This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel apologized for the attack, saying that USS Liberty had been attacked in error after being mistaken for an Egyptian ship.
Johnson of having covered up that the attack was a deliberate act. USS Liberty was originally the 7,long-ton 7, t light civilian cargo vessel Simmons Victory , a mass-produced, standard-design Victory ship , the follow-on series to the famous Liberty ships that supplied the Allies with cargo during World War II. It carried out five operations in waters off the west coast of Africa leading up to However, due to ineffective message handling and routing, these messages were not received until after the attack.
He asked the U. American sources said that no inquiry about ships in the area was made until after the attack on Liberty. In a message sent from U. Secretary of State Dean Rusk to U. Barbour responded: "No request for info on U. With the outbreak of war, Captain William L. Martin at the United States Sixth Fleet headquarters to send a destroyer to accompany Liberty and serve as its armed escort and as an auxiliary communications center. The following day, Admiral Martin replied: " Liberty is a clearly marked United States ship in international waters, not a participant in the conflict and not a reasonable subject for attack by any nation.
Request denied. Meanwhile, at the United Nations on 6 June, U. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg told the United Nations Security Council that vessels of the Sixth Fleet were several hundred miles from the conflict, in response to Egyptian complaints that the United States was supporting Israel in the conflict.
On the night of 7 June Washington time, early morning on 8 June, Zulu or local time, the Pentagon issued an order to Sixth Fleet headquarters to tell Liberty to come no closer than nautical miles mi; km to Israel, Syria, or the Sinai coast Oren, p. The Navy said a large volume of unrelated high-precedence traffic, including intelligence intercepts related to the conflict, were being handled at the time; and that this combined with a shortage of qualified radiomen contributed to the delayed transmission of the withdrawal message.
