U.S. Navy Captain William L. McGonagle (1926-1999)

By Richard H. Curtiss

Retired U.S. Navy Captain William L. McGonagle, who died of lung cancer March 9 in Palm Springs, California, at the age of 73, was a Navy commander on June 8, 1967 when his ship, the USS Liberty, was attacked and nearly sunk by Israeli fighter aircraft and torpedo boats. Of the 294 Navy and National Security Agency personnel aboard, 34 were killed and 171 were wounded, including McGonagle. However, despite napalm burns and heavy bleeding from multiple shrapnel wounds, he didn’t leave the ship’s bridge during the two-hour attack in international waters off the Sinai coast on the fourth day of the June War, nor for 15 hours afterward as the crippled ship steamed westward toward sanctuary with the main body of the U.S. Sixth Fleet.

The heavily damaged ship was decommissioned after the attack and surviving crew members were deliberately separated and sent to different commands, with the warning that if they ever discussed or wrote about the Israeli attack on their ship, they would be court-martialed and discharged from the Navy. Most of the linguists and technicians from the code-breaking NSA, the U.S. government’s most secret agency, which operated sophisticated electronic equipment to listen to military communications from all sides in the war being fought around them, faded back into the anonymity of the Cold War.

So, initially, did the other widely dispersed crew members, most of whom, like McGonagle, were career Navy personnel. McGonagle, who had entered the Navy in 1944 during World War II and also had seen action during the Korean War, spent another seven years in the Navy and retired with 30 years’ service. Few of the other crew members saw each other again until after they had retired.

Yet, to all of them, as they gradually coalesced into the now active “USS Liberty Veterans Association,” McGonagle always remained “The Captain,” a revered figure whose calm professionalism had steered them safely through the most perilous, searing and, ultimately, hurtful experience of their lives.

They were bonded not just by the need to know why they were attacked by the armed forces of Israel. In fact, several plausible explanations have been advanced, one being that Israel hoped to send the American ship to the bottom with no survivors and then blame Egypt. What held the crew together was the hurt that grew through years of rejection by their own government, starting with the U.S. Navy on the day of the assault.

When the Liberty sent out a radio distress call that it was under attack, Sixth Fleet aircraft carriers twice launched flights of rescue aircraft. Both flights were immediately recalled, however, allegedly on direct orders from the White House. Meanwhile the Liberty, armed only with four 50-caliber machine guns that were quickly immobilized by the attacking Israeli Mirage aircraft, was being blasted repeatedly with rockets and machine guns, and then napalmed from the air.

Next, Israeli torpedo boats appeared and fired five torpedos, four of which missed but one of which tore a huge hole amidships that should have sunk the ship. Then, as Liberty crew members prepared to abandon ship, the torpedo boats circled, methodically machine gunning and sinking the rubber life rafts as they were lowered to the water, and firing at any crew members visible on deck.

After the attack ended and the crippled Liberty reached the port of Malta, a U.S. Naval board of inquiry was convened under Admiral Isaac Kidd. Crew members were admonished to confine their answers to strictly circumscribed questions about the ship’s operations prior to and during the attack. No questions about the attackers or their motives were asked, and when crew members volunteered statements on the subject, the statements disappeared from the record.

The news blackout continued. When on the day after the attack a Pentagon spokesman suggested in answer to a journalist’s question that the two-hour attack on the well-marked ship could not have been accidental because it had taken place from close quarters on a clear day, the spokesman was assigned other duties and the Pentagon would not accept or answer further questions on the subject. However, retired naval officers who were on active duty at the time, including Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was chief of naval operations just prior to the attack, have testified repeatedly that it was deliberate.

Admiral Moorer also pointed out that two years after the assault on the Liberty a sister electronic “ferret” ship, the USS Pueblo, was attacked by North Korea, with the loss of one crewman’s life, and then held with its crew for a year before being released. “I wore a path between the Pentagon and Capitol Hill,” Moorer said, where he was repeatedly called to testify before congressional committees about the Pueblo affair. Yet, like the Navy, which only investigated what the Liberty was doing when it was attacked, but not why the attack took place, Congress has never investigated any aspect of the Liberty disaster.

When Captain McGonagle was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism in bringing the ship through its ordeal, while having to lie part of the time on the bridge with his leg propped up on the captain’s chair to stanch the bleeding, the medal was presented at the Washington Naval Shipyard, instead of at the nearby White House. McGonagle thus became perhaps the only living recipient of the nation’s highest military award who did not receive it from an American president.

In fact, for many years no president acknowledged the disaster. Finally, in 1991, members of the Liberty Veterans were invited to visit the White House during their annual convention. But the visit was scheduled at the same time then-President George Bush was reviewing a parade of returned Gulf war veterans, so all the Liberty Veterans received was a wave of the presidential hand as his car left the White House for the parade route. There has been no follow-up invitation from President Clinton.

There were small triumphs, however. Although bodies of most of the Liberty’s dead were returned to their families, six of the victims were buried in a mass grave at Arlington National Cemetery under a single headstone saying “Died in the Eastern Mediterranean, June 8, 1967.” After years of agitation by the Liberty Veterans, the inscription was amended to read “Killed, USS Liberty, June 8, 1967.”

“At least we finally got them ‘killed,’” said one frustrated crew member.

Through the years of slights, when Captain McGonagle attended annual meetings of survivors of the Liberty disaster, he generally kept his own counsel as to its causes. Few of the other survivors were as restrained. One, James Ennes Jr., who was wounded while serving above decks during the attack, retired as a Navy lieutenant commander and then wrote a best-selling book, Assault on the Liberty. In it he presented detailed personal recollections of other survivors. Subsequently an Israeli-government-inspired article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly weaving a complex theory of mistaken identity that seemed to have been concocted to explain away the eye-witness accounts.

Later another book, originally a Ph.D. thesis by Dr. John Borne, a professor of history, presented additional evidence including the recollection of the U.S. ambassador in Beirut at the time of the 1967 war that CIA radio monitors in his embassy had heard Israeli pilots identifying the ship as American but being told to carry out the attack as ordered. This evidence for a deliberate attack has been followed by publication of a conflicting thesis, presumably Israeli-inspired, seeking to refute the new evidence.

In fact, in his book Ennes concluded that the Israelis attacked the Liberty to keep it from alerting the U.S. government that, even though Egyptian forces had been defeated and the Syrians were calling for a cease-fire, Israeli forces were going to carry out a frontal attack on Syria’s Golan Heights. The attack on the sixth and final day of the war was successful, and Israel subsequently “annexed” the territory, which it has held ever since.

McGonagle was born in Wichita, Kansas. When he enlisted in the Navy in 1944 he was enrolled in a Naval officers’ training program at the University of Southern California from which he received a degree and his commission in 1947. He subsequently received another degree from the University of Idaho in Moscow in 1961, and settled in Southern California’s Coachella Valley when he retired from the Navy. He is survived by two married daughters, both of whom have kept their maiden names, Cindy McGonagle of Portland, OR and Sandra McGonagle of Austin, TX. Memorial services will be held at 9 a.m. April 9 at Arlington National Cemetery and also during the USS Liberty reunion in June of this year in Virginia Beach, VA.

At an Arlington Cemetery observance on the 30th anniversary of the attack, attended by, among others, grandchildren of survivors, Captain McGonagle spoke eloquently on behalf of his crew, who had felt so betrayed for so long:

“I think it’s about time that the state of Israel and the United States government provide the crew members of the Liberty and the rest of the American people the facts of what happened and why...the Liberty was attacked 30 years ago today,” McGonagle said.

“For many years I have wanted to believe that the attack on the Liberty was pure error. [But] it appears to me that it was not a pure case of mistaken identity. It was, on the other hand, gross incompetence and aggravated dereliction of duty on the part of many officers and men of the state of Israel.”

Although the remarks were carried by the Associated Press at the time, they did not appear in major U.S. newspapers. Nor, predictably, was there any official response from either the U.S. or Israeli governments to McGonagle’s remarks, although he was attired in full Naval dress uniform and wearing his Congressional Medal of Honor when he made them in America’s most hallowed national shrine.

In death, however, Captain McGonagle’s measured words finally received national exposure. They were repeated, in full, in lengthy obituaries in America’s three largest “newspapers of record,” The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Perhaps, finally, the American media are ready to echo Captain McGonagal’s call and insist that after 32 years the president and Congress “provide the crew members of the Liberty and the rest of the American people the facts of what happened and why the Liberty was attacked.”

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.