turned
over to the U.S. Embassy there, the report may have been
altered. "I made lots of corrections which are no longer in the
report," Captain Boston told the WASHINGTON REPORT. "There are
even pages missing."
A U.S. Embassy official in London told Kidd that he and his
men must keep quiet. Ten days after the attack, the Navy's Court
of Inquiry, despite all the evidence to the contrary, somehow
exonerated Israel and ruled the attack was a case of mistaken
identity. Following the Court proceedings in London, Admiral
Kidd returned to Washington, DC and called Boston, with whom
he was very close. "We have to be quiet," he said. "We can't
talk to the media."
"LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson] had ordered us to put
the lid on it. Don't talk about it," Boston told the WASHINGTON REPORT. "And after 35 years of active duty, when I get an
order, even from a yellow-bellied superior, I follow those
orders. All this time I've kept quiet until this [explicative
deleted, Cristol] book came out."
After years of obeying those orders, Captain Boston broke
his silence on June 26, 2002, when he told MARINE CORPS TIMES
reporter Bryant Jordan the attack was deliberate (see "Israel
Attack on USS Liberty 'No Accident' Says Helms" published in
the Navy Times July 2, 2002).
Boston said he just had to speak out after reading
Cristol's claim that Kidd, in interviews conducted in the early
1990s, had said Israel's attack was not intentional. The captain
told the WASHINGTON REPORT that he finds it hard to believe
Cristol's version of interviews with the now deceased Admiral
Kidd, a man Boston greatly admired. "Admiral Kidd called me two
hours after an interview with Cristol," Boston related, "and
said, 'I think Cristol's an Israeli agent.'"
According to Boston, both he and Admiral Kidd always be-

lieved that, despite the Court's official conclusion, the

Israelis knew the ship was American. "I have strong patriotic
feelings," he explained. "I believe the CIA slogan, 'the truth
will out,' and hate the Israeli Mossad's motto: 'Win By
Deception.'"
"Madder Than Hell"
"Cristol now says I recanted my interview with the NAVY TIMES.
That makes me madder than hell," Boston said. "I have not
recanted one thing. If anything, now I'm going to speak out
louder than before and tell people what Admiral Kidd told me.
He and I were very close. He said, 'those sons of bitches
knew what they were doing when they killed innocent sunbathing
kids. They tried to sink that ship.'" Cristol may now be
kicking himself for waxing so eloquently about Boston's qualifications and skills, calling him a "man of integrity" on pg.
149 of his book.
LIBERTY survivor James Ennes, author the groundbreaking
book ASSAULT ON THE LIBERTY, also had numerous conversations
with Admiral Kidd over the years. Kidd never characterized the
attack as an accident. In fact, Ennes says Kidd told him many
times, "You are on the right track, Jim. Just keep on probing.
Keep on doing what you're doing."
When asked why he thought the U.S. government has covered
up the attack for 36 years, Captain Boston replied: "Iraq,
Vietnam, the LIBERTY -- it's the same old story. When people
are in power they don't want to upset people who may help them
get reelected. Maybe people didn't want the world to see that
Israelis were slaughtering Egyptian prisoners of war. Maybe
Johnson was afraid of upsetting potential voters."
As a captain and staff legal officer in London, retired
Admiral Merlin Staring reviewed the Court of Inquiry's report
in 1967. Before he could finish, however, the report was taken
away. Based on what he read however, Staring, who later became
the top JAG officer, has said the evidence did not support the
"accidental" attack contention.
Last year Richard Helms, CIA director at the time of the attack,
agreed that "it was no accident." Helms also told MARINE CORPS
TIMES correspondent Jordan on May 29, 2002, "I've done all I can.
I don't want to spend the rest of my life in court testifying
about the incident."
Helms' book, A LOOK OVER MY SHOULDER, written in collaboration with William Hood, describes the LIBERTY attack as "one
of the most disturbing incidents in the six days [war]...Israeli
authorities subsequently apologized for the accident, but few in

Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified
as an American naval vessel."
Admiral Rufus Taylor, Helms' deputy, told his boss, "To me,
the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the
Israelis knew that LIBERTY might be their target and attacked
anyway..."
A fine article by David Walsh was released in the NAVAL
INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS on June 3, 2003, (available on the USNI
Web site at <http://www.usni.org>). Walsh's well-documented
article notes that even Clark Clifford, chairman of President
Johnson's, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a great supporter of Israel, called Israeli claims that the attack was
accidental "unbelievable." Clifford told the president, "Something had gone terribly wrong and then it had been covered up.
I never felt the Israelis had made adequate restitution or
explanation for their...unprovoked actions."
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Walsh's article adds,
had said there was "every reason to believe that the USS
LIBERTY was identified, or at least her nationality determined...one hour before the attack." Finally, Walsh notes,
former NSA and CIA director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, based
on his talks with NSA seniors at the time, "flatly rejected"
the Cristol/Israel thesis.
Former Chief of Naval Operations and Joint Chiefs of
Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer has been on the record
for some time as saying the attack on the LIBERTY was deliberate. Among those agreeing with him are then-NSA Director
Marshall Carter, Carter's deputy, Louis Tordella, NSA
"LIBERTY Incident" analyst Walter Deeley, and Hayden Peake,
professor of intelligence history at the Joint Military
Intelligence College and a retired CIA officer.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control,
Communications and Intelligence John Stenbit told an audience at a conference on "Transforming National Security and
Protecting the Homeland," held April 15 to 17 in Vienna, VA,
that the Israelis had warned the U.S. to move the USS
LIBERTY or they would sink it. His comments appeared in the
Israeli daily JERUSALEM POST and elicited a letter to the
editor in the online section of the magazine. Both the
letter and the article have mysteriously vanished from the
Web site.
In addition to the many Americans noted above, Israelis
and even Russians are adding to the public record on the attack.
Nikolay Cherkashin, who has spent years investigating the
LIBERTY tragedy, quoted a recently published Russian translation of Joseph Daichman's HISTORY OF THE MOSSAD, which states

that it was perfectly clear to Israelis that the LIBERTY was an

American ship and that the attack was committed to deprive the
U.S. "of its eyes and ears."
Daichman also argues that Israel had every right to attack
the American ship. If the LIBERTY had reported that Israeli
troops had moved from the Egyptian borders to the Syrian front,
the Soviets, if they were eavesdropping on the U.S., could have
warned the Arabs. Eliminating any eyes and ears, Israel was
able to attack Syria and capture the Golan Heights.
Daichman also speculates that Israel may have tried to sink
the ship and blame Egypt, and thus provoke a lethal U.S.
response. That theory is the theme of the documentary "DEAD IN
THE WATER," nominated for Best Documentary at the Vancouver Film
Festival, and the new OPERATION CYANIDE book by Peter Hounam.
Despite overwhelming new testimony, however, Cristol's
version of the attack on the LIBERTY is gaining notoriety.
Michael Oren's SIX DAYS OF WAR won an award for best history book
at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. According to Ennes,
Oren's chapter on the treacherous attack echoes Cristol's version,
which Ennes describes as "pure Israeli spin and truth distortion."
That's not surprising, of course, since in his book's
acknowledgements Oren thanks the Shalem Center, where he is a
senior fellow and "under whose auspices this book was researched
and written." The center describes its senior fellows program as
"promoting the research and writing of agenda-shaping work."
Its journal, AZURE, with editorial offices in Jerusalem and Washington, DC, "champions...a strong, free and Jewish State of
Israel for the future of the Jewish people."
"Cristol, though discredited at every turn, continues to
hawk his book," Ennes says, "arguing endlessly that the attack
was a tragic accident and that we who say otherwise are simply
either anti-Semites or blinded by blood and what he calls the
'fog of war.' Cristol will be promoting his book in August
and speaking at a large veterans' forum in Pigeon Forge, TN,"
Ennes told the WASHINGTON REPORT. He added, "Knowing the
views of most veterans who know about the LIBERTY, I cannot
imagine that Cristol will be well received."
"Will the LIBERTY remain a sort of 'Flying Dutchman,'
sailing forever around her poor men's souls?" Walsh concludes
his LIBERTY article by asking. Until a congressional investigation gives survivors the opportunity to tell their stories
before they die, and Americans can examine top-secret reports
still shrouded in secrecy, the LIBERTY's ghost will not rest.
------------------------------------------------------------Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the WASHINGTON REPORT ON
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS.

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