# Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in 1967 and both governments covered it up

**No verdict.** The attack, the 34 dead, Israel's apology and compensation, and the official mistaken-identity finding are all documented. The claim rated here, that Israel knowingly attacked a US ship and that the two governments then buried the truth, rests on serious but circumstantial arguments, the markings, the duration, disputed intercepts, and dissenting officials, and has never been definitively established either way.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: 1960s · First circulated: June 1967 · Believed by: There is no reliable polling on the question. The surviving crew, organized as the USS Liberty Veterans Association, have pressed for a fresh congressional inquiry for decades, and the belief that the attack was deliberate is widely held among them and shared by some former senior US military and intelligence figures.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/uss-liberty

## Summary
On 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli jets and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American signals-intelligence ship in international waters off the Sinai. Thirty-four US sailors were killed and 171 wounded. Israel called it a tragic case of mistaken identity, apologized, and paid compensation; a US Navy Court of Inquiry and later official reviews accepted that finding. But many survivors and some senior officials have argued for more than half a century that Israel knew it was hitting a US ship and that Washington helped bury the truth to protect a strategic ally. This case file separates what is documented (the attack, the deaths, the apology, the investigations) from the rated claim (deliberate intent plus a coordinated cover-up), which remains unproven.

## The claim
That the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was not a mistake but a deliberate assault on a vessel Israel knew to be American, intended to stop the ship from intercepting Israeli communications during the Six-Day War, and that both the Israeli and US governments then concealed the truth, steering the official inquiries toward a mistaken-identity finding to preserve the relationship between the two countries.

## Origin and timeline
- 1967-06-05: The Six-Day War begins between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The USS Liberty (AGTR-5), a lightly armed Navy technical research ship operated with the Naval Security Group to collect signals intelligence, is ordered toward the eastern Mediterranean off the Sinai coast.
- 1967-06-08: In the early afternoon, in clear weather and international waters roughly 25 nautical miles off the northern Sinai, the Liberty is attacked by unmarked Israeli Mirage and Mystere jets with cannon, rockets, and napalm, then by three Israeli motor torpedo boats that launch five torpedoes. One strikes the starboard side, tearing open the intelligence spaces. Thirty-four Americans are killed and 171 wounded.
- 1967-06-08: Within hours Israel notifies the US that its forces attacked the ship in error, believing it to be an Egyptian vessel, and offers apologies and assistance. The Liberty, badly holed but afloat, makes its own way to a rendezvous with US Sixth Fleet ships.
- 1967-06-10: A US Navy Court of Inquiry convenes under the authority of Admiral John S. McCain Jr., with Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd presiding. Meeting for roughly a week, it concludes that available evidence points to a case of mistaken identity and finds no basis to attribute the attack to a knowing assault on a US ship.
- 1968-06-11: The Liberty's commanding officer, Captain William McGonagle, receives the Medal of Honor. Unusually for the award, it is presented not by the President at the White House but by the Secretary of the Navy at the Washington Navy Yard, a low-key ceremony that critics later cite as evidence the incident was being kept quiet.
- 1968–1980: Israel pays compensation in stages: about $3.3 million to the families of the dead (1968), about $3.6 million to the wounded (1969), and roughly $6 million in a 1980 settlement for damage to the ship, alongside a formal apology.
- 1981: The National Security Agency completes an internal cryptologic history, Attack on a SIGINT Collector, the U.S.S. Liberty. Released in redacted form years later, it leans toward mistaken identity while acknowledging that important questions about Israeli intent remain unresolved.
- 2003–2004: The NSA declassifies further records, including recordings of Israeli helicopter crews after the attack. Separately, Captain Ward Boston, the Navy lawyer who served as counsel to the 1967 Court of Inquiry, signs a public affidavit stating that he believed the attack was deliberate and that the inquiry had been directed to conclude otherwise, a charge the official record does not corroborate. An unofficial panel chaired by former Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer also concludes the attack was deliberate.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The Liberty was flying a US flag, clearly marked, and in daylight and clear weather, so experienced Israeli pilots and torpedo crews must have known it was American.
  Evidence: Partly documented, and the strongest single point for the deliberate case. The Court of Inquiry found the ship was in international waters, properly marked with the hull letters GTR-5, and attacked in clear weather, and Israeli aircraft had overflown and observed it earlier that day. Against that, Israel argued the identifying flag may have hung limp in light wind or been shot away early, that aerial recognition of ship types is error-prone, and that a torpedo-boat crew concluded the target matched the Egyptian horse-carrier El Quseir, a far smaller and older ship. The markings make an innocent error harder to credit, but they do not by themselves prove that any Israeli aircrew actually read the ship's identity and pressed on regardless.
- Claim: The attack was too long, too coordinated, and too determined to be a mistake, and the torpedo boats even fired on the life rafts.
  Evidence: The sequence is real; its meaning is disputed. The assault unfolded over an extended period, jets first and then torpedo boats, and survivors reported that the boats fired on rafts and the ship after the torpedo strike. Israel's account is that its forces believed throughout that they were engaging an enemy combatant in a war zone, and that the torpedo boats broke off and offered help once they closed and recognized the ship as American. Whether the duration and the fire on the rafts reflect knowing malice or the compounding errors and confusion of a fast-moving wartime engagement is exactly the point on which the two readings diverge, and the record does not settle it.
- Claim: US signals intercepts prove that Israel identified the ship as American before and during the attack.
  Evidence: Not established on the public record. The NSA released recordings of Israeli helicopter crews communicating after the attack, and authors such as James Bamford have argued that intercepted communications show Israeli awareness of the ship's identity. But the NSA's own declassified history and successive official reviews concluded that the available intercepts do not demonstrate prior knowledge that the target was a US vessel, and some relevant records remain classified. The intercepts are cited by both sides; none released so far amounts to a clear admission of knowing intent.
- Claim: The US government suppressed the truth, silencing survivors and steering the inquiry to protect its relationship with Israel.
  Evidence: Mixed, and the crux of the cover-up claim. Survivors were instructed not to discuss the incident publicly, the Court of Inquiry ran only about a week, and the Medal of Honor was awarded in an unusually muted setting, all of which fuel suspicion. Captain Ward Boston, counsel to the inquiry, later swore that its conclusion had been dictated in advance. Yet the deliberate-and-covered-up reading has to account for the fact that Israel apologized, paid compensation, and cooperated with US claims, and that a long series of US bodies, the Navy, the CIA, congressional committees, and the NSA, each separately reaffirmed mistaken identity rather than reversing it. Reticence and a fast inquiry are documented; a proven, coordinated concealment of known intent is not.

## Why people believe it
- The core facts are horrifying and undisputed: an ally killed 34 American sailors and wounded 171 in international waters, and no one was ever held to account. When the baseline is that stark, the leap to deliberate intent feels small.
- The ship was well marked and attacked in daylight, after hours of Israeli aerial reconnaissance. To many, the idea that trained pilots and sailors could mistake a 455-foot US intelligence ship for a small Egyptian freighter simply strains belief.
- The dissenters are not cranks. They include the ship's own survivors, the Navy lawyer who staffed the Court of Inquiry, and senior former officers up to a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with reports of private doubt inside the intelligence agencies at the time.
- The handling looked like burial: survivors told to stay silent, a week-long inquiry, a Medal of Honor pinned on quietly rather than at the White House, and records still withheld decades later. Secrecy invites the inference of something worth hiding.
- The geopolitics supply a ready motive on both sides. A young, strategically vital alliance gave Washington reasons not to press, and gave Israel, mid-war, reasons some believe it might not want a neutral ship listening in, so the convenient explanation is distrusted on principle.

## Open questions
- Why did the attack continue as long as it did, and why did torpedo boats press in after the air strikes, if the target was believed to be a minor Egyptian vessel already disabled? The extended, two-phase character of the engagement has never been reconciled to everyone's satisfaction with a simple, brief error.
- What is in the intercepts and cryptologic records that remain classified more than half a century on? The government has released a great deal, yet the persistence of withheld material keeps alive the suspicion that the most decisive evidence, in either direction, has not been made public.
- How should Captain Ward Boston's sworn 2004 statement be weighed? The counsel to the Court of Inquiry declaring, decades later, that the finding was dictated is a serious allegation from an insider, but it is uncorroborated by the contemporaneous record and contradicts the inquiry's own documents, and no neutral body has ever adjudicated the conflict.
- How could Israeli identification have gone so wrong after hours of observation? The official explanation, that the ship was taken for the Egyptian El Quseir, requires mistaking a large, modern US vessel for a much smaller and older one, and whether that is a plausible fog-of-war error or an implausible one is precisely where honest observers still divide.

## Sources
- Attack on a SIGINT Collector, the U.S.S. Liberty, William D. Gerhard and Henry W. Millington, National Security Agency (U.S. Cryptologic History) (1981): https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-gpo73820/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-gpo73820.pdf
- SRH-256: Attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, Naval History and Heritage Command (1967): https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/library/online-reading-room/ships/attackliberty/srh-256-liberty-final.pdf
- Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian (2004): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19
- Memorandum From the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense McNamara (fact-finding team report on the USS Liberty), U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian (FRUS 1964–1968, Vol. XIX, Doc. 337) (1967): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d337
- U.S.S. Liberty (declassified documents and audio releases), National Security Agency: https://www.nsa.gov/Helpful-Links/NSA-FOIA/Declassification-Transparency-Initiatives/Historical-Releases/USS-Liberty/
- USS Liberty incident, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
- Fifty Years Later, NSA Keeps Details of Israel's USS Liberty Attack Secret, The Intercept (2017): https://theintercept.com/2017/06/06/fifty-years-later-nsa-keeps-details-of-israels-uss-liberty-attack-secret/
- The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship, James Scott, Simon & Schuster (2009): https://archive.org/details/attackonlibertyu0000scot

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