Code Warriors

by Stephen Budiansky

  That changed suddenly in November 1967, when intercepts showed two North Vietnamese divisions on the move simultaneously, both crossing into the South in the area of Khe Sanh, where the U.S. Marines held a key base near the DMZ. Khe Sanh bore an uncomfortable resemblance—at least in the minds of senior American officials—to Dien Bien Phu, where the French army had made its last stand in 1954: it was at the bottom of a bowl surrounded by a ring of hills and guarded routes passing through the central highlands of South Vietnam from Laos and the North. The commander of U.S. forces, General William C. Westmoreland, however, saw a chance for a decisive battle and moved U.S. forces north, even as NSA reports beginning on January 25, 1968, called attention to an “accumulation of SIGINT data” pointing to a “coordinated offensive” throughout South Vietnam, to commence on a simultaneous “D-Day”:

  During the past week, SIGINT has provided evidence of a coordinated attack to occur in the near future in several areas of South Vietnam. While the bulk of SIGINT evidence indicates the most critical areas to be in the northern half of the country, there is some additional evidence that Communist units in Nam Bo may also be involved. The major areas of enemy offensive operations include the Western Highlands, the coastal provinces of Military Region 6, and the Khe Sanh and Hue areas.33

  Nam Bo was the region immediately surrounding Saigon. But Westmoreland, increasingly certain that Khe Sanh and the northern province areas were where the real attack was going to fall—and sure that the Communist military commanders were incapable of such coordinated operations—easily convinced himself that the other movements were diversions. NSA’s reporting quickly followed suit. After that one passing reference to Nam Bo, NSA analysts at Fort Meade never even mentioned the southern provinces again in the subsequent twenty-six reports they issued before the Communist attacks began a week later. In the days immediately leading up to what would become known as the Tet Offensive, only eight provinces in the north and the west central highlands were identified by NSA as places where attacks would occur.34

  A subsequent NSA history tried to blame the lapse on a lack of intercept sites in the southern provinces: “SIGINT cannot report what it does not hear.”35 In fact, ASA had five intercept stations in the immediate Saigon area, supplemented by an airborne DF aviation company, and following that initial January 25 report those stations continued to detect and report indications of possible Communist military operations in the southern area. None of their warnings, however, made it into the NSA reports that went to Westmoreland and the White House.

  It was probably not so much a case of NSA skewing its findings to tell the commanders what they wanted to hear as a matter of focusing on what they knew they were most interested in, Westmoreland having committed himself to a major American military operation in the northern areas. But the effect was the same. The SIGINT reporting reinforced itself; intelligence to the contrary was brushed aside. Captured documents and prisoner interrogations that strongly suggested a major offensive was being planned for the Saigon area and southward were likewise given short shrift in the face of what now appeared to be decisive signals intelligence evidence. NSA’s practice of issuing a blizzard of individual SIGINT reports rather than attempting to synthesize the entire picture further blurred indicators that pointed to a general offensive in the works.

  “Such nuanced indicators as highly unusual long-range moves by [Communist] formations, new command relationships, the extensive references to security concerns, morale and propaganda messages, and the concentration of combat units lost their significance in the welter of other information contained in the reports,” concluded NSA’s historian Robert Hanyok in a critical reappraisal. In a pattern familiar from the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and other similar episodes that had caught by surprise commanders accustomed to assuming that they knew everything the enemy was up to, SIGINT had become “a victim of its own success.”36

  Intelligence historians even had a name for that: “the Ultra Syndrome.” It was exacerbated by the fact that inevitably NSA had edged more and more into the role of performing intelligence analysis even as it had to pretend it was not. The very act of selecting, collating, and reporting translations inherently emphasized certain conclusions and interpretations over others; in many ways it was the worst of both worlds, analysis that concealed the analysis that had taken place; analysis performed by analysts who, as CIA correctly complained, often lacked the experience and means to synthesize all available sources into a complete picture.

  On January 31, 1968, the first day of Vietnam’s celebration of Tet, the lunar new year, eighty-four thousand Communist troops launched attacks against virtually every major population center in South Vietnam. Sixteen provincial capitals in the Mekong Delta south of Saigon were hit, along with nearly one hundred other cities and towns in thirty-eight of the country’s forty-four provinces. Power plants, radio stations, army bases, police offices, and government buildings across the country were struck. In Saigon, five battalions of Communist troops that had slipped into the city singly or in small groups, disguised as peasants or South Vietnamese army soldiers, attacked the presidential palace and the American embassy; it took embassy security forces six and a half hours to regain control of the building.

  The siege of Khe Sanh was real enough, but in fact it was the diversion; it would take seventy-six days, one hundred thousand tons of bombs from B-52s and other U.S. warplanes, and a relief force of thirty thousand troops to lift the siege. Meanwhile, U.S. troops fought desperate battles to retake most of the Mekong Delta and dozens of cities. In the old imperial capital of Hue, American marines endured weeks of fighting straight out of the assaults on the Japanese island redoubts of World War II, employing flamethrowers, grenades, and bayonets in an inch-by-inch struggle. Seventy percent of the city’s homes were in ruins when it was over.37

  That the offensive had failed in purely military terms, with U.S. and South Vietnamese forces losing four thousand killed to considerably higher Communist casualties, and that the mass Communist uprising it was supposed to trigger failed to materialize, was small consolation. The assault on the American embassy in Saigon—which a tone-deaf U.S. spokesman tried to dismiss as “a piddling platoon action”—made a mockery of Westmoreland’s confident assertion just two months earlier that the Communist forces were being whittled down and the war might soon be over.

  By the spring of 1968 the United States had 549,000 troops in Vietnam, and Johnson’s military advisers now were telling him that as many as half a million more would be needed to prevent an American defeat. The war was costing two thousand American lives and $2 billion a month, but it had also taken yet another irreversible toll on America’s credibility abroad, and that of its military and political leaders at home. The utter futility of the entire effort, and the sense that the generals leading the war had no real plan for winning it, seemed to be underscored when after the months of bloody fighting to successfully lift the siege of Khe Sanh, Westmoreland issued a matter of fact announcement that the Marine base there was being “inactivated.”38

  On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced a halt to U.S. bombing above the 20th parallel, the opening of peace negotiations with North Vietnam, and his decision not to seek reelection as president. The war would drag on for another five years until a peace treaty signed on January 27, 1973, gave President Nixon what he declared to be “peace with honor,” but in fact offered little more than North Vietnam’s face-saving concession that it would, in effect, slightly delay its conquest of the South while American troops withdrew. On April 30, 1975, the last South Vietnamese troops defending Saigon surrendered. Late the previous night the last NSA officer still in the country, the Saigon station chief, Tom Glenn, was lifted out of the U.S. embassy compound on one of the helicopters that shuttled back and forth to a fleet of Navy ships assembled just offshore to evacuate the last remaining Americans.39

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  U.S. signals intelligence failures in Vietnam would remain unknown to the public
for decades, but the growing disarray of NSA’s operations burst into public view in a disastrous and humiliating incident that riveted world attention for almost a year in the midst of the fighting in Southeast Asia. On January 16, 1968, two weeks before the start of the Tet Offensive, a small U.S. Navy vessel fighting rough winter seas, bitterly cold weather that each night would leave the deck coated with two inches of solid ice to be laboriously chipped off by the crew the next day, an antiquated steering mechanism of uncertain reliability, a failing heating system, and a generator that had blown up on the voyage in, arrived at the 42nd parallel in the Sea of Japan, just south of Vladivostok and the North Korean–Soviet border.

  The USS Pueblo was neither a happy nor a modern ship. A World War II light transport originally built to ferry supplies between the Pacific islands for the U.S. Army, the Pueblo was one of three similar cargo ships pulled out of mothballs beginning in 1964 and hastily reconverted as floating electronic surveillance platforms. Less than half the length and one-tenth the displacement of the eleven-thousand-ton Oxford-class “Technical Research Ships,” the Pueblo and her sister ships were intended to be a cheap and quick answer to the Russians’ ubiquitous fleet of forty-eight antenna-laden “fishing trawlers” that prowled along American coasts and overseas bases and shadowed U.S. fleet operations: NSA originally hoped to have twenty-five of the small ships available for deployment against targets of interest throughout the world.40

  Even under the best of circumstances, life aboard the 177-foot-long Pueblo could hardly have been very comfortable for its seventy-six men, but adding to the physical discomforts were a captain sourly resentful of his assignment, personal enmities among the officers that left several barely on speaking terms, and a raw and unconfident crew. Lieutenant Commander Lloyd Mark Bucher had spent eleven years in the Navy in single-minded pursuit of his goal of commanding a submarine; being handed the Pueblo was the Navy’s way of telling him he was never going to make it, and that his days as a submariner were over. “The orders came as a painful turning point in my career,” Bucher later frankly admitted, and “dashed the last of my hopes.”

  To his further irritation, he learned that the Naval Security Group contingent that made up nearly half of his crew were not to be under his direct command but rather that of the detachment’s chief, Lieutenant Stephen R. Harris, a Russian linguist and Harvard grad—from whom Bucher had to request assistance, not give orders, whenever he wanted some of Harris’s men to stand watches or make up damage control or firefighting teams. From the start Bucher and his executive officer, Lieutenant Edward R. Murphy, developed a mutual dislike that destroyed any semblance of normal command arrangements and communication, all the more important on a small ship. Bucher sneered at Murphy’s straitlaced “pristine perfection” and abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and even “the stimulant of strong navy coffee,” while Murphy was offended by the captain’s casual inattention to the proprieties of naval dress and professionalism and his attempt to cultivate popularity with subordinates by playing favorites.41

  Though briefed in general terms about the goings-on in the equipment-jammed Special Operations Department, or “SOD hut,” Bucher had no direct involvement in its “mysterious” operations. Only two of the twenty-nine members of the NSG detachment had ever been to sea before. But even their training in their supposed specialty and preparation for the signals-collecting mission was surprisingly deficient. The SOD hut contained multiple intercept positions and equipment racks filled with gear to receive and record radar ELINT, telemetry, teleprinter, manual Morse, and radiotelephone signals, but several of the men had never used the equipment required to search for and detect teleprinter signals; the documentation they had been provided listing North Korean manual Morse call signs and frequencies turned out to be out of date and useless; and the two marine sergeants assigned to the unit as Korean linguists—who boarded the ship just as it left Yokosuka, six days before the start of the mission—made no secret of the fact that they barely knew any Korean at all and were completely unable to translate or even transcribe the small number of intercepted North Korean voice communications that the detachment was able to collect.42

  Bucher had expressed some concerns when the ship was being fitted out about the need to ensure a means for emergency destruction of all the documents and gear in the SOD hut, but he never pressed the point, not wanting to make waves in his first command. He also never bothered to exercise his crew in emergency destruction procedures or the standard “repel boarders” maneuver. On earlier patrols, Russian and Chinese warships had harassed and intimidated the American SIGINT ships; twice they had hoisted a signal with the order “Heave to or I will open fire,” but in the end had let the U.S. ships depart. A Pentagon review considered the risk of the Pueblo’s mission to be minimal, but at the last minute the chief of naval operations ordered that the ship be fitted with two .50-caliber machine guns; installation was completed the day before the Pueblo departed Yokosuka. Disregarding Murphy’s suggestion that the guns be mounted on the port and starboard sections of the superstructure where they were better protected, Bucher ordered them installed on the forward and aft of the main deck. Only one of the crew, a former Army soldier, had fired one before, and the guns themselves proved to be temperamental, requiring ten minutes of fiddling adjustments every time they were used.43

  On the passage north Bucher had kept his ship forty miles off the coast and the SIGINT unit had been able to copy little but a few HF Morse signals. For the return trip, the plan was to steam as close as thirteen miles to pick up VHF and UHF signals, particularly those associated with coastal radars and shore defenses, as well as North Korean air force and naval voice communications. On January 22, 1968, the Pueblo spent most of the day dead in the water fifteen miles east of Wosan, flying a flag declaring that it was conducting “hydrographic operations.” That afternoon two North Korean trawlers made several close passes, once coming as near as thirty yards. Bucher called his Korean “linguists” to come up to the bridge and translate the names of the ships that were painted on their hulls in Korean characters. With the help of a dictionary they finally were able to do so: that was Bucher’s first inkling of how little the two marines actually knew of the language.44

  After standing out to sea for the night, the Pueblo resumed its station off Wosan the next morning. A little before noon a North Korean subchaser was seen coming up fast; it circled the Pueblo and raised a flag signal asking the ship’s nationality, to which Bucher replied with the American ensign. That was when things started to change in a hurry. The North Korean ship signaled with the hoist “Heave to or I will open fire,” and shortly afterward three torpedo boats came speeding toward the Pueblo, a pair of MiGs made a pass at four thousand feet and began to circle the area, then a fourth torpedo boat joined the small armada that was clearly intending to surround and board the American ship: one of the torpedo boats was rigged with fenders, and an armed party crowded in the bows.

  Bucher ordered his ship to make for open sea, which momentarily caught his pursuers off guard, but the PT boats quickly began trying to chivvy him back toward the Korean coast, crisscrossing his bows at twenty-five to thirty-five knots, cutting as close as ten yards. Hoping to avoid giving the North Koreans any excuse to open fire, Bucher ordered the crew not to man the guns or go to general quarters. Harris asked for permission to begin emergency destruction; Bucher denied that request, too, though the crew in the SOD hut by this point just ignored the captain and began to start trying to destroy its gear and papers as best they could.45

  Had the ship’s Korean linguists known Korean, they might well have had an additional eighty minutes to get going on the job, since the subchaser after its first contact had radioed a message in plain language identifying the Pueblo as an American surveillance ship, and even as Bucher was still hoping the North Koreans were bluffing, a radio message from the subchaser was asking for permission to open fire.46 The Pueblo had only one small paper incinerator and two shredders t
hat could each handle six sheets of paper at a time. The SOD hut was equipped with axes and sledgehammers, but the crew found they did not have enough room to swing the tools in the confined space. Most of the blows they did land just seemed to bounce off the equipment, a testament to rugged American engineering. Bucher would later say he had no idea how much material there was to try to dispose of: “There was a just fantastic amount of paper, almost I would say ten times what I would have expected that we would have had on board.”

  At about 1:20 p.m. the subchaser opened fire with its 57mm battery, joined by machine guns from the PT boats. It was quickly apparent that the North Koreans wanted to seize the ship intact, not sink her: they were aiming high, for the bridge, while avoiding the waterline.

  Bucher gave the order now for emergency destruction, but the more important reality was that he was losing control of the entire situation. As the fire from the 57mm guns continued with the subchaser now moving up to point-blank range, the Pueblo’s engineering officer, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Lacy, turned to Bucher and said, “Are you going to stop this goddam ship before we’re all killed?” When Bucher did not reply, Lacy rang the order himself over the annunciator: All stop.