36th Anniversary of Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty

Link on this page for the NYT bestselling book, Body of Secrets:

http://www.ussliberty.org/


BODY OF SECRETS
JAMES BAMFORD

Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War through a New Century

Doubleday New york London Toronto Sydney Auckland
________________________________________________________________________________________________

PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
A division of Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10056

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are
trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bamford, James,
Body of secrets: anatomy of the ultra-secret National Security Agency:

from the Cold War through the dawn of a new century /
James Bamford.—1st ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. United States. National Security Agency—History. 2. Electronic
intelligence—United States—History. 3. Cryptography—United
States—History. I. Title.
UB256.U6 B56 2001
527.1273—dc21
00-058920

ISBN 0-585-49907-8
Book design by Maria Carella

Copyright © 2001 by James Bamford
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
May 2001
First Edition
15579 10 8642

_______________________________________________________________________________________

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My most sincere thanks to the many people who helped bring Body of
Secrets to life. Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, NSA's director,
had the courage to open the agency's door a crack. Major General John
E. Morrison (Retired), the dean of the U.S. intelligence community, was
always gracious and accommodating in pointing me in the right direc-
tions. Deborah Price suffered through my endless Freedom of Informa-
tion Act requests with professionalism and good humor. Judith Emmel
and Colleen Garrett helped guide me through the labyrinths of Crypto
City. Jack Ingram, Dr. David Hatch, Jennifer Wilcox, and Rowena
Clough of NSA's National Cryptologic Museum provided endless help in
researching the agency's past.

Critical was the help of those who fought on the front lines of the
cryptologic wars, including George A. Cassidy, Richard G. Schmucker,
Marvin Nowicki, John Arnold, Harry 0. Rakfeldt, David Parks, John
Mastro, Wayne Madsen, Aubrey Rrown, John R. DeChene, Bryce Lock-
wood, Richard McCarthy, Don McClarren, Stuart Russell, Richard E.
Kerr, Jr., James Miller, and many others. My grateful appreciation to all
those named and unnamed.

Thanks also to David J. Haight and Dwight E. Strandberg of the
Dwight D. Elsenhower Presidential Library and to Thomas E. Samoluk
of the U.S. Assassinations Records Review Board.

Finally I would like to thank those who helped give birth to Body
of Secrets, including Kris Dahl, my agent at International Creative
Management; Shawn Coyne, my editor at Doubleday; and Bill Thomas,
Bette Alexander, Jolanta Benal, Lauren Field, Chris Min, Timothy Hsu,
and Sean Desmond.
______________________________________________________________________________________


Chapter Seven - BLOOD



For four years NSA's "African Queen" lumbered inconspicuously up and
down the wild and troubled East African coast with the speed of an old
sea turtle. By the spring of 1967, the tropical waters had so encrusted her
bottom with sea life that her top speed was down to between three and
five knots. With Che Guevara long since gone back to Cuba, NSA's G
Group, responsible for the non-Communist portion of the planet, de-
cided to finally relieve the Valdez and send her back to Norfolk, where
she could be beached and scraped.

It was also decided to take maximum advantage of the situation by
bringing the ship home through the Suez Canal, mapping and charting
the radio spectrum as she crawled slowly past the Middle East and the
eastern Mediterranean. "Now, frankly," recalled Frank Raven, former
chief of G Group, "we didn't think at that point that it was highly de-
sirable to have a ship right in the Middle East; it would be too explosive
a situation. But the Valdez, obviously coming home with a foul bottom
and pulling no bones about it and being a civilian ship, could get away
with it." It took the ship about six weeks to come up through the canal
and limp down the North African coast past Israel, Egypt, and Libya.

About that same time, the Valdez's African partner, the USS Lib-
erty, was arriving off West Africa, following a stormy Atlantic crossing,
for the start of its fifth patrol. Navy Commander William L. McGona-
gle, its newest captain, ordered the speed reduced to four knots, the low-
est speed at which the Liberty could easily answer its rudder, and the
ship began its slow crawl south. On May 22, the Liberty pulled into
Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, for a four-day port call.

Half the earth away, behind cipher-locked doors at NSA, the talk
was not of possible African coups but of potential Middle East wars. The
indications had been growing for weeks, like swells before a storm. On
the Israeli-Syrian border, what started out as potshots at tractors had
quickly escalated to cannon fire between tanks. On May 17, Egypt (then
known as the United Arab Republic [UAR]) evicted UN peacekeepers
and then moved troops to its Sinai border with Israel. A few days later,
Israeli tanks were reported on the Sinai frontier, and the following day
Egypt ordered mobilization of 100,000 armed reserves. On May 25,
Gamal Abdel Nasser blockaded the Strait of Tiran, thereby closing the
Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping and prohibiting unescorted tankers
under any flag from reaching the Israeli port of Elat. The Israelis de-
clared the action "an act of aggression against Israel" and began a full-
scale mobilization.

As NSA's ears strained for information, Israeli officials began ar-
riving in Washington. Nasser, they said, was about to launch a lopsided
war against them and they needed American support. It was a lie. In
fact, as Menachem Begin admitted years later, it was Israel that was
planning a first strike attack on Egypt. "We . . . had a choice," Begin
said in 1982, when he was Israel's prime minister. "The Egyptian army
concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was re-
ally about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to
attack him."

Had Israel brought the United States into a first-strike war against
Egypt and the Arab world, the results might have been calamitous. The
USSR would almost certainly have gone to the defense of its Arab
friends, leading to a direct battlefield confrontation between U.S. and
Soviet forces. Such a dangerous prospect could have touched off a nu-
clear war.

With the growing possibility of U.S. involvement in a Middle East
war, the Joint Chiefs of Staff needed rapid intelligence on the ground
situation in Egypt. Above all, they wanted to know how many Soviet
troops, if any, were currently in Egypt and what kinds of weapons they
had. Also, if U.S. fighter planes were to enter the conflict, it was essen-
tial to pinpoint the locations of surface-to-air missile batteries. If troops
went in, it would be vital to know the locations and strength of oppos-
ing forces.

Under the gun to provide answers, officials at NSA considered
their options. Land-based stations, like the one in Cyprus, were too far
away to collect the narrow line-of-sight signals used by air defense radar,
fire control radar, microwave communications, and other targets.

Airborne Sigint platforms—Air Force C-150s and Navy EC-121s—
could collect some of this. But after allowing for time to and from the
"orbit areas," the aircrews would only have about five hours on sta-
tion—too short a time for the sustained collection that was required.
Adding aircraft was also an option but finding extra signals intelligence
planes would be very difficult. Also, downtime and maintenance on
those aircraft was greater than for any other kind of platform.

Finally there were the ships, which was the best option. Because
they could sail relatively close, they could pick up the most important
signals. Also, unlike the aircraft, they could remain on station for weeks
at a time, eavesdropping, locating transmitters, and analyzing the intel-
ligence. At the time, the USS Oxford, and Jamestown were in Southeast
Asia; the USS Georgetown and Belmont were eavesdropping off South
America; and the USNS Muller was monitoring signals off Cuba. That
left the USNS Faldez and the USS Liberty. The Valdez. had just com-
pleted a long mission and was near Gibraltar on its way back to the
United States. On the other hand, the Liberty, which was larger and
faster, had just begun a new mission and was relatively close, in port in
Abidjan.

Several months before, seeing the swells forming, NSA's G Group
had drawn up a contingency plan. It would position the Liberty in the
area of "LOLO" (longitude 0, latitude 0) in Africa's Gulf of Guinea, con-
centrating on targets in that area, but actually positioning her far
enough north that she could make a dash for the Middle East should the
need arise. Despite the advantages, not everyone agreed on the plan.
Frank Raven, the G Group chief, argued that it was too risky. "The ship
will be defenseless out there," he insisted. "If war breaks out, she'll be
alone and vulnerable. Either side might start shooting at her. ... I say
the ship should be left where it is." But he was overruled.

On May 25, having decided to send the Liberty to the Middle East,
G Group officials notified John Connell, NSA's man at the Joint Recon-
naissance Center. A unit within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the JRC was
responsible for coordinating air, sea, and undersea reconnaissance
operations. At 8:20 that spring evening, amid the noisy clatter of tele-
type machines, a technician tapped out a brief Flash message to the
Liberty:

MAKE IMMEDIATE PREPARATIONS TO GET UNDER-
WAY. WHEN READY FOR SEA ASAP DEPART PORT
ARIDJAN AND PROCEED REST POSSIRLE SPEED TO
ROTA SPAIN TO LOAD TECHNICAL SUPPORT MATE-
RIAL AND SUPPLIES. WHEN READY FOR SEA PRO-
CEED TO OPERATING AREA OFF PORT SAID.
SPECIFIC AREAS WILL FOLLOW.

In the coal-black Ivoirian night, an island of light lit up the end of the
long wooden pier where the USS Liberty lay docked. Reyond, in the har-
bor, small dots of red and green blinked like Christmas-tree lights as
hulking cargo ships slowly twisted with the gentle tide.

It was around 5:45 A.M. when Lieutenant Jim O'Connor woke to a
knock on his stateroom door. The duty officer squinted as he read the
message in the red glow of an emergency light. Still half asleep, he
mumbled a curse and quickly threw on his trousers. "It was a message
from the Joint Chiefs of Staff," O'Connor recalled telling his cabinmate.
"Whoever heard of JCS taking direct control of a ship?" Within minutes
reveille sounded and the Liberty began to shudder to life. Less than
three hours later, the modern skyline of Abidjan disappeared over the
stern as the ship departed Africa for the last time. Silhouetted against
the rising sun was the large moon-bounce antenna on the rear deck,
pointing straight up as if praying.

For eight days, at top speed, the bow cut a silvery path through
5,000 miles of choppy Atlantic Ocean. The need for linguists was espe-
cially critical on the Liberty, which, because of her West African targets,
carried only French and Portuguese language experts. Therefore, five
Arabic linguists—two enlisted Marines and three NSA civilians—were
ordered to Rota to rendezvous with the Liberty. Although the ship al-
ready had numerous Russian linguists, it was also decided to add one
more, a senior analytical specialist.

NSA had originally wanted to also put Hebrew linguists on the
ship, but the agency just didn't have enough. "I mean, my God," said

Frank Raven, "you're manning a crisis; where are you going to get these
linguists from? You go out and ask the nearest synagogue? We got to-
gether every linguist we could manage and we not only sent them to
Rota but then we have to back up every military station in the Middle
East—we're sending them into Athens, we're sending them into
Turkey—by God, if you can speak Arabic and you're in NSA you're on
a plane!"

As the Liberty steamed northward, Marine Sergeant Bryce Lock-
wood was strapped in a signals intelligence plane flying 50,000 feet
above the frigid Norwegian Sea off Iceland. Lockwood was an experi-
enced signals intelligence intercept operator and Russian linguist; he
and his crewmembers were shadowing the Russian Northern Fleet as it
conducted summer war games. But the ferret operation had been
plagued with problems. A number of the missions had been canceled as
a result of aircraft equipment failures and the one Lockwood was on in-
tercepted only about three minutes of Russian voice, which was so gar-
bled that no one could understand it.

During the operation, Lockwood was temporarily assigned to the
U.S. Navy air base at Keflavik, Iceland. But as the Russian exercise
came to an end, he headed back to his home base, the sprawling Navy
listening post at Bremerhaven, where he specialized in analyzing inter-
cepted Russian communications. The plane flew first to Rota, where he
was to catch another military flight back to Germany. However, be-
cause it was the Memorial Day weekend, few U.S. military flights were
taking off; he was forced to spend the night. That afternoon Lockwood
went to a picnic, had a few beers, and then went to bed early in his
quarters.

About 2:00 A.M. he was suddenly woken up by some loud pounding
on his door. Assuming it was just a few of his fellow Marines wanting to
party, he pulled the cover over his head and ignored it. But the banging
only got louder. Now angry, Lockwood finally threw open the door.
Standing in front of him in the dim light was a sailor from the duty of-
fice. "I have a message with your name on it from the Joint Chiefs of
Staff," he said somewhat quizzically. "You're assigned to ]oin the USS
Liberty at 0600 hours. You better get up and pack your seabag." It was a
highly unusual order, a personal message from the JCS at two in the
morning; Lockwood had little time to ponder it.

It was just an hour or so after dawn on the first of June when the
Liberty slid alongside a pier in Rota. Already waiting for them were
Lockwood and the five Arabic linguists. A short time later, thick black
hoses, like boa constrictors, disgorged 580,000 gallons of fuel into the
ship's tanks while perspiring sailors in dungarees struggled to load crates
of vegetables and other food. Several technicians also retrieved boxes of
double-wrapped packages and brought them aboard. The packages con-
tained supersensitive signals intelligence data left for them by the
Valdez as she passed through Rota on the way back to Norfolk. Included
were critical details on Middle East communication patterns picked up
as the Valdez transited the area: "who was communicating on what
links—Teletype, telephone, microwave, you name it," said Raven.

As she steamed west across the Mediterranean to Rota, the Valdez
had also conducted "hearability studies" for NSA in order to help deter-
mine the best places from which to eavesdrop. Off the eastern end of
Crete, the Valdez discovered what amounted to a "duct" in the air, a sort
of aural pipeline that led straight to the Middle East. "You can sit in
Crete and watch the Cairo television shows," said Raven. "If you're over
flat water, basically calm water, the communications are wonderful." He
decided to park the Liberty there.

Rut the Joint Chiefs of Staff had other ideas. In Rota, Commander
McGonagle received orders to deploy just off the coasts of Israel and
Egypt but not to approach closer than twelve and a half nautical miles
to Egypt or six and a half to Israel. Following some repairs to the trou-
blesome dish antenna, the Liberty cast off from Rota just after noon on
June 2.

Sailing at seventeen knots, its top speed, the Liberty overtook and
passed three Soviet ships during its transit of the Strait of Gibraltar.
From there it followed the North African coastline, keeping at least thir-
teen miles from shore. Three days after departing Rota, on June 5, as the
Liberty was passing south of Sicily, Israel began its long-planned strike
against its neighbors and the Arab-Israeli war began.

On June 5, 1967, at 7:45 A.M. Sinai time (1:45 A.M. in Washington, B.C.),
Israel launched virtually its entire air force against Egyptian airfields,
destroying, within eighty minutes, the majority of Egypt's air power. On
the ground, tanks pushed out in three directions across the Sinai toward
the Suez Canal. Fighting was also initiated along the Jordanian and Syr-
ian borders. Simultaneously, Israeli officials put out false reports to the
press saying that Egypt had launched a major attack against them and
that they were defending themselves.

In Washington, June 4 had been a balmy Sunday. President John-
son's national security adviser, Walt Rostow, even stayed home from the
office and turned off his bedroom light at 11:00 P.M. But he turned it
back on at 2:50 A.M. when the phone rang, a little over an hour after Is-
rael launched its attack. "We have an FBIS [Foreign Broadcast Infor-
mation Service] report that the UAR has launched an attack on Israel,"
said a husky male voice from the White House Situation Room. "Go to
your intelligence sources and call me back," barked Rostow. Ten minutes
later, presumably after checking with NSA and other agencies, the aide
called back and confirmed the press story. "Okay, I'm coming in," Ros-
tow said, and then asked for a White House car to pick him up.

As the black Mercury quickly maneuvered through Washington's
empty streets, Rostow ticked off in his mind the order in which he
needed answers. At the top of the list was discovering exactly how the
war had started. A few notches down was deciding when to wake the
president.

The car pulled into the Pennsylvania Avenue gate at 5:25 and Ros-
tow was quickly on the phone with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who
was still at home. "I assume you've received the Flash," he said. They
agreed that, if the facts were as grim as reported, Johnson should be
awakened in about an hour. Intelligence reports quickly began arriving
indicating that a number of Arab airfields appeared to be inoperative
and the Israelis were pushing hard and fast against the Egyptian air
force.

Sitting at the mahogany conference table in the Situation Room, a
map of Vietnam on the wall, Rostow picked up a phone. "I want to get
through to the President," he said. "I wish him to be awakened." Three
stories above, Lyndon Johnson picked up the phone next to his carved
wood bedstead. "Yes," he said.

"Mr. President, I have the following to report." Rostow got right to
business. "We have information that Israel and the UAR are at war." For
the next seven minutes, the national security adviser gave Johnson the
shorthand version of what the United States then knew.

About the same time in Tel Aviv, Foreign Minister Abba Eban
summoned U.S. Ambassador Walworth Barbour to a meeting in his of-
fice. Building an ever larger curtain of lies around Israel's true activities
and intentions, Eban accused Egypt of starting the war. Barbour quickly
sent a secret Flash message back to Washington. "Early this morning,"
he quoted Eban, "Israelis observed Egyptian units moving in large num-
bers toward Israel and in fact considerable force penetrated Israeli terri-
tory and clashed with Israeli ground forces. Consequently, GOI
[Government of Israel] gave order to attack." Eban told Barbour that his
government intended to protest Egypt's action to the UN Security Coun-
cil. "Israel is [the] victim of Nasser's aggression," he said.

Eban then went on to lie about Israel's goals, which all along had
been to capture as much territory as possible. "GOI has no rpt [repeat]
no intention taking advantage of situation to enlarge its territory. That
hopes peace can be restored within present boundaries." Finally, after
half an hour of deception, Eban brazenly asked the United States to go
up against the USSR on Israel's behalf. Israel, Barbour reported, "asks
our help in restraining any Soviet initiative." The message was received
at the White House at two minutes before six in the morning.

About two hours later, in a windowless office next to the War
Room in the Pentagon, a bell rang five or six times, bringing everyone
to quick attention. A bulky gray Russian Teletype suddenly sprang to
life and keys began pounding out rows of Cyrillic letters at sixty-six
words a minute onto a long white roll of paper. For the first time, an ac-
tual on-line encrypted message was stuttering off the Moscow-to-Wash-
ington hot line. As it was printing, a "presidential translator"—a
military officer expert in Russian—stood over the machine and dictated
a simultaneous rough translation to a Teletype operator. He in turn sent
the message to the State Department, where another translator joined in
working on a translation on which both U.S. experts agreed,

The machine was linked to similar equipment in a room in the
Kremlin, not far from the office of the chairman of the Council of Min-
isters of the USSR. Known formally as the Washington—Moscow Emer-
gency Communications Link (and in Moscow as the Molink), the hot
line was activated at 6:50 P.M. on August 50, 1965, largely as a result of
the Cuban missile crisis.

The message that June morning in 1967 was from Premier Alexei
Kosygin. The Pentagon and State Department translators agreed on the
translation:

Dear Mr. President,

Having received information concerning the military clashes
between Israel and the United Arab Republic, the Soviet
Government is convinced that the duty of all great powers is
to secure the immediate cessation of the military conflict.

The Soviet Government has acted and will act in this
direction. We hope that the Government of the United States
will also act in the same manner and will exert appropriate
influence on the Government of Israel particularly since you
have all opportunities of doing so. This is required in the
highest interest of peace.

Respectfully,
A. Kosygin

Once the presidential translator finished the translation, he rushed
it over to the general in charge of the War Room, who immediately
called Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara several floors above.
McNamara had arrived in his office about an hour earlier. "Premier
Kosygin is on the hot line and asks to speak to the president," the War
Room general barked. "What should I tell him?"

"Why are you calling me?" McNamara asked.

"Because the hot line ends in the Pentagon," the general huffed.
(McNamara later admitted that he had had no idea that the connection
ended a short distance away from him.) "Patch the circuit over to the
White House Situation Room, and I'll call the president," McNamara
ordered.

McNamara, not having been in on the early morning White House
calls, assumed Johnson would still be sleeping, but he put the call
through anyway. A sergeant posted outside the presidential bedroom
picked up the phone. "The president is asleep and doesn't like to be
awakened," he told the Pentagon chief, not realizing that Johnson had
been awake since 4:50 A.M. discussing the crisis. "I know that, but wake
him up," McNamara insisted.

"Mr. President," McNamara said, "the hot line is up and Kosygin
wants to speak to you. What should we say?"

"My God," Johnson replied, apparently perplexed, "what should
we say?" McNamara offered an idea: "I suggest I tell him you will be in
the Situation Room in fifteen minutes. In the meantime, I'll call Dean
and we'll meet you there." Within half an hour, an American-supplied
Teletype was cranking out English letters in the Kremlin. Johnson told
Kosygin that the United States did not intend to intervene in the con-
flict. About a dozen more hot-line messages followed over the next few
weeks.

As the first shots of the war were being fired across the desert wasteland,
NSA had a box seat. A fat Air Force C-150 airborne listening post was
over the eastern Mediterranean flying a figure-eight pattern off Israel
and Egypt. Later the plane landed back at its base, the Greek air force
section of Athens International Airport, with nearly complete coverage
of the first hours of the war.

From the plane, the intercept tapes were rushed to the processing
center, designated USA-512J by NSA. Set up the year before by the U.S.
Air Force Security Service, NSA's air arm, it was to process intercepts—
analyzing the data and attacking lower-level ciphers—produced by Air
Force eavesdropping missions throughout the Mediterranean, North
Africa, and the Middle East. Unfortunately, they were not able to listen
to the tapes of the war immediately because they had no Hebrew lin-
guists. However, an NSA Hebrew linguist support team was at that mo-
ment winging its way to Athens. (To hide their mission and avoid the
implication of spying on Israel, Hebrew linguists were always referred
to as "special Arabic" linguists, even within NSA.)

Soon after the first CRITIC message arrived at NSA, an emergency
notification was sent to the U.S. Navy's listening post at Rota. The base
was the Navy's major launching site for airborne eavesdropping missions
over the Mediterranean area. There the Navy's airborne Sigint unit,
VQ-2, operated large four-engine aircraft that resembled the civilian
passenger plane known as the Constellation, an aircraft with graceful,
curving lines and a large three-section tail. Nicknamed the Willy Victor,
the EC-121M was slow, lumbering, and ideal for eavesdropping—capa-
ble of long, twelve- to eighteen-hour missions, depending on such fac-
tors as weather, fuel, altitude, intercept activity, and crew fatigue.

Within several hours of the tasking message, the EC-121 was air-
borne en route to Athens, from where the missions would be staged. A
few days before, a temporary Navy signals intelligence processing center
had been secretly set up at the Athens airport near the larger U.S. Air
Force Sigint facility. There, intercepts from the missions were to be an-
alyzed and the ciphers attacked.

After landing, the intercept operators were bused to the Hotel
Seville in Iraklion near the Athens airport. The Seville was managed by
a friendly Australian and a Greek named Zina; the crew liked the fact
that the kitchen and bar never closed. But they had barely reached the
lobby of the hotel when they received word they were to get airborne as
soon as possible. "We were in disbelief and mystified," said one member
of the crew. "Surely, our taskers did not expect us to fly into the combat
zone in the dead of the nightl" That was exactly what they expected.

A few hours later, the EC-121 was heading east into the dark night
sky. Normally the flight took about two or three hours. Once over the
eastern Mediterranean, they would maintain a dogleg track about
twenty-five to fifty miles off the Israeli and Egyptian coasts at an alti-
tude of between 12,000 and 18,000 feet. The pattern would take them
from an area northeast of Alexandria, Egypt, east toward Port Said and
the Sinai to the El Arish area, and then dogleg northeast along the Is-
raeli coast to a point west of Beirut, Lebanon. The track would then be
repeated continuously. Another signals intelligence plane, the EA5B,
could fly considerably higher, above 50,000 to 55,000 feet.

On board the EC-121 that night was Navy Chief Petty Officer
Marvin E. Nowicki, who had the unusual qualification of being a He-
brew and Russian linguist. "I vividly recall this night being pitch black,
no stars, no moon, no nothing," he said. "The mission commander con-
sidered the precariousness of our flight. He thought it more prudent to
avoid the usual track. If we headed east off the coast of Egypt toward
Israel, we would look, on radar, to the Israelis like an incoming attack
aircraft from Egypt. Then, assuming the Israelis did not attack us, when
we reversed course, we would then appear on Egyptian radar like Israeli
attack aircraft inbound. It, indeed, was a very dangerous and precarious
situation."

Instead, the mission commander decided to fly between Crete and
Cyprus and then head diagonally toward El Arish in the Sinai along an
established civilian air corridor. Upon reaching a point some twenty-five
miles northeast of El Arish, he would reverse course and begin their
orbit.

"When we arrived on station after midnight, needless to say the
'pucker factor' was high," recalled Nowicki; "the crew was on high,
nervous alert. Nobody slept in the relief bunks on that flight. The night
remained pitch black. What in the devil were we doing out here in the
middle of a war zone, was a question I asked myself several times over
and over during the flight. The adrenaline flowed."

In the small hours of the morning, intercept activity was light.
"The Israelis were home rearming and reloading for the next day's at-
tacks, while the Arabs were bracing themselves for the next onslaught
come daylight and contemplating some kind of counterattack," said
Nowicki. "Eerily, our Comint and Elint positions were quiet." But that
changed as the early-morning sun lit up the battlefields. "Our receivers
came alive with signals mostly from the Israelis as they began their
second day of attacks," Nowicki remembered. Around him, Hebrew
linguists were furiously "gisting"—summarizing—the conversations
between Israeli pilots, while other crew members attempted to combine
that information with signals from airborne radar obtained through
electronic intelligence.

From their lofty perch, they eavesdropped like electronic voyeurs.
The NSA recorders whirred as the Egyptians launched an abortive air
attack on an advancing Israeli armored brigade in the northern Sinai,
only to have their planes shot out of the air by Israeli delta-wing Mirage
aircraft. At one point Nowicki listened to his first midair shootdown as
an Egyptian Sukhoi-7 aircraft was blasted from the sky. "We monitored
as much as we could but soon had to head for Athens because of low
fuel," he said. "We were glad to get the heck out of there."

As they headed back, an Air Force C-150 flying listening post was
heading out to relieve them.

Down below, in the Mediterranean, the Liberty continued its slow jour-
ney toward the war zone as the crew engaged in constant general quar-
ters drills and listened carefully for indications of danger. The Navy
sent out a warning notice to all ships and aircraft in the area to keep at
least 100 nautical miles away from the coasts of Lebanon, Syria, Israel,
and Egypt. But the Liberty was on an espionage mission; unless specif-
ically ordered to change course, Commander McGonagle would con-
tinue steaming full speed ahead. Meanwhile, the Soviet navy had
mobilized their fleet. Some twenty Soviet warships with supporting
vessels and an estimated eight or nine submarines sailed toward the
same flashpoint.

On hearing that war had started, Gene Sheck, an official in NSA's
K Group section, which was responsible for managing the various mo-
bile collection platforms, became increasingly worried about the Lib-
erty. Responsibility for the safety of the ship, however, had been taken
out of NSA's hands by the JCS and given to the Joint Reconnaissance
Center. Nevertheless, Sheck took it upon himself to remind NSA's rep-
resentative at the JRC, John Connell, that during the Cuban missile cri-
sis five years earlier, the Oxford had been pulled back from the Havana
area. Then he asked if any consideration was being given to doing the
same for the Liberty. Connell spoke to the ship movement officer at the
JRC but they refused to take any action.

Although analysts in K Group knew of the Liberty's plight, those
in G Group did not. Thus it was not until the morning of June 7 that an
analyst rushed into Frank Raven's office and asked incredulously, "For
God's sake, do you know where the Liberty is?" Raven, believing she was
sitting off the east end of Crete as originally planned, had barely begun
to answer when the analyst blurted out, "They've got her heading
straight for the beach!" By then the Liberty was only about ten hours
from her scheduled patrol area, a dozen miles off Egypt's Sinai Desert.

"At this point," recalled Raven, "I ordered a major complaint
[protest] to get the Liberty the hell out of there! As far as we [NSA] were
concerned, there was nothing to be gained by having her in there that
close, nothing she could do in there that she couldn't do where we
wanted her. . . . She could do everything that the national require-
ment called for [from the coast of Crete]. Somebody wanted to listen to
some close tactical program or some communications or something
which nobody in the world gave a damn about—local military base,
local commander. We were listening for the higher echelons. . . . Hell,
you don't want to hear them move the tugboats around and such, you
want to know what the commanding generals are saying."

The JRC began reevaluating the Liberty's safety as the warnings
mounted. The Egyptians began sending out ominous protests complain-
ing that U.S. personnel were secretly communicating with Israel and
were possibly providing military assistance. Egypt also charged that U.S.
aircraft had participated in the Israeli air strikes. The charges greatly
worried American officials, who feared that the announcements might
provoke a Soviet reaction. Then the Chief of Naval Operations ques-
tioned the wisdom of the Liberty assignment.

As a result of these new concerns, the JRC sent out a message in-
dicating that the Liberty's operational area off the Sinai was not set in
stone but was "for guidance only." Also, it pulled the ship back from 12Va
to 20 nautical miles from the coast. By now it was about 6:50 P.M. in
Washington, half past midnight on the morning of June 8 in Egypt. The
Liberty had already entered the outskirts of its operational area and the
message never reached her because of an error by the U.S. Army Com-
munications Center at the Pentagon.

About an hour later, with fears mounting, the JRC again changed
the order, now requiring that Liberty approach no closer than 100 miles
to the coasts of Egypt and Israel. Knowing the ship was getting danger-
ously close, Major Breedlove in the JRC skipped the normal slow mes-
sage system and called Navy officials in Europe over a secure telephone
to tell them of the change. He said a confirming message would follow.
Within ten minutes the Navy lieutenant in Europe had a warning mes-
sage ready.

But rather than issue the warning, a Navy captain in Europe in-
sisted on waiting until he received the confirmation message. That and
a series of Keystone Kops foul-ups by both the Navy and Army—which
again misrouted the message, this time to Hawaii—delayed sending the
critical message for an incredible sixteen and a half hours. By then it
was far too late. More than twenty years had gone by since the foul-up
of warning messages at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, yet it
was as if no lesson had ever been learned.

At 5:14 A.M. on Thursday, June 8, the first rays of sun spilled softly over
the Sinai's blond waves of sand. A little more than a dozen miles north,
in the choppy eastern Mediterranean, the Liberty continued eastward
like a lost innocent, 600 miles from the nearest help and oblivious to at
least five warning messages it never received. The "Plan of the Day"
distributed throughout the ship that morning gave no hint of what was
in store. "Uniform of the Day" for officers was "tropical wash khaki"
and, for enlisted men, "clean dungarees." The soda fountain, crewmem-
bers were informed, would be open from 6:00 P.M. until 7:50 P.M.

Just after sunup, Duty Officer John Scott noticed a flying boxcar
making several circles near the ship and then departing in the direction
of Tel Aviv. Down in the NSA spaces, Chief Melvin Smith apparently
also picked up signals from the plane, later identified as Israeli. Shortly
after the plane departed, he called up Scott and asked if he had had a
close air contact recently. Scott told him he had, and Smith asked which
direction it had gone in. "Tel Aviv," said Scott. "Fine, that's all I want to
know," replied Smith. Scott glanced up at the American flag, ruffling in
a twelve-knot breeze, to check the wind direction, and then scanned the
vast desert a little more than a dozen miles away. "Fabulous morning,"
he said without dropping the stubby binoculars from. his eyes.

But the calmness was like quicksand—deceptive, inviting, and
friendly, until too late. As the Liberty passed the desert town of El Arish,
it was closely watched. About half a mile away and 4,000 feet above was
an Israeli reconnaissance aircraft. At 6:05 A.M. the naval observer on the
plane reported back to Israeli naval headquarters, "What we could see
was the letters written on that ship," he said. "And we gave these letters
to the ground control." The letters were "GTR-5," the Liberty's identi-
fication. "GTR" stood for "General Technical Research"—a cover des-
ignation for NSA's fleet of spy ships.

Having passed El Arish, the Liberty continued on toward the Gaza
Strip. Then, about 8:50 A.M., it made a strange, nearly 180-degree turn
back in the direction of El Arish and slowed down to just five knots. The
reason for this maneuver was that the ship had at last reached Point
Alpha, the point on the map where it was to begin its back-and-forth
dogleg patrol of the Sinai coast.

For some time, Commander McGonagle had been worried about
the ship's proximity to the shore and about the potential for danger. He
called to his cabin Lieutenant Commander David E. Lewis, head of the
NSA operation on the ship. "How would it affect our mission if we
stayed farther out at sea?" McGonagle asked. "It would hurt us, Cap-
tain," Lewis replied. "We want to work in the UFH [ultra-high-fre-
quency] range. That's mostly line-of-sight stuff. If we're over the
horizon we might as well be back in Abidjan. It would degrade our mis-
sion by about eighty percent." After thinking for a few minutes, McGon-
agle made his decision, "Okay," he said. "We'll go all the way in."

The reconnaissance was repeated at approximately thirty-minute
intervals throughout the morning. At one point, a boxy Israeli air force
Noratlas NORD 2501 circled the ship around the starboard side, pro-
ceeded forward of the ship, and headed back toward the Sinai. "It had
a big Star of David on it and it was flying just a little bit above our
mast on the ship," recalled crewmember Larry Weaver. "We really
thought his wing was actually going to clip one of our masts. . . .
And I was actually able to wave to the co-pilot, a fellow on the right-
hand side of the plane. He waved back, and actually smiled at me. I
could see him that well. I didn't think anything of that because they
were our allies. There's no question about it. They had seen the ship's
markings and the American flag. They could damn near see my rank.
The under way flag was definitely flying. Especially when you're that
close to a war zone." '

By 9:50 A.M. the minaret at El Arish could be seen with the naked
eye, like a solitary mast in a sea of sand. Visibility in the crystal clear air
was twenty-five miles or better. Through a pair of binoculars, individual
buildings were clearly visible a brief thirteen miles away. Commander
McGonagle thought the tower "quite conspicuous" and used it as a nav-
igational aid to determine the ship's position throughout the morning
and afternoon. The minaret was also identifiable by radar.

Although no one on the ship knew it at the time, the Liberty had
suddenly trespassed into a private horror. At that very moment, near the
minaret at El Arish, Israeli forces were engaged in a criminal slaughter.

From the first minutes of its surprise attack, the Israeli air force
had owned the skies over the Middle East. Within the first few hours, Is-
raeli jets pounded twenty-five Arab air bases ranging from Damascus in
Syria to an Egyptian field, loaded with bombers, far up the Nile at
Luxor. Then, using machine guns, mortar fire, tanks, and air power, the
Israeli war machine overtook the Jordanian section of Jerusalem as well
as the west bank of the Jordan River, and torpedo boats captured the key
Red Sea cape of Sharm al-Sheikh.

In the Sinai, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers pushed
toward the Suez Canal along all three of the roads that crossed the
desert, turning the burning sands into a massive killing field. One Israeli
general estimated that Egyptian casualties there ranged from 7,000 to
10,000 killed, compared with 275 of his own troops. Few were spared as
the Israelis pushed forward.

A convoy of Indian peacekeeper soldiers, flying the blue United
Nations flag from their jeeps and trucks, were on their way to Gaza
when they met an Israeli tank column on the road. As the Israelis ap-
proached, the UN observers pulled aside and stopped to get out of the
way. One of the tanks rotated its turret and opened fire from a few feet
away. The Israeli tank then rammed its gun through the windshield of
an Indian jeep and decapitated the two men inside. When other Indians
went to aid their comrades, they were mowed down by machine-gun
fire. Another Israeli tank thrust its gun into a UN truck, lifted it, and
smashed it to the ground, killing or wounding all the occupants. In Gaza,
Israeli tanks blasted six rounds into UN headquarters, which was flying
the UN flag. Fourteen UN members were killed in these incidents. One
Indian officer called it deliberate, cold-blooded killing of unarmed UN
soldiers. It would be a sign of things to come.

By June 8, three days after Israel launched the war, Egyptian pris-
oners in the Sinai had become nuisances. There was no place to house
them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport
them to prison camps. But there was another way to deal with them.

As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on
surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a
slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow
of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian
prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with ma-
chine guns until the pale desert sand turned red. Then they forced other
prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves. "I saw a line of prisoners,
civilians and military," said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of those who dug
the graves, "and they opened fire at them all at once. When they were
dead, they told us to bury them." Nearby, another group of Israelis
gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to
cover them with sand.

In still another incident at El Arish, the Israeli journalist Gabi
Bron saw about 150 Egyptian POWs sitting on the ground, crowded to-
gether with their hands held at the backs of their necks. "The Egyptian
prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot
them to death," Bron said. "I witnessed the executions with my own
eyes on the morning of June eighth, in the airport area of El Arish."

The Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, who worked in the
army's history department after the war, said he and other officers col-
lected testimony from dozens of soldiers who admitted killing POWs.
According to Yitzhaki, Israeli troops killed, in cold blood, as many as
1,000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai, including some 400 in the sand
dunes of El Arish.

Ironically, Ariel Sharon, who was capturing territory south of El
Arish at the time of the slaughter, had been close to massacres during
other conflicts. One of his men during the Suez crisis in 1956, Arye Biro,
now a retired brigadier general, recently admitted the unprovoked
killing of forty-nine prisoners of war in the Sinai in 1956. "I had my
Karl Gustav [weapon] I had taken from the Egyptian. My officer had an
Uzi. The Egyptian prisoners were sitting there with their faces turned
to us. We turned to them with our loaded guns and shot them. Magazine
after magazine. They didn't get a chance to react." At another point,
Biro said, he found Egyptian soldiers prostrate with thirst. He said that
after taunting them by pouring water from his canteen into the sand, he
killed them. "If I were to be put on trial for what I did," he said, "then
it would be necessary to put on trial at least one-half the Israeli army,
which, in similar circumstances, did what I did." Sharon, who says he
learned of the 1956 prisoner shootings only after they happened, refused
to say whether he took any disciplinary action against those involved, or
even objected to the killings.

Later in his career, in 1982, Sharon would be held "indirectly re-
sponsible" for the slaughter of about 900 men, women, and children by
Lebanese Christian militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps fol-
lowing Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Despite his grisly past, or maybe
because of it, in October 1998 he was appointed minister of foreign af-
fairs in the cabinet of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sharon later took over the conservative Likud Party. On September 28,
2000, he set off the bloodiest upheaval between Israeli forces and Pales-
tinians in a generation, which resulted in a collapse of the seven-year
peace process. The deadly battles, which killed over 200 Palestinians and
several Israeli soldiers, broke out following a provocative visit by Sharon
to the compound known as Haram as-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) to Mus-
lims and Temple Mount to Jews. Addressing the question of Israeli war
crimes, Sharon said in 1995, "Israel doesn't need this, and no one can
preach to us about it—no one."

Of the 1967 Sinai slaughter, Aryeh Yitzhaki said, "The whole
army leadership, including [then] Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and
Chief of Staff [and later Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin and the gener-
als knew about these things. No one bothered to denounce them."
Yitzhaki said not only were the massacres known, but senior Israeli of-
ficials tried their best to cover them up by not releasing a report he had
prepared on the murders in 1968.

The extensive war crimes were just one of the deep secrets Israel
had sought to conceal since the start of the conflict. From the very be-
ginning, an essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have
been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of
lies. Lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies
to the American president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the
press, lies to the public. Thus, as the American naval historian Dr.
Richard K. Smith noted in an article on the Liberty for United States
Naval Institute Proceedings, "any instrument which sought to penetrate
this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal 'fog of war'
would have to be frustrated."

Into this sea of lies, deception, and slaughter sailed the USS Lib-
erty, an enormous American spy factory loaded with $10.2 million
worth of the latest eavesdropping gear. At 10:59 A.M., the minaret at El
Arish was logged at seventeen miles away, at bearing 189 degrees. Sail-
ing at five knots, the Liberty was practically treading water.

By 10:55 A.M., senior Israeli officials knew for certain that they had
an American electronic spy in their midst. Not only was the ship clearly
visible to the forces at El Arish, it had been positively identified by Is-
raeli naval headquarters.

The Israeli naval observer on the airborne reconnaissance mission
that had earlier observed the Liberty passed on the information to Com-
mander Pinchas Pinchasy, the naval liaison officer at Israeli air force
headquarters. "I reported this detection to Naval Headquarters," said
Pinchasy, "and I imagine that Naval Headquarters received this report
from the other channel, from the Air Force ground control as well." Pin-
chasy had pulled out a copy of the reference book Jane's Fighting Ships
and looked up the "GTR.-5" designation. He then sent a report to the
acting chief of naval operations at Israeli navy headquarters in Haifa.
The report said that the ship cruising slowly off El Arish was "an elec-
tromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy, named Liberty,
whose marking was GTR.-5."

Not only did the ship have "GTR-5" painted broadly on both sides
of its bow and stern, it also had its name painted in large, bold, black let-
ters: "U.S.S. LIBERTY."

Although no one on the Liberty knew it, they were about to have
some company.

"We were 'wheels in the well' from Athens about mid-morning," said
Marvin Nowicki, who was aboard the EC-121 headed back to the war
zone. In the rear NSA spaces, the crew strapped on their seat belts. It was
an everyday routine. The VQ-2 squadron would fly, on average, six to
twelve missions per month against Israel and the Arab countries of the
Middle East. Exceptions took place when higher-priority Soviet targets
came up, for example when the Soviet fleet conducted exercises in the
Mediterranean or Norwegian Sea. Nowicki himself accumulated over
2,000 hours in such spy planes over his career.

Back at Athens Airport, the 512J processing center had been beefed
up to help analyze the increasing flow of intercepts. Three NSA civilian
Hebrew linguists had arrived and were attacking the backlog of record-
ing tapes. The pile had grown especially large because the Air Force had
no Hebrew linguists for their C-150 Sigint aircraft. "As it turns out," said
Nowicki, "they were blindly copying any voice signal that sounded He-
brew. They were like vacuum, cleaners, sucking every signal onto their
recorders, with the intercept operators not having a clue as to what the
activity represented."

In charge of the half-dozen Elint specialists aboard the EC-121,
searching for radar signals and analyzing their cryptic sounds, was the
evaluator, who would attempt to make sense of all the data. Elsewhere,
several intercept operators were assigned to monitor VHF and UHF
radio-telephone signals. In addition to Chief Nowicki, who could trans-
late both Hebrew and Russian, there were two other Hebrew and two
Arabic linguists on board.

Soon after wheels-up from. Athens, a security curtain was pulled
around the "spook spaces" to hide the activity from members of the
flight crew who did not have a need to know. In front of the voice-in-
tercept operators were twin UHF/VHF receivers, essential because the
Israelis mostly used UHF transceivers, while the Arabs used Soviet VHF
equipment. To record all the traffic, they had a four-track voice recorder
with time dubs and frequency notations. Chief Nowicki, the supervisor,
had an additional piece of equipment: a spectrum analyzer to view the
radio activity in the form of "spikes" between 100 to 150 megahertz and
200 to 500 megahertz. It was very useful in locating new signals.

About noon, as they came closer to their orbit area, the activity
began getting hectic. Fingers twisted large black dials, sometimes
quickly and sometimes barely at all. "When we arrived within intercept
range of the battles already in progress," Nowicki recalled, "it was ap-
parent that the Israelis were pounding the Syrians on the Golan
Heights. Soon all our recorders were going full blast, with each position
intercepting signals on both receivers."

In addition to recording the voices of the Israeli and Egyptian
troops and pilots, the linguists were frantically writing down gists of
voice activity on logs and shouting to the evaluator what they were
recording. The evaluator in turn would then direct his Elint people to
search for corresponding radar activity. At other times, the Elint opera-
tors would intercept a radar signal from a target and tip off the linguists
to start searching for correlating voice activity. A key piece of equipment
was known as Big Look. It enabled the Elint operators to intercept, em-
ulate, and identify the radar signals, and to reverse-locate them—to
trace them back to their source.

Sixty miles north of Tel Aviv, atop Mount Carmel, Israel's naval com-
mand post occupied a drab former British Royal Air Force base built in
the 1920s. Known as Stella Marts, it contained a high-ceilinged war
room with a large map of Israel and its coastal areas on a raised plat-
form. Standing above it, senior naval officials could see the location of
ships in the area, updated as air reconnaissance passed on the changing
positions of various ships. Since dawn that morning, the Liberty had
been under constant observation. "Between five in the morning and one
in the afternoon," said one Liberty deck officer, "I think there were thir-
teen times that we were circled."

About noon at Stella Marts, as the Liberty was again in sight of El
Arish and while the massacres were taking place, a report was received
from an army commander there that a ship was shelling the Israelis
from the sea. But that was impossible. The only ship in the vicinity of
El Arish was the Liberty, and she was eavesdropping, not shooting. As
any observer would immediately have recognized, the four small defen-
sive 50mm machine guns were incapable of reaching anywhere near the
shore, thirteen miles away, let alone the buildings of El Arish. In fact,
the maximum effective range of such guns was just 2,200 yards, a little
over a mile. And the ship itself, a tired old World War II cargo vessel
crawling with antennas, was unthreatening to anyone—unless it was
their secrets, not their lives, they wanted to protect.

By then the Israeli navy and air force had conducted more than six
hours of close surveillance of the Liberty off the Sinai, even taken pic-
tures, and must have positively identified it as an American electronic
spy ship. They knew the Liberty was the only military ship in the area.
Nevertheless, the order was given to kill it. Thus, at 12:05 P.M. three
motor torpedo boats from Ashdod departed for the Liberty, about fifty
miles away. Israeli air force fighters, loaded with 50mm cannon ammu-
nition, rockets, and even napalm, then followed. They were all to return
virtually empty.

At 1:41 P.M., about an hour and a half after leaving A-shdod, the tor-
pedo boats spotted the Liberty off El Arish and called for an immediate
strike by the air force fighters.

On the bridge of the Liberty, Commander McGonagle looked at the
hooded green radar screen and fixed the ship's position as being 25V2
nautical miles from the minaret at El Arish, which was to the southeast.
The officer of the deck, Lieutenant (junior grade) Lloyd Painter, also
looked at the radar and saw that they were \7Vt miles from. land. It was
shortly before two o'clock in the afternoon.

McGonagle was known as a steamer, a sailor who wants to con-
stantly feel the motion of the sea beneath the hull of the ship, to steam
to the next port as soon as possible after arriving at the last. "He longed
for the sea," said one of his officers, "and was noticeably restless in port.
He simply would not tolerate being delayed by machinery that was not
vital to the operation of the ship." He was born in Wichita, Kansas, on
November 19, 1925, and his voice still had a twang. Among the first
to join the post—World War II Navy, he saw combat while on a
minesweeper during the Korean War, winning the Korean Service
Medal with six battle stars. Eventually commanding several small ser-
vice ships, he had taken over as captain of the Liberty about a year ear-
lier, in April 1966.

A Chief of Naval Operations once called the Liberty "the ugliest
ship in the Navy," largely because in place of powerful guns it had
strange antennas protruding from every location. There were thin long-
wire VLF antennas, conical electronic-countermeasure antennas, spira-
cle antennas, a microwave antenna on the bow, and whip antennas that
extended thirty-five feet. Most unusual was the sixteen-foot dish-shaped
moon-bounce antenna that rested high on the stern.

Despite the danger, the men on the ship were carrying on as nor-
mally as possible. Larry Weaver, a boatswain's mate, was waiting outside
the doctor's office to have an earache looked at. Muscular at 184 pounds,
he exercised regularly in the ship's weight room. Planning to leave the
Navy shortly, he had already applied for a job at Florida's Cypress Gar-
dens as a water skier. With the ability to ski barefoot for nine miles, he
thought he would have a good chance.

As for Bryce Lock-wood, the Marine senior Russian linguist who
had been awakened in the middle of a layover in Rota, Spain, and vir-
tually shanghaied, his wife and daughter had no idea where he was.
Having boarded the ship on such short notice, Lockwood had gone to the
small ship's store to buy some T-shirts and shorts. While waiting to go
on watch, he was sitting on his bunk stamping his name in his new un-
derwear.

On the stern, Stan White was struggling with the troublesome
moon-bounce antenna. A senior chief petty officer, he was responsible
for the complicated repair of the intercept and cipher gear on board.
The giant dish was used to communicate quickly, directly, and securely
with NSA back at Fort Meade, and for this purpose both locations had to
be able to see the moon at the same time. But throughout the whole voy-
age, even back in Norfolk, the system was plagued with leaking hy-
draulic fluid. Now another critical part, the klystron, had burned out and
White was attempting to replace it.

Below deck in the Research Operations Department, as the NSA
spaces were known, Elint operators were huddled over round green
scopes, watching and listening for any unusual signals. Charles L. Row-
ley, a first-class petty officer and a specialist in technical intelligence col-
lection, was in charge of one of the Elint sections. "I was told to be on
the lookout for a different type of signal," he said. "I reported a signal I
thought was from a submarine. ... I analyzed it as far as the length of
the signal, the mark and space on the bods, and I could not break it, I
didn't know what it was, I had no idea what it was . . . and sent it in to
NSA." But NSA had an unusual reaction: "I got my butt chewed out.
They tried to convince me that it was a British double-current cable code
and I know damn good and well that it wasn't." In fact, the blackness
deep beneath the waves of the eastern Mediterranean was beginning to
become quite crowded.

One deck down, just below the waterline, were the Morse code as
well as Russian and Arabic voice-intercept operators, their "cans" tight
against their ears. Lined up along the bulkheads, they pounded away on
typewriters and flipped tape recorders on and off as they eavesdropped on
the sounds of war. Among their key missions was to determine whether
the Egyptian air force's Soviet-made bombers, such as the TU-95 aircraft
thought to be based in Alexandria, were being flown and controlled by
Russian pilots and ground controllers. Obtaining the earliest intelli-
gence that the Russians were taking part in the fighting was one of the
principal reasons for sending the Liberty so far into the war zone.

In another office, communications personnel worked on the ship's
special, highly encrypted communications equipment.

Nearby in the Coordination—"Co-ord"—spaces, technicians were
shredding all outdated documents to protect them from possible capture.
Others were engaged in "processing and reporting," or P&R. "Process-
ing and reporting involves figuring out who is talking," said Bryce Lock-
wood, one of the P&R supervisors, "where they're coming from, the
other stations on that network, making some kind of sense out of it, for-
warding it to the consumers, which primarily was the NSA, the CIA,
JCS."

But as the real war raged on the shore, a mock war raged in the Co-
ord spaces. One of the Arabic-language P&R specialists had developed a
fondness for Egypt and had made a small Egyptian flag that he put on
his desk. "The guys would walk by and they would take a cigarette
lighter," recalled Lockwood, "and say, 'Hey, what's happening to the
UAR [United Arab Republic, now Egypt] over there?' And they would
light off his UAR flag and he would reach over and say, 'Stop that,' and
put the fire out, and it was getting all scorched."

Then, according to Lockwood, some of the pro-Israel contingent
got their revenge. They "had gotten Teletype paper and scotch-taped it
together and with blue felt marking pens had made a gigantic Star of
David flag. This thing was about six feet by about twelve feet—huge.
And stuck that up on the starboard bulkhead."

"You'd better call the forward gun mounts," Commander McGonagle
yelled excitedly to Lieutenant Painter. "I think they're going to attack!"
The captain was standing on the starboard wing, looking at a number of
unidentified jet aircraft rapidly approaching in an attack pattern.

Larry Weaver was still sitting outside the doctor's office when he
first heard the sound. A few minutes before, an announcement had come
over the speaker saying that the engine on the motor whaleboat was
about to be tested. "All of a sudden I heard this rat-a-tat-tat real hard
and the first thing I thought was, 'Holy shit, the prop came off that boat
and went right up the bulkhead,' that's exactly what it sounded like.
And the very next instant we heard the gong and we went to general
quarters."

Stan White thought it sounded like someone throwing rocks at the
ship. "And then it happened again," he recalled, "and then general quar-
ters sounded, and by the captain's voice we knew it was not a drill.
Shortly after that the wave-guides to the dish [antenna] were shot to
pieces and sparks and chunks fell on me."

"I immediately knew what it was," said Bryce Lockwood, the Ma-
rine, "and I just dropped everything and ran to my GQ station which
was down below in the Co-ord station."

Without warning the Israeli jets struck—swept-wing Dassault Mi-
rage IIICs. Lieutenant Painter observed that the aircraft had "absolutely
no markings," so that their identity was unclear. He then attempted to
contact the men manning the gun mounts, but it was too late. "I was try-
ing to contact these two kids," he recalled, "and I saw them both; well,
I didn't exactly see them as such. They were blown apart, but I saw the
whole area go up in smoke and scattered metal. And, at about the same
time, the aircraft strafed the bridge area itself. The quartermaster, Petty
Officer Third Class Pollard, was standing right next to me, and he was
hit."

With the sun at their backs in true attack mode, the Mirages raked
the ship from bow to stern with hot, armor-piercing lead. Back and forth
they came, cannons and machine guns blazing. A bomb exploded near
the whaleboat aft of the bridge, and those in the pilothouse and the
bridge were thrown from their feet. Commander McGonagle grabbed
for the engine order annunciator and rang up all ahead flank.

"Oil is spilling out into the water," one of the Israeli Mirage pilots
reported to b