Spy story
Anthony Nutting
Conspiracy of Silence Anthony Pearson (Quartet £4.95) The attack on the American spy-ship Liberty by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats during the Six Days War in 1967 must certainly rank as one of the more bizarre episodes in the recent history of the Middle East. And the disingenuous explanation given to the American government at the time by the Israelis — namely mistaken identity — can have fooled no one. For the ship was clearly flying American colours at a time when the Israeli authorities knew full well that the United States were solidly behind them in their determination to break, by all means including force, the blockade of the port of Elath which Nasser had imposed by closing the Straits of Tiran.
Yet anyone seeking enlightenment from Anthony Pearson's researches is going to end up more confused than ever. Beginning in the vein of some secondrate spy novel, his book, one of the worst constructed I have ever read upon a serious subject, winds its way through a series of explanations and conjectures that become progressively more farfetched and unbelievable without the author ever bothering to assess or analyse any of them. The author's style, when it is not seemingly aping John Buchan, is sloppy, the kind of journalese that, if written for a respectable newspaper, would drive a conscientious sub-editor to distraction, peppered as it is with spelling mistakes, errors of fact, repetitions and contradictions. To select but a few examples, we are told that Abdul Gamal (sic) Nasser's Egypt was tied to Syria by the United Arab Republic when in fact the UAR had broken up after Syria's secession some six years before, and that Mendes-France, not Mollet, was Eden's French partner at Suez in 1956! The notorious Lavon affair — when Israeli agents were caught by the Egyptian police trying to blow up the American consulate in Cairo — is explained on page 73 as having been designed to stir up anti-Arab feeling in the USA and on page 110 as an attempt to arouse antiAmerican feeling in Egypt! On page 108, according to some unnamed American senator, the Israeli government never paid the compensation claimed by the Americans for those killed and injured in the attack on the Liberty and that the money was in fact paid by the US Treasury. But on page 133 the author states, 'In May 1968 the Israeli government paid $3.3 million to the families of the thirty-four Liberty dead. One year later they paid $3.5 million to the 171 who had been injured.'
But these errors and contradictions are but minorirritations compared with Mr Pearson's attempts to unravel the mysterY of why the Israelis attacked a ship belonging to their American allies. Clearly there was a lot of double-crossing involved. Maybe, as Nasser told me he suspected very strongly, the Americans were engaged in a kind of proxy-Suez exercise, inciting the Israelis to attack Egypt and topple him, while at the same time getting an Israeli undertaking not to go for Jordan, whose King was one of the few Arab friends the US government still possessed. And it is quite possible that the Israelis, who were only waiting for an opportunity to grab the West Bank of the Jordan, realised that the Liberty had been stationed off their shores to monitor any offensive Israeli movements in that direction and that they decided to sink the ship to eliminate any risk of Washington intervening to forestall an attack on King Hussein's territory. But it is altogether too fanciful to suggest that the Americans' efforts to hush up the Liberty episode and restrain the US Navy's natural anger stemmed from a threat by General Dayan that 'if they [the Americans] exposed the true mission of the ship, he would in turn expose the extent of American covert anti-Soviet operations against Egypt, Syria and Iraq.' Presumably this, unhappily typical, sentence means that, if the Americans revealed that the Liberty was checking on whether Israel was preparing to, break her undertaking not to attack Jordan, Dayan would reveal that the CIA were in league with the Israeli Secret Service in anti-Soviet activities in the Arab world. But, since this was precisely what every Arab government knew already and every Arab radio listener and newspaper reader was being told every day, such a threat would have been largely, if not totally, ineffective. Clearly what caused the Americans to be so reti cent was the reluctance of the CIA to admit what their spy-ship was doing and of the White House to be seen quarrelling openly with their Israeli friends and allies.
No less ridiculous is Mr PeaTS011'S suggestion that the Russians were playing the same game as the Americans by goading Nasser into a confrontation with Israel, from which he would emerge defeated and so discredited that Ali Sabry would then be installed in his place. In fact, as the Kremlin knew full well, Ali Sabry was no more pro-Russian than Nasser and, as an ambitious careerist who would bend whichever way the wind blew, a great deal less trustworthy as an ally of the Soviet Union. Also, as the Russians probably knew, the greater Egypt's defeat at the hands of Israel, the more the Egyptian people would cling to Nasser as the only leader they knew. Finally, and most fancifully of all, Mr Pearson, having only a few pages earlier seemed content to accept the proxy-Suez explanation of what the Americans were up to, tells us that, according to some, again unnamed, general in the Pentagon, the Liberty, together with the American Polaris submarine which accompanied her, was engaged in a contingency plan concocted by the Americans and the Russians to stop hostilities in the Middle East developing into a nuclear confrontation between the two super-powers. Afraid that Israel might be tempted to escalate the war against Egypt by using nuclear weapons and warned by Moscow that if this should happen Russia would attack Israel which, in its turn, would oblige America to intervene, the American government, in cahoots with the Russians, had decided that, if such an escalation was threatened, American forces would themselves immediately knock out all Israeli missile sites and bomber bases and so eliminate the risk of confrontation with the Soviet Union. The Liberty's role was to monitor any signs of the Israelis reaching for their nuclear weapons while the Polaris shadow waited in readiness to launch the planned attack. The mind boggles at the thought of President Johnson, had this 'plan' been put into operation, explaining to the American public how he, in collaboration With the Russians, attacked Israel without warning and destroyed in a few minutes her entire arsenal of ultimate defence. Perhaps Mr Pearson himself realised how ridiculous this and others of his theories really are when he wrote in his final sentence that, much as he wished it, he could not write 'Finished' to his manuscript. I Pray heaven, though, that he will not inflict another volume on this subject Upon the reading public.
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