About the USS Liberty...
Recently, I made some waves on X responding to a clip featuring Candace Owens and Andrew Tate relating to the USS Liberty. Here is what I have to say about that...
Recently, I made some waves on X (formerly known as Twitter) when responding to a clip featuring Candace Owens and Andrew Tate relating to Israel.
While I certainly do not agree with those two on everything — including some of what they stated in that clip — they are two people I do greatly admire.
I was elated when Candace Owens responded with similar admiration:
The clip, which you can watch below, is of Owens and Tate discussing whether Israel is as great an ally as both Democrats and Republican elected officials, with a few exceptions, claim.
I have written about my take on Israel in the modern era, most notably in a piece here on Stone Cold Truth titled America Must Support Israel—But Must Put America First, where I reaffirm my support for Israel, while cautioning against U.S. intervention in their conflicts:
Considering the dismal situation, any expansion of the military in the Middle East to protect Israel must be looked at with extreme caution. Israel has wise national leaders, a united people, and sophisticated military capacity at their disposal. In many ways, they operate in a superior fashion to our divided country that is lorded over by a federal swamp that rarely if ever acts in the best interest of its people. Israel can handle its own defense without being unduly burdened by our problems that would inevitably make the situation worse. Conservatives ought to decide to stray from hawkish doctrine and opt for military restraint no matter how counterintuitive that may seem.
One thing in the clip which I note on X, is Owen’s mention of the USS Liberty, which was a U.S. Navy warship that was attacked by Israel in 1967.
Even mentioning that attack is enough to face an onslaught of attacks from those who do not want to acknowledge that the event, which killed 34 Americans, ever happened.
But I believe that not acknowledging it is a great dishonor to those brave American service-members who died on that day.
That’s why I wanted to give a little context surrounding the attack, using a section of my New York Times Best Selling book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.
As you will read, I make the case that it was then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson who orchestrated the attack, in coordination with the Israeli Defense Forces, in an attempt to give the U.S. cover to attack Egypt, which likely would have resulted in World War III.
The section of my book relating to the USS Liberty is below:
The JFK assassination opened the door to an even greater crime by Lyndon Johnson, which might be his most egregious: the orchestration of the attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, in which 34 Americans were murdered and 171 others were wounded. It was an attempted murder of 294 Americans and is the type of a crime that puts Lyndon Johnson justifiably in the same league with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. In fact, McGeorge Bundy would say that in his last days of working at the White House, Lyndon Johnson specifically reminded him of Joseph Stalin.
In a nutshell, Lyndon Johnson coordinated with the Israeli Defense Forces, in particular Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan, to attack an American intelligence ship the USS Liberty, sink it, and murder all 294 Americans on board in order to engineer a false-flag pretext, an action made to appear as if it were perpetrated by Egypt. Blaming the attack on Egypt would have given the US cover to attack, bomb, and remove Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had drifted into the Soviet camp over the preceding ten years.
In order to understand the attack on the USS Liberty, you must first understand “Operation Northwoods,” an incredible Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) proposal rejected by JFK in 1962 as it reveals the mentality of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s.
Operation Northwoods was a diabolical proposal presented to John Kennedy in the spring of 1962. It called for a series of false flag attacks and self-inflicted acts of terrorism by the CIA or the US military which would then be blamed on Cuba that would give the US a pretext to invade Cuba and take out Fidel Castro. In other words, Operation Northwoods called for deceiving the American people into a war with Cuba.
The Northwoods documents are astounding and give deep insight into the Machiavellian thinking of high-level American military brass and intelligence. The National Security papers are revealing:
Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
Land friendly Cubans in uniform “over-the-fence” to stage attack on base.
Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.
Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.
Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
Capture militia group which storms the base.
Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires—naphthalene.
Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims (may be in lieu of #10).
We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.
We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The United States could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by U.S. fighters to “evacuate” remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
Operation Northwoods, which was approved by the entire JCS, even called for creating a terror campaign in the Miami area or even sinking a boatload of actual Cuban refugees!:
We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.
The terror campaign could be pointed at refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement, also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.
Author James Bamford summarized just how deplorable Operation Northwoods was:
Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving [General] Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.
Lyndon Johnson’s mentality precisely mirrored that of the Machiavellians in the JCS and CIA. LBJ, a master of deception and dirty machinations, would often say that behind every great success was a great crime. It was a motto that he lived his life by.
Peter Hounam, the author of the book Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused WWIII provided evidence that Israel was fully aware that the USS Liberty was an American ship and went to great lengths attempting to murder every one of the 294 Americans on the Liberty. There is absolutely no way Israel would have intentionally committed this heinous crime against American life and property unless the Israeli Defense Forces had been given explicit orders from the President of the United States Lyndon Johnson to commit such a crime.
Hounam demonstrates that the US Strategic Air Command going on full alert before Israel attacked the USS Liberty at 1:58 p.m. Israeli time, (6:58 a.m. Eastern time, 3:58 a.m. Pacific time) is the smoking gun that proves that the US was fully aware of the impending Israeli attack on the Liberty on June, 8, 1967.
Hounam interviewed a retired Air Force pilot, Jim Nanjo, who told him that his strategic (i.e. nuclear) air wing went on full alert sometime between 2 a.m. and 4 p.m. Pacific time, in other words one or two hours before Israel attacked the USS Liberty at 4 a.m. Pacific (or 7 a.m. Eastern, or 2 p.m. Israeli time). Nanjo said he was awakened by the alarm klaxons “early, early” in the morning.
Nanjo, at the time, was a thirty-year-old pilot in the elite 744 Bomb Squadron of the 456 Strategic Air Wing at Beale Air Force Base which is located near Sacramento, California. He confirmed to Peter Hounam that his plane’s nuclear payload was thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs. His unit of six B-52 bombers supported by a group of KC-135 tanker planes meant they could drop their payload pretty much anywhere in the world—Russia being a top target.
Nanjo also said that US strategic (nuclear) airbases were on high alert around the world in places such as Guam, Britain, Spain and other strategic bases in American cities. Nanjo was asked was it a World War III nuclear situation.
‘It was. Yes. Yes,’ he said. ‘The only thing we were looking for was the go-code, authorized by the National Command Authority. The aircraft commander and myself were the only people [who were authorized] to authenticate the message. We were both waiting for this message to come, which never came.’
“Having arrived at his plane between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., Nanjo taxied to the end of the runway, where the squadron waited loaded with hydrogen bomb payloads with engines running. Nanjo cannot remember whether they sat for four hours, six hours or even longer, but it was well into the morning before a coded message came through ordering everyone to stand down.”
Only the President of the United States could have ordered the strategic air wings to go on high alert all around the world at the same time, and apparently Johnson gave those orders one to two hours before Israel attacked the USS Liberty. In other words, LBJ had to know the attack on the USS Liberty was coming.
Another key incident that indicts Lyndon Johnson in the attack is the incriminating behavior he displayed after being informed that Israel was attacking the ship. The Liberty had miraculously sent out an SOS, known as an emergency flash bulletin, within ten to twelve minutes of being attacked.
The Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, after getting the SOS flash bulletin, immediately sent out two separate squadrons of fighter jets to give assistance to the ship. On both occasions the rescue planes were called back. It is documented that on one of the occasions, during a conversation between Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the Sixth Fleet Commander, Johnson personally got on the radio and roared, “We will not embarrass an ally [Israel],” and ordered the planes turned back.
Miraculously, the Liberty did not sink despite being bombed, napalmed, torpedoed, and machine gunned by the Israelis. Some Israeli pilots, knowing the ship was a well-marked American vessel, dropped their ordinance into the ocean or refused to continue bombing. They were in open insubordination to their Israeli Air Force superiors and baffled about why they were being asked to sink an American ship.
The Liberty suffered a direct hit from a torpedo courtesy of the Israeli Navy but miraculously still did not sink. James Ennes, a Liberty survivor and an expert on the subject, estimates that the whole attack lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. Because the Liberty had been able to send out an SOS flash bulletin, the world became aware quickly that an American ship was under attack.13 The attack stopped just before Israel was going to drop commandos onto the Liberty and “finish the job,” i.e. kill everyone still alive.
The Israeli attack on the Liberty came to an end but did not precipitate a direct attack on Cairo.
LBJ was ready to launch a nuclear attack on Cairo and almost did so, notwithstanding the Liberty not sinking. In a 2002 interview with Liberty survivor Moe Shafer, Peter Hounam wrote:
Before the attack he was cleaning the moon-bounce dish and watched as an Israeli plane flew low over the ship taking photographs. He had a direct view of cameras slung from an opening on the underside of the plane and it was confirmation of the testimony of other eyewitnesses that Israel was well aware of the ship’s presence.
The second memory from after the attack was much more significant. Moe said he was hurt by shrapnel during the assault. . . . Unlike most of the injured who had already been taken away to the USS America, he was loaded into a helicopter and flown to the USS Davis, the flagship of Sixth Fleet commander Admiral Martin. The next morning he was sitting on his bunk with two or three other injured men when Martin came in to see them.
Shafer said he seemed to want to tell someone about what had happened before he would be obliged through pressure from above to clam up: ‘Not only did Admiral Martin tell me that four jets were on their way to the Liberty with conventional weapons [and were recalled]; he stated that four were on their way to Cairo loaded with nuclear weapons. He stated they were three minutes from bombing them [the Egyptians]. He also said that the jets could not land back on the carrier with nuclear arms and they had had to land in Athens. He stated this from my bedside while on the Little Rock [the codename of the flagship] after the attack.
Ronnie Dugger in his book The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson tells the story about LBJ having a long and deep conversation with Austrian ambassador, Dr. Ernst Lemberger. LBJ told Lemberger that he was being visited by God in the White House. Dugger:
Didn’t the ambassador think, Johnson asked him, that the Holy Ghost might visit the leader of a very powerful country now that we had nuclear weapons? The ambassador still did not think so, and he told the president he did not. With that, the president told him that he knew the Holy Ghost [God] was making such visitations, because the Holy Ghost was visiting him.
“Really!” the ambassador said, displaying amazement in a manner that conveyed acceptance.
Yes, President Johnson told the ambassador, the Holy Ghost was visiting him around two or three o’clock in the morning at about the time he received reports from Vietnam.
Ambassador Lemberger was quite rattled after talking with LBJ. “He said, What if this got to the Russians, and they decided he was crazy, and they are afraid he’s unstable and go into a pre-emptive strike?” reported Clyda Gugenberger, a friend of the ambassador’s. Lemberger told her, “If the Soviets think he’s completely crazy, they might be forced into doing something.”
Keep in mind the above anecdote when examining LBJ’s behavior and his approval of the Israeli attack on the Liberty. LBJ was playing with nuclear hellfire and his mental instabilities were well known to people who had intimate dealings with him.
Maybe that is why Defense Secretary Robert McNamara—like Bundy considered a “Whiz Kid” and a man of acute intelligence—developed a curious case of amnesia when it came to the Liberty “incident.” McNamara did not mention the attack in his memoirs or that the Russians had to use the “hotline” with the Americans three times that day. June 8, 1967, was one of the most dangerous and intense days in US military history, yet McNamara would not mention it. According to Peter Hounam: “When I interviewed [McNamara] for a BBC TV documentary and for [my] book, what he said was unbelievable. ‘Don’t have . . . anything about the Liberty on the tape,’ he told me after we finished recording, ‘because I don’t know what the hell happened and I haven’t taken the time to find out.”
Both Bundy and McNamara were fully aware of how mentally unstable LBJ was and how reckless he was during the Six Day War. Both men knew that nuclear war was on the table at the time of attack on the Liberty. Think of Slim Pickens waving his 10-gallon cowboy hat while riding the nuclear bomb down in the movie Dr. Strangelove, and one can imagine Lyndon Johnson in his stead.
At the very height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on Sunday, October 28, 1962, the very day before it was settled, Lyndon Johnson forcefully allied himself with the majority hawks on ExComm (the Executive Committee of the National Security Council), a body of United States government officials assembled to advise the President during the crisis, and told Jack Kennedy that he should bomb, attack or invade Cuba. LBJ favored war with Cuba just hours before Kennedy accepted Khrushchev’s offer that resulted in the crisis being resolved without bloodshed. For decades historians have understood just how close the US came to nuclear war with Cuba and Russia. Any US invasion or bombing campaign against Cuba—as LBJ and Curtis LeMay and the war hawks on the Joint Chiefs staff were pushing for—would almost certainly have been met with a nuclear response from the Russians.
If Cuba had launched a nuclear attack on even one American city, then under the “Single Integrated Operational Plan” the USA would have responded with a retaliatory nuclear strike against Cuba and much of the USSR. LBJ favored a course of actions that would have led to a catastrophic nuclear Armageddon .
Author Peter Hounam also details Lyndon Johnson’s mindset in the run-up to the attack on the Liberty. Israeli diplomat Eppie Evron, who was close to Lyndon Johnson (who was pro-Israel in the extreme), met with him on May 26, 1967 just before the Six Day War. Evron said:
Then he went on to say, ‘I, Lyndon Johnson, have to get congressional approval if I want to act as President of the United States. Otherwise, I’m just a six-foot-four Texan friend of Israel.’ (That description stuck in my memory.) ‘But you and I, the two most powerful people in Washington, are going to get Congress to pass another Tonkin resolution.’ . . . I thought, ‘He’s telling me that Congress is never going to give him permission to use military force.’
The notations on LBJ’s presidential diary for the LBJ-Evron meeting (which lasted from 7:15 p.m. to 8:40 p.m.) on 5/26/67 are notated as “STRICTLY OFF RECORD” (all caps in the diary).
The Gulf of Tonkin was the pretext to get America into a war with Vietnam. The attack on the USS Liberty, if it had been successful, was LBJ’s pretext to get Congress to justify American military intervention in the Six Day War on the side of Israel. More importantly, Lyndon Johnson wanted to topple Nasser, who had drifted into the Soviet camp, once and for all. Toppling Nasser and controlling all of Egypt was a pill too hard to swallow for Israel alone: LBJ wanted American intervention.
A final side note: within ten days of the attack on the USS Liberty, a US Navy Court of Inquiry issued a report on the incident that declared it had all been a tragic case of mistaken identity and that Israel thought it was attacking an Egyptian ship that carried horses. The man who issued this whitewash report was Admiral John S. McCain Jr., the father of current Arizona Senator John McCain. The report was the equivalent of the now discredited Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination; in other words, a cover-up.
It is not enough to rely on only the word of Author James Bamford. He also supplies a list of high-level players who were convinced that Israel intentionally attacked the USS Liberty with LBJ’s approval:
Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter, director of the National Security Agency at the time: “There was no other answer than it was deliberate.”
Dr. Louis Tordella, the deputy director of NSA at the time: “I believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula [where the massacres were taking place] who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities.” Tordella also scrawled across the top page of the formal Israeli “mistake” report, “A nice whitewash.”
Major General John Morrison, NSA deputy director of Operations at the time: “Nobody believes that explanation. The only conjecture that we ever made that made any near sense is that the Israelis did not want us to intercept their communications at that time.”
Walter Deeley, the senior NSA official who conducted an internal NSA investigation of the incident: “There is no way that they didn’t know that the Liberty was American.”
Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I have to conclude that it was Israel’s intent to sink the Liberty and leave as few survivors as possible. Israel knew perfectly well that the ship was American.”
Captain William L. McGonnagle, the Liberty’s commander: “After many years I finally believe that the attack was deliberate.”
Phillip F. Tourney, president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association and a survivor of the attack: “The Israelis got by with cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Americans.”
Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence at the time: “Your chapter on the Liberty was exactly right.”
George Christian, press secretary to President Johnson at the time: “I became convinced that an accident of this magnitude was too much to swallow.”
Paul C. Warnke, Under Secretary of the Navy at the time: “I found it hard to believe that it was, in fact, an honest mistake on the part of the Israeli air force units. . . . I suspect that in the heat of battle they figured that the presence of this American ship was inimical to their interests.”
Dean Rusk, Secretary of State at the time: “The Liberty was flying an American flag. It was not all that difficult to identify, and my judgment was that somewhere along the line some fairly senior Israeli official gave the go-ahead for these attacks.”
David G. Nes, the deputy head of the American mission in Cairo at the time: “I don’t think that there’s any doubt that it was deliberate. . . . [It is] one of the great cover-ups of our military history.”
George Ball, Under Secretary of State at the time: “American leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of its citizens.”
The assault on the USS Liberty was likely Lyndon Johnson’s greatest crime and the blood of the 34 Americans murdered and 171 wounded that day is on LBJ’s hands.
You can order a signed copy of The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ at my official shop.
Stone Cold Truth is your home for the most controversial and groundbreaking content from legendary political operative and cultural icon Roger Stone. Your subscription not only gives you first access to this information, but helps keep Stone Cold Truth alive.
Already subscribed and want to support Stone Cold Truth further, while getting more eyes on this important information? You can gift a subscription to a friend at the button below!