Dan Raviv

The USS Liberty and U.S./Israeli Covert Cooperation

Today marks the 41st anniversary of the USS Liberty incident. Although perceived by many as a purely hostile attack on the part of Israel, recent documentaries make a strong case that the Liberty incident was a failed False Flag attempt, with the intent of drawing the U.S. into an attack on Egypt during the 6 Day War, which would have led to a massive bloodbath, and possibly a larger confrontation with the USSR. Further, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Lyndon B. Johnson were fully aware of what was going on that day, yet the Liberty was still not given air cover.* Proceeding from the possibility that the Liberty incident was a conscious, tandem act of deception, I offer a brief survey of U.S./Israeli covert cooperation.

The Liberty

What happened to the USS Liberty should not be looked upon as an isolated incident. It was preceded in 1964 with the infamous Tonkin Gulf fabrication, which kicked off a major escalation in the Vietnam War. The Liberty incident was probably destined to be the capstone for Israel's covert war against Egypt, now in overt mode during the 6 Day War. Also, the Liberty incident was followed in 1968 by another incident involving North Korea and the USS Pueblo, another Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) ship, which also appears to have been a failed attempt at a provocation.(1) The intent: to provoke U.S. retaliaiton against North Korea, and get the North/South Korean standoff to heat up again.

The covert mission against the Liberty failed because the boat was not sunk, and the survivors were able to talk about what had happened to them. Had the U.S. launched an attack against Egypt, there would have been some serious problems explaining away the stories of the survivors, who knew they had been surveilled by Israeli aircraft.

In 2002, the BBC broadcast "Dead in the Water", a documentary by Christopher Mitchell which proposed the general theory that the Liberty incident was a False Flag failure to a broad (British) audience. Alex Jones came to the same conclusion in his 2006 film "Terrorstorm", based mostly on his own original interview work.

If you have not seen Christopher Mitchell's film, I strongly encourage you to watch it, most visitors to this site have probably already seen Terrorstorm. It's just over an hour long, and it's a fine way to honor the casualties of the Liberty on this anniversary;

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