HAVE O KEY LISTS LEFT AND THIS ONLY ONE HAVE, HAVE BEEN REQUESTED FOLLOW INTO WONSAN, HAVE THREE WOUNDED AND ONE MAN WITH LEG BLOWN OFF, HAVE NOT USED ANY WEAPONS NOR UNCOVERED 50 CAL. MAC . . . DESTROYING ALL KEY LISTS AND AS MUCH ELEC EQUIPT AS POSSIBLE. HOW ABOUT SOME HELP, THESE GUYS MEAN BUSINESS. HAVE SUSTAINED SMALL WOUND IN RECTUM, DO NOT INTEND TO OFFER ANY RESISTANCE.
No high-ranking officer came on the circuit to overrule Bucher’s plan or give him fresh orders. The only reply was from the Kamiseya Teletype operator:
ROGER, ROGER. WE DOING ALL WE CAN. CAPT HERE AND CNFJ [COMNAVFORJAPAN] ON HOTLINE. LAST I GOT WAS AIR FORCE GOING HELP YOU WITH SOME AIRCRAFT BUT CAN’T REALLY SAY AS CNFJ COORDINATING WITH I PRESUME KOREA FOR SOME F-105. THIS UNOFFICIAL BUT I THINK THAT WHAT WILL HAPPEN.
The anonymous operator was trying to encourage him, suggesting that F-105 fighter-bombers might be headed his way, but Bucher figured the odds of rescue were getting longer by the minute. He hurried out of the crypto room.
On his way back to the pilothouse, the captain kicked several fittings in frustration and swore at the torpedo boats shadowing the Pueblo. The air had turned bitingly cold; Bucher estimated the temperature at zero.
In the pilothouse, a radioman was smashing electronic gear with a hammer. Tim Harris noted the captain’s return in his narrative and then looked up imploringly. Bucher gave him a wry smile.
“Okay, Tim,” he said. “Now put down there that the captain orders the narrative log destroyed—and destroy it!”
Harris did so with relish, shredding his report and tossing the pieces out a window like confetti. Bucher noticed a long stream of paper fragments floating in the Pueblo’s wake—and a PT boat churning heedlessly through the top secret debris.
Steve Harris called from the hut, asking permission to inform Kamiseya that he was unable to destroy all classified publications. Bucher angrily demanded to know what would be compromised. “Mostly technical pubs and such,” said Harris, his voice trailing off. The captain said to send the message if he had to, but to keep destroying at full tilt.
Minutes later, No. 35 signaled the Pueblo to stop. A torpedo boat powered in alongside, a squad of armed boarders ready on deck. The other communist ships trained their guns on the Pueblo. Bucher reluctantly told Lacy to ring all-stop.
Below, Schumacher was trying to burn the papers Duane Hodges had been holding when he was wounded, but they were soggy with blood. The lieutenant was nauseated and angered by the sight of his comrades’ flesh and blood smearing the passageway. Where were those goddamn American jets? Wasn’t any help coming? Would the Navy just stand by and let these commie pricks shoot them to pieces and steal their ship in broad daylight?
Schumacher watched admiringly as CT Peter Langenberg, the Princeton dropout, came down the corridor with a bag of papers over his shoulder. Blood streamed from behind his right ear; the same shell that struck Hodges had wounded Langenberg. Undaunted, the CT calmly walked to the exposed outer railing and heaved the bag over the side, then went back for another one.
A moment later Bucher hustled past Schumacher into his cabin. The lieutenant followed and found him sitting on his bunk, jaws grinding in frustration. The captain pulled on his arctic boots and stood up. He adjusted his new commander’s hat on his head. Schumacher realized he was dressing to surrender. The two officers said nothing; Schumacher was afraid he’d burst into tears if he tried to speak. He looked on sadly as Bucher left to meet the boarding party.
At about that time Lacy’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker: “Now hear this! All hands are reminded of our Code of Conduct. Say nothing to the enemy besides your name, rank, and serial number!”
The North Koreans on the PT boat tried to throw a rope onto the Pueblo’s stern but missed. They succeeded on the second try, and a swabbie mechanically tied the line to a bitt. A deathly silence descended over both craft. About ten soldiers hefting automatic rifles with fixed bayonets swarmed over the side, followed by two officers in green uniforms with red-and-gold epaulets.
One of the officers strode toward Bucher, his pistol pointed at the captain’s head.
—
The Pueblo’s first situation report reached the Navy’s mightiest warship at 2:30 p.m. By coincidence, the USS Enterprise had departed Sasebo that same day and was about 500 miles south of Wonsan in the East China Sea. But no one aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier had ever heard of the spy boat. Nor did they know what it was doing so close to North Korea.
The Enterprise was the flagship of Admiral Horace Epes, who called for a ship identification manual to look up the Pueblo. The admiral plotted its position and how far away it was. He asked his meteorologist what time darkness would fall on Wonsan and what the weather was like there. Then he called for a status report on his strike aircraft and how long they needed to get airborne.
On the crowded flight deck, crewmen began clearing takeoff lanes.
Escorted by a guided-missile frigate, the huge carrier—nearly as long as four football fields—was bound for the Gulf of Tonkin, from which its 59 fighter-bombers would resume pounding North Vietnam. Normally, most of the jets would be on the hangar deck while the carrier was in transit. But today they were packed together on the flight deck; the hangar deck below had been emptied so the crew could play basketball and watch movies while docked in Sasebo.
Epes controlled the air wing, but the carrier itself was commanded by Captain Kent Lee, a forceful South Carolinian who’d flown carrier planes in World War II and the Korean War. With a master’s degree in nuclear physics, Lee had leapfrogged a number of more senior officers to become, at 44, boss of the Enterprise, the Navy’s most prestigious sea command.
Despite their close working relationship and similar career arcs, Lee didn’t like Epes. Lee viewed his superior as a poor air commander and a “creature-comfort admiral”—too attached to perks like fresh tablecloths, polished silverware, and new drapes in his flag quarters. Nor did Lee think much of the admiral’s habit of leaving strict instructions that he not be disturbed while he watched a movie in his stateroom every night.
When Lee wasn’t needed on the bridge, he enjoyed drinking coffee and swapping sea stories with a fellow captain, Frank Ault, who formerly commanded the carrier USS Coral Sea off Vietnam. Ault was now Epes’s chief of staff, but he was no more a fan of the admiral than Lee. Epes didn’t seem to know a lot about the carrier’s nuclear dynamics, which Ault and Lee frequently had to explain to him. Ault also regarded his boss as indecisive.
Now Epes was faced with a very tough decision. Another message came in from the Pueblo. With North Koreans firing at and trying to board it, the surveillance vessel clearly needed help.
On its way to Japan, the carrier had been enveloped by a typhoon that damaged a number of jets. Mechanics were working on them, but only 35 aircraft were now flyable. About three hours would be needed to fuel and arm them, brief their pilots, and get them over the Wonsan area. In the carrier’s war room, Epes and Ault gathered all available intelligence on the port city’s air defenses, which appeared to be strong. Any attacking planes would have to run a gauntlet of 14 antiaircraft batteries, two surface-to-air missile sites, and as many as 75 MiG fighters.
Epes considered his options. By the time any sizable group of his jets reached the Pueblo, it would be dark—sunset was at 5:41 p.m.—and the spy ship probably would be in Wonsan harbor. Epes stood to lose a significant number of aircraft, maybe even enough to render the carrier and its 5,500 crewmen vulnerable to counterattack by North Korean planes.
If many American pilots were killed, or the carrier was damaged or even sunk, the pressure on the United States to retaliate would be tremendous. If it did so, the communists might then execute the Pueblo crew. Where would the escalation end? And all this over a rinky-dink surveillance ship that hadn’t directly asked the Enterprise for assistance.
Epes didn’t want to jeopardize his flagsh
ip. He didn’t want to do something that might entangle his country in another Far East war. At 3:06 p.m., his cautious approach was confirmed by a higher authority. A message from Admiral William F. Bringle, commander of the Seventh Fleet, told him to take “no overt action until further informed.” The decision was final: No rescue attempt would be mounted from the carrier.
—
At Fuchu Air Station, north of Tokyo, the man who controlled all land-based American combat jets in Northeast Asia was furiously working the phones.
Air Force Lieutenant General Seth McKee was determined to help the Pueblo. He sat at a phone-strewn table in a glass-walled war room, flanked by a dozen members of his battle staff, all of them making call after call. McKee commanded the Fifth Air Force, comprising all U.S. military planes in Japan, South Korea, and Okinawa.
He knew he didn’t have much time. Minutes earlier, an aide had handed him a copy of the Pueblo’s rescue plea. Like the officers of the Enterprise, the general had never heard of the spy ship, although he knew his fighters had been alerted that they might have to protect the Banner on a couple of its 16 missions.
McKee fired question after question at his staff. On the other side of the glass was a command center, where airmen posted markers on wall maps showing the positions of American and hostile aircraft in the region. It was like a scene from an old movie about RAF Bomber Command.
The 51-year-old general spoke very rapidly, in clipped but precisely worded sentences accented with the rich drawl of his native Arkansas. After nearly 30 years in the Air Force, he was accustomed to crises. During World War II, he’d flown 69 combat missions over Europe in a P-38 Lightning, downing two enemy aircraft. He flew cover for the Normandy landings during the bloody Armageddon of D-day. During the Battle of the Bulge, he commanded an air base in Belgium that lay directly in the path of advancing German tanks.
So far, he was having little luck scrounging up combat-ready planes for the Pueblo. McKee had jurisdiction over two Marine fighter squadrons at Iwakuni Air Base in Japan, just 375 miles—less than an hour’s flight—from Wonsan. But only four planes were available there, and their ground crews needed three hours just to load ammunition. Two other American bases in Japan were switching to modern F-4 Phantoms from older fighters, and none of the new aircraft could be ready to fly in less than several hours.
McKee also was in charge of American air units in South Korea. But with the Vietnam War sucking up planes from bases everywhere, the only ones in South Korea were six Phantoms, configured for nuclear bombs, which were part of the Pentagon’s global standby network of aircraft, submarines, and intercontinental missiles that would rain atomic destruction on the USSR in the event of war. McKee ordered the Phantoms reloaded with conventional 3,000-pound bombs. But that would take several hours, and the jets still had no air-to-air guns or missiles to fight MiGs. Even properly armed, a handful of Phantoms wouldn’t stand much chance against dozens of MiGs, many of which, McKee knew from intelligence, already were in the air.
There was another possibility. The South Korean Air Force consisted of more than 200 combat aircraft, some located at Osan Air Base near Seoul, only 25 minutes by air from Wonsan. McKee told a subordinate to check on their availability through U.S. Army General Charles Bonesteel, an eye patch–wearing former Rhodes scholar who commanded all United Nations forces in South Korea, including that country’s air force.
But Bonesteel had no intention of further inflaming a South Korean public already angry and frightened over the Blue House raid. To many southerners, the outrageous attempt to kill their president represented a dramatic escalation of their long-running blood feud with the north that could be answered only with massive retaliation, even invasion. The Pueblo hijacking, Bonesteel believed, would only intensify that sentiment. And if multiple southern pilots died while trying to rescue the ship, the resulting public rage might be just enough to tip South Korea into war. Since many South Korean jets were aging U.S.-built F-86s, no match for North Korea’s advanced MiGs, southern casualties indeed could be heavy. Bonesteel passed word that South Korean planes were off-limits in any attempt to save the Pueblo.
McKee moved down his list of prospects. He knew the Enterprise and its fighters might be close enough to help. So he placed a call to Honolulu, trying to reach a good friend, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McKee had a novel proposition for Sharp: that he, an Air Force general, be given operational control of the Enterprise, the Navy’s most prized asset. Then McKee himself could order carrier planes into the air. But Sharp was in Vietnam conferring with Army commanders there. A deputy took McKee’s call and flatly refused his request.
That left McKee only one card to play: his F-105 fighter-bombers at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, more than 1,100 miles from Wonsan.
—
Air Force Major John Wright was in his wing commander’s office at Kadena when the call came in.
The wing boss picked up the phone and sat bolt upright. “Yes, sir,” he said. “No, sir. Yes, sir.” A pause. “Yes, sir, I know where it is. Yes, sir, we can get planes over there right away.” A couple more “yes, sirs” and he hung up, cursing vehemently.
“Do you know that someone stole a Navy ship?” he asked Wright.
“What kind of ship?”
“I don’t know, but the goddamn Navy just got one of their ships stolen.”
The caller had been McKee, who wanted as many fighters as possible sent aloft as soon as possible. They were to fly to Osan Air Base, refuel, and immediately take off to attack the North Korean gunboats herding the Pueblo. The wing commander put Wright in charge of the operation.
The 38-year-old Texan quickly assembled several other officers from the 18th Tactical Fighter Wing to go over their available aircraft. A maintenance officer made a few hasty calls and said he could pull together a dozen F-105s. Half of them were airborne in training exercises. Several more were being repaired. Wright decided to launch the planes in pairs, as fast as they could be readied. The major and his wingman would bring up the rear.
The first two F-105s blasted off from Okinawa at 4:11 p.m., afterburners punching them into the sky with a deafening roar.
In his war room outside Tokyo, McKee received the liftoff news with mixed emotions. Time was running out for the Pueblo. The Okinawa jets needed roughly two and a half hours to get to where the ship was believed to be. But with a refueling stop at Osan, McKee’s pilots had little, if any, chance of reaching Bucher and his men before nightfall, when a rescue attack was no longer feasible.
“Those poor bastards,” the general muttered to no one in particular. “What’s happening to them?”
CHAPTER 5
WE WILL NOW BEGIN TO SHOOT YOUR CREW
“I protest this outrage!” Bucher yelled at the North Korean aiming the gun at his head. “We are a United States ship operating in international waters and you have no damned right to attack us like this. As captain, I order you to get off my ship at once.”
The communist officer gave no sign of comprehension. His soldiers moved quickly to take control of the Pueblo. They forced some sailors back to the fantail and made them sit, shivering, on the cold steel deck. Others were ordered to the well deck near the bow. The boarders tied the Americans’ hands and blindfolded them with torn bedsheets. Anyone who resisted was instantly bludgeoned with the butt of an AK-47 or kicked with a heavy boot.
The two North Korean officers shoved Bucher up to the pilothouse. One pointed at sub chaser No. 35, still flying FOLLOW ME pennants, and indicated with vigorous hand motions for the captain to get his boat moving. Bucher ordered all ahead one-third, telling his helmsman to steer in the gunboat’s wake. The other communist officer pantomimed for Bucher to turn off the sole radio transmitter that was still intact and crackling. When he refused, the North Korean promptly clouted him in the head with his pistol and ripped out the power cord himself
.
The skipper then was prodded at gunpoint toward the aft machine-gun mount and told to remove the frozen tarp draping the weapon. He again shook his head no and again was pistol-whipped.
Blindfolded on the fantail, Schumacher heard the sickening smack of steel against bone. Along with about 15 other crewmen, he squatted on the icy deck, hands tightly bound. A soldier had fired a terrifying burst from his automatic rifle over their heads, making sure they got down and stayed down. In minutes the Americans had been snatched from the snug, seemingly predictable world of the Pueblo and thrust into a dark parallel universe of fear and uncertainty. No one spoke. On the well deck, where about half of the crew sat in rows, the stench of a fresh bowel movement filled the air.
Schumacher kept telling himself it was all a bad dream. How could a bunch of goons from some tin-pot country take over with such impunity a ship belonging to the world’s most powerful navy? He wondered whether the communists planned to machine-gun the entire crew. Or maybe they’d just let the Americans freeze to death on this windswept deck and toss the rigid corpses overboard like so much old furniture.
The North Koreans ordered sailors from both ends of the ship to the forward berthing compartment, where at least it wasn’t as cold. Schumacher’s supercharged thoughts and emotions crashed into one another like bumper cars at some crazy amusement park: Anger collided with fear; frustration piled into bewilderment. He couldn’t figure out what the North Koreans hoped to gain by seizing the Pueblo. Were they trying to incite a new war with the United States? Did they think they could exchange the crew for a lucrative ransom? The U.S. government would never cave in to such extortion. So what was their game?
Act of War Page 10