Some researchers believe that LBJ was the mastermind behind JFK’s assassination and researcher Phillip F. Nelson wrote a book documenting his investigation on this issue: LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination. 

However, one of the greatest unknown chapters in LBJ’s presidency is that he personally gave the order to Israel to bomb and utterly destroy the USS Liberty and its entire crew of 294 Americans. Astoundingly, when the mission went awry and Sixth Fleet Commanders were ordering the rescue of the besieged and bloodied USS Liberty crew, LBJ ordered that rescue operations be called back, at least twice. Against all odds, the USS Liberty survived but after the attack, 34 Americans lay dead. Except for four worthless .50 caliber machine guns, the USS Liberty was unarmed and defenseless against the far superior firing power of the Israeli navel and air force armada that descended upon it with relentless and unspeakable terror.

Not a whole lot has been written about the USS Liberty. It’s just another critically important issue that has been buried in history, but two extraordinary books document the truth. James M. Ennes Jr., is a retired US Naval Officer and a survivor of the Liberty attack who wrote a book that documents his investigative disclosure of the truth, here.

Peter Hounam, an investigative journalist, wrote Operation Cyanide, Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. Hounam’s extraordinary book, published in 2003, relies heavily on the work of Ennis and also documents numerous interviews that Hounam conducted with the USS Liberty survivors as well as other folks in the US, British, and Israeli governments.

The “official” story of the USS Liberty, according to the government and mainstream media version of the event, is that on June 8, 1967 the Israelis accidentally bombed the Liberty off the coast of Egypt and killed 34 American sailors.

The real story is that President Johnson, who was being battered in the polls over the Vietnam War and facing a general election loss and even losing the Democrat primary, [encouraged] the Israelis to bomb the Liberty to create a casus belli and to secure a Gulf-of-Tonkin-style resolution to explode the world into war — because in America everybody loves an outraged and indignant president who will use the full force of the military at the slightest provocation, even a government-planned false flag attack.

The USS Liberty, however, encompasses far more than a murderous psychopathic American president resorting to hideously evil deeds to get re-elected. In addition to ordering the total destruction of the USS Liberty and potentially sending 294 Americans to a watery grave in the Mediterranean Sea, LBJ also ordered the nuclear bombing of Cairo, an event specifically designed to create a nuclear war by blaming the entire USS Liberty affair on Russia or Egypt. More horrifying, it’s documented that US planes were on emergency standby orders as pilots waited on the runways in their planes armed with nuclear weapons. The nuclear bombing of Cairo was called off only three minutes before the nuclear bomb drops.

As fate would have it, LBJ’s plan blew up in his face and the world got a reprieve from a US-induced nuclear holocaust.

How did all this happen? First, it must be understood that the USS Liberty was supposed to be destroyed and sunk within minutes and without any survivors.

The actual attack on the USS Liberty commenced at 2:00 p.m. Israel time on June 8, 1967. The USS Liberty was 13 miles off the coast of Gaza and moving slowly at five knots. The crew had observed several flyovers by Israeli reconnaissance planes earlier in the day.

When the USS Liberty was struck, it was struck with an awesome force. According to USSLiberty.org, a website created by the survivors to document and expose the truth, the ship was first struck by Israeli fighter aircraft:

“Israeli fighter aircraft launched a rocket attack on USS Liberty. The aircraft made repeated firing passes, attacking USS Liberty with rockets and their internal cannons. After the first flight of fighter aircraft had exhausted their ordnance, subsequent flights of Israeli fighter aircraft continued to prosecute the attack with rockets, cannon fire, and napalm. During the air attack, USS Liberty’s crew had difficulty contacting Sixth Fleet to request assistance due to intense communications jamming. The initial targets on the ship were the command bridge, communications antennas, and the four .50 caliber machine guns, placed on the ship to repel boarders.

After the Israeli fighter aircraft completed their attacks, three Israeli torpedo boats arrived and began a surface attack about 35 minutes after the start of the air attack. The torpedo boats launched a total of five torpedoes, one of which struck the side of USS Liberty, opposite the ship’s research spaces. [20] Twenty-six Americans in addition to the eight who had been killed in the earlier air attacks, were killed as a result of this explosion.

Following their torpedo attack, the torpedo boats moved up and down the length of the ship (both the port and starboard sides), continuing their attack, raking the ship with cannon and machine gun fire.[21] In Malta, crewmen were later assigned the task of counting all of the holes in the ship that were the size of a man’s hand or larger. They found a total of 861 such holes, in addition to “thousands” of .50 caliber machine gun holes.”, link here.

USS Liberty Timeline, here.

0600: Israeli Nord 2501 Noratlas (flying boxcar) reconnoiters Liberty….

0603: Reconnaissance aircraft reports to Israeli naval headquarters that “GTR-5” is written on the ship, identifying it as an NSA intelligence vessel.

0720: Fresh American flag is raised….

1000: Two unmarked, rocket-armed, delta-winged jets circle Liberty three times. Liberty officers can count rockets and see the pilots, but see no identifying marks on the plane. The jets radio Israeli headquarters that the ship is flying an American flag….

1055: Pinchas Pinchasy, naval liaison officer at Israeli air force headquarters, reports to Naval Headquarters that the ship cruising slowly off El Arish is “an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy, named Liberty, whose marking was GTR-5.”…

1100 & 1130: Israeli reconnaissance aircraft again circle Liberty.

The above information is critically important because it proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Israelis were well aware that the USS Liberty was a well-marked US spy ship. US spy ships are extremely easy to spot because, as telecommunication vessels, they are loaded with wires, antennas and other communication gear that are easily recognized and identifiable (unlike Russian spy ships that were realistically camouflaged as trawlers and fishing boats). The reason it’s important to understand this is because the cover-up of of the USS Liberty incident was so flimsy and fictitious that both the US and Israeli governments officially stated that the USS Liberty was mistook for an Egyptian vessel that hauls horses. This is simply impossible.

As the timeline unfolds, it’s clear that the attack on the USS Liberty had two goals: 1. first destroy and disable all communication capabilities and 2. sink the ship, her crew and guarantee that there were no survivors. The timeline continues:

1358: Two unmarked delta-winged Mirage jets attack Liberty. After taking out gun mounts, they target ship’s antennae and bridge with heat-seeking missiles.

1424: Three French-built 62-ton Israeli motor torpedo boats approach Liberty in attack formation.

1435: Torpedo boats launch five German-made 19-inch torpedoes at Liberty. One torpedo strikes starboard directly into NSA area, accounting for 25 of the 34 men who would be killed. Torpedo boats then circle, machine-gunning the ship with armor-piercing projectiles for another 40 minutes.

At this point, the USS Liberty was being pummeled by air and sea with everything that attack planes and motorized torpedo boats (MTB’s) could possibly throw at them. The decks were ablaze from napalm fires, the ship was being torpedoed by the Israeli Navy and bombs and rockets from the air rained down on them.

This is where the story turns extraordinarily heroic from human ingenuity that pretty much killed LBJ’s grand plan. One of the USS Liberty’s communication transformers had been down and not functioning, something the Israeli’s must have known in advance because it wasn’t destroyed or even hit. A courageous crew member managed to fix it by stringing long wires across a burning deck and rendered it operable, and, of course, capable of sending out a mayday message to numerous US aircraft that permeated the area. However, the Israeli planes had high tech jamming equipment that successfully jammed the signal. It’s probably also true that at that point the Israeli’s were not much concerned with the USS Liberty sending out a message because they believed that all communication equipment was knocked out permanently.

Peter Hounam writes in Operation Cyanide, “Liberty radioman Richard Sturman concluded that the attackers had carefully prepared for the attack with the specific intention of preventing the ship communicating with the outside world. To do so effectively they must have had prior knowledge from shore-based receivers of the five frequencies being used by the ship, so that jamming gear could be tuned to them. Sturman recalled his anger when he discovered that the international distress frequency, used for Mayday messages, was also jammed”.

The astute crew however made a startling discovery. The Israeli jamming capabilities did not work when they were actually engaged bombing and the USS Liberty crew had windows of a few seconds of opportunity in between strikes to send out a message.

Hounam writes, “At first, the signalmen felt their task was hopeless. Plane after plane was swooping in on the ship, firing cannon, shooting missiles and dropping napalm….Then someone spotted that there was a respite from the jamming, lasting just a few seconds, when the attacking planes fired their missiles. Halman grabbed the opportunity and shouted into the mike, ‘Any station, this is Rockstar. We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate assistance!’”. On the USS Saratoga (call-sign ‘Schematic’) the radioman picked up the message but it was garbled, possibly by further jamming. “Rockstar, this is ‘Schematic,’ he said. ‘Say again, you are garbled.’”

Eventually, the USS Liberty message was acknowledged and authenticated 10 minutes after the attack began. The USS Saratoga confirmed Liberty’s message with “Roger, Rockstar. Authentication is correct…”. The messaged bounced everywhere and was even acknowledged by two US embassies in the region. Furthermore, it was impossible for the Pentagon not to know of Liberty’s attack as all messages are also automatically routed to the Pentagon and other government agencies. The Israelis must have also intercepted the radio message.

The Liberty crew was relieved and believed that help was on the way. Wrong! Although fleet commanders quickly ordered rescue operations, twice the rescue missions were ordered called back by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a close friend and trusted associate of LBJ. In fact, it’s documented that during one of the conversations between the the Sixth Fleet Commander and McNamara, LBJ got on the phone and roared, “We will not embarrass an ally,” to reinforce McNamara’s direct command from LBJ to not rescue the ailing USS Liberty and her crew.

According to James Ennes, the entire attack lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes, although some crew members believe it was longer. Unquestionably, the attack was sheer hell for those on board the USS Liberty and the agony was prolonged by the fact that help from the Sixth Fleet never arrived as expected.

Then something extraordinary happened. The Israelis stopped attacking despite having more than enough firepower to finish the job of sinking the USS Liberty and her crew. Its been documented that the Israelis had commando helicopter crews hovering above the USS Liberty with a crew to finish the job. Clearly, the USS Liberty crew expected to die.

But with the message out and everybody knowing about it, including the Russians who knew what was going because they were close by in their own disguised spy ships as they intercepted the message or possibly even observed the USS Liberty being attacked, the Israelis panicked, called off the attack and never finished the job. Eventually, the surviving crew was rescued and many were badly injured.

Hounam documents an interview with one of the injured USS Liberty crew members, Joe Lentini:

I woke up, it was pitch-black and I was in water. I tried to stand up and put my weight on my left leg and it wouldn’t support me, obviously I fell back down; I didn’t know at the time I had six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a fractured skull, both tympanic membranes in my ears were blown out, shrapnel all over me in my body…it never occurred to me that I didn’t have a leg and it never occurred to me that I was about to die.

Shockingly, the USS Liberty tragedy did not begin at 2:00 p.m. Israeli time according to the sanitized official version. It began earlier. According to Hounam, he interviewed a retired Air Force pilot, Jim Nanjo, who spent 20 years on the H-bomb attack force. The job of such pilots who lived on US air bases was to be ready to jump into a plane and carry out orders immediately.

Nanjo told Hounam about how he was awakened on the morning of 6/8/67 between 2:00 a.m. and no later than 4:00 a.m. by an alert that told him an emergency situation existed and he needed to man his plane immediately. Other bomber pilots were also manning their planes and revving up their engines waiting for the “go” order and their orders. They knew nothing about their mission and Hounam writes:

Nanjo was in no doubt that the world was near to Armageddon that day…

There was however one other significance of his story that he had not spotted. The klaxons had woken him at between 1 am. and 4 am; he was certain it was no later, but the Liberty was not attacked until 5 am California time. How were the American military and their commander in chief, Lyndon Johnson, able to anticipate the attack, and yet apparently not know the Israelis were behind it.

Hounam also documents that Nanjo was aware that other US Air Force bases were under the same highest alert in Guam, Britain, Moron, Spain as well as in the US. What was Nanjo carrying? Hounam writes:

Even after 35 years, he was reluctant to provide details of the bombs carried by his squadron that morning.: ‘Other than to say it was a weapon of mass destruction. I am not able to give you the nomenclature.’ Then he confirmed that they were carrying thermonuclear weapons — H-bombs…

It’s well documented that LBJ and his trusted Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, were deeply and personally involved in the USS Liberty tragedy, the cover-up of the truth and even a scheme to explode the world into nuclear warfare.

To comprehend the severity of the situation, it’s imperative to understand the Cold War, the backdrop against which it was played, the prevalent paranoia at the time of the Communist threat and the incredible rise of America’s military industrial complex to the world’s sole superpower. Many who knew LBJ well feared that he was unstable, mentally ill, a psychopath, or even worse. He was notoriously crude and vulgar. Denis Healey, the Secretary of Defense in Britain so despised and distrusted LBJ that he wrote in his memoirs:

Lyndon Johnson was a monster….

[He was] one of the few politicians with whom I found it uncomfortable to be in the same room. Johnson exuded a brutal lust for power which I found most disagreeable. When he said, “I never trust a man unless I have his pecker in my pocket,” he really meant it. He boasted about acting on the principle, “Give me a man’s balls, and his heart and mind will follow.”… Source: Operation Cyanide

That LBJ was mad is validated by his numerous actions that fueled his personal ambitions over the decades and in the summer of 1967. LBJ was obsessed with one thing and one thing only: reelection. He was in grave danger of losing the presidency and his power. That he would do anything to maintain that power is 100% consistent with the depth of his evil.

But LBJ was also an extraordinarily clever master politician who profoundly understood how a raucous game of geopolitics could be played and manipulated to his own advantage, especially when it came to courting the approval of the American people. Vietnam was already a whopper of a failure and LBJ’s war was growing more unpopular by the second.

The Middle East has always been a disaster (some things never change), at least since oil came into play and the modern nation state of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1948. The rise of Arab nationalism was also heating up as Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and the Marxist styled Baathist movements were flourishing. Syria and Iraq had shed western imposed monarchs and were raising their own brand of dictators. Israel was becoming America’s unofficial 51st state as the Evangelical movement was rising in anticipation of fulfilling Biblical prophecy now that Israel existed for the first time since Biblical times.

The bellicose rhetoric blossomed as Arab leaders publicly vowed to destroy Israel. This was nothing new and even the Israelis perceived that such utterances were an appeasement to the neurotic Arab street rather than an actual threat. Still, that didn’t stop Israel from launching the preemptive Six Day War.

The significance of the Six Day War as it relates to the USS Liberty is that the USS Liberty was bombed on the fourth day of the Six Day War — that Israel had actually won during the first hour of the first day of the Six Day War when it wiped out the entire Egyptian Air Force. The geopolitical drama of the Middle East is acutely linked to the Cold War because the Soviet Union was arming and funding Middle East regimes, notably Egypt and Syria. The Middle East was a pawn on the chessboard of America vs. the Soviets during the Cold War because influential dominance of the region was a key goal of both nations. Of course, the obviously oily nature of Middle East natural resources was considered a prize.

Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin paid a visit to former Israeli Prime Minster David Ben Gurion who is Israeli’s most esteemed national hero, loved and respected by all. Ben Gurion was appalled at the prospects of war with Egypt or anybody, and is reported to have told Rabin, “You made a mistake…. You led the state into a grave situation. We must not go to war.” Rabin was reportedly horrified that he didn’t have the blessing of Ben Gurion for a preemptive war. Ben Gurion isn’t shy about war; in fact, he was the leader of Israel’s War of Independence when Israel was the the target of Arab military violence right after the UN declared Israel a nation. Though a fighter and even a terrorist according to some, Ben Gurion preferred peace and negotiation with his cantankerous Arab neighbors because war was always hideously destructive.

Who was behind the Six Day War and why? It’s highly unlikely that Israel unilaterally initiated the Six Day War without specific instructions and support from the US. Some observers believe that the US and LBJ engineered the Six Day War as part of America’s Cold War strategy to humiliate the Soviet Union and and advance US hegemony in the Middle East.

Furthermore, it’s ludicrous to accept that Israel accidentally bombed the USS Liberty and it’s clearly obvious that the official US/Israel version is so flimsy a cover-up that any citizen journalist using his Google fingers could credibly research enough facts to blow that lie to shreds.

However, the USS Liberty incident was far more sinister. Nasser, other Arab leaders, and Arab journalists tended to believe that the U.S. and Britain were behind the Six Day War and actually participated. The consensus in the Arab world was that the entire Israeli Air Force wasn’t sufficient in numerical strength to accomplish the now infamous Israeli aerial armada that struck the Egyptian Air Force with such a devastating force that the entire Egyptian Air Force was demolished. Moreover, it appears that the Arab world was clueless about US plans to start a war with Egypt through its proxy Israel and/or that the nuclear bombing of Cairo was on the table. Hounam writes:

Before Day Four of the war, Nasser had been accusing the US and Britain of directly assisting Israel. After the hot-line exchange about the Liberty, he was convinced of it. Of course, he was not aware that the ‘reconnaissance planes’ had in fact been on their way to bomb Cairo or…. that an atomic device could have been detonated.