Author Archives: joanmellen

Newly Published: “Sherlock Being Catfished,” a Memoir by Joan Mellen

Joan Mellen has a new book, “Sherlock Being Catfished,” a memoir and departure from her usual works, with many references to JFK assassination research.

Sherlock Being Catfished is a memoir of a self-induced hypnosis, brilliantly choreographing a pas-de-deux with an internet “catfish” and allowing us to see a sensitive, lonely woman succumb to a devilish entrapment helplessly yet altogether knowingly. The story conveys a thrilling level of consciousness, overwhelmed yet in full knowledge of what is happening and even why, enabling Mellen to speak in a manner that transcends her personal experience, to the universal vulnerability of the human heart.

As the scam unfolds, she makes connections between present and past – the work she has done and people she has encountered over her decades of research, investigations and writing. Sherlock Being Catfished is an undeniably unique and penetrating look at the world of internet dating, and how anyone, regardless of their prolific life’s work and accomplishments, can fall victim to a romance scammer.

Purchase “Sherlock Being Catfished” by Joan Mellen:

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Praise for “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty”

“Finally, the definitive reconstruction of the greatest moral and political scandal in American history, which demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the US government at its highest level conspired with Israel in 1967 to destroy a surveillance naval vessel, USS Liberty, and murder its own sailors to gain a pretext for launching an aggressive attack on Egypt. With this exposé, based on exhaustive research and extensive interviews, Joan Mellen has done an immense patriotic service. An extraordinary book that should be not only read but acted upon.”

—Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University

 

“With predictable moral courage and impressive literary deftness, Joan Mellen has now written a very important book which punctures the long-standing official explanations of what exactly happened when Israel attacked the intelligence ship U.S.S. Liberty during the frenzy of the Six Day War.  Like the JFK assassination, the truth about this incident has been deliberately buried for decades in misleading documents.  All along, Israel has proven to be an amazing success and a truly desperate enterprise.  Both aspects of its history come through in this inspired book.”

—Burton Hersh, Ted Kennedy’s primary biographer (“Edward Kennedy:  An Intimate Biography”) and the author of “Bobby and J. Edgar”, often cited as the “breakthrough book” about the JFK and RFK assassinations.  Hersh is also the author of The Old Boys:  The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, currently mandatory reading for incoming CIA officers.

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Manchester Union Leader’s John Koziol on “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty”

The Manchester Union Leader, the daily newspaper of Manchester, the largest city in the U.S. state of New Hampshire has published a leader article on Joan Mellen’s new book, “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty”. Written by John Koziol, the article delves into the forthcoming book’s explosive revelation that  then-President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Israeli Defense Forces to attack and sink, with no survivors, the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967 in an effort to promote regime change in Egypt.

With a North Country native at its core, a book to be released this fall will argue that then-President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Israeli Defense Forces to attack and sink, with no survivors, the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967 in an effort to promote regime change in Egypt.

“Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty” by Joan Mellen, a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, explores this tragic episode of an attack by one of America’s allies that resulted in dozen of American deaths and nearly 200 injuries.

Deep in the midst of the Cold War, the NSA wanted to hear everything that the then-Soviet Union and its allies or proxies were saying anywhere in the world. The 456-foot Liberty — whose specialty was gathering electronic communications — was accordingly sent around the world.

On June 5, 1967, when Israel launched a strike against Egypt, Jordan and Syria — the so-called Six-Day War — she was ordered to proceed “at best speed” to the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

While Cmdr. William McGonagle, the ship’s captain, and his crew of 99 sailors directed the Liberty toward the Sinai Peninsula, inside the vessel, then-Lt. Cmdr. David Edwin Lewis, the Liberty’s chief intelligence officer and a 1949 graduate of Colebrook Academy, received a terse order for himself and the 194 other communications gatherers under his command: “Find out who’s doing what to whom.”

“But Israel,” said Lewis, during an interview last Wednesday at his Colebrook home, “didn’t want that” and on June 8, 1967, its military attacked the Liberty with the intent of sending her to the bottom with all hands.

Israel has repeatedly said the incident was a tragic error caused by the fog of war during which the Liberty was confused with an Egyptian vessel. Israel quickly apologized for the attack that killed 34 crew members, including a civilian, and injured 173 others, and it also paid financial compensation to the victims and the U.S. government.

The day of the attack was “a beautiful day,” recalled Lewis. Israeli planes had flown over the Liberty nine times prior to the strike, including once that was so close that sailors were able to see and wave to the pilots, Lewis said. It was apparent that Israel knew who the Liberty was.

In the attack,McGonagle was able to dodge four torpedoes before the fifth struck the Liberty midship, ripping a hole in her side, and covering Lewis, who had been applying a tourniquet to a sailor’s bleeding leg, in a quarter-inch of heavy, burnt naval paint. The impact of the blast destroyed both of Lewis’ eardrums while the heat seared his eyes shut.

“I was one of the very, very lucky ones,” Lewis said. “Everybody around me was killed instantly.”

Lewis said he feels personally responsible for what happened to the Liberty, explaining that the day before the attack McGonagle asked him whether moving the Liberty further out to sea would affect communications-gathering. Lewis said it would.

As he recuperated, Lewis learned that James Terry Halbardier, an electronics technician 3rd Class, saved the heavily damaged Liberty from more destruction.

Although under fire, Halbardier, who later received the Silver Star, ran a coaxial cable across the deck to the sixth Liberty antenna, which had been inactive at the time of the attack, allowing an SOS to be sent to the Sixth Fleet. The message was seemingly also heard by the Israelis, who immediately ceased their attack.

But help for the Liberty did not arrive with equal alacrity and, as Lewis later learned, there was a nefarious reason for the delay.

While recovering aboard the carrier USS America, Lewis said he had a conversation with Adm. Lawrence R. Geis, the Sixth Fleet’s carrier division commander, who “swore me to secrecy for his lifetime” and then shared that the Fleet had twice launched relief aircraft to the Liberty and that each time they had been recalled by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

When Geis challenged the second recall, Johnson came on the phone himself, the admiral told Lewis, who remembered Geis quoting the President saying that “I don’t give a damn if the ship sinks and all the Americans are killed. I will not embarrass my ally.”

In 2003, an independent commission released the Moorer Report that took a hard look at the incident.

The commission wrote that on June 8, 1967, the Israelis had aerially surveilled the Liberty for eight hours before launching an attack that lasted about 25 minutes “during which time unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on USS Liberty’s bridge, and fired 30mm cannons and rockets into our ship, causing 821 holes, more than 100 of which were rocket-size; survivors estimate 30 or more sorties were flown over the ship by a minimum of 12 attacking Israeli planes, which were jamming all five American emergency radio channels.”

Now 87 and the oldest survivor of the Liberty, Lewis keeps trying to understand why Israel did what it did 51 years ago Friday and he comes to some of the same conclusions that others, including Mellen, have reached: that the U.S. and Johnson had decided to destabilize Egyptian President Gamal Abel Nasser by blaming his country for the attack.

Asked what he hopes will happen when “Blood in the Water” is released, Lewis replied that he’d be happy if the book educated more people about what happened to the USS Liberty and why.

“It’s frustrating that the American people know nothing about this and that the U.S. perpetrated it,” he said.

Synopsis of “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty” by Joan Mellen

By Joan Mellen

In 2014 I was completing a book exposing dark truths about President Lyndon Johnson that had been suppressed by Johnson’s official biographers whose goal in recent years was to provide cover for an official whose actions not infrequently bordered on the criminal. One day I received an email from a fellow researcher who offered a challenging question: will you be including Johnson’s role in the attack on the USS Liberty? I had never heard of the USS Liberty. When I learned of the ambush of this unarmed USS Intelligence ship, and of Johnson’s role in planning it and then covering it up, I was at once committed to a course that resulted in a new book, “Blood in the Water,” whose subtitle is “How the US and Israel Conspired in the Ambush of the USS Liberty” devoted entirely to the events surrounding the LIBERTY. My goal was to discover who had planned the attack and what was their motive.

I had for more than a decade been writing books of investigative journalism, tackling historical issues about which the government had kept the public in the dark. The best known is called “A Farewell to Justice,” which tackled another unsolved case, the assassination of President Kennedy, and is set in New Orleans where Lee Harvey Oswald lived during the spring and summer of 1963. “A Farewell to Justice” became a biography of District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation and took seven years to complete.

By the time I committed to the Liberty story I had published 23 books. None focused on Israel or the Middle East. Nor had I written anything about the U.S. military.

When you begin a book whose issues are unfamiliar, the writer invariably hears an inner voice with the warning, “I can’t do this.” I knew nothing about the US Navy, its protocols and hierarchies. I knew a bit about the intelligence services whose activities figure in this story, CIA and the NSA, National Security Agency. There had been several books published about this attack on LIBERTY, an unarmed US intelligence ship, by Israeli commandos and ships, on June 8, 1967, in the middle of the Six-Day War. All insisted that Israel, who admitted to have attacked ship by planes and torpedo boats, was acting alone, but they made no sense to me: why would Israel attack a vessel belonging to its sole ally, for by now France had canceled its arrangements to offer Israel military support? None of the books or articles, and I read them all, could answer this question or entertain why Israel would engage in so foolhardy an operation. Israel had on the same day admitted that they had been behind the attack, but the “explanation”, that it was an “accident,” was flimsy and easily challenged.

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Coming in November: “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to ambush the USS Liberty”.

At left is Meir Amit, chief of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence services, in 1967, the year of the attack on Liberty , at the right is John Hadden, chief of station for CIA in Tel Aviv, at the same time.

Joan Mellen’s new book, “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to ambush the USS Liberty”, will be published in November 2018 by Prometheus Books.

Joan Mellen will be launching the book in Colebrook, New Hampshire, on December 1 at the Colebrook Country Club.

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 About “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to ambush the USS Liberty”

Presents evidence of collaboration between the United States and Israel in an attack on a US naval surveillance vessel during the Six-Day War pointing to collusion between the US government and the Israeli Mossad.

On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, an unarmed intelligence ship reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the auspices of the National Security Agency, was positioned in international waters off the coast of Egypt when it was attacked with deadly violence by unmarked jet planes firing rockets and machine guns and throwing napalm onto its deck. This ambush was followed by a torpedo strike that blew a forty-foot hole in the starboard side of the ship. Lacking the capacity to defend themselves, thirty-four sailors were killed and 174 wounded, many for life. By the end of the day, Israel had confessed to having been the aggressor, simultaneously arguing that the attack had been an “accident” and a “mistake.”
The facts said otherwise. So intense and sustained was the attack – it lasted for nearly an hour and a half – so specific was the aiming for the antennae and satellite dish on deck, that it was scarcely credible that Israel’s aggression was not deliberate; such was the view of Marshall Carter, the director of the National Security Agency, his deputy director Louis Tordella, and Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence.
Based on interviews with more than forty survivors, knowledgeable political insiders, and Soviet archives of the period, investigative writer Joan Mellen presents evidence suggesting complicity between US and Israeli intelligence in the attack on Liberty and the more than fifty-year long cover-up. What were the underlying motives? Was this a false flag operation conducted in the midst of the Six-Day War? Was it conceivable that Israel would have initiated such an operation without a green light from the United States?
For the sake of justice, truth and the murdered and surviving sailors, this is a story demanding to be told.

“Faustian Bargains” Review: American History Magazine

american-history-magazine-reviewIn the 20th book of a diverse oeuvre of biographies, cinema, and literature, Joan Mellen documents Lyndon B. Johnson’s career in cronyism, mainly in his home state but also on the international stage. The title reflects LBJ’s penchant for obscuring his personal and financial affairs and his membership in a cadre of pols and business types given to enriching themselves at voters’ expense. The subtitle might well have mentioned Billie Sol Estes, who, after serving his king, tried unsuccessfully to drag him into disgrace.

Citing recently released FBI files, interviews, books, newspaper and magazine articles, and diaries, Mellen traces Johnson’s lifelong dance with power and infamy. Analyzing the 1948 campaign, she shows how Johnson, ever the clever puppeteer, had marionettes falsify records and destroy ballots at arm’s length from their boss to defeat Coke Stevenson by 87 votes in a Democratic primary runoff that assured Johnson of a U.S. Senate seat. “Johnson was not elected to the United States Senate, and so should not have served there,” Mellen writes.

In the Senate, as he had in the House, Johnson toadied to his betters, engineering profitable arrangements that Mellen illuminates using sources well-known but in this context previously untapped–Estes, influence peddler Bobby Baker, and federal contractors willing to kick back dough to a frenemy they mostly feared. Mellen establishes Johnson’s corruption by showing that he directly awarded government work that was worth millions to cronies.

As LBJ was amassing paydays and political clout, men and women in his circle were dying under mysterious circumstances. The fallen included Johnson’s loose-lipped younger sister Josefa, who expired at 49 only hours after leaving a Christmas party at her brother’s home in 1961. As Lyndon Johnson rose, so did Mac Wallace, one of Josefa’s beaus. LBJ counted Wallace among his elves in the 1948 campaign. Wallace later worked for the U.S. Agriculture Department and a military contractor favored by Johnson. A 1952 murder conviction seemed no bar to advancement.

Wondering whether Johnson pondered which, if any, of many dangerous secrets Wallace knew, and whether LBJ did anything about that, Mellen plunges into Wallace’s self-destructive story: college corner, weapons merchant, holder of a controversial security clearance, convicted but unpunished murderer, chronic drunk, dead in a one-vehicle accident for which all official reports disappeared.

Faustian Bargains stands apart from the latter-day run of LBJ books by distinguishing fact from opinion and primary from hearsay evidence, conscientiously not vaulting to conclusions and satisfying the author–and this reader–that Lyndon Johnson was a killer more than metaphorically.

–Richard Culyer is a writer in Hartsville, South Carolina