Ward Boston

Who was Ward Boston?

Ward Boston, Jr. was an attorney and a retired United States Navy Captain. He served in World War II as a Navy fighter pilot and worked as a special agent for the FBI. He gained notability due to his service in the Navy as a Legal Specialist, where, as chief counsel to the Naval Board of Inquiry investigating the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 crewmen and injured 172, he personally concluded that the attack was most likely deliberate. He stated the court was ordered by superiors to ascribe the attack to an accident, rather than to deliberate hostility.

In 2002 Boston told the Navy Times that the naval court was a politicized sham with conclusions preordained to exonerate Israel. In a signed affidavit he stated that U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had ordered the President of the Court, Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, Jr., that the assault be ruled an accident, and to reach the conclusion "that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity'" despite "overwhelming evidence to the contrary." He said he felt compelled to make this information public following the publication of the book The Liberty Incident by bankruptcy judge A. Jay Cristol, which concluded the attack was unintentional, while Boston found that the attack was most likely deliberate. In early 2004, Boston repeated the revelation before a State Department conference about the Six-Day War.