06/04/09 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and I know it's strange that this is an anarchist radio show on a little pirate radio station in Austin, Texas, and yet I'm always interviewing CIA guys.
It seems like they're the bad guys, right?
And yet, you listen to what they say on this show, and it's always what our government is doing wrong.
That was Phil Giraldi, now Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You can find much of what he writes at ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Perry's excellent website.
And unlike Phil, who was a covert operative, Ray was an analyst for 27 years at the CIA, and including gave the morning briefings to Vice President Bush in the 80s.
And unlike that, you can find what he writes at Antiwar.com at Original.
Antiwar.com slash McGovern.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Well, so this is a hell of a story you got here.
Your most recent article, Navy Vet Who Foiled Israeli Attack Honored.
Tell us, who is Terry Halbadier?
Halbadier, he says.
Oh, there you go.
Halbadier, who is he?
Well, he's a bit about my age.
He's from Texas.
He's good at what we in the infantry used to call field expedience, what the Navy calls a bunch of bailing wire and whatever else is necessary.
He was on the Liberty crew, and when the Israelis attacked on the afternoon of June 8, 1967, the first thing they attacked were the communications antennae and all the other communications gear on the deck and on the sides of the ship, and on the top, of course.
But they didn't get one.
They didn't get one transmitter, which hadn't been operable for a while.
It needed repair.
And of course, the attack was fast and furious, and it looked very much like the Israelis wanted very much to sink the ship and leave no survivors, which we know in retrospect was exactly what they intended.
And so there was some premium on getting an SOS out.
Well, Terry remembered that there was this one antenna that hadn't been functional, but he thought maybe they'd make a stab at repairing it and then connecting it with the transmitter so they get this message out.
Now, Israeli planes are strafing the deck.
They're pouring napalm on the deck.
And this courageous guy from Texas just goes out there, finds one end of the antenna, realizes that there's a cable that's been destroyed on the deck, goes back, gets some, I say, bailing wire.
Obviously, it was a cable.
And he connects the two, the antenna that hadn't been working and the transmitter, and by God, the damn thing works.
The radio man gets an SOS out, and the next thing you know, the USS Saratoga scrambles some jets and sends them off to do battle with whoever it is that's attacking USS Liberty.
Wow, what an exciting chapter of the U.S.
-Israeli War of 1967.
I didn't even know we had a war against Israel in 1967, right?
Most people don't know that, but we did have a particular incident here which will, as I say, live on in infamy just as the surprise attack on the Navy in Pearl Harbor did.
Well, and just as much infamy, because as we find out more and more information about how FDR deliberately turned a blind eye and covered up what really happened at Pearl Harbor, that's the same thing that happened here with the Lyndon Johnson administration.
FDR's former lackey in the House of Representatives from the old days.
The head of the commander of the Sixth Fleet issued these instructions to send the jets, and they were sent.
Now, bear in mind, the casualties were severe, but not as severe as they ended up being, because most of the crew, of course, was below deck, including those from NSA or seconded to NSA who were intercepting the Egyptian, Russian, and, dare I say, Israeli communications.
So after Admiral Geis set his fighter bombers off the carrier, all of a sudden he gets this message from McNamara saying, call those jets back immediately.
And Geis says, I'm sorry, sir, one of my ships is being attacked.
I'm not going to do that unless I can speak to your superior officer.
He said that to the Secretary of Defense?
Yeah, yeah.
And guess what?
LBJ is on the other line.
And he gets right on.
And he said, you call those jets back right away.
I don't want to embarrass my ally, Israel.
And so Admiral Geis called the jets back.
Now, what's the significance of that?
Well, if those jets arrived on the scene, they would have arrived in time enough to prevent the torpedo boats, three of them, 60 tons each, from firing their torpedoes, one of which hit the NSA unit there below deck, killed 25 immediately, and disabled, of course, the entire intercept operation.
So there you have 25 people that would have been not killed.
And they were added to the, well, it ended up being 34 that were killed, 174 that were wounded.
And that amounts to two thirds, two thirds of that crew of 294.
So this was an incident that was not just a paltry little thing.
It was a deliberate attack.
We know from the intercepts between, you know, pilot to control tower, but that's an American flag.
It's an American flag.
Bomb it, strafe it, carry out your orders.
These things were heard by my colleagues.
I was on sort of active duty, you might say, at the CIA at the time.
And I know that my colleagues heard these things.
They saw the transcripts.
And guess what happened?
Guess what happened to the tapes of all this, Scott?
I'll give you one guess.
Winston Smith put them down the memory hole in order to avoid his own torture.
Well, NSA destroyed them.
We made the comment at the time, or several years ago at least, that, you know, if you let the evidence be destroyed in a clearly criminal act involving murder, well, you know, you set that up for happening again.
And do you think it might happen again?
I guess it has happened again with respect to the interrogation tapes, hasn't it?
So there you go.
And the evidence is so damn damning, so to speak, it'll be destroyed unless you have people with integrity at the top.
We did not have that during those days, and we don't have it now.
Ray, I got to tell you, I think for people who've never heard of this story before, they might think that this is just crazy.
I mean, the fact that you're a CIA agent gives, or a former one, gives, you know, a certain credibility to what you're saying.
But for people who've never heard of this, this sounds like lunacy.
Israel attempting to sink an American Navy ship in the Mediterranean, and Lyndon Johnson personally intervening to call back the fighter jet protection to let these men be killed.
You know, and by the way, try to weave into your answer why it is that your friend with the name that's hard to pronounce there is back in the news, why his story is relevant in 2009, other than we're creeping up on the anniversary of the attack here.
Yeah.
Well, let's start with that first.
Terry Albert Yee, again, this veteran who was 23 years at the time he did these heroics in 1967, so you could do the math, but I think he's 65 now.
He finally was recognized for his heroism, and it took a gutsy congressman from the Central Valley of California, the town is named Visalia, I've been there before, I was again there for the ceremony.
It took a gutsy congressman, his name is Nunes, to say, look, this is a constituent of mine.
This is 42 years late, but this guy certainly deserves to get at least a silver cross.
And so he took the recommendation of Jim Ennis, who was one of the officers in charge of Terry, one of the people who suggested he might try his heroics, and went to the Secretary of the Navy, and gosh, this time the citation even names the attacker, namely Israel.
The reason this is significant is that when the skipper of the Liberty, Captain McGonigal, when he was honored with the Medal of Honor, the citation simply said that his ship was attacked in the eastern Mediterranean by enemy forces, enemy forces undesignated.
That's kind of interesting metal gymnastics there, Scott, because everybody says Israel is our ally.
Yeah, which is why it's okay to look the other way during a time like this, but then when they don't want to name Israel, and they have to call him something, well, what do you call a foreign government's military attacking yours but an enemy?
I guess it's an enemy, yeah.
So sometimes friends, I'd say that's sort of like a summer soldier, wouldn't you say?
My goodness.
And you know, I've seen on TV, and I forget the man's name, he may be one of the people you reference in your most recent article here at Antiwar.com, of course originally ran at Consortium News, but I've seen on TV a guy, a Navy somebody or other, saying, hey, the President told me to lie, okay?
And my job was to do what the President said.
There's no value judgment about telling a lie or not when you work for the government.
You say what the President wants you to say, period.
Now Johnson's dead, and it's the 21st century, and so here's the truth.
Yeah, you know, that's really sad.
I was an Army officer for a couple of years back in the 60s, and I know the ethos.
You obey orders.
But we also instructed our men that illegal orders, deceitful orders, false orders, not only need not be obeyed, but should be disobeyed.
And so for Captain Ward Boston, who is the name of the Navy lawyer who was ordered to fix the investigation, guess how long the investigation took?
It took one week.
Usually an investigation like this goes three to six months at least, but the results were known before the investigation was ever going to be started.
The result had to be that Israel made just this terrible mistake, okay?
And so Ward Boston, to his great regret, was ordered to cooperate with an admiral named Kidd, who was in charge of this thing.
And, you know, as these things work, Scott, people do have consciences.
And as Captain Ward Boston approached the end of his days just a couple years ago, he signed a formal declaration.
The date was January 8, 2004, and he railed against those who still claim that this attack was a case of, quote, mistaken identity.
This is what he said.
The evidence was clear.
Both Admiral Kidd, in charge of the investigation, and I believed with certainty that the attack was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.
Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm gunfire and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats, machine gun, three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the to save the most serious wounded.
That's a war crime, end quote.
So here's Boston coming clean, saying, yeah, I cooperated.
I followed orders because I was, quote, a good Navy officer.
But in 2004, do the math.
How many years between 2004 and 67?
I guess 37 years, okay?
He comes clean, and he says, yeah, I played a role in this cover-up.
I'm sorry for it.
And recently, Captain Boston died.
So, you know, the evidence is out there.
Well, let me ask you, what was it like in 67, 68, 73?
Was this a crazy conspiracy theory?
Or was this something that pretty much everybody knew, but they didn't talk about in the New York Times?
Or what was the story behind this, like in the general public reaction to it, that kind of thing?
Well, what happened, Scott, was Captain McGonagall was able to sort of limp the ship back to Malta.
He was severely wounded.
And actually, he was evacuated from the ship before they got to Malta.
But when they got to Malta, a big Navy brass was there, and they took each one of these wounded, and I'm telling you, 174 wounded sailors, and the rest of them, the rest of the 294, except for the dead, of course, 34 dead, they took them aside and said, look, you are not to breathe a word about this attack to anyone, not even to your wife.
You're not to talk to each other about it.
And if you do violate any of these instructions, you're going to have a big, big, stiff penalty, and you're going to spend a lot of time in jail.
So take this seriously.
Now, just picture yourself as one of these wounded guys who was told that, just trying to get repaired and well, and then he's subject to this edict that he couldn't discuss it, not even with his own crewmates.
This is what they instructed the guys as they were laying burned in their hospital beds.
That's exactly right.
Of course, a third of them escaped serious injury.
Now, one of the things I learned out in Visalia talking to some of these veterans is that a couple of them had the gruesome task of going down into the NSA spaces there and trying to match arms with legs, shoulders, knees of men that they had worked alongside for several years.
The body parts, some of them were still around there, and it was there they were ordered to go ahead and do this.
Okay, so put yourself in the position, as I was talking to one of these folks, of these folks, okay?
They do this gruesome task, and then they're told, don't say a word about this to anybody, not even to your crew members.
And when they get well enough, they go away, and they can't even talk about this with anybody.
So the attack wasn't even in the papers at all until when?
Well, the attack was, but the Israelis said, oh, whoops, whoops, a terrible mistake.
And so it didn't make the first page of the Times.
It was in an inside page, but the story was cooked right from the beginning.
Terrible accident in the eastern Mediterranean.
Israeli gunboats mistook the liberty for, get this, an Egyptian cavalry, that means in those days, horse unit carrier.
In other words, a little boat that carries Egyptian horses and cavalry, okay?
Well, easy mistake to make, right?
Give me a break, you know?
Well, no one believes that the Israeli Air Force and Navy were so feckless as to not recognize what this was.
And of course, the evidence is very clear in the intercepts, and the evidence is clear in the fact that there was surveillance of the liberty by Israeli surveillance aircraft all morning, on the morning of June 8th, 1967.
Well, and again, most importantly, they have, or there has been numerous credible reports, numerous credible reports, not just, you know, two off the record good enough for the New York Times, but all over the place about, and as you said, your former CIA colleagues shared this with you at the time, I guess, that they had on tape the Israeli pilot saying, no, there's an American flag.
This must be the wrong boat or something.
You don't want me to fire on them, do you?
And they said, ignore that.
Go ahead.
And he said, are you sure?
And even double checked.
Are you sure you want me to attack this American boat?
Never mind.
It was the exact response here.
We have some of the, you know, some of the, the way these things happen, people in Vietnam, people in Omaha, people elsewhere in the Mediterranean, intercept people, NSA or Air Force people listening in on all this.
So, you know, you can't suppress this kind of thing when, when the research was done and these people who are known to have been in possession of this information were, were asked, one of them said, for example, this is what I remember, Israeli pilot, the ground control boat.
This is the American ship.
You still want us to attack?
Ground control.
Yes.
Follow orders.
So there are numerous examples of all that.
And then, of course, the tapes.
Whoops.
Somebody destroyed the tapes.
Well, let me ask you this.
They must have had some real good reason to want to attack an American boat, because just think if the truth got out to the American people at large that Israel had committed an act of war such as this, then that could cost American support for Israel over the long term.
I mean, this is a major gamble they were playing.
Why would in the world would Israel do such a thing?
Right.
Well, Scott, it depends on how you look at it.
Now, I've been close enough to this issue to kind of conclude.
And, you know, don't be shocked by this.
It really wasn't much of a gamble.
The Israelis were riding high.
OK, they had destroyed the Egyptian Syrian Air Force.
They were going up on the Golan Heights the next morning.
And so they weren't really all that concerned about, you know, the Americans messing around.
What they were concerned about was the diplomatic niceties of this whole thing.
OK, they saw this ship.
They knew exactly what it was doing.
It was in international borders, but it was close enough to intercept Israeli communications as well.
Now, why they did it?
There are two reasons that I give equal possibility to.
Let me let me first say that this is really important for your listeners.
There is no doubt that it was deliberate.
There is no doubt that the Israelis wanted to sink the ship and make sure that there were no survivors that came out, among other things, from a independent investigation led by previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Moore, United States Navy.
OK, that is clear.
It was deliberate and it was meant to do the complete job, sink the ship and leave no survivors.
Now, what is not clear is exactly why.
And there are all kinds of speculations, but there are two that merit most attention, in my view.
The first one is that the Israelis had been so duplicitous with the United States in well, first they came to Washington in May of 67.
They said, oh, you know, the Egyptian thing, you know, there's such a problem and we're afraid the Egyptians are going to attack us.
And of course, you know, we won't do anything without checking with you, of course.
But of course, then what they did as soon as the Egyptians made the bad mistake of putting some divisions in the Sinai, the Israelis took advantage of that and hit them real, real hard on June the 9th.
I'm sorry, June the 5th, 1967.
So what was happening here is that the U.S. had been obviously bamboozled, snookered.
Every advance by our ambassador in Tel Aviv was met with a disingenuous deceit, frankly.
And he was still banging on them, saying, look, look, Moshe Dayan, you've done a great job here.
Now, don't do any more.
Don't go up on the Golan.
Don't take on Syria now.
OK, it's no problem.
You destroy their air force, but don't take the Golan Heights.
We prohibited that.
And Moshe Dayan said, yes, sir, yes, sir.
Now, their plan was to take the Golan Heights starting on the 9th of June.
This was the 8th of June.
They couldn't communicate with their forces up there in Golan Heights without the liberty intercepting the messages.
And so what do you do?
Well, if you're pretty sure that the U.S. is going to have to let you off on this, you destroy the ship, you sink all the tapes as well, and you destroy all the survivors so that you can go up on the Golan and not give the U.S. the opportunity to bang on you again and say, look, don't do it.
In other words, in the Israeli frame of mind, it was better to ask for forgiveness rather than for permission.
And that's precisely what they did.
They went up on the Golan the next day.
They didn't want us to know about it.
They didn't want us to interfere with their plans.
And that's one explanation.
Now there's another.
And this is sort of gory.
But this is the explanation.
James Bamford, who is one of the best and all the best chronicler of NSA activities, he offers this view in that excellent book he wrote.
It's called Body of Secrets.
He has evidence there that including reporting from an Israeli journalist who was an eyewitness, he was there, there is Al Arish, which is a little seaside city right in the Sinai, right on the Mediterranean.
So this Israeli journalist was there and also an Israeli military historian was there.
And they talked about these Egyptian prisoners that the Israelis had rounded up in the Sinai.
Now, as the Israelis rolled into the Sinai, they had three axes, right?
They came in with tanks on three different roads.
And they picked up and they killed a lot of Egyptians, of course, but they picked up about a thousand prisoners.
And prisoners are a real pain, you know, in Sinai.
You have to feed them.
You have to give them water.
And it's a real pain.
And so what happened here, according to Bamford and these eyewitnesses, is that Egyptian prisoners of war, there are about three or four hundred of them in the coastal town of Al Arish there in the Sinai, they were lined up.
They dug their own graves.
They were shot.
And that's the way they took care of the Egyptian prisoners.
Now, the Liberty is patrolling directly opposite Al Arish, OK, in international waters, but within easy range to pick up the intelligence while it's going on there.
OK, why not fight?
I mean, you could see Liberty big as big as it can be right off the shore.
Now, the Israelis are well aware of that.
And that wouldn't be terribly good PR to get back to the U.S.
Yeah, it's better.
It's better to commit two war crimes than one.
It's better to strafe Americans, attack Americans and strafe them in their lifeboats than slaughtering a bunch of Egyptians, which obviously Americans don't care about anyway.
Yeah, well, if you could achieve both, then you know, you suppress all the evidence.
And Shalom, of course, was one of the folks there in the Sinai that was that was behind all this.
He had Egyptian prisoners of his own.
So, yeah, I give equal merit, equal weight to these.
I don't think equally true.
There are other theories about the Israelis trying to get the U.S. to attack Egypt on the premise that this was an Egyptian attack on their ship.
I think that's too much of a stretch.
So these are the two that I go with.
But again, I would just sort of caution your listeners.
This is in the area of speculation with respect to why they did it, that they did it and that they did it deliberately and that they wanted to kill all the crew and sink the ship.
That is beyond reasonable doubt.
You know, Terry Halbert, the awardee with the silver star there last Wednesday, he summed it up this way.
He said, you know, this is a quote.
There's lots of theories out there, but let's just say the Israelis didn't want us listening into what they wanted to do, end quote.
All right, now we're going to end up going over time here anyway, but if you can keep it real short, I'd like to give you a chance to comment about why this is so important right now in terms of the American-Israeli relationship and Admiral Mullen's reference to the USS Liberty last year when he went to Israel and so forth.
Well, long story short, no U.S. politician has dared to breathe the word USS Liberty since 1967 until July of 2008.
Not even Ron Paul?
Well, yeah.
Ron Paul, I suppose, is the exception to that.
Always is.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
But you've got Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
You know, he's a pretty gutsy guy.
And so he was sent to Israel to tell them that they didn't want, that is the U.S. administration and particularly the U.S. military, they didn't want Israel mousetrapping the U.S. into a major fight with Iran.
In those days, we know from reporting from Sy Hersh and others that there were all kinds of bizarre plans like, you know, building five Iranian, painted with Iranian colored PT boats and then, you know, taking pot shots at our own ships.
So provocation, OK?
So what Mullen was hell-bent and determined to prevent was the Israelis doing this last summer when it looked very much like Vice President Cheney and what's his name, the guy in the NSC, his name I'll remember.
Elliot Abrams.
Elliot Abrams, yeah.
They were encouraging the Israelis to do precisely that.
So Mullen goes there and he says, look, if you're thinking about perpetrating a little provocation, like say in the Persian Gulf, don't even think of it.
Because you know what?
We know what happened to the USS Liberty on June 8th, 1967.
And it ain't going to happen again.
You hear me?
Now, why is that gutsy?
Well, that's gutsy because it's the first time any U.S. official braced the Israelis.
They know that Mullen knows not only that Mullen knows, but he's not going to let it happen again, OK?
And that was a gutsy thing for him to do.
And it was one of the reasons, I'm sure, that the Israelis did not succumb to the blandishments of the likes of Cheney.
Because, you know, if the chairman of the Joint Chiefs says, look, don't do it, this time that gives a little weight to the to the warning.
You know, you can always depend on the Senate and House of Representatives.
You know, I've repeated the old saw as to why the Israelis refused to become our 51st state.
Do you know that one?
Because then they'd have less representation in Congress.
They'd only have two senators.
So anyhow, the Senate, the House of Representatives is one thing, but the U.S. military.
And to their credit, Mullen stepped up to the plate there.
And before him, Admiral Fallon.
And I hate to give this credit to all these naval officers, but they did the job.
They prevented it from happening in cooperation with some gutsy people at CIA, mind you.
The ones that came up with that gutsy estimate that says, don't believe what Cheney and Bush are saying.
Iran stopped working on the nukes, the nuclear weapons related part of its program in the fall of 2003.
So that's five and a half years ago now, and they haven't resumed.
So that that combination of things, plus the misadventure in Georgia and that kind of thing where the Russians came in strong and said, look, enough of this, enough of this stuff.
We're not going to suffer this kind of stuff on our coast, on our border.
All that kind of congealed in the summer of last year and prevented something really bad from happening.
Well, what am I worried about now?
Well, Netanyahu.
He's worse than Olberg.
He's been saying that Iran has to be zapped.
He's been saying that for decades.
OK, and will he do it?
Well, look at the people that he's in with, Lieberman and those kinds of folks.
So when we ask the question, why should all the American soldiers in Iraq have to start the Iraq war all over again against the Iran loyal Shiite parties there for a country that's willing to at least attempt to sink an American ship with napalm and so forth, you know, it adds a little bit of context to the equation other than, you know, God wants us to protect Israel and they're the only democracy in the Middle East, our heroic ally, and all the slogans that we generally hear, you know, this kind of thing that you're talking about adds a little bit of, you know, I don't know, we wouldn't go to war for Lebanon.
And yet they never attack our Navy ship with napalm, you know what I mean?
I don't know.
Yeah, it's a little, it gives a little clarity to the whole thing.
And, you know, it reminds us that, you know, the real statesmen that should be regarded in these connections are former presidents who are generals.
General Washington, warned in his farewell address against passionate attachments to one country, thinking that that country has the identical objectives as the United States of America.
He also warned against entangling alliances.
And of course, General Eisenhower, also president, warned against the military-industrial complex, which now we can call the military-industrial-congressional-media complex.
And that's very close to fascism, my friends.
All right, everybody, that's Ray McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You can find what he writes at ConsortiumNews.com and at Original.
Antiwar.com slash McGovern.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Ray.
Thank you, Scott.