That only caused the Bear to flog him harder. He clubbed the prostrate sailor over and over and over. The force of the blows broke the rod in two, one piece of it flying across the room. Law was close to losing consciousness. The Bear stabbed him in the ear with the jagged piece of stick he still held; tears flushed Law’s eyes. For the first time in prison he feared for his life. The North Koreans seemed out of control, like they didn’t give a damn whether he lived or died. The Bear beat Law with the shortened rod until it broke and then hit him with the remaining piece until that snapped, too. Temporarily exhausted, the guard paused and then kicked the downed sailor in the belly again.
Law lay on his side, sobbing and struggling to breathe.
Odd Job told him to get back into the chair and asked whether he was ready to be sincere. Though the quartermaster feared being beaten to death, he shouted, “Every goddamned thing I told you was a lie, you bastard!” With his fist the Bear clouted Law on the side of the head, dumping him out of the chair. Another guard entered the room carrying a wooden board that looked like a four-by-four. “God, you can’t hit me with that!” Law wailed. The guard whacked him across the back, knocking him onto his face.
Law lay sprawled on the floor, his body pulsing with pain. He choked back the urge to vomit. Odd Job ordered him to his feet. The sailor staggered upright and was led next door to Bucher’s cell.
The skipper was kneeling in the center of the room, his scrawny frame shaking. Standing over him was Silver Lips. The interpreter looked like a crazy man, his hair and uniform disheveled.
“Aren’t you a paid spy?” Silver Lips screeched.
“Yes, yes!” the frightened captain replied.
“Aren’t you going to tell us the instructions you passed to Law?”
“Yes, yes!”
Silver Lips then demanded of Law, “What instructions he give you?”
Still stupefied, Law replied, “Pardon me?”
The interpreter belted him in the jaw. “Pardon me!” he shouted sarcastically. “Pardon me!” Two guards started pummeling the quartermaster as if they were working out on a speed bag. Trying to ward off the blows, Law crossed his arms in front of him. A guard kneed him in the groin, flooding his belly with nausea and pain.
Law was forced back to his interrogation room. Silver Lips told him to reveal his escape plans. When the American mumbled that he didn’t have any, Silver Lips made him get down on his knees. A guard slugged him several times in the head, trying to topple him over. But the sailor remained upright, so the guard kicked him in the stomach. Law slumped to the floor in the fetal position. The guard kicked him in the back and rump, and then hauled him back into the chair.
“Escape plans!” Silver Lips demanded again.
His head spinning, Law blurted a fictitious tale of how he, Bucher, and several others planned to steal a truck and drive to Panmunjom. The scheme was preposterous, but Silver Lips listened intently, as if it made perfect sense.
“You using crossword puzzles to pass messages?” Silver Lips asked.
“I don’t know about that,” Law replied. A guard whacked him on the head. “Yes!” the sailor corrected himself, instantly conforming to his captors’ preconceptions. “We were passing the puzzles back and forth. They were messages on the plan.”
At that point Law had been alternately walloped and questioned for five hours. Pain fogged his mind. Told to write a confession, he scrawled anything that came into his head—he’d thumbed his nose at duty officers behind their backs; he’d peed out his cell window. He printed in big block letters to fill more space, covering fifty pages with his crimes. About ten p.m. Odd Job came in, glanced at the confession, and said he already knew about the petty offenses; he wanted the serious stuff. Law scribbled wearily through the night. If he paused, a guard hit him. At six a.m. on December 13, he was given soup and a slice of bread, his first food in almost 20 hours, and he gobbled it hungrily. His confession was taken away. He sat throbbing in the interrogation room until ten a.m., when Odd Job came back.
“You are starting,” the North Korean said approvingly, “to become sincere.”
—
Over the next several days Bucher was beaten twice during daylight hours and at least once each night. Soon, he wrote later, “my ribs felt cracked, my guts ruptured, my testicles ready to burst, and my face a pulp with all my front teeth loosened and almost falling out.” Lying gingerly on his bunk between thrashings, the captain could hear the groans and screams of his men getting worked over. It was as if they’d somehow time-traveled back to the pitiless days of January. Again Bucher was urinating blood in a latrine spattered with the blood and vomit of his mauled sailors. Again he was agonizing over not being able to shield his men, even as he whispered encouragement to them:
“At least we’ve rattled these bastards by making them look stupid to the outside world. That’s something we can all be proud of!”
His pain was so bad and the situation so dire that he contemplated another suicide attempt. He wasn’t the only one. After a vicious assault by the Bear, Howard Bland, the young fireman, tried to dive out a second-floor window, only to be snagged by guards. Law’s low point came when he was made to scoop feces out of a clogged toilet with his bare hands.
Despite his efforts to keep his head down, Harry Iredale found himself in the North Koreans’ crosshairs like everybody else. In an interrogation room one morning he found himself facing Possum, his room daddy, plus three other officers and a guard. “Who is the CIA agent?” Possum demanded. “Who made you try to fool us?” When Iredale said he didn’t understand the question, the officers rapidly filed out of the room and the guard set to beating him. Possum and his retinue came back later and asked the same question. Iredale again said he didn’t understand. Enraged, an officer punched him in the mouth. Fear flashed through Iredale’s belly. No officer had ever hit him before; the communists seemed to be panicking. Iredale was told to write a confession identifying the CIA man and all his shipmates’ plots.
The oceanographer wrote for the rest of that day and all through the night. Scared as he was, he was fed up with being bullied. Back in January, an interrogator had chided him for being “weak” and caving in too fast, and the remark still stung. Not this time, Iredale resolved. This time he’d give the Koreans nothing.
“I’m English,” he explained many years later. “I got stubborn.”
By the time he finished, his “confession” was little more than a rehash of past statements. He didn’t finger anyone as the CIA agent and revealed nothing about the crew’s resistance activities. In the morning someone came by to pick up his work. A few hours later, the guard who’d worked him over the previous day returned. Iredale was punched and kicked so vigorously that he flew out the door into the corridor.
That afternoon he was brought to a bigger room where the Bear and three other guards waited. They made him kneel and jammed a thick wooden pole behind his knees. Two guards jumped up and down on the ends of the pole several times while the Bear screamed threats at the top of his lungs. The communist bruiser then produced a wooden hammer handle and began whacking Iredale around the crown of his head. The oceanographer shrieked as loudly as he could, trying to convince the Bear he was inflicting too much pain.
Iredale soon looked as if he’d just lost a one-sided prizefight. His lower lip had swollen to three times its normal size; angry red welts were rising all over his battered scalp. His left eye was swollen shut and a bloodred halo encircled his right pupil. His ribs, hips, and knees ached. But he hadn’t caved.
He was told to draft yet another confession, and this time he added the tidbit that he’d once sailed on the Banner. At dusk an officer came in and ordered Iredale to wash his own blood off the floor and walls with a rag. The oceanographer had to stand on a chair to reach the highest spatters.
Around four a.m. the next day—after 39 hours of beatings and grillin
g, with no food, water, or sleep—he was sent back to his cell. His cellmates groggily asked whether he was okay. He mumbled something about still being alive and collapsed on his bed.
With his history of unbending defiance, Bob Hammond figured he’d be singled out for special abuse, and that made him “damn scared.” The Marine sergeant wasn’t sure he could take much more. As guards wreaked havoc on his shipmates, Hammond thought of ways to kill himself. He’d hurl himself out a window or attack a North Korean and get himself shot.
But, with a wife and two small children, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He decided instead to bluff the North Koreans with a fake suicide try. Even though they were beating the daylights out of the Americans, the communists evidently wanted to keep them alive, and Hammond hoped to turn that desire to his advantage.
One night he broke a mirror and tried to cut his wrists. He sawed vigorously with a shard of glass but drew hardly any blood. Then he tried another method. Getting into bed, he placed the sliver against his stomach and rolled over hard on it, opening a wound so big he worried that he’d gone too far. But the bleeding stopped after a while and Hammond fell asleep.
The next morning he stayed in his rack, smeared with dried blood, until guards came around. Shocked, they took him to a duty officer, who asked why he cut himself. Yelling like a maniac, Hammond demanded that the officer shoot him and called him “chicken” for not doing so. A communist colonel later gave the Marine a fatherly lecture, ticking off all the reasons for him to stay alive. But Hammond’s gambit apparently worked; the North Koreans didn’t touch him again.
Hell Week abruptly ended on the morning of December 19. The beatings stopped and Glorious General’s enforcers withdrew. The halls grew quiet, and a feeling of uncertain reprieve settled over the battered, worn-out Americans.
CHAPTER 14
BRIDGE OF NO RETURN
In Washington, Nicholas Katzenbach had reached the bottom of his bag of diplomatic tricks.
The rangy, balding under secretary of state, Dean Rusk’s right-hand man, had been directly supervising the U.S. side at Panmunjom since the secret talks began in February. Now it was early December, and the North Koreans had systematically ridiculed and rejected every negotiating gimmick Katzenbach and his team had come up with.
Katzenbach was no stranger to trying to get his government out of a tight spot. A Rhodes scholar and Yale Law School graduate, he’d joined the Kennedy administration in 1961 and soon became a key member of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s “riot squad” that worked to enforce civil rights laws in the Deep South. In one memorable episode, Katzenbach led a band of federal marshals as they struggled to carry out a court order to enroll a black former Air Force sergeant, James Meredith, at the University of Mississippi in 1962. For several hours, about 400 marshals holding a defensive line outside the registrar’s office withstood a deadly hail of bricks, Molotov cocktails, and gunshots from as many as 5,000 enraged whites. Mobs attempted to run down the marshals with a bulldozer and blast them with jets of water from a fire truck. Katzenbach ran a makeshift command center inside the registrar’s office; at one point, a marshal was carried in with a hemorrhaging gunshot wound to the neck. Katzenbach and the besieged lawmen finally were relieved by rushed-in Army and National Guard troops.
The North Koreans, Katzenbach had discovered, were no less intractable than rampaging racists at Ole Miss. At almost every meeting with the Americans, General Pak repeated his charges that the Pueblo had violated North Korean waters while committing espionage. His demand for a U.S. apology never wavered. But for months Pak had refused to guarantee that if General Woodward signed a mea culpa satisfactory to North Korea, Bucher and his men would be released at the same time. Then, at a meeting on September 30, Pak suddenly reversed course, agreeing to simultaneous release.
Woodward, however, had never offered to sign an unvarnished apology. He told Pak time and again that he was prepared to put his name only on a handwritten “receipt” acknowledging that 82 Americans had been turned over to him—the overwrite gambit. Katzenbach brooded over the possibility that Pak’s abrupt, almost glib acceptance of simultaneity meant he didn’t understand the difference between “acknowledging receipt” and simply signing a communist-drafted apology. If the overwrite didn’t come into focus for the North Koreans until they saw it at the signing ceremony, they might angrily walk out—and take their prisoners with them. To avoid such a calamity, Woodward was instructed to explain the overwrite to Pak in detail.
The American general had done so on October 10. Pak listened carefully and then said nothing for more than half an hour as he formulated a reply. He finally muttered that the Johnson administration had “taken an insincere and arrogant attitude, frustrating the agreement.” At the next get-together, two weeks later, Pak cross-examined Woodward about exactly what an overwrite would look like. When Woodward showed him, scrawling the receipt language diagonally across the text of the apology, Pak exclaimed sarcastically, “Ha!” One of his aides commented that the American was trying to “cancel the text.” “Understandable!” snapped Pak. During an October 31 meeting, Pak declared that the overwrite was “far beyond discussion” and warned yet again that the crewmen would “pay appropriate costs” unless Washington bowed down.
Pak stayed away from the bargaining table for the next six weeks. In the United States, the lack of progress triggered complaints that President Johnson—who had said nothing publicly about the Pueblo for months—“was not sufficiently engaged in this problem.” Americans were further stirred up by another blizzard of letters from the seamen, who now urged family and friends to lobby Washington to give the communists what they wanted.
To avoid further complicating the Panmunjom talks, LBJ in late October postponed a joint military exercise with South Korea. Under the operation, code-named “Focus Retina,” 2,500 U.S. paratroopers were to fly to South Korea for maneuvers with 4,500 American and South Korean soldiers. Focus Retina was meant to reassure President Park that the United States could rapidly reinforce him if war broke out. But Johnson was concerned that the North Koreans might feel they were being strong-armed into settling at Panmunjom.
The communists, however, had no qualms about conducting real military operations amid the talks, as their commandos attacked along the demilitarized zone and the South Korean coast. On November 3, about 50 guerrillas came ashore near the town of Ulchin and made their way inland over mountainous terrain—the largest incursion in the south since the 1953 armistice. The infiltrators took over a village and held a propaganda rally in broad daylight. When one peasant tried to escape, the communists beat and stabbed him to death, warning other villagers to expect the same if they said anything to police. The peasants sounded the alarm anyway, and more than 5,000 South Korean troops and combat police rushed to the area; within days 40 commandos had been killed and the rest were on the run.
Having lost contact with the communists at Panmunjom, Katzenbach and his aides ransacked their brains for a way to gain some leverage over them. At the time a Dutch firm was building four fish-processing ships for North Korea at a cost of nearly $28 million. That gave Katzenbach and his people an idea. If they could plant rumors that the U.S. Navy might commandeer the factory ships on their long journey between Rotterdam and the Far East, the communists might soften their position on the Pueblo. Fish provided much of the animal protein in the North Korean diet, and each of the ships—described as “by far the biggest fish freezing installations in the world”—was capable of processing 125,000 fish per day. As overfishing depleted North Korea’s coastal waters, the communist fishing fleet was ranging farther from shore, making the refrigeration ships vital.
“If for some reason we could inject [the] thought that [the] U.S. might obstruct their delivery to North Korea,” Katzenbach cabled the American ambassador at the Hague, “this might have [a] salutary effect.”
Doing nothing about the vessels, the State Department
believed, was not an option. Congress had learned of the Dutch shipbuilding contract and was likely to demand some sort of action. Ambassador Porter countered that Kim Il Sung might react to any hint of Navy intervention by refusing to let the Pueblo crew out of his grip until his fish ships were safely moored in North Korean ports. One of Katzenbach’s deputies, James Leonard, cabled Porter that Washington was aware of that danger. But, he added, the moment the North Korean vessels put to sea there would inevitably be public cries for their seizure. A little rumor-mongering, Leonard said, was preferable to a potentially violent confrontation on the high seas. Such a clash could result in Bucher and his men being held longer, or even executed.
American diplomats in Europe began quietly spreading the story. They persuaded the Dutch government to convey Washington’s “great interest” in the ships to the North Koreans through an executive of the Verolme shipyard in Rotterdam, where the vessels were under construction. The British government was enlisted to pass a similar message to Lloyd’s of London, which was insuring the craft, in the hope that the firm also would put a bug in the North Koreans’ ears.
Despite all the innuendo, the United States had no intention of actually hijacking the communist ships. “It was a bluff,” Katzenbach acknowledged in an interview more than 30 years later.
The disinformation campaign imploded, however, when The New York Times revealed it in a front-page story on November 26. The newspaper also ran an editorial opposing a revenge seizure, saying it was “inconceivable that the world’s foremost champion of freedom of the seas would stoop to such a form of retaliation, no matter how worthy the cause.” The episode became a major political embarrassment to the Dutch government, with nationalist critics charging that it underscored the country’s “servility” to Washington.
With their government seemingly unable to make headway with North Korea, ordinary Americans began to volunteer their services as international deal makers.
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