Special Report

With Friends Like This ...

December 1986, Page 6

By Jane Hunter

Thirty years ago, during construction of their plant at Dimona, the Israelis placed Dr. Zalman Shapiro, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, in the uranium enrichment business. In 1965 federal authorities inspected Shapiro's NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, and discovered that more than 200 pounds of enriched uranium was missing. In 1967 the CIA determined that the uranium had gone to Israel.

A recent article in the Washington Post describes a similarly suspicious occurance: Milco is a firm in Huntington Beach, California, 80 percent of whose business consisted of obtaining military equipment for Israel outside of its normal procurement channels. Like Shapiro, Milco's owner, Richard K. Smyth, did highly classified work for the US Defense Department.

Smyth was indicted in May 1985 on 30 felony charges related to the illegal export to Israel of 810 krytons. Krytons are electronic timing devices whose precision can increase the explosive power of nuclear weapons. Their export to non-signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, such as Israel, is prohibited under US law. After failing to get permission to export the krytons to Israel, Smyth ordered them for "domestic use," labeled them "electronic parts," and shipped them to Israel.

At the time of Smyth's indictment the US had received a special National Intelligence Estimate that Israel had built nuclear weapons bunkers in the Negev Desert. A report in Aerospace Daily said Israel had deployed nucleartipped Jerico II missiles in those bunkers. Israel insisted that it was not using the krytons for nuclear-related purposes, but it refused a request for a US inspection of its Dimona facility.

Smyth's Israel connection was Arnon Milchan, who recently told The Jerusalem Post that he had been the main Israeli channel for arms sales to South Africa. Smyth began his efforts to export the krytons in 1975, two years before Israel and South Africa tested a nuclear weapon, and his firm, Milco, also attempted to export fuel ingredients for missiles and slightly radioactive green salt" uranium to Israel.

The kryton case dropped from sight when Smyth jumped bail and vanished shortly before he was to appear in court. Rumors of his death, or murder, began to circulate. Now The Washington Post reports that a friend of Symth's has run into him in Israel.

... Who Needs Enemies?

Eyewitness Report from the USS Liberty

By John Hrankowski

June 8 was a bright, sunny day in international waters off Egypt 19 years ago. A breeze tracked our electronics-laden vessel, the USS Liberty, cruising under orders of the US Navy.

As an engineer I was not on deck, but when several jets began buzzing us I bounded to the main deck. My shipmates waved, laughed, and joked. Among the planes was a Piper Cub, clearly marked with the Star of David. The plane flew so low and so slowly that we could see its camera turret as it snapped our picture. Over our communications equipment crew members could hear the aircraft identify our ship as the USS Liberty. These were our allies, friends, the Israelis.

Several hours later, at about 2 P.M., the jets returned and made five to seven passes over us, machine-gunning and rocketing our lightly-armed ship. More planes arrived, this time Mirage jets, and loosed bursts of bullets and cannon fire as well as napalm into the ship.

In the initial attack, nine of my surprised comrades died. From the rockets and napalm, scores more were lying everywhere, wounded, horribly burned, moaning, dead, or dying. I was seriously wounded by rocket shrapnel.

This, however, was not the end of the two-and-one-half hour ordeal. Israeli torpedo boats streaked toward our stricken ship and fired five torpedos. One hit home, bringing violent death to 25 more American crew members.

Preparing to abandon ship, some of my shipmates dropped rubber rafts into the sea. It seemed like a horrible, slow-motion movie as we watched the torpedo boats circle back and fire machine guns at the helpless survivors on deck and the rubber rafts already in the sea. One curious torpedo boat skipper even picked up an empty raft - perhaps to keep as a souvenir.

To prevent the Liberty from communicating with other vessels and Navy communications centers, our radio was jammed. This, we later learned, could only have been accomplished by a friendly nation that knew our radio frequencies.

As we noted in our November issue, the USS Liberty Veterans Association announced an essay contest on the subject, "The Attack on the LISS Liberty." Any student in an accredited school, whether in the US or abroad, can enter, and prizes of $500, $300, and $100 will be awarded to the three best essays. Essays must be neatly typed with a fresh black ribbon, and be no longer than 2,500 words, or ten double-spaced typewritten pages, on 8 1/2-inch by I ]-inch paper with standard one-inch margins on all sides. A /I entrants must register with the LISS Liberty Veterans Association by March 31, 1987, and the deadline for essays is June 30, 1987. For more information, please write: USS Liberty Scholarship Headquarters, P.O. Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009.

For 19 years my shipmates and I have been trying to get out the truth about the attack that killed 34 Americans and wounded 171 others. All of us agree that the attack could not possibly have been a mistake. The Israeli aircraft that came within 200 feet, the messages giving the ship's name, the two large US Navy flags billowing in the breeze, the big GTR-5 stenciled on the bow characters well-known to friend and foe as a US Navy designation -all clearly identified us.

For years our crew was puzzled, and incredulous, when Israeli authorities claimed our ship had been mistaken for an Egyptian freighter, of all things! Israel apologized. Much later it offered compensation to the Liberty's survivors (which I refused) and to relatives of the victims.

I believe it was no coincidence that the Israeli attack took place on June 8, and that the next day Israel invaded Syrian territory, capturing the Golan Heights, an area it still holds 19 years later and which it now says it has annexed for permanent retention. The Liberty was a Navy electronic "ferret" research vessel, listening to communications from both sides in the Six Day War of 1967, because President Johnson feared an Israeli attack on Syria would draw the Soviet Union into war.

Very little of this information has ever reached the American public. Even Congress, importuned for decades by survivors to at least investigate the reasons behind the attack on a US military vessel, up to now has refused to do so. After the attack, when the surviving crew members were still together aboard the ship, we were officially warned not to talk to reporters. The Navy has never been willing to release, even to us, a list of crew members so that we can mobilize to tell our story.

Nor has the American press covered itself with glory. I speak frequently in the upstate New York area, and I find people invariably shocked that they have been kept ignorant of this incident. The fact that the American public remains largely unaware of what happened at the hands of a so-called ally 19 years ago proves that the press has failed to exercise its mandate to keep the American people informed.

The American public must believe us, Americans like themselves who joined the Navy to serve their country, when we produce irrefutable evidence that the attack on June 8, 1967, could not have been an error. It was, in fact, an attempt to sink an American ship that might have alerted the world to an Israeli act of aggression. Americans should know the facts so they can judge the credibility and reliability of a nation that wants us to believe that it is "our closest ally." The American taxpayers should know because they helped buy the planes, the boats, the bombs, rockets, torpedos, and napalm that struck us.

At one time we surviving crew members hoped official Naval inquiries would elicit all the facts. But we have given up on that. Those inquiries, we're convinced, were part and parcel of the government cover-up: evidence was concealed, key crew witnesses were never interviewed; the Israeli government's conclusions were never really queried or published.

Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, Chief of US Naval Operations from 1967 to 1970 and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1971 to 1974, last December called upon Congress to investigate the attack against the USS Liberty.

"I just cannot accept the explanation that the attack was a case of mistaken identity," he said. "I think, without a doubt, that those 34 men who were killed in the Liberty were killed deliberately."

With the aid of another partiotic American, I have been distributing copies of the 1979 book, Assault on the Liberty, written by former Lt. James Ennes, which describes these events in detail. Anyone who read the book found it incredible that, for domestic political reasons, the entire matter has been swept under the rug, not only by Congress but by successive US Presidents and our supposedly aggressive investigative journalists.

Admiral Moorer, who held the highest military position in the United States, is ignored when he calls for an investigation. We American sailors who were wounded doing our duty are still shunned as troublemakers or oddballs. Since we were serving in no official war at the time of the attack, we are entitled to no benefits, no matter what our physical or psychological scars. No congressman will champion us. No newspaper will launch an investigation. But we continue to ask Americans: who do you trust - your fellow Americans who know what we saw, or the apologists for a foreign power who seek to discredit us?

John M. Hrankowski, a crew member who was wounded in the June 8, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats, lives in Rochester, New York.

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