On the 50th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty on June 8,1967, people wonder how could the United States let the deaths of 34 servicemen go unpunished.
“The next day, the CIA produced its first analysis, which exonerated the Israelis. The paper concluded, erroneously, that there was ‘little doubt that the Israelis failed to identify the Liberty as a U.S. ship before or during the attack.” The Liberty “could easily have been mistaken” for El Quesir,” the memo asserted, a claim that the U.S. Navy would soon repudiate. The report was ‘compiled from all available sources,’ probably by [James] Angleton, the Israeli desk officer.”
One of the biggest factors in the stonewalling around the USS Liberty was CIA counterintelligence chief Angleton, who also served as Israeli desk officer.
I tell the story of Angleton’s role in the Liberty incident in my forthcoming book, The Ghost; The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, which will be published in October 2017.
You can pre-order the book here.