Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

The captain knew the North Koreans wanted to convey the image of a well-fed and cared-for “guest” of their government. Warner’s footage probably would be broadcast throughout North Korea and in other countries as well. But Bucher couldn’t resist the bait. He decided to eat his fill while sabotaging the propaganda by acting as if he hadn’t had a meal in days. Picking up the bowl of soup in both hands, he slurped it with piggish abandon. He drained the beer like a construction worker after a day in 100-degree heat. If nothing else, the skipper wanted to wolf down as much food and drink as possible before it was taken away. To his surprise it wasn’t, even after the filming stopped. Bucher ate until he was stuffed. When he was finished, a communist officer arrived with a small glass and a bottle of ginseng liquor. The officer filled the glass again and again—five times in all—until the captain felt the room spin. He was gloriously, sumptuously drunk. He staggered to his bed for a nap. And no one woke him up.

  In spite of the unexpected rest and nourishment, Bucher’s psychological state remained fragile. The day after the army anniversary, an alert young seaman, Stu Russell, was assigned to scrub the captain’s floor. When a guard caught them whispering, both Americans were beaten. Nevertheless, Russell showed up for the same duty the next day. A new guard looked away for a moment and Russell murmured, “What are our chances, Captain?” Embittered by the previous day’s clobbering, Bucher replied, “They’ll get what they can, then get rid of us.”

  A few days later, the captain passed a note to Schumacher saying he didn’t think he’d survive prison and that he felt responsible for Duane Hodges’s death. He asked the lieutenant to visit Rose if he ever got out. Suspecting the skipper was contemplating suicide, Schumacher sent back a note urging him to stay alive.

  As Bucher struggled to keep his mental balance, the North Koreans stepped up their efforts to exploit him and his men for propaganda.

  One day in early February, the captain was escorted to the big interrogation room for another press conference. Through the blinding TV lights he saw a crowd of people that included, to his amazement, the Pueblo’s five other officers. They were all alive and together for the first time since they’d been threatened with a firing squad. Bucher was so elated that he had to stifle the impulse to shout happily and throw himself into his men’s arms.

  The other Americans had lost weight and looked haggard; their eyes were bloodshot and they seemed jumpy. Bucher noticed a bad cut on one of Ed Murphy’s ears. The captain knew he, too, looked like hell, but he felt a surge of confidence at finding his wardroom intact.

  About 20 North Koreans in civilian clothes were jammed into the room, which had the look of a U.S. Senate committee chamber at the start of an important hearing: curls of cigarette smoke, TV cables everywhere, cameramen rushing back and forth, heat, anticipation. Schumacher recognized most of the North Koreans as army officers in mufti. But several others were representatives of the Korean Central News Agency and other communist media outlets.

  The journalists laughed boisterously and called out to one another. They sat at a large, U-shaped table facing the Americans, who were at a rectangular table laden with apples, cigarettes, candies, and cookies. After the chill of his cell, the hot lights made Murphy a little sleepy.

  Earlier, the Americans had been ordered to memorize answers to a series of questions they’d be asked at this conference. They also were told to always refer to North Korea as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Colonel Scar opened the proceedings, and Bucher fielded the first couple of questions, describing the health of his men as good and the North Koreans as “gentlemanly and understanding.”

  As the communists had instructed him, Murphy falsely stated that the Pueblo penetrated North Korean waters at six different points. Steve Harris explained the CTs’ jobs, revealing so many accurate details that Schumacher winced.

  The charade lasted five nerve-racking hours, as the Americans regurgitated predetermined answers to prearranged questions. Toward the middle of the conference, a glimmer of Bucher’s old impishness broke through. He’d been groping for ways to subvert the show, and an opportunity eventually presented itself. A North Korean correspondent mentioned that two top Japanese government officials had publicly asserted that the spy ship was boarded on the high seas, not in North Korean waters. What did the captain think of their statement?

  “That’s nonsense. I am sure Japanese Prime Minister Sato and Foreign Minister Miki were not on board our ship,” he replied earnestly. “If they were on board, they would have been captured together with us and detained in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, wouldn’t they?” The absurdity of Bucher’s denial that a pair of internationally known Japanese politicians had been his passengers underlined the inanity of the entire press confab—especially the notion that the Americans were speaking of their own free will.

  Unperturbed, Super C pronounced the event a great success. A few days later, he again summoned the Pueblo officers and demanded that they now write a letter of apology to the North Korean people. The apology, the colonel said, must be completely sincere if the Americans ever hoped to win the people’s forgiveness. Otherwise, he threatened, the crew would face the full fury of socialist justice.

  Super C turned over the letter project to Colonel Scar, who laid down the general line he wanted followed. The Americans were ordered to sit at a table, issued pencils and paper, and told to start writing. Again Bucher saw an opening. If he and his men could twist the letter’s phrasing the right way, they could signal those in the United States who read it that their “apology” was just another bucket of bilge.

  Armed guards stood outside the room. The Americans were told not to talk about anything not directly related to the letter. A new translator, quickly dubbed Silver Lips because of his relative fluency in English, accompanied Scar. Silver Lips listened to everything the Pueblo officers said and scrutinized everything they wrote.

  Bucher and his men tried to stall the writing process as long as possible. They debated the exact meaning of various words. They argued about the best synonyms for those words. They consulted a dictionary, and consulted it again. They deliberately misspelled words so it took longer to find them in the dictionary. The exercise turned into something akin to an unending game of Scrabble played by patients in a lunatic asylum. Bucher’s group wrote a draft apology, then rewrote it, then rewrote the rewrite. Days passed. The Americans enjoyed one another’s company, and they especially liked jerking around Colonel Scar and his minions.

  Finally Scar began to lose patience. Hoping to streamline the writing committee, he sent all of the Americans back to their cells except the captain and Schumacher. That was a mistake. No one in the wardroom was more adept at word games than Schumacher, who’d majored in religion in college. With his brains and command of Old Testament language, Schumacher uncorked long, baroquely tangled sentences that sounded grand but on closer examination were meaningless.

  After nearly a week of this literary burlesque, the communists had had enough. They drafted the apology themselves and handed it to Bucher. Though riddled with the usual leaden propaganda slogans, it was reasonably well written and made good use of American idiom. The captain argued for changes but was overruled.

  At two a.m. on February 15, guards rousted all of the Americans from their beds for a mass signing of the apology. Bucher and his officers were taken to the third-floor interrogation room, and then the enlisted men were brought in, about 20 at a time.

  They looked gaunt and fearful. Many exhibited signs of abuse: black eyes, lumpy jaws, and stiff, painful gaits. They made no attempt to communicate with their officers. Hammond seemed in the worst shape: pale, his face badly swollen, his body quivering with pain.

  The sight of his bedraggled men made Bucher’s throat constrict with pride and affection. Many sailors in turn seemed surprised and relieved to see him alive. The captain wanted to assure them that in spite of his devastated appearance,
he was all right and ready to resume his role as their leader. But no talking was allowed and the North Koreans kept the officers and men apart.

  Cynically, Super C had handed Bucher the task of persuading his crew to sign the apology—and thus violate the Code of Conduct. Article V of the code specifically called on POWs to “make no oral or written statements disloyal to [their] country . . . or harmful to [its] cause.” The skipper figured some of his people would refuse and suffer awful punishment as a result; a few, including the steel-willed Hammond, might die while resisting. Bucher couldn’t bear the thought of that. Surely his country didn’t expect men to perish over a piece of paper. And ultimately, the captain knew, the communists could and would force every member of the crew to sign.

  He decided to let them all off the hook.

  Jack Warner switched on his lights and started filming. Bucher broke into a sweat as he faced his men to speak. The last thing he wanted them to think was that he was pressuring them to collaborate. Super C watched him closely.

  “Men, I’m delighted to see all of you looking so well,” he said, using a flat tone to disguise his sarcasm. He wanted to underscore his point with a wink, but the communists would pick up on that. He let his body sag slightly instead.

  “As you can see, I’m still with you, and have been given the same humane treatment by the marvelous peace-loving Korean people, regular chow to keep me fit, and a room all to myself—which is why we haven’t seen each other for a while.”

  A collective apology, the captain said, could help expedite their release from prison. He also insisted that he was the only man on the Pueblo who knew for sure whether the ship had actually violated North Korean waters.

  He wasn’t asking them to sign, he said grimly. “I’m telling you to sign.”

  It occurred to Bucher that by ordering subordinates to ignore the Code of Conduct, he might be exposing himself to Navy discipline if he ever got home. He wasn’t going to worry about that now, though. Getting the crew’s signatures on the apology was the only way he could think of to shield them from beatings or worse.

  But in trying to keep his men’s heads off one chopping block, the captain was potentially placing them on another. The apology made the entire crew culpable for entering North Korean waters for the purpose of spying, giving the communists a handy pretext to shoot them all. It also contained additional “admissions” shrewdly calculated to tie Washington’s hands in dealing with the crisis. For example, the letter said the Pueblo intrusions weren’t due to technical problems, making it more difficult for the Johnson administration to claim that navigational error was behind any inadvertent violations.

  The signing exercise made clear that Pyongyang’s goal was to squeeze a mea culpa not just from the sailors but from the U.S. government—and that the communists had no compunction about using the crew as hostages to get what they wanted. “Our fate,” the crew’s letter said, “depends largely on whether or not the government of the United States, which has forced us into espionage, makes public the facts of crimes to the fair world opinion and apologizes to the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

  One by one, the sailors approached the table where the document lay. Some gazed intently at their commander; others wouldn’t meet his eyes. Some signed hesitantly, others with indifference. Still others tried to obscure their signatures with wild flourishes or by slanting the letters too much. When the first group finished, the next 20 were prodded in. Bucher repeated his speech and they signed, too.

  And so, in only a few weeks, the North Koreans had broken a large group of American fighting men. They’d done so with a combination of physical pain; food, sleep, and heat deprivation; and, most of all, fear. No one had been killed or maimed in prison. No one had his fingernails pulled out, his legs broken, or his brain washed. Yet all had succumbed, becoming fresh proof of the barbarous old adage that, if subjected to enough pressure, a man can be made to do anything.

  CHAPTER 8

  AT THE MAD HATTER’S TEA PARTY

  North Korea went on red alert after taking the Pueblo, girding for a possible revenge attack. On the first night Pyongyang was blacked out. People in the capital heard artillery bellowing in the distance, but it wasn’t clear whether the guns were firing at U.S. jets and warships or just practicing.

  A government radio announcer hailed the capture as a great victory over the imperialist spy dogs. North Korean waters had been encroached upon from time to time, the communist media said, but the Pueblo had gone too far. The ship was said to have fired first on North Korean patrol boats, which then shot back, killing an American gunner. The brave socialist sailors were praised and the arrogant Yankees ridiculed for surrendering in spite of their superior armaments, including “tens of anti-aircraft machineguns” and “tens of thousands of hand grenades.”

  North Korean forces shifted to a war footing. Sixteen reserve army divisions were mobilized, and military jets crisscrossed the skies over Pyongyang. Troop-laden trucks rushed to and fro in the city; factory workers performed martial drills. Industrial plants were evacuated and schoolchildren sent to live in the countryside. All citizens over the age of five were instructed to carry food and other necessities in backpacks wherever they went.

  Yet many North Koreans didn’t seem particularly afraid of what the United States might do. An East German diplomat in Pyongyang reported to superiors that many civilians believed their superpower ally, the Soviet Union, would fight on their side if war broke out.

  The people’s defiant confidence also had roots in their boundless hatred of Americans, a sentiment carefully cultivated by their absolute ruler, Kim Il Sung. Kim had long accused his depraved archenemies of committing all manner of atrocities during the Korean War and now of plotting a new war on the peninsula. Kim told his subjects over and over that their discipline and martial spirit would prevail in any clash with the world’s most vicious capitalist power, notwithstanding its arsenal of nuclear weapons.

  Kim perfected over many years his methods of controlling and manipulating public opinion. The son of an herbal pharmacist and a teacher, he’d been kicked out of school at 17 for taking part in communist activities. In the early 1930s he joined Chinese guerrillas fighting the Japanese army in Manchuria, eventually becoming a commander. By 1941, however, the Japanese had crushed the partisans in Manchuria. Kim fled to the Soviet Union, where he underwent additional training in the armed forces of his hero, Joseph Stalin.

  After World War II ended, Kim, wearing the uniform of a Red Army major, returned to Korea in the wake of Soviet occupation troops. The Russians touted Kim to his countrymen as a great wartime paladin and installed him as head of the communist regime that ruled north of the 38th parallel. Kim rapidly built up an army, a government apparatus, and an authoritarian political party modeled along Soviet lines. In 1950, with Moscow’s encouragement and matériel, Kim’s forces invaded South Korea in a brutal gamble to reunite north and south under communist leadership.

  By the time the war ended in stalemate in 1953, much of North Korea lay in ruins. When high-ranking members of Kim’s party attempted a coup against him, he easily deflected the thrust and, after a series of show trials, executed ten conspirators. In later years he purged numerous opponents, real and imagined, arrogating all state power to himself and creating a cult of personality second only to that of Mao Zedong. Kim billed himself as North Korea’s “peerless patriot, national hero, and ever-victorious, iron-willed commander.” He was the saryong, the supreme leader, “without precedent in West or East in all ages.”

  Kim proved a temperamental ally of the two communist giants with whom he shared a border, China and the USSR. Playing one against the other, he often managed to extract more economic and military aid from both. From 1953 until the early 1960s he gravitated toward China, which had saved him during the war by sending hundreds of thousands of bugle-blowing “volunteers” to battle United Nations fo
rces after they pushed Kim’s troops nearly to the Yalu River. After Chinese Red Guards assailed him as an aristocrat and “fat revisionist pig” during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, Kim edged back toward the Soviet camp.

  The Russians rewarded him by opening wide the spigots of economic and military assistance, allowing Kim to modernize and enlarge his armed forces. By the late sixties, he’d built one of the most formidable air forces in the communist world—nearly 500 aircraft, more than half of which were Soviet-built MiG fighters and IL-28 bombers. Kim’s army, consisting of about 350,000 men, also relied heavily on Soviet equipment, including medium tanks.

  In spite of the Soviets’ munificence, Kim went to some lengths to demonstrate that he wasn’t their puppet. He criticized Moscow for not taking a more aggressive stance against the United States in Vietnam, even though Russian freighters were delivering a steady stream of military supplies to Haiphong harbor. When the Soviets passed along one of Lyndon Johnson’s beseeching letters, plus their own request for a detailed explanation of the Pueblo seizure, Kim didn’t bother to reply.

  The North Korean leader never wavered in his efforts to reunite the sundered peninsula under his rule. For several years after the Korean War, his method was peaceful subversion. His agents merely spread propaganda in the south, particularly the idea of a loose north-south confederation. By 1961, he was convinced a revolutionary party must be organized in South Korea. Communist operatives became more militant, calling on southerners to engage in strikes and industrial sabotage, resist conscription, and expel American troops.

  By 1965, however, it was clear this strategy had failed. Many South Koreans, who had vivid memories of the savagery of Kim’s soldiers and political cadres during the Korean War, despised the North Korean autocrat and wanted no part of a communist government.

  Kim’s campaign turned violent. He infiltrated more and more armed agents into the south in what General Bonesteel, the U.N. commander, aptly called a “porous war.” North Korean marauders crossed the demilitarized zone to shoot up U.N. military outposts and pick off patrolling soldiers. U.S. intelligence believed Kim didn’t want outright war, but was trying to nurture a revolutionary movement in the south that one day would morph into an armed insurgency, as Ho Chi Minh had done in South Vietnam. To that end, well-trained commando teams, dropped by high-speed boats on southern beaches, set up remote inland camps and sallied forth to attack police stations and attempt to indoctrinate villagers in the gospel of Kim Il Sung. But the communists found little popular support in South Korea.