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STAYING AHEAD - SIGINT SHIPS AND SPY PLANES 263
and were making Moon-bounce redundant. 13 Moreover, back
in Britain there were growing arguments over money, with
GCHQ and the Navy attempting to offload most of the cost of
the sigint ship on each other. 14 Both GCHQ and NSA were
encountering serious financial problems, and were having to
choose between projects. 15
The final death knell for Britain's sigint supership was sounded
elsewhere. On 8 June 1967, one of NSA's larger sigint ships,
the USS Liberty, was tracking developments during the Six-Day
War between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai Desert. The Liberty
was busy intercepting both Egyptian and Israeli traffic while
anchored twelve miles off the Sinai coast near El Arish. One of
its tasks was to try to pick up any evidence of Soviet advisers
assisting the Egyptians. Planners were aware that the ship was
in a dangerous spot, and ordered the commander to move
further away from the coast, but these instructions were not
received. During the afternoon the Israelis, who had been
keeping the ship under aerial surveillance for several hours,
launched a ferocious attack by air and sea. The first was
conducted by Mirage jet fighters, and the second by torpedo
boats. By the time the torpedo boats attacked, the Liberty's crew
had hoisted an enormous flag that measured no less than seven
feet by thirteen, declaring her to be an American ship.16
Thirty-four of the Liberty's crew died and 170 were wounded.
The ship, with eight hundred holes from prolonged rocket and
cannon fire, managed to limp away to Malta. In July 1967, the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, with full access
to sigint intercepts of Israeli radio traffic, concluded that although
Israeli aircraft had correctly identified the Liberty as an American
ship, the subsequent attack was the result of incompetence and
miscommunication. 17 However, James Bamford, whose sigint
history was written with the cooperation of NSA, asserts that
the attack was deliberate, and that the Liberty was prominently
displaying the American flag. He claims that the reason for the
attack was that the Israelis feared that the Liberty had been
eavesdropping on a massacre of Egyptian prisoners of war.