The USS Liberty Incident: NSA Intercepts of Pilots During Liberty Incident

On July 2, 2003, the National Security Agency (NSA) released additional information relative to the June 8, 1967, attack on the U.S.S. Liberty. Within an hour of learning that the Liberty had been torpedoed the Director, NSA, LTG Marshall S. Carter, USA, sent a message to all intercept sites requesting a special search of all communications that might reflect the attack or reaction. No communications were available. However, one of the airborne platforms, a U.S. Navy EC-121, had collected voice conversations between two Israeli helicopter pilots and the control tower at Hazor Airfield following the attack on the Liberty. The three audio recordings are in Hebrew, and are difficult to hear and large files, so we have reproduced here only the NSA transcripts (in English). The actual recordings can be heard on the NSA web site.

The transcripts are in pdf format:

8 June 1967, 1229Z-1244Z

8 June 1967, 1247Z-1319Z

8 June 1967, 1307Z-1311Z

Sources: National Security Agency