On January 12, 2004, the United States Department of State declassified and released Volume XIX in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. The series is the official historical documentary record of US foreign policy prepared by the Department of State Office of the Historian. It contains documents of the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the White House for the period from May 15, 1967 through November 22, 1967, the date of passage of UN Resolution 242.

In conjunction with the release, the Department of State hosted a two day conference titled "The United States, the Middle East, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War" on January 12 and 13, 2004. The conference was organized into seven panels with 29 invited presentations on subjects related to the United States, the Middle East, and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war (see the agenda).

The first panel, "War, Intelligence and the USS Liberty," was moderated by Dr. Marc Susser, the historian for the State Department, and carried live on C-SPAN. The panel featured Judge Cristol, Dr. David Robarge (historian for the CIA), Dr. David Hatch (historian for the NSA), Mr. James Bamford, and Dr. Michael Oren.

The scholarly papers submitted for the conference have not yet been published by the State Department. The paper, "The USS Liberty and the Role of Intelligence," by Judge Cristol, Captain Ernest Castle, USN (Ret) (US Naval Attache in Tel Aviv in 1967), and John Hadden (CIA Chief of Station in Tel Aviv in 1967) is available here.

The free Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from the Adobe web site

Other links:

Conference Agenda
Press Release
Summary by the Office of the Historian (Department State)
Text of Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume XIX