Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  Since the start of the crisis, an interagency team of government specialists dubbed the Korean Task Force had worked furiously to give him some feasible options. The group was headed by Sam Berger, a hard-driving former ambassador to South Korea known for his candor and strong distaste for traditional diplomatic bowing and scraping.

  Berger and his people labored in the State Department’s locked-door operations center, where Teletypes clattered nonstop with the latest cables from American embassies around the world. Berger often put in ten-hour days, six or seven days a week, racking his brains for ways to deal with the Pueblo.

  “With Sam, you could almost feel the tension bouncing off the walls,” recollected one task force member. “His mind was always churning over, over, over.”

  The pressure on Berger and his staff was enormous. His chief deputy soon developed heart-attack symptoms and had to be replaced. On January 29, the task force presented LBJ with ten possible courses of action. The trouble was that each one risked escalating the crisis—and none offered much hope of getting back the ship and its crew.

  One possibility was to capture a North Korean naval vessel and swap it for the Pueblo. But most of Kim Il Sung’s combat ships were high-speed patrol boats, equipped with radar and difficult to surprise at sea. Most also were based near Wonsan, meaning that even if the U.S. Navy did manage to grab one in that area, it would have to be sailed to the nearest port in South Korea, Mukho, 129 miles away. North Korean MiGs could be expected to pounce on U.S. forces every step of the way, inflicting significant losses. Nearby Russian men-of-war might try to interfere, directly involving the Soviet Union in the conflict. Moreover, such a “reciprocal” abduction amounted to a reprisal, a violation of the U.N. Charter that would make the United States appear as ruthless and piratical as North Korea. And in any event, Pyongyang was unlikely to trade its great propaganda prize, the Pueblo, for a mere patrol boat.

  A far more aggressive option was an air strike against the big MiG base and the Munpyong Ni naval station near Wonsan. Ninety-two American and South Korean jets would hit the two installations, with the aim of punishing Kim Il Sung for both the Pueblo and guerrilla raids on South Korea. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that in order to minimize U.S. losses, the entire North Korean air force had to be wiped out at the same time.

  The consequences of such a colossal attack could only be guessed at. If all or most of Pyongyang’s airpower—about 400 jet fighters and 80 light bombers—were knocked out, could President Park resist the impulse to invade the suddenly vulnerable north? Might the Soviets and Chinese feel compelled to move in to defend a prostrate ally? World reaction would be severe, the Korean Task Force warned, with a majority of U.N. member states condemning the massive retaliation as “a dangerously excessive measure, disproportionate to the provocation and too risky in terms of resumed hostilities in Korea.”

  Berger’s group also suggested a naval blockade of Wonsan or a tank assault across the demilitarized zone aimed at destroying the headquarters of a North Korean infantry division. But a blockade would leave American ships open to attack by MiGs or deadly Styx missiles fired from patrol boats, while causing only minor inconvenience to communist naval vessels, which tended to hug the shore anyway. A punitive armor thrust through the DMZ would produce high casualties and, as Berger’s team noted, might also “result in major ground action which would be difficult to stop.”

  The president’s impulse was to commandeer a North Korean ship. But doing that wasn’t likely to get the Pueblo crew home; nor was any other military action. On the contrary, any serious retaliation might prompt the communists to execute Bucher and his men.

  And that was a horror that no one in the White House could abide.

  —

  For three days, Major Wright and his pilots sat in their cockpits, waiting for the signal to take off in their F-105s and sink the Pueblo. But the order never came and they finally were told to stand down.

  Steaming with the Enterprise task force, Captain Denham was informed that his men needn’t practice lassoing the spy ship anymore; higher-ups had canceled the daring scheme to snatch it back from the North Koreans.

  CHAPTER 7

  SUICIDE IN A BUCKET

  In the early hours of his second day in prison, Bucher decided to kill himself.

  He was a physical and emotional wreck. Repeated beatings had left him pissing blood. Sleep was nearly impossible; his arms, legs, back, sides, and chest bore so many painful bruises that it was difficult even to lie down. Lingering nausea erased any desire for food.

  A profound sense of shame tormented him. He berated himself for caving in so quickly to Super C. He should’ve held out longer, absorbed more kicks and punches and karate blows. Why hadn’t he called the communists’ bluff when they brought Howard Bland to the interrogation room? Maybe they wouldn’t have shot the young seaman after all.

  It had all happened so fast, still was happening fast. Shortly after confessing, the captain was forced to appear at a staged press conference during which North Korean “journalists” hissed at him and angrily demanded details of how he’d spied on their country. Exhausted, deeply depressed, and reading from a prepared script, Bucher robotically confirmed every allegation.

  There was no telling what the North Koreans would try to extract next. So far they’d been content merely to use him as a mouthpiece for obvious propaganda. What if they wanted more? His mind was a treasure chest of military secrets: details of U.S. naval war plans, submarine operations, undersea surveillance techniques, and agent landings. Could the communists pry open that mental lockbox with the diabolical levers of pain and fear? The truth was that they probably could.

  Snow flurries thrummed against the window of his threadbare room. The ceiling light burned around the clock. Despair and loneliness plagued him. By now, he figured, the communists probably had pumped all the classified information they could out of Steve Harris and shot him. Other crewmen might be dead from wounds suffered during the attack or beatings in prison.

  Suicide was contrary to Bucher’s life-loving nature and staunch Catholicism, but he felt he had no choice. He sensed he already was close to a breaking point from all of the beatings and intimidation; more concentrated forms of pain probably would cause him to fall apart completely. He feared torture much more than death, and killing himself quickly seemed a lot better than letting Super C’s thugs do it slowly. The last thing he wanted was to be reduced to a shattered wretch babbling his country’s secrets in exchange for even a brief respite from the torturer’s dreadful tools.

  But if he were to take his own life, how exactly to do it? Bucher had no gun to blow out his brains with, and he lacked the physical strength and demonic willpower to bash them out against a wall. He might be able to fashion a noose from a blanket, but there was nothing to hang it from. He thought of breaking his window and using a glass shard to slit his wrists, but the noise would attract the guards who patrolled continuously just outside his door. If he jumped out the third-story window, he’d probably end up with no more than a broken leg.

  The only other possibility was a metal pail in his cell. It had been filled with water so he could wash his face. In his desperation the skipper began to think he could drown himself in it. He’d heard that drowning wasn’t too unpleasant once you stopped struggling. To anyone in a normal frame of mind, the notion of drowning yourself in a bucket would be absurd. But the bereft captain thought it might work.

  It had to work.

  His cell was so cold that a thin layer of ice had formed over the water in the pail. Bucher speared his head through the ice. Most of the water slopped out and the shock of the freezing liquid brought him to his senses. To end his life this way, he realized, was impossible. Drenched and defeated, he pulled his head out.

  By January 26, his third day in prison, Bucher was so weak he could barely walk. Interrogations and beatings went on day and night; the
skipper heard shouts, scuffling, and muffled cries as his men were slugged and pistol-whipped. He tried to get a few minutes of sleep whenever he was left alone in his room. But almost as soon as he closed his eyes, horrific images filled his head: explosions ripping through his ship, bloody bodies carried off on stretchers, a man dangling from a meat hook.

  Bucher developed a fever, his body racked by chills. Slumped in his chair, he sank into torpor and confusion. At times he thought he was delirious. He couldn’t distinguish between the moan of the wind outside the winter-bound prison and the cries of his men within. When the Koreans unexpectedly gave back his watch, he stared at it obsessively, trying to restore his sense of time. He began to hallucinate, seeing the dial replaced by the angry face of an interrogator shrieking threats at him. A nurse entered his cell and injected him with something; he wasn’t sure what.

  When he finally had to move his bowels, he nearly fainted from the pain of the shrapnel lodged in his rectum. His body stank from stale sweat and suppurating leg wounds. Concerned by his shivering and lack of appetite, his captors moved him across the hall to a cell where the radiator actually emitted some warmth.

  In his lucid moments the skipper yearned to see a mushroom cloud billowing above Pyongyang. An American nuclear strike meant his own immolation, of course, but Bucher wanted these piratical animals punished regardless. His Navy briefers had promised swift and forceful retaliation if anything happened to him and his men, but thus far there’d been no visible action. The North Koreans seemed nervous about the possibility of an air strike or commando raid, and kept the prison blacked out at night. They threatened to kill Bucher if his countrymen tried to rescue him or avenge the Pueblo’s capture.

  He didn’t particularly care. Unable to sleep, he shuffled back and forth in his cell, his mind buzzing with unanswerable questions.

  What classified materials had the North Koreans salvaged besides the documents he’d been shown? How many sailors had signed phony confessions? Had the U.S. government seen through the ludicrous propaganda sham that was Bucher’s own statement? He reproached himself for not radioing Japan while the ship was under attack and specifically stating that it had never trespassed in North Korean waters. Was the Pentagon’s uncertainty over the ship’s whereabouts the reason for the absence of retaliation?

  He struggled to understand why the communists grabbed the Pueblo in the first place. The only explanations that made any sense were that they wanted to start another war with South Korea or to distract the United States from Vietnam. Why didn’t they seem interested in using him for anything other than propaganda? When they’d pounded enough “confessions” out of him and his crew, would the seamen be freed or left to rot for years in this miserable sty? Or simply taken to an empty field and shot?

  The more he thought about it, the angrier he got at the Navy for ordering him into the Sea of Japan with such poor preparation and equipment. His request for a specially designed destruction system for the SOD hut had been rejected. He’d been saddled with too many secret papers and given peashooters to defend against 57-millimeter cannon. Worst of all, he’d been lulled into a false sense of security.

  In the final analysis, though, the disaster had happened on his watch. And according to the age-old custom of the sea, a captain was solely responsible for everything that took place on his ship. At least one of his men was dead and the rest reduced to quivering hostages. His ship had been stolen, his country’s security compromised, and he had to shoulder the blame. He should’ve off-loaded more classified material in Japan, he told himself, no matter how much higher-ups complained. He should never have put to sea until he had enough dynamite to blow the SOD hut sky-high. Why hadn’t he ridden Steve Harris harder during the attack to get rid of his electronic gear? Why hadn’t he ordered secret documents stacked in a compartment, doused with diesel fuel, and set on fire, even if the blaze spread uncontrollably and burned the ship to the waterline?

  The skipper had only limited time for such self-flagellation, however. At any hour of the day or night he might be pulled from his room and brought before Super C, invariably chain-smoking and looking immaculate, for another arduous round of questions and threats. Bucher had to admire the colonel’s endurance. He’d grilled the skipper again and again in the past few days—often for hours on end, in the dead of night—yet his alertness and ramrod bearing never faltered.

  Super C always greeted his quarry the same way, asking through his translator: “How is your life these days?”

  Filthy, bone-tired, and in constant pain, Bucher studied his antagonist to see whether he was mocking him. He decided to concede nothing.

  “I am only interested in the condition of my men, especially the wounded ones,” he replied during one session.

  Super C ignored his request for news and launched into a long speech.

  “You must be aware of the tortures which the Korean people suffered during the Fatherland Liberation War with the United States,” he began, using the communist name for the Korean War. “Every Korean lost relatives in the war. CIA tortured them, killed them. Koreans hate the lackeys of imperialism, not the American people.” He went on to blame the United States for keeping the people of North and South Korea divided for so many years. He characterized President Johnson as a CIA puppet and “murdering enemy of Koreans.”

  Super C’s translator was proficient in English but hardly fluent. Bucher nicknamed him Wheezy, for his habit of coughing and wheezing to cover up his frequent stumbles. As long as Super C spoke in a calm, measured fashion, Wheezy did reasonably well. But he fell behind as the colonel’s harangues gathered speed.

  The American people, Super C charged, were “in the clutches of the Johnson murder clique and the Rockefeller gluttons and bloody-handed Wall Street warmongers—and kept oppressed with vicious murder by paid running dogs of CIA! We know that American workers are whipped slaves of Morgan Steel! We know that Americans will be our friends when they overthrow the CIA.”

  The colonel paused to let Wheezy catch up, and then went on in a more personal vein.

  “You must show your gratitude and sincerity to the Korean people by honest confession of your crimes. Then you may go home to your loved ones. You will soon see what I mean. You see, I have a message for you from your wife, Madame Rose.”

  The mention of his beloved spouse hit Bucher like an emotional right hook. Was it possible that she’d gotten a message to North Korea so fast? He doubted it; this had to be another attempt to manipulate him.

  Wheezy began reading from what sounded like an American news interview with Rose. She spoke of the agonizing ordeal of not knowing what had become of her husband, and her hopes for his rapid release and safe return home. The translator mentioned that a friend named “Hemmel” had appeared with her at a press conference in San Diego. The captain knew no one by that name and stared suspiciously at Wheezy, who tried another pronunciation: “Hemple.” Bucher brightened. It had to be Lieutenant Commander Allen Hemphill, who’d served under him on the submarine USS Ronquil. Since there was nothing aboard the Pueblo to indicate they were friends, the news story had to be true. The skipper’s heart filled with immense yearning for Rose, along with gratitude toward his old buddy for standing by her.

  Super C didn’t miss Bucher’s reaction. “Very nice message from Mrs. Rose and your friend,” he said. “Now we will help you every way to be sincere and make forgiveness from peace-loving Korean people so you can go home.”

  The captain, feeling he was being played again, angrily shouted, “How about my man Hodges whom your people murdered? What have you done with his body? We did nothing to provoke your ships into firing on us—nothing!”

  As Wheezy’s translation sank in, Super C’s face turned a dark, furious red. He ordered Bucher to stand at attention. For the next three or four hours the North Korean ranted, raved, and emoted over the full catalog of American imperialistic sins: the CIA, the Vietnam W
ar, the craven U.S. puppets running the Seoul government. Though he felt a grudging admiration for the colonel’s staying power, Bucher was never quite sure what to make of these endless declamations. Sometimes Super C struck him as little more than a buffoon in uniform. Amid one extended tirade, the colonel nearly tied himself in a knot trying to haul a foot over his head to simulate how GIs supposedly strung up North Korean civilians by their heels during the Korean War.

  But there was no denying Super C’s intelligence: He’d read Shakespeare, was familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, and spoke of attending a Moscow military academy. His one vanity seemed to be a fondness for luxurious, Western-style leather shoes, possibly purchased in Shanghai. He was relatively well-informed about U.S. history and current events, although his knowledge was filtered through, and distorted by, his Marxist ideology. After several sessions with him, Bucher realized that an interesting dynamic was at work during these verbal marathons. No matter how long he bellowed and blustered, the colonel always paced himself, carefully gauging the impact of his performance on his captive. And while the skipper had no illusions about Super C’s capacity for violence, he never seemed to apply more than necessary to achieve his ends.

  Bucher also found that he needed to stay alert for the North Korean’s rhetorical gear shifts, when he’d abruptly switch from an assault on the U.S. government to a personal attack on the captain.

  “Why you use insincere, unusual English language in your confession?” he suddenly asked one day. “Do you not think we are aware of such tricks?”

  The question was an odd one, especially coming from Super C, who had, after all, dictated Bucher’s confession and pressured him relentlessly to sign it. What lay behind the query? Maybe it meant that the U.S. media and public had reacted skeptically to the forced statement, as the skipper hoped they would, and that the North Koreans now understood their mistake. On the other hand, maybe it signified that communist language experts had blocked release of the confession because it sounded inauthentic. There was no way of telling.