Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  Washington swiftly returned fire. Having finally had a chance to confer directly with the crew, the Navy held a press conference at the hospital the day after Christmas to refute the key allegation that the Pueblo had trespassed in North Korean waters. The main attraction was Ed Murphy, standing in for Bucher, who was confined to bed with fever and chills from an upper respiratory infection.

  Murphy told a roomful of newsmen that, as navigator, he was certain his ship had never come closer than 12 miles to the communist shore. Smiling and appearing rested, the executive officer told of how the North Koreans forged navigation charts and logs to make it look as if the Pueblo had intruded, and how he’d inserted errors in the forgeries to make them look inane. On the same day, Admiral Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations, told reporters in Washington that the Navy knew early on the charts were faked, but decided not to say so publicly for fear of further endangering Bucher and his fellow captives.

  Meanwhile, Navy doctors began examining the crew. Malnourishment was the main diagnosis. Seven men, including Bucher, reported pain in their hands and feet, probably caused by a loss of fat supporting peripheral nerve sheaths. Schumacher still had “considerable pain” in his back, sternum, and thorax from Hell Week, though his overall prognosis was good. Despite the vicious beatings that left him unconscious on several occasions, Hammond exhibited “no residual injuries.”

  Bucher had been running a fever since his release, and his vision was still fuzzy. He was transferred to a single room and confined to bed rest for several days. A Marine guard stood watch outside his door, but the captain talked his way past him several times to use a pay phone in the hall.

  Bucher’s vivid descriptions to the media of the crew’s treatment in prison caused general repugnance in the United States, and President Johnson ordered an “urgent investigation” of what had happened in North Korea.

  The Navy hastily complied. Investigators showed the crewmen dozens of still photos of communist officers and guards, extracted from news footage of Super C’s propaganda pageants. The sailors dutifully pointed out Robot, Possum, Odd Job, and others. Police-style “identi-kits” were used to reconstruct the faces of North Koreans who didn’t appear at news conferences, such as those in the Gypsy Tea Room. The crewmen also gave affidavits detailing how they were beaten and otherwise abused. The statements, the men were told, were to be sent to the United Nations, along with Washington’s formal protest.

  But that never happened. The bottom line, as the Balboa hospital commander told the press, was that “no serious injuries” had been inflicted on the sailors. (He apparently overlooked Law’s ruined eyes and Woelk’s loss of his testicles.) The worst beatings had been reserved for tough guys like Hammond and Kisler, who served as bloody warnings to the rest of the Americans not to resist. The survival of all 82 crewmen, Navy investigators concluded, suggested the North Korean government had “consciously and carefully controlled” the levels of violence. In any event, there was little Washington could do about it, short of a military strike, and the results of the inquiry were quietly shelved.

  Their physical exams completed, the sailors were handed off to a team of Navy psychiatrists led by Captain Raymond Spaulding, chief of psychiatry at Balboa and an expert on POW psychology. Spaulding and his cohorts interviewed each member of the crew, often for several hours at a time. To no one’s surprise, they determined that being imprisoned and brutalized by a communist dictatorship for nearly a year had been hard on the men’s psyches. Sixteen sailors exhibited symptoms of severe depression while incarcerated, including feelings of despair and thoughts of suicide. Forty others experienced “significant anxiety,” largely due to their captors’ capricious violence. Twenty developed anorexia. Plagued by guilt over their forced confessions, some sailors fantasized about the United States bombing the prison and killing everyone—guards and captives alike.

  But Spaulding also found the seamen had drawn psychic strength and comfort from one another’s company. Living together in cells became a form of group therapy as they discussed their lives, aspirations, sexual adventures, and favorite foods. Natural leaders emerged in each room, helping shipmates resist “thought reform” efforts by discussing what the room daddies said and “destroying their logic.” “‘Brainwashing’ techniques were unsuccessful in converting any man to Communism or even in persuading him to reject any American principles,” Spaulding reported in an article for the American Journal of Psychiatry.

  Upon their return to the United States, many sailors expected to be “punished and ridiculed” and were confused by their enthusiastic reception, Spaulding wrote. While they professed remorse over being used as propaganda puppets, most had “ready rationalizations” for their behavior, noting that they’d often undermined the North Koreans’ message with the Hawaiian good-luck sign and other tricks.

  An exception to the rationalizers was Schumacher, whom other crew members regarded as “exceptionally strong and an inspiration,” according to Spaulding. The young lieutenant had hidden “considerable mental anguish” in prison, including anxiety nightmares, thoughts of suicide, and “feelings of guilt over not having lived up to the military Code of Conduct.”

  One of the psychiatrists on Spaulding’s team, Commander C. W. Erwin, interviewed 15 enlisted men, whom he viewed as “unusually bright” compared to typical enlistees. Not only did they not suffer any lasting mental harm, Erwin said, but most described their time in North Korea as a “profound, life-changing experience” that gave them significant insight into themselves and others. Many cited “major religious experiences” and other personal epiphanies that convinced them to work harder at their marriages or go back to college when they got home. They didn’t feel bad about surrendering, since they were convinced that fighting back “would have been suicide.” And although the communists had tortured and humiliated them, the sailors believed they’d triumphed in the end by simply surviving.

  Certified by the hospital as relatively healthy in body and mind, the men were ready for the most sensitive part of Breeches Buoy: the intelligence debriefings. Months before, in a secret planning document, the Navy had declared these interviews “a matter of the highest priority.” The government badly wanted to find out what classified information and equipment—especially code machines—had been lost or compromised as a result of the Pueblo’s capture. The answers would be incorporated into what was known in intelligence circles as a “damage assessment.”

  Underscoring the assessment’s importance was the sudden appearance in San Diego of nearly 300 members of a special team—interviewers, technical experts, transcribers, report writers, and administrators—drawn from the National Security Agency, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Naval Intelligence Command, and FBI. The NSA contingent arrived the day after Christmas aboard a chartered plane from Baltimore, some members a bit tipsy from martini consumption along the way.

  The team’s interrogation protocol had been carefully worked out in Washington; the goal was to extract as much information as possible from each seaman. But actually doing so was expected to be a tricky business.

  Intelligence officials were concerned that as crewmen became aware they could be liable for stiff punishment, they might clam up in the debriefings. To allay their anxiety, the Navy took the unusual step of erecting a legal firewall between the debriefers and the Court of Inquiry. Each seaman was given a written guarantee that whatever he said in the debriefs was privileged and couldn’t be used against him in disciplinary proceedings of any kind. Debriefers were instructed to avoid coming off like prosecutors; they were to establish a “relaxed atmosphere” and a “sympathetic relationship” with the crewmen. If a sailor displayed any sign of distress or confusion, the interview was to be terminated and medical assistance summoned. If anyone inquired about his legal rights, he was to be provided with a Navy lawyer at no cost.

  For crewmen not connected to the SOD hut, the debrief sessions had th
e comfortable feel of a conversation between friends. For the communication technicians, the experience was more intense. Michael Barrett underwent 15 interviews; another CT endured 26. But, protected against legal fallout from their revelations, many sailors spoke frankly. As one NSA debriefer recalled: “We told them, ‘I don’t want to hear about the fight. I don’t want to hear anything about the battle. I don’t want to hear nothing about who got shot. I don’t want to hear nothing about who was on their hands and knees and praying. . . . All I want to know is, what did you take aboard that ship when you went?’ And the kids became pretty free in telling me that.”

  At the end of each day, behind-the-scenes technical experts pored over transcripts of the interviews and drew up a list of more specific questions for debriefers to ask the next day. The process yielded a huge amount of material: 270 miles of interview tapes and enough written reports to fill a number of large filing cabinets. Everything was boxed up and flown to Washington, where another group of analysts was to go over it in minute detail inside a locked vault at Naval Security Group headquarters. The results of the damage evaluation wouldn’t be known for weeks.

  In the meantime, the citizens of San Diego—arguably the most Navy-friendly town in America—continued to treat the crew like kings. The Chamber of Commerce raised more than $52,000 to defray the cost of hotel rooms and food for out-of-town relatives. The owner of an Italian restaurant offered sailors and their families a free meal for each day of captivity. When Stu Russell announced his impending marriage, local women’s groups volunteered to sew his bride’s gown, bake the wedding cake, buy flowers, and organize the reception. Smiling strangers came up to Steve Harris’s wife and told her approvingly, “You belong to the Pueblo family.”

  As the days passed the Navy loosened its leash on the men. On New Year’s Day, 19 of them were allowed to ride a chartered bus up to Pasadena to see the Rose Bowl. CT Don McClarren got married in Las Vegas, with a casino singer picking up the tab for champagne, flowers, and a bridal suite at the Riviera Hotel. Bucher’s health gradually improved and, on January 3, 1969, he, Murphy, and eight others were awarded Purple Hearts for wounds received in action. For some unfathomable military reason, “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones” played on the public-address system during the medal-pinning ceremony in a sunny hospital courtyard.

  On January 12, actor John Wayne, singer Pat Boone, and “several Hollywood starlets” entertained the awestruck sailors at a party in a local hotel. About 100 other well-wishers crowded into the bash, which was organized by local pro-Pueblo groups and began with Bucher and his men marching into the room to the strains of “The Lonely Bull.” Wayne presented the captain with a plaque saying Americans would always remember the Pueblo crew with gratitude. To Rose the movie star gave two dozen long-stemmed roses, gallantly telling her, “With one Rose as lovely as you, we don’t need the other 23.”

  Rose had saved armloads of newspaper and magazine clippings about the Pueblo, and she gave them to her husband to read while he recuperated at the hospital. He hadn’t known how big the story was in the United States. He began to understand its full dimensions when he saw a painting of himself, in white captain’s hat and dress blue uniform, on the cover of Time magazine.

  Some of the articles, however, made for uncomfortable reading. A good portion of the Navy’s command hierarchy, it was clear, was furious at Bucher. The captain had soiled the most hallowed tradition of the most tradition-steeped branch of the armed services: He’d surrendered without a fight.

  The Navy’s self-image was built on heroic tales of sea commanders who fought against long odds or otherwise tempted fate with their derring-do. There was John Paul Jones, who captured the faster and much better armed British frigate Serapis after a ferocious night battle, then watched from its decks as his own badly shot-up vessel, the Bonhomme Richard, slid beneath the waves of the North Sea. There was David Farragut, who led his squadron into a Confederate minefield protecting Mobile Bay by calling out, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” For generations a banner had hung in the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis as an inspiration to cadets. It bore the last words of a mortally wounded commander, James Lawrence, during an 1813 battle off Boston harbor: “Don’t give up the ship.” In the minds of many naval officers, that brave exhortation carried the gravity and immutability of sacred writ.

  By contrast, Bucher’s most aggressive act had been to hurl expletives at the North Korean gunboats. “There had better be a good explanation,” one Navy officer told the Los Angeles Times after the Pueblo’s seizure. “You don’t just give up the ship because somebody asked you to.” Others insisted Bucher should have at least scuttled or blown up his boat. Asked what he’d have done in the same circumstances, Admiral William Raborn, who at different times in his career had run the Navy’s Polaris missile program and the CIA, snapped, “I would have shot the hell out of them. I would have made those North Koreans pay a high price.” Another captain said that while many officers felt compassion for Bucher because of his prison travails, “I haven’t heard of anyone who is sympathetic with his decision to give up the ship.”

  To Bucher the handwriting was on the wall. If the Navy was looking for a scapegoat in the upcoming court of inquiry, he was the leading candidate.

  CHAPTER 16

  BUCHER’S GETHSEMANE

  As the crew jetted toward Miramar on Christmas Eve, a Navy lawyer named William Newsome drove out to the airfield in his Volkswagen Beetle to see how ordinary San Diegans would receive them.

  Newsome’s motive was more than idle curiosity. The previous summer the Navy had designated the balding, 45-year-old captain as chief counsel for the Pueblo court of inquiry. Newsome was given a private office at the Navy amphibious base on Coronado Island, just across the bay from downtown San Diego, where the inquest was to be held. The office soon filled with boxes of sensitive documents: sailors’ personnel files; urgent messages flashed among various Navy commands during the seizure crisis; the background investigation that revealed Bucher’s dalliances in Japan.

  The son of a Brooklyn postal worker, Newsome was a serious, driven man. After serving aboard a mortar-firing assault boat during the World War II invasions of Okinawa and other Pacific islands, he earned a law degree from New York University. He studied so hard for a postgraduate course in military law that he ended up in the hospital with bleeding ulcers. (Despite his illness, friends kept bringing homework to his bedside so he wouldn’t fall behind in class.) He’d been involved in hundreds of military cases and had served as a military judge. Yet for all his experience Newsome worried that he wasn’t up to handling the Pueblo court, which promised more raw drama than any military judicial proceeding since the 1925 court-martial of General Billy Mitchell, an outspoken proponent of airpower, for insubordination.

  Contrary to what its name might suggest, a court of inquiry isn’t an arena for a trial. It’s a fact-finding body, similar to a civilian grand jury, designed to get to the bottom of naval disasters that result in loss of life or property. Courts of inquiry have investigated some of the most wrenching episodes in Navy history: the mysterious explosion that sank the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898; the lack of preparedness on the part of top Navy and Army commanders prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941; and the sudden flooding and sinking of the submarine Thresher off Cape Cod in 1963. A court’s importance is proportional to the number of admirals who sit on it. One admiral signifies a relatively simple, low-level investigation; more indicate a complex, higher-profile probe. Five admirals—the maximum—would sit on the Pueblo court.

  Courts of inquiry can recommend but not impose punishment. As court counsel, Newsome’s job wasn’t to prosecute Bucher and his men but to elicit enough facts from them and other witnesses to enable the court members to understand the circumstances that led to the Pueblo calamity.

  Some of those facts, Newsome knew, might reflect badly on the sailors, and bringing them to light i
n open hearings could put him in an unenviable position. The crewmen already were riding a wave of public sympathy, and two admirals—Rosenberg and Hyland—had publicly crowned them as heroes. At the same time, public opinion was turning against the Navy and the rest of the military over the Vietnam War. By asking tough, potentially embarrassing questions of Bucher and his men, Newsome could easily become the villain in a high-visibility morality play. If that happened, so be it. But the attorney wanted to get a sense of what he was in for. And so he drove out to Miramar.

  The scene at the airfield shook him badly. As the freed seamen staggered off their planes, the waiting crowd exploded in cheers, screams of joy, and tears—not just the men’s families, but hundreds of regular people standing outside the base gates as well. They’re acting like they just saw Lindbergh touch down in Paris, Newsome thought in alarm. He could guess what that meant: When the court of inquiry got under way, many Americans would view him as the guy throwing mud at a bunch of national idols.

  For a wild moment, all he wanted to do was run away.

  “I honestly thought of getting in my Volkswagen and filling it up with gas, and going as far east as I could, and filling it up with gas again, and going as far east as I could again, and never coming back to this thing,” Newsome recalled, “because I was scared to death.”

  But he didn’t take off. He kept going to work at his Coronado office each day, methodically preparing for the biggest case of his life.

  Bucher didn’t feel ready for the rigors of a public inquiry, but the Navy wanted it to begin before too many crewmen’s enlistments expired. By the middle of January 1969, 25 sailors would be eligible for discharge. If they reverted to civilian status and left town, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to get them to return as witnesses. So the Navy placed 90-day “medical holds” on the men, forcing them to stay in San Diego for the duration of the court, which Newsome expected would be no more than three or four weeks. When Bucher asked for a delay, the Navy said his men with expired enlistments couldn’t go home until the inquest had concluded. The captain reluctantly agreed to a January 20 start date.