The Loss of Liberty: What Really Happened When Israel Attacked the USS Liberty and Why Washington Buried the Truth?

On the morning of June 8, 1967, under clear blue skies over the eastern Mediterranean, an American naval vessel flying the Stars and Stripes was subjected to a sustained, coordinated, and devastating military assault. When the guns finally fell silent, 34 American sailors and intelligence personnel lay dead. More than 170 others were wounded. The ship the USS Liberty was left listing, burning, and riddled with holes. And yet, the United States government would spend the next several decades insisting it had all been a terrible accident.

That official narrative is now in serious dispute not from the fringes of political commentary, but from the mouths of former senior military officers, Navy lawyers, and admirals who were present at or privy to the investigation. Their testimony points to something far more troubling than a case of misidentification: a deliberate military strike, and a deliberate cover-up reaching to the highest levels of the American government.

An Unarmed Ship in International Waters

The USS Liberty was an electronic intelligence-gathering ship cruising international waters off the Egyptian coast on June 8, 1967, during what became known as the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. It was unarmed, flying a clearly visible American flag, and operating in daylight in calm seas.

What happened next shocked the survivors, though it would take decades for the full picture to emerge. Israeli planes and torpedo boats opened fire on the Liberty, killing 34 Americans and wounding more than 170 others. The attacks was not brief or ambiguous. It lasted approximately two hours, involved napalm, missiles, and torpedoes, and was carried out with a ferocity that survivors said left no room for doubt about intent.

Survivor David Lewis, who was on the Liberty when it was attacked, said Israel had to know it was targeting an American ship. A U.S. flag was flying that day, and Israeli forces shot it full of holes. The sailors quickly hoisted another American flag a much bigger one to make their nationality unmistakable. "No trained individual could be that inept," said Lewis.

Making the attack even more difficult to explain away as accidental, the Liberty was the most sophisticated intelligence ship in the world in 1967. With its massive radio antennae, including a large satellite dish, it resembled a large lobster and was one of the most easily identifiable ships afloat. Israel also attempted to prevent the Liberty's radio operators from sending a distress call by jamming American emergency radio channels. Israeli torpedo boats then machine-gunned lifeboats at close range that had been lowered to rescue the most seriously wounded.

The Official Story and Its Collapse
Israel and its supporters long maintained that the attack was a "tragic case of misidentification" that Israeli forces believed the ship was an Egyptian vessel. This explanation was one that President Lyndon Johnson's administration did not formally challenge. Israel apologized to the United States.

After the attack, a Navy court of inquiry concluded there was insufficient information to make a judgment about why Israel attacked the ship, stopping short of assigning blame or determining whether it was an accident. That finding, delivered within a matter of days and without cross-examination of a single Israeli pilot or commander, would stand as the official record for decades.

But behind that record laid a very different story one that a former senior Navy lawyer finally made public in 2003.

Ward Boston's Affidavit: Orders From the Top

In a signed affidavit released at a Capitol Hill news conference, retired Captain Ward Boston who had served as senior legal counsel to the Navy's original 1967 review of the attack stated that President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered those heading the inquiry to reach a predetermined conclusion: that the attack was a case of "mistaken identity" despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Boston revealed that he knew from personal conversations with the late Admiral Isaac C. Kidd the president of the Court of Inquiry that Johnson and McNamara had ordered Kidd to conclude it was a case of mistaken identity. He said he had maintained his silence for decades because, as a military man, "when orders come in from the Secretary of Defense and President of the United States, I follow them."

Boston further alleged that Admiral Kidd told him that after receiving the president's cover-up orders, he was instructed to sit down with two civilians from either the White House or the Department of Defense and rewrite portions of the Court's findings.

Kidd reportedly said, "Ward, they're not interested in the facts." Among the more explosive allegations in Boston's account: testimony from Lieutenant Lloyd Painter concerning the deliberate machine-gunning of life rafts by Israeli torpedo boat crews, which Boston distinctly recalled being given at the Court of Inquiry and included in the original transcript, was subsequently found to be missing from the record.

Johnson went further still. After the assault, he ordered Admiral Kidd to keep survivors from talking about their ordeal. As soon as they were brought ashore, Kidd complied with the presidential order by threatening the sailors some still bedridden with court martial and imprisonment if they said anything publicly.

Why Would Washington Cover This Up?
In his statement, Boston did not specify why Johnson would have ordered a cover-up. Later, in a phone interview, he suggested Johnson may have worried the inquiry would hurt him politically with Jewish voters.

The central question remains painfully simple: why would Johnson and McNamara allegedly suppress a more aggressive investigation if the mistaken identity explanation were unquestionably true? One possibility is that the administration feared a rupture in relations with Israel during the height of the Cold War. Another is that Johnson, already drowning in the political quicksand of Vietnam, had no appetite for another international crisis.

A further explosive detail emerged from testimony considered by independent investigators. When military rescue aircraft were launched to assist the Liberty while it was still under attack, Secretary McNamara ordered them recalled. When the commanding officer sought confirmation, a higher authority came on to confirm that "President Johnson" had issued the instructions that the aircraft were to be returned, and that "he would not have his allies embarrassed."

The Moorer Commission: Deliberate Attack, Deliberate Cover-Up

Retired Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spent the final years of his life fighting for the memory of the Liberty's victims. In 2003, he chaired an Independent Commission of Inquiry that determined the IDF's attack was deliberate. Though Moorer submitted the commission's findings in a formal request for a congressional investigation, Congress never acted upon it.

The commission's findings, later published in the Congressional Record, concluded that "there is compelling evidence that Israel's attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew" and that "the White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack."

The commission called for a new court of inquiry, full congressional oversight, and declassification of all relevant NSA and CIA records. It also called upon Congress to investigate the actions of the White House and Defense Department that prevented the rescue of the USS Liberty, thereafter threatened her surviving officers and men if they exposed the truth, and covered up the true circumstances of the attack from the American people.

A Question That Will Not Go Away
More than half a century after those 34 men died in the Mediterranean, the USS Liberty attack remains one of the most contested and suppressed episodes in American military history. Admiral Moorer himself asked the question that haunts the entire affair: "Why would our government put Israel's interests ahead of our own? Does it continue to do so? This is an important issue that should be investigated by an independent, fully empowered commission of the American government."

As recently as June 2026, U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie took to the floor of the House of Representatives demanding an investigation into the attack, noting that the American flag was flying visibly over the Liberty when Israeli jets arrived, and that planes from Israel surveilled the vessel before the assault commenced.

The call for accountability has now crossed generations from the sailors who survived, to their families, to elected officials today.

Israel maintains the attack was an error. The CIA's 2006 declassified assessment similarly concluded that Israeli pilots failed to correctly identify the Liberty as a U.S. vessel. But those findings sit uneasily alongside the machine-gunned life rafts, the jammed emergency frequencies, the two-hour duration of the assault, and the sworn testimony of the Navy's own chief legal counsel that the official investigation was rigged from the start.

For the 34 Americans who never came home, and for the more than 170 who bore lifelong wounds from that June morning, the question is not merely historical. It goes to the heart of what a government owes its own citizens and whether the truth, however inconvenient, can ever truly be buried.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.

International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP

[email protected]
+233-555-275-880