Foreword

Joan Mellen, who has completed years of research into the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, will provide answers that have heretofore eluded those seeking information as to why it was done and who was involved in an event that resulted in the murder of 34 Americans (31 sailors, 2 marines, and 1 NSA civilian), the wounding of 174, and the attempted murder of 294 Americans by the Israel Defense Forces. It is a continuation of her tireless and tenacious study of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his administration, providing her readers with details that have not been made known to the American public.

Why is this accurate account so vital to the future of America? As an eyewitness, a survivor of the attack, and a witness to the US government’s deception, I am very much aware of the events. My hometown, upbringing, and church and the US Navy provided me with the moral character and determination to complete our mission despite any adversities. It is my love of country that forces me to want the truth told. I have observed the whole scale of lies, deceit, and forgery by the US Navy, who were ordered to do so by our government officials, orchestrated by their commander in chief. The American public needs to know what was done to the USS Liberty crew and to our nation for the sole purpose of protecting our relationship with Israel and profiting for political gain on the backs of the Liberty crew.

Therefore, prepare to devour Ms. Mellen’s account of this event and time period, Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty. She has uncovered details that have been deliberately hidden from your eyes to prevent you from forming a better understanding of the consequences of our silence. Please take this information to heart and share it with your family and friends. Joan Mellen’s book is that important for future American generations to understand the abuses that took place during the Johnson years. I deeply appreciate Ms. Mellen’s ability to document these events so that we can take steps to return to the form of governing our founding fathers gave us. If we do not learn from what her book provides us, our future is in jeopardy.

—Ernest A. Gallo, President, USS Liberty Veterans Association



From the Preface

At the dawn of the Six-Day War,... Liberty was rushed to the Eastern Mediterranean. On June 8, she was trolling in international waters at her normal cruise speed of five knots, the speed they traveled when they were on station and doing their intelligence collection, twelve and a half miles off the coast of Egypt. In a bloody, unprovoked, and systematic attack that continued for an hour and a half, Israeli jet fighter planes—their hulls blackened to conceal their country of origin, in defiance of international law—blasted the unarmed Liberty. They were followed by torpedo boats brandishing machine guns.

For more than fifty years, the Survivors (the use of the uppercase is their designation) have sought an explanation for this attack, clearly designed to murder everyone on board and send their ship to the bottom of the sea. Intelligence gathering on the high seas is lawful, and it becomes illegal, naval historian Walter Jacobsen says, only when it infringes upon “protected features of the public order in the coastal state,” which Liberty did not do. It turns out that Liberty was not gathering intelligence on Israel at all.

The United States professed that it was not a participant in any way in the Six-Day War, an event that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted had “given Johnson the little respite he wanted from Vietnam.” Yet the decimation of the Egyptian Air Force on the first day of the war would not have been possible without the participation of US F-4 planes doing aerial surveillance photography that Israel lacked the technological know-how itself to accomplish.

Where documents elucidating these events have emerged, they have been heavily redacted.

Blood in the Water is an effort to penetrate the motives for this attack. History may be defined as what is not yet known, hidden corners that illuminate events that seem otherwise inexplicable. Please be so kind as to consider this effort, this book, in the light of its unsatisfactory predecessors. Some components of one agency (CIA) will be revealed to have known the attack was coming, while others, appalled, were unable to stop it. CIA was not a monolith, and those who did not support this operation included Richard Helms, the director of Central Intelligence himself.

Along the way, I have been guided by the words of members of the intelligence services with access to the truth of what happened and who refused to participate in the cover-up. Among them was a CIA asset named Wilbur Crane Eveland, who requested of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, his longtime friend, that he be removed from duty in the Middle East so that he would not be complicit in the injustices he was certain would come.

Allen Dulles acknowledged to his asset Eveland that “the CIA and Israel’s Mossad had worked jointly to monitor developments within the Soviet Union and Russia’s satellites, and even before the Egyptian-Czech arms agreement, the Israelis had warned that Russia had plans to arm the Arabs.” CIA had monitored Russian arms shipments to the Middle East.

In 1959, Dulles had told Eveland that CIA’s collaboration with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, left the United States exposed to blackmail and established Israel as the first nuclear power in the Middle East. In 1972, General Matityahu Peled of the Israeli army stated in the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, that “the thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff which was born and developed after the war.”

Government documents allow that Israel did not act alone in this operation and therefore cannot be blamed for the devastation by itself. The fifty-year cover-up has been tightly held and respected by every president from Lyndon Johnson, a principal in these events, through Barack Obama.

Available documents have been few and far between. Sometimes they arrive from the unlikeliest sources, like Mossad chief Meir Amit, who distributed the minutes of his pivotal May 1967 meeting with CIA station chief John Hadden to interested Israeli journalists. Israel argued, falsely, that the USSR had “instigated” the Six-Day War and had targeted Dimona, Israel’s secret nuclear arms facility. Israel continued for fifty years to argue that the attack on the ship was an “accident,” passing along this disinformation to its assets like Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb, who attempted to pass it along to me. It was also Cohen, resident as a “scholar” in the United States, who reported to former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy that the memoir about Hadden written by Hadden’s son, Conversations with a Masked Man: My Father, the CIA, and Me, had finally been published. Halevy replied, “I thought we had taken care of that.” It was a rare glimpse into Israel’s shameless interference in US publishing.

Thomas Lowe Hughes, heading up State Department intelligence in the 1960s, told me there was no one in the government who saw any value in the truth about the USS Liberty emerging. That a cover-up had descended on these events was taken for granted. As Nicholas Katzenbach, then an undersecretary of state, remarked to Hughes, “What good would it do?”

Katzenbach was echoing the very view held in Israel after the collapse of its terrorist “Operation Susannah”: “What good could come of an investigation?” The truth was, at best, an inconvenience. Katzenbach had never been a proponent of speaking the truth to the public, as he revealed three days after the Kennedy assassination.

“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin,” he wrote in a memorandum to Lyndon Johnson’s aide, Bill Moyers, “that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at a trial.” Discussion was anathema. “Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off,” Katzenbach decreed. Katzenbach had been chosen by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover “to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.” Katzenbach began to write his memorandum on the Sunday after the assassination, the same general time when J. Edgar Hoover, writes historian Rex Bradford, was writing memos to the same effect.

When Katzenbach was asked, “How are you going to pursue this with the Israelis, namely the Liberty?,” he responded, “We’re not going to. What good would it do?” He had gotten the message that Liberty was a nonissue, and that the sooner it was behind us, the better. “It will do nothing but damage our friends politically.”

In conversation with me, Hughes speculated that Katzenbach “thought it would just produce an enormous maelstrom of political controversy.”

I asked, “Wouldn’t we have a better country if we had the truth?”

“Who knows?” Hughes said.

History has revealed that some distinguished figures in American government were appalled by the attack and knew how it came about, but kept silent. They include the chief of naval operations, Admiral David Lamar McDonald, who published a series of autobiographical interviews with the Naval Institute Press, yet did not mention the USS Liberty.

To blame Israel alone for this attack on innocent Americans is like talking about the Holocaust, as Donald J. Trump did on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January 2017, without mentioning the Jewish people. A Trump spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, told CNN the omission was intentional because the administration “took into account all of those who suffered”—echoing, the New York Times noted, “the position of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers who work to play down the genocide of Jews.” Trump repeated this travesty of history in August 2017 when he wanted to blame “both sides” for the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

That his son-in-law’s Holocaust-survivor grandmother was a founder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum fazed Trump not at all. So the fifty years of silence and obfuscation about the attack on the USS Liberty have a continuing legacy: it is acceptable to lie and distort, so long as you’re not called out on it.

Over the years, one specious motive for the attack after another has been advanced. One has it that Israel feared that Liberty had discovered its plan to invade Syria the next day, June 9, and so had to pulverize the ship, to sink it with all hands, as it most obviously intended to do. In fact, Moshe Dayan, commanding the Israel Defense Forces, had not completed his plan for Syria before Liberty was bombarded, nor was the ship conducting surveillance on Israel. It was under instructions specifically not to process Israeli intercepts.

A variation submitted by Joseph Daichman in his history of Mossad was that the Soviets had been intercepting American radio signals. Should Liberty not be removed, the Soviets would inform Egypt that Israel had moved troops to the Golan and left its border with Egypt undefended. None of this can be supported.

Wilbur Eveland came closest to the truth in his memoir, Ropes of Sand: “Unless the United States wished the Russians and Arabs to learn of joint CIA-Mossad covert operations in the Middle East and of Angleton’s discussions before the 1967 fighting began, the questions of the lost American ship and how the war originated should be dropped.”

The CIA-Mossad joint covert operation was the attack on the USS Liberty, “the lost American ship.” Nor can the attack on the ship be mentioned without the name “James Angleton” entering the discussion and his role being spelled out. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Joan Mellen is professor emerita at Temple University, where she taught literature and creative writing for fifty years, and the author of twenty-four books.

--This text refers to the mp3_cd edition.