Liberty doomed fate - James Bamford

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BODY OF SECRETS 

Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century. 

By James Bamford.

721 pp. New York: Doubleday.

 $29.95.

An account of the Liberty doomed fate 

(according to CHAPTER VIII 

 Body of Secrets - by J. Bamford, 2001)  

PLANES: 

        Air Force C-130 + EC-121M + EA3B

SHIPS:     Liberty + Valdez

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.

officials at NSA considered their options … to collect the narrow

 line-of-sight signals used by air defense radar, fire control radar,

 microwave communications, and other targets.

Using the ships 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

intelligence.

Liberty -1966
Technical research ship

  

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.

The need for linguists was especially critical on the Liberty, which carried

 only French and Portuguese language experts. Therefore, five Arabic 

linguists were ordered to Rota to rendezvous with the Liberty. Although 

the ship already had numerous Russian linguists, it was also 

decided to add one more, a senior analytical specialist.

Another ship, the Valdez, had also conducted "hearability studies" for NSA

 in order to help determine 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.

But 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.

On June 5, 1967, at 7:45 A.M. Sinai time,  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 Syrian borders.

President Johnson'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

Israel launched its attack. "We have an FBIS [Foreign Broadcast

Information 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.

As the first shots of the war were being fired across the desert

wasteland, NSA had a box seat. A fat Air Force C-130 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 linguists.

However, an NSA Hebrew linguist support team was at that moment

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.)

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 analyzed and the

 ciphers attacked.

Another plane, the EC-121M, was slow, lumbering, and ideal for 

eavesdropping—capable of long, twelve- to eighteen-hour missions, 

depending on such factors as weather, fuel, altitude, intercept activity, 

and crew fatigue. 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 north-orbit.

Another signals intelligence plane, the EA3B, could fly

considerably higher, above 30,000 to 35,000 feet.

"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.

The JRC began reevaluating the Liberty's safety as the warnings

mounted. The Egyptians began sending out ominous protests

complaining that U.S. personnel were secretly communicating with Israel

and were possibly providing military assistance.

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. 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 recording

tapes. The pile had grown especially large because the Air Force had no

 Hebrew linguists for their C-150 Sigint aircraft.

Procedure:

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, the activity began getting hectic. soon all our recorders were going full blast, with each position  intercepting signals on both receivers."
A key piece of equipment was known as Big Look. It enabled the Elint operators  to intercept, emulate, and identify the radar signals, and to reverse-locate them—to trace them back to their source.
The giant moon-bounced antenna 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.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.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.In another office, communications personnel worked on the ship's
special, highly encrypted communications equipment.
Nearby in the Coordination—"Coord"—spaces, technicians were
shredding all outdated documents to protect them from possible capture.
 

ATTACK

Without warning the Israeli jets struck—swept-wing Dassault Mirage

IIICs. Lieutenant Painter observed that the attacking aircraft had "absolutely no markings," so that their identity was unclear.

"It appears to me that every tuning section of every HF antenna had a hole in it," he said. "It took a lot of planning to get heat-seeking missiles aboard to take out our entire communications.

In the communications spaces, radiomen James Halman and Joseph

Ward had patched together enough equipment and broken antennas to

get a distress call off to the Sixth Fleet, despite intense jamming by the

Israelis. "Any station, this is Rockstar," Halman shouted, using the

Liberty's voice call sign. "We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft

and require immediate assistance."

Now the operators began frantically searching the airwaves,

attempting to discover who was attacking them. At the same time, Lock-

wood and some others started the destruction procedure.

  At 2:09, the American aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, operating near

Crete, acknowledged Liberty's cry for help. "I am standing by for further

traffic," it signaled.

For nearly thirty-five years NSA has hidden the fact that one of

its planes was overhead at the time of the incident, eavesdropping on

what was going on below. The intercepts from that plane, which answer

some of the key questions about the attack, are among NSA's deepest

secrets.

Two hours before the attack, the Navy EC-121 ferret had taken off

from Athens and returned to the eastern Mediterranean for its regular

patrol. Now it was flying a diagonal track from Crete and Cyprus to El Arish and back.

"Sure as the devil," said Nowicki, "Israeli aircraft were completing an attack on some object. I alerted the evaluator, giving him sparse details, adding that we had no idea what was taking place." For a while the activity subsided.

Deep down in the NSA spaces Terry McFarland, his head encased in

earphones, was vaguely aware of flickers of light coming through the

bulkhead. He had no idea they were armor-piercing tracer bullets slicing

through the Liberty's skin. 

 

A later analysis said it would take a squadron of fifteen

or more planes to do such damage as was inflicted on the ship.

I heard a couple of references to the flag during an apparent attack. The

attackers weren't aircraft; they had to be surface units (we later found

out at USA-512J it was the Israeli motor torpedo boats attacking the

Liberty).

To prevent anyone from escaping the badly wounded ship, the Israelis

even destroyed the few surviving life rafts that were put into the water

following the call to abandon ship. "No survivors were planned for this day!" said Stan White.

The Israelis, not knowing what intelligence NSA had picked up, would

have had reason to suspect the worst—that the agency had recorded

evidence of the numerous atrocities committed that morning only a few

miles away. This would be devastating evidence of hundreds of serious

war crimes, approved by senior Israeli commanders.

Indeed, many Israeli communications had been intercepted. "We

heard Israeli traffic," said section supervisor Charles L. Rowley.

 Much of what was recorded was to be listened to and analyzed later, either at the secret processing station in Athens or back at NSA.