Part 7: Body of Secrets....Spine

CHAPTER EIGHT 

SPINE 

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Despite the trauma of losing a ship and many of its men, neither the NSA nor the Navy learned much; in less than a year more blood would run across gray decks, and another seagoing listening post would be lost. 

Long before the Liberty was attacked, the Navy had become disenchanted with the entire NSA oceangoing program. Navy personnel had become little more than seagoing chauffeurs and hired hands for NSA, permitted to eavesdrop on targets of great interest to the Navy only when doing so could not in any way interfere with the program's primary mission of monitoring NSA's targets. To listen to foreign naval signals, the Navy had to stick its analysts in awkward, antenna-covered mobile vans placed aboard destroyers and destroyer escorts. But doing so meant pulling the ships out of normal service to patrol slowly along distant coasts, rather than taking part in fleet exercises and other activities. It was a highly inefficient operation, combining the minimum collection capability of a crowded steel box with the maximum costs of using a destroyer to cart it around. 

"The Navy was very interested in having a trawler program of their own," said Gene Sheck, formerly a deputy chief within NSA's collection organization, K Group. Sheck managed the mobile platforms, such as the Sigint aircraft, ships, and submarines. "The Navy position pretty clearly was that they wanted a Navy platform controlled by Navy, responsive to Navy kinds of things." The Navy said they needed their own fleet not just for collecting signals intelligence, but also for a wide variety of intelligence activities. A fleet would be useful, they said, for such things  as hydrographic intelligence ,analyzing the salinity of the ocean at various locations, which could enable better tracking of Soviet submarines. 

But NSA was not buying that. "It was totally Sigint," Sheck said. "When they tried to tell us about all this other collection, it consisted of a rope and a bucket, and it pulled water out of the ocean. ... I said, 'You're not going to get away with [this] garbage. The director of NSA is going to have a lot to say about what you do with Sigint platforms.'" 

Nevertheless, despite the NSA's serious misgivings over its loss of control, the Navy began laying out ambitious plans for its own Sigint fleet. "We talked once . . . about having small intelligence gathering ships . . . two hundred of them," said one Navy admiral who was involved. Chosen as the maiden vessel for the Navy's own spy fleet was the U.S.S. Banner (AGER—Auxiliary General Environmental Research— 1), a humble little craft that had spent most of its life bouncing from atoll to atoll in the Mariana Islands and was then on its way back to the United States to retire in mothballs. At 906 tons and 176 feet, the twenty-one year-old ship was a dwarf compared with the 10,680 tons and 455 feet of the Liberty. 

Like a short football player overcompensating for his size, the Banner wasted no time in sailing into harm's way. It was assigned to the Far East, and its first patrol, in 1965, took it within four miles of Siberia's Cape Zavorotny Bay to test the Soviets' reaction to the penetration of their twelve-mile limit. At the time, the United States disputed the U.S.S.R.'s assertion of that limit. As the Banner chugged north toward Siberia, a frigid storm began caking ice forward and on the superstructure. Still closer, and Soviet destroyers and patrol boats began harassment exercises, darting in and out toward the bobbing trawler, sometimes closing to within twenty-five yards before veering away. But as a fresh storm began brewing, the fear of capsizing under the weight of the ice predominated, and the Banner's skipper, Lieutenant Robert P. Bishop, radioed his headquarters in Yokosuka and then swung 180 degrees back toward its base in Japan. Several hours later a reply came through, ordering him back and warning him not to be intimidated. Bishop obeyed and turned back into the storm, but finally gave up after progressing a total of minus two miles over the next twenty-four hours. 

During sixteen missions over the next two years, the Banner became the tough gal on the block, always looking for a fight. And on its patrols off Russia, more often than not it found one. It had been bumped, nearly rammed, buzzed by Soviet MiGs and helicopters, and come under threat of cannon fire. In each case, the Banner managed to wiggle out of the potentially explosive situation. 

Sam Tooma was a civilian oceanographer on the ship who helped maintain the cover story. Employed by the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office, he would take various readings from the ocean during the missions. "We were operating twelve miles at least off the Soviet port of Vladivostok in February," he recalled. "The wind was blowing off the mainland at a ferocious speed. It was sort of raining, sleeting, and God knows what else. ... I wear glasses, and they were coated with ice, as was the rest of my face. It took forever to take a station. I don't know how many times I thought that if Hell were the worst place on earth, then I was in Hell. I have never been more miserable in my whole life as when I was on the deck of the Banner trying to collect oceanographic data. 

"We were constantly being harassed by the Russians," said Tooma, who would frequently discuss with the captain what would happen if the ship were attacked or towed into Vladivostok. "Right now there are aircraft on standby ready to take off if they pull some fool stunt like that," he was told. "Our aircraft would destroy the naval base, including this ship." One March, Tooma was on the bridge when a Soviet ship began heading straight for the Banner. "Some of the watch-standers started to act quite excited and began yelling about the 'crazy Russians,'" he said. "The captain ordered the helmsman to maintain course. According to international rules of the road, we had the right of way. Meanwhile, the distance between them and us was closing quite rapidly. We continued to maintain course, until I thought that we were all doomed. At the last second, the captain ordered the helmsman to go hard right rudder. I'm glad that he didn't wait any longer, because all we got was a glancing blow. We had a fairly nice dent in our port bow." Later Tooma was ordered never to mention the incident. 

Codenamed Operation Clickbeetle, the Banner's signals intelligence missions became almost legendary within the spy world. The reams of intercepts sent back to Washington exceeded expectations and NSA, now the junior partner, asked that the scrappy spy ship try its luck against China and North Korea. The change in assignment was agreed to and the harassment continued. The most serious incident took place in the East China Sea off Shanghai in November 1966, when eleven metal-hulled Chinese trawlers began closing in on the Banner. However, after more than two and a half hours of harassment, Lieutenant Bishop skillfully managed to maneuver away from the danger without accident. "There were some touchy situations," said retired Vice Admiral Edwin B. Hooper. "At times she was harassed by the Chinese and retired. Occasionally the Seventh Fleet had destroyers waiting over the horizon... Banner was highly successful, so successful that Washington then wanted to convert two more. The first of these was the Pueblo." The second would be the USS Palm Beach. 

A sister ship of the Banner, the Pueblo was built in 1944 as a general purpose supply vessel for the U.S. Army. She saw service in the Philippines and later in Korea, retiring from service in 1954, where she remained until summoned back to duty on April 12, 1966. Over the next year and a half she underwent conversion from a forgotten rust bucket into an undercover electronic spy at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, Washington. She was commissioned in May 1967. 

"The Liberty size ships were owned by NSA pretty much and were designed and operated in support of their operations, strictly collection for NSA," said Lieutenant Stephen R. Harris, a Harvard graduate who was selected to run the Sigint operation on the ship. "Pueblo and company were supposed to be more tactical support to the fleet, although I don't think that ever came to be, so we were operating in support of the Navy. However, all the data that we would have gathered went to NSA for their more detailed analysis." Before his assignment to the Pueblo, Harris was assigned to a naval unit at NSA headquarters and also went on hazardous Sigint missions aboard submarines cruising close to hostile shores. 

Chosen to skipper the Pueblo was Lloyd Mark (Pete) Bucher, a Navy commander with a youth as rough as a provocative cruise on the Banner. Bounced from relative to relative, then put out on the street at age seven, he eventually ended up in an orphanage and, finally, at Father Flanagan's Boys Town. Then he dropped out of high school, joined the Navy, and eventually was commissioned after receiving his high school diploma and a degree from the University of Nebraska. A submariner, he had always dreamed of skippering his own sub. Instead, he was put in charge of a spy boat that spent most of its time sailing in circles. 

Adding to the insult, he discovered that a large section of his own ship was only partly under his command. He had to share responsibility for the signals intelligence spaces with NSA and its Naval Security Group. In these spaces, he had to first show Harris, a junior officer, that he had a need to know before he could learn some of the secrets held by his own ship. 

In October 1967, Harris flew to Washington for briefings on the ship by NSA and the Naval Security Group. "The location of the first mission hadn't been decided upon," he said, "but I was sure we were going to do some productive things. So I selected a list of countries which I thought were significant, and went around to various offices at NSA and talked to people about them. North Korea was on my list. I remember feeling, 'Well, we might go there.'" 

Through an agreement between the Navy and NSA, it was decided that the Banner and Pueblo "would do one patrol in response to Navy tasking and then one patrol in response to NSA tasking," said Gene Sheck of K Group. "It was decided that because the Banner . . . had completed a patrol off the Soviet coast, that why don't you guys, Navy, you take the  first patrol of the Pueblo and designate where you want it to go. . . . They, the Navy, determined that the ship ought to operate off North Korea in 1967. And we, NSA, at that particular point in time, had no problem with that." The Pueblos missions would be codenamed Ichthyic, a word that means having the character of a fish. 

A few weeks later, the Pueblo departed the West Coast on the first leg of its journey to Japan, where it was to join the Banner on signals intelligence patrols in the Far East. 

While Harris was walking the long halls at NSA, getting briefings, reading secret documents, and scanning maps, a man with darting eyes was walking quickly up a sidewalk on Sixteenth Street in northwest Washington. A dozen blocks behind him stood the North Portico of the White House. Just before reaching the University Club, he made a quick turn through a black wrought-iron fence that protected a gray turn-of-the-century gothic stone mansion. On the side of the door was a gold plaque bearing the letters "CCCP"—the Russian abbreviation of "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." 

A few minutes later, Yakof Lukashevich, a slender Soviet embassy security officer with stiff, unruly hair, greeted the man. "I want to sell you top secrets," the man impatiently told the Russian. "Valuable military information. I've brought along a sample." With that, he reached into the front pocket of his jacket and handed Lukashevich a top secret NSA keylist for the U.S. military's worldwide KL-47 cipher machine. With it, and the right equipment, the Russians would be able to break one of America's most secret cipher systems. "My name is James," the man said. "James Harper." It was the beginning of a long and profitable relationship. Within weeks Harper would also be selling the Soviets keylists for the KW-7, a cipher system more modern and secret than the KL-47. Over KW-7 passed some of the nation's most valuable information. 

The afternoon was as gray as the Pueblo's wet bow when the ship steamed gently into the Yokosuka Channel. Sailors in midnight-blue pea coats and white Dixie Cup hats raced about in the frigid December wind arranging thick brown lines and shouting instructions as the ship nudged alongside Pier 8 South at Yokosuka Naval Base, just south of Tokyo. After nearly a year of preparation, the Pueblo was now positioned for the start of its first mission. 

Across the Sea of Japan sat its target, North Korea, a mysterious volcano sending out increasingly violent tremors after a decade of lying dormant. Starting in May, teams of heavily armed agents began landing in rear areas of South Korea with orders to test the guerrilla environment. Since September, trains had twice been sabotaged. In October and November there were seven attempts to kill or capture U.S. and South Korean personnel in or near the DMZ. Finally, several ambushes resulted in the death of six American and seven South Korean soldiers. Between January 1 and September 1, 1967, there had been some 360 incidents of all types, compared with 42 for the entire previous year. 

Despite the growing storm clouds, the approval process for the Pueblo's first mission was moving ahead like a chain letter. The outline for the operation was contained in a fat three-ring binder, the Monthly Reconnaissance Schedule for January 1968. Full of classification markings and codewords, it was put together by the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Joint Reconnaissance Center. Inside the black notebook was a menu of all of the next month's technical espionage operations, from U-2 missions over China to patrols by the USNS Muller off Cuba to deep penetrations into Russia's White Sea by the attack submarine USS Scorpion. The Navy had evaluated the Pueblo's mission, a dozen miles off the North Korean coast, as presenting a minimal risk. 

On December 27, at 11:00 in the morning, middle-ranking officials from an alphabet of agencies gathered in the Pentagon's "tank," Room 2E924, to work out any differences concerning the various platforms and their targets. The action officers from the CIA, NSA, DIA, JCS, and other agencies routinely gave their approvals, and the binder—"the size of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue," said one former official—was sent on its way. Two days later, a courier hand-carried it around to the various agencies for final approval. At the Pentagon, Paul H. Nitze, the deputy secretary of defense, signed off on it, and at the White House, the National Security Council's secret 303 Committee, which reviews covert operations, gave the Pueblo mission an okay. There were no comments and no disapprovals. 

But at NSA, one analyst did have some concerns. A retired Navy chief petty officer assigned to B Group, the section that analyzed Sigint from Communist Asia, knew that North Korea had little tolerance for electronic eavesdropping missions. Three years earlier, they had attempted to blast an RB-47 Strato-Spy out of the air while it was flying in international airspace about eighty miles east of the North Korean port of Wonsan. This was the same area where the Pueblo was to loiter—only much closer, about thirteen miles off the coast. 

Codenamed Box Top, the RB-47 flight was a routine Peacetime Airborne Reconnaissance Program (PARPRO) mission. It departed from Yokota Air Base in Japan on April 28, 1965, and headed over the Sea of Japan toward its target area. "We were about six hours into one of those  ho-hum missions on a leg heading toward Wonsan harbor, approximately eighty nautical miles out," recalled one of the Ravens, First Lieutenant George V. Back, "when the hours of boredom suddenly turned into the seconds of terror." Raven One, Air Force Captain Robert C. Winters, intercepted a very weak, unidentifiable airborne intercept (AI) signal that he thought might have come from somewhere off his tail. "At approximately the same time," said Back, "we received a message that there were 'bogies' in the area. Neither the pilot nor the copilot observed any aircraft and we continued the mission." 

A short while later, Back, down in the cramped, windowless Sigint spaces, intercepted a signal from a ground control radar and began recording it. By then the plane was about thirty-five to forty miles off Wonsan Harbor. "Suddenly the aircraft pitched nose down and began losing altitude," he said. "The altimeter was reading about twenty-seven thousand feet and unwinding." 

"They are shooting at us," yelled Henry E. Dubuy, the co-pilot, over the intercom. "We are hit and going down." Back began initiating the ejection process and depressurized the Raven compartment. Next the co-pilot requested permission to fire. "Shoot the bastard down," shouted Lieutenant Colonel Hobart D. Mattison, the pilot, as he made repeated Mayday calls into his radio. He then asked for a heading "to get the hell out of here." 

"By this time," recalled Back, "all hell had broken loose. The pilot had his hands full with the rapidly deteriorating airplane; the co-pilot was trying to shoot the bastards visually; the navigator was trying to give the pilot a heading; the Raven One was dumping chaff, and the second MiG-17 was moving in for his gunnery practice." The two North Korean MiG-17s came in shooting. "There was no warning, ID pass, or intimidation," said Back, "just cannon fire." The planes were too close for the RB-47's fire control radar to lock on to them. 

By now the Strato-Spy was severely wounded. The hydraulic system failed and fire was coming from the aft main tank. Two engines had also been hit, and shrapnel from number three engine exploded into the fuselage. Nevertheless, said Back, "both engines continued to operate but number three vibrated like an old car with no universal joints." 

Dubuy, the co-pilot, fired away at the MiGs but without tracers it was hard to tell where he was shooting. The MiGs would dive down, then quickly bring their nose up and attempt to rake the underside of the plane with cannon fire. Down in the Raven compartment, Robert Winters released a five-second burst of chaff during one of the firing passes, hoping to throw off the MiG's radar. 

Dubuy watched as the MiG nearly disappeared in the chaff cloud before breaking off. Finally the MiGs began taking some fire. One suddenly turned completely vertical and headed toward the sea, nose down. The other MiG headed back toward Wonsan. 

As Colonel Mattison leveled out at 14,000 feet, the plane was still trailing smoke. The aft wheel well bulkhead was blackened and nearly buckled from the heat of the fire, and the aircraft was flying in a nose down attitude because of the loss of the aft main fuel tank. Mattison assured the crew that he had the plane under control but told them to be ready to bail out. Despite the heavy damage, the Strato-Spy made it back to Yokota and hit hard on the runway. 

"We porpoised about eighty feet back into the air where we nearly hit the fire suppression helicopter flying above us," said Back. Once the plane had come to a stop, he added, "we exited, dodging emergency equipment as we headed for the edge of the runway." With that incident and others clearly in mind, the Navy chief in B Group went down to the operation managers in K Group. "This young fellow had a message drafted," said Gene Sheck of K-12, "that said, 'Boy, you people have got to be complete blithering idiots to put that ship off North Korea, because all kinds of bad things are going to happen. Therefore cancel it.' It had very strong [language], not the kind of political message you'd ever get out of the building." An official from K Group therefore rewrote the message, the first warning message Sheck had ever sent out: 

The following information is provided to aid in your assessment of CINCPAC's [Commander-in-Chief, Pacific] estimate of risk: 

1. The North Korean Air Force has been extremely sensitive to peripheral reconnaissance flights in the area since early 1965. (This sensitivity was emphasized on April 28, 1965, when a U.S. Air Force RB-47 was fired on and severely damaged 35 to 40 nautical miles from the coast.) 

2. The North Korean Air Force has assumed an additional role of naval support since late 1966. 

3. The North Korean Navy reacts to any ROK [Republic of Korea] naval vessel or ROK fishing vessel near the North Korean coast line. 

4. Internationally recognized boundaries as they relate to airborne activities are generally not honored by North Korea on the East Coast of North Korea. But there is no [Sigint] evidence of provocative harassing activities by North Korean vessels beyond 12 nautical miles from the coast. 

The above is provided to aid in evaluating the requirements for ship protective measures and is not intended to reflect adversely on CINCPACFLT [Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet] deployment proposal. 

Marshall Carter approved the message and at 10:28 that Friday night it rattled onto a cipher machine at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Signal Office in the Pentagon. There a clerk routed it up to the War Room, where a watch officer sent a copy to the chief of the JCS's Joint Reconnaissance Center, Brigadier General Ralph Steakley. 

"This was the first voyage in which we were having a vessel linger for a long period of time near North Korean waters," Carter recalled. "It therefore was a special mission as we saw it. We knew that she was going to stay in international waters. We had no evidence that the North Koreans at sea had ever interfered with or had any intentions to interfere with a U.S. vessel outside of their acknowledged territorial waters. Nevertheless, our people felt that even though all of this information was already available in intelligence community reports it would be helpful if we summed them up and gave them to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for whatever use they might make of them or assistance in evaluating this particular mission." 

Had NSA wished, it could have called off the entire mission. But because this first Pueblo operation was being run solely by the Navy, officials were reluctant to use their big foot. "NSA has a pretty strong voice," said Sheck. "If NSA had gone out with a message or a position on that book [the monthly reconnaissance schedule] in that time frame, I'm sure the mission probably would not have gone. . . . There have been a few cases where NSA has done that. An airborne mission that might provoke the director of NSA to say, 'We don't want to do that.'... But nobody did that. Even this message is a little wishy-washy, because of the position NSA's in. It was a Navy patrol proposed by Navy people in response to Navy tasking, and we were an outsider saying, 'You really ought to look at that again, guys. If that's what you want, think about it.'" 

On January 2, 1968, after the New Year's holiday, General Steakley found his copy of the warning message when he returned to his office. But rather than immediately bringing it to the attention of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA, and the 303 Committee, which had only a few days earlier approved the mission, he buried it. First he changed its NSA designation from "action"—which would have required someone to actually do something about it—to "information," which basically meant "You might find this interesting." Then, instead of sending it back to the people who had just signed off on the mission, he pushed it routinely on its way to the office of the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, in Hawaii. At CINCPAC headquarters, the message was first confused with the Pueblo approval message, which arrived at about the same time, and then ignored because of the "information" tag. 

An earlier "action" copy had also been sent to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, but because the DIA Signal Office mistakenly attached the wrong designator, it wound up in limbo and was lost for the next month. 

There was still one last chance for NSA's warning message to have an impact. One copy had been passed through back channels to the head of the Naval Security Group in Washington. When Captain Ralph E. Cook saw the "action" priority tag, he assumed that the matter would be debated among senior officials in Hawaii, among them his own representative, Navy Captain Everett B. (Pete) Gladding. Nevertheless, he passed a copy on to Gladding to give him a heads-up. 

With rosy cheeks and a web belt that stretched wide around his middle, Gladding looked more like Santa Claus than an electronic spy. As director of the Naval Security Group, Pacific, he managed a broad range of signals intelligence missions, including those involving the Banner and the Pueblo. Located behind a cipher-locked door on the top floor of the old U.S. Pacific Fleet Headquarters at Pearl Harbor, his offices were close to the World War II code breaking center. And as in the disastrous series of events that led to the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, once again a warning message was lost or ignored and men would be put in peril. Although Gladding later denied ever having received the message, other officers said he did get it. In any case, rather than NSA's warning, the approval with its "minimal risk" advisory was sent from Hawaii to Japan, and the Pueblo made preparations to get under way. 

The highly secret operations order instructed the Pueblo to: 

• Determine the nature and extent of naval activity in the vicinity of North Korean ports of Chongjin, Song in, Mayang Do and Wonsan. 

• Sample electronic environment of East Coast North Korea, with emphasis on intercept/fixing of coastal radars. 

• Intercept and conduct surveillance of Soviet naval units. 

• Determine Korcom [Korean Communist] and Soviet reaction respectively to an overt intelligence collector operating near Korcom periphery and actively conducting surveillance of USSR naval units. 

• Evaluate USS Pueblo's (AGER-2) capabilities as a naval intelligence collection and tactical surveillance ship. 

• Report any deployment of Korcom/Soviet units which may be indicative of pending hostilities or offensive actions against U.S. forces. 

Finally, the order added: "Estimate of risk: Minimal." 

Lieutenant Stephen Harris, in charge of the signals intelligence operation on the ship, was disappointed when he read the Pueblo's operational order a few weeks before departure. "I was very upset when we found out we were going to North Korea," he said, "because we were configured to cruise off the Soviet Union's Kamchatka Peninsula . . . primarily Vladivostok and secondarily Petropavlovsk. That's where we were supposed to be going, and that's where all the training for our guys came from. And then to find out we were going to North Korea, I thought what a waste ... It was our first mission and somebody thought, Well, this will give these guys a chance to learn how to do it. Well, we had all done this before. 

"Supposedly our inventory of intelligence information on North Korea was not very current so they thought, Well, here's a chance to update that. But it just caused no end of trouble for us, I mean even before we got under way, because I had a bunch of Russian linguists on board. We had to get these two Marines from the naval listening post at Kamiseya who, they knew about ten words of Korean [Hongul] between the two of them. . . . They were good guys but they had not been really seasoned in the language and this type of collection." 

"Answer all bells," shouted the officer of the deck. "Single up." In the pilothouse, Boatswain's Mate Second Class Ronald L. Berens held the ship's wheel in his two hands and gently turned it to port. Heavy, low hanging clouds seemed to merge with the gray seas on the morning of January 5, 1968, as the Pueblo slipped away from her berth. Over the loudspeaker came the sounds of a guitar—Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass playing "The Lonely Bull," adopted by Commander Bucher as the ship's theme song. It would be the most prescient act of the entire voyage. As the Pueblo disappeared over the horizon, the North Korean volcano began to erupt. 

One of the Sigint technicians, Earl M. Kisler, later began a long poem: 

Out of Japan on the fifth of Jan. 

The Pueblo came a-steamin'. 

Round Kyushu's toe, past Sasebo, 

You could hear the captain a-screamin', 

"XO!" he said, "Full speed ahead! 

We've got us some spyin' to do! 

Timmy, be sharp!" Then with Charley Law's charts, 

Away like a turtle we flew. 

For several months now, Pyongyang KCNA International had been broadcasting frequent warnings in English about U.S. "espionage boats" penetrating North Korean territorial waters. These messages had been picked up by the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service. "It [the United States] infiltrated scores of armed boats into the waters of our side, east of Chongjin port on the eastern coast to conduct vicious reconnaissance," said one broadcast on November 27. Chongjin was to be one of the Pueblo's key targets. Another report, on November 10, quoted a "confession" by a "spy" caught from one of the boats. "Drawn into the spy ring of the Central Intelligence Agency," he said, "I had long undergone training mainly to infiltrate into the north in the guise of a fisherman." 

As the weeks and months progressed, the warnings grew more belligerent. Often they quoted the accusations of North Korean major general Pak Chung Kuk. "As our side has declared time and again," he said in a report on December 1, "it had no alternative but to detain the ships involved in hostile acts, as a due self-defense step." 

In January, a warning aimed directly at the Pueblo was even quoted in a Japanese newspaper, the Sankei Shimbun: North Korean forces would take action against the Pueblo if it continued to loiter near territorial waters. All of this "open source intelligence" was readily available to NSA and Naval Security Group officials in Hawaii and Japan. 

One day after the Pueblo parked herself little more than a gull's breath outside North Korea's twelve-mile limit, still another warning was issued. "The U.S. imperialist aggressor troops again dispatched from early this morning . . . spy boats disguised as fishing boats into the coastal waters of our side off the eastern coast to perpetrate hostile acts. As long as the U.S. imperialist aggressor troops conduct reconnaissance by sending spy boats, our naval ships will continue to take determined countermeasures." 

The Pueblo had sailed into a spider's web. Late on the evening of January 19, a group of thirty-one North Korean army lieutenants quickly navigated their way through a labyrinth of mines, brush, barbed wire, fences, and other obstacles. They were penetrating the formidable demilitarized zone, a machete like scar that sliced North from South Korea. For weeks they had been training with sixty-pound packs on their backs, mapping the route, and clearing a path. Now, armed with submachine guns, nine-inch daggers, and  grenades that hung from their South Korean army fatigues, they were heading in the direction of Seoul at about six miles an hour. 

At that moment the Pueblo, unaware of the tremors taking place little more than a dozen miles to the west, was sailing slowly south toward Wonsan. After leaving Japan, the ship had been hammered by a fierce winter storm and had taken several dangerous rolls while tacking. By the time she reached her northernmost point, an area where North Korea meets Russia, the weather was so cold that ice covered the ship's deck and superstructure. Wearing the warmest clothing he could find, Seaman Stu Russell ventured on deck to take a look around. 

"Although the seas were calm, the humidity was rising, and as a result, ice was forming on every surface of the ship," he recalled. "Had anyone seen the ship in this condition it would have appeared to be a ghost ship floating on a gray sea." Then Russell turned his attention toward the bleak shoreline. "The world looked black and white with shades of gray," he said. "There was no color to it. The sky was overcast, the sea had a leadlike sheen to it, and the mountains in the distance were black, with a coating of white on their northern flanks . . . . Few if any of us had ever experienced cold such as this, and we were ill prepared for it." 

The heavy ice worried Bucher, and he ordered the crew to begin chipping it away with sledgehammers, picks, whatever they could find. 

From morning til dark, 

A gray Noah's ark, 

We bounced and quivered along. 

But instead of a pair of all animals rare, 

We carried agents, about 83 strong. 

The mercury dropped the further north that we got, 

So cold, frost covered my glasses, 

So cold, ice covered the fo'c'sle and bridge, 

So cold we froze off our asses. 

The Pueblo was hardly bigger than an expensive yacht; space was tight, and within the Sigint area it was at a premium. In addition to the KW-7, one of the most modern cipher machines in the U.S. government, the space held a WLR-1 intercept receiver, an assortment of typewriters, and nearly five hundred pounds of highly secret documents. 

Another hundred pounds were generated during the voyage. About twenty-two weighted and perforated ditching bags were stored on board—not enough to hold all the documents in the event of an emergency. 

For routine destruction of documents at sea, a small incinerator was installed against the smokestack. Since it could only handle about three or four pounds of paper at a time, it was not considered useful for emergency destruction. The ship also had two shredders that could slice an eight inch stack of paper in about fifteen minutes. To destroy equipment, there were sledgehammers and axes in both the Sigint and cipher spaces. 

Because the twenty-eight enlisted Sigint specialists labored mysteriously behind a locked door and seldom socialized with the other members of the crew, friction occasionally developed. 

"We had a crew meeting and we were told that the mission of this ship was none of our business," said one member of the ship's crew, "and we were not to discuss anything about it or speculate about it. And if we went by the operations spaces and the door was open we were to look the other way. And these guys were all prima donnas and they reported to NSA and there was always friction between the guys that had to do the hard work and the Sigint crew." 

On January 20, the warnings of General Pak once again vibrated through the ether. "In the New Year, the U.S. imperialist aggressors continued the criminal act of infiltrating armed vessels and spy bandits, mingled with South Korean fishing boats, into the coastal waters of our side. . . . Major General Pak Chung Kuk strongly demanded that the enemy side take immediate measures for stopping the hostile acts of infiltrating fishing boats including armed vessels and spy boats into the coastal waters of our side." 

The messages, broadcast in English, were repeated ten times in Hongul, the Korean language, creating great public anxiety in North Korea about unidentified ships. But Bucher was never informed of the warnings. 

As Bucher maintained radio silence off the North Korean coast, the clandestine force of North Korean lieutenants dressed as South Korean soldiers reached the outskirts of Seoul. Three hours later they arrived at a checkpoint a mile from the entrance to the Blue House, the residence of South Korean president Park Chung Hee. When questioned by a guard, the lead lieutenant said that his men belonged to a counterintelligence unit and were returning from operations in the mountains. They were allowed to pass, but the guard telephoned his superior to check out the story. Minutes later the night lit up with muzzle flashes and the still air exploded with the sounds of automatic weapons. Through much of the early morning the fighting went on. The guerrillas were massively outnumbered; most were killed and a few surrendered. Had they succeeded, the assassination might have triggered an all-out invasion from the North. The calls for retaliation were quick and strong. 

By noon the next day, January 22, the Pueblo lay dead in calm waters. A short twenty miles to the south and west was Wonsan. 216 On the way to this spot, the ship had begun trolling for signals through its three operational areas, codenamed on the map Pluto, Venus, and Mars. In the Sigint spaces, the technicians, under the command of Stephen Harris, worked twenty-four hours a day in three shifts. But the electronic pickings were slim near two of their key targets, the ports of Chongjin and Songjin. Adding to the problems, the two Hongul linguists weren't fully qualified and some of the equipment had been malfunctioning. As the men fought off boredom, Bucher began thinking the entire mission was going to be a bust. 

Then, as they approached their third key target, Wonsan, the activity suddenly began picking up. Signals were logged, recorded, and (if any words were recognizable) gisted. 

From "Venus" to "Mars," 

Charley shootin' the stars, 

Songjin, Chongjin, and Wonsan, 

The Pueblo a-bobbin', Our receivers a-throbbin', 

Us sly secret agents sailed along. 

If a ship passing by were to see us they'd die. 

"Ha! A harmless and leaky ill craft." 

Our ship may be leaky, 

But by God we 're sneaky, 

In the end we'll have the last laugh. 

Soon the Pueblo had company. A pair of North Korean fishing boats approached, and one made a close circle around the ship. There was no question; they were had. "We were close enough to see the crew looking back at us," recalled Stu Russell, "and they looked upset. On the bridge we could make out what looked like several military personnel who were looking back at us with binoculars. Maybe they were political commissars who kept an eye on the crewmembers to make certain they didn't defect. But this group didn't look like they wanted to defect, they looked like they wanted to eat our livers." 

Bucher ordered photographs taken of the boats and then decided it was time to break radio silence. He drafted a situation report and gave it to his radioman to send out immediately. But because of the Pueblo's weak transmitting power and low antenna, as well as difficult propagation conditions in the Sea of Japan, the message was not going through. 

That night the crew watched Jimmy Stewart in The Flight of the Phoenix, about a group of people stranded in the Sahara Desert after a  plane crash. Others played endless games of poker or read in the berthing compartment. In South Korea, television viewers watched as the one live captive from the failed Blue House raid was paraded on national television—a great humiliation for North Korea. 

Although most of the people of North Korea did not have televisions, their officials at Panmunjom, where northern, southern, and American negotiators met, had access to TVs and witnessed the spectacle. They may have been left with the feeling that one humiliation deserves another. 

The next morning, January 23, a hazy mist obscured the North Korean island of Ung-do, sixteen miles west. Bucher considered it the best place from which to sit and eavesdrop on Wonsan. From there, the sensitive Sigint equipment could pick up some of the more difficult signals as far inland as fifteen miles. About 10:30 A.M., an Elint specialist in the Sigint spaces sat up, adjusted his earphones, and began listening intensely as he studied the green scope in front of him. 

He had just intercepted two radar signals from subchasers although he could not determine their range or bearing. Half an hour later, the ship managed to connect with the Naval Security Group listening post at Kamiseya. Once the right circuit was found, the signal was clear and strong and the situation report was finally sent. Then the ship reverted to radio silence. 

About noon, as the Pueblo was broadcasting to Kamiseya, an intercept operator there began picking up signals from a North Korean subchaser, SC-35. It was the same one that the Elint operator on the Pueblo was following. The captain of the subchaser reported to his base his position, about eighteen miles off the coast and twenty-five miles from Wonsan. That was very close to where the Pueblo sat dead in the water. 

By now Bucher was on the flying bridge, peering through his "big eyes"—twenty-two-inch binoculars. He could see that the fast approaching boat was an SO-1 class subchaser, hull number 35. He could also see that the boat was at general quarters and that its deck guns—a 3-inch cannon and two 57mm gun mounts—were manned and trained on his ship. A quick check through the files indicated that the SO-1 also carried two rocket launchers. 

Bucher ordered flags raised indicating that the Pueblo was engaged in hydrographic research, its cover. But the subchaser just drew closer and began circling the ship at a distance of about 500 yards. On the Pueblo, all hands were ordered to remain below decks to disguise the number of persons on board. 

In North Korea, a shore station reported the contact to higher command. "Subchaser No. 35 has approached a 300-ton vessel which is used for radar operation. ... it is believed the vessel was not armed and that it was an American vessel."

At 12:12, SC-35 signaled the Pueblo, "What nationality?" Bucher ordered the ensign raised and then the hydrographic signal. Next he called the photographer to the bridge to get some shots of the incident and ordered the engines lit off in preparation for some fancy maneuvering if necessary. Despite the worrisome guns pointed his way, he thought that this was simple harassment and decided to report it to Kamiseya. After all, the captain of the Banner had told him about a number of similar incidents. 

"A guy comes steaming back from that kind of thing," said NSA's Gene Sheck, referring to the captain of the Banner, "and he says to the skipper of the Pueblo, 'Lloyd, baby, you got nothing to worry about. They do that every day. They'll come out. They'll harass you. You wave back. You blink a few things at them and they'll go away. Everybody knows that. We knew it. They do it to our reconnaissance, airborne reconnaissance missions. Nobody gets excited about that." But, added Sheck, "Here come these guys—only they weren't playing." 

At 12:20, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Lacy noticed a number of small dots on the horizon, approaching from Wonsan. Through the big eyes, Bucher identified them as three North Korean P-4 motor torpedo boats headed his way. Seven minutes later, on its third swing around the Pueblo, SC-35 hoisted a new signal: "Heave to or I will open fire on you." 

Lieutenant Ed Murphy, the executive officer, again checked the radar and confirmed that the Pueblo was 15.8 miles from the nearest land, North Korea's Ungdo island. Bucher told the signalman to hoist "I am in international waters." 

Down in the Sigint spaces, First Class Petty Officer Don Bailey, who had just transferred to the Pueblo from NSA's USNS Valdez, kept in continuous contact with Kamiseya. "Company outside," he transmitted to the listening post in Japan, then asked them to stand by for a Flash message. Although Bucher had no way of knowing it, as far as the North Koreans were concerned the game was already over. 

At 12:35, the shore station reported that "subchaser has already captured U.S. vessel." About that time, the three torpedo boats had arrived and were taking up positions around the ship while two snub-nosed MiG-21s began menacing from above. Bucher passed the word over the internal communications system to prepare for emergency destruction. He then turned to his engineering officer, Gene Lacy, and asked him how long it would take to scuttle the ship. 

Lacy explained that the Pueblo had four watertight bulkheads. Two of those would have to be opened to the sea. They could be flooded with the ship's fire hoses, but that would take a long time, about three or more hours. A quicker method, Lacy told Bucher, would be to open the cooling water intakes and outlets in the main engine room and cut a hole into the auxiliary engine room from the main engine room. Once this was done, Lacy said, the ship could go down in forty-seven minutes. 

But the problem was that many of the life rafts might be shot up during an attack; without enough life rafts, and with the bitter January water cold enough to kill a person exposed to it in minutes, Bucher gave up on the idea. New flags were going up on one of the torpedo boats: 

"Follow in my wake. I have pilot aboard." Then a boarding party transferred from the SC-35 to one of the torpedo boats, and PT-604 began backing down toward the Pueblo's starboard bow with fenders rigged. Men in helmets with rifles and fixed bayonets stood on the deck. Next came the signal "Heave to or I will open fire." 

Bucher, hoping to somehow extricate the ship, ordered hoisted the signal "Thank you for your consideration. I am departing the area." Bucher knew there was no way his tub could outrun the forty-knot torpedo boats. He considered manning the 50mm machine guns but decided against it, believing it was senseless to send people to certain death. 

He was still hoping to somehow make a "dignified" departure. Yet, with the North Koreans about to board his ship, he still had not ordered emergency destruction down in the Sigint spaces. 

Bucher gave the quartermaster instructions to get under way at one-third speed. As the Pueblo began to move, the torpedo boats began crisscrossing the ship's bow and SC-35 again signaled, "Heave to or I will fire." Bucher ordered the speed increased to two-thirds and then to full speed. SC-35 gave chase, gaining rapidly on Pueblo's stern. To the side, sailors aboard PT-601 uncovered a torpedo tube and trained it on the ship. 

Down in the Sigint spaces, Don Bailey's fingers flew over the keyboard. "They plan to open fire on us now," he sent to Kamiseya. 

SC-35 then instructed all North Korean vessels to clear the area. He said he was going to open fire on the U.S. vessel because it would not comply with North Korean navy instructions. Seconds later the boat let loose with ten to twenty bursts from its 57mm guns. At almost the same moment, the torpedo boats began firing their 30mm machine guns. 

The men in the Sigint spaces threw themselves on the deck. Personnel on the flying bridge dove into the pilothouse for cover. 

About four minutes later, general quarters was finally sounded. But Bucher immediately modified the command, forbidding personnel from going topside. He wished to keep anyone from attempting to man the 50mm guns. 

SC-35 let loose with another burst of heavy machine fire. Most of the rounds were aimed over the ship, but something struck the signal mast. Bucher collapsed with small shrapnel wounds in his ankle and rectum. 

Everyone then hit the deck. "Commence emergency destruction," Bucher ordered. Bailey notified Kamiseya, "We are being boarded. Ship's position 39-25N/127-54.3E. SOS." Over and over he repeated the message. In the Sigint spaces, sailors were destroying documents. Bailey was pleading. "We are holding emergency destruction. We need help. We need support. SOS. Please send assistance." 

It was now 1:31 P.M. In the Sigint spaces, the emergency destruction began slowly and with great confusion. Fires were started in wastepaper baskets in the passageways outside the secure unit. About ten weighted ditching bags were packed with documents and then stacked in the passageways. Using axes and sledgehammers, the cipher equipment was smashed. 

Back at Kamiseya, intercept operators heard the subchaser notify its shore command that he had halted the U.S. ship's escape by firing warning shots. One of the torpedo boats then informed its base that two naval vessels from Wonsan were taking the U.S. ship to some unidentified location. 

By now, U.S. forces in the Pacific were becoming aware of the desperateness of the situation. Flash messages were crisscrossing in the ether. Although some 50,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in South Korea, most near the demilitarized zone, the ongoing war in Vietnam had sapped American airpower in South Korea. The U.S. Air Force had only six Republic F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers in the country. These "Thuds," the largest single-engine, single-seat fighters ever built, were capable of carrying 18,500-pound bombs. 

But at the time, they were armed only with nuclear weapons, to take out targets in China in the event the balloon went up. Removing the nuke-alert packages and replacing them with air-to-ground weapons would take hours. Also on runways in South Korea were  combat-ready South Korean fighters and interceptors that could reach the Pueblo before dark. 

"The Koreans requested from the United States permission to save the Pueblo," said one U.S. Air Force fighter pilot. But the U.S. officer in charge of American and UN forces in South Korea, Army General Charles H. Bonesteel III, refused to allow them to launch. 

He feared the South Korean air force might respond "in excess of that necessary or desired" and thus launch an all-out war, impossible to contain. The next closest aircraft were in Japan, where the U.S. had seventy  eight fighters parked on runways. But because of agreements with the Japanese government prohibiting offensive missions from bases in that country, these were also unavailable on short notice. 

Four hundred and seventy miles south, steaming at twenty-seven knots toward Subic Bay in the Philippines, was the USS Enterprise, the  largest aircraft carrier in the world. On the rolling decks of the nuclear powered flat-top were sixty attack aircraft, including twenty-four F-4B Phantoms capable of Mach 2 speed. But by the time the confused messages regarding the Pueblo reached the carrier, it was too distant for its aircraft to reach the Pueblo before it would arrive in Wonsan. 

That left Okinawa, which was nearly as distant as the Enterprise. Although it was part of Japan, at the time it was also an American protectorate and could be used to launch hostile attacks. 

The island was home to the 18th Tactical Fighter Wing, made up of combat-experienced fighter jocks who had flown numerous missions against targets in Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam. Some wore the famous "100 Missions/North Vietnam" patch on their flight jackets. Others, who had flown across the Red River on missions into the heart of North Vietnam, wore the "River Rats" patch. 

An orange-red flash exploded from the end of a huge J-75 turbojet engine and a deep-throated roar vibrated across Okinawa's Kadena Air Base. The first of a dozen F-105s screeched down the runway. The pilots wanted to fly straight to the Pueblo, attack the North Korean torpedo boats, and then fly to Osan Air Base in South Korea for refueling. But instead they were ordered to refuel first at Osan. 

By now Bucher realized that there was no escape. He considered that any further resistance would result in the needless slaughter of the crew. Depending on how well the destruction was going in the Sigint spaces, he decided, he would offer no more resistance and would surrender the ship. 

At 1:34 P.M. he ordered "All stop" and instructed the signalman to hoist the international signal for "Protest." 

The 57mm fire halted but the 30mm fire continued sporadically. Bucher estimated that he was now about twenty-five miles from the North Korean shore. "We are laying to at present position," Bailey transmitted. "Please send assistance. We are being boarded." 

Bucher left the bridge and ran to his stateroom to check for classified information. Finding nothing revealing the Pueblo's true mission, he handed a few documents and his personal sidearm to someone in the passageway and ordered him to throw them overboard. On his way back, he looked in on the destruction taking place in the Sigint spaces and then headed back to the bridge. 

On SC-35 was the signal, "Follow me. I have pilot on board." Bucher complied and ordered his quartermaster to make a slow, five-degree turn. Bailey notified Kamiseya, "We are being escorted into probably Wonsan." A few minutes later he again pleaded for help: "Are you sending assistance?" 

Kamiseya replied, "Word has gone to all authorities. COMNAVFORJAPAN [Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Japan] is requesting assistance." 

At NSA headquarters near Washington it was the middle of the night when the CRITIC and Flash messages began stuttering from cipher machines. "For ten days," said NSA's Henry Millington, who conducted a highly secret study of the incident, "nobody knew where they were." 

"That happened around two o'clock in the afternoon, Korean time," recalled Gene Sheck of NSA's K Group, "which was like two o'clock in the morning here. I got a call to come to work and I came in and General Morrison was at work." 

At the time, Major General John Morrison was NSA's operations chief. "And General Morrison decided that he was going to be the guy in charge of the Pueblo, whatever problem we had with them. He called all kinds of other people, but Morrison was kind of running the show at that particular time." 

A short time later, Marshall Carter arrived—but he didn't stay long. "You know," he told Morrison, "there's no sense both of us standing here while this thing is trying to work itself out. You stay here, gather all the data, and I'm going to be back in at six-thirty or seven o'clock in the morning." 

In addition to the safety of the crew, one of the chief concerns at NSA through the early-morning hours was whether the North Koreans had been able to capture the Pueblo's cipher material, especially old NSA keylists, which would enable easy deciphering of U.S. material already intercepted. These lists—one per month—explained the daily settings for the cipher machines. Across the top of the eight-by-ten sheets of paper were the words in bold red ink: "TOP SECRET—SPECAT": "Special Category." 

The keylists consisted of instructions on which numbers to set the dozen rotors in the machine on, and other technical details. With these lists and the right equipment, the North Koreans would be able to break the code of every naval unit using the same ciphers. 

From Kamiseya the question went out to the Pueblo. "What keylists do you have left? . . . Please advise what keylists you have left and if it appears that your communications space will be entered." 

At about two o'clock, Bucher suddenly ordered another "All stop" in order to check on the progress of the destruction and to give more time for its completion. But almost immediately SC-35 closed to a range of about 2,000 yards and fired. Upward of 2,000 rounds pounded the ship's thin quarter-inch steel skin. Rapid-fire bursts sent shells into the laundry room, the small-arms locker, the wardroom, and a number of passageways. 

Near the captain's cabin, Fireman Duane Hodges was picking up some papers to destroy when he was thrown to the deck, his leg nearly severed and his intestines torn from his lower abdomen. As he lay dying, blood from his severed arteries washed from one side of the passageway to the other as the ship rolled with the waves. 

Nearby,  Fireman Steven Woelk suddenly felt a burning in his chest and groin from razor-sharp shrapnel. Blood also poured profusely from the thigh of Marine Sergeant Robert Chicca, a linguist. Sprawled across another passageway was Radioman Charles Crandall, jagged shards of hot metal spiking from his leg. 

In order to stop the firing, Bucher ordered full ahead at one-third speed. He then turned the conn over to Lacy and raced down to check on the destruction. Along the way he saw the broken, twisted form of Duane Hodges in the crimson passageway. He pushed open the door to the Sigint spaces and saw some of the men hugging the deck. "Get up and get going!" Bucher shouted. "There's a man with his leg blown off out there." He then saw three large mattress covers overflowing with secret documents. 

Turning to Stephen Harris, he shouted, "Get this stuff out of here." 

Rushing into the cipher spaces, at 2:05 P.M. Bucher dictated a message: 

HAVE 0 KEYLISTS AND THIS ONLY ONE HAVE. HAVE BEEN REQUESTED TO FOLLOW INTO WONSAN. HAVE THREE WOUNDED AND ONE MAN WITH LEG BLOWN OFF. HAVE NOT USED ANY WEAPONS NOR UNCOVERED FIFTY CALIBER MACHINE GUNS. DESTROYING ALL KEYLISTS AND AS MUCH ELEC EQUIPMENT AS POSSIBLE. HOW ABOUT SOME HELP. THESE GUYS MEAN BUSINESS. HAVE SUSTAINED SMALL WOUND IN RECTUM. DO NOT INTEND TO OFFER ANY RESISTANCE. DO NOT KNOW HOW LONG WILL BE ABLE TO HOLD UP CIRCUIT AND DO NOT KNOW IF COMMUNICATIONS SPACES WILL BE ENTERED. 

wo minutes later, Kamiseya replied: 

ROGER WE ARE DOING ALL WE CAN CAPTAIN HERE AND HAVE COMNAVFORJAPAN ON HOT LINE. LAST I GOT WAS AIR FORCE GONNA HELP YOU WITH SOME AIRCRAFT BUT CAN'T REALLY SAY AS COMNAVFORJAPAN COORDINATING WITH I PRESUME KOREA FOR SOME F105. THIS UNOFFICIAL BUT I THINK THAT WILL HAPPEN, BACK TO YOU. 

Back in the pilothouse, Bucher again asked about the possibility of scuttling the ship but once again he was told it could not be done quickly. Down in the Sigint spaces, Don Bailey was at last hearing some encouraging words. Kamiseya was reporting that everyone was turning to, doing everything they could, and "figure by now Air Force got some birds winging your way." 

"Sure hope so," replied Bailey. "We are pretty busy with this destruction right now. Can't see for the smoke. . . . Sure hope someone does something. We are helpless." On shore, concern over the NSA material was growing. At 2:18, Bailey was again asked about the status of the classified material and cipher machines. 

In the choking darkness, Bailey said that the KW-7 and some of the printed circuit boards for the KW-37 and the KG-14 remained. Time was quickly running out and there was no way everything would be destroyed. 

The major problem was Lieutenant Harris's decision to attempt to burn the documents rather than jettison them overboard. This was because the regulations said that jettisoning was not permitted in water less than 600 feet deep, and the Pueblo was then in water little more than 200 feet deep. 

Bucher authorized a message sent saying that destruction would not be complete. In the passageways, technicians built small bonfires of dense cryptographic manuals. Into the inferno went stacks of raw intercept forms covered with row after row of intercepted five-number code groups; keylists classified "Top Secret/Trine"; and NSA "Techins"—technical instructions on how to conduct signals intelligence. 

Supersecret manual after supersecret manual, file drawer after file drawer. But the space was too small, the fires too weak, and the smoke too thick. Ninety percent of the documents would survive. 

Destruction was also on the minds of the North Koreans. About 2:20 one patrol craft instructed another to watch for attempts by U.S. personnel to throw things into the water. SC-55 reported that the U.S. crew was ditching some items and burning others. 

The Koreans then ordered Bucher to come to all stop. Without consulting any of the other officers, Bucher agreed to surrender and allow the boarding party to come aboard. The twin screws spun to a halt, sending large bubbles to the surface. A few minutes later Bailey, hunched over his cipher machine, notified Kamiseya. "Destruction of publications has been ineffective," he wrote. "Suspect several will be compromised." 

Kamiseya then requested a list of what had not been destroyed. Back on deck, Bucher passed the word to lay aft and assist the boarding party. The carbine normally kept on the bridge was thrown overboard. At someone's suggestion, he then notified everyone that the only information they were required to give was name, rank, and serial number. Realizing that he did not have on his officer's cap, Bucher then left the bridge, went to his cabin, where he wrapped his wounded ankle with a sock, put on his cap, and returned to the bridge. 

It would be a dignified surrender. No small arms would be broken out, no machine guns manned, no attempt made to scuttle the ship or destroy the engines. The tarps would never even be removed from the 50 mm machine guns, a process that would have taken about three minutes. 

At 2:32, officers from the North Korean People's Army (KPA), in charge of the attack boats, boarded the Pueblo. "We have been directed to come to all stop," Bailey notified Kamiseya, "and are being boarded at this time." A minute later, he transmitted his last message. "Got four men injured and one critically and going off the air now and destroy this gear. Over." 

Kamiseya answered, "Go ahead," and then asked the ship to transmit in the clear. But there would be no more messages from the Pueblo. Met by Bucher, the boarding party came aboard without resistance. It consisted of two officers and eight to ten enlisted men. All were armed and none spoke English. Accompanied by Bucher, they went to the pilothouse and the bridge, where crewmembers were ordered to the fantail. All hands below decks, said Bucher, were to immediately lay up to the forward well area. The helmsman was then brought back to the wheelhouse to take the helm. 

"Each time the mike was keyed there was a very audible click which preceded whatever was being said," recalled Stu Russell. "Each time that thing was clicked, I was sure that they were giving the order to fire into us. It was possible that no one in the free world, no one in the U.S. military knew we had been captured and that the Koreans might as well kill us then and there and cover the whole thing up." 

For the first time since 1807, when Commodore James Barron gave up the USS Chesapeake after it was bombarded and boarded by the crew of the HMS Leopard off Cape Henry, Virginia, an American naval commander had surrendered his ship in peacetime. 

Back at Kamiseya, intercept operators kept close track of the Pueblo by eavesdropping on the SC-35 and the other escorts as they radioed their positions, about every five minutes, to their shore command in North Korea. About 4:00 P.M., a second boarding party arrived with a senior North Korean colonel and a civilian pilot. 

The pilot relieved the Pueblo's helmsman, who was taken to the forward berthing compartment. Together with Bucher, the colonel inspected the ship. White canvas ditching bags, bursting at the seams with highly classified documents and equipment, still lined the passageway; only one had ever been thrown overboard. 

When Bucher and the North Korean colonel entered the cipher-locked Sigint spaces, a bulging white laundry bag stuffed with documents sat in  the middle of the floor. The WLR-1 intercept receivers were still in their racks; only the faces had been damaged. Also undamaged was perhaps the most secret Sigint document on the ship: NSA's Electronic Order of Battle for the Far East. 

The EOB was a detailed overlay map showing all known Russian, Chinese, and Korean radar sites and transmitters as well as their frequencies and other key details. The information was critical in case of war. Knowing where the radar systems were located and on what frequencies they operated would allow U.S. bombers and fighters to evade, jam, or deceive them through electronic countermeasures. 

Knowing that the United States possessed that information, the various countries might now change the frequencies and other technical parameters, thereby sending the NSA back to square one. 

Within days the document would be on a North Korean desk. "That's guys' lives. That's pilots' lives," said Ralph McClintock, one of the Pueblo's cryptologic technicians, years later. Following the inspection, about 4:30 P.M., Bucher was ordered to sit on the deck outside his cabin. 

At that moment, U.S. Air Force officials were notified by Kamiseya that the Pueblo was now within North Korean waters. All help was called off. 

The F-4s in South Korea had not finished converting to conventional weapons, and the F-105s from Okinawa were still an hour away from their refueling base in South Korea. They were ordered to refuel as scheduled but not to attack. The United States had given up on Bucher and his crew. 

"They were on their own," said NSA's Gene Sheck. "They were literally one hundred percent on their own." At about 8:30 P.M., the Pueblo arrived in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and was tied up at a pier about ten miles northwest of Wonsan. 

Several high-ranking officers from the KPA then came on board to interview Bucher in his cabin. Afterward the crewmembers were blindfolded, had their hands bound, and were led off the ship. A crowd of people who had gathered near the pier shouted and spat at them and then tried to grab them, only to be restrained by guards using rifle butts. They were then put on a bus for the start of the long journey to Pyongyang. 

"We were, it seemed, being guided to the crowd," said Stu Russell. "I was amazed that only a few minutes before, I thought I was scared as much as I could possibly be. I was beyond scared. No, now I was beyond that feeling and entering into emotional arenas that I didn't know existed. My feet and legs were no longer part of my body, they were part of a mechanical system over which I had no control." 

We sailed quiet free until Jan. 23, 

When out of nowhere there came 

Six boats from the west, 

The KPA's best  Six hunters, and Pueblo fair game. 

What a sensation we caused in this nation, 

When caught red-handed that day. 

A slight irritation, quite advanced inflammation, 

In the rectum of the DPRK. 

As the North Koreans were tying the spy ship to the pier in Wonsan, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter was walking to his corner office on the ninth floor of NSA's Headquarters Building. 

Eight-thirty P.M. in Korea on January 23 was 6:30 A.M. in Washington on that same day, fourteen hours earlier. 

There to greet Carter was Air Force Major General John Morrison, his operations chief. He had been at work for hours attempting to make sense of events. Others soon arrived at the director's office for a briefing. 

Among those standing in front of his mahogany desk, near an oversize globe, were Gene Sheck of K Group; Milt Zaslow, chief of B Group; and Louis Tordella. Because the Pueblo was a joint NSA-Navy operation, Carter knew he was going to have a great deal of explaining to do, particularly about why such a risky mission was launched in the first place. 

Then Milt Zaslow, who was responsible for analysis of Sigint from Communist Asia, handed Carter a copy of the earlier warning message that NSA had sent out for action. 

By now most, including Carter, had forgotten about it. "General Carter read it, and then he got up and took what I thought was the greatest political position anybody could take," recalled Sheck. "He said, 'I don't want anybody in this room to call or to bring to anybody's attention the existence of this message. They will find out themselves, and when they do they will be sufficiently embarrassed about the whole situation that I don't have to worry about that and you don't have to worry about that, but I consider that message as kind of saving our ass." 

Following the briefing, NSA officials began planning what to do next. Zaslow argued that they should immediately bring the Banner up from Japan to take the Pueblo's place, only with a destroyer or two for protection. The operation could be accomplished within fifty-seven hours, he said. 

Sigint flights would also be increased south of the demilitarized zone and unmanned drones would be used over North Korea. In addition, President Johnson personally approved the use of the superfast, ultrahigh-flying SR-71 reconnaissance plane to overfly North Korea in an attempt to precisely locate the ship and its crew. 

Another top priority was recovering any highly secret material jettisoned from the Pueblo. 

However, Gene Sheck was totally opposed to now putting the Banner in harm's way after what had happened to the Pueblo. "Our reaction was," he said, "you ought to be careful, Mr. Zaslow, because you know, if they've done that to the Pueblo . . . We would say, 'That's kind of a dumb thing to do.' . . . and there was a lot of argument in the building whether that made sense or not." Eventually it was decided to position the Banner within the safety of a naval task force south of the 38th Parallel. 

Twenty-five miles south of NSA, at the White House, President Lyndon Johnson was secretly planning for war. Within hours of the incident, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his generals were leaning over curled maps, revising America's war plan for North Korea. 

At 10:00 A.M. on the day following the attack, McNamara called a war council to discuss preparations for combat with North Korea. It was to be an enormously secret deliberation. 

"No word of the discussion in the meeting should go beyond this room," everyone was warned. "Our primary objective is to get the men of the Pueblo back," said McNamara. "Return of the ship is a secondary objective." There would be a limited call-up of the reserves. Upwards of 15,000 tons of bombs were to be diverted to the area from the war in Vietnam. 

"There are about 4,100 tons of aircraft ordnance in Korea now," said General Earle G. Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "with about 10,000 more on the way. We need Strike, Bullpup, Walleye, Falcon, Sparrow, and Sidewinder missiles." 

Admiral Moorer said that he could maintain two aircraft carriers off Korea for about six weeks without affecting the war in Vietnam. A plan to mine Wonsan harbor would also be drawn up and nine surveillance/attack submarines would be sent into the area. 

"This could be done completely covertly, and within a week," said Moorer. More naval gunfire support—cruisers and destroyers—could be brought in. A blockade of selected harbors was also a possibility, as were "reprisal" actions against North Korean ships on the high seas. 

The Joint Chiefs recommended moving fifteen B-52 bombers to Okinawa and eleven more to Guam. "We had F-4s lined up wingtip to wingtip," said General Charles Bonesteel, in charge of U.S. and UN forces in Korea, "and if the North Koreans had wished to run the risks and indulge in a five-day war of their own, they could have really provided Time-Life Incorporated with some ghastly sights." 

Known as Operation Combat Fox, what followed became the largest strategic airlift in U.S. Air Force history. More than 8,000 airmen, hundreds of combat-ready aircraft, and millions of pounds of bombs, rockets, ammo, and supplies were flown in. 

Among the options were selective air strikes against North Korea. "Our first action, should we become involved," said the Air Force Chief of Staff, "should be to take out the North Korean air capability." At the same time, according to NSA documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Pentagon began planning still another trumped-up "pretext" war, this time using the Banner to spark a full-scale conflict with Korea. 

"They wanted to provoke the North Koreans into doing something so they could get back at them," said NSA's Sheck. Manned by only a crew of two—a captain and an engineman—the Banner would be sent to the same location the Pueblo was at when it was fired on. Then it would just wait for the torpedo boats to attack. 

"They were going to do that with carriers over the horizon, out of radar range," said Sheck, "and having air cover . . . out of range. And the minute the ship indicated the North Koreans were coming after them, they would then send an alert. That was the signal to launch all the fighters." But, said Sheck, the logistics and the risk to the American prisoners made the idea unfeasible. 

"It took some time to get the carriers over there," he said. "It took time to get the Banner ready for sea, and by then, the reaction of the United States was, Let's cool it, because we don't want to lose the eighty guys and all that sort of thing. So they didn't do that." 

Another proposal, said Sheck, came from the four-star admiral in charge of U.S. forces in the Pacific. "CINCPAC [Commander-in-Chief, Pacific] wanted to go in and tie a lasso on it and pull it out of Wonsan harbor. Literally! He said he'd propose a message that said, 'I will send a fleet of destroyers in with appropriate air cover. I will tie a rope on the goddamn tub and I'll pull it back out.' But some cooler heads at the Pentagon said, 'No, forget that.' " 

On January 26, three days after the Pueblo's capture, an aircraft as black as a moonless night slowly emerged from its steel hangar at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. With stiletto-sharp edges, windscreens like menacing eyes, a skin of rare titanium, and engines pointed like shotgun barrels, the CIA's secret A-12 was at once threatening and otherworldly. 

Beneath the cockpit canopy, dressed in moon boots and space helmet, Frank Murray pushed forward the throttles to the mid-afterburner position. Fuel shot into the engines at the rate of 80,000 pounds per hour and fireballs exploded from the rear of the shotgun barrels. 

In the distance, a flock of birds flapped for safety. Looking at his control panel, Murray saw that he had reached decision speed and all was go. Ten seconds later he pulled gently back on the stick and the A-12's long nose rose ten degrees above the horizon. 

Murray was on his way to find the Pueblo. By January 1968, CIA pilot Frank Murray was a veteran of numerous overflights of North Vietnam. But following the capture of the Pueblo, he was ordered to make the first A-12 overflight of North Korea. 

An attempt had been made the day before but a malfunction on the aircraft had forced him to abort shortly after takeoff. Following takeoff on January 25,  Murray air-refueled over the Sea of Japan and then pointed the plane's sharp titanium nose at the North Korean coast. 

"My first pass started off near Vladivostok," he recalled. "Then with the camera on I flew down the east coast of North Korea where we thought the boat was. As I approached Wonsan I could see the Pueblo through my view sight. The harbor was all iced up except at the very entrance and there she was, sitting off to the right of the main entrance. I continued to the border with South Korea, completed a 180-degree turn, and flew back over North Korea. I made four passes, photographing the whole of North Korea from the DMZ to the Yalu border. As far as I knew, I was undetected throughout the flight." (Actually, NSA Sigint reports indicated that Chinese radar did detect the A-12 and passed the intelligence to North Korea. No action was taken, no doubt because of the plane's speed, over Mach 3, and its altitude, 80,000 feet.)2 

2 On May 8, while the Pueblo crew was imprisoned near Pyongyang, CIA pilot Jack Layton flew another A-12 mission over North Korea. (Although he did not know it, this was to be the last operational flight of the CIA's prize A-12. The fleet of the spy planes was to be scrapped for a newer, two-seat version being built for the Air Force, the SR-71.) 

Murray's film was quickly flown to Yokota Air Base in Japan, where analysts determined that North Korea was not building up its forces for any further attacks. 

Shortly after the January 26 A-12 mission, another set of spies made preparations for the waters off North Korea. They would travel via the opposite route: under the sea. 

Navy Chief Warrant Officer Harry O. Rakfeldt, a career cryptologic officer, and three other Sigint technicians based at Kamiseya were ordered to report to the USS Volador, a diesel powered attack submarine then docked at Yokosuka. 

"Our mission was to support the captain with special intelligence received from Kamiseya," said Rakfeldt, "and intelligence we might obtain on our own." The sub was part of the Navy's buildup in the days following the attack, to put subs in place to locate Soviet submarines should war begin with North Korea. 

On January 31, the Volador’s loud Klaxon sounded twice, the hatch was slammed shut, and the sub slipped beneath the waves to periscope depth. Sailing north, the Volador quietly crept into the crowded Tsugaru Strait separating the main island of Honshu from the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, and entered the Sea of Japan during daylight. 

"We entered the Sea of Japan covertly," said Rakfeldt, "the first challenge. A current runs from the Sea of Japan to the Pacific Ocean and there is a lot of surface traffic in the strait." 

The Volador’s operational area consisted of a 10,800-square-mile stretch of water in the middle of the Sea of Japan; for a while, it seemed the mission would be fairly routine. Its first priority was to locate the Russian subs before being discovered itself. 

Every night the Volador had to come up to periscope depth and raise its hydraulic breathing tubes, like chimney tops, above the surface of the sea. That evening, the sub discovered company nearby. Sitting in front of a round green screen, the sonarman watched the deep sea as a plane's navigator scanned the sky. Gradually he began noticing a pinging in his earphones, coming from the Volador's passive sonar. 

It was a Soviet sub that had surfaced. Despite the darkness, the Volador's captain decided to maneuver close enough to be able to read the hull number and identify the sub. Closer and closer he edged the Volador, quietly heading directly toward the Russian boat, broadside. 

"Damn it, it's turning on us," the captain shouted as the Soviets suddenly embarked on a collision course. 

"Dive!" 

The hatch to the conn was quickly closed, sealing Rakfeldt and other officers off from the rest of the boat. They avoided a crash by diving under the Russian sub. 

"It was a close one," said Rakfeldt. "We did it without being detected." Later, as the Volador was snorkeling, the tables were turned. "We were found by a Soviet sub," said Rakfeldt. 

Once again the sonarman heard the distinctive metallic pinging of a Russian boat. The captain began maneuvers to determine if the Volador had been detected. "It was confirmed that the sub was tracking us," said Rakfeldt. "What evolved was a hide-and-seek operation." 

To keep as quiet and invisible as possible, all operations were kept to a minimum and the snorkel was retracted. "It took many hours but it worked, as the Soviet sub was finally detected snorkeling," Rakfeldt recalled. "We then became the hunter and maintained covert contact on the sub for a period before it moved out of our area of operations." But now another problem developed. 

After the long period of deliberate inactivity, one of the diesel engines refused to start because the oil had become too cold. Finally, after hours of work, the chief in the engine room jury-rigged a temporary pipe system connecting the oil supplies for the two engines. 

"It wasn't pretty," said Rakfeldt. "The temporary piping was suspended overhead." By circulating the cold oil from the dead engine into the working engine, the chief was able to warm it up enough to restart the dead engine, and the crew sailed back to Yokohama without further incident. 

Following a bus and train ride to Pyongyang, Bucher and his crew were locked in a worn brick building known as the "barn." Dark and foreboding, it had hundred-foot-long corridors; bare bulbs hung from the ceilings. 

From the moment they arrived, they were regularly beaten, tortured, and threatened with death if they did not confess their espionage. 

To Pyongyang we were taken, 

All comforts forsaken, 

When into the "barn " we were led. 

All set for the winter, 

Cords of bread you could splinter, 

A rat ate my turnips, now he's dead. . . . . 

"What's your status?! Your function?! 

Could it be in conjunction 

With spying on our sovereign territory?!" 

Said the captain, "Goddamn! I'm a peace-loving 

man, Same as you and your crummy authorities!" 

In the meantime, the KPA removed the papers and equipment from the Pueblo, and the highly secret information was shared with the Russians. 

Major General Oleg Kalugin was deputy chief of the KGB station at the Soviet embassy in Washington. "The KGB did not plan to capture the Pueblo," he said. "The KGB was not aware of the Pueblo's capture until the Koreans informed the Soviets. So the Soviets were taken unaware. But they were very interested because they knew that it was a spy ship. And in fact, the Koreans managed to capture a lot of classified material aboard the ship. They also picked up the code machines. They picked up the keylists. . . . And this, of course, for the Soviets, had very great operational importance." 

The North Koreans, said Kalugin, permitted the Soviets to go over what they found. "The Soviets had been allowed to inspect the captured material because they were the only ones who knew how to handle this stuff. They knew how to make use of it. 

I know the code machines, KW-7, [were] supposedly smashed by the crew of the Pueblo. But," said Kalugin, laughing, "I think that was probably not quite that." According to Kalugin, nothing is more valuable than cryptographic material. 

"The ciphers and codes are considered the most important piece of intelligence because they provide you authentic material on the problems and events which are of interest. . . . When you pick up a cable and you decipher it, you break the code, you read the genuine stuff, it's no rumor." 

But while the Russians received a KW-7 cipher machine from the Pueblo, it and the keylists were useless: the minute NSA learned the ship had been captured, they changed the keylists throughout the Navy and also slightly modified the KW-7. 

What NSA didn't know, however, was that among the recipients of the new keylists and the technical changes for the cipher machine was the Kremlin. 

Since that chilly October day in 1967, when James Harper had walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington, the Russians had had a key piece of the puzzle: "James Harper" was actually John Walker, a U.S. Navy communications specialist. From him they would regularly receive top secret NSA keylists and technical modifications for the cipher equipment. 

The Soviet agent who ran Walker was Major General Boris A. Solomatin, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking KGB chief of station in Washington from 1965 to 1968. As Oleg Kalugin's boss, he was considered "perhaps the best operative the KGB ever produced," according to one high-ranking FBI counterintelligence official. "Walker showed us monthly keylists for one of your military cipher machines," said Solomatin, now retired. 

"This was extraordinary. . . . Walker was offering us ciphers, which are the most important aspect of intelligence. . . . For more than seventeen years, Walker enabled your enemies to read your most sensitive military secrets. We knew everything. There has never been a security breach of this magnitude and length in the history of espionage. Seventeen years we were able to read your cables!" 

Supplied with the keylists since October 1967, all the KGB needed was an actual working machine. The capture of the Pueblo answered their wishes. 

"So John Walker's information, on top of Pueblo," Kalugin said, "definitely provided the Soviets with the final solutions to whatever technical problems they may have had at the time. And I think this combination of two really brought about, you know, tremendous results for the Soviet side. . . . We certainly made use of the equipment from the Pueblo." 

In addition to the KW-7, the North Koreans also salvaged two other valuable cipher machines from the Pueblo—the KW-37 and the KG-14— and turned them over to the Russians. 

One member of John Walker's spy ring, Jerry Whitworth, was later stationed at the U.S. Navy base on the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. There he had access to the KW-37, the KG-14, and other cipher machines and sold key materials for them to the Russians. 

It is hard to overestimate the value of the Soviet code break. "Using the keylists provided by John Walker," Kalugin said, "We read all cryptographic traffic between the United States Naval Headquarters and the Navy across the world. ... So by keeping control of the movement of U.S. nuclear submarines, by controlling the coded traffic between the Navy and the units in the open seas, we could really protect our country's security. ... I think this was the greatest achievement of Soviet  intelligence at the time of the Cold War." 

In March, the crew of the Pueblo was moved to a newer detention facility outside Pyongyang, and the physical mistreatment became less frequent and less severe. 

Three months later, a number of the Sigint technicians were interrogated about cipher equipment by officials with obvious knowledge of the subject. In some instances, classified information was passed on and block diagrams and explanations of the KW-37 and KG-14 cipher machines were provided. 

In the end, despite the thirst for retaliation back in Washington, diplomacy won out over military action in the efforts to gain the release of the Pueblo crew. But for nearly a year the cumbersome talks dragged on. 

"Americans were shocked at President Lyndon Johnson's inability to 'free our boys,'" said William Taylor, Jr., of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Coming on top of repeated disasters in the Vietnam War, congressional opposition to Johnson grew rapidly. This was the beginning of the end of a failed presidency." Two months after the capture, on March 30, 1968, Johnson stunned the nation when he announced that he would not run for a second term. 

By the fall of 1968, the Pueblo had become a hot political issue. Richard Nixon, running for the presidency against Vice President Hubert Humphrey, pounded on a podium and called for revenge. "When a fourth-rate military power like North Korea will seize an American naval vessel on the high seas," he said, "it's time for new leadership." 

On December 23, 1968, Major General Gilbert Woodward, the American representative to the Military Armistice Commission in Panmunjom, signed a North Korean—prepared apology admitting to the espionage and the intrusion. However, before it was signed, Woodward denounced the papers as false. "I will sign the document," he said, "to free the crew and only free the crew." Nevertheless, the North Koreans accepted the fig leaf, and later that day all the Pueblo crewmen—along with the body of Duane Hodges—crossed the bridge linking North and South Korea. It had been exactly eleven months since the ordeal began. 

Imprisoned [eleven] months, 

A grand collection of lumps 

We've gathered since 

the dawn of detention. 

But do you think we're resentful? 

Hell no! We're repentful! 

How repentful it's safer not to mention.

Following the crew's release, a Navy court of inquiry was harshly critical of Bucher's performance during the crisis. He was accused of not recognizing in time the serious threat to his ship. "A determination to resist seizure was never developed in Pueblo prior to or during the incident," it said. 

"Commander Bucher had the responsibility for developing the best defensive capability possible in his ship utilizing all weapons and personnel available. This he did not do." 

He was also severely criticized for giving up his ship and its secrets. "He should have persisted—increased speed, zigzagged, and maneuvered radically. No boarding party could have come aboard had the ship so maneuvered. In view of the absence of fire or flooding and few minor casualties at the time the Commanding Officer made the fatal decision to stop and follow the SO-1 into Wonsan, his ship was fully operational. . . . He should have realized that the greatest service to his country could have been performed by denying to a foreign government classified material and personnel with knowledge of sensitive information on board." 

Finally, the court said, "He decided to surrender his ship when it was completely operational without offering any resistance. He just didn't try—this was his greatest fault. . . . He made no apparent effort to resist seizure of his ship. He permitted his ship to be boarded and searched while he still had the power to resist." 

On the other hand, the court gave Bucher high marks for the way he held the crew together and kept up their morale while in custody "in a superior manner." 

The court also had harsh words for Lieutenant Stephen Harris, the head of the Sigint operation on the ship, with regard to his ineffective destruction of the classified material in the spaces. It was estimated that only about 10 percent of the material within the Sigint area was actually destroyed. 

In light of that record, the court concluded, Harris "failed completely in the execution of emergency destruction of classified material." 

Finally, the court found the conduct of most of the crew, and the Sigint personnel in particular, was greatly lacking. "With few exceptions the performance of the men was unimpressive. Notably the performance of the Sigint personnel in executing emergency destruction was uncoordinated, disappointing and ineffective. A general description of the crew of the Pueblo might be summarized by noting that in most instances CPOs chief petty officers and petty officers simply did not rise to the occasion and take charge as the emergency demanded." 

The court recommended that Bucher and Harris be court-martialed. But the crusty admirals on the court had been reading too many biographies of John Paul Jones when they should have been watching Mission Impossible, No one, especially in peacetime, is required to  commit either suicide or murder. 

The prosecutable offense should have been ordering anyone out on the open deck as a fleet of torpedo boats fired 3-inch shells at anything that moved. It would have taken a sailor between five and ten minutes just to undo the gun's cover, unlock the ammunition locker, and load the weapon. He would have been dead before he even reached the gun. 

And as a spy ship the Pueblo was supposed to maintain its cover as long as possible, not go to general quarters every time a foreign ship came by for a look. 

"You're surrounded," said NSA's Gene Sheck. "You're literally surrounded. You've got to make a judgment. Do I lose all eighty-one guys? Those days of John Paul Jones, as far as I'm concerned, are long gone. While the Navy shudders and shakes at the thought that somebody surrendered a Navy ship, I don't think he had any choice. . . . You can imagine that thing being surrounded by all these gunboats out there and patrol boats and these guys just pulled right up to them and just literally climbed on board. They had nothing to fight back with. One .50-caliber machine gun, a couple of small guns, maybe a rifle or two, I don't know. But nothing that made sense." 

Those who should have been court-martialed instead were the deskbound Naval Security Group officers at Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Hawaii who planned the operation so carelessly. 

First they paid no attention to either the NSA warning message or the mounting North Korean threats—in English—against "U.S. spy ships" sailing off its eastern coast. 

Then they sent a bathtub-sized boat on its way lined bulkhead to bulkhead with unnecessary documents and a destruction system consisting of matches, wastebaskets, and hammers. Finally, they made no emergency plan should the ship come under attack. 

Said Sheck: "Folks out there said, Ain't no NSA bunch of guys going to tell us what not to do. And besides that, who's going to capture one of our Navy combat ships?' " General Charles Bonesteel, who was in charge of both U.S. and UN forces in Korea at the time of the incident, said Bucher had no choice but to give up his ship. 

"They had total incapacity to do anything except die like heroes, and they couldn't have even done that. The North Koreans would have taken the damned ship," he said. "I think they probably did about all they could do under the circumstances." 

Those who were at fault, said Bonesteel, were the Naval Security Group planners in Washington and Hawaii. "The degree of risk was totally unnecessary," he said. "Now, I wanted intelligence. I didn't have any damned intelligence, real intelligence, that could provide early warnings against a surprise action from the North. But we didn't need it in superfluous Comint. This was the intelligence wagging the dog. . . 

North Korea wasn't a very serious threat to the continental U.S. . . . North Korea had made it very plain that this was an area they didn't want bothered. Sitting around there for several days relying on international law of territorial waters was just asking for it. 

I don't think this was very much of a planned action on the part of the North Koreans. I think our actions were just so blatant and obvious that they just couldn't resist the temptation. . . . 

The people who were responsible were totally out of touch with what the situation was in North Korea." 

In the end, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral John J. Hyland, approved letters of reprimand instead of court-martials for Bucher and Harris. 

Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee then declared, "They have suffered enough," and dropped all charges against Bucher and Harris. 

"The Pueblo incident, I think, was one of the remarkable episodes of the Cold War," said the KGB's Kalugin. "It was remarkable not only because it allowed the North Koreans and the Soviets to get hold of the . . . highly classified equipment and cryptographic material. It was also important because it allowed the Soviets and North Koreans and the Chinese to play this propaganda game. . . . great propaganda value."

The Pueblo is still in the hands of the North Koreans. They keep it as a symbol of American interference, American arrogance, and a symbol of American defeat of sorts. For them it's a symbol of North Korean ability to deal with the greatest power in the world. . . . 

Then North Korean President Kim Il Sung raised his own stature to a level unthinkable before. He challenged the United States. He kept Americans in prison. He kept the Pueblo in the hands of the North Koreans and never let it go." 

By 2001 the Pueblo had been moved to a pier on the Taedong River, which flows through Pyongyang, and opened to tourists. Visitors hear from two North Korean sailors who took part in the capture and watch a video recording of the incident. Nevertheless, for some former senior NSA, officials, the Pueblo's last battle is not yet over. 

Led by a former NSA contractor who installed much of the ship's Sigint equipment, they were angry that the United States did not grab the Pueblo back as it was moved, past South Korea, from one side of the country to the other. They also quietly pressured the Clinton administration to seek the return of the freshly painted and battlescarred ship. "The sooner, the better!" agreed retired Navy Commander Lloyd Bucher.  

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