‘I know nothing about it. I don’t want to say I didn’t at the time, but today I have no knowledge of it.’ Former US Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara on the attack on USS Liberty.
‘As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy four years earlier, the official version [of the attack on the USS Liberty] is even more unlikely than some of the conspiracy theories.’ John Simpson, forward to Peter Hounam’s Operation Cyanide (London: Vision, 2003)
The well-documented rise of the neo-cons has highlighted again a seemingly enduring feature of what Peter Dale Scott has labelled ‘deep politics’: the ability of a small, determined clique to seize control of vital aspects of US national policy, particularly in affairs concerning the Middle East. But the neo-cons rising to prominence under Nixon and the bane of Kissinger have a perhaps neglected provenance in the administration of Lyndon Johnson.
The crippling of the 455-foot USS Liberty, a SIGINT intelligence vessel run jointly by the US navy and the NSA, in a sustained two hour attack by Israeli bombers and torpedo craft at the height of the 1967 Middle East war, is still regarded as a distressing but understandable incident of ‘friendly fire’ by most mainstream historians.(1) This view, challenged by historian of the NSA James Bamford in 1982,(2) has been also opposed by former head of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moorer; beltway luminary the late Clark Clifford; former Secretary of State Dean Rusk; guardedly by former CIA chief Richard Helms; and by the surviving crew, who have maintained an active campaign for a congressional inquiry.
Former Sunday Times chief reporter and broadcaster, Peter Hounam, has mustered some admittedly oblique confirmation that a deliberate Israeli assault took place in interviews with Helms and former US Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara; and much supporting testimony from Liberty and other navy and airforce veterans and a range of significant players in US and Israeli military/intelligence circles. He makes a plausible case that the attack was indeed co-ordinated by elements in the Israeli government and the Johnson White House. The aim of Operation Cyanide (‘if it gets out, we’ll be poisoned…..’) was to provide a pretext for US intervention on Israel’s side in the conflict and to intimidate the Soviet navy, then extending its reach into the Mediterranean. He also provides much evidence of US/UK/Australian intelligence cooperation with the Israeli campaign and the plausible claim that the Six Day war was actively promoted by LBJ (and some in Whitehall) ([1]) as a latter day ‘Suez’, to finally oust Egypt’s President Nasser, pile pressure on North Vietnam and, most importantly, secure Johnson’s re-election.
It is often thought that Johnson consummate congressional operator that he was was something of an ingenue in international matters. In fact, Dean Rusk observed, he was, ‘extraordinarily well informed about foreign affairs’ ([2]) and driven by anti-communism and a passionate Zionism. Hounam suggests there was a very tight loop of Johnson confidants notably Walt Rostow (National Security Advisor), neo-con godfather, Democratic Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, Arthur Goldberg (UN Ambassador), the mysterious movie moguls Mathilde and Arthur Krim and Israeli Deputy ambassador, Eppie Evron on the inside track of Cyanide planning.([3]) This was co-ordinated with Israeli hawks Rabin, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan to the similar ignorance of the broader Israeli government, including Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.([4]) An outer US circle, knowledgeable of various aspects and of varying degrees of enthusiasm for the plan, included Dean Rusk, the Joint Chiefs, and Robert McNamara, who resigned shortly after on the issue, ([5]) as did Cyrus Vance, then Secretary of the Navy. Aware of possible exposure, but confident of drowning out the potential blowback in the general victory euphoria, Johnson, on 26 May 1967, called Evron into his office, remarking, ‘You and I…are going to get the Congress to pass another Tonkin Resolution.'([6])
By 1967 LBJ was becoming increasingly unstuck domestically. Riots, civil unrest, the anti-war movement and growing internal opposition were, it seemed, combining to deny him his place in history. ([7]) In the febrile, near-psychotic atmosphere of the Johnson White House, two goals were pursued with total obsession: winning the Vietnam war and stopping Bobby Kennedy. An easy US victory against Nasser, the Arab bogey-man, could be a short cut to both. One historian observed of Johnson:
‘His political world was ridden with conspiracies, false fronts and secret pacts and agendas. Everywhere he turned, he saw a communist or a Kennedy or, in his most hallucinatory moments, a communist Kennedy …at times Johnson seemed to know that this was all nonsense…But when Johnson slipped into these self hypnotic states it became harder, as the months passed…to pull him out.'([8])
Loyal till the end, though, were the emerging circle of neo-cons who, with some justification regarded, the unqualified 1967 Israeli victory as the dawn of a new era in US/Israel relations. ([9])
In view of what later transpires, it is worth considering Bobby Kennedy’s own foreign policy platform. By now totally opposed to the Vietnam war, Kennedy held fairly conventional views on support for Israel. He endorsed the controversial sale of 50 Phantom jets to Israel in May 1968; but, like his brother, did not encourage a blank cheque. JFK’s repeated frustrating of Israel’s nuclear ambitions had been a particularly sore point amongst the proto-neocons, as was general US State Department opposition to Israel holding its post-1967 conquered territory. An RFK presidency increasingly possible as the ’68 bandwagon rolled on would be bad news for greater Israel enthusiasts, with Kennedy’s liberal advisers putting on pressure for serious negotiation. And potential for leverage was certainly present in Operation Cyanide, which was, to date, the most sensitive secret in US foreign policy. By early 1967 Kennedy was getting confidential briefings on the Vietnam war supported by classified documentation from a by now increasingly disillusioned Robert McNamara.([10]) From October 1967 he had also recruited Daniel Ellsberg as his ‘man on Vietnam’.([11])Ellsberg, a Pentagon high-flyer seconded to the RAND corporation, was at this time compiling (and selectively leaking) the Pentagon Papers and was anxious to pass on as much as possible to Bobby Kennedy. Clearly, from a number of camps, Kennedy had to be stopped. And this is where the strange figure of Sirhan Sirhan enters the picture
Sirhan
Two recent books have appeared that shed a possible light on the proceedings. Well known investigative journalist Peter Evans is the author of a definitive biography of Aristotle Onassis and the sixties pulp classic, Goodbye Baby and Amen.In Nemesis([12]) he traces a complex web of business, criminal, and terrorist connections retained by Onassis, and concludes that a mixture of commercial threat and sheer vendetta led to a contract killing on Bobby Kennedy, orchestrated by a senior figure in the PLO.
Matthew Smith’s latest work ([13]) fits more clearly into the assassination genre mainstream. His thesis is that a shifting coalition of the usual suspects set out to destroy not only JFK’s presidency but the entire dynasty. And in doing so, he offers not only a second ‘Oswald’, but a possible second ‘Sirhan’. There is indeed much in Smith, to me at any rate, that is new and on the JFK stuff and the hapless Edward Kennedy that looks very interesting; but I am not sufficiently au fait to judge.
Sirhan’s travels
But what did grab my attention in the RFK section were the claims concerning Sirhan Sirhan’s alleged travels to the Middle East. These crop up in reports for the London Evening Standard. Here, according to Iraeli-sourced information purported to be from then unnamed ‘Arab governments’,([14]) Sirhan Bishara Sirhan Abu Qatar visited named addresses and individuals in Beirut, Damascus, Gaza, Cairo and Jordan on journeys in 1957 (where the 13-year old was married in a Coptic church near Amman), 1964 and 1966. On these latter two visits he allegedly spent some time at various PLO training camps, the stories containing precise dates, locations and individuals, including one (Algerian) camp commander. As Smith points out, the last dateline clashes with Sirhan’s recorded employment at the horse breeding farm in Del Rio, California.
Matthew Smith is largely uninterested in any wider implications of US/Israeli intelligence collaboration. His main theme is that Sirhan’s identity was in use by one or other US agencies active in the Middle East, thus accounting for a further tier of RFK cover-up. Given the stock role of identity theft in intelligence trade craft, this bears some examination. But why, if so, would the Israelis blow what would have been, at least partially, their own operation?
What is interesting here is the stance taken at trial by LA District Attorney, Joseph P. Bush, the prosecution team and the lead LAPD unit, ‘Special Unit Senator’. Despite the flourishing of Sirhan’s somewhat phantasmagoric diaries at a post-assassination press conference by Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, replete with much talk of alleged communist links and revenge for RFK’s endorsement of the Phantom jets sale to Israel, the whole thing vanishes from view. True, both the Los Angeles prosecutors and the (mob-related) ‘defence’ team were determined to close matters down as cleanly as possible, ([15]) but it is still worth examining the source of what should have been absolutely critical information.
Jon Kimche was the long-standing Middle East correspondent for the Evening Standard with a reputation for insider contacts. This was no accident. Kimche’s brother, David Kimche, was a then senior figure in the Mossad and from 1981, Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and chief negotiator in the 1983 Israel-Lebanon accords.([16]) However, notwithstanding the significance of source and detail in Matthew Smith’s speculation here, ([17]) it seems more likely that the story of Sirhan and the PLO training camps was simply Israeli disinformation. Kennedy apparently being killed by a Palestinian presented an opening too good to miss. It is, though, of at least passing interest that this potentially juicy opportunity to smear the PLO was quietly dropped by both the Israelis and their growing caucus of US allies. A realisation, perhaps, that renewed media focus on the Middle East might start unravelling the Liberty incident, and wider secrets of the Six Day war? Kimche could, however, have got the right Palestinian group, but without then knowing why.([18])
Onassis
Matters take a further turn in the light of what we find in Peter Evans. Drawing on a formidable range of interviewees, Evans offers a plausible case that Bobby Kennedy was murdered by, inter alia, a somewhat freelancing Palestinian team led by later PLO Paris ambassador and Black September leader, Mahmoud Hamshari, at the instigation of, and bankrolled by, Ari Onassis, who wanted Bobby out of the way so he could marry Jackie Kennedy. ([19]) Fact and coincidence are both here to support this claim. Hamshari was indeed (covertly) in LA at the right time, ostensibly to set up a Fatah intelligence cell and lobbying/fund-raising base. He was allegedly in possession of a list of Palestinian immigrants to the US, gathered from the UN Relief and Works Agency,([20]) to whom Sirhan’s family had applied for assistance.
He had first met Onassis in Paris in autumn 1967, heading a PLO-sanctioned extortion squeeze on Onassis-owned Olympic Airways. According to Evans’ interviews with surviving Onassis henchmen, the two soon hit it off. Hamsharmi got his kickback and more on the understanding that he do Onassis a little favour: arrange the murder of Robert F. Kennedy.
Hamshari got access to Onassis’ mob contacts ([21]) and was even put in touch with LA hypnotist and purported MKULTRA veteran, William Joseph Bryan, by an Onassis middleman.([22] ) Bryan, who was found dead under mysterious circumstances in Las Vegas, is a likely candidate for the role Sirhan’s mind control Svengali.([23])
Hamshari, targeted by Mossad in December 1972 and later killed on orders from PLO intelligence chief, Abu Iyad, for misappropriating PLO funds notably the $1.2m payment from Onassis ([24]) had no particular grudge against RFK. The motive was money and the kudos of a big hit within those PLO circles in a position to know.([25]) Others who could have had at least strong suspicions include the Israelis, closely tracking Hamshari’s movements in Paris([26])at the time and the CIA, who, Evans asserts, ‘took a very close interest’ in Onassis’ tangled business affairs.([27])
So far, Evans’ take that Onassis had both motive and opportunity to order RFK’s killing stacks up. But he assumes, against all the best evidence, that Sirhan did actually shoot Bobby Kennedy. True, this conforms to conventional empiricist concerns for analytic parsimony. However, a further simple ad hoc hypothesis can make things more readily explicable. Hamshari’s access to LA mob circles could have easily provided for a backstop killer in near certainty, hotel security guard Thane Cesar ([28]) to either shoot Kennedy or terminate Sirhan himself a la Jack Ruby.
If the killing of Kennedy was, in many ways, a stroke of luck for RFK’s opponents, their very range would ensure the cover-up went swiftly and smoothly. Bobby’s list of enemies was truly awesome. As well as the familiar roll call of big oil, military/industrial interests, Bay of Pigs veterans, the mob and dissidents in the CIA, we can also factor in the Greek Colonels (business partners of Onassis and bankrolling Nixon),([29]) the Shah of Iran (bitterly opposed to the Kennedys and also bankrolling Nixon), ([30] ) LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover and the mob-linked billionaire with a grudge, Aristotle Onassis.
We have to ask at this point, what did Bobby Kennedy himself know about Operation Cyanide? Certainly, he was getting in a position to know. Peter Hounam cites John McNaughton, Special Council at the DoD and ‘the Pentagon’s principal civilian war planner’ ([31]) as a likely Cyanide instigator. He was also Daniel Ellsberg’s boss on compiling the Pentagon Papers, and had recently withdrawn classified access to the office safe after suspecting Ellsberg’s unauthorised probings.([32] )
We can only speculate about what a Robert Kennedy presidency would have done in the Middle East. But at the least we could have expectations of a more critical engagement with such dictatorships as Iran, an olive branch to Nasser (who had admired JFK) ([33]) and a more proactive stance on pushing peace, UN resolution 242 and Israeli withdrawal. And further hopes, perhaps, of a corrective to the relentless rise of neo-con triumphalism within the sobering lessons exposed by Operation Cyanide.
Notes
1 It was not mentioned in the long account of the Israeli lobby’s role in US politics by John Mearsheimer and Stephan Walt in London Review of Books 23 March 2006, on-line at <www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/ mear01_. html>. See Peter Hounam, Operation Cyanide:Why the bombing of the USS Liberty nearly caused World War 3 (London: Vision, 2003). Hounam, from witness testimony, records that the Liberty suffered 34 crewmen dead, 171 wounded, 851 rocket hits, one torpedo direct hit (of 5 launched) after assault by two waves of 15 aircraft and three torpedo boats. The attack was preceded by 13 over-flights of Mirage jets and Noratlas reconnaissance aircraft. (pp.18-42)
2 See James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1982). In his his more recent Body of Secrets Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001) Bamford claims the Liberty was attacked to conceal evidence of Israeli war crimes in the El-Arish area other navy and airforce veterans and a range of significant players in US and Israeli military/intelligence circles. He makes a plausible case that the attack was indeed co-ordinated by elements in the Israeli government and the Johnson White House. The aim of Operation Cyanide (‘if it gets out, we’ll be poisoned…..’) was to provide a pretext for US intervention on Israel’s side in the conflict and to intimidate the Soviet navy, then extending its reach into the Mediterranean. He also provides much evidence of US/UK/Australian intelligence cooperation with the Israeli campaign and the plausible claim that the Six Day war was actively promoted by LBJ (and some in Whitehall) as a latter day ‘Suez’, to finally oust Egypt’s President Nasser, pile pressure on North Vietnam and, most importantly, secure Johnson’s reelection.
3 Peter Hounam (see note 1) pp.227-8. Hounam has confirmation of ‘freelance’ UK/Australian personnel in the Sinai theatre in interviews with General Meir Amit and various field officers present. They were apparently transferred from Yemen, where Israel was assisting the UK counterinsurgency against Nasser and the NLF/FLOSY.
4 From a transcript of taped interview by Dean Rusk for the LBJ Library, Austin, Texas, cited in Hounam, p.130.
5 Hounam claims that the original plan was for the war to start on June 15, under the designation ‘Frontlet 615’, authorised by the 303 committee in 1966, but was brought forward to frustrate international pressure for a peace plan. Frontlet 615 was apparently the overall plan to oust Nasser, with Operation Cyanide as its military component. Hounam (see note 1) pp.120-3, 270.
6 Hounam (see note 1) pp.86-7
7 McNamara was also severely at odds with Johnson over Vietnam, but states in Hounam’s interview that the Middle East war, ‘brought me into total confrontation with the top of the State Department and the White House and I left soon after.’ Hounam (see note 1) p.264.
8 Personal recollection of former ambassador Ephraim Evron, reported in, Richard B. Barker (ed.) The Six Day War A Retrospective, (University Press of Florida, 1996) cited in Hounam (see note 1), p.267.
9 See Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (London: Penguin, 2002) p.198.. Ellsberg, who had serious top-level access at the time, recalls being taken aside by Johnson’s ultra-loyal Press Secretary, Bill Moyers, in autumn 1967 to hear grave doubts expressed about the President’s sanity, with Moyers stating, ‘I never thought the situation could arise when I would wish for the defeat of LBJ’.
10 See Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and the Feud that Defined a Decade (New York: Norton, 1997), p.387.
11 Here Hounam (p.107) cites author Jonathan Goldberg (son of Ambassador Arthur): ‘In the popular mind, the New Jews of 1967 the Zionists, the orthodox and the neo-conservatives quickly came to be identified as the leadership of the American Jewish community.’
12 See Shesol (see note 10) p.390. These included General Earle Wheeler’s February 1967 request for 206,000 extra troops, nuclear weapons options and plans to drastically widen the war. Hounam claims that nuclear-armed A4 Skyhawks were launched from the US Sixth Fleet during the Liberty attack, targeted at Egypt, but were recalled in minutes by a frantic Robert McNamara. Hounam (see note 1) pp.171-88.
13 See Ellsberg (see note 9 ) p.218. Ellsberg became a Kennedy speech writer and total devotee.
14 Peter Evans, Nemesis Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O and the love triangle that brought down the Kennedys (New York: Harper-Collins, 2004)
15 Matthew Smith, The Kennedys: the conspiracy to destroy a dynasty (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2005)
16 Smith pp.223-7. The governments were later reported by Standard columnist Jon Kimche to Smith as being Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon.
17 Chief defence council, Grant Cooper was also retained by Mafia chief, Johnny Roselli; co-council Russell Parsons had been investigated by RFK himself. See David E. Sheim, The Mafia Killed President Kennedy (London: W.H. Allen, 1988) pp.295-6.
18 David Kimche’s own views on the Israel and the Middle East peace, as set out in his 1991 book dedicated to brother Jon are robust, but more conventionally ‘realist’ than hard-line Likudnik. See David Kimche, The Last Option: After Nasser, Arafat and Saddam Hussein (London: Weidenfeld, 1991)
19 Smith (see note 15) pp.227-8
20 Matthew Smith forwarded the Standard articles to Sirhan’s current defence lawyer, Lawrence Teeter before publication, to have them dismissed as ‘Israeli disinformation’.
21 Matthew Smith forwarded the Standard articles to Sirhan’s current defence lawyer, Lawrence Teeter before publication, to have them dismissed as ‘Israeli disinformation’.
22 See Evans (note 14) p.197.
23 Inter alia Onassis met Jimmy Hoffa in September 1963. Evans (see note 14) pp.79-80.
24 This was corporate raider and sometime film producer, David Karr, who had met Bryan at MGM. Bryan later met Onassis in May, 1968 in Las Vegas. Evans (see note 14) p.182.
25 Evans (see note 14) p.301. At the time of Bryan’s death, he was under investigation by journalists Bill Turner and John Christian for their book, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: a searching look at the conspiracy and cover-up (New York: Random House, 1978).
Bryan was the technical consultant for the film The Manchurian Candidate. See Philip H. Melanson, The RFK Assassination (NY: Shapolski, 1991)
26 According to Evans’ interviews, Hamshari was shopped by David Karr after the two had fallen out over an arms deal. Evans (see note14) pp.238-9. On 7 December 1972, a Mossad hit team (in the familiar guise of telephone engineers) detonated a bomb in the PLO ambassador’s Rue d’Alesia apartments. Seriously injured, the recovering Hamshari was again struck thirty-two days later by a mysterious fatal poison, which Evans’ sources claim, was administered after a formal PLO court-martial.
27 Hamshari, it should be noted, was an accomplished hit man, responsible for the Munich Olympics killings, a Swissair bomb blast in 1970 and an attempt of the life of David Ben Gurion in 1969. Evans (see note 14)p.236. See also Evans’ interview evidence that Hamshari proposed assassinating a ‘major’ political figure on US soil to a horrified PLO central committee in July 1967 (see note 14: pp.156-7, 176, 196).
28 Evans (see note 14) p.160. Yet another Middle East connection crops up with Khaibar Khan, the ‘Iranian enigma’ who so intrigues veteran RFK researcher, Philip Melanson. Khan, a publicly acknowledged former Iranian intelligence chief supposedly turned dissident, moved in the same tightly-knit, jet-set milieu as Onassis (he was close to Lilly Lawrence, daughter of Iranian oil tycoon and Onassis confident, Reza Fallah) and was working in an improbably lowly role in Bobby’s LA campaign headquarters, a location where Sirhan had been allegedly witnessed immediately prior to the assassination. Khaibar Khan, to be sure, was unlikely to be privy to the plot and had volunteered as a witness to the LAPD; but, whether or not running a false front organisation for SAVAK, he had certainly kept up his intelligenceconnections which, inevitably, involved Mossad. See Melanson (note 26) pp. 273-87.
29 Also in the loop was LBJ. According to White House logs cited by Evans, David Karr and columnist Drew Pearson met Johnson privately for 50 minutes in April 1968 apparently mentioning Onassis’ payoff to Hamshari and Jackie Kennedy’s wedding plans. Evans (see note 14) p. 170.
30 See Melanson (note 24) pp.71-87.
31 See Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: the Secret World of Richard Nixon (London: Gollancz, 2000) pp.284-7.
32 Summers pp.163-4
33 Hounam (see note 1) p.272. McNaughton had long been seeking a Vietnam exit strategy. In one memo, he suggests employing ‘diversionary offensives’ against Soviet allies elsewhere in the third world, a ploy known in Pentagon parlance as ‘horizontal escalation’. McNaughton memo to McGeorge Bundy, March 10, 1965 (LBJ Library).
34 Ellsberg(see note 9) p.84
35 See Anthony Nutting, Nasser (London: Constable, 1972) pp.383-402. Nutting, a friend and confident of Nasser, was present in Cairo at the build-up of the Six Day war and records Nasser’s increasing fatalism at being outmanoeuvred by the Israelis and LBJ, whom he had long thought was out to destroy him.