Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  Overlooking Maunalua Bay, the estate was a private paradise that featured a 14,000-square-foot main residence, an Olympic-size swimming pool lined in marble, sunken bars, volleyball and basketball courts, air-conditioned kennels, and a string of tropical fish ponds cascading to the sea. It must have seemed a welcome refuge to Johnson. Only two weeks before, he’d stunned the nation by announcing he wouldn’t run for reelection in the fall. Instead, he said, he planned to devote his final months in office to ending the Vietnam War. His calm and unexpected act of self-sacrifice electrified ordinary Americans and left political antagonists agape. “I don’t think anyone is more surprised or taken aback than I was by the announcement,” said Democratic Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, a leading critic of the administration’s Vietnam policies. Outside the White House, a group of antiwar youths unfurled a banner reading, “Thanks, L.B.J.” Johnson received thunderous applause when he appeared at a broadcasters’ convention in Chicago and a standing ovation from parishioners at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

  Four days after the president’s dramatic withdrawal, the murder of Martin Luther King touched off rioting, looting, and arson in dozens of cities across the country. Washington was particularly hard hit. Arsonists set more than 700 fires, creating “a pyrotechnical spectacle unmatched since British troops burned the capital in 1814.” Looters cleaned out high-end clothing stores and neighborhood liquor outlets. The city’s mayor pleaded for help, saying his police department was overwhelmed. LBJ called in more than 15,000 soldiers and Marines—the first federal troops to occupy the capital since the Civil War—but three days passed before order was restored. The disturbances left ten people dead and property damage exceeding $13 million—more destruction than in any other U.S. municipality. Touring the wounded city by helicopter, the president peered down at burned-out buildings that were still smoldering days later.

  Preoccupied with war, riots, and a raft of other problems, Johnson was devoting less attention to the Gordian knot of the Pueblo. But for some members of his administration the spy ship remained a top priority. The latest letters from the crew—pleading for a U.S. apology—were under scrutiny by cryptanalysts at the Navy, CIA, and National Security Agency, all looking for coded messages. The government also brought in behavioral psychiatrists familiar with POWs to try to divine the sailors’ physical condition based on what they’d written.

  Oddly, the letters were postmarked not from Pyongyang but from Paris and New York. Navy intelligence speculated that communist-bloc diplomats had dropped the envelopes in Western mailboxes, perhaps because the North Koreans feared that federal agents intercepted mail from communist nations. When the Naval Investigative Service tried to trace the letters, it found only phony addresses and nonexistent senders. One missive bore the return address of “George Sand,” which was, as an NIS man dryly noted, “the well-known pen name for Amandine Aurore Dupin, cigar smoking, female French novelist, of socialist orientation, who died 8 June 1876.”

  The Pentagon concluded that the letters were products of coercion and urged that LBJ not answer the ones sent to him. “Replying to the letters would import [sic] a significance to them which should be avoided,” said a memo circulated in the White House. But the specter of Americans being executed in a communist land caused consternation in Congress, leading to scattered calls for a government mea culpa.

  The Panmunjom talks, meanwhile, had produced no real dividends. By mid-April, after 14 tense meetings between Admiral Smith and his unyielding communist counterpart, the negotiations were deadlocked.

  —

  President Park, too, had much on his mind as his plane touched down in Honolulu. He was eager to see the communists crushed in South Vietnam, and two of his best infantry divisions were fighting there with notable valor. But escalating North Korean aggression—exemplified by the Blue House and Pueblo incidents—had caused him to reconsider his vow to commit more troops to Vietnam.

  Indeed, the day before President Johnson arrived in Hawaii, Kim Il Sung’s guerrillas ambushed a U.S. Army truck a mile south of the demilitarized zone, killing two American and two South Korean soldiers. Many South Koreans expected the spring and summer to bring a new wave of violence by northern commandos. If Kim’s armies suddenly surged across the border, Park didn’t want to be caught with some of his toughest fighters 2,200 miles away.

  His overarching fear was that America simply was losing its nerve in Asia. He’d watched in dismay as Johnson temporarily stopped bombing North Vietnam—a move Park strenuously opposed—and tried to engage its government in peace talks. Antiwar demonstrations in the United States were growing in size and intensity as more and more American soldiers returned home in wheelchairs or coffins. Park was concerned that LBJ’s impending departure from the White House would lead to a sea change in U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia, with any successor devoting far less American blood and treasure to battling communists. He also was miffed that Johnson, whom he considered a personal friend, hadn’t told him in advance of his intention to drop out as a presidential contender.

  The South Korean leader saw signs of trouble everywhere. Washington’s covert discussions with the North Koreans at Panmunjom were, in his eyes, a direct challenge to South Korean sovereignty. He’d listened to Cyrus Vance’s well-reasoned appeals for restraint. He’d watched the United States put on a big show over its captured spy ship, flying in jet squadrons and forming battle groups in the Sea of Japan, while taking no real action. As a result, his thinking about South Korea’s security had reached a turning point.

  Since the end of World War II, his nation had grown and prospered under the protective umbrella of American military power. Fifty thousand U.S. soldiers still bulwarked its frontier with North Korea. But LBJ’s cautious response to the Pueblo piracy convinced Park that America might not be willing to go to war again to defend his end of the Korean peninsula.

  That uncertainty weighed heavily on him. He brimmed with a sense of destiny, a messianic conviction that history had chosen him to weld the two Koreas into one. He wanted to be seen as a national hero on a par with Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the sixteenth-century naval commander who defeated a Japanese invasion fleet with the help of innovative, iron-roofed “turtle ships.” Given enough time, Park might be able to achieve his dream of peaceful unification. On the other hand, he was a marked man. If war came, Kim Il Sung probably would send his special forces to hunt down and liquidate him. Gripped by “intense fear” over his and his family’s safety, Park had gratefully accepted Ambassador Porter’s offer for experts from the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations to train his bodyguards to repel any future assaults on the Blue House. (OSI also had trained praetorian guards for the leaders of South Vietnam, Thailand, and Bolivia.) Park and his advisers believed Kim’s tanks would crash through the DMZ in an attempt to conquer the south no later than 1970. Time might be running out for him to accomplish his historic mission.

  Israel’s blitzkrieg victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War had made a deep impression on Park. The Israelis seized large swaths of Arab territory and confronted the United States and other great powers with a fait accompli that no one was willing to forcibly undo. In a memo to Washington, Ambassador Porter’s staff speculated that Park and his generals might be contemplating an all-out preemptive attack on North Korea in the belief that, like the Israelis, they could triumph in a “relatively short war.”

  Porter’s people based that conclusion on an ambitious plan, drafted by Park’s aggressive defense minister, for a major expansion of South Korean forces with the help of American financing and equipment. The plan envisioned converting seven rear-area security divisions into combat-ready reserve units and positioning them north of Seoul. In addition, Park’s government still wanted the six squadrons of F-4 Phantom jets requested during Vance’s visit (Washington had agreed to deliver only one), along with more air bases, helicopters, destroyers, landing craft, sel
f-propelled artillery, and modern rifles. Pentagon analysts agreed that the South Korean military needed a major upgrade; most of its aircraft, tanks, trucks, and rifles dated to the Korean War, and even to World War II. But the huge quantities of new equipment the South Koreans were seeking would alter the essentially defensive nature of their military, giving it powerful offensive punch. And that, wrote a member of Porter’s staff, “could lead to a military force capable of independently taking courses of action inimical to the U.S. national interest.”

  American policy long had been to defend South Korea while ensuring that the South Koreans didn’t lash out at the north on their own, possibly starting a new war. The United Nations Command, in the person of General Bonesteel, had direct control of South Korea’s armed forces, but Park was clearly straining against that short leash. In a bid for more military autonomy, he’d laid plans to manufacture his own small arms and ammunition. In addition, he was creating a two-million-member militia, training more commandos to infiltrate the north, and trying to stockpile surplus American grain as an emergency food reserve in the event of war.

  Shortly after ten a.m. on April 17, the American and South Korean presidents shook hands in the library of the Kaiser estate. Each man was accompanied only by a personal interpreter. Park expressed his sorrow at Johnson’s decision not to stand for reelection, describing it as a “drastic measure” that was “a shock for the Asians to hear.” LBJ said he’d do everything possible to bring the Vietnam War to a successful conclusion, but he didn’t know what would happen after he left office in January 1969.

  Park complained that the media were “giving distorted news to the public” about the war. South Korea’s army commander in Vietnam, he said, had reported that the Vietcong were “hit very badly” during Tet, losing some 60,000 fighters and “great quantities” of weapons and ammunition. Johnson agreed, but added that if the United States and its allies ultimately lost in Vietnam, the communists would only increase their pressure on South Korea, Thailand, and Laos. The time for decisive action, he said, was now. The Thais soon would be sending another infantry division into the fray. LBJ reminded Park of his promise to ante up a “light division”—11,000 soldiers—for Vietnam.

  “You must give us the main strength to rout the enemy,” he insisted.

  Park at first dodged the issue, saying he disagreed with limits Johnson had placed on the bombing of North Vietnam. Why, he asked angrily, weren’t American planes hitting Russian and Chinese supplies coming into the port of Haiphong? Even if the United States sank their freighters in Haiphong harbor, he asserted, the Russians and Chinese would do nothing.

  LBJ rejoined that U.S. jets attacked Haiphong and Hanoi frequently. But no matter how often enemy targets were blasted, it was impossible to completely cut off the flow of war matériel. Attacking Russian and Chinese ships, he said, might set off World War III. With more troops from Park and a resumption of U.S. bombing, however, “I think we can take offensive action,” Johnson said.

  The South Korean, however, flatly refused to send the light division, saying he needed his soldiers at home. “North Korea is in a state of complete war preparedness, and we expect a considerable number of enemy guerrillas appearing in South Korea during the summer,” he said. “In order to check these guerrillas, it is impossible for me to send more active soldiers to South Vietnam at present.” Park said he’d be able to dispatch a combat brigade—about half the number of men he’d pledged—by July 1, but that was it.

  Johnson argued that on the strength of the commitment Park made in Australia, the Pentagon had funneled $32 million earmarked for Vietnam into counterinsurgency equipment for South Korea’s military. In addition, $12 million worth of gear for the promised light division had been stockpiled on Okinawa. If Park didn’t spring for more troops, LBJ warned, he had no choice but to ship that critical equipment to the South Vietnamese army.

  Park still wanted the Okinawa goods for his forces. The situation in South Korea, he insisted, was just as delicate and important as that in South Vietnam. “North Korea knows that whatever they do in South Korea, the U.S. will sit idly because of its troops committed to the Vietnam War,” he said peevishly. “And thus there will be more incidents in Korea this year.” He expected “big trouble” soon.

  The two leaders decided to stop haggling for a while and eat lunch: lobster thermidor, steamed rice, Hawaiian fruit salad, and strawberry shortcake. Afterward Johnson said he needed to rest for a few hours “because of heart trouble.” (A heart attack nearly killed him in 1955, and his family had a history of strokes and heart disease.)

  At five p.m., LBJ took another run at his ally, employing his characteristic mix of down-home charm and thinly veiled threats. After inviting Park to visit him “anytime,” Johnson reminded him that, “as your friend,” he’d asked Congress to appropriate nearly $500 million in overall aid for South Korea in 1968. But, he warned, Washington lawmakers would be none too pleased if Park failed to live up to his promise to provide more soldiers for Vietnam, implying that some or all of the aid money for his country could be blocked.

  Park reiterated his willingness to part with only one brigade. “Why can’t he understand the true Korean situation?” he whispered irritably to Johnson’s interpreter. His army, Park told LBJ, was “far inferior” to North Korea’s, and his air strength was on a par with Kim Il Sung’s only because of the presence of hundreds of recently arrived American jets. He asked Johnson pointedly, “At the time of the capture of the Pueblo, wasn’t it due to your weakness that you could not give assistance to the ship?”

  Park had no intention of being weak when Kim came after him; he was hurriedly erecting a multitude of new defenses. “In Seoul,” he said, “pillboxes and bunkers will be built at intersections, places of work are being armed, and even some women have volunteered to join the local reserve corps.” The Blue House, too, was being fortified with “electric wire entanglements” and “dozens of pillboxes.” If communist invaders managed to get past all those barriers and into his innermost sanctum, the doughty little Korean told Johnson, he intended to fight to the death.

  “I keep a carbine loaded with live bullets,” he confided, “in my bedroom.”

  —

  A week before LBJ met Park in Hawaii, Kim Il Sung greeted a delegation of Hungarian comrades at the headquarters of his ruling Korean Workers’ Party in Pyongyang.

  After describing how low rainfall was hurting North Korea’s production of hydroelectric power, Kim turned to a subject that no doubt held more interest for his visitors: the fate of the Pueblo. He expressed satisfaction that the American imperialists were making less “fuss and noise” lately about the lost spy boat. Because he hadn’t backed down in the face of their “threats” to bomb Wonsan and retake the vessel militarily, he said, the Americans had been forced to negotiate. And unless they relented in their arrogant refusal to apologize, they’d never see their ship or sailors again.

  North Korea had to house and feed 82 capitalist layabouts in the meantime. That wasn’t cheap, and Kim planned to make them work off their expenses. “We are studying what sort of qualifications the various members of the crew of the captured ship have and what sort of useful work we can make them do,” he told the Hungarians, “for we are treating them too well.”

  Like the Soviet Union, the communist nations of Eastern Europe were keenly concerned over Kim’s risky showdown with the United States, and their diplomats in Pyongyang kept a close eye on developments. Among the best-informed and most perceptive observers were those attached to the embassy of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs felt Kim had wrung all possible propaganda value from the Pueblo early in the crisis and that, by not releasing the ship, he was prolonging a dangerously unstable situation.

  But the Czechs also realized that Kim’s metronomic warnings about crazed Pentagon warmongers launching an all-out attack against North Korea were a useful internal political tool for the dictator. Alt
hough Kim had assured the Soviets he’d do nothing to provoke military conflict with the United States, his state-controlled media continued to bray to the North Korean public that war was imminent. One Czech analyst described North Koreans as living in a state of “military psychosis.” The torrent of predictions of a coming death struggle with America allowed Kim’s regime to demand strict obedience from its hard-pressed citizens and to stamp out any criticism of its policies. As the Czech put it: “The inescapability of war is theoretically explained, its consequences are played down, and the fear of war is countered as a display of bourgeois pacifism and revisionism.”

  In the past year, Kim had inflated his cult of personality to “monstrous” proportions, according to a Czech diplomatic report. The dictator had turned even his parents and grandparents into objects of compulsory veneration, complete with their own national celebrations. And his total domination of the media meant he could put his own slant on virtually all “news” consumed by North Koreans, isolating them not only from the West but from other socialist nations as well.

  —

  At some point, the North Koreans moved the Pueblo away from Wonsan, putting it farther out of reach of potential air or commando raids. It was a gamble, but a communist crew sailed the ship about 220 miles up the east coast to the port of Najin, not far from the Soviet border.

  Whether the U.S. Navy was aware of the transfer is unclear. In any event, it made no apparent effort to interfere.

  CHAPTER 11

  SUMMER OF DEFIANCE

  Dysentery scythed through the crew in June. Sailors collapsed in the corridors, doubled over with pain, unable to control their bowels. They struggled to reach the second-floor latrine in time, but there was only one toilet and it was constantly occupied; men often had no choice but to squat and relieve themselves on the floor. Guards angrily ordered the messes cleaned up.