June 6,

The USS Liberty, a communications vessel attached to the Sixth Fleet, took on fuel and provisions at Rota, Spain, on June 2, 1967. She left that same day, under orders to proceed at top speed to an assigned position off the Sinai coast 800 miles to the east. She carried a crew of fifteen officers and 279 men. Three civilians identified cryptically as “technical representatives” from the Department of Defense (DOD), also were aboard. She arrived on station early on the morning of Thursday, the 8th. It was the fourth day of the six-day war between Israel and the Arab nations. That afternoon the Liberty was to undergo an attack without precedent in modern naval history. Thirty-four men would die, among them one of the DOD technicians; another 75 would be wounded. Well over a third of her total company would be casualties of an unprovoked assault in an undeclared war, victims of an inexplicable “mistake” on the Israelis’ part. Or so the incident is described. What follows here is neither an exposé of the Liberty’s clandestine role in the Mediterranean nor an explanation of the Israelis’ trigger-happy attack; these aspects of the affair are at present unknowable. What follows is no more than an account, drawn largely from official records, of what happened. This is, in brief, a sea story; nothing more. Yet sea stories always are worth the spinning, and the story of the Liberty, that blazing summer afternoon, speaks of enduring values that men too often forget: loyalty, and discipline, and courage under fire. As she chugged eastward across the Mediterranean, the Liberty surely was no thing of remarkable beauty. She had started her maritime life as a freighter of the old Victory class, her keel laid down in Portland, Oregon, late in February 1945. These were the days of Rosie the Riveter; merchant ships were not long in gestation. This product of the assembly line was delivered to the Maritime Commission a little more than two months later. During the closing months of World War II and for some years thereafter, she plied the Pacific Far East. She saw considerable service during the Korean conflict. In 1958, an old tub, she went into the Reserve Fleet, mothballed in Puget Sound, there to slumber for nearly five years.

Meanwhile, the Navy embarked upon a program of developing special communications ships. Three old Liberty freighters came out of mothballs, to emerge on the East Coast as Oxford, Georgetown and Jamestown. In the summer of 1963, two additional conversions were ordered from the aging Victories on the West Coast. The former Iran Victory returned to service in November of 1964 as the Belmont; and on December 30, 1964, the former SS Simmons Victory went – back to sea as the USS Liberty. By general acknowledgment, the five vessels make up our own fleet of “Russian trawlers.” In the short word, they are spy ships. We pick her up in early June: 455 feet long, 62 feet at the beam, her topside exhibiting a puzzling collection of masts and antennae, a “Big Ear’ turning inquisitively amidships, – assigned to the Sixth Fleet, in the Mediterranean. Down below, in the forward compartments, walled off from the operating crew, were the communications technicians. And with them, by general report, were specialists not merely from DOD, but more precisely from the super-secret National Security Agency. Among them, it is said, were experts in codecracking and cryptographic machinery. One can only guess at the devices the Liberty had aboard for receiving, recording, transmitting. It is known that the Big Ear could pick up messages from a hundred miles away. And now, with war briefly raging between Israel and the Arab nations, the Big Ear was ordered to listen off Sinai. In April of 1966, Commander William Loren McGonagle, USN, had assumed command of Liberty. Born in Kansas, he had been raised in Coachella, California. He was graduated in 1947 from the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, an ensign in the V-12 program. He served for nearly three years on a redar picket destroyer, then as executive officer on the minesweeper Kite on combat patrol off Korea. Tours of duty followed at San Francisco and Bremerhaven and Philadelphia; he was back at sea for two years on the heavy cruiser Rochester; then came his first command on Mataco, an ocean-going tug. He returned to shore for special training at the University of Idaho; spent two more years at sea, commanding the salvage vessel Reclaimer; then put in another two years of staff operations in the Pacific. Finally came his assignment to Liberty.

JJ

About the Author

James Jackson Kilpatrick

Featured Tags

Department of Defense

Military

War

National Security

The USS Liberty, a communications vessel attached to the Sixth Fleet, took on fuel and provisions at Rota, Spain, on June 2, 1967. She left that same day, under orders to proceed at top speed to an assigned position off the Sinai coast 800 miles to the east. She carried a crew of fifteen officers and 279 men. Three civilians identified cryptically as “technical representatives” from the Department of Defense (DOD), also were aboard. She arrived on station early on the morning of Thursday, the 8th. It was the fourth day of the six-day war between Israel and the Arab nations. That afternoon the Liberty was to undergo an attack without precedent in modern naval history. Thirty-four men would die, among them one of the DOD technicians; another 75 would be wounded. Well over a third of her total company would be casualties of an unprovoked assault in an undeclared war, victims of an inexplicable “mistake” on the Israelis’ part. Or so the incident is described. What follows here is neither an exposé of the Liberty’s clandestine role in the Mediterranean nor an explanation of the Israelis’ trigger-happy attack; these aspects of the affair are at present unknowable. What follows is no more than an account, drawn largely from official records, of what happened. This is, in brief, a sea story; nothing more. Yet sea stories always are worth the spinning, and the story of the Liberty, that blazing summer afternoon, speaks of enduring values that men too often forget: loyalty, and discipline, and courage under fire. As she chugged eastward across the Mediterranean, the Liberty surely was no thing of remarkable beauty. She had started her maritime life as a freighter of the old Victory class, her keel laid down in Portland, Oregon, late in February 1945. These were the days of Rosie the Riveter; merchant ships were not long in gestation. This product of the assembly line was delivered to the Maritime Commission a little more than two months later. During the closing months of World War II and for some years thereafter, she plied the Pacific Far East. She saw considerable service during the Korean conflict. In 1958, an old tub, she went into the Reserve Fleet, mothballed in Puget Sound, there to slumber for nearly five years.

Meanwhile, the Navy embarked upon a program of developing special communications ships. Three old Liberty freighters came out of mothballs, to emerge on the East Coast as Oxford, Georgetown and Jamestown. In the summer of 1963, two additional conversions were ordered from the aging Victories on the West Coast. The former Iran Victory returned to service in November of 1964 as the Belmont; and on December 30, 1964, the former SS Simmons Victory went – back to sea as the USS Liberty. By general acknowledgment, the five vessels make up our own fleet of “Russian trawlers.” In the short word, they are spy ships. We pick her up in early June: 455 feet long, 62 feet at the beam, her topside exhibiting a puzzling collection of masts and antennae, a “Big Ear’ turning inquisitively amidships, – assigned to the Sixth Fleet, in the Mediterranean. Down below, in the forward compartments, walled off from the operating crew, were the communications technicians. And with them, by general report, were specialists not merely from DOD, but more precisely from the super-secret National Security Agency. Among them, it is said, were experts in codecracking and cryptographic machinery. One can only guess at the devices the Liberty had aboard for receiving, recording, transmitting. It is known that the Big Ear could pick up messages from a hundred miles away. And now, with war briefly raging between Israel and the Arab nations, the Big Ear was ordered to listen off Sinai. In April of 1966, Commander William Loren McGonagle, USN, had assumed command of Liberty. Born in Kansas, he had been raised in Coachella, California. He was graduated in 1947 from the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, an ensign in the V-12 program. He served for nearly three years on a redar picket destroyer, then as executive officer on the minesweeper Kite on combat patrol off Korea. Tours of duty followed at San Francisco and Bremerhaven and Philadelphia; he was back at sea for two years on the heavy cruiser Rochester; then came his first command on Mataco, an ocean-going tug. He returned to shore for special training at the University of Idaho; spent two more years at sea, commanding the salvage vessel Reclaimer; then put in another two years of staff operations in the Pacific. Finally came his assignment to Liberty.