The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  The intelligence officers next drove the two ladies to an apartment only a block from the Liberation office. The two POW wives were warned to stay no longer than thirty minutes—or their escorts would come in and get them. To their surprise, Hayden answered the doorbell and invited them in. They sat down in the living room and were soon joined by Berrigan, Dellinger, and Zinn.

  The ladies explained their mission and gave the men the POW/MIA families’ letters and photographs. Jane recalled that “Hayden was casual and relaxed. Dellinger, the older one, let me know he had been an activist all his life. Father Berrigan sat on a chair somewhat removed from the group and stared at us in a suspicious, hostile way.”

  The entire meeting was over in a matter of minutes. The antiwar activists agreed to take the letters and try to find out what information they could about the POWs and the missing men. Hayden escorted the women to the elevator. Jane then asked what Naval Intelligence had instructed her to find out: “What route do you plan to take?” Hayden answered, “Via Russia.” While this was not much of a secret, it further confirmed the Mobe’s close ties with the North Vietnamese.

  Jane later remembered, “The elevator door opened, we stepped inside, and it closed behind us. Janie and I almost collapsed, and we laughed too. We had made our effort to get information on our husbands and their comrades. It might or it might not work. But we had succeeded in one thing for sure: we had found out the route they were taking for Naval Intelligence.”19

  Jane and Janie didn’t realize it at the time, but their clandestine work on behalf of their husbands would facilitate POW communication with their families and help provide some accounting for the missing. The two POW wives had done something extraordinary—something all the famous diplomats in D.C., with all their expertise, found impossible to achieve. They had broken through to the other side. To hell with diplomacy and government protocol: the women’s goal was to get the men out, alive, using any means necessary.

  * * *

  Three airmen who had been prisoners of war were released from Hanoi that winter through the efforts of Berrigan, Zinn, Dellinger, and Hayden. Zinn later recalled the meeting with Jane and Janie from his perspective, noting that the POW wives “showed only a slight tension at meeting objectors to a war their husbands were waging; it helped perhaps that one of the emissaries [Berrigan] was a Jesuit priest and the other [Zinn himself] a professor who had been an Air Force bombardier.”20

  Berrigan and his band were just beginning to grasp the idea that they were becoming power brokers in Hanoi. They were used to being in the background, working behind the scenes. But now they were the diplomats. They finally had currency. “In the peace movement, you got used to being without power; that was your name. Then the invitation from Hanoi—and suddenly, what power!… Why we were doing what all the king’s armies and all the king’s men couldn’t do. We were going where Mr. Rusk couldn’t go, or Bundy, or the President himself.”21

  In addition to Jane Denton and Janie Tschudy, Berrigan and Zinn had one other unexpected pre-flight visit that February night they flew to Hanoi. Averell Harriman had sent one of his State Department staffers to meet with the group. Zinn remembered that the staffer “offered to validate our passport for travel to North Vietnam, an officially forbidden destination.” All the same, Berrigan and Zinn declined—they had mutually agreed not to recognize any government’s right to approve or deny their travel.22

  Sybil was always curious why Bob Boroughs had told her that the State Department was too cozy with the antiwar activists. “He thought that some State Department officials were too friendly with those Americans who happily spread North Vietnamese propaganda in the United States.”23 In desperation, Harriman and his men were counting on Berrigan, Zinn, Hayden, Dellinger, Cora Weiss, and others in their network to aid them in the early releases of American prisoners. Harriman even hosted Hayden and Dellinger at the State Department to discuss their ideas.24

  Though he didn’t tell Sybil, Boroughs knew of the February 1968 meeting between State and antiwar leaders—as well as others who happened under the radar. Despite his dislike of the antiwar lobby, Boroughs realized that he, too, had to use any means necessary to get word of the POWs. Writing to Sybil from D.C. on February 12, 1968, the Naval Intel officer awaited the release of the three POWs and their escorts, saying, “Let’s hope Berrigan and Zinn come out with a suitcase full of letters. It’s been a long dry spell. Keep your fingers crossed.”25

  * * *

  Other POW wives were not only meeting with the perceived enemy and passing messages—they were becoming full-fledged “Jane Bonds.” Boroughs recruited numerous POW wives to assist Naval Intelligence in its efforts to gain more information on the captured men. Dot McDaniel recognized Boroughs as an ally almost as soon as she met him. “I had a strong suspicion that I had found a maverick bureaucrat, one who didn’t buy the ‘keep silent’ rule.”26

  Many of Dot’s friends on the East Coast—Jane, Janie, and Phyllis among them—worked with Boroughs at Naval Intelligence to produce letters into which code could be inserted.27 Most of the women were terrified to talk to one another about what they were doing. They were, after all, risking their husbands’ lives by participating. It was perhaps a Faustian deal, but the women had all seen firsthand that doing nothing was even more dangerous.

  Sybil was one of the few women who wrote about her experiences coding secret letters, recording them for posterity. She began working with Boroughs on the West Coast in 1966, coding messages into her letters to Jim. She later recalled how exhausted she was after producing these missives for encryption. It took tremendous time, effort, and careful thought.

  In her diary, she recorded that her letter to Jim of May 25, 1967, looked “simple as you read it, but it took me all that time to write because almost all of it is in a cryptographic code.” She continued, addressing her four sons as she recorded her work for posterity, “Save your time boys, and don’t try and break it [the code]. I never could, even having the formula I worked from. As I wrote, I knew that one mistake would throw the whole thing off, and oh how I labored over those words.”28

  Some of the POWs who knew these same techniques taught them to other prisoners so they could also send information back to their wives via coded letters. The men shared names of other prisoners in the POW camps, information on MIAs, reports of the torture they were undergoing, intelligence about possible North Vietnamese military plans, the location of camps, and potential nearby targets.

  Jim Stockdale’s son Jim Jr. would later reveal that his dad and many of the other POWs “used invisible carbon techniques, cryptography, and (at the very end) microdots to reach beyond their prison cells to the offices of Naval Intelligence and beyond.”29 The women received these seemingly innocuous letters from their husbands and promptly passed them on to Naval Intelligence for decoding.

  If caught, Jim Stockdale, Jerry Denton, Paul Galanti, and numerous others who wrote and sent coded letters faced torture and probable execution. Their wives would become widows. The stakes for POWs and their wives/encryption partners were much higher than anything Sean Connery faced in the Cold War–era James Bond films playing in theaters at the time.30

  * * *

  The Pentagon, the State Department, and the Department of Defense were increasingly at odds. No one trusted anyone else, and each department kept a tight grip on its own secrets and military intelligence. Different branches were often disinclined to work together. Boroughs was uniquely positioned to see this problem. During 1967, he served on both Harriman’s Interdepartmental Committee on Prisoner Matters and Defense Department general counsel Paul Warnke’s DoD Prisoner of War Policy Committee.31 Boroughs was not supposed to talk to his friends in the CIA or share intel with other government departments. But he often did. “When Bob Boroughs of Naval Intelligence reached out to other clandestine services in 1967 for their expertise, the challenge was significant. But persistence, risk-taking, and cooperation led to a durable communications netwo
rk.”32 The POW wives were the bedrock of this enterprise, the conduits through which intel could pass unnoticed by the North Vietnamese.

  Boroughs would also use the antiwar activists as couriers to find out as much information about the POWs and MIAs as possible. He was forced to think outside the box and to use all available outlets to get messages through to American prisoners of war. The women’s former existence as military wives had strict but clear codes of conduct. Their frightening new existence involved scenarios of espionage, political intrigue, and strange wartime bedfellows the wives could not have imagined before the Vietnam conflict. Once a crisp black-and-white, the POW/MIA wives’ world was now painted with many shades of gray.

  Sybil, Louise, Jane, Janie, Phyllis, Dot, and many other POW wives decided to use whatever methods they had at their disposal to help their husbands. Other military wives (not just POW wives) hesitated. Sybil noticed this early on, writing later that “the officer’s wives’ clubs connected with different bases were hesitant to get involved because the policy had been to not say or do anything for so long.” She also surmised, “I think a lot of them were afraid that if they got involved with us that perhaps it would hurt their husbands’ careers.”33

  As the years dragged on, the highest priority for most of the wives became bringing the men home honorably. While this did not indicate that the POW and MIA wives supported early release for the prisoners (this was against the military Code of Conduct, though the U.S. government would consistently ignore this and allow early releases through the peace groups), it did mean communication via any possible route. As Louise Mulligan, Dot McDaniel, and many other POW wives later emphasized, “We were willing to make a deal with the devil if we had to to get our husbands back.”34

  Nine

  YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?

  IN JANUARY 1968, JUST before Jane and Janie entered their unlikely alliance with Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, and his band of radical activists, an incident took place at the White House that the POW/MIA wives surely took notice of. Glamorous singer and Batman TV series star Eartha Kitt single-handedly took on the Johnson administration when she was invited to a White House luncheon on crime issues. The young star criticized LBJ’s Vietnam policies in front of the fifty or so other women at the event. Kitt was so forceful in her comments, she made the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, cry. “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” she told her fellow guests. “They rebel in the street. They will take pot … and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.” Kitt was just getting warmed up. She then told the First Lady that young Americans felt alienated because “they can’t get to you and they can’t get to the President, and so they rebel in the streets.”1 After her comments, the CIA would put Kitt under surveillance and ruin her career for a decade.

  The young people weren’t the only ones who couldn’t get near Johnson. The POW/MIA wives and their cause were not on his agenda, either. The alienation Kitt described was reflective of what the wives were feeling also. Though Sybil, Jane, Louise, Helene, and the other POW/MIA wives would not have approved of Kitt’s approach or her politics, they must have admired her courage. Revolution was brewing. The White House was beginning to burn down from the inside out. Kitt was not going to keep quiet anymore—and soon, neither would the much more rule-conscious POW and MIA wives.

  * * *

  On January 23, the USS Pueblo, an American naval intelligence collection ship sailing in international waters in the Sea of Japan, was attacked and then boarded by North Korean patrol boats. The armed North Koreans wounded several of the crew members and killed one during the assault. The Pueblo’s commander, Lloyd M. Bucher, and eighty-one other crew members were taken hostage before American forces could intervene.2 The men were just beginning an eleven-month ordeal of imprisonment in North Korea. Johnson would do nothing in response.

  The North Koreans, however, would do quite a bit with their prize hostages. “Communications technology had given the ancient practice of hostage-taking a whole new purpose as a tool of propaganda,” wrote historian Amanda Foreman.3 They proceeded to use them as a beacon from which to broadcast their political position. The ensuing press coverage of the incident dissected every detail of the plight of these American prisoners. Though the U.S. presence in the Sea of Japan was not illegal, “the North Koreans, by the exercise of extreme brutality and what seemed to Bucher and his men to be a credible threat of death, extracted ‘confessions’ that the spy ship had violated the coastal zone.” Johnson still did nothing. The only way the United States was finally able to rescue the American naval crew was by submitting a formal apology to the North Koreans, while simultaneously repudiating the apology in the international media. (This could be done only on account of North Korea’s ironclad control of its domestic media—the North Korean public heard only the U.S. apology, not its denial.)4

  During their captivity, the men had found a way to communicate their ill treatment to the world: in a famous photo of eight crew members that appeared in the international press in August of 1968, all the prisoners were giving the camera the finger. They had told their captors this was the “Hawaiian good luck sign.” While the Koreans didn’t get it, the American press certainly did.5 POW Paul Galanti had done the same thing in Life magazine in October of 1967. These images were a powerful symbol. Even in captivity, American soldiers retained their SERE skills—and their sense of humor. Still, some of the American prisoners eventually broke due to ongoing months of abuse and torture, making forced false “confessions” to satisfy their captors.

  When the Pueblo crew finally returned home to San Diego on December 23, 1968, there was talk of court-martial for Commander Bucher and some of the crew. Though this did not happen, the military Code of Conduct came under intense scrutiny. The general conclusion was that in certain hostile and brutal situations, prisoners could be forgiven for signing false confessions. No disciplinary action would follow, given the prolonged and harsh treatment by the enemy. This would later have a great impact on the Code of Conduct regarding servicemen held in captivity in North and South Vietnam. The military had long cautioned the men to “keep quiet” themselves, to accept torture, punishment, or even death before they gave the enemy any information. Things would change as the length of prisoner captivity increased in Vietnam.

  Even more significant to the POW/MIA cause at the time, however, was the intense media coverage of the Pueblo encounter. Sybil noted, “It was a fantastically frustrating experience … to have all the ‘hullabalu’ about these prisoners going on in the press while nothing was being said by our Government about our own men in Vietnam.”6 The inconsistent way LBJ and his staff handled this incident chipped away even more at the fragile layer of trust that the women still had in the current administration. They could also see how disengaged their president was from the prisoner issue, letting the men suffer indefinitely at the hands of the North Koreans. The president’s lack of action and engagement with the Pueblo prisoners did not build their confidence in Lyndon Johnson or his government. The wives were watching, and they did not like what they saw.7

  * * *

  On February 29, 1969, only a few months after the Pueblo incident wrapped up, Robert McNamara left his position as secretary of defense. Rumor had it that McNamara was close to a nervous breakdown. But perhaps closer to the truth was the public perception that McNamara had gone from Whiz Kid to washout. “McNamara had been a model cabinet officer for Johnson—able, conscientious, discreet, and above all, loyal. But Johnson was ruthless, and McNamara had become a liability.”8 Conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater and many others supported LBJ’s decision to fire the Kennedy appointee, proclaiming, “McNamara was to me the most dangerous man we’ve ever had in the secretary’s job.”9

  Sybil didn’t agree with LBJ on much, but she did agree with his decision to give McNamara the ax. She saw the former secretary’s fla
ws clearly through a prisoner-of-war lens. After his departure, Sybil remembered hearing McNamara “say something on the radio to the effect that no one would have dreamed this war could last so long. I thought to myself, anybody who fights a war the half-baked way you do, should know it can go on almost forever.”10

  That same winter, another young woman was about to join the reluctant sorority of POW/MIA wives. Raised in New York City, Andrea Rander was petite, stylish, and smart. Born in Harlem, she later moved to the South Bronx, where she attended a diverse high school, mixing with students of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religious backgrounds. Andrea was African American and had Jewish and Italian friends from school. She loved New York and the mix of cultures there that were part of her daily life. She recalled her neighborhood and its streets fondly and had a happy childhood and adolescence there. Her parents regularly took her to the Met and to Broadway shows and to events like the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. These experiences provided her with a wide exposure to art and culture that helped form her outlook on life.11

  Andrea had moved to Baltimore while her husband, Army sergeant Donald “Don” Rander, was deployed in Vietnam. Now he was close to finishing up his deployment, and stationed in the city of Hue. Unbeknownst to his wife, Rander had received special intelligence training. Andrea had been a little surprised, in late January of 1968, when she got a call from her husband at home. He had called from one of the fancy military phones that high-ranking officers typically would use. He told her not to worry about him: “Things are busy here, but we’re ok.”