Act of War Read online

  NAL Caliber

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by NAL Caliber, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  First Printing, December 2013

  Copyright © Jack Cheevers, 2013

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  NAL CALIBER and the “C” logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Cheevers, Jack.

  Act of war: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the capture of the spy ship Pueblo/Jack Cheevers.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63864-4

  1. Pueblo Incident, 1968. 2. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908–1973. 3. Korea (North)—Foreign relations—United States. 4. United States—Foreign relations—Korea (North) I. Title.

  VB230.C44 2013

  359.3'4320973—dc23 2013021620

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Version_1

  For my mother and father

  Regina A. Cheevers

  1927–1957

  John S. Cheevers

  1918–2003

  and for my grandmother

  Mary A. Cheevers

  1893–1972

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 SPIES AHOY

  CHAPTER 2 DON’T START A WAR OUT THERE, CAPTAIN

  CHAPTER 3 ALONG A DREAD COAST

  CHAPTER 4 SOS SOS SOS

  CHAPTER 5 WE WILL NOW BEGIN TO SHOOT YOUR CREW

  CHAPTER 6 A MINEFIELD OF UNKNOWNS

  CHAPTER 7 SUICIDE IN A BUCKET

  CHAPTER 8 AT THE MAD HATTER’S TEA PARTY

  CHAPTER 9 THE ENDURANCE OF MEN

  CHAPTER 10 ALLIES AT ODDS

  CHAPTER 11 SUMMER OF DEFIANCE

  CHAPTER 12 AN UNAPOLOGETIC APOLOGY

  CHAPTER 13 HELL WEEK

  CHAPTER 14 BRIDGE OF NO RETURN

  CHAPTER 15 A CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR THE NATION

  CHAPTER 16 BUCHER’S GETHSEMANE

  CHAPTER 17 EVERYONE’S WORST NIGHTMARE

  CHAPTER 18 BALM OF MERCY

  CHAPTER 19 A DAY IN THE SUN

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ENDNOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  You can’t understand command till you’ve had it. It’s the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world. It’s a nightmare, unless you’re an ox. You’re forever teetering along a tiny path of correct decisions and good luck that meanders through an infinite gloom of possible mistakes. At any moment you can commit a hundred manslaughters.

  —The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

  It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

  —Napoleon Bonaparte

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I came across the Pueblo story one Saturday morning while scrounging for something to read at my neighborhood coffeehouse in Venice, California. The place sold used books along with the java, and for a dollar I bought a well-thumbed copy of a 1970 memoir by the Pueblo’s captain, Lloyd M. Bucher. I took it home, thinking I’d read a chapter or two before getting into my weekend routine. Instead, I spent the rest of that day and all of the next utterly engrossed in Bucher: My Story.

  Later I called the long-retired skipper at his home in Poway, California, and asked whether I could interview him. He consented and over the next few years we met a half dozen times, talking for up to eight hours at a stretch. At the end of these sessions I often took Bucher and his wife out to dinner, where he continued to regale me with vivid anecdotes about his rough childhood, Navy career, and Pueblo experiences.

  I conducted multiple in-depth interviews with six other former crewmen whom I wanted to highlight in this narrative. Some of the most enjoyable talks were with Charlie Law, the bass-voiced former quartermaster who’d lost all but his peripheral vision as a result of malnutrition in North Korean prisons. I met him several times for breakfast on a hotel patio overlooking San Diego’s sparkling Mission Bay. In spite of his badly damaged eyesight, Law never failed to spot a pretty woman passing by on her way to the beach.

  In all, I interviewed more than 50 people, including onetime members of President Johnson’s administration; the Air Force general who tried desperately to rescue the spy ship when it came under attack; and the lawyer who led the Navy’s controversial public inquiry into the Pueblo disaster. With the help of the indispensable Freedom of Information Act, I obtained more than 11,000 pages of once-secret Central Intelligence Agency reports, military messages, transcripts of closed-door Navy hearings, and summaries of State Department negotiations with North Korea.

  Through a little-known procedure called mandatory declassification review, I got hold of a CIA psychological profile of Bucher as well as National Security Agency studies of how severely the loss of the Pueblo and its large trove of classified materials compromised national security. (The NSA doesn’t let such information out of its grasp easily; these secret “damage assessments” took more than seven years to acquire.) I also have drawn on archival material from the United States, South Korea, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.

  One important question I haven’t been able to answer is exactly what motivated North Korea to seize the Pueblo. Bucher believed that the communists mistook his vessel for a South Korean ship. But declassified transcripts of National Security Agency radio intercepts show that Pyongyang’s gunboat commanders knew the spy craft was American before they opened fire on it. My speculation is that North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to harass and humiliate the United States, while simultaneously diverting its attention and military resources from the Vietnam War. Kim had long urged other socialist nations to do anything they could to injure his capitalist archenemy and, to back up his words, had sent a handful of his pilots to fly combat jets for North Vietnam. I wrote to Kim Il Sung’s son, Kim Jong Il, requesting an interview, and North Korean officials at first showed some interest in granting it, but then apparently changed their minds.

  Any book is, of course, the child of its author, but this one was born and raised with the help of many people. In particular I’d like to thank Doris M. Lama, a Freedom of Information officer for the Navy who steered me to a large batch of Pueblo records early in my research; Stuart Culy, who provided box upon box of key documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; and William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Overs
ight Office in Washington, D.C., who worked diligently over several years to help declassify revealing documents from the CIA and the National Security Agency. My researcher in South Korea, Hyunjung Lee, dug up useful material from the South Korean foreign ministry archives and South Korean newspapers. Senior archivist Rebecca Greenwell and others at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, assisted me in declassifying scores of documents that had been locked in the library’s files, unavailable to the public, for years.

  Former Pueblo crewmen Jim Kell, Peter Langenberg, Tom Massie, and Skip Schumacher were unstintingly generous with their time and memories, as was Harry Iredale, a civilian oceanographer aboard the spy ship. E. Miles Harvey and Captain William R. Newsome, U.S. Navy, retired, gave me many details and much insight into the Navy court of inquiry that investigated the Pueblo fiasco. Lieutenant Commander Allen Hemphill, U.S. Navy, retired, helped me understand the risks and excitement of being a Navy submariner in the 1950s and 1960s. My editor at New American Library, Brent Howard, is nothing short of amazing. (My gratitude also to my previous editor, Stephen Power, who helped make the manuscript tighter and more focused when it was at John Wiley & Sons.) My agent, Mel Berger, of William Morris Endeavor, provided wise and timely counsel throughout long years of research and writing. And William D. Cohill, of Orrtanna, Pennsylvania, reminded me of the power and grace of an unexpected kindness.

  I’m deeply indebted to the fine work of several journalists who preceded me on the Pueblo story, especially Trevor Armbrister, of the Saturday Evening Post; Bernard Weinraub, of The New York Times; George C. Wilson, of the Washington Post; and Ed Brandt, of the Virginian-Pilot. As my footnotes testify, I borrowed shamelessly from Armbrister’s superb 1970 book, A Matter of Accountability, about the U.S. military’s failure to rescue the Pueblo. Professor Mitchell Lerner of Ohio State University, author of the well-researched and insightful The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy, gladly and generously shared source material. My dear friends and former Los Angeles Times colleagues Rick Barrs and Leslie Berger read an early draft of the book and gave invaluable critiques. My old friend Bob McAuliffe, professor of economics at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, also reviewed the manuscript with a discerning eye. Miles Corwin, another ex-Times cohort and a writer whom I’ve long admired, offered something every would-be author craves: early encouragement.

  And to my loving wife, Kathleen Hope Matz, I can only say, in the words of the old Waylon Jennings song, where would I be without you?

  Jack Cheevers

  Oakland, California

  April 2013

  PROLOGUE

  On an October day in 1952, a Soviet coast guard cutter eased its way toward a headless corpse floating off Yuri island, a small link in the Kuril archipelago that stretches from northern Japan to Siberia.

  Clad in a black flight suit, the body was the earthly remains of a U.S. Air Force lieutenant named John R. Dunham. The 24-year-old officer had been navigating an RB-29 reconnaissance plane northeast of Japan’s Hokkaido island when two Soviet fighters opened fire. The lumbering, propeller-driven American aircraft caught fire and crashed into the sea; Dunham and seven other airmen perished. The Russians buried Dunham a few days later on Yuri without bothering to hold a ceremony or notify his next of kin.

  The incident was just one of many Cold War run-ins—some of them fatal—between U.S. intelligence collectors and communist defenders. Starting in 1945, American planes, surface ships, and submarines skirted the borders of the USSR, China, North Korea, and various Eastern European nations, probing and analyzing their defenses.

  The Sea of Japan was a hot spot in this little-known drama. U.S. planes monitored hundreds of miles of coastline running from Wonsan, a major North Korean port protected by scores of MiG fighters, to Vladivostok, headquarters of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, and farther north to Petropavlovsk, another important Russian naval station near the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Flying aboard lightly armed aircraft stuffed with eavesdropping equipment, specialists known as “ravens” tuned in on communist radio, Morse code, and radar emissions. Their planes usually stayed in international airspace, but occasionally they darted over the border, as if on a bombing run, to “spoof” communist air defenses. When alarmed ground commanders switched on antiaircraft radars, the ravens carefully noted their location and frequencies, crucial targeting data in the event of war. The American aircraft also recorded details of how Soviet jets were scrambled, and sniffed the atmosphere for telltale chemical traces of nuclear tests.

  Soviet and North Korean fighters often were content simply to fly alongside, watching the watchers. But sometimes they reacted with lethal fury. Between 1950 and 1956, for instance, seven U.S. reconnaissance aircraft were shot down over the Sea of Japan, the Kurils, or near Siberia; at least 46 airmen were killed or listed as missing. (Another plane bearing 16 Americans disappeared in a typhoon.) Washington responded with sharply worded protests and more spy flights.

  U.S. submarines, meanwhile, kept an eye on Soviet naval operations. Often prowling perilously close to shore, they taped distinctive propeller noises made by Russian subs, compiling an audio “library” that could identify any Soviet undersea boat anywhere in the world. American crews planted listening devices on the ocean floor to detect communist naval movements. They observed sea trials of the Russians’ new missile subs and measured the telemetry of ballistic rockets as they arced from launch sites in the USSR to splash down in the Pacific.

  Aircraft and submarines were an expensive way to spy, however. They had the additional disadvantage of being able to stay on target for only relatively short periods. The Navy sometimes used destroyers for surveillance, but such missions took fighting ships away from more pressing duties.

  Faced with the same problems, the Soviets solved them by loading eavesdropping gear aboard fishing trawlers, inexpensive, harmless-looking vessels that could loiter in the same area for days or weeks on end. By 1965, almost three dozen trawlers were watching American nuclear subs coming and going from bases in South Carolina, Scotland, and Guam; studying the tactics of U.S. battle groups maneuvering on the high seas; and warning the North Vietnamese whenever Navy fighter-bombers lifted off from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

  The trawlers sometimes even tried to interfere with the carriers, cutting across their bows as they turned into the wind to launch planes. One Soviet boat, the Gidrofon, was involved in six “provocative incidents” in the South China Sea during a single month, December 1965. Another trawler nearly collided with an American destroyer off Long Island, New York, as the Russian captain rushed to recover a test missile fired from the atomic sub USS George Washington.

  The United States soon began outfitting its own small, cheap spy ships under Operation Clickbeetle, a top secret Navy program to pack refurbished freighters with advanced electronics. Clickbeetle was the pet project of Dr. Eugene Fubini, an energetic, bushy-haired physicist who oversaw key Pentagon research initiatives in the early 1960s. Fubini believed the snooper boats could play an important role in keeping tabs on the Soviets’ rapidly expanding blue-water fleet, which was challenging the U.S. Navy’s supremacy in both the Pacific and the Mediterranean. He wanted up to 70 such vessels, although the Navy ultimately commissioned only three.

  The most tragically famous of these was the USS Pueblo, which was attacked and captured by North Korean patrol boats in January 1968.

  The loss of the Pueblo—which was jammed with sophisticated electronic surveillance gear, code machines, and top secret documents—turned out to be one of the worst intelligence debacles in American history. The ship’s seizure pushed the United States closer to armed conflict on the Korean peninsula than at any time since the Korean War in the early 1950s. And subsequent investigations by Congress and the Navy revealed appalling complacency and shortsightedness in the planning and execution of the Pueblo’s mission.

  Nati
ons spy on one another for a variety of reasons, some quite sensible. The most common one is the fundamental imperative of self-preservation: National leaders have a keen, if not mortal interest in knowing whether a rival state is getting ready to attack them or their allies. The main purpose of the Pueblo’s ill-starred voyage was to give the United States a clearer picture of North Korea’s ability to wage war. “Our knowledge about North Korean military capabilities is limited and may not be altogether reliable,” Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach wrote in a secret memo to President Lyndon Johnson. “Our limited intelligence makes it difficult to estimate the precise nature of the threat to South Korea.” That blind spot was particularly alarming, since 50,000 American troops were then stationed in South Korea as a bulwark against the aggressive north.

  But intelligence gathering can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, acquiring reliable information about an enemy’s intentions and capabilities may have a calming effect on international relations. If Country A verifies that Country B is not, as rumored, massing troops on their common border, Country A is less likely to mobilize its own forces, thereby reducing the chances of war. Paradoxically, good spy work can also create dangerous volatility between states. Such was the case in 1962, when a U-2 aircraft photographed Soviet technicians installing long-range missiles in Cuba, leading the United States to impose a naval quarantine on the island and raising the fearsome specter of nuclear war between the two superpowers.

  In some instances, the very act of spying can catalyze international tension, as the Pueblo episode demonstrates.

  Then as now, North Korea was one of America’s most implacable enemies. In the late 1960s, it possessed one of the largest air forces in the communist world, along with a formidable army. Its Stalinist leaders were deeply committed to conquering South Korea. And with so many U.S. soldiers deployed in the south, Washington had ample reason to pursue additional information about what North Korea was up to.