Among the documents the White House spent decades trying to hide under the “top secret” classification, cable number 0854 holds a key place. It was sent from the US Defence Attaché’s office in Tel Aviv just two days after the massacre.
According to this document, Washington possessed direct evidence from the very beginning: Israeli pilots, under orders from ground command, made at least two reconnaissance runs, clearly identified the American flag on the USS Liberty, and reported this to base twice.
Only after headquarters confirmed that the vessel before them was a US vessel did the pilots receive a second order to open fire.
This conspiracy of silence includes the House Appropriations Committee’s (HAC) report, which the NSA refuses to release to the public on legal grounds.
According to testimony from former CIA analysts and members of Congress, the document conceals the most inconvenient fact: as early as June 7, 1967, the day before the attack, the Israelis threatened to destroy the USS Liberty unless the spy ship was immediately removed from international waters off the Sinai coast.
‘A shameful act’
The secrecy surrounding the incident endured for decades. Surviving sailors repeatedly claimed that after their return, they were effectively forbidden from discussing the attack publicly, under threat of disciplinary action.
One officer later recalled that the admiral summoned him to a closed office, removed his rank insignia, demanded a detailed account of what he had seen, and warned that if he told anyone else, he would face prison.
In 2003, Captain Ward Boston, senior counsel to the Naval commission that investigated the 1967 attack, testified in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit about the pressure.
In a sworn affidavit, he claimed that President Lyndon Johnson and Defence Secretary Robert McNamara ordered a finding of “mistaken identity,” despite what he said was evidence to the contrary.
Boston attributed his years of silence to military discipline: “When orders come, I carry them out.” He decided to speak out after the publication of a book that defended the official version and, in his view, distorted the facts.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, who participated in the investigation into the incident, called it a “classic American cover-up.”
He said he had no doubt it was a deliberate attack. He described the recall of the rescue planes as “the most shameful act” he had witnessed in his military career. Moorer also questioned why American authorities could put Israel’s interests above their own national interests.
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In January 2024, during a hearing on HB 1041 in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, USS Liberty veterans were given the opportunity to present their account of events to a government body for the first time in decades.
The bill would have established a special commission to investigate the 1967 attack and its aftermath.
Speaking before the House Committee on State-Federal Relations and Veterans’ Affairs, Purple Heart recipient Larry Bowen said the US government failed to come to the crew’s aid and later prohibited survivors from discussing the incident publicly. According to the veteran, the crew members’ testimony and the investigation’s findings were tailored to fit the Israeli narrative.
Bowen noted: “I never had the opportunity to tell the American people what happened. Our government did not come to our aid. It silenced us, prohibiting us from speaking about it and threatening us with imprisonment and fines if we violated that prohibition.
“Our government failed to conduct a thorough investigation of the attack. The Navy convened a formal commission of inquiry and received testimony from several of my fellow service members, but they were then ordered to adjust that testimony to fit the story of mistaken identity that Israel advanced in its apology for the attack.”
The battle for the narrative
Although this topic is rarely raised in the media and is considered undesirable, individual politicians and public figures periodically return to it. For example, on the anniversary of the incident—June 8, 2026—Republican Congressman Thomas Massie delivered a speech in the House of Representatives, calling the attack “unprovoked” and demanding a new investigation.
Twelve surviving members of the Liberty crew, most of them over eighty, sat in the visiting gallery.
The Kentucky congressman, who recently lost a primary in which pro-Israel groups actively campaigned against him and invested heavily in his cause, declared: “Let’s conduct an investigation. Let’s pass a resolution that honours them. This is long overdue.”
In his speech, he recalled that visibility that day was perfect, the American flag was clearly visible, and Israeli planes had been circling over the ship the day before.
“The Israelis intended to leave no survivors,” he stated, describing the 25-minute sustained barrage of the air strike. To support his position, Massey cited the aforementioned politicians and military officials, including Rusk and Moorer:
“None of these distinguished people believes this was an accident,” the congressman said. “They are convinced this was a deliberate assassination—either a false flag operation or an attempt to cover up what Israel was doing that day.”
Supporters of the official Israeli narrative, of course, reject accusations that the attack was deliberate.
The pro-Israel publication JNS and other similar platforms characterised Massie’s speech as “promoting conspiracy theories”, while fellow Israeli politician Dan Crenshaw suggested he was simply seeking an audience in the anti-Israel media for personal gain.
Many continue to attribute the incident to a “tragic chain of errors” in combat. Within this framework, the attack is portrayed not as the shooting of American sailors but as a classic “friendly fire” incident, caused by communications chaos, pilot fatigue, and catastrophic failures in communications systems on both the Israeli and American sides.
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Similarly, proponents of an alternative interpretation of the incident are reduced to the category of people for whom the slogan “Remember Liberty” is a veiled expression of the view that “Israel is evil.”
Last year, Candace Owens, a former pro-Israel activist who has worked for Zionist American media, interviewed one of the attack’s survivors and said, “There is hardly a story that better reveals the deceptive and vile nature of modern Israel and its influence on the American government.”
Any testimony from surviving ship veterans, statements from senior Pentagon officials, or independent investigations indicating the deliberate nature of the attack are systematically dismissed within this discourse.
The full picture of the incident that occurred sixty years ago has still not been established, simply because no concerted effort has been made to reconstruct it.
The years-long siege of government databases continues. Intelligence agencies are reluctant to declassify the documents, as their public disclosure would dispel the convenient myth of an “inadvertent error.”
Yet, against the backdrop of the war in the Middle East, accusations against Israel and demands for an investigation that Washington has long tried to bury, along with the dead sailors, are growing louder.
