Something that I see being referenced a lot on the dissident Right is the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War in June 1967 as an ironic statement on the “greatest ally” myth. It’s usually merely a mention: the Liberty. Everybody is simply expected to know what it is all about.
I find that there are a number of misconceptions floating around, stemming from outdated information and speculation on the part of the survivors themselves. “Israel attacked our ship, and then Lyndon Johnson hushed it up.” Well, that’s the very basic of basics.
An up-to-date and brilliantly-edited documentary is Sacrificing Liberty (2020) — and yes, the filmmakers chose the ambiguous title consciously. This miniseries is aimed at a mainstream conservative, Christian, patriotic audience, which I think was a good decision. Later on, I will show the clever techniques that director and editor Matthew Miller Skow employed to make the audience more receptive to the, well, sensitive parts of the background story.
Sacrificing Liberty is a documentary that you can — and should — show to your not yet red-pilled family members and friends, and it was deliberately produced that way. All those involved are clearly aware of Israel’s influence on American politics — they’ve had decades to learn its extent — but they don’t go overboard with it. (Pardon the pun.) They simply point out the logical conclusions drawn from the combined evidence as it pertains to the Liberty. They ask the right rhetorical questions. They carefully avoid uttering any specific statement that might get them cancelled, while saying what they want to say, anyway. Intelligence officer David Lewis carefully frames it that it was “a limited group that betrayed me, very influential but limited,” but he also states that ever since LBJ, Israel has gotten from the United States whatever it wanted, any time it wanted. “It has nothing to do with the religion, it’s the politics of Zionism.” There are clips showing the descendants of those involved in the attack on the Liberty still networking with one another on behalf of Israel.
For decades, the survivors of the attack on USS Liberty have tried to piece together the puzzle of what really happened on that fateful day of June 8, 1967. Most of them only started to get serious after they had retired. They reunited and formed the USS Liberty Veterans Association. Many veterans are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt to this day, and it’s easy to understand why as the story unfolds.
Sacrificing Liberty includes extensive footage from the 2002 BBC documentary Dead in the Water by Peter Hounam, whom we will meet later. Hounam interviewed several higher-ups, both American and Israeli, who had been involved in the Liberty incident, many of whom were no longer available for the 2020 production, either because they had died in the meantime or for other reasons.
Sacrificing Liberty consists of four parts, each about an hour long, and is available on Odysee, but I strongly encourage you to support the filmmakers.
The first part, “Unfriendly Fire,” covers the biographies of 14 former crewmen and how they ended up on the USS Liberty. The vessel was an intelligence-gathering ship, — aka a spy ship — monitoring the political situation on the west coast of Africa. Contrary to what the survivors had assumed in earlier interviews and books, espionage was not the reason why she was targeted by the Israeli military in 1967, as it turned out. Although this function of hers meant that there was a clear divide between the members of the crew: the “communication technicians” and the so-called ship’s company, the regular crew. The survivors express regret about it today, because they were literally in the same boat.
Assisted by archival footage and computer-generated imagery, the initially light-hearted story proceeds to the Liberty being suddenly ordered at the end of May 1967 to the eastern Mediterranean — “full speed, top speed, as fast as we could go,” in the words of survivor Phil Tourney. In Rota, Spain they picked up additional personnel: linguists proficient in Arabic and Russian. This hasty transfer will become meaningful later on.
Knowing they were going into a warzone, the Liberty’s officers requested escorts. This was denied by Vice Admiral William I. Martin (Commander of the Sixth Fleet) and Admiral John S. McCain (Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Europe) on the grounds that the Liberty was clearly not armed, except for one 50mm machine gun that was mounted on its deck, and which could not be considered a serious danger by anyone.
The Liberty then went about her business in international waters off the Sinai coast. Conscious of a war going on ashore, the crew wasn’t worried when, over the course of several hours, Israeli surveillance planes repeatedly circled the ship. The crew felt safe, one survivor attested, because they knew the Israelis were on their side. Everybody at the time was cheering for Israel, and all seemed fine.
During lunch, Bob Eisenberg, a Jewish communications technician, told one of his colleagues that something was about to happen. Somebody was “going to get it.” He had picked up Israeli chatter that referenced “the target.” Eisenberg himself would be killed in the attack.
At about 2 PM, two unmarked fighter aircraft approached the Liberty and began strafing it with 50mm machine-gun fire, three-inch rockets, and finally, napalm. Taken out in the initial attack run were all the ship’s antennas, except for one that was offline due to a malfunction. Now, there has been some debate in the comments on the Odysee videos about this fact. It is claimed in the documentary that the fighter jets had tuned their missiles to the frequency of the live antennas. Some commentators have claimed that this is not how it works; others have claimed that it is. I don’t know anything about radio frequencies, targeting systems, or fighter planes, so I’ll leave the discussion to the experts.

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At any rate, one crewmember managed to reactivate the remaining antenna while under fire, and so the Liberty was able to send out a distress signal. The documentary does not explicitly make this clear, but while this feat of genuine heroism did nothing for the Liberty at the time, it produced a large number of new eyewitnesses who would later help in getting to the bottom of the story.
Busy as they were with trying not to get killed, carrying the wounded below deck, and putting out fires, the crew didn’t give much thought to who was attacking them, but they assumed it to be Egyptian forces. But there was no mistaking the two or three (accounts differ) torpedo boats that showed up after the first wave of attacks, given that they were flying the Israeli flag. Any relief the survivors felt about help arriving was quickly dispelled when an announcement came from the ship’s Captain, William McGonagle: “Prepare for torpedo attack.”
Another hour-long wave of attacks followed — as the documentary makes clear, commencing 20 minutes after the aircraft had identified the Liberty as American. It is claimed that the Israeli boats fired five torpedoes, but I don’t know who did the counting. At least two missed the ship, as stated by Phil Tourney. One struck the Liberty amidships and managed to hit an I-beam, which actually prevented the worst damage by directing the force of the explosion outward. Water flooded through the huge hole in the Liberty’s hull, and she began listing to starboard.
The torpedo boats also shot up the Liberty’s life rafts, and even carried one of them off as a trophy, where it is displayed in the Haifa National Maritime Museum even today.
After the torpedo boats retreated, attack helicopters approached and attempted to board the Liberty. Survivor Phil Tourney, the angry rebel, described how he locked eyes with one of the Israeli Marines and flipped him off. “He thought it was funny,” Tourney said. The Israeli smiled, answered the gesture — and then the helicopters took off.
The first part of the documentary ends with David Lewis’ enigmatic words: “If my troops had known the President of the United States was attempting to kill all of them, it might have been the first mutiny the Navy ever saw.”
The second part, “Perfectly Executed Military Operation,” deals with the attack’s immediate aftermath. David Lewis analyzed what had been going on: “The aircraft were sent to make us incommunicado so that we couldn’t send an SOS out, the torpedo boats were sent to sink us, and the helicopters were sent to pick out survivors, so there’d be no trace.”
Clips from Peter Hounam’s documentary are shown in which the Israeli commanders offer the usual excuses that have been given: the Israelis had had doubts about the identification of the ship, and there had been some sort of miscommunication between the Israeli forces involved in the attack. Read the Wikipedia entry for the very lengthy, convoluted explanations and timelines that are clearly designed to either bore or confuse you into giving up looking into it further, including the ridiculous story of how
an Israeli jet fighter pilot reported that a ship 20 miles (32 km) north of Arish had fired at his aircraft after he tried to identify the vessel. Israeli naval command dispatched two destroyers to investigate, but they were returned to their previous positions at 9:40 a.m. after doubts emerged during the pilot’s debriefing.
I mean — what?
The period of waiting for rescue after the intense footage of the attack allows Sacrificing Liberty to show what else was going on. We are introduced to Bill Knutson, who in 1967 was a Navy fighter pilot aboard the USS America, which was part of the Sixth Fleet. He was part of an abortive rescue mission for the Liberty. We learn that the Israelis had been jamming both the international distress frequency (which is a war crime) as well as the Liberty’s tactical frequencies; the jamming only stopped when the aircraft attacked, and this was when the Liberty was able to send out an SOS.
We learn from Captain Tully of the USS Saratoga that he launched 12 conventionally-armed aircraft in response to the SOS, and that Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, the carrier division commander of the Sixth Fleet, then sent a message ordering the aircraft to return to the Saratoga. What was that all about?
By this point, the USS Liberty was riddled with bullet and rocket holes. She was also listing to starboard, where the torpedo had punched a huge hole in her hull. The survivors were trying to evacuate from the flooded lower decks. The mess hall had been turned into a field hospital. The ship’s surgeon, Richard Kiepfer, operated on crewmen while being wounded himself; he had shrapnel in his abdomen, and was only holding his guts in by way of a life jacket tied around his torso.
Lieutenant George Golden, Phil Tourney’s “boss,” basically took over command of the ship at this point. This is not explicitly stated in Sacrificing Liberty, only that Golden was one of the heroes that day. Captain McGonagle was in a state of shock. It has been stated elsewhere that McGonagle actually knew about the upcoming attack, but had been assured that it would only be for show — just so they could claim to have been attacked by the Egyptians. A few shots would be fired, but nothing major. By this time the Captain knew he had been tricked, and that he had been one of the victims selected to be sacrificed.
Over 17 hours after the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty began, help finally arrived at 5 AM the following day. The wounded and some of the dead were flown out. The first reporter on the scene was Robert Goralski of NBC. In the Navy, however, there was an immediate lockdown on information.
The Liberty was ordered to go to Malta instead of Crete, which was much closer; during the six-day voyage, the remaining crewmen suspected the ship was meant to break apart and finally sink. In the sealed-off lower decks, the bodies of 25 crewmen were still floating in 110-degree saltwater.
That was when Admiral Isaac Kidd and his legal aid, Ward Boston, came on board to conduct an enquiry. According to Wikipedia:
[Admiral McCain] ordered a Naval Court of Inquiry to be convened following the June 1967 USS Liberty incident, and chose his colleague, Admiral Isaac C. Kidd Jr., to head it. McCain limited the scope of the Inquiry and gave Kidd only a week to investigate and come up with a report on the matter, factors that led to doubts persisting for decades about what actually took place in the Liberty attack.
And:
Captain Ward Boston . . . claimed that the entire Inquiry was a sham meant to exonerate Israel: “I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of “mistaken identity” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
“Conclude” is perhaps a bit of a weak statement, if one listens to the survivors’ accounts. According to them, Kidd actively threatened them with prison — “or worse” — if they ever spoke a word to anyone about what had happened.
The third part, “Jigsaw Puzzle”, returns us to the USS America, where Admiral Geis told David Lewis in confidence that, upon picking up the Liberty’s SOS, he had launched aircraft, but that Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense, had immediately ordered him to recall them. Geis had then exercised his military prerogative to challenge the order, which meant it was now up to President Johnson to decide. His answer was clear: “I don’t care if the ship sinks, I will not embarrass my ally” – and this was several hours before he was officially informed about who had attacked the Liberty. “Further proof,” concludes Lewis, “that he was behind it all. . . . I hated Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t think much of McNamara. But I couldn’t believe either of them were capable of that.”
In the dry dock at Malta, the huge clean-up and hush-up began. The crewmen had to do the cleaning themselves, including body removal, as no civilians were allowed on board. If you want to have nightmares, this section of the documentary is for you. The most horrible story is that of Ronald Kukal, who had the job of putting the body parts back together. No journalists were allowed on board, and the crewmen were not allowed to talk to the media. The cover story was that the Liberty had been assisting in evacuating US personnel from the Sinai region. Meanwhile, the message to anyone involved, including the relief forces, was: This didn’t happen.

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After the holes had been patched up and the ship was newly painted, a skeleton crew, consisting mainly of the engineering crew, brought the Liberty back to the US. Only family members greeted them at Little Creek, and of course they were forbidden to talk to anybody about what had happened.
The affair ruined dreams, ambitions, marriages. The traumatized young men were scattered to various service stations, with no mention of the Liberty in their service records. Phil Tourney relates that he was informed that Israel wanted to settle with him for $200 in damages — take it or leave it.
Captain McGonagle got his Medal of Honor, the only recipient who has received it from someone other than the President — “for action in Vietnam.”
Again, the segment ends with a bombshell: Admiral Martin told one of the survivors that, as a reaction to the Liberty’s distress signal, he had launched four conventionally-armed aircraft to the rescue, and four nuclear-armed aircraft to attack Cairo.
Up to now, the viewer has been cleverly teased with interviewees making reference to President Lyndon B. Johnson as the real culprit behind the attack. Naturally, the question arises: Why would he do such a thing? What would he have to gain from it? It’s only in the fourth and final installment that all the threads come together.
The fourth part, “It’s Not A Whodunnit . . . It’s A Whydunnit,” introduces a whole new cast of characters. It opens with Peter Hounam, author of Operation Cyanide and of the BBC documentary Dead in the Water, talking about the extensive political background of the attack on USS Liberty.
Hounam discusses the many inconsistencies between the official line and both the eyewitness testimony as well as the records. He then reveals that, instead of being an obscure incident as the attack on the Liberty is seen today, this was the moment when the US and the world were probably minutes away from a nuclear war. Admiral Martin had not launched merely four, but 50 aircraft, as well as amphibious landing craft full of Marines, all of which were headed toward Egypt when suddenly a call came from the Israelis: “Oh, sorry, it was our planes, big mistake.” So the attack on Egypt was cancelled.
This odd backtracking is explained by interviews with the Soviet commanders who were involved in the story, of whom we have so far heard little. But naturally, any movement in the region was closely monitored by Soviet submarines and destroyers. And while Strategic Air Command was readying its forces for attacks on the Soviet Union and China four hours before the Liberty incident, these Russian veterans now confirmed that they were ready to launch an attack on Israel if Egypt had been invaded. There was in fact a nuclear-armed submarine in the same waters as the Liberty that had been issued express orders, in the case of an attack on Egypt, to target Israel. But its targeting system required a high reflectivity surface. Where do you find that in the region? Exactly: the Dome of the Rock, smack in the middle of Jerusalem.
Since counter-intelligence never sleeps, this information apparently made its way to the Mossad and the CIA, creating a panicked flurry of activity. There are several reports describing LBJ and McNamara shouting into their phones to stop the attack. All fighter jets were immediately recalled — including those en route to the Liberty. There would be no invasion of Egypt by US forces. There would be no joining the war. And 34 Liberty crewmen had died pointlessly, murdered on behalf of their own government.
After this shocking revelation, the documentary gets into Johnson’s extreme philo-Semitism. (He was partly of Jewish descent himself.) We meet the femme fatale of the story: charming, beautiful blonde Mathilde Krim. Born Mathilde Galland in Italy in 1926, she had fallen in love and married a Jew from Palestine who had been exiled by the British for his involvement with the terrorist organization Irgun. Mathilde had converted to Judaism and started to work for Irgun herself. The couple moved to Israel, but separated after the birth of a daughter. Mathilde then married the much older Arthur Krim, a rich motion picture executive and finance chairman for the US Democratic Party, which is obviously how LBJ and the Krims met.
The Krims were very close to the President. They bought the neighboring farm to his own at his suggestion, had access to state documents, and during the Six-Day War, Mathilde was in the White House almost every day.
David Lewis gets to the heart of the matter with a few barbed words: “He [LBJ] thought if he invaded Egypt with Israel . . . his girlfriend from the Mossad told him he could raise all kinds of money to continue the Vietnam War.” But, in what increasingly proves to be the US military playbook, he needed a pretext to get America involved in the conflict. What better way than the sinking of a US ship by Egyptian forces?

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How many other historic instances such as this come to mind? I can think of a number of them. If the US joins the current fighting either in Ukraine or the Middle East, it will have something to do with a ship. You heard it here first.
We then meet the late Pete McCloskey, who helped form the USS Liberty Veterans Association. He relates a wild tale. According to McCloskey, survivor Jim Ennes, who had written the first book about the Liberty incident, had been contacted by a man with “a hoarse voice” who claimed to be an Israeli pilot who had taken part in the attack, and who now wanted to tell the true story. This character was then serving time in an American prison for embezzlement, so I have some doubts about his credentials. At any rate, he claimed that he and his squadron had radioed back to base that it was an American ship, but were ordered to attack anyway. When he returned to base, he was prosecuted for disobeying orders. Now that he was imprisoned in a US jail, he was afraid of being deported back to Israel when he got out, where he would be court-martialed and probably executed. He wanted either a Congressional hearing or federal witness protection. He also wanted to talk to Pete McCloskey.
Accordingly, McCloskey paid him a visit in Leavenworth and, on his behalf, contacted an Israeli Colonel who went to the same synagogue as the alleged pilot prior to his arrest. I don’t know why you would want to alert a member of the Israeli military to your presence if you were afraid of being deported and executed, but perhaps that’s just me. Within a month or so, Pete McCloskey got a call from the prisoner, informing him that he been transferred to a maximum security penitentiary. People were painting swastikas on the walls, he said, and asked McCloskey to call a rabbi (who was with the Anti-Defamation League) to help stop this anti-Semitic treatment. This was done, and everything appeared to be fine.
Shortly before his release, this man called McCloskey again and changed his statement. “You misinterpreted what I’ve said,” he claimed. He then disappeared after his release, so McCloskey assumed he had indeed been deported.
We are next shown a clip from a 1991 C-SPAN interview with Andrew Cockburn, author of Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship, in which he talks about a memoir by the military aide to the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Levi Eshkol. He gives an account of June 3, 1967, when he was at Eshkol’s home, waiting for Meir Amit, head of Mossad, to return from Washington. Amit had gone there to ask permission to start what would become the Six-Day War. Amit then reports that the Americans — probably the CIA — had given him to understand that they would bless the endeavor if the Israelis took out President Nasser of Egypt.
Cockburn mentions another major player in the story, James Jesus Angleton, who was head of counter-intelligence as well as head of the Israeli Desk at the CIA at the time. Angleton was a Zionist and had a close relationship with the Mossad.
Planning for what would become the Six-Day War, we learn, started as early as 1964 under the direction of the so-called 303 Committee led by Walt Rostow, who was the US National Security Advisor. The purpose of the 303 Committee was to serve as a front, so that the US President could pretend ignorance in case something went wrong with “sensitive operations” carried out by the US military — covert or “black” operations, in short.
The 303 Committee came up with the idea of a false-flag attack which would allow the US to join Israel in a war against Egypt in order to remove Nasser, whom they considered dangerous and a Soviet puppet. This became known as Operation Cyanide.
The aforementioned Jim Ennes found reference to this as well as to something called Frontlet 615 during his research. Frontlet 615 was a not-so-cleverly disguised name for the operation that had originally been chosen to start on June 15 (hence 6-15). Time was needed to get the chosen sacrifice, the USS Liberty, into position so that she could be attacked on the very first day of the war, and thus enable the US to join in right at the start. But for some unexplained reason, the events developed faster than planned, and so the Liberty had to make her “full speed, top speed” journey from the African west coast to the Sinai.
Hounam summed it up: After all this, Israel had the US by the scruff of the neck. It was now in a position to blackmail America into becoming its main supplier of arms and aid given that, of course, Johnson and his cronies had much more to lose than Levi Eshkol. Had the American public at the time learned that their own president had given orders to murder 294 of their countrymen just to get them embroiled in yet another conflict at a time when the Vietnam War was already unpopular — well, that would probably have shortened his time in office considerably.
The first three parts of Sacrificing Liberty deliberately kept away from the Jewish Question, focusing instead on the obvious military conspiracy that was going on. By the beginning of the fourth part, the audience can rightly be expected to be angry. That is when the documentary gets into the murky waters of US-Israeli politics under the Johnson administration. It eases the viewer into the bigger picture. But after establishing that, yes, the attack on the Liberty was a joint US-Israeli covert operation to take out Nasser by way of murdering US citizens, things get real.
What follows is a brutal montage of Zionist influence on US politics. David Lewis makes it clear: “The Zionists are an enemy of the United States, and they subverted the policy of the United States.” We are bombarded with clips and images, ranging from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to Cynthia McKinney’s 2007 revelation, and even to Donald Trump’s pro-Israel policy. We learn that the Liberty veterans have been banned forever from the American Legion national convention — because of anti-Semitism.
After this section, tempers are allowed to cool down a little with tales of the veterans’ struggle for justice and recognition. It becomes a call to the American people to reclaim their country’s sovereignty. The documentary ends with another montage: 9/11, the “dancing Jews,” headlines about the attack being “good for Israel,” Iraq, Afghanistan, Trump Heights.
Sacrificing Liberty is an excellent production, and I highly recommend it. It is extensive, well-researched, and well-presented. Many little nuggets are thrown in for good measure; for example, it is only briefly but strongly hinted at that John F. Kennedy’s assassination may have had something to do with his hardline stance on Israel.
Mike Rathke’s music also deserves mention; it perfectly creates the different parts’ atmosphere, from raucous during the crossing-of-the-line ceremony, to aggressive during the attack, to harrowing in the aftermath — and even spooky when the bodies are retrieved from below deck, and the homebound journey in a literal ghost ship.
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38 comments
Thank you for your detailed and credible write-up on this four-hour documentary. If true, and it may well be, heads should roll for this, but the sad thing is that they never will. So many great villains of history never get their rightful comeuppance.
I would like to hear commenter Scott’s take on the USS Liberty attack.
Hmm, does this documentary make any mention of the NSA? I bought a book about the NSA called the Puzzle Box, mainly to read the chapter on the USS liberty. Supposedly in that book, some new information was released on the subject. The NSA had an AWACS radar jet flying above at the time of the attack. They had brought in what are called “special Arabic” translators, which is a code word for modern Hebrew translators. They had to be called such because Zionists would become angry if they knew that we had Hebrew translators. Obviously, why would we need that? Anyway, supposedly they heard transmissions from the Israelis piloting the jet attack back to their commanders, saying, we know this is an American ship should we abort the attack? and the commander said yes, attack anyway. Similar to what the guy in prison said! So they knew it was an American vessel.
Yes, the NSA is mentioned several times, mainly in Part IV. Not this particular incident, but I’ve heard or read it somewhere else before. The recordings of those transmissions exist, and they are in the documentary. Al Jazeera broadcast them as well – could be they were the ones to actually leak them, but I’m not sure.
The story about those translators seems a bit odd, though. I mean, it’s not as if there was any shortage of Hebrew speakers in the US, so it seems like something the Israelis would expect!
They definitely knew the Liberty was American. Any claims to the contrary are just lame excuses.
I’ll re-read that part of the book and transcribe any more useful information on the topic. Actually, to be honest, it seemed sort of weakly written. There seemed to me to be logical inconsistencies, and it would repeat sentences at times, as if it had been poorly edited like someone rapidly cribbing notes together or something.
bought a book about the NSA called the Puzzle Box
In his recent book, SPYFAIL, James Bamford, author of the Puzzle Palace, attacks Israelis and their lobbies in America even sharper.
“I would like to hear commenter Scott’s take on the USS Liberty attack.”
🙂
Well, thanks. I am not an expert on the event, but I have read the standard book on the subject:
Ennes, James, N. Jr., Assault on the Liberty: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship. New York: Random House (1979).
https://search.worldcat.org/title/5051709
I would also like to add that there is often a tendency to overstate the obvious. Sometimes simpler answers are better.
I agree that it is unlikely that the Israelis really made a mistaken identification of the ship, and particularly so with the protracted nature of the attack, and by different military assets no less.
According to the Wikipedia article on the USS Liberty Incident,
<< Author and former crew member James M. Ennes theorized, in the epilogue of his book Assault on the Liberty, that the motive was to prevent the ship’s crew from monitoring radio traffic that might reveal Israel as the aggressor in its impending invasion of Syria, which the White House opposed. According to the Anti-Defamation League “the argument that Israel knowingly attacked an American ship has always lacked a convincing motive.” [121] >>
Riiight. I’d say that the ADL notwithstanding, it is quite obvious that the Israelis didn’t want any Signals Intelligence ship monitoring their radio traffic during the Six-Day War when they essentially destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground ─ and might easily have been inclined to attack any foreign spy ship, regardless of who they thought it might belong to.
It might have belonged to the Soviets who were already supplying their enemies, and I think that would have at best only discouraged such an sneak attack compared to an ally like the United States which half-heartedly wanted to hem Israeli ambitions a smidge but was not going to press any issues.
I would respectfully caution against people building wild theories about weird (or not so weird) circumstances. Sometimes things just happen the way that they do ─ and real life is as weird as anything in fiction.
The Israelis attacked. They did not like their sneak attacks and military operations against their neighbors being subjected to worldwide scrutiny. The SuperJoos also knew that they could just deny that it was deliberate attack since nobody really wanted to start World War III.
Surely the Israelis did not really need any complicated “REASON” to attack a spy ship other than that they just did not like the idea of foreign powers clandestinely monitoring their Signals traffic off in nearby international waters right in the middle of one of their modern wars of righteous Liberation.
Considering everything thus far, it was naïve to think otherwise. A generation earlier, why would Jews not have given away atomic secrets to Stalin and friends? Wake up, comrades.
Regarding my technical background, I was not in the Navy but I was in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and I have done a lot of electronic bench work and college course work, especially with 2-Way radios, broadcast TV, repeaters, and electronic theory. I have an Extra class Amateur Radio License, ticketed since 1985.
If I remember correctly, when the USS Liberty was attacked in 1967 and the ship’s communications were taken out, what the crew had to do was get a long wire attenna into the air and with Morse code key in hand send a shortwave band distress call out to one of their network contacts. The Israelis would have been pretty quick with the mea culpas AFTER the fait accompli.
I was interested in the Wikipedia article on such Technical Research Ships as the USS Liberty and learning that some were equipped with EME or Moonbounce equipment in the 1960s. Wow.
Today quite a few of the more-skilled Amateur Radio operators do Earth-Moon-Earth from their backyards with modern equipment, some of it homebrewed. We have powerful computers and other electronics in our junk piles. The idea that this was being done in the 1960s with U.S. Navy spy ships is pretty remarkable.
Moonbounce is basically when you beam a microwave or other radio signal to the Moon and somebody on the other side of the world likewise points their dish or antenna array to the Moon and picks up your signal.
EME does not use a communications satellite and it works best with digital modes and modern error-correction algorithms because the noise and path loss is incredible. But so long as both stations can see (or point to) the Moon looming a little above the horizon from their locations, it is a pretty slick and reliable means of non-Internet electronic communication ─ and far more secure than the short-wave bands that anybody can eavesdrop on.
It appears that the Israeli attack easily silenced the USS Liberty sending or recording high-bandwidth data or whatever Signals Intelligence information could be collected on their military operations against their neighbors, and that this, therefore, was quite a coup. And all the Israeli bandit state then had to do is Deny any harmful intent. Nobody is going to nuke Tel Aviv or Peking over stuff like this.
The you-know-whos get away with this crap because nobody ever dares to meaningfully call them on it. Why do we continue to send billions and billions of dollars to such dubious clients?
As I have pointed out many times, the Social Justice paragons even have a bronze Anne Frank statue in Boise, Idaho of all places.
Regarding the missiles fired by the Israeli aircraft at the USS Liberty, the basic sources say that they used Mirage and Mystère jets to attack the American electronic spy ship.
“Israeli Super Mystères were involved in a controversial incident in which the USS Liberty was attacked. The aircraft saw action in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which 6 were lost.” (LINK)
AND
“The Mirage III has been used in active combat roles in multiple conflicts by a number of operators. The Israeli Air Force was perhaps the most prolific operator of the fighter outside of France itself. Israel deployed their Mirage IIIs in both the Six-Day War, where it was used as both an air superiority and strike aircraft, and the Yom Kippur War, during which it was used exclusively in air-to-air combat in conjunction with the IAI Nesher, an Israeli-built derivative of the Mirage 5.” (LINK)
Some have wondered if the Israelis were using Anti-Radiation Missiles or HARMs (high-speed ARMs). One of the oldest such air-to-air or air-to-ground missiles would be the AIM-9 Sidewinder. These are heat-seeking (infrared) missiles that are at least 5 inches wide and have been used cheaply and reliably by the U.S. Navy since 1956 and by the U.S. Air Force since 1964.
Since the 1970s, and especially during the First Gulf War, very deadly anti-ship missiles were developed, but I don’t think the Israelis were using anything so slick in 1967.
If they were using anti-Radar missiles at the time, these would have been to achieve aerial superiority by attacking radar warning stations and enemy airfields while their aircraft were still on the ground. As far as I know, the Israelis in the 1960s were not that busy popping modified freighter ships with sophisticated electronically-guided missiles fired from aircraft.
“An anti-radiation missile (ARM) is a missile designed to detect and home in on an enemy radio emission source. [1] Typically, these are designed for use against an enemy radar, although jammers [2] and even radios used for communications can also be targeted in this manner.” (LINK)
An interesting side note is that the first “Anti-Radiation Missile” was developed late in World War II by the Germans.
“The Blohm & Voss BV 246 Hagelkorn (German language: “Hailstone”) was a guided glide bomb developed to bomb specific targets (bridges, ships, etc.) once it was released.This glider was designed by Richard Vogt, at first under the designation of BV 226, which was later changed to its definitive designation BV 246 on December 12, 1943.
“It was intended to be dropped from a Junkers Ju 88 or a Heinkel He 111 bomber, either of which could carry three of the weapons, and was to be dropped from a height of 7,000 m (23,000 ft) at a speed of 550 km/h (340 mph), giving it a range of up to 210 km (130 mi). In a slight dive the BV 226 could reach a speed of 900 km/h (560 mph).
“The construction of the BV 246 avoided the usual aircraft techniques and strategic materials, so it could be mass-produced. […]
“The weapon was revived a further time, in early 1945, as an early form of anti-radiation weapon, using the Radieschen passive seeker which was designed to home in on Allied radar transmitters; around 1,000 units were produced but never used operationally.” [4] (LINK)
I don’t think anything like that is what was used in the attack on the USS Liberty.
I haven’t studied this extensively, but it appears that the rockets in question on the USS Liberty attack were unguided SNEB 68 mm (2.7 inch) diameter with spring-loaded tails, and these rockets are fired in a single consecutive volley from one or more aerodynamic pods containing about 18 or so shots each, similar to what was done during World War II by Allied ground-attack aircraft and by German interceptor aircraft like the late-war Me 262 jet with R4M “Orkan” rockets.
A volley of SNEBs from a couple of fighter jets would probably not sink a ship like the USS Liberty, but I am sure that it would handily knock out their SigInt mission.
I’m not a war-hawk, but there are some things that cannot reasonably be tolerated by sovereign states. Bloodthirsty attacks on ships in International Waters without warning, and storming embassies to take hostages, are two that I can think of.
No offense to teenaged diarists, but we don’t need to be raising more money for Anne Frank memorials.
🙂
Thanks, that’s precisely what I was hoping for. Always get my money’s worth from you! On one of the films about the attack, one of the American communications officers who had been on the Liberty said,”if they didn’t know it was an American ship, how did they know what frequency to jam?” But at the same time, some of the Israeli soldiers they interviewed were so convincing in arguing that the attack was accidental that they almost had me believing them. A testament to the power of their chutzpah.
I don’t think there’s any question it was intentional, and there are a number of highly compelling motives(false flag to involve us in the war, to silence counterintelligence spying), but I was wondering what you thought of high level US involvement with lbj. That Im doubtful of. That actually seems like an attempt to jiu-jitsu blame for the event back onto the Americans somehow.
“That actually seems like an attempt to jiu-jitsu blame for the event back onto the Americans somehow.”
I agree.
“… they heard transmissions from the Israelis piloting the jet attack back to their commanders…”
There’s a somewhat long discussion of this in the well-known 2008 Chicago Tribune article, “New revelations in attack on American spy ship” in the section “Key NSA tapes said missing.” The article is posted on the If Americans Knew website: https://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ul-crewdson.html
“It has nothing to do with the religion, it’s the politics of Zionism.” Au contraire it has everything to do with the religion and ethnicity. Obviously, framing it this way is to be tactful to avoid censorship. But the other side does not use tact; Philip Roth is very explicit on how they view us. The animous behind these perverts drives them to commit war crimes and be shameless parasites.
While the truth of the Liberty must be brought to light, and justice must be executed, there are much bigger and obvious acts of aggression committed by them. Just look at the deductions on your paycheck if you are employed. That money ain’t going to fix the roads, unless those roads are in Haifa…
None of this would ever have happened if the Nazis won. Why do you Anglos whine about misfortunes that are caused by others, blast the Nazis for their violence, and then take a neutral stance toward the people causing the problems while you continue antagonism or at best distance yourself from the real purveyors of truth
Unless I missed something, I’m not seeing anything like that on this article or its comments so far. Personally, after much careful consideration, I’ve decided that there’s no need for hand-wringing about Germany’s much-overhyped excesses as long as leftists refuse to recognize their own dirty laundry.
For a start it’s the NSDAP not “Nazis”. Article is written by a patriotic German lady and comments kicked off by a Turk, admittedly one who regularly sticks the boot into England and her imperial politicking. If you’re trying to sow discord you’re in the wrong place, speaking to the wrong people.
This miniseries is aimed at a mainstream conservative, Christian, patriotic audience…
Maybe it’s time to quit aiming truth at those who “cheer for Israel” since they <cough!> “[know]” the Israelis [are] on their side.”
The National Alliance has been sounding the alarm about the Jews’ murderous act of war against the U.S. vessel for decades. See beaucoup articles about it at nationalvanguard.org, like “Erasing the USS Liberty”
[T]he most shocking part of this story, is that the country who attempted to sink the Liberty with all those aboard, Israel, on that beautiful, sunny day in the Eastern Mediterranean in June, 1967, not only continues to erase the true history of what happened, but our own country, the United States of America, and those public officials sworn to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution, initiated the coverup and continue, to this very second, to dishonor those 34 men viciously slaughtered and the 174 wounded, who are forced to live knowing their own country abandoned them on the altar of political expediency.
The coverup has been so thorough that this is the only maritime attack in U.S. history not afforded a Congressional investigation, as required by the U.S. Constitution.
I don’t think this was meant as a reply to me, however I I can’t understand your objection. The docuseries is very well produced and Frau Schnabel thinks it’s pitched at conservatives. Well we might wish that they didn’t exist but they do and they need to be nudged inexorably towards our position on Israel. For many of these people the soft sell, with spoken testimonies of the crew, will work better than reading NV (which is where I began to learn about the Liberty). Propaganda is needed at all levels.
Great article. Thank you.
One point of disagreement, however. Lyndon Johnson was not “partly of Jewish descent himself”. The documentary in part 4 shows a brief clip of LBJ’s daughter Luci Baines Johnson’s talking about her family’s having had a bar mitzvah. Luci and her first husband had four children and one of their children, as an adult, converted to Judaism (after presumably marrying a Jew). So, it was one of LBJ’s great-grandchildren his daughter was referring to when she reported on their having had a bar mitzvah. Not the man himself– far from it.
Luci speaks of her daughter’s conversion to Judaism here: https://austinfamily.com/get-to-know-luci-baines-johnson/
My own view is that Johnson, while a wily politician, was not a terribly sophisticated man. He was from rural Texas. He wasn’t a reader and hadn’t traveled widely. Like many other rustic White folks, I think Johnson mistakenly believed Jews were the bearers of culture and erudition. (Marilyn Monroe, in her relations with Arthur Miller, Lee Strasburg, and others, comes to mind.) It’s a view cultivated by the likes of smarmy Simon Schwarma; hell, even Camille Paglia buys this nonsense. Christianity no doubt plays a role in framing this view of Jews. LBJ was likely thus beguiled by Jews on the one hand. And, with his master politician’s instincts, aware of their power and ruthlessness in using it on the other– among other things their involvement in his predecessor’s death and their ability to thwart his policies.
Thank you.
No, I wasn’t referring to the bat mitzbah scene. There is an earlier mention that I completely missed at first, too. 🙂 Apparently, LBJ had Jewish ancestors on one of his grandparents’ side. Maybe it’s alleged; I haven’t bothered to check, to be honest.
No, LBJ’s himself being of “Jewish descent” is not substantiated at all, AI-generated synopses notwithstanding.
It’s also not the case that, as USS Liberty survivor David Lewis contends, “ever since LBJ, Israel has gotten from the United States whatever it wanted, any time it wanted”. That begins much earlier with Franklin Roosevelt, as we now know from the Venona Papers. The New Deal era is also when LBJ cut his teeth in the US Congress. It was Jews in Roosevelt’s administration, such as Henry Morgenthal and Harry Dexter White, who fomented war with NSDAP Germany–by way of war in Asia for a Sinophile president–, when the American public was staunchly against involvement in another European war and supported the America First platform. (To that end, it was most likely Jewish gangs who kidnapped the Lindbergh baby to undermine the AF leadership.) The film cites Eisenhower’s naming of the MIC in his farewell address, but the post-War era was the culmination of Jewish power in America, not its nascence.
Likewise, the motivations ascribed to LBJ of Operation Cyanide, the “whydunnit”, don’t really hold up. Even when considering this terrible attack against our people, there is a reticence to fully consider the Jews, as Ron Unz has said, as the most murderous people in history. The film no doubt hedges in order to spare the feelings of Christians. But does anyone think a people who, not three years earlier, had blown a sitting US President’s head off in broad daylight (over nuclear weapons) really couldn’t pull the trigger on an unarmed ship listening in on their war with Egypt? The charge of warmonger simply doesn’t fit LBJ. His domestic agenda was what mattered to him. The foreign wars were the work of the generals and the MIC, which he inherited. There were mass rallies against the Vietnam War already that spring of 1967. In that atmosphere, would Johnson, who was always looking ahead to re-election, really have wanted to have become embroiled in yet another war?
The readiness to single Johnson out as malevolent is so prevalent, the otherwise intelligent Laurent Guyénot ascribes to the ludicrous anti-White propaganda that there never was a moon-landing, simply because it happened under LBJ. Johnson suffers by comparison with the hagiography of JFK, upon whom much is projected. I contend the view of him is also colored by long-standing prejudice against White Southerners as ignorant and crude.
Johnson was undoubtedly a criminal, and a loathsome predator who forced himself on numerous women. There is a lot of evidence that he was behind the Kennedy assassination. He was facing the very real threat of being exposed by a Congressional investigation into his corrupt practices and imprisoned, as Spiro Agnew later was, when his fortuitous elevation to the presidency put an end to it. I’ve seen no credible evidence that The Jews were behind Kennedy’s murder.
Jacob Rubinstein took out the patsy Oswald. The only person in the affair to have provably killed someone was a Jewish underworld character who sacrificed his freedom to silence the goy. LBJ was a long-standing ally and tool of the Jews.
https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/lbj-an-unheralded-holocaust-hero/2023/03/01/
The moon landing happened, or “happened”, under Nixon not Johnson.
NASA was much more than just a race with the Russians. Both Kennedy and Johnson were extremely supportive of space exploration. Nixon not so much.
In fact, by the time Nixon was sworn into office in early 1969, the Moonshots could almost not be stopped. The economy was going to pot because of all of the Great Society spending and the money pit from the war in Vietnam.
Nixon was willing to indulge NASA to a point, but he was not anywhere nearly as supportive of space exploration as his predecessors. In fact, there is a good reason that NASA’s Mission Control was placed in Houston, Texas.
It is also not a surprise that the father of the U.S. Air Force’s Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program Bernard Adolph Schriever, was a Bremen-born German from New Braunfels, Texas.
🙂
I saw a Jewish newspaper article (from 2012 I think) which claimed LBJ as a Jew or at least of Jewish descent. Unfortunately I didn’t archive it but in any case a newspaper article is rarely proof of anything. Regardless he does seem to have had a very cosy relationship with them from the 1930s onwards.
My take is that LBJ was very clever indeed, and that (much like Khrushchev) appearing to be a hick was an act to get others to underestimate him.
Johnson was also not of Northkorean descent, but he still let the Northern Koreans capture the USS Pueblo in 1968 and did not revenge for this. He was simply a weakling, as all Democrats since Roosevelt were and are.
Maybe LBJ had reasons to help his Israeli buddies, relating to how he got his job. It’s speculative, though possible.
I don’t know if LBJ was really more pro-Israel than his more-charismatic predecessor, but Kennedy was actually not very skilled legislatively, according to the Joe Kennedy clan’s mentee, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. Kennedy was a Yankee Catholic and just could not get his race-mixing bile through the South.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, however, was a hardscrabble other-side-of-the-tracks New Dealer and good ol’ boy Texas pol with a tremendous amount of acquired political skill. Probably nobody else could have gotten the Civil Rights and other crap through Congress.
LBJ was able to cash in on the Kennedy martyrdom in doing so, but in fact he had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Dealey Plaza shooting other than being terrified about having possibly been a target himself. In a recorded White House telephone call with the FBI’s Director, Mr. Hoover assured Lyndon that no shots had been fired at the Vice President’s limousine.
Other than that, Johnson’s main worry was that he was afraid that the assassination could lead to World War III if he was not very careful, but he was overthinking things.
It was certainly weird that Oswald had recently been a Soviet defector, but in fact he was just a malecontent loser with a learning disability and a lot of energy. The only thing useful Oswald did in the Marine Corps was learn how to shoot competently.
🙂
As for JFK’s relations with the Israelis, he was not writing them a blank check. Instead, he suspected (correctly) that they were developing nuclear weapons at their Dimona facility, and was beginning to press the issue.
Another interesting data point comes from a deathbed confession, IIRC by H. Howard Hunt, which was written up in Rolling Stone. According to that one, LBJ was dirty, as well as Cord Meyer. The latter had a very personal grudge with JFK, but he was a very tricky spook otherwise.
Even so, all this is speculative and I don’t claim to have the final word on it.
I think LBJ suspected(rightly or wrongly)the Israelis were behind the jfk assassination and was merely scared of them. That’s why he was so compliant. And that’s why he stepped down, to get off a hot seat on which he felt compromised.
I am not saying that LBJ was not corrupt nor a tool of the Joos in general, but the reason that LBJ stepped down in 1968 and would not seek reelection as “your President” was because Camelot had blown up in his face with Vietnam, and he had to appease the anti-Communist Democrats after having gotten Kennedy’s Civil Rights nastiness through Congress.
Specifically, LBJ badly mishandled the Gulf of Tonkin “Incident” and got a stupid bellicose resolution through Congress. It was an entangling faux pas that only got more feces onto the soles of his shoes.
Then Secretary of Defense Dr. “Strangebob” McNamara and the U.S. Army’s General William Westmoreland came up with a plan to give the troops / “advisors” more tools and apply some heat to defeat the Viet Cong. Woo Hoo! That’ll show them Commies in Moscow and Peking.
It would be comparatively cheap, not risk World War III, and the United States being a technological global superpower would be able to easily win a war of attrition with the insurgents in Vietnam ─ without mostly taking on the North Vietnamese regulars or the Soviets and Communist Chinese.
However, this escalation immediately became a quagmire and was directly connected to the military Draft ─ where students were notably exempted, and surly Leftists were already running riot through University institutions.
As the retired U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay noted, more ordnance had been dropped impotently on jungle trails used by insurgents in Indochina than the entire bomb tonnage used during World War II.
This is exactly why you do not let corporate accountants like Robert S. McNamara run your military strategy.
So President Johnson did not run for reelection in 1968 ─ but there is no way in hell that the establishment wing of the Democratic Party would have supported peacenik Bobby Kennedy (had he not gotten killed by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles after winning the California primary). RFK just would not have gotten the Democratic Party nomination at the Convention in Mayor Daley’s Chicago.
Candidates Vice President Humphrey in 1968 and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine in 1972 were actually stay-the-course war-Democrats that did not present a threat to Nixon, an anti-Communist politician who became unfairly associated with the war’s origins himself.
This Vietnam War fallout still existed for the Democrats in 1972, which is why peace candidate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota got very little support from the establishment Democrats against Nixon until it was too late to matter.
Perhaps nobody could have beat Nixon in 1972, who was committed to ramping down conscription and (slowly) winding down Vietnam “with honor,” and occasionally applying a little B-52 strategic bombing to wake up Hanoi when negotiations faltered.
But the only people still supporting McGovern by November were the looney Left and the saboteur Jews who ran them.
If Johnson and McNamara were serious about ending the war in Vietnam in 1964, they would have been better off blockading Hanoi and signalling a willingness to ramp down the military advisors in South Vietnam rather than sending in more conscripts. Haiphong Harbor was not even mined until 1972 and Ho Chi Minh was long dead.
🙂
“I am not saying that LBJ was not corrupt nor a tool of the Joos in general”
Well, that’s any politician, or anybody in the US with a position above janitor.
A people that shall dwell alone? In many respects, yes, absolutely. But in many other ways they seem to operate in accordance with the dictum: Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.
Thank you for this excellent write-up, Clarissa.
I have only read James Ennes’s book “Assault on The Liberty”, and one chapter about this story in the book “On Intelligence” written by John Hughes-Wilson, an Englishman and former intelligence officer. Both books impressed me very much, but I also remember, that some commentaries on the AMAZON criticized Mr. Hughes-Wilson for his “anti-semitism”.
Truth is anti-Semitic, especially to dimwits.
Interesting article. There is no doubt the Israelis knew it was a US ship before attacking.
I can’t remember where I read it, but that theory was that the Liberty was tracking what both the Israelis and Egyptians were doing and sending the information back to the US. The Soviets had cracked the US encryption and were able to read the information live. The Soviets were able to pass this to the Egyptians. The Israelis found out out about the Soviet ability to read the information and so destroyed the ship to stop this happening.
The US, at the height of the cold war, didn’t want to turn on Israel as it would effectively turn the whole region over to the Soviets who were more successful with the Arab states.
I don’t know the real reason why the ship was sunk, but the important thing was the Israelis sunk a US ship without repercussion.
Thanks for the highly informative write up. Another in a long line of episodes that have a part where we reasonably ask “Why would they do that?” There’s usually a common denominator in modern times. But who gets to answer for the mass slaughter of white men that were the Civil War and the world wars? Not to mention Vietnam and Korea? Now I have another historical episode to learn more about.
LBJ belonged to a small denomination, the Christadelphians, who believe that Jewish lives are more valuable than non-Jewish lives.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131209091225/http://www.5tjt.com/our-first-jewish-president-lyndon-johnson-an-update/
This article is no longer available at the 5 Towns Jewish Times website. In any case it provides no conclusive evidence but is another example of the information available in the Jewish press.
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