Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  Of the 539 classified documents and pieces of equipment aboard the ship, up to 80 percent had been compromised, the National Security Agency reported in one assessment. Only 5 percent of the electronic gear had been “destroyed beyond repair or usefulness.” As an NSA historian later wrote of the Pueblo seizure: “It was everyone’s worst nightmare, surpassing in damage anything that had ever happened to the cryptologic community.”

  NSA experts characterized the crew’s stabs at destruction as “highly disorganized” and carried out “in almost total confusion.” Steve Harris was faulted for not drilling his men beforehand. The lieutenant had told his debriefers he was “pretty confused” and “a little bit scared” as his men struggled to tear apart their gear. But instead of directly supervising and helping them, Harris spent his time anxiously overseeing radio transmissions to Kamiseya.

  “I didn’t pay any attention to the emergency destruction,” he said in a startling admission quoted in one damage estimate. “I would like to have, but I felt that there should be no unauthorized information transmitted because this was being watched very closely by high-ranking people.”

  Bucher, too, came in for criticism. Although the captain had tried in Bremerton and Japan to obtain a rapid-destruction system, an NSA report blamed him for not following through and “ensuring that his men knew what to do in an emergency.”

  NSA investigators conducted an experiment to test the effectiveness of the CTs’ adrenaline-fueled attempts to demolish code machines. Hefting sledgehammers and fire axes, they bashed similar encryptors with the same force and frequency described by the CTs. The metal-walled devices were remarkably strong. Tightly wired circuit boards, the NSA team discovered, were largely immune to pounding. Even after being smashed apart, some components could be reassembled in as little as 30 minutes.

  Moreover, the CTs had neglected to get rid of spare parts. The NSA reported it was “highly probable” that communist electronics experts, using spares and scarcely damaged circuit boards, were able to assemble working copies of at least three of the four types of code machines aboard the spy ship. North Korea’s acquisition of the devices was “a major intelligence coup without parallel in modern history,” according to an NSA study written in 1995.

  The CTs had tried to destroy as many operating and maintenance manuals for the code machines as they could. To an enemy specialist, such handbooks could provide important insights into how the encryptors worked, if not partial blueprints for them. But wastebasket fires had consumed few of the manuals and the two slow shredders weren’t even used. Sailors tossed some books into ditch bags and mattress covers, intending to jettison them when the fleeing ship reached the 100-fathom curve. Since it never did, an “undetermined number” of manuals were captured intact, the NSA reported. (One bag was heaved overboard, but the North Koreans retrieved it.) Publications stored outside the SOD hut had been “largely overlooked in the frantic destruction efforts.”

  The damage evaluators had a hard time figuring out precisely what fell into communist clutches because the sailors failed to keep track of what they did burn or tear up. For example, no one was sure what had become of the “key cards”—IBM-style punch cards used to program code machines each day. NSA investigators established that of 36 key card booklets aboard, only two had been fully destroyed. The rest, they were forced to assume, had been compromised.

  It was clear the loss included all code cards for the months of November and December 1967, which the crew should’ve burned within a few weeks of using but hadn’t. These were particularly valuable, because an enemy that had intercepted and taped encrypted messages during those two months could use the captured cards to unscramble them. While the North Koreans probably didn’t have the technical savvy to pull two months of worldwide U.S. radio traffic from the airwaves, the Soviets did.

  Indeed, Moscow seemed to have benefited nicely from the spy-boat debacle. According to NSA sources, the North Koreans arranged for Soviet technicians to examine materials from the Pueblo “immediately after the seizure.” A group of electronic-surveillance specialists from Soviet military intelligence inspected the vessel, and some electronic components were taken back to the USSR for closer study.

  American intelligence officials also were concerned about the possible compromise of about 8,000 messages radioed to Bucher’s ship as part of the Navy’s fleet-wide operational intelligence broadcasts in the Western Pacific. Transmitted from Guam, these so-called GOPI broadcasts carried detailed reports of U.S. air and ground combat in Vietnam, along with results of American intelligence-gathering efforts throughout Southeast Asia.

  Many GOPI messages pertained to electronic monitoring of North Vietnamese air defenses. U.S. eavesdroppers knew, for instance, when enemy jets and antiaircraft missiles were being readied for launch—and swiftly relayed warnings to approaching American bombers to switch on electronic jammers or take evasive action. If the North Vietnamese learned the extent of this penetration, they’d tighten their communications security. That would not only impede U.S. intelligence-collection operations, but it would put aircrews at greater risk.

  As of early 1969, however, no heightened security measures had been detected. Nor had the North Vietnamese gained any noticeable advantage in the war as a result of the Pueblo incident. But the “great danger,” as the NSA’s director, General Marshall Carter, told Congress behind closed doors on March 10, was that the Soviets and Chinese, alerted to the sophistication of American surveillance, would find ways to better protect their secret transmissions.

  NSA investigators discovered, too, that captive CTs had been an unexpectedly bountiful source of information for the North Koreans. CTs had been interrogated as many as 20 times in sessions lasting as long as several hours. While some of them dismissed the North Koreans as “stupid” and unable to grasp technical subtleties, others admitted the communists were highly knowledgeable about electronics and “could not be deceived.”

  The North Koreans had quickly zeroed in on CTs who operated code machines, questioning them extensively. Under the pressure of beatings and fear of beatings, the NSA noted, some young technicians proved to be “more talkative and cooperative than originally imagined.”

  One SOD hut denizen was intensively interrogated about the KW-7, an encryptor widely used by U.S. and NATO forces. The man initially tried to give up as little information as possible, drawing a diagram of the device that lacked detail and contained errors. But the North Korean grilling him pointed out the “mistakes” and demanded a better sketch. When the CT tried to claim he had a poor memory, the communist pulled out a captured maintenance manual and continued to ask on-point questions. The American eventually gave up a full explanation of how and when KW-7 code changes were made; a second CT described the machine’s complicated operating procedures.

  The North Koreans sweated another CT about the KWR-37, which deciphered “fleet broadcast” messages sent to all Navy warships. As the American tried to explain its workings, an impatient interrogator interrupted to say he already understood the basics; he wanted more advanced data. The CT ended up diagramming the machine’s electronic brain, or “logic”—circuits that used algorithms to generate random codes—in great detail. The communists used tidbits extracted from one CT to confirm those coughed up by another, and they didn’t hesitate to clobber anyone they felt wasn’t giving correct information. The NSA believed the CTs’ explanations saved the North Koreans many months of arduous trial and error to figure out how the code machines worked.

  The North Koreans also showed great interest in CTs who intercepted and translated Soviet naval traffic. A North Korean colonel fluent in Russian supervised the questioning of these men. While being debriefed in San Diego, one CT admitted that due to his “terrified condition,” he’d fingered “Russian linguists, intercept operators, and cryptographic personnel” among his shipmates. NSA analysts believed that some CTs, out of shame or fear of possible punishm
ent, hadn’t told their debriefers the whole truth about what classified information they gave up, making an accurate accounting more difficult.

  Yet even with the enormous loss from the Pueblo, U.S. intelligence and military officials didn’t lose faith in the fundamental security of their clandestine communications. For although the North Koreans and Russians might now possess American code machines, they still lacked the codes needed to program them. The ciphers were changed daily as a security precaution. In fact, the NSA designed its encryptors on the assumption that a foreign power would someday steal them or capture them on a battlefield. Thousands of KW-7s, for instance, were then in use by American troops, combat ships, and air squadrons around the globe, not to mention by the armed services of a dozen or more allied nations. By 1969, at least four KW-7s were thought to have been acquired by hostile forces. But as long as the enemy didn’t have the corresponding codes, encrypted messages were believed to be safe.

  —

  Unfortunately, what no one in the cryptographic community knew at the time was that a U.S. Navy radio specialist named John Anthony Walker Jr. recently had begun selling codes to the Soviets. Walker went to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., in late 1967 and offered to sell a broad range of secret documents related to Navy operations. The Soviets quickly accepted. In early January 1968, shortly before the Pueblo hijack, Walker left a package of KW-7 codes for the Russians at a dead drop in the Virginia countryside.

  Walker went on to assemble the most devastatingly effective spy ring in American history, recruiting his son, a communication technician aboard an aircraft carrier; his brother, a retired Navy officer; and his best friend, a fellow Navy radioman, to help him steal sensitive Navy documents.

  The ring remained active for an extraordinary 17 years, until Walker’s ex-wife tipped the FBI and he was arrested in 1985. The damage he inflicted on national security was “incalculable,” according to Robert Hunter, who led the FBI team that finally cornered Walker at a Virginia motel. Thanks to the traitorous radioman, the Russians knew the tactics American aircraft carriers would use in wartime and how to sabotage U.S. spy satellites. He sold the locations of underwater listening devices used to track Soviet subs and information on GI movements in South Vietnam. At the time he was caught, Walker was, incredibly, trying to hand the Soviets authentication codes needed to launch U.S. nuclear missiles.

  Since so many American military units relied on the KW-7, the NSA decided not to replace it despite the Pueblo seizure. Instead, the NSA modified the machine, thinking the changes plus daily code switches would suffice to keep it secure. When the NSA distributed a new technical manual outlining the modifications, Walker sold a copy to the Soviets.

  Walker had a diabolically fruitful partnership with his closest friend, Jerry Whitworth, a mild-mannered chief warrant officer over whom Walker seemed to have Svengali-like influence. Whitworth photographed technical manuals for the KW-7 and KWR-37 and turned the film over to Walker for delivery to the Soviets. Whitworth also took pictures of code lists and technical publications for five other cryptographic systems, providing the Russians with schematics for almost every U.S. code device. “For more than 17 years, Walker enabled your enemies to read your most sensitive military secrets. We knew everything!” Boris Solomatin, chief of the KGB station in Washington, once exulted.

  Cunning and ruthlessly manipulative, Walker also recruited his son Michael and older brother Arthur. (He tried but failed to lure a daughter serving in the Army Signal Corps, where she, too, had access to secret ciphers.) He met his KGB handlers in Vienna, Austria, nearly a dozen times over the years, passing on rolls of microfilm. On one trip he brought along his mother, taking her on a side visit to Italy. On the flight home he persuaded her to wear a money belt containing $24,000 in KGB payoff cash. Unaware of its contents, Walker’s mother wore the belt as she passed through U.S. Customs, where she could’ve been arrested for violating federal currency-control laws.

  Working in communication centers aboard two nuclear subs, and later at Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, Walker stole all manner of valuable material. “A Kmart store has better security than the U.S. Navy,” he later crowed. Facing a routine FBI background check, he forged his own security clearance so agents wouldn’t talk to his hard-drinking wife, Barbara, who knew how he was earning up to $4,000 a month over his $725 salary as a Navy warrant officer. (He subsequently urged the KGB to “eliminate” her.) The Soviets code-named Walker “Agent No. 1” and made him an honorary admiral.

  After Walker was arrested, a high-ranking KGB defector, Vitaly Yurchenko, told his American debriefers that with Walker’s help, his country had deciphered more than one million U.S. military messages. So much information flowed in that a special building had to be constructed in Moscow to house all the analysts needed to process it, he said. “It was the greatest case in KGB history,” asserted Yurchenko. “If there had been a war, we would have won it.”

  In custody Walker vehemently denied that his dealings with the Soviets set the Pueblo capture in motion, and no persuasive evidence has yet surfaced to contradict him. Nearly 30 years after he was exposed, it remains unclear whether the Soviets were able to synthesize the material Walker delivered with whatever they may have gleaned from the Pueblo. But that could be a moot question, since the Walker ring itself supplied the two critical tools—codes and code machine schematics—that may have enabled Moscow to crack America’s elaborate military encryption system.

  —

  The court hearings were taking a visible toll on Bucher. He didn’t look well as he sat at his table, swallowing pills and peering at documents through a magnifying glass. He took frequent drinks of water and occasionally trembled. To one journalist he looked like “a desperate, cornered man.” When he testified, his manner was a little too forceful, a bit irritable, as if he sensed the admirals didn’t believe him. A Navy doctor called a three-day recess to give him a rest.

  Away from the pressures of the courtroom, the captain became his old self. The hunch went out of his shoulders. He was animated and laughed easily. When his crew played flag football against another Navy team, Bucher gave his guys noisy encouragement from the sidelines. In the evenings, he sometimes joined Schumacher, Lacy, and Tim Harris for drinks at the Mexican Village, a loud, lively restaurant and bar on Coronado that attracted crowds of fliers from the North Island Naval Air Station and young women who didn’t mind meeting them.

  The rest of the crew spent little time in court, though they were on 24-hour call as witnesses. Other than keeping their barracks clean, they had no duties. “Like sheep awaiting the slaughter, we innocent peons do nothing but wait our turn in court,” Peter Langenberg wrote to his mother, sarcastically referring to the hearings as “the Great Pueblo War Criminal Trial.”

  To pass the time, the men golfed, went sightseeing, hit bars, and chased women. San Diego businesses were still showering them with freebies; the sailors ate on the cuff everywhere from pizza joints to the best restaurants in town. A group of them glided over San Diego in a Goodyear blimp; others took day trips to Disneyland or Tijuana.

  Charlie Law got married. His wedding was a rowdy blowout held at the Beach Boy, a local bar where he’d met his future wife, a secretary for a landscaping firm, just five weeks earlier. “We were in there yahooin’ and drinkin’ and raisin’ hell, and I saw this good-lookin’ bitch come in one day and went ‘wow’!” Law recollected. He and his bride arrived for the ceremony in a chauffeured limousine, courtesy of a local cab company owner. A popular blues musician, C. C. Jones, entertained the guests, whose ranks included Bucher, Rose, and about 30 Pueblo sailors, as camera crews from three local TV stations recorded the nuptials. Law made his entrance from the men’s room, and he and his new wife later sliced a towering wedding cake. The quartermaster downed so many Velvet Hammers that he couldn’t remember whether his best man made a toast or how he got back to his hotel room. He woke up the next
morning on the floor.

  Harry Iredale spent his time “just partying.” His usual coconspirator was Friar Tuck, with whom he was living in bachelor officer quarters at the naval air station. Their routine was to get up for morning roll call, jump back in the sack for a few more hours of shut-eye, and rise again for lunch. At night they’d hit some nightclubs, have a late dinner, and stay out until closing time. Sometimes they hung out at a topless dance joint called the Body Shop.

  For some crewmen, however, the good times weren’t enough to blot out the self-doubt and remorse.

  The men suspected they’d violated at least some tenets of the Spartan-tough Code of Conduct, which prohibited any cooperation with the enemy. Yet the sailors had confessed to trumped-up espionage charges, written propaganda letters home, taken part in anti-U.S. press conferences, and, on Bucher’s order, signed a group apology to North Korea. When they arrived at Miramar, some of them expected to be marched straight to the brig.

  (They needn’t have worried. Though some of the acts it prohibited could be prosecuted under military law, the code itself had no legal force: It was intended only as a guide. In an official opinion issued a few days after the crew returned home, Navy lawyers said breaking the code carried no criminal penalties.)

  Still, some crewmen harbored doubts about their performance during the attack and in prison, and the court of inquiry exacerbated those feelings. The sailors followed the hearings in local newspapers, and it was obvious that the admirals were none too impressed with the way the crew had dealt with the North Korean gunboats. Snide comments were sometimes aimed their way in bars. At night, sleeping uneasily in their barracks, some sailors let out screams that petrified a young Navy sentry on patrol outside. “I don’t know if they thought I was a North Korean guard or what,” he related, “but I had no trouble staying awake during my watch.” With their haggard appearances and thousand-yard stares, the sentry said, the crewmen reminded him of dazed prisoners he’d seen in old newsreels of newly liberated Nazi concentration camps.