Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  Bucher still hadn’t been told the target of the Pueblo’s first mission, so he paid a call on an old friend, Lieutenant Commander Erv Easton, now serving on the CINCPACFLT intelligence staff. Bucher was headed for North Korea, not the USSR, said Easton, and the voyage was rated low-risk. The Pueblo’s sister ferret, the USS Banner, had transited the North Korean coast a couple of times without incident, and Easton promised to give the captain copies of its mission reports. Bucher, he said, should consider his maiden trip a shakedown cruise, a chance to make sure his surveillance gear worked and give his crew a taste of what to expect on more serious outings in the future.

  Bucher knew little about North Korea other than that it’d started the Korean War 17 years earlier and possessed only a bathtub navy of patrol boats, sub chasers, and a handful of aging Soviet-built subs. The idea of such a fourth-rate country attacking a commissioned ship of the mighty United States Navy, he believed, was absurdly far-fetched. Yet he wanted to know what the Navy planned to do if the impossible somehow happened. Easton didn’t know, so he passed Bucher on to Captain George Cassell, CINCPACFLT’s assistant chief of staff for operations. Bucher asked Cassell how the Navy would react if the North Koreans went beyond Soviet-style harassment and started shooting. What if they tried to capture his ship on the high seas?

  The odds of that happening were extremely long, Cassell replied. The Banner had had no trouble off North Korea and neither would the Pueblo. But in the highly unlikely event that he did come under attack, Bucher was on his own. The Navy simply didn’t have enough combat ships to give him immediate relief, although help would be sent as soon as possible. And if the Navy didn’t get to the Pueblo in time, Cassell promised, a retaliatory hammer would come down hard on North Korea within 24 hours.

  “Contingency plans for such an occurrence,” he said, “are written and approved.” In other words, the Pueblo was expendable, but the Navy would swiftly avenge it.

  Festooned with antennae, the Pueblo attracted plenty of attention at Pearl Harbor, and Bucher invited aboard any and all officers with a role in its mission. To preserve its cover story, the Navy called it an “auxiliary general environmental research” ship, or AGER, a designation few Navy officers recognized. Between briefings and tours of the vessel, though, Bucher wanted to make sure his officers and men got time off to enjoy the delights of Hawaii. In fact, he was eager to hit the beachfront bars and nightclubs of Waikiki himself.

  On their first evening in port, the officers all went to a club that featured the entertainer Don Ho and luscious Tahitian dancers. The men tossed 20 bucks apiece into a food-and-drinks kitty. But the money ran out by the end of the first show, and Lieutenant Murphy was perturbed at having to kick in more. Bucher ignored him, and the wardroom had a fine time. Tim Harris lost his shoes after a bout of hula dancing, and Bucher and Lacy didn’t get back to the Pueblo until five a.m. Despite his pique, Murphy covered for his captain later that morning when some CINCPACFLT bigwigs showed up to inspect the Pueblo and Bucher couldn’t seem to rouse himself from bed.

  The tireless skipper hit the beach again that night with Lacy, Tim Harris, and about 25 enlistees and petty officers. Unlike many commissioned officers, Bucher made no effort to maintain an attitude of authoritarian aloofness toward the lower ranks. He didn’t think downing a few brews with his men in some dive undermined good shipboard order and discipline; on the contrary, such comradely elbow-bending just might foster loyalty and make the ship run better. Whatever respect the swabbies had for him, he believed, depended on his abilities as a wise leader and problem solver—not on how often he struck heroic solo poses on the bridge. If big-ship officers subscribed to the notion that familiarity bred contempt, Bucher thought familiarity aboard smaller vessels—such as subs and crowded little spy boats—was unavoidable.

  After three days, the Honolulu yard workers emerged from the Pueblo’s bowels, weary and defeated, saying they could do no more to patch up the steering engine. Bucher would have to hope for the best on the next leg of his trip and make permanent repairs in Yokosuka. On the afternoon of November 18, the ship pulled away from its dock at Pearl and headed north and west.

  The steering engine failed yet again on the second day out. Sailors were still losing their lunches over the side, and the ship’s limited hygiene facilities compounded their misery. For a crew of 83 there were only four shower stalls and six washbasins. The head in the first-class petty officers’ compartment continually backed up, spitting feces and urine on the deck. (The men nicknamed it “the shooter.”) The air belowdecks was rank; by the end of the tropical days, the broiling bunk areas reeked.

  Bucher stopped midocean for a “swim call,” a tradition popular with sub crews on lengthy patrols. His sailors loved it. They pulled on trunks and jumped off the low-slung well deck into the water. Then some horseplay began, with bigger men throwing in smaller ones. Someone shoved Langenberg off the deck. He landed on top of radioman John Mullin, who shrieked in pain.

  The ship’s veteran corpsman, Herman “Doc” Baldridge, thought Mullin’s back might be broken. But the Pueblo had no doctor or proper sick bay, and Baldridge couldn’t do much beyond giving the injured man painkillers. Bucher radioed Pearl Harbor for advice and was told to rendezvous with a destroyer tender, the USS Samuel Gompers, which was on the same course to Japan and rapidly catching up with him. The Gompers carried doctors, X-ray equipment, and other trappings of a small hospital.

  The sunshine and smooth seas gradually disappeared as the Pueblo plodded on in the volatile North Pacific. A gray curtain of rainsqualls on the horizon drew closer and thickened into a steady downpour. The skies darkened and the wind accelerated, heralding a storm. Visibility dropped to a few miles. The Pueblo jerked and heaved even more violently than usual; Mullin, strapped to his bunk, groaned in distress. Finally, the Gompers appeared on the Pueblo’s radar screen. Thirty minutes later, the big tender broke into view through the driving rain, its signal lights flashing:

  STAND BY

  IN MY LEE

  TO RECEIVE OUR DOCTOR.

  Bucher took the conn, silently praying that the steering engine wouldn’t quit again. Just in case, he stationed a team on the fantail, the men ready to spring into action with ropes and iron tiller. As rain and flying spume pelted him on the open bridge, the skipper edged closer to the Gompers’s downwind flank, watching intently as the bigger ship swayed ponderously alongside him.

  The destroyer tender launched its whaleboat, which puttered close enough for an agile physician to leap across the last few feet of churning sea onto the Pueblo’s rain-slick well deck. He hurried below, examined Mullin, and confirmed Baldridge’s diagnosis. Although it was risky to transfer the radioman in the storm, he had to be taken to the Gompers for treatment.

  There was no way to safely deposit Mullin in the Gompers’s bucking whaleboat. Instead, he was lashed to a stretcher and placed in the Pueblo’s motor launch. Bucher had only a handful of men who were even halfway qualified to lower the boat into the water and maneuver it over to the Gompers in such rough conditions. But he had no choice. He gave Ensign Harris command of the launch, and then spurred the Pueblo a little nearer to the protective bulk of the Gompers. Harris and his crew managed to plop into the sea without capsizing. They beelined for the Gompers, which quickly and expertly winched up their boat and its patient.

  The drama wasn’t over: Harris still had to get back to the Pueblo. As he and his men approached the ship, a sudden squall engulfed them. They could barely see in the heavy rain. They banged into the hull and had to back off. They tried again, only to be waved away by sailors on deck. On the third try Harris and his men made it. They were hoisted back on board, soaked to the bone and freezing, but proud of their deliverance of an ailing shipmate.

  The Gompers sped off into the squall line and disappeared.

  Bucher treated every man who’d been in the launch or out on deck to a two-ounce bottle of brandy. T
he grog, according to one sailor, “boosted morale about 600 percent.”

  —

  After two weeks at sea, Bucher was generally satisfied with the way his crew was shaping up, with one notable exception: Ed Murphy, his executive officer.

  Tall and owlish behind horn-rimmed glasses, Murphy came across as a strictly-by-the-book type. His black shoes gleamed, a gold clip firmly secured his tie, and his shirtsleeves were rolled all the way down. A devout Christian Scientist, the 30-year-old lieutenant was a teetotaler who also didn’t smoke or drink coffee. His job as the Pueblo’s number two officer was to ensure that the captain’s orders were carried out quickly and efficiently. But after working with him only a few months, Bucher regarded his deputy as a bungler and a stuffed shirt.

  The son of a general-store proprietor, Murphy had grown up in the lumber town of Arcata in Northern California’s redwood country. After college, he enrolled in officer candidate school in Newport, Rhode Island. Posted to a fleet oiler, he later served on a destroyer as assistant navigator, earning good fitness reports.

  Murphy liked the Navy and wanted to make it his career. In 1964, he was assigned, as a full-fledged navigator, to a guided missile destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf. By then his father had died and his mother was trying to run the family store herself. That became more and more difficult as her health deteriorated. In 1965, Murphy made a difficult decision to put his shipboard career on hold and got a humanitarian transfer to a small Navy shore facility near Arcata. During off hours, he helped his mother get the store ready to sell.

  Murphy might be straitlaced, but he had mettle. Walking along the beach near the base one winter morning, he and another lieutenant spotted a foundering crab boat getting knocked to pieces in heavy surf. At first the officers thought the vessel was abandoned. Coming closer, they saw three men aboard. Murphy and his colleague plunged into the frigid ocean, swam to the boat, and hauled the crabbers to shore. For risking their lives, both officers were awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.

  From his first moments aboard the Pueblo, however, Murphy rubbed Bucher the wrong way. The lieutenant prissily turned down a cup of coffee, saying, “I never use it, thank you,” as if he’d been offered a bowl of opium. When the wardroom retired that afternoon to the Bremerton officers’ club to toast the new executive officer with martinis, Murphy sipped a ginger ale and left early.

  Bucher believed that compatibility was as important as competence among officers on a small ship. Murphy certainly wasn’t very compatible with the captain’s style of hard work and boozy hard play. To Bucher, the XO seemed unable to cope with his paperwork or carry out shipboard policies. Nor did he join the other officers in their frequent beer-and-bull sessions after work. He seemed preoccupied with his family, especially his mother’s ongoing difficulties with the store.

  More and more, the exec found himself cut out of the wardroom loop. In port, Bucher often made decisions about ship’s business while out on the town with his more convivial officers. Murphy didn’t find out until he tried to give someone an order later, only to be told, “The captain said we weren’t going to do that.”

  Bucher also regularly embarrassed Murphy by dressing him down—“chewing ass,” the captain called it—within earshot of others. Murphy felt his boss was obsessed with his refusal to consume alcohol, seeing it as a sign that the executive officer regarded himself as morally superior. Murphy considered that ridiculous; he was simply living the tenets of his faith, not turning up his nose at anyone else.

  How to run the ship was another source of friction between the two men. Murphy disliked the skipper’s tendency to act as if the Pueblo were a submarine instead of a surface vessel. He referred to the flying bridge as the “conning tower” and the crew’s mess area as the “after battery.” Murphy approved of some of Bucher’s sub-style practices, such as the midafternoon “soup down,” which let the men put something hot in their stomachs before going on the four-to-eight-p.m. watch. But the captain, a confirmed night owl, also canceled reveille, routinely held on surface ships but not on subs, whose crews can’t usually be lined up on deck for head counts. Murphy thought eliminating reveille made it more difficult to get the Pueblo’s men up for morning work details.

  Bucher’s vexation with his second in command peaked just before Thanksgiving, as the ship snorted and churned its way toward Japan.

  Murphy had been aware for some time that the cooks were using bourbon and wine to prepare some meals. Thinking Bucher was trying to bait him, the exec said nothing. Before setting sail, the skipper had tripled the Pueblo’s alcohol allowance. Murphy didn’t question that; nor did he complain of the frequency with which liquor was broken out for nonmedicinal purposes. What Bucher and the others drank was their business.

  Shortly before the holiday, the officers were chatting in the wardroom when Tim Harris suggested that the mincemeat pies be laced with brandy. Suspecting a trap, Murphy didn’t object. Then Schumacher piped up, asking what the lieutenant thought should be done. Murphy, a big fan of mincemeat, peered through his glasses and said perhaps a compromise was in order. All the holiday pies could be spiked save one, for those who might want a nonalcoholic dessert.

  “Hell, no!” Bucher roared. “We’ll put brandy in all the pies, and that’s that!”

  On Thanksgiving, Murphy took a pass on the mincemeat.

  In the final week of its voyage, the Pueblo ran into gale-force winds and mountainous seas. It rolled as much as 50 degrees, so far over that Bucher feared a fatal capsize. Pots, pans, and plates flew every which way in the galley; green-gilled CTs pressed themselves tighter into their bunks. In spite of all the trouble with the steering engine, the main engines functioned flawlessly. The ship crawled up and over row after row of towering graybeards.

  Finally, on December 1, the main Japanese island of Honshu appeared. The Pueblo rounded Cape Nojima and cruised past the long headland that protects the entrance to Tokyo Bay. Darkness had fallen by the time the storm-lashed ferret entered the Yokosuka channel, bound for its new home. Every man not on duty came out on deck, gazing eagerly at the bright lights of shore.

  Bucher felt a flush of satisfaction at having finished his first sea journey as a commander. He had many sub buddies in Yokosuka and he was determined to impress them by gliding to a perfect stop at his designated dock. But he blew it, chugging right past the berth. Realizing his error, he threw the twin diesels into reverse. The steering engine chose that moment to quit completely. Since he didn’t dare approach the dock with only rope-and-tiller steering, the skipper had to call for a tug.

  As the spy ship was nursed into its slot, Bucher saw some familiar faces gathered under the pier lights.

  They were laughing at him.

  CHAPTER 2

  DON’T START A WAR OUT THERE, CAPTAIN

  Five days before Christmas, the USS Banner—the first spy ship sent out under Operation Clickbeetle—returned to Yokosuka from its latest patrol and tied up next to the Pueblo. After several weeks at sea the Banner’s unshaven crew looked like tired pirates. Bucher and his men soon would replace them in the wintry Sea of Japan.

  Like its sister a onetime freighter, the Banner had ferried coconuts, pigs, and pregnant women around the Mariana Islands for years. In 1965, workmen at Bremerton converted it into a spy platform in just seven weeks—so fast that one Navy officer observed that it had been “literally put together like a plate of hash.”

  The Banner’s first commander was Lieutenant Bob Bishop, a South Carolinian who seemed to possess a sixth sense for extricating himself from white-knuckle situations. His inaugural mission was intended to gauge the Soviets’ reaction to the presence of a lone unarmed intelligence vessel near their shores. And the communists weren’t shy about demonstrating their displeasure.

  Their destroyers and patrol boats tried to drive off Bishop by speeding straight at the Banner and swerving away moments before a collision. The harassme
nt didn’t faze the American skipper, but the horrendous weather did. After 20 hours of plowing into a Siberian storm, he realized the Banner had been pushed two miles backward. The storm left so much ice on the ship’s topsides that Bishop worried it might turn turtle.

  The Navy wanted Operation Clickbeetle focused on the USSR, its biggest maritime rival. But when it became clear, after half a dozen voyages, that the Banner was acquiring high-quality intelligence, the National Security Agency began lobbying for the ship’s itinerary to be broadened to include China and North Korea. Navy officials objected, saying that doing so would negate Clickbeetle’s central premise: that American ferrets would be protected by the gentlemen’s agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union that neither would harm the other’s boats for fear of reciprocal action. China and North Korea were bound by no such constraints. They possessed only coast-hugging navies incapable of ranging far enough from shore to eavesdrop on foreign adversaries. Thus they had less to lose by going after American snoopers. But the NSA prevailed in the debate.

  Bishop faced his most alarming harassment in December 1966, when six Chinese gunboats surrounded the Banner off Shanghai. Each of the 60-foot patrol boats had a machine gun on its forward deck, manned and pointed at the American ship. The Chinese vessels apparently doubled as fishing boats, since all had lines running from their masts with fish drying on them. Their pilothouses bore the same painted slogan: “Chairman Mao is the envy of our hearts.” Bishop turned and headed back to sea at full speed; the communists trailed along for a while but made no move to stop him.

  Lieutenant Commander Charles Clark, another surfaced submariner, succeeded Bishop in 1967. Clark had been friends with Bucher at sub school in the mid-1950s and promised to keep him informed about his experiences on the Banner.