On January 10, a Navy doctor told the press Bucher’s “emotional condition is now good.” In fact, it still was quite iffy. The captain suffered fierce headaches—a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder—and often wept at the mere thought of his prison experiences. “Emotions just leaked out of me like I was a sieve,” he remembered. “God, I felt like a damn fool. But I just [couldn’t] control myself.”
The court hearings were to be held in a small auditorium at the Naval Amphibious School on Coronado. Extra seats were installed to accommodate the expected passel of newsmen. The five admirals would sit on a raised stage behind a long table covered with green baize. A few feet in front of the stage was a small table for Bucher and his attorneys, and a solitary chair for witnesses. A scrambler phone with a direct line to Washington hung on a wall. Some court sessions would be open to the public and others closed; testimony involving classified matters would be heard in an identical room next door. Technicians swept both chambers for hidden bugs. Marine guards posted inside and outside the auditorium would provide security.
Admiral John Hyland, the Pacific Fleet commander and convening authority for the court, chose each of its members as carefully as if he were selecting a bride. All were Annapolis graduates, and four of the five had seen combat in waters near Wonsan during the Korean War. Collectively they represented all major subdivisions of the Navy: surface ships, naval aviation, amphibious warfare, and submarines.
For the “horrible chore” of serving as court president, Hyland picked a close friend, Vice Admiral Harold G. Bowen Jr., commander of U.S. antisubmarine warfare forces in the Pacific. Hyland admired Bowen as “one of the brightest guys . . . that ever graduated from the [Naval] Academy.” Hyland knew Bowen didn’t want the job, but he didn’t think he had anyone else who could handle it.
His reluctance aside, the 55-year-old Bowen was a natural choice. As the son and son-in-law of vice admirals, he was Navy royalty. Patrician-looking and fit from frequent games of squash and tennis, he’d graduated fourth in his class at Annapolis in 1933 and had gone on to earn a master’s degree in metallurgical engineering. He commanded a destroyer in the South Pacific during World War II and a destroyer division in the Korean War. For his coolheaded leadership in a deadly artillery duel between his flagship, the destroyer Maddox, and enemy shore batteries near Wonsan, Bowen was awarded the Legion of Merit. Later he ran the Navy’s nuclear power division. He talked softly and with an engineer’s dry precision, but the lanky admiral had a charismatic presence. “When he spoke, everybody listened,” recalled Newsome. He also had a good trial judge’s knack for cutting through thickets of verbiage and getting to the heart of a matter, which would serve him well during the complicated Pueblo probe.
Bowen’s four court colleagues also were pillars of the Navy establishment.
A brusque ex-submariner whose teeth often were clamped around an unlit cigar, Rear Admiral Allen Bergner headed the big San Diego naval training center. In 1939, he’d captained the Naval Academy football squad that beat Army 10–0. Called “Big Bear” by teammates, Bergner played tackle both ways. He also was captain of the Annapolis wrestling team and lettered in boxing and lacrosse. As a newly minted ensign, he found himself assigned to the USS West Virginia on December 7, 1941, when the battleship was sunk in Pearl Harbor by Japanese attackers. Later in World War II, as executive officer of the submarine Gar, he won a Bronze Star. At 53, the white-haired Bergner was the youngest member of the court.
Rear Admiral Edward Grimm, 58, was the oldest. A veteran of 35 years in the Navy, he headed the Pacific Fleet training command, based in San Diego. As navigator of the cruiser Birmingham during World War II, he was badly injured when his ship pulled alongside the carrier Princeton to fight fires touched off by a kamikaze strike. Like Bowen, Grimm had skippered a destroyer that bombarded targets near Wonsan. In 1952, he obtained a master’s degree in business administration; his subsequent career alternated between sea commands and shore jobs as a Navy budget expert. With a faint smile often playing on his face, Grimm seemed more sympathetic toward Bucher than any other court member.
Soft-spoken and scholarly-looking, Rear Admiral Richard Pratt, commander of amphibious training in the Pacific, had been both a star athlete at the Naval Academy and a war hero. The nephew of a chief of naval operations, he quarterbacked the Navy football squad three years in a row in the 1930s and also captained the baseball team. During the hellish struggle for Okinawa in 1945, he commanded a destroyer that put fire hoses aboard a burning aircraft carrier and saved it. Pratt’s medals included two Navy Crosses, the service’s highest decoration for heroism; a Silver Star; and a Bronze Star. In his spare time he enjoyed attending art exhibits and other cultural events.
The last member of the court, Rear Admiral Marshall White, was a flier and former skipper of the aircraft carrier Hornet. A Bronze Star winner during the Korean War, he now commanded the Navy missile test range at Point Mugu, California. He spoke with a Missouri drawl and, as the court dragged on, occasionally sighed about neglecting his weekend gardening.
Together, the court members had served 184 years, won 77 medals and decorations, and, in a number of ways, embodied the best of Navy tradition. Hyland directed them to investigate “all the facts and circumstances” of the Pueblo’s capture and the detention of its crew, and the admirals seemed determined to do so.
Bucher was impressed by Bowen and his distinguished cohorts and believed they’d give him a “full, fair, and impartial” hearing, as Navy regulations required. The captain was willing to shoulder some of the blame for the disaster off Wonsan, but he also felt that nothing he had or hadn’t done on January 23, 1968, would have changed the outcome after the gunboats surrounded him. He believed the investigating admirals would want to know about how ill-prepared the Navy had left him, and he envisioned a long line of brass hats from Washington being called on the carpet to explain why they turned down his requests for a rapid-destruct mechanism and other necessary hardware.
But the skipper didn’t know the Navy had quietly placed strict limits on how far Bowen could go with his investigation. According to a secret internal agreement struck before the court began, Bowen couldn’t take testimony in several key areas. For one thing, he was prohibited from examining the actions of the court’s convener, Hyland, even though Hyland’s command might have made important decisions involving the Pueblo. Nor could Bowen call anyone in “higher authority” as a witness, meaning no one from Admiral Moorer’s office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the White House could be compelled to explain their actions, or lack thereof.
Bucher spent the weekend before the court began sequestered with his lawyer, E. Miles Harvey, a dapper young partner in a white-shoe San Diego firm. Harvey had helped Rose Bucher with various matters during her husband’s captivity. He initially turned down the captain’s request to represent him before the admirals, saying he wasn’t qualified. Harvey was a top-drawer business attorney, brokering complex real estate deals and corporate mergers and acquisitions. But he’d never tried a case in court and knew almost nothing about military law.
“I didn’t know what a court of inquiry was,” he admitted years later.
Harvey did know something about the Navy, however. He was a commander in the Navy Reserve, specializing in intelligence. He agreed to represent Bucher partly because the skipper also would have the services of an experienced Navy lawyer, Captain James E. Keys. Regarded in naval circles as a superb, even brilliant legal mind, the crew-cut, soft-voiced Keys had participated in numerous military trials and served as a military judge in Vietnam. He knew the Uniform Code of Military Justice backward and forward. But he had a major liability: He was a heavy drinker. “By noon he was through half a fifth of scotch,” recalled Harvey, “and by two o’clock he was through the fifth.” Keys also would fail Harvey at a critical juncture in the court hearings, by Harvey’s account. (The author was unable to locate Keys to ask for his respo
nse.)
Harvey was optimistic about Bucher’s chances in court; he thought the skipper could even wind up with a medal. The notion that Bowen and his court colleagues might recommend serious disciplinary action, up to and including a court-martial, didn’t cross his mind. Though handicapped by his unfamiliarity with military law, Harvey was shrewd and imaginative. After years of hard bargaining with CEOs and other high-powered business types, he wasn’t the least bit intimidated by the prospect of facing a few admirals. Plus, he had Keys to help him, or so he thought.
Since Harvey didn’t have nearly enough time to get up to speed on the intricacies of military law, he asked Bowen to suspend the rules of evidence, as permitted under the flexible regulations governing courts of inquiry. Harvey expected to be turned down, but Bowen assented to his request. Among other things, the court president’s decision meant witnesses could testify without being interrupted by lawyers’ distracting and time-consuming objections. And that cleared the way for Harvey to pursue a clever public-relations strategy.
The attorney correctly sensed that the media would play a crucial role in the court’s outcome, and he wanted journalists to “come on board with Bucher.” He hoped to nudge them up the gangway by having the captain narrate, from beginning to end, his astonishing story of capture on the high seas, barbaric imprisonment, brave resistance, and eventual freedom. As soon as they heard the full saga, Harvey believed, newsmen would be more likely to identify with the earthy, careworn skipper than with the five admirals, whom Harvey described as looking “as pompous as they possibly could” with their copious gold braid and medal-bedecked chests. To Harvey’s delight, Bowen also agreed to let Bucher be the leadoff witness.
Newsome had some interesting cards to play as well. Thanks to the Naval Investigative Service, he already knew about Bucher’s bar habits and womanizing. The NIS gave the court counsel a copy of its investigation of Bucher as the court was getting started. But, reading through the file, Newsome realized it created a dilemma for him as much as it provided potential ammunition against the Pueblo commander.
Certainly the NIS material could be used against Bucher, if that became necessary. But publicly dredging up sordid personal information about the skipper could backfire, making Newsome—and by extension, the Navy—look sleazy and ruthless. Despite the tactical advantage the dossier might give him, Newsome didn’t want to use it in court. By the same token, he didn’t want Harvey to get too carried away extolling Bucher’s virtues to the admirals. So he privately warned the captain’s attorney that he had the NIS report.
“You can make him John Paul Jones,” Newsome remembered telling Harvey, “but don’t make him John the Baptist.”
—
Cold rains inundated Coronado on Monday, January 20, the court of inquiry’s first day. The amphibious school auditorium was jammed with spectators, most of them news reporters. Ever since their release, Bucher and his men had been a media sensation, and the court was to receive extensive coverage from newspapers, magazines, television, and radio.
The admirals filed in and took their seats promptly at nine a.m. Sitting a few feet away were Bucher and Harvey. The captain assured the court he was in “very good physical condition,” having gained 18 pounds since his return. But his appearance belied his words. He wore black-rimmed glasses to improve his vitamin-deficient eyesight; when he stood up, his uniform sagged on his undernourished frame.
Bucher took the witness seat and, over the next four days, told his epic tale from start to finish. He began, slowly and solemnly, by itemizing the Pueblo’s many deficiencies. Its ancient steering system broke down continually on the way to Japan, he said, though it was largely fixed by the time he left for North Korea. A request for a collision alarm was denied. He never got the dedicated phone circuits he wanted to better communicate with his navigation and damage-control teams. He made “two or three” requests to the chief of naval operations’ office for a rapid-destruction system, but was turned down. While mounts were installed for three machine guns, only two were delivered. Camouflaged under frozen tarpaulins, the weapons took agonizing minutes to be brought into action; Bucher’s men once needed a full hour to get one working. The guns were unshielded and prone to jamming; the captain never expected them to be very effective.
Without explicitly saying so, Bucher left the strong impression that the Navy regarded the AGERs and their crews as expendable. Bowen had no intention of letting that perception go unchallenged, however. Under Navy regulations, a captain had the right to refuse to weigh anchor if he believed his vessel unprepared for its mission. The court president listened to Bucher’s complaints and then asked whether the Pueblo hadn’t been ready, drawing a telling response from its commander.
“There was no question in my mind that the ship and myself, as well as the crew, were prepared to carry out the mission assigned successfully,” he said.
Thus, with a single incisive question, Bowen neatly boxed in the captain. Had Bucher answered that he wasn’t prepared to depart, but did so anyway, he’d have appeared negligent. His acknowledgment that he was ready tended to undercut his criticisms of the Navy for not properly equipping him.
Under further questioning, Bucher also admitted he’d been less than diligent in drilling his men for emergencies. While they’d practiced going to general quarters and abandoning ship during their storm-lashed passage to North Korea, they didn’t exercise in repelling boarders or destroying classified materials.
On his second day of testimony, Bucher described his frustrating, unproductive transit of the communist coast. Looking tense and sipping frequently from a glass of water, he told of drifting from one North Korean port to another as the CTs tried to zero in on radio and radar signals. The admirals questioned him closely on the possibility of navigational error—What charts had he used? Was his loran accurate?—but Bucher insisted the Pueblo had never left international waters.
Then came the calamity off Wonsan: the sudden appearance of the sub chaser; the sharklike circling of the PT boats; the terrifying hail of shells and bullets as the Pueblo tried to run. In short order, said the captain, he found himself “completely and hopelessly outgunned.” The tarps on his machine guns were frozen solid; anyone trying to pry them loose and set up the weapons would have been quickly cut down.
“I saw no point,” said Bucher, explaining why he hadn’t manned the guns, “in senselessly sending people to their deaths.”
The skipper recounted the MiGs roaring overhead and Dwayne Hodges’s intestines spilling on the deck. He didn’t mention what he remembered as Lacy’s frenzied demand to stop the ship and Murphy’s deck-hugging under fire. As the Pueblo coasted to a halt, the North Koreans ceased firing. “I felt that any further, or any, resistance on our part would only end up in a complete slaughter of the crew,” the captain stated.
The admirals’ next round of questions reflected their skepticism of Bucher’s rationale for surrendering. The cigar-chewing Bergner led the charge, demanding to know whether small arms had been broken out.
No, the captain replied.
What had his damage-control parties reported before Bucher stopped the ship? Bergner asked.
“No fires, no flooding, and no material casualties,” the captain calmly answered.
Apparently taken aback, Bergner then asked, “For clarification, what significant event occurred just prior to your making the decision to stop?”
“No particular action took place,” said Bucher. “My feeling was that we would be hopelessly riddled and perhaps sustain an inordinate number of casualties, which would interfere with the destruction of the classified matter.”
Bowen weighed in with another penetrating question:
“Did you ever consider that you might [be] attacked and, if so, what would you do?”
“No, sir,” responded the captain. “I never considered that I would ever be attacked on this mission. It never occur
red to me.” (These remarks were contradicted by Bucher’s discussions, in Hawaii as well as Yokosuka, about what help he could expect if the North Koreans went after him.) He also admitted he hadn’t fully grasped the dangerously large volume of secret publications aboard, which he estimated would have taken up to 12 hours to burn.
Bucher testified that the “one thing I wanted to accomplish without fail” was the destruction of classified materials. But Newsome, who soon began to sound more like a prosecutor than a neutral fact finder, used that assertion to lure the captain into a trap.
“Commander, certainly one of the most classified elements on this ship were the personnel, was that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So that in making the decision to surrender your ship, and surrender the personnel, you also made the calculated decision that you would also surrender the additional classified element of your ship, the personnel?”
“Yes, sir. That is correct.”
Newsome had all he needed. On the afternoon of Bucher’s third day in the witness chair, the court counsel abruptly cut off his testimony and Bowen adjourned the court. Shortly afterward, the admirals reconvened and Newsome officially warned Bucher he was suspected of violating Article 0730, a Navy regulation that forbade a commander from letting a foreign power search his vessel or remove any of his sailors “so long as he has the power to resist.” Anything Bucher said from that point on, Newsome added, could be used against him “in a subsequent trial.”
The warning stunned the courtroom audience. It was the first time the Navy had so forcefully raised the possibility of court-martialing Bucher. Harvey was caught completely off guard. He was furious at Keys for not advising him this might happen. But the suave corporate lawyer showed no outward sign of distress. He got to his feet, declared, “[O]bviously we anticipated the situation that we find ourselves in at the present moment,” and asked his client one question:
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