NSA Cites Grave Damage to Shield USS Liberty Attack Secrets
By Miriam Adler ·
Those who survived the torpedoes and strafing are left with redacted summaries while the Agency hides records that could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security.
An EC-121 aircraft, circling high above the Eastern Mediterranean, was listening. It was not listening to the sailors aboard the USS Liberty as they were being torpedoed and strafed; it was listening to the aftermath. Specifically, it caught the voices of two Israeli helicopter pilots talking to the control tower at Hazor Airfield, near Tel Aviv.
According to a letter from the National Security Agency to Mr. A. Jay Cristol, mirrored by the FAS Intelligence Resource Program, these voice conversations are among the few remaining auditory fragments of the June 8, 1967, attack. The NSA provided Cristol with three CDs containing the Hebrew recordings, accompanied by English transcripts and summaries. The recordings include time counts in English, added later by an intercept operator, marking the seconds and minutes of a conversation that took place while a Belmont-class technical research ship was being torn apart.
Voices from Hazor Airfield
The USS Liberty had been built as a Victory cargo ship, the SS Simmons Victory, during the closing months of World War II. By 1967, she had been converted into a sophisticated listening post. But on that June afternoon near El Arish on the Sinai Peninsula, the ship became the target.
The NSA’s response to Cristol’s 2001 request for surveillance records shows a stark divide in what the government was willing to produce. Cristol had asked for recordings from the Liberty herself, the USS Amberjack, and the EC-121 aircraft. The Agency reported that a "thorough search" yielded nothing for the first two. The ship and the submarine—the primary witnesses—remained silent in the archives. Only the airborne platform, the EC-121, held a record.
Within an hour of the torpedoing, the Director of the NSA had ordered all intercept sites to conduct a "special search" for communications reflecting the attack or the reaction to it. Yet, the Agency admits in the letter that "no communications of the attacking aircraft or torpedo boats were available." The only thing they caught was the chatter between the helicopters and the tower. These were not the words of the attackers in the heat of the moment, but the logistical echoes that followed.
"Exceptionally Grave Damage"
For the families of those who served on the Liberty, the documents provided by the NSA are less a revelation and more a reminder of what is still missing. The letter to Cristol is a study in the art of the partial release. While the Agency handed over CDs and summaries, it simultaneously excised significant portions of the record.
Louis F. Giles, the NSA Director of Policy, explains that certain information was deleted because it remains classified as TOP SECRET and SECRET. The justification is the standard, heavy-handed language of the security state: disclosure "could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."
This phrase—"exceptionally grave damage"—serves as a permanent wall. In the context of the Liberty, where the public record of the Six-Day War already establishes the brutality of the Israeli attack, one wonders what remains so sensitive after decades. The Agency cited Executive Order 12958 and various statutes, including Title 18 U.S. Code 798, to protect its activities. It is the same logic used to shield the details of human experimentation or covert interventions: the state's need for secrecy is weighed against the truth, and the state always wins.
June 8, 1967
The record provided to Cristol includes three full transcripts, two summary reports that "omit the non-substantive chatter," and a compiled report. This curation process is where the nuance of a crisis is often lost. By stripping away the "non-substantive," the government decides which parts of a tragedy are meaningful and which are mere noise.
There is a haunting quality to the fact that the NSA possessed recordings of the Israeli pilots but nothing from the Liberty’s own surveillance equipment that could be released. It creates a vacuum where the only available voices are those of the party that conducted the attack. The sailors who survived the strafing and the torpedoes are left with summaries and redactions.
The letter concludes by noting that the matter was "currently in litigation," rendering an administrative appeal unnecessary. This suggests that the fight for the full record had moved from the FOIA office to the courtroom.
Other related files exist in the National Archives concerning ship hull design and general records of attacks and accidents. There are also mentions of communications in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes regarding the Arab-Israeli crisis. But the specific voice of the EC-121, the one that heard the pilots at Hazor Airfield, remains the most concrete evidence of the immediate aftermath—even if the NSA still believes parts of it are too dangerous to hear.