Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (35 page)

One deck
down, just below the waterline, were the Morse code as well as Russian and
Arabic voice-intercept operators, their "cans" tight against their
ears. Lined up along the bulkheads, they pounded away on typewriters and
flipped tape recorders on and off as they eavesdropped on the sounds of war.
Among their key missions was to determine whether the Egyptian air force's Soviet-made
bombers, such as the TU-95 aircraft thought to be based in Alexandria,
were being flown and controlled by Russian pilots and ground controllers.
Obtaining the earliest intelligence that the Russians were taking part in the
fighting was one of the principal reasons for sending the
Liberty
so far
into the war zone.

In another
office, communications personnel worked on the ship's special, highly encrypted
communications equipment.

Nearby in
the Coordination—"Coord"—spaces, technicians were shredding all
outdated documents to protect them from possible capture. Others were engaged
in "processing and reporting," or P&R. "Processing and
reporting involves figuring out who is talking," said Bryce Lockwood, one
of the P&R supervisors, "where they're coming from, the other stations
on that network, making some kind of sense out of it, forwarding it to the
consumers, which primarily was the NSA, the CIA, JCS."

But as the
real war raged on the shore, a mock war raged in the Coord spaces. One of the
Arabic-language P&R specialists had developed a fondness for Egypt and had
made a small Egyptian flag that he put on his desk. "The guys would walk
by and they would take a cigarette lighter," recalled Lockwood, "and
say, 'Hey, what's happening to the UAR [United Arab Republic, now Egypt] over
there?' And they would light off his UAR flag and he would reach over and say,
'Stop that,' and put the fire out, and it was getting all scorched."

Then,
according to Lockwood, some of the pro-Israel contingent got their revenge.
They had gotten Teletype paper and scotch-taped it together and with blue felt
marking pens had made a gigantic Star of David flag. This thing was about six
feet by about twelve feet—huge. And stuck that up on the starboard
bulkhead."

"You'd
better call the forward gun mounts," Commander McGonagle yelled excitedly
to Lieutenant Painter. "I think they're going to attack!" The captain
was standing on the starboard wing, looking at a number of unidentified jet
aircraft rapidly approaching in an attack pattern.

Larry
Weaver was still sitting outside the doctor's office when he first heard the
sound. A few minutes before, an announcement had come over the speaker saying
that the engine on the motor whaleboat was about to be tested. "All of a
sudden I heard this
rat-a-tat-tat
real hard and the first thing I
thought was, 'Holy shit, the prop came off that boat and went right up the
bulkhead,' that's exactly what it sounded like. And the very next instant we
heard the gong and we went to general quarters."

Stan White
thought it sounded like someone throwing rocks at the ship. "And then it
happened again," he recalled, "and then general quarters sounded, and
by the captain's voice we knew it was not a drill. Shortly after that the
wave-guides to the dish [antenna] were shot to pieces and sparks and chunks
fell on me."

"I
immediately knew what it was," said Bryce Lockwood, the Marine, "and
I just dropped everything and ran to my GQ station which was down below in the
Co-ord station."

Without
warning the Israeli jets struck—swept-wing Dassault Mirage IIICs. Lieutenant
Painter observed that the aircraft had "absolutely no markings," so
that their identity was unclear. He then attempted to contact the men manning
the gun mounts, but it was too late. "I was trying to contact these two
kids," he recalled, "and I saw them both; well, I didn't exactly see
them as such. They were blown apart, but I saw the whole area go up in smoke
and scattered metal. And, at about the same time, the aircraft strafed the
bridge area itself. The quartermaster, Petty Officer Third Class Pollard, was
standing right next to me, and he was hit."

With the
sun at their backs in true attack mode, the Mirages raked the ship from bow to
stern with hot, armor-piercing lead. Back and forth they came, cannons and
machine guns blazing. A bomb exploded near the whaleboat aft of the bridge, and
those in the pilothouse and the bridge were thrown from their feet. Commander
McGonagle grabbed for the engine order annunciator and rang up all ahead flank.

"Oil
is spilling out into the water," one of the Israeli Mirage pilots reported
to base.

Charles L.
Rowley, an electronics intelligence specialist who doubled as the ship's
photographer, grabbed his Nikon and raced to the bridge to try to get a shot of
the planes. Instead, the planes shot him. "They shot the camera right out
of my hands," he recalled. "I was one of the first ones that got
hit."

In the
communications spaces, radiomen James Halman and Joseph Ward had patched
together enough equipment and broken antennas to get a distress call off to the
Sixth Fleet, despite intense jamming by the Israelis. "Any station, this
is Rockstar," Halman shouted, using the
Liberty's
voice call sign.
"We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate
assistance."

"Great,
wonderful, she's burning, she's burning," said the Israeli pilot.

As Bryce
Lockwood rushed into the Co-ord unit, most of the intercept operators were
still manning their positions. Suddenly one of the other Russian voice
supervisors rushed over to him excitedly, having at last found what they had
been looking for, evidence of Soviet military activity in Egypt. "Hey,
Sarge, I found them, I found them," he said. "You found who?"
Lockwood asked. "I got the Russkies."

Now the
operators began frantically searching the airwaves, attempting to discover who
was attacking them. At the same time, Lock-wood and some others started the
destruction procedure. The Marine linguist broke out the white canvas ditching
bags, each about five feet tall. The bags were specially made with a large flat
lead weight in the bottom and brass fittings that could be opened to let in the
water so they would sink to the bottom faster. At the top was a rope
drawstring. "We had a room where we did voice tape transcripts," said
Lockwood, "and there were literally hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes in
there that had to be put in those ditching bags. So we got these ditching bags
and started putting these tapes in there. These were voice conversations of,
mostly, UAR targets. All the tapes and transcripts were loaded in the bags, a
lot of code manuals, and so forth."

At 2:09,
the American aircraft carrier USS
Saratoga,
operating near Crete,
acknowledged
Liberty's
cry for help. "I am standing by for further
traffic," it signaled.

After
taking out the gun mounts, the Israeli fighter pilots turned their attention to
the antennas, to sever the
Liberty's
vocal cords and deafen it so it
could not call for help or pick up any more revealing intercepts. "It was
as though they knew their exact locations," said Senior Chief Stan White.
Lieutenant Commander Dave Lewis, in charge of the NSA operation on the ship,
agreed. "It appears to me that every tuning section of every HF antenna had
a hole in it," he said. "It took a lot of planning to get
heat-seeking missiles aboard to take out our entire communications in the first
minute of the attack. If that was a mistake, it was the best-planned mistake
that has ever been perpetrated in the history of mankind."

Not
hearing anything from the
Saratoga
for a few minutes, the radio operator
repeated his call for help. "Schematic, this is Rockstar. We are still
under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate
assistance." But the
Saratoga
demanded an authentication code.
Unfortunately, it had been destroyed during the emergency destruction and the
Saratoga
operator was giving him a hard time about it. "Listen to the goddamned
rockets, you son-of-a-bitch," the
Liberty
radioman screamed into
his microphone.

"He's
hit her a lot," reported an Israeli Army commander at El Arish, where the
war crimes were taking place. "There's black smoke, there's an oil slick
in the water."

Then the
planes attacked the bridge in order to blind her, killing instantly the ship's
executive officer. With the
Liberty
now deaf, blind, and silenced,
unable to call for help and unable to move, the Israeli pilots next proceeded
to kill her. Designed to punch holes in the toughest tanks, the Israeli shells
tore through the
Liberty's
steel plating like hot nails through butter,
exploding into jagged bits of shrapnel and butchering men deep in their living
quarters.

"Menachem,
is he screwing her?" headquarters asked one of the pilots, excitedly.

As the
Israelis continued their slaughter, neither they nor the
Liberty
crew
had any idea that witnesses were present high above. Until now. According to
information, interviews, and documents obtained for
Body of Secrets,
for
nearly thirty-five years NSA has hidden the fact that one of its planes was
overhead at the time of the incident, eavesdropping on what was going on below.
The intercepts from that plane, which answer some of the key questions about
the attack, are among NSA's deepest secrets.

Two hours
before the attack, the Navy EC-121 ferret had taken off from Athens and
returned to the eastern Mediterranean for its regular patrol. Now it was flying
a diagonal track from Crete and Cyprus to El Arish and back. "When we
arrived within intercept range of the battles already in progress," said
Marvin Nowicki, "it was apparent that the Israelis were pounding the
Syrians on the Golan Heights. Soon all our recorders were going full blast,
with each position intercepting signals on both receivers [Hebrew and Arabic].
The evaluator called out many airborne intercepts from Arab and Israeli
aircraft. We were going crazy trying to cope with the heavy activity."

Then, a
few hours later, about the time the air attack was getting under way, Nowicki
heard one of the other Hebrew linguists excitedly trying to get his attention
on the secure intercom. "Hey, Chief," the linguist shouted,
"I've got really odd activity on UHF. They mentioned an American flag. I
don't know what's going on." Nowicki asked the linguist for the frequency
and "rolled up to it." "Sure as the devil," said Nowicki,
"Israeli aircraft were completing an attack on some object. I alerted the
evaluator, giving him sparse details, adding that we had no idea what was
taking place." For a while the activity subsided.

Deep down
in the NSA spaces Terry McFarland, his head encased in earphones, was vaguely
aware of flickers of light coming through the bulkhead. He had no idea they
were armor-piercing tracer bullets slicing through the
Liberty's
skin.
The "flickers" were accompanied by a strange noise that sounded like
chains being pulled across the bottom of the ship. Then McFarland looked up to
see "Red" Addington, a seaman, race down the ladder from above with
blood running down his right leg. "Somebody's up there shootin' at
us," he said.

When the
attack started, Larry Weaver had run to his general quarters station but it was
located on an old helicopter pad that left him exposed and vulnerable. He
grabbed for a dazed shipmate and pushed him into a safe corner. "I said,
'Fred, you've got to stay here, you've just got to because he's coming up the
center,' " Weaver recalled. "I yelled, screaming at him probably, and
finally he said he would stay." Then the only place Weaver could find to
hide was a small chock, the kind used to hold lines. "I got in the fetal
position," he said, "and before I closed my eyes I looked up and I
saw the American flag and that was the last thing I saw before I was hit. And I
closed my eyes just waiting for hell's horror to hit me. And I was hit by
rocket and cannon fire that blew two and a half feet of my colon out and I
received over one hundred shrapnel wounds. It blew me up in the air about four
and a half, five feet. And just blood everywhere. It felt like a really hot
electrical charge going through my whole body."

Stan White
raced for the enclosed NSA spaces, cutting through the sick bay. "Torn and
mutilated bodies were everywhere," he said. "Horrible sight! On the
mess deck I ran into one of my ETs [electronics technicians], he had a hole in
his shoulder and one you could see through in his arm. The sound of the shells
and rockets was overwhelming and I can only tell you that I didn't know a
person could be so terrified and still move."

Lloyd
Painter was also trying to get to his general quarters station on the mess
decks. "I was running as fast as I could," he recalled. "By the
time I got to the Chief's Lounge, the entrance through the lounge to the mess
docks, I saw [Petty Officer John C.] Spicher, our postal clerk, lying there cut
in half with strafing."

As soon as
the Mirages pulled away they were replaced by Super Mystère fighters which
first raked the ship from stern to bow and then crisscrossed it broadside. A
later analysis would show 821 separate hits on the hull and superstructure. Now
in addition to rocket, cannon, and machine-gun fire, the Mystères attacked with
thousand-pound bombs and napalm. Deafening explosions tore through the ship and
the bridge disappeared in an orange-and-black ball. Lying wounded by shrapnel,
his blood draining into his shoe, was Commander McGonagle. Seconds later they
were back. Flesh fused with iron as more strafing was followed by more rockets
which were followed by napalm.