lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes, although some crew members believe it was longer. Unquestionably, the attack was sheer hell for those on board the USS Liberty and the agony was prolonged by the fact that help from the Sixth Fleet never arrived as expected.

Then something extraordinary happened. The Israelis stopped attacking despite having more than enough firepower to finish the job of sinking the USS Liberty and her crew. Its been documented that the Israelis had commando helicopter crews hovering above the USS Liberty with a crew to finish the job. Clearly, the USS Liberty crew expected to die.

But with the message out and everybody knowing about it, including the Russians who knew what was going because they were close by in their own disguised spy shipsit never occurred to me that I was about to die.

Shockingly, the USS Liberty tragedy did not begin at 2:00 p.m. Israeli time according to the sanitized official version. It began earlier. According to Hounam, he interviewed a retired Air Force pilot, Jim Nanjo, who spent 20 years on the H-bomb attack force. The job of such pilots who lived on US air bases was to be ready to jump into a plane and carry out orders immediately.

Nanjo told Hounam about how he was awakened on the morning of 6/8/67 between 2:00 a.m. and no later than 4:00 a.m. by an alert that told him an emergency situation existed and he needed to man his plane immediately. Other bomber pilots were also manning their planes and revving up