Nation: In Pueblo’s Wake

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In the wintry waters of the Sea of Japan, 26 miles off the inhospitable coastline of North Korea, the 906-ton U.S.S. Pueblo went routinely about her tasks as an electronic scavenger. She sampled the water around her with bottles strung from her sides, and listened for submarines below. She sniffed the skies above with the thickets of antennas that bristle from her superstructure, and scooped up every electronic signal for miles around with a formidable array of supersecret equipment.

Converted last spring from a lowly Army freighter of the sort that toted toothpaste and toilet paper around the South Pacific during World War II, the ship was on her first surveillance mission, gathering intelligence practically on the doorstep of Russia’s Pacific fleet headquarters at Vladivostok. The spooking game is a lonely one at best, but as Pueblo’s 83-man crew and the rest of the world learned last week, it can also be perilous.

It was noon, Korea time, when a Soviet-built North Korean torpedo boat bore down on Pueblo. Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, 40, was not overly disturbed. Harassment is one of the hazards of electronic snooping, and Skipper Bucher (pronounced booker) had expected to be buzzed by MIGS and bugged by surface craft when he began a month-long tour off the North Korean coast nearly two weeks earlier.

“All Stop.” Using international signal flags, the PT boat asked Pueblo’s nationality. When she identified herself as American, the Korean boat signaled: “Heave to or I will open fire.” Pueblo replied: “I am in international waters.” She maintained her course at two-thirds speed (8 knots), with the PT boat never very far away. An hour later, three more North Korean vessels came slashing in from the southwest. One was a 30-knot, Soviet-built subchaser, the others 40-knot PT boats. “Follow in my wake,” signaled one of the small vessels. “I have a pilot aboard.” The Korean boats took up positions on Pueblo’s bow, beam and quarter. Two MIG jets screamed in and began circling off the American vessel’s starboard bow.

Still, Bucher kept his cool. After all, U.S. planes not infrequently buzz the Soviet trawlers that serve as spy ships, whooshing in at mast level and sometimes shearing off antennas. It was only when one of the Korean PT boats rigged fenders—rubber tubes and rope mats to cushion impact—and began backing toward Pueblo’s bow that Bucher realized what was happening; in the bow of the PT boat stood an armed boarding party. “These guys are serious,” the skipper radioed his home port, U.S. Navy headquarters in Yokosuka, Japan. “They mean business.”

Strangely enough for a ship of such sophistication and strategic value, Pueblo had no automatic “destruct” mechanism. As the Koreans swarmed aboard, U.S. Navymen feverishly set fire to the files, dumped documents, shredded the codes, and did their valiant best to wreck the electronic gear with axes, sledge hammers and hand grenades. In the process, apparently, one sailor’s leg was blown off and three others were injured. According to a Defense Department official, Bucher’s instructions “covered everything except being boarded.”

At 1:45 p.m., Pueblo radioed Yokosuka that the North Koreans were aboard. Twenty-five minutes later, she reported that she had been “requested” to steam into Wonsan, a deep-draft port used by many Soviet submariners in preference to Vladivostok, where the continental shelf forces them to cruise uncomfortably close to the surface. At 2:32 p.m., barely 2½ hours after the first Communist PT boat hove into view, came Pueblo’s last message. Engines were “all stop,” Bucher reported; he was “going off the air.”

From the time the boarding seemed imminent until the final message, Pueblo’s communications were relayed simultaneously from Yokosuka through several command tiers to the office of the Commander in Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) in Honolulu and all the way to Washington. Yet there were some unaccountable lapses. At Yokosuka, Rear Admiral Frank L. Johnson got the messages quickly enough, but he knew that there were no naval aircraft available to help Pueblo. He turned at once to the Air Force’s Lieut. General Seth J. McKee, who is commander of U.S. forces in Japan and chief of the Fifth Air Force, which has half a dozen bases in both Japan and South Korea. McKee, too, was strapped, for whatever planes were available were either unequipped or out of range for any rescue mission—even though it would take the Koreans a good two hours to tow Pueblo into Wonsan.

Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral John Hyland was summoned by news of the seizure from a dinner party at his Hawaii home. At the same moment, Hyland’s boss, CINCPAC Commander Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, was on the opposite side of the Pacific, conferring in Danang with General William Westmoreland. Unaccountably, Sharp was not informed of Pueblo’s plight until he had flown from Danang and landed on the carrier Kittyhawk—a lapse of 3 hrs. 15 min.

Act of War. In Washington, 14 hours behind Korean time, the news arrived before midnight. The reports were distributed simultaneously to the State Department’s seventh-floor Operations Center, the Pentagon’s basement National Military Command Center and the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. Duty officers immediately began calling second-echelon officials at their homes; Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was not alerted until 12:23 a.m. By 12:45, White House Aide Walt Rostow was convinced that the situation was serious and drove to the White House, arriving there at 1:15. Shortly after 2 a.m., he telephoned the President, who stayed in bed but was briefed during the next four hours as additional details flowed in.

By daybreak, controlled calm had given way to a growing sense of consternation. Here were 83 Americans and a ship crammed to the gunwales with electronic hardware, hostages to one of the Communist world’s most belligerent and intransigent regimes (see THE WORLD). Though the Navy bravely tried to make light of the loss of the equipment aboard Pueblo, arguing that the Russians have comparable gear, few electronics experts were so blase. “This equipment is so esoteric that it verges on the unattainable,” said one U.S. authority, who considers Pueblo’s capture “a really major catastrophe.” In purely political terms, it was also a crisis of the first magnitude.

In his first comment on the capture, Secretary of State Dean Rusk called it “a matter of the utmost gravity.” Later, he termed it an “act of war.”

New Rules. But what to do? The Navy reacted in classic style by ordering the 85,000-ton nuclear-powered carrier Enterprise to show the flag in the Sea of Japan. En route at the time to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin after a stop in southern Japan, the carrier headed north instead, accompanied by the nuclear frigate Truxtun and several other escort vessels. Six or seven other warships put out of Yokosuka later in the week, presumably bound for the same area. Shadowing Enterprise, sometimes at the dangerously close range of 800 yards, was the Soviet trawler Gidrolog, a gadget-crammed spy ship of the same genre as Pueblo.

It would have been easy enough for the U.S. flotilla to harass the Soviet trawler, but that would have invited similar treatment for any U.S. ELINT, or electronic intelligence-gathering vessel, in any other part of the world. Even in the seamy business of espionage, some gentlemanly rules prevail, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as first-rate maritime powers, generally try to observe them scrupulously. North Korea, with only a bathtub navy, obviously feels no such compunction. “The North Koreans have made their own rules,” said Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer, “and they are new rules.”

In any event, Gidrolog was not the only party curious about the whereabouts of the U.S. armada. The day after Enterprise headed toward Wonsan, North Korean MIGS flew more than 40 sorties around the port, and U.S. listening posts intercepted a steady stream of chatter from Pyongyang to the pilots: “Where is the Enterprise? What is the position of Enterprise?” Either the leviathan was making North Korea nervous, or Pyongyang, in the wake of its success at swiping Pueblo, was thinking of bigger things.

About eight hours after Pueblo was towed into Wonsan, the Pentagon released word of her capture. In Yokosuka, the pregnant wife of Pueblo’s executive officer, Lieut. Edward R. Murphy, heard about it from a neighbor, who heard it from her radio. As for the wounded crewmen, the Pentagon could not say which of Pueblo’s complement of six officers, 75 enlisted men and two civilian hydrographers had been injured—or how.

To most Americans, it seemed unbelievable that a U.S. vessel could be brazenly held up and taken captive on the high seas. Nothing remotely like it had happened since 1807, during the Napoleonic wars, when a British man o’ war overtook the U.S.S. Chesapeake, searched her for deserters and shanghaied four seamen. An even more dramatic depredation occurred in 1804, four months after Barbary pirates captured the grounded U.S. frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor and clapped her crewmen into prison. Lieut. Stephen (“Our country, right or wrong”) Decatur sailed into the port aboard a vessel disguised as a blockade-runner from Malta, boarded Philadelphia and, with a crew of 84, routed the 200 Tripolitan crewmen who had been put aboard. Decatur set Philadelphia ablaze, and just as his aptly named Intrepid darted out of the harbor, the captured ship exploded.

Well-Behaved. That was a century and a half ago, when corsairs roamed the seas. How could it happen in 1968? And how could the U.S., with its vast might, fail to do anything to rescue Pueblo during the two hours it took to be towed into Wonsan?

It appeared at first that Bucher might have been remiss for not having summoned help immediately, for not fighting back, for not scuttling his ship when it was obvious that she was going to be captured and, finally, for not attempting earlier to destroy the gear and intelligence that fell into Communist hands.

Defense officials, however, supported Bucher’s conduct on every point. He had been approached and signaled by several Communist PT boats in the past few days, saw nothing unusual in the one that turned up last week. And, as a Pentagon aide put it, “You don’t wake up the President or the Secretary of Defense in Washington just because some patrol boat is circling you.” Even when three more vessels showed up, Bucher still had good cause to assume that they were only trying to interfere with him. “What,” asked one official, “if he had destroyed millions of dollars worth of gear and raised tensions by summoning a jet squadron to his aid, only to see those Korean boats fade away as they usually do?”

In fact, Pueblo’s predecessor in the same waters, the U.S.S. Banner, was at one point surrounded and harassed by eleven Communist PT boats without being fired upon or boarded. Notwithstanding the Navy tradition of never giving up a ship without a fight, Bucher had orders to keep Pueblo’s three .50-cal. machine guns under canvas. Be sides, had he unsheathed them, his ship would probably have been blown right out of the water.

Bucher lacked the explosive charges to scuttle the vessel; in addition, most or all of his crew almost certainly would have perished in the numbing water or under the Koreans’ guns. As for destroying his equipment, by the time it became evident that the Koreans intend ed to board Pueblo, there simply was not sufficient time to get rid of everything. Some records were tossed overboard—and North Korean frogmen were later reported to be diving in an attempt to retrieve them. “From what we know,” said Admiral Moorer, “Bucher behaved well.”

No Help. In that case, were U.S. field commanders at fault for having failed to send planes to frighten off Pueblo’s captors? Should they have sunk her rather than let the ship fall into probing Communist hands? Astonishingly, there were no planes in a position to help. Navy officials in Washington said that Enterprise’s 90 or 100 jets would have been of no assistance, since she was nearly 800 miles away and the planes would have run too low on fuel to engage North Korean fighters. Only four U.S. warplanes in all of South Korea were on “strip alert” when Pueblo was boarded, and all of them—sitting at the U.S. airbases at Osan and Kunsan—were either armed with nuclear bombs or rigged for them. To have modified the planes for close-support missions would have taken from two to three hours, and by then Pueblo would have been tied up in Wonsan. A Defense Department official, questioning the lack of preparation for conventional warfare, observed that the lingering “mythology” of the cold war was to blame.

Even if aircraft had been available, however, Washington officials question whether it would have been wise to send them to Pueblo’s aid. The hijack was evidently well planned, and it was quite possible that an ambush awaited any rescue force; at Wonsan perched 50 to 100 MIGS, and South Korean intelligence spotted two additional Communist squadrons flying near the DMZ about the time of Pueblo’s capture. Further, in towing Pueblo into Wonsan, the Koreans sailed in close formation, which would have made it difficult for a strafing plane to avoid killing Americans. Once in Wonsan, the six U.S. officers were met by Defense Minister Kim Chang Bong, who flew back with them to Pyongyang, the capital.

All the same, the failure to extricate Pueblo is riddled with ironies and grievous shortcomings. For so risky an action as a strafing run on North Korean vessels, the President’s approval would have been needed. But Johnson was asleep, unaware of the situation until his advisers finally tipped him off a full 2 hrs. and 15 min. after Pueblo had been boarded. Even if the chain of communication had been less sluggish and reached Johnson in time for him to approve an air strike, his O.K. would have meant nothing. The world’s foremost airpower did not have the retaliatory capacity ready in the right place to do the job.

Johnson’s chief concern, as a result, was how to respond ex post facto without renewing the Korean War and forcing the U.S. to open a second front on the Asian mainland.

The President went into his crisis routine, meeting Rostow, conferring by telephone with Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Central Intelligence Agency Director Richard Helms. The first afternoon of the crisis, an informal “Planning Committee”-reminiscent of the Executive Committee (ExComm) set up under President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962—began to emerge. It included Rusk, McNamara, Helms, Rostow, Press Secretary George Christian, UnderSecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Sam Berger, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke.

Johnson, disturbed by the heat and depth of Congress’ reaction, set about trying to calm it down. Meeting with key congressional experts on foreign af fairs and atomic energy at the White House, he emphasized the need to take a calm approach and give diplomacy every opportunity to work. And if it did not? Nobody was willing to guess just what would happen.

War Maniac. Determined to show that the U.S. means business, the Planning Committee endorsed McNamara’s suggestion for a limited call-up of air units, and decided to take the matter to the United Nations. Johnson also appeared on a nationwide TV hookup to explain the Reserve mobilization—as had Kennedy when he called up the Reserves for the 1961 Berlin confrontation and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In a somber three-minute talk delivered hurriedly and rather flatly, he pledged that “we shall continue to use every means available to find a prompt and peaceful solution.” But he also called the seizure of the ship a “wanton and aggressive act” and added, tightlipped: “Clearly, this cannot be accepted.”

Moments after Johnson finished, the TV cameras switched to the U.N. Security Council, which had held up its own deliberations until the President had finished his speech. The Russians, who missed the last major debate on Korea in 1950 because they were boycotting the Security Council, were on hand this time to take the role of Pyongyang’s advocate. Soviet Delegate Platon D. Morozov immediately moved to strike the issue from the agenda, won support only from Hungary and Algeria and was voted down, 12 to 3. U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg then called on the council to “act with the greatest urgency” lest the U.S. be forced to seek “other courses which the U.N. charter reserves to member states.”

Some other course may well prove mandatory. For one thing, a Soviet veto of any constructive proposal is a strong possibility. For another, Pyongyang has clearly announced that it would ignore any suggestion from the U.N., under whose shield, after all, South Korea has remained a free nation.

The Joint Military Armistice Commission at Panmunjom seemed an even less fruitful court of resort. Meeting there the day after Pueblo’s seizure, as they have for more than 14 years of sterile harangue, the U.S. and North Korean representatives exchanged angry denunciations.

U.S. Rear Admiral John V. Smith, son of the late Marine General Holland M. (“Howlin’ Mad”) Smith, protested both the Pueblo incident and an attempted attack on South Korea’s President Chung Hee Park by a North Korean suicide squad earlier in the week. His Communist counterpart, Major General Pak Chung Kuk—known to American officers as “Frog Face”-claimed that the U.S. ship had been caught spying in North Korean waters and that the suicide squad was actually made up of “patriotic” South Koreans. To that, Smith angrily retorted: “I want to tell you, Pak, that the evidence against you North Korean Communists is overwhelming, and I am in no mood to listen to an obfuscating smoke screen.” Pak, in turn, scored Lyndon Johnson as a “war maniac” and added: “They are burning Johnson’s effigies today, but tomorrow they will burn Johnson alive.” His rhetoric was a match for Pyongyang radio, which described how North Korean attacks had “left the U.S. imperialists shivering.”

Nothing Printable. North Korea has certainly done its best to keep its brethren in the South shivering. Late in 1966, Premier Kim II Sung launched a program of guerrilla subversion designed to disrupt the South and humiliate the U.S. at every turn.

With the capture of Pueblo, Kim went a long way toward achieving one of his goals. He also had possession of a U.S. spook ship packed with supersecret gear and if he did not have Lyndon Johnson for burning, he did have the hapless Commander Bucher. Nobody can be certain what happened to Bucher, but the Pyongyang regime was plainly making every effort to exploit him. It was a sad conclusion to Lloyd Bucher’s first command.

A native of Pocatello, Idaho, Bucher was an orphan who was schooled first at a local Catholic orphanage and then sent to Boys Town, Neb. At Boys Town, he picked up the nickname Pete, after an upper-class football player he admired, along with a couple of letters for football, the vice-presidency of his class and a solid, tough-minded approach to life that was devoid of self-pity. Too poor to attend college, he joined the Navy, later entered the University of Nebraska on the G.I. bill, also enrolled in the Naval Reserve officer program to help pay his way. He left Nebraska with a degree in geology, a pretty, brown-haired wife and a Navy commission. He joined the elite Submarine Service, still favors subs, though the duty has kept him away from Rose and their sons Mark, 15, and Michael, 13, more than 50% of the time.

A tough, 5-ft. 10-in. 195-pounder, Bucher strikes one of his closest friends, Navy Lieut. Commander Alan Hemphill, as “a very patriotic person. Today it doesn’t seem fashionable to believe in God, country, Mother and apple pie, but Pete does, and he isn’t embarrassed to tell people about it.”

That was one reason why his friends scoffed when Pyongyang radio broadcast a patently fake confession by Bucher. “If Pete Bucher said anything to the North Koreans beyond his name, rank and serial number,” said Hemphill, “you can bet it wouldn’t be something that would be printable.”

Indelible & Inedible. The “confession,” delivered in a strangled voice, was in the dialectic pidgin prose favored by Communist writers. At one point, it claimed that the CIA promised “a lot of dollars would be offered to the whole crew members of my ship and particularly I myself would be honored” for a good job. Another sample: “I have no excuse whatsoever for my criminal act as my ship intruded deep into the territorial waters of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and was captured by the naval patrol crafts of the Korean People’s Army in their self-defense action while conducting the criminal espionage activities. My crime committed by me and my men is entirely indelible.”

Even Radio Prague found Bucher’s confession inedible rather than indelible, and refused to swallow it. The Pentagon dismissed it as “a travesty on the facts” and added that “the style and wording of the document provide unmistakable evidence in themselves that this was not written or prepared by any American.” When Rose Bucher heard a garbled tape of him supposedly reading the confession, she declared: “That is not my husband’s voice. It does not sound in any remote way like my husband. The inflections and the sounds were not his.” An obvious conclusion from the slurred speech was that Bucher had been drugged. Shown a photo of her husband allegedly writing his confession and a sample of the handwriting from that confession, Mrs. Bucher said: “That can’t be Pete’s. He writes a terrible scrawl.”

Radio Pyongyang later broadcast what it described as an interview with Bucher conducted by North Korean reporters. In it, Bucher—or a stand-in—was asked whether his ship had intruded into Korean waters and whether his crew should be considered aggressors. A dull voice replied: “Yes, I admit. I have no excuse whatsoever. Our espionage acts are plain acts of aggression and criminal acts that violated the rudimental norms of international law.”

There was some suspicion that Pyongyang might be planning to use Bucher’s confession and interview as grounds for a trial of Pueblo’s crew. “The criminals who encroach upon others’ sovereignty and commit provocative acts must receive deserving punishment,” said the party newspaper Nodong Sinmun. “These criminals must be punished by law.” Warned State Department Spokesman Robert McCloskey: “The U.S. Government would consider any such moves by North Korea to be a deliberate aggravation of an already serious situation.”

Exterminatory Blow. Just how serious the Administration considers the situation is obvious from Lyndon Johnson’s worried, wary handling of it. The North Korean regime at week’s end pronounced itself “fully combat ready” and determined to deliver “an exterminatory blow” at the U.S. if attacked. And it has amply proved its volatility and hornet sting. North of the 38th parallel it has an army of 367,000, an air force of 35,000 equipped with 650 planes, and a navy of 10,500. Arrayed against this force is a South Korean army of 600,000 men, plus the 2nd and 7th U.S. Infantry Divisions, totaling another 50,000 men. The South cannot match the North’s airpower, though the U.S. is moving in 200 to 300 late-model planes to end the imbalance.

Through nearly 15 years of an uneasy armistice—peace has yet to return formally to the ravaged peninsula—the two forces have glared at one another across the 2½-mile-deep DMZ, constantly exchanging insults, often bullets. It would take a small spark to ignite such tinder, and the Pueblo incident came very close to providing such a spark.

That it did not was no tribute to Washington’s wisdom. What the piracy of Pueblo did rehearse for the nation —and its adversaries—was a dismaying litany of military procedures and political assumptions that proved in the crunch to be inadequate, unimaginative and unbelievably overconfident. It will probably take years to dissect and document all the slippages and oversights that have led the U.S. to the brink of a second front in Asia. It is already apparent that this was a casus belli that need never have arisen.