South Korean authorities interrogated Lieutenant Kim and made him the star of a sensational press conference. He claimed he and his comrades originally had several targets in Seoul. Besides killing Park, they planned to murder the American ambassador and his wife, attack South Korean army headquarters, and blow open the gates of a prison that held communist agents. But shortly before leaving North Korea, the hit team decided to concentrate on the Blue House. Kim also revealed that 2,400 other North Korean soldiers were in training to carry out guerrilla attacks and instigate revolution in the south.
In the snow-blanketed countryside north of Seoul, meanwhile, the remorseless search for the remaining commandos went on. Allied soldiers pursued them with helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and dogs. They waited in ambush holes dug in the frozen earth and broke up ice covering the Imjin River near the DMZ, so no one could cross on foot.
One by one, the exhausted North Koreans still at large were cornered and killed. Troops shot one to death at a farmhouse where he’d stopped to beg for food. The young captain who’d led the assassination squad met his end on a rocky hilltop after refusing to surrender. Another infiltrator was slain just five miles south of the DMZ. Only two were believed to have made it home.
The attempted assault on the Blue House was an astonishing act of international savagery that might well have touched off a new Korean War had it succeeded. The South Korean army was placed on maximum alert; North Korea braced for possible retaliatory attacks by Park’s forces.
Bucher and his men arrived off Wonsan the morning after the Blue House raid was broken up. It was an extraordinarily tense moment. North Korea easily could have interpreted an intelligence ship lurking near a key port as a scout for a counterattack, a dire threat that must quickly be neutralized.
Yet no one bothered to inform Bucher of the incendiary events in Seoul, or of how the North Koreans might now be expected to react to his ship.
CHAPTER 4
SOS SOS SOS
Bucher rolled out of bed just before seven a.m. on January 23. He hadn’t slept much. It had taken nearly 14 hours for his SITREP of the previous afternoon to reach Kamiseya, in part because of heavy traffic on frequencies the Pueblo used. The captain had anxiously checked with his radiomen during the night; any communications delay was worrisome, but one this long was dangerous. Now, feeling tired and stiff, he shuffled into the wardroom for a cup of coffee. The ship smelled sour; Bucher resolved to tell the men to air out their bedding.
Fortified with caffeine, the skipper pulled himself up the ladder to the flying bridge and joined Gene Lacy, that morning’s officer of the deck. The weather was improving. The temperature had risen to a tolerable 20 degrees, and a four-knot wind was blowing out of the northwest. The sea undulated with gentle swells; high, thin clouds reflected the first pale fingers of dawn.
Bucher checked the ship’s position: 25 miles out. He told Lacy to close to 15 miles, making it easier for the CTs to detect radio or radar emanations from Wonsan. Then he went back down to the wardroom for breakfast, convinced this was to be another routine day in the Sea of Japan.
By ten a.m., the captain could clearly see the islands of Ung-do and Yo-do, lying at the mouth of the large bay that leads to Wonsan. As he had done ever since the near-shipwreck on the way to Sasebo, Bucher double-checked Murphy’s navigation. Then he rang up all-stop on the annunciator. The Pueblo went dead in the water exactly 15.5 miles from the nearest landfall. He saw no activity outside Wonsan—not a single patrol boat, freighter, or fishing vessel. Aside from yesterday’s excitement with the trawlers, the communists seemed to be ignoring the American ship. Bucher felt a bit disappointed.
Friar Tuck and Harry Iredale ambled out on deck for their daily plumb of the depths. A work party came topside to clear snow and ice that had accumulated during the night. With the temperature edging higher, there was little buildup. Bucher heard the rhythmic sloshing of the ship’s superannuated washing machine as it cranked to life in the fo’c’sle with the first laundry of the day.
Steve Harris called from the SOD hut to report that the CTs were picking up signals from two search radars conducting normal sweeps. There was also something new: voices on North Korean radio channels.
“Anything indicating an interest in us?” Bucher asked.
“Not that we can read, Captain. Probably routine traffic, but we’re recording and will go back over the tapes.”
Bucher had no use for that process. Taping and translating the communist chatter would take hours, as the two Marine sergeants went over the recordings inch by inch with Korean dictionaries in hand. They were supposed to be Bucher’s early-warning system, but their inability to translate in real time meant he had to guess at what the communists were up to. To reassure himself, he again scanned the coast with his binoculars: still no movement.
It seemed as if the Pueblo were the only ship in the world.
At noon the captain was back in the wardroom for lunch. The mess was into its second seating, 25 men digging into generous portions of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy, and succotash. Lacy, who’d turned over the conn to Charlie Law, squeezed in with the rest of the officers.
“Everything okay on your watch, Gene?” Bucher asked.
“Yes, sir,” the chief engineer answered, smiling. “And we’re catching up with some housekeeping in this nice weather.”
“Yeah, almost like the balmy winters on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks,” cracked Schumacher.
A call from the bridge interrupted the conversation. Law reported an unidentified vessel approaching from about eight miles away. Bucher told him to call again if it got within five miles. The officers continued talking and eating; there was no cause for alarm. The captain had tucked into his second helping of meat loaf when the phone buzzed again. The alien craft was now five miles out and closing rapidly.
Maybe this wasn’t such an ordinary day after all.
Bucher dropped his fork and hurried to the bridge. The air was noticeably colder; the sun glowed weakly through wintry overcast. He focused the big eyes on the incoming vessel and made a tentative identification: a submarine chaser, flying a North Korean ensign and bearing down on the Pueblo at flank speed.
The sight irritated the captain; leave it to these godless bastards to interrupt his midday meal. He called for Schumacher and Steve Harris to join him on the bridge. To reinforce the Pueblo’s facade as a research vessel, Bucher told Tuck and Iredale to lower their Nansen bottles. Then he ordered his signalman to hoist flags indicating oceanographic activity.
The sub chaser kept coming. Bucher clambered down to the pilothouse to recheck the Pueblo’s position. It had drifted farther out, floating 15.9 miles from Ung-do. The captain returned to the flying bridge with Harris, who studied the communist boat and flipped through his identification book.
“She’s a Russian-built, modified SO-1-class submarine chaser,” the lieutenant concluded, confirming Bucher’s ID. Modern versions of such craft, 138 feet in length, were armed with two 25-millimeter antiaircraft guns and four 16-inch torpedo tubes. This one also had a 57-millimeter deck cannon.
On its bow the gunboat displayed the number 35.
“Get below,” Bucher told Harris, “and find out if your CTs can eavesdrop on any talk with her base.”
Unbeknown to the captain, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft at that moment was flying about 50 nautical miles east of his position, listening to North Korean military channels. The crew of the Air Force C-130 heard the North Koreans dispatch several warships to intercept the Pueblo.
“We have approached the target here,” sub chaser No. 35 radioed as it sped toward Bucher’s boat. “It is U.S. Did you get it? It looks like it’s armed now. . . . I think it’s a radar ship. It also has radio antennae. It has a lot of antennae, and, looking at the wavelength, I think it’s a ship used for detecting something.”
Bucher, clad only in a khaki sh
irt, trousers, and shower slippers, sent below for his leather flight jacket and boots. He pulled a white ski cap with a red tassel over his head and began to dictate a running account of No. 35’s approach into a portable tape recorder, as Chuck Clark had done when the Banner was harassed.
The sub chaser closed to 1,000 yards. Through his field glasses Bucher saw helmeted men manning its guns. The captain ordered Lacy to replace Law as officer of the deck. So far, the incident was nothing out of the ordinary, but Bucher wanted his most experienced officer at his side if things got dicey.
He told Schumacher to work up a situation report to keep Admiral Johnson in the loop. The captain also ordered his enginemen to light off the twin diesels, in case he decided to bail out.
No. 35 came closer and began circling the Pueblo. On the second circuit, it ran up a signal flag: WHAT NATIONALITY? Bucher ordered the American colors hoisted.
Ensign Harris, excited and apprehensive, joined the others on the upper bridge. Bucher put him to work writing a narrative of communist actions in the log. Harris climbed back down to the pilothouse, plopped into the padded captain’s chair, and started scribbling.
Lacy sang out that three torpedo boats also were racing toward the Pueblo at better than 40 knots, their rooster tails visible several miles away.
This was beginning to look like full-blown harassment. Part of the Pueblo’s mission was to test the North Koreans’ reaction to a ferret’s prolonged presence, and they certainly were reacting. The captain told Murphy to check the Pueblo’s position yet again; it was still nearly three miles outside the no-go zone.
Closing to 500 yards, the sub chaser ran up an attention-getting set of flags: HEAVE TO OR I WILL FIRE.
The message baffled Bucher. His ship already was stopped. What were these idiots talking about? He told Murphy to look up the precise meaning of “heave to” in a nautical dictionary, to make sure there were no nuances he didn’t know about. There weren’t.
As the captain struggled to divine their intentions, the North Koreans settled on their course of action:
“We will close down the radio, tie up the personnel, tow it, and enter port at Wonsan,” one communist gunboat radioed. “We are on the way to boarding.”
Hearing this, the Americans aboard the C-130 tried to alert Bucher. They had no direct way to contact him so they radioed Kamiseya, urging that he be informed immediately of the trap that was about to snap shut on him. But no warning came from Japan.
Bucher dropped down the ladder again to the pilothouse. He wanted to check his coordinates once more, to make absolutely sure of where he was. Radar didn’t lie: The Pueblo was now 15.8 miles from the nearest shore. Murphy had plotted their position a half dozen times; it was impossible that both he and the captain had been wrong over and over again. Bucher hauled himself back up to the flying bridge and told his signalman to raise another string of flags: I AM IN INTERNATIONAL WATERS.
Schumacher hurried below to have the SITREP sent out. He entered the crypto room, just off the SOD hut’s main compartment, and watched as CT Don Bailey pounded out the message on the keyboard of an encoding machine. Steve Harris suggested the report’s priority be upgraded to CRITIC, a designation that would propel it ahead of other Navy traffic to the Pentagon, the National Security Agency—and the White House.
“We have a CRITIC tape already cut, Skip, if the captain wants to wake up the president,” advised Harris.
Schumacher returned to the bridge to find the situation worsening. No. 35 was still circling, its guns aimed squarely at the American vessel. The three PT boats continued to close at high speed, their torpedo tubes loaded and their machine guns trained on the intelligence ship as they skimmed across the cold gray sea.
Bucher was taken aback by how fast things were happening. Just 20 minutes had elapsed since the sub chaser was first spotted. A pang of uneasiness shot through him. He still didn’t think things were out of hand, but how far would the communists go? Would he need to destroy his classified material? How long would that take?
He turned to Lacy. “Could we scuttle the ship quickly if we had to?” he asked.
Lacy gave his commander a searching look. “Not quickly, sir,” he replied. “About two hours to flood the main engine room, after unbolting and disconnecting the saltwater cooling intakes.” Then more time until inrushing seawater breached the bulkhead of the auxiliary engine room and its accumulating weight began to pull the ship under.
With its engines crippled and its hull filling with water, however, the Pueblo would wallow helplessly. If American jets or warships showed up and attempted a rescue, Bucher couldn’t maneuver. And what if his men had to abandon ship? Their vessel carried a 26-foot whaleboat and more than enough life rafts for everyone. But some sailors might spill overboard. The water temperature was 35 degrees, cold enough to kill a man in minutes. Would the North Koreans pick up survivors or simply leave them adrift on the high seas in the dead of winter?
Bucher called down to the pilothouse for a depth sounding. “Thirty fathoms!” someone shouted back—180 feet. The relatively shallow water increased the chances that North Korean divers could recover classified material if the ship were deliberately sunk.
The captain noticed some nervousness among his men. Though he rarely smoked, Tim Harris lit a cigarette. Bucher knew it was important for him as their leader to act with supreme confidence, to display not a trace of worry. But that was getting harder to do with each passing minute. The torpedo boats arrived, zooming to within 150 feet of the Pueblo. The sleek craft had a top speed of 50 knots, nearly four times faster than the spy ship.
From point-blank range No. 35 leveled its guns at the Pueblo. Bucher sent up a defiant flag set: INTEND TO REMAIN IN THE AREA. He noticed his signalman trembling as he tied in the pennants; whether from fear or the icy air, the captain couldn’t tell. To buck up his men on the bridge, Bucher loudly declared: “We’re not going to let these sons of bitches bullshit us!”
At that moment, two MiG fighters roared overhead at about 1,500 feet. In the distance Bucher saw a second sub chaser as well as a fourth PT boat sprinting toward him.
“Should we think about going to general quarters, Captain?” Lacy asked.
A call to general quarters would bring helmeted and battle-jacketed sailors running on deck to man the machine guns. Bucher’s instructions were to avoid provoking the communists, to deny them any pretext for inciting an international incident. So far, they’d only tried to spook him. Bucher told Lacy he didn’t want to go to general quarters just yet, and watched as consternation spread across the engineering officer’s face. He also ordered Schumacher to draft a second SITREP.
No. 35 halted about 300 yards off the Pueblo’s starboard bow. One of the torpedo boats motored over to the larger craft to discuss matters. The two communist crews communicated by megaphone, their excited voices clearly audible across the slow swells. Then, to the alarm of the Pueblo officers, soldiers with AK-47 rifles began jumping from the sub chaser to the PT. The torpedo boat reversed its engines and began backing toward the American vessel. There was no mistaking the North Koreans’ intent to board the Pueblo.
It was about one p.m.
“I’ll be goddamned if they’re going to get away with that!” Bucher burst out.
He shouted at Schumacher to include the boarding attempt in his next SITREP.
The North Koreans obviously were prepared to go far beyond any harassment encountered by the Banner. Bucher yelled into the voice tube, “All ahead one-third!”
He called for Murphy to give him the best course for the open sea. “Zero-eight-zero, sir!” came the reply—away from the coast at an almost perpendicular angle.
“Build up speed to two-thirds, then full,” the captain ordered. The Pueblo would withdraw in a calm, dignified manner, not in panic.
Black smoke and a series of guttural coughs erupted from the stack. The Pueblo
began to move. As it did so, an anguished cry arose from the bow.
“For God’s sake, stop!” shrieked Tuck. His Nansen bottles were still in the water. As the ship plowed forward, the containers came boiling to the surface in its wake.
“Friar,” Bucher yelled back, “get that damn gear up here, because I’m leavin’—now!”
The backing PT boat was nearly close enough for its soldiers to leap onto the Pueblo. But the intelligence ship, gathering speed, churned past the communist vessel, leaving the would-be boarding party behind. Two other torpedo boats began cutting back and forth directly in front of the Pueblo, trying to impede its escape.
For a few minutes it looked like Bucher might break free. No. 35 lowered its HEAVE TO flags and chugged along indecisively behind the Pueblo, gradually dropping back more than 2,000 yards. But Bucher wasn’t convinced he’d get away. He passed word to prepare for emergency destruction. Then he raised a new array of flags: THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION—I AM LEAVING THE AREA. The message struck Schumacher as a bit flippant.
The torpedo boats kept playing porpoise just ten yards ahead. Schumacher jotted down his new situation report, describing the boarding attempt. Bucher pounded the lieutenant’s back, shouting, “Get it going, get it going! Hurry up, goddamn it!”
Astern, the lagging sub chaser again ran up HEAVE TO OR I WILL FIRE. The gunboat sped up, rapidly regaining ground it had lost. Filled with dread, Schumacher departed again for the SOD hut to transmit his report.
“They saw us and they keep running away,” No. 35 radioed its base. “Shall I shoot them?”
Instinctively trying to present the smallest possible target, Bucher ordered his helmsman to come right ten degrees. The sub chaser easily countered that move, pouring on more speed and turning outside the Pueblo to give its gunners a broadside shot. Bucher called for another ten-degree turn to the right. No. 35 accelerated and angled farther outside. The MiGs made another pass, thundering low over the Pueblo.
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