Remember the USS Liberty

A textbook case of Israel’s perfidy and U.S. government treason, and what it teaches us about Kennedy's assassination

The attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967 was a false flag attack by the Israeli Air Force and Navy, meant to be blamed on Egypt, in order to draw the U.S. into bombing Egypt, and possibly to start WWIII. To succeed, the operation needed the unarmed NSA ship to be sinked with no survivor. It failed: despite having been strafed, bombed and torpedoed by fighter aircrafts and destroyers for seventy-five minutes, the USS Liberty stayed afloat and, though 34 crew members were killed and 171 wounded, the evidence and the survivors’ experience made it impossible to blame the attack on Egypt. Instead, Israel apologized for the attack, pretending that the ship had been mistaken for an Egyptian warship. President Johnson accepted the excuse, and the scandal was hushed up.

This is one of the most significant event in recent history, because it exposes the defining pattern of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, which consists primarily in Israel using every possible means of deception to make the U.S. military fight Israel’s enemies (Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, etc.), and the U.S. unconditionally supporting Israel despite being betrayed and humiliated.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this war crime is the demonstrable complicity of President Lyndon Johnson and of CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, amounting in both case to high treason. That makes the USS Liberty attack all the more important to study and teach, because those two men are also the prime American suspects in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Since evidence has been accumulating into a critical mass that Israel was the main beneficiary of the coup to replace Kennedy by Johnson in the White House (read my book The Unspoken Kennedy Truth, or the first chapter of Monika Wiesak’s recent Echoes of a Lost America), the active participation of Johnson and Angleton in both plots (JFK assassination and USS Liberty attack) become a crucial piece of circumstantial evidence in the JFK case.

Let’s review that evidence.

The Six-Day War and the USS Liberty attack

The Six-Day War, in June 1967, allowed Israel to more than double its territory, with the annexation of the Gaza Strip and Sinai from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, a major step in Israel’s ongoing strategy to conquer the whole of Palestine and dominate the Middle East. Having learned the lesson of its failure in 1956, when both Eisenhower and Khrushchev forced Israel to back up from the Sinai, Israel succeeded in creating the illusion that it was acting in self-defense. By deceiving Soviet espionage with false communications, Israel incited Nasser to begin troop movements in Sharm el-Sheikh near the Israeli border. On May 27, 1967, Nasser blocked access to the Straits of Tiran, cutting the Israeli Navy’s access to the Red Sea. Israeli propaganda, disseminated in the United States, cast these defensive movements as preparations for aggression, justifying a preventive attack by Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would admit in 1982 that the Six Day War had not been a “war of necessity” but a “war of choice. … Nasser did not attack us. We decided to attack him.”[1]

Four days after the Israeli air strikes which crippled the Egyptian air force on the ground, Nasser accepted the ceasefire request from the UN Security Council. It was too early for Israel, which had not yet achieved all its objectives.

That is when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a NSA spy ship stationed in international waters off Sinai, easily recognizable by its huge antennas and its very large American flag. It was a clear and sunny day. Israeli jets had flown over the ship at low altitude in the morning and there is not the slightest doubt that the ship had been identified.

Then, in the early afternoon, two unmarked Mirage III fighter jets dove repeatedly on the ship, firing 30-mm cannons and rockets, first aiming at the antennas in an attempt to prevent the crew from sending an SOS, then at the crew, even shooting at the lifeboats that were being lowered into the sea. After the Mirages had expended their ammunitions, they were replaced by Dassault Super Mystères which dropped napalm bombs on the ship, causing much of the ship’s superstructure to catch fire. The air attack was followed by the high-speed approach of three torpedo boats, which launched five torpedoes, causing huge breaches in the hull of the ship under the waterline.

When the attack was first reported on American television and radio, it was presented as an Egyptian act of war, and some elected officials immediately called for retaliation against. When it was finally revealed that the attackers were Israeli forces, the story was quietly dropped, and received no more media coverage.

Oliver Kirby, Deputy Director for Operations at the NSA at the time, reported to journalist John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune (October 2, 2007) that the transcripts of the communications intercepted from the Israeli planes and immediately sent to Washington by the NSA, left no doubt that the Israeli pilots had identified their target as American before attacking it.[2]

Lyndon Johnson, traitor for Israel

From the day of the President Kennedy’s assassination, his vice-president Lyndon Johnson has been on the top of the list of suspects. Many investigators have identified him as the mastermind, such as, to name only recent authors, Phillip Nelson (LBJ: The Master­mind of JFK’s Assassination, 2010), Roger Stone (The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, 2013), and James Tague (LBJ and the Kennedy Killing, 2013). As probably the most influential political figure of Texas, Johnson had the means and the opportunity to organize the ambush in Dallas, and he spent the weeks following the coup making sure that no investigation would deviate from the predetermined conclusion that Oswald alone shot Kennedy. LBJ is also on record as ordering the Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who was trying to save Oswald’s life in Dallas, to instead obtain from him “a death-bed confession”, which makes him the second person after Irgun-connected gangster Jacob Rubenstein to have acted for the death of Oswald.[3]

Considerable evidence has also surfaced in recent years that Israel’s attack on Egypt on June 5 had been secretly authorized by Lyndon Johnson. In May 1967, Ephraim “Eppy” Evron, deputy Israeli ambassador and Mossad liaison in Washington, had met Johnson at the White House, and later reported that Johnson told him, “You and I are going to pass another Tonkin resolution,” in reference to the mock incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that Johnson used to justify the aggression against North Vietnam. According to Peter Hounam, who document this in Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III (2003), the attack on the USS Liberty had been secretly authorized by the White House as part of the project Frontlet 615, “a secret political agreement in 1966 by which Israel and the U.S. had vowed to destroy Nasser.”[5]

Although the Israeli Mirages had strafed the antennas on their first attack, the crew managed to send an SOS, which was picked up by the Sixth Fleet. The latter’s commander, Admiral Lawrence Geis, immediately sent fighter jets to the rescue. But minutes later, he received a phone call from Johnson in person, who ordered him: “I want that goddamn ship going to the bottom. No help. Recall the wings.”[6]

After the failure of Israeli forces to sink the ship, Johnson accepted Israel’s phony excuse of “mistaken identity” and hushed the affair, against the advise of some members of his Cabinet, including Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State originally named by Kennedy.

A commission of inquiry headed by Admiral John Sidney McCain II, commander-in-chief of US Naval forces in Europe (and father of 2000 presidential candidate John McCain III), sealed that conclusion. The survivors received a formal order never to mention the incident, under penalty of prison, “or worse”. Only recently have some of them broken their silence.[7]

Five months after Israel’s treacherous attack, Johnson invited Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to the White House, even welcoming him to his private Texas ranch (photo below). What’s more, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting the embargo on offensive military equipment: US-made tanks and aircraft immediately flowed to Tel Aviv. Israel soon became the biggest customer of the US defense industry.

Evidence that LBJ had played a decisive role in the preparation of the attack includes the fact that, on May 23, 1967, the USS Liberty was ordered to leave its patrol on the West Coast of Africa into what was not yet a war zone off the Sinai Peninsula, while another spy ship, the USNS Private Jose F. Valdez, was ordered to leave the area. Phillip Nelson remarks:

Perhaps the reason that the Liberty was tagged by Johnson as a “sacrificial lamb” was because of its name: As suggested by author [Phil] Tourney, a survivor, “Remember the Liberty,” like the Alamo, or the Maine, would be a much better battle cry to rally the troops than the name of the ship it replaced. “Remember the Private Jose F. Valdez” just did not have the same panache.[8]

James Angleton, traitor for Israel

James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence, was one of the most powerful men in the CIA in the 1960s. JFK researchers who have investigated the CIA’s role in the preparation of the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald end up at Angleton’s door. John Newman, for example, writes: “No one else [but Angleton] in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot.”[9] Jefferson Morley also indicted Angleton, and concluded after years of research: “CIA’s Counterintelligence was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination.” However, Morley could have said just as well: “CIA’s ‘Israeli desk’ was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination”, since Angleton was also head of that very secretive department, and the CIA’s exclusive liaison with the Mossad. In his biography titled The Ghost, Morley actually documents that Angleton was so intimate with Mossad’s high-ranking officials that one of them, Meir Amit described him as “the biggest Zionist of the lot.” Angleton made many trips to Israel, and even met privately with David Ben-Gurion in the summer of 1963, months before Kennedy was assassinated, as revealed by Mossad officer Efraim Halevy (left on the photo below, beside Angleton).

According to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, “There is a body of opinion within the American intelligence community that Angleton played a leading part in orchestrating the events leading up to the June 1967 war. One long-serving official at CIA’s ancient rival, the code-breaking National Security Agency, states flatly that ‘Jim Angleton and the Israelis spent a year cooking up the ‘67 war. It was a CIA operation designed to get Nasser.’”[10] It is assumed that Angleton provided his Mossad friends with the CIA’s aerial photos that enabled Israel to locate and destroy Egypt’s air forces in a day.

As Joan Mellen documents in Blood in the Water, in the weeks preceding the Six-Day War, Eppy Evron, Mossad’s supervisor in Washington, “had arranged meetings between Angleton and Moshe Dayan … to discuss the feasibility of an attack on Egypt with the objective of toppling Nasser. Lyndon Johnson had authorized Angleton to inform Evron that the United States would not intervene to stop an attack on Egypt.” On May 30, Meir Amit, then head of global operations for Mossad, flew to Washington and met first with Angleton the next day. There is no documentary record of their conversation, but on June 1, Amit reported to Israel: “there is a growing chance for American political backing if we act on our own.” “It would be Angleton,” says Mellen, “who would prevail in formulating, with Meir Amit, the configuration of the operation that would culminate in the attack on the USS Liberty.”[11]

In his account of this meeting, Tom Segev writes that “Jim Angleton was enthusiastic,” and saw in Israel’s strike “the possibility of solving the region’s problems.” When corresponding with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol on the phone, Amit acknowledged the decisive importance of Angleton’s support. Angleton, he said, intimated that the Americans “would undoubtedly look positively on a knockout” on Egypt; “Angleton was an extraordinary asset for us. We could not have found ourselves a better advocate.”[12]

In December 1967, the Israelis threw a big party for Angleton when he visited them on his 50^th birthday.

From USS Liberty to 9/11

George Ball, former Undersecretary of State, wrote in The Passionate Attachment:

the ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack had far more effect on policy in Israel than in America. Israel’s leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal. If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seems clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.[13]

This, and the new escalation of the Cold War in the Middle East, allowed for the most hard-core Zionists to seize the leadership of the Jewish State. In 1967, Menachem Begin, still a wanted terrorist for his role in blowing up the King David Hotel in 1946, was invited by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to join a “government of national unity.” Ten years later, he became Prime Minister himself (1977-1983). He was succeeded by Yitzhak Shamir, former operational chief of the Lehi (aka the Stern Gang) that had assassinated British diplomat Lord Moyne and UN peace mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, bombed the British embassy in Rome, and mailed letter bombs to every senior British cabinet member in London.[14] Hope for peace was restored by Yitzhak Rabin, who shook hands with Yasser Arafat and signed the Oslo Accords, but Rabin was assassinated for this, and a new generation of Machiavellian extremists came to power: Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon, the instigators of the 9/11 coup.

With John Kennedy as president until 1968, possibly succeeded by his brother Robert until 1976, none of that would have happened. There would have been no Six-Day War, and the Palestinian question may have found a peaceful and lasting solution. The “passionate attachment” between the U.S. and Israel, which started under Johnson and has now morphed into a psychopathic bond, would never have developed. The road to 9/11 would not have been paved, Israel would have no nuclear arsenal and no “Samson Option” to threaten the rest of the world with, and would have been forced to comply with international law.

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[1] George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, W.W. Norton & Co., 1992, p. 22.

[2] John Crewdson, “New revelations in attack on American spy ship”, Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2007.

[3] Charles A. Crenshaw, JFK, Conspiracy of Silence, Signet, 1992, pp. 185-189.

[5] Peter Hounam, Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty nearly caused World War III, Vision, 2003, pp. 266-267.

[6] Robert Allen, Beyond Treason: Reflections on the Cover-up of the June 1967 Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty, an American Spy Ship, CreateSpace, 2012; Phillip F. Nelson, Remember the Liberty, Trine Day, 2017, Kindle l. 1307.

[7] Watch the 2014 Al-Jazeera documentary The Day Israel Attacked America.

[8] Phillip F. Nelson, LBJ: From Mastermind to “The Colossus”, Skyhorse, 2014, p. 508.

[9] John M. Newman, Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK, Skyhorse, 2008, pp. 636-637.

[10] Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, HarperCollins, 1991, pp. 146-147.

[11] Joan Mellen, Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty, Prometheus Books, 2018, pp. 37-40, 49-50.

[12] Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, Henry Hold, 2007, pp. 329-332.

[13] Ball, The Passionate Attachment, op. cit., p. 58.

[14] Ronan Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, John Murray, 2019, pp. 18-20.