The AGER proposal also had to pass muster by the 303 Committee, a little-known arm of President Johnson’s National Security Council. The 303 Committee—so named because its civilian members formerly met in room 303 of the Executive Office Building—had the final say on all eavesdropping expeditions by American aircraft, surface ships, and submarines around the globe. At the time the Pueblo mission was approved, the group’s members were national security adviser Walt Rostow, CIA Director Richard Helms, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze.
As part of the planning process, each echelon in the chain of command made its own estimate of risk for a specific AGER mission. Admiral Johnson testified that he considered several factors, including the degree of political tension between the United States and the target country, and whether that nation had tried to interfere with American ferrets in the past. None of the Banner’s 16 previous missions in the Sea of Japan and East China Sea had drawn a risk assessment higher than “minimal,” even though several trips proved to be somewhat dangerous. Chinese patrol boats or armed trawlers had trained their guns on the Banner on four separate occasions, and a Soviet intelligence collector, the Anemometer, had once “shouldered”—deliberately bumped—the U.S. ship.
Johnson’s command was less worried about North Korea. The Banner had lain off Wonsan on two trips—for 11 hours in 1966 and 36 hours in 1967—without the North Koreans trying to bully it away. Johnson thought the Pueblo was likely to encounter the same evident forbearance. Like most Navy officers involved in the AGER program, he believed with almost mystical conviction in the abstract protections of international maritime law and custom. No U.S. Navy vessel had been attacked on the high seas in more than a century and a half, and he saw no reason to think that time-tested precedent wouldn’t hold true for the Pueblo as well.
“If you were a betting man,” he told the court members, “I would suggest that a [bookmaker] would give you such fantastic odds that such an incident would not happen . . . that maybe somebody even as rich as Howard Hughes could not pay off on it.”
But North Korea’s track record was more complex than Johnson made it out to be. While Kim Il Sung’s commanders hadn’t reacted to the Banner, they could be very sensitive about foreign ships and aircraft approaching their shores, and that touchiness had led to violence in the past. In 1965, two North Korean jets opened fire on an American RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft flying in international airspace about 50 miles east of Wonsan. Though severely damaged, the plane was able to limp back to its base in Japan. In 1967, communist coastal batteries had sunk a South Korean patrol boat, PCE 56.
Ever since the Korean War, Pyongyang had been broadcasting strident warnings to South Korean fishing boats and “U.S. imperialist aggressors” to stay clear of its claimed waters, especially near the demilitarized zone. Southern fishermen, however, frequently motored across the seaward extension of the demarcation line in search of bigger catches. North Korea’s navy sometimes responded by seizing or shooting up interlopers. Just two weeks before the Pueblo was captured, a pair of North Korean patrol craft slashed into a fleet of 200 fishing boats, ramming and sinking one and forcing three others to go north. In 1967, North Korea had kidnapped a total of 353 southern fishermen aboard 50 boats.
The communists often accused the United States of using southern fishing fleets as a screen to infiltrate surveillance ships into their waters. Indeed, on January 11, 1968—two days before the Pueblo first arrived off Wonsan—Pyongyang radio had promised to take “determined countermeasures” against American “spy boats.” Johnson’s headquarters had been aware of these threats, but wrote them off as routine communist saber rattling of the sort that had been occurring since the early 1950s.
There were other red flags as well, but Johnson—along with everyone else in the chain of command—paid little heed. The number of clashes between allied and North Korean troops in the DMZ was rising dramatically; the U.N. Command reported a more than tenfold increase in border incidents from 1966 to 1967. The biggest warning flag of all was the Blue House raid, which took place less than 36 hours before the Pueblo reached Wonsan for the fateful second time. Prudence should have dictated that the spy ship be given plenty of protection or pulled back until things cooled down. Instead, the Navy allowed it to cruise ever closer to disaster, clinging to the hollow assurance of a “minimal” risk rating.
Though Johnson had operational responsibility for all Pueblo and Banner missions, he had no combat ships or planes to send to their rescue in an emergency. His only option was to request long-distance help from the Seventh Fleet or the Fifth Air Force. But Johnson’s closed-door testimony revealed the illusory nature of that “on-call” arrangement.
The admiral had pushed the on-call button on two occasions when Chinese boats confronted the Banner, summoning distant U.S. destroyers to drive off the harassers. In both instances the Banner slipped away to safety long before the destroyers arrived. The reality was that the Seventh Fleet could help only if its vessels were close enough—which they usually weren’t, since most fleet assets were tied up by the Vietnam War.
Air Force assistance was no less problematic. Johnson was so convinced the Pueblo’s maiden mission would be a cakewalk that he hadn’t asked for jet fighters to be placed on “strip alert,” meaning they’d be armed and fueled and their pilots set to go if trouble developed. And even if he had requested an alert, American warplanes were anything but readily available in the Far East.
The handful of U.S. jets in South Korea—those closest to the Pueblo when it came under attack—were reserved for use in a nuclear war against the Soviets. And General Bonesteel, the commander of all allied forces in the south, wasn’t inclined to permit the South Korean air force to go to the aid of an American ship for fear of touching off an uncontrollable clash with the communists. Indeed, Bonesteel wouldn’t let the South Koreans help their own naval vessels, as he demonstrated when he refused to allow their jets to break up the attack on PCE 56.
Nor was it a simple matter to launch U.S. aircraft based in Japan. A secret status-of-forces agreement required American commanders to “consult” with the Japanese government before mounting combat strikes from Japanese soil—a time-consuming and politically uncertain process. Asked whether jets from the Enterprise even could have refueled in Japan en route to helping the spy ship, Johnson replied that doing so without Japanese concurrence would have created “a diplomatic uproar.”
Bowen quickly grasped the main implication of Johnson’s testimony.
“Would you say then that essentially there was no means to protect this ship if she got into a situation such as she did?” he asked.
Johnson answered bluntly: “There was no means and no procedures established to prevent the Pueblo or the Banner from being seized on the high seas.”
Johnson also made it clear he didn’t approve of installing machine guns on AGERs. Such light weapons, he told the court, didn’t significantly improve the boats’ capacity to defend themselves against anything bigger than an armed junk. Johnson was especially concerned about what might happen if an American snooper with guns manned confronted a communist ship in the same mode. He acknowledged telling Bucher before he left Japan to keep his guns covered so as not to “provoke” hostile vessels. But the admiral insisted he’d placed no restrictions on using the .50-calibers if the Pueblo’s survival was threatened. He added that Bucher was specifically instructed to bring the machine guns into action against would-be boarders.
Although Johnson had been ordered to verify the Pueblo’s ability to get rid of its classified material, his inspection was cursory at best. He testified that he personally examined the ship’s topside incinerator, but not its fire axes, sledgehammers, and ditch bags. Neither he nor his staff tested how much time might be needed to burn, shred, or pulverize all of the electronic equipment and publications. He also noted that multiple commands, including his,
had delivered secret documents to the ship willy-nilly, with no single authority limiting the overall volume.
The bottom line on Johnson’s testimony was devastating: The little spy tub, jammed with sensitive documents and electronics, had been sent into dangerous waters with no air or sea cover and virtually no means to defend itself. Navy planners assumed that a solitary intelligence ship hard by the shores of one of the world’s most heavily armed and unpredictable regimes would be safe at a time when that regime could reasonably be expected to be on high military alert, deeply fearful of possible retaliation for the Blue House raid. And no one in the Navy had given much thought to destroying a mountain of top secret material in a hurry.
The level of complacency and heedlessness was appalling.
To Bowen’s credit, Johnson was recalled to the witness chair two days later to repeat in open court much of what he’d said behind closed doors. Johnson then dug himself an even deeper hole by testifying that he hadn’t raised the mission’s risk assessment even though he knew of North Korea’s attacks on the South Korean patrol boat and the American RB-47, as well as the sharp rise in violence along the DMZ.
The admirals of the court hadn’t been pleased with Johnson’s secret testimony, and they sharpened their criticism in the public session.
“So, when we add it up, then, we really had a contingency plan to use [rescue] forces which do not exist,” said White, summing up the on-call arrangement.
Bowen piled on Johnson with “ill-concealed disgust.” “You have referred frequently to the on-call concept, which I believe is somewhat misleading, since nothing was on-call,” said the court president.
Johnson’s cheeks reddened as the humiliation sank in. A few feet away sat Bucher, biting his lip. Johnson’s testimony had been embarrassing, but it was the truth.
CHAPTER 17
EVERYONE’S WORST NIGHTMARE
Having all but torn off the hapless Admiral Johnson’s epaulets, Bowen and his cohorts turned their attention to the Pueblo’s crew. And the court members soon discovered that the seamen’s preparations to defend their ship and its top secret contents left much to be desired.
Since no one had ever told them what their true mission was, some sailors actually believed the cover story that the spy ship was conducting scientific research. Few if any had given much thought to the possibility of being attacked. “This never really entered my mind,” testified Law. Said Schumacher, “I honestly believed the worst that might happen to us would be perhaps a dent or some scratched paint.”
Bob Chicca, the Marine translator, testified that he’d informed his superiors at the Kamiseya communication station that his Korean language skills were very rusty, but he was ordered aboard the spy ship anyway. When he reported for duty, the SOD hut commander, Steve Harris, never asked about his proficiency. Harris testified that he realized after leaving Japan the ship wasn’t carrying enough ditch bags to dispose of all the classified documents, but he didn’t warn Bucher. Jim Kell, Harris’s number two, admitted in closed session that he didn’t even know where the bags were stored.
Crewmen gave contradictory testimony about the ship’s destruction bill, a vital directive specifying which CT was responsible for getting rid of what secret material in an emergency. The bill was supposed to have been posted in the SOD hut for all to read. (The Banner’s four-page bill was so detailed that it prescribed a certain sequence for destroying individual documents stashed in shipboard safes.)
Harris said the Pueblo’s bill had been properly displayed, but at least four CTs testified that they never saw it. Bucher said he signed the bill somewhere “between Pearl Harbor and Yokosuka,” but didn’t know whether it was ever posted. CT Donald Peppard testified that he typed the document and put it up at Harris’s request a few hours before the attack. Kell insisted it wasn’t posted until 15 minutes after sub chaser No. 35 began circling the Pueblo.
One of the few moments of levity in the courtroom came when Captain John Williams, an icily correct officer from Naval Security Group headquarters in Washington, took the witness seat. As Williams poured himself a glass of water, accidentally spilling some on his pants, Miles Harvey asked whether he had any experience in submarines. “I do now,” he said in chagrin, as guffaws erupted in the audience. But Williams went on to contradict Steve Harris on a key provision of the destruction bill. Harris had believed that classified material couldn’t be dumped in less than one hundred fathoms—six hundred feet—of water. Williams, however, said there were no specific depth requirements and it was the captain’s call whether the water was deep enough to make salvage difficult or impossible.
Questions also were raised about Harris’s leadership during the attack. In closed-door testimony, three CTs said the lieutenant gave them no guidance as they struggled to annihilate classified materials. (Indeed, it was Kell, not Harris, who’d given the order to initiate emergency destruction.) Two CTs said they never saw Harris laying waste to anything himself. Asked who was in charge of the overall elimination effort, one CT replied, “I don’t know. It seemed like no one was, actually.”
The CTs described scenes of confusion and chaos in the SOD hut, where about ten men had tried to destroy whatever they could. After only fifteen minutes or so of burning documents, someone ordered them to stop. But no one seemed to know who issued that command or why, and the North Koreans didn’t board the ship for at least another hour.
Kell said CTs tore up documents by hand after the order to cease burning. But the chief petty officer also admitted he didn’t know the ship carried two shredders and that the source of the stop-burning command might have been him, although he couldn’t remember for sure. He testified that he hadn’t spoken to Harris at any point during the destruction work. Asked to evaluate Harris as an officer, Kell responded, “Nothing outstanding, nothing bad, sir. Just average.” (Kell later asked to revise his testimony, saying he hadn’t known the lieutenant long enough to form a meaningful opinion.)
The spook chief took a beating from the media, too. Time magazine ran a sneering profile, calling Harris the “villain” of the Pueblo story and deriding his physical appearance. “Pale and skinny, he is the antithesis of the recruiting-poster image of a Navy officer,” the article said. “His face has a furtive cast to it, his chin is narrow, and when he takes his glasses off, he has a wide-eyed, rabbity look.” The magazine even used Harris’s looks to imply he was a coward, saying he “gives the appearance of being a timorous man, one who might well lose control under fire.”
In his own testimony, Harris acknowledged the destruction process had been “painfully slow” and “considerably less than efficient.” Part of the problem, he said, was the sheer mass of material. “We went out to sea with what I consider an immense amount of junk on board, which was of no use to us whatsoever,” he told the admirals in one closed session. Harris believed up to nine hours would’ve been needed to get rid of everything—far more time than he and his men had. The reason some CTs didn’t see him in the SOD hut, he explained, was because he’d gone aft to burn papers from a safe outside the captain’s cabin.
Yet Harris insisted that despite the obstacles, he and his men had been very successful, reducing classified documents to “confetti” and electronic equipment “virtually to powder.” By the time the CTs were dragged off the ship, he said, none of their instruments was usable.
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But had the manic destruction effort really been so thorough?
At the time of the sailors’ joyous homecoming, Americans were led to believe the intelligence material that fell into enemy hands wasn’t worth losing much sleep over. “Some of the equipment North Korea seized and some of the documents aboard were secret, but so far as we know they were not regarded as any great loss,” NBC News anchor David Brinkley told his viewers on December 23, 1968. Such a conclusion wasn’t surprising, given how the Johnson administration downplayed the severity of the loss. A National
Security Agency official told Newsweek magazine, for example, that the crew had done “an excellent job” of getting rid of “nearly all the secret gear and papers.”
The truth, however, was that government officials had received a number of confidential reports during 1968 indicating that the communists had gotten their hands on a good deal of valuable paraphernalia.
In May, naval intelligence informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the seizure had caused “the probable compromise of a considerable amount of U.S. classified material.” The CIA reported in August that North Korean divers had “recovered the gear tossed overboard by the Pueblo crew prior to capture.” At a closed-door congressional hearing in September, CIA chief Richard Helms said the North Koreans “have been dismantling the antennas and by now have probably completed their exploitation of the ship’s equipment.”
Ever since the crewmen were debriefed in San Diego, NSA and Navy intelligence specialists had been working to put together a detailed picture of how the Pueblo’s capture affected national security. At Naval Security Group headquarters in Washington, about 75 analysts sifted through the sailors’ voluminous statements in an effort to figure out exactly what codes, code machines, and other material had been compromised.
By late February 1969, the first of several top secret damage assessments was finished. The cumulative conclusion: The actual intelligence loss was far graver than originally believed. (These reports remained secret for many years. At the author’s request, the National Security Agency declassified all or parts of three damage assessments. The declassification took more than seven years.)
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