The USS Liberty: An Investigation Into the Attack, the Survivors, and the Official Story

On June 8, 1967, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, a United States Navy technical research ship operating in international waters during the Six-Day War. Thirty-four Americans were killed, 170 were wounded, and the ship was left with a massive torpedo hole, shredded topside equipment, and decks covered in dead and wounded sailors.

What followed was not only a battle for survival aboard a burning and listing vessel. It was also the beginning of one of the most disputed episodes in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship: an attack that Israel said was a tragic mistake, while many survivors, intelligence officials, naval officers, and later investigators insisted it was plainly deliberate.

This account reconstructs what happened to the Liberty on the day of the attack, what is known about the assault itself, why the official explanation remains contested, and how the political handling of the incident deepened the sense among survivors that the truth had been suppressed.

The Ship and Its Mission

The USS Liberty was an American intelligence collection ship assigned to gather signals intelligence in the eastern Mediterranean. In early June 1967, as war broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the ship was operating off the Sinai coast in international waters as part of a U.S. effort to monitor the rapidly changing battlefield and intercept regional communications.

The ship was not built for a duel with modern strike aircraft and torpedo boats. It carried only light defensive armament, and although technologically sophisticated in communications and intelligence work, it was effectively vulnerable if hit by a determined combined air and sea attack.

The historical record also shows that warnings intended to move the ship farther from the coast did not reach it in time. A Sixth Fleet message ordering Liberty to remain at a greater distance apparently was not received before the attack began, leaving the vessel where it was when Israeli forces struck that afternoon.

The Morning Before the Assault

The attack did not come out of nowhere. According to accounts cited by later commentators and to the Navy history timeline, the Liberty had been observed during the day by aircraft before the shooting started. The weather was clear, visibility was strong, and survivors have long pointed to these conditions as part of the reason they reject the claim that the ship could have been honestly misidentified.
That question matters because the core dispute in the entire case is not whether Israel attacked the ship. That is undisputed. The central issue is whether Israeli forces knew they were attacking an American vessel and continued anyway, or whether they mistook it for an Egyptian ship in the confusion of war.

Survivors have repeatedly said the ship was flying an American flag and was visibly identifiable in daylight. Some later accounts also describe the first flag being shot away and a larger one being raised, reinforcing the belief among crewmen that there was no plausible basis for repeated identification error once the attack was underway.

The Air Attack

At 1505 local military time, according to the Navy’s historical timeline, the Liberty was attacked by jet fighters that made multiple strafing runs. Other accounts describe rockets, cannon fire, and anti-personnel munitions slamming into the ship, destroying communications gear, killing topside personnel, and setting fires while crewmen struggled to send a distress call.

The napalm allegation is central to survivor memory and to later retellings of the attack. Contemporary and retrospective accounts describe Israeli aircraft returning to the ship and dropping napalm, spreading burning fuel across portions of the vessel and adding to the chaos on deck as medics and damage-control teams tried to rescue the wounded.

The image that emerges is not of a single mistaken burst of fire, but of an extended assault. The attack went on long enough to cripple antennas, jam communications, and isolate the ship while sailors tried desperately to keep it afloat and get word to the Sixth Fleet that an American vessel was under sustained attack.

The Torpedo Boats and the Hole in the Hull

About twenty minutes after the initial air assault, three motor torpedo boats closed on the ship. The Navy history states that five torpedoes were launched and one struck the starboard side, tearing a 39-foot-wide hole in the hull and killing 20 crewmen instantly in the intelligence spaces below.

That torpedo strike turned a devastating attack into a near-catastrophic sinking. Survivors were suddenly dealing not only with fire and mass casualties but with severe flooding, mounting structural damage, and the possibility that the ship would go down with hundreds of men aboard.

Some survivor accounts and later retellings also maintain that lifeboats lowered after the torpedo strike were machine-gunned. This accusation became one of the most inflammatory elements of the case because, if accurate, it would suggest an effort not merely to disable the ship but to leave no survivors behind to testify about what had happened.

Distress Calls, Recall Orders, and Rescue Delays

One of the ship’s greatest struggles during the attack was simply communicating. Communications were disrupted during the assault, but Liberty eventually succeeded in transmitting word that it was under attack. The Navy history records that Sixth Fleet ordered carriers to provide air cover and that aircraft were launched from USS America and USS Saratoga.

Then came one of the most bitterly remembered aspects of the incident: those aircraft were recalled. The Navy history confirms the recall, and later public commentary has treated it as extraordinary because it meant a U.S. ship under attack did not receive the fighter support that had been dispatched to protect it.

The reasons for the recall remain part of the wider controversy over Washington’s response. For survivors, the recalls became inseparable from the larger belief that saving the alliance with Israel took precedence over a full accounting for the men being killed in real time aboard an American ship.

The White House, McNamara, and the Alleged Order to Bury the Case

The most explosive claim in the post-attack history is that President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara intervened to shape the official response. A 2003 CBS report quoted retired Captain Ward Boston, senior legal counsel to the Navy’s original inquiry, as saying in a signed affidavit that Johnson and McNamara ordered those handling the review to conclude the attack was a case of mistaken identity despite evidence pointing the other way.

That affidavit is one of the strongest published pieces of evidence used by critics of the official account. Boston said he had remained silent for years because he had followed orders, but later felt compelled to say publicly that the investigation had been steered away from the truth.

The specific quote often circulated in Liberty literature — that the president said he did not care if the ship sank and did not want to embarrass an ally — is widely repeated in survivor and advocacy narratives, but the wording does not appear in the sources used here as a verified contemporaneous transcript. What is documented in these sources is the accusation by Boston that senior political leaders pushed the inquiry toward an accident finding, and the broader charge by former senior officers such as Admiral Thomas Moorer that the U.S. government placed Israeli interests ahead of its own servicemen.

The Official Israeli Explanation and the Challenge to It

Israel apologized after the attack and has long maintained that the Liberty was mistaken for an Egyptian vessel during the confusion of combat. That explanation was accepted publicly by the Johnson administration, at least in the sense that Washington did not formally accuse Israel of a deliberate attack.

But key parts of the factual record have kept the controversy alive. The ship was in daylight conditions, it had been under surveillance before the attack, helicopters later asked repeatedly whether the flag was American, and the attack involved multiple phases rather than a single split-second misjudgment.

Declassified material and later reporting have also fed suspicion. CNN reported in 2003 that newly released NSA tapes shed additional light on the attack, while public arguments from survivors and some former intelligence and military officials have consistently maintained that the ship’s identity should have been obvious.

The Human Cost on Board

The official casualty count remains stark: 34 Americans killed and 170 wounded out of a crew of 293. The dead included sailors, Marines, and a civilian from the National Security Agency. Dozens more would carry physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives.
The crew’s conduct during the attack was later recognized as heroic. The ship stayed afloat through extraordinary damage-control work, and commanding officer William L. McGonagle later received the Medal of Honor for his leadership during the assault despite his own wounds.

Yet for many survivors, medals and decorations never resolved the deeper grievance. Their complaint was not only that Israel attacked them; it was that Washington failed to defend them, failed to investigate fully in public, and left them with the sense that the lives of dead Americans had been subordinated to diplomatic convenience.

Why the Attack Still Matters

The USS Liberty remains politically radioactive because it sits at the intersection of war, intelligence secrecy, alliance management, and state credibility. It raises enduring questions about whether an allied government deliberately struck a U.S. ship, whether American leaders then suppressed the truth, and what that says about accountability when strategic interests collide with the deaths of servicemen.
For critics of the official version, the cumulative pattern is the point: prior surveillance, clear weather, repeated attack runs, napalm, torpedoes, allegations of attacks on lifeboats, delayed rescue, recalled aircraft, and a constrained inquiry. For defenders of Israel’s account, the attack remains a terrible wartime error compounded by confusion and communication failures during a fast-moving regional war.

What is beyond dispute is that on June 8, 1967, Israeli forces attacked an American ship, killed 34 Americans, wounded about 170 more, and left behind a controversy that has never truly closed. Every anniversary reopens the same unresolved question: whether the United States ever told the full truth about what happened to the men of the USS Liberty.

Bibliography

Video'It Was Intentional Murder By...': Thomas Massie Blasts Israel Over USS Liberty Attack In Congress

Hot topics

Finance

Marketing

Politics

Strategy