Act of War Read online

  Today, more than 45 years after the events described in this book, North Korea is still a dangerous threat to peace and stability in Northeast Asia. Its economy is a shambles and its citizens are impoverished and underfed. Its armed forces remain large and potent, and its new, 28-year-old leader, Kim Jong-un, seems bent on producing nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles needed to deliver them. The United States still conducts reconnaissance forays and North Korea still strives to fend them off. In 2003, four North Korean MiG jets tried to force down an unarmed RC-135 spy plane. Despite the risk of being attacked, the American aircrew resisted communist demands to land (one MiG pilot flew to within 50 feet of the RC-135 and gave hand signals for it to descend) and flew back to their base in Japan.

  Why should the Pueblo’s sole mission, bungled so long ago, matter to us now? Without a doubt, unremitting surveillance by American ships, aircraft, satellites, and human agents around the globe has helped us better understand our foes’ strengths and weaknesses. For diplomats trying to preserve the peace, or military strategists trying to win a war, the importance of accurate, timely intelligence cannot be overstated. But snooping on other countries is inherently provocative. (Indeed, North Korea regarded the Pueblo’s activities as an “act of war.”) Since intelligence collection often carries the potential to set off an international crisis or even war, we as citizens must endeavor to restrain excessive risk taking and recklessness on the part of our professional watchers.

  In order to be effective, clandestine reconnaissance missions must, of course, be clandestine. Risk-to-reward ratios can’t exactly be debated in public before such operations are set in motion. In our democracy, we depend on Congress—especially members of the House and Senate intelligence committees—to provide close and continuous scrutiny of the nation’s spy agencies. (The news media occasionally reveal details of intelligence operations, although usually after the fact.) Congressional oversight isn’t always as robust as it should be, however. Members of Congress had little, if any, advance knowledge of how much risk was involved in the Pueblo’s doomed journey to the Sea of Japan. It was only later that investigators uncovered the false assumptions, negligent planning, and embarrassingly inadequate equipment that culminated in the vessel’s capture and set the stage for a dangerous showdown between the United States and North Korea.

  As we unleash spies and covert operations against a growing list of twenty-first-century adversaries, we’d do well to remember the painful lessons of the Pueblo.

  CHAPTER 1

  SPIES AHOY

  The strange little ship lay at the far end of the pier, rolling gently in the morning chop. Ensign F. Carl Schumacher stared at it from the bucket seat of his Porsche, then got out and walked down the dock, brimming with anticipation.

  Schumacher didn’t know much about the diminutive boat that was to be his new home. It certainly stood out from the vast gray warships cruising majestically through San Diego Bay, many of them bound, in that autumn of 1967, for the Vietnam War. Just 176 feet long, the USS Pueblo was smaller than some Navy tugboats. With no deck guns and a poky top speed of 13 knots, it was unfit for serious combat at sea. Indeed, the canvas awning that shaded its afterdeck made the Pueblo look more like a tramp steamer than a naval vessel, with one curious difference: Its topsides bristled with tall antennae, swaying in the breeze like giant fishing rods.

  Though Schumacher hadn’t been told yet, the Pueblo was an electronic intelligence collector—a spy ship—newly outfitted to eavesdrop on military installations along communist coastlines in the Far East. Before its conversion to seagoing ferret, the Pueblo had been an Army cargo ship, hauling food and supplies to remote South Pacific island bases after World War II. Given its lowly pedigree, some of its crewmen jokingly compared it to the USS Reluctant, the down-at-the-heels Navy freighter in the movie Mister Roberts.

  “Skip” Schumacher was 24 years old, a bright, perceptive Missourian who relished arguing about philosophy and trading humorous barbs with relatives and friends. Slim and blond, he had a sly smile, an unexpectedly deep voice, and a young man’s studiedly cynical facade. The son of an affluent St. Louis insurance broker, he’d had a privileged youth, attending a local prep school and a private college, Trinity, in Connecticut. After graduating, he signed on as a Navy officer candidate, mostly to make sure he didn’t get drafted into the Army and shot up in some Indochinese rice paddy.

  His first sea assignment had been aboard a refrigeration ship that delivered food and beer to the busy aircraft carrier crews at Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin. It was safe, dull duty, and Schumacher wanted a bit more adventure. When his transfer orders to the Pueblo arrived, he immediately tried to find out what sort of boat it was. Nobody seemed to know, and, mysteriously, it wasn’t listed in the Navy directory of ships. Several weeks later, Schumacher got a letter from the Pueblo’s executive officer, telling him only that the vessel was to conduct “oceanographic research” in the Sea of Japan. That was the spy ship’s cover story. For its public commissioning ceremony in Bremerton, Washington, the Navy had gone so far as to bring in a local college professor to extol the Pueblo’s anticipated contributions to helping mankind extract more food from the sea.

  Seeing it now for the first time, Schumacher wondered whether the Pueblo could even stay upright in a storm. He’d never seen a Navy ship so small that its gangplank led down from the dock rather than up. Nonetheless, he saluted its American flag, marched over the gangway, and presented his orders to a petty officer.

  Schumacher was taken on a tour of the ship and then to lunch in the wardroom. As he sat down, conversation among the other officers fell off; that usually happened when a new face appeared in officer country.

  The lull didn’t last long.

  The Pueblo’s captain burst into the compartment like a sudden clap of thunder over a calm sea. Tough, charismatic, and cheerfully profane, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher had just turned 40. His arms bulged with muscle and his eyes shone with intelligence and a touch of mischievousness. He had a handsome, square-jawed face, an easy grin, and a bullhorn of a voice that could stop a belowdecks fistfight cold. To Schumacher, the skipper’s presence seemed to electrify the very air around him.

  Even seated Bucher had a dynamic quality. While one big hand shoveled food into his mouth, the other switched on a tape player mounted in the bulkhead, filling the wardroom with the rollicking ballads of Johnny Cash. Schumacher was introduced and the captain’s right hand shot out in greeting. “Glad to have you,” he boomed. “Where’d you come from?” Badly intimidated by his new boss, the young ensign stammered a few words of personal history.

  Bucher was an ex–submarine officer, a superb navigator and ship handler. In the late 1950s, he’d served aboard subs with the delicate and dangerous job of eavesdropping on Soviet naval activities in the North Pacific; in the early sixties, he’d planned such missions for a Japan-based sub squadron. A voracious reader, he kept a set of Shakespeare’s works in his stateroom. He played chess with merciless speed and waded into barroom brawls with happy abandon; a friend aptly described him as an “intellectual barbarian.”

  A taskmaster at sea, Bucher was a major-league drinker and party animal onshore. With his loud singing and even louder off-duty outfits, he was often the center of attention at officers’ clubs and wharfside dives alike. For all that, he was a surprisingly sensitive man, given to choking up in emotional moments. He preferred to be called by his boyhood nickname, Pete.

  The captain loved the adventure and camaraderie of subs and longed to command one of his own. Instead, the Navy “surfaced” him—removed him from the submarine corps—and made him skipper of the Pueblo in 1966. Bucher was bitterly disappointed, but he resolved to do his best with the intelligence ship. Before long he realized how similar the Pueblo’s cruises would be to his old sub missions—a lone vessel patrolling a hostile coast for days or weeks at a time. The big difference was that now he’d travel on the
surface.

  Shortly after taking command of the Pueblo, Bucher flew to Washington, D.C., for ten days of classified briefings on his upcoming missions. Following a series of security checks, he was ushered into the Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the National Security Agency, the secretive government organization that monitored radio transmissions, telephone traffic, and radar signals worldwide. The NSA also developed the complex code machines used by the American military to send encrypted messages. In conjunction with the Navy, the NSA would assign the Pueblo specific eavesdropping targets. Bucher also paid a visit to the Naval Security Group, which ran the Navy’s own global network of electronic surveillance.

  The Pueblo was to be home-ported in Japan, within cruising range of three potential wartime foes: the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. Bucher wouldn’t find out until later which nation he’d sail against first, though he suspected it was the USSR, which was doing its level best to discourage U.S. seaborne reconnaissance. When the first unarmed spy boat, the USS Banner, was sent out under Operation Clickbeetle, the Russians had tried to scare it away from their shores by playing hair-raising games of chicken. Soviet destroyers trained their guns on the Banner and raced directly at it, as if intending to ram, before veering away at the last moment. During night maneuvers at close quarters, they tried to blind the Banner’s skipper by aiming powerful searchlights at his bridge.

  But Bucher’s briefers told him there was little chance that he and his vessel would actually be harmed. His best protection, they said, was the centuries-old body of international law and custom that guaranteed free passage on the high seas to ships of all nations. The Pueblo had a legal right to patrol foreign coasts as long as it didn’t violate territorial waters. While the United States enforced only a three-mile offshore limit, most communist nations claimed 12 miles. As a precaution, the Pueblo was ordered to stay at least 13 miles from land at all times. The captain also was advised that he could take comfort in a much older and far less civilized doctrine: an eye for an eye. Because if the Soviets were foolish enough to attack his vulnerable, solitary spy ship, the United States could just as easily go after one of theirs.

  Bucher enjoyed his stay in Washington, but was unimpressed by the NSA bureaucrats, who struck him as “pipe-smoking characters” trying to act like Ivy League professors. As he wrote later, he couldn’t help but wonder whether any of these men had ever “enjoyed a wild Saturday night drunk, got into a good fight over a poker game, abandoned themselves to a hot extramarital affair, or, for that matter, brazenly run a stop light before the eyes of a traffic cop.”

  His briefings finished, the captain departed for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, where he expected to oversee the finishing touches on the Pueblo’s metamorphosis from washed-up cargo hauler to cutting-edge intelligence platform.

  The great yard was roaring with activity when he arrived in January 1967. Welders, pipe fitters, electricians, and other workers swarmed over sleek warships, readying them for action off Vietnam. But Bucher felt a stab of dismay when he spotted his new boat bobbing forlornly among much bigger and grander cruisers, missile frigates, and nuclear submarines. Dusted off from the Navy’s mothball fleet near San Francisco and towed north to Bremerton, the dilapidated old freighter had been subjected to months of hammering and drilling, yet its conversion was far from complete. Rust streaked its hull. Scaffolding, shipping crates, tools, and random wires clogged its decks. Bucher thought it resembled nothing so much as an abandoned derelict.

  A small group of officers and enlisted men already had reported aboard to help civilian contractors build out the ship’s most important section, the Special Operations Department, or “SOD hut.” The claustrophobic hut, also known innocuously as “the research spaces,” housed the radar detectors, radio receivers, oscillators, spectrum analyzers, amplifiers, dosimeters, and four-channel demultiplexers that gave the Pueblo its purpose. Behind a triple-locked steel door, highly trained Navy communication technicians, or CTs, would operate the top secret eavesdropping hardware.

  The amount of work still to be done stunned Bucher. Dozens of problems in the engine room, berthing areas, mess decks, and elsewhere needed to be fixed. With few sealable hatches between compartments, the ship’s watertight integrity was questionable. Its windlass, which raised and lowered the anchor, was unreliable, meaning that the Pueblo might drift helplessly into communist waters in the event of engine failure. Instead of an intercom to transmit orders from bridge to engine room, the skipper had to rely on an antiquated system of bells installed by the Army. A subsequent inspection by Navy experts counted no fewer than 462 mechanical and design deficiencies.

  The captain began haunting shipyard managers, vociferously demanding improvements to the Pueblo’s operating equipment and living areas. He clashed so often with the superintendent that he was criticized in a fitness report as “overzealous.”

  Part of the problem was that few people working on the spy ship had high enough security clearances to be told of its true function. They treated it according to its old designation as an auxiliary cargo ship, light, or AKL. An AKL carried a crew of 27, but the reconfigured surveillance vessel would bear 83 men, including 30 communication technicians. Bucher had to fight for more berths and better hygiene facilities for his unusually large crew. After long days of wrangling, he characteristically invited the shipyard boss to the officers’ club for conciliatory cocktails.

  By June 2, the Pueblo finally was ready for sea trials in Puget Sound.

  The first exercise involved the basic task of dropping anchor, but the anchor chain jumped off the faulty windlass. Next were maneuverability tests. Cruising in reverse, Bucher ordered left full rudder. That caused the cable connecting the rudder to the steering engine to snap, freezing the rudder in its turned position. The Pueblo could only sail in circles until Bucher made a humiliating call for a tugboat to tow his new ship home.

  Three days later, the cable parted again. Grunting and cursing, Bucher’s men fitted a heavy cast-iron tiller to the rudder in order to manually turn it. The sight of men pulling mightily on ropes to swing the big tiller back and forth made one sailor wonder what it was like to be a galley slave in the fourth century B.C. But spare parts were no longer available for the steering engine, manufactured during World War II by a now-defunct Wisconsin elevator company, and the Navy decided the cost of replacing it was prohibitive. By the time the Pueblo completed its sea trials, the steering engine had failed 180 times.

  Bucher knew his new ship was unlikely to ever be much more than a balky, patched-together tub. Yet he found himself developing a distinct affection for the Pueblo; it was his first command, after all. He also held many of his men in high regard, especially his taciturn chief engineer, Gene Lacy, a 36-year-old from Seattle who was fast becoming the captain’s best friend aboard.

  Besides the fragile steering engine, Bucher worried about the large load of classified materials on board, and whether he’d be able to destroy it in an emergency. The Pueblo carried not only electronic surveillance gear and code machines but also hundreds of pounds of top secret paper: military plans, intelligence reports, repair and operating manuals for the encryption devices, and other sensitive documents.

  Submarines he’d served on had crude but effective quick-destruction systems: dynamite canisters that could blow a hole in their hulls and send their secret contents to the bottom in minutes. But the Pueblo crew had only sledgehammers and fire axes to break up electronic devices. Documents could be fed into two small, sluggish shredders, burned in a 50-gallon drum, or torn up by hand and heaved overboard in weighted canvas bags. Busting up well-built machines and disposing of mounds of paper took time, however. If the ship lost propulsion near an unfriendly shore or ran aground in a storm, it might not be possible to get rid of everything in time. What if the Pueblo got stranded on, say, the Siberian coast? An impressive cache of national secrets easily could wind up in Soviet
hands.

  Bucher fired off a letter to his superiors, requesting, “in the strongest possible language,” a specially designed destruction system. The missive found its way to the office of the chief of naval operations, Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Navy’s highest-ranking uniformed official. Moorer’s office asked the Army whether putting explosives aboard its former freighter made sense. Many weeks later, Bucher was informed that such a system was too expensive.

  Most of the captain’s other requested upgrades were denied as well. Acutely aware of the rising costs of the Vietnam War, the Navy slashed $1 million from the Pueblo’s $5.5 million makeover budget. When the bean counters turned down his requisition for a fuel-fed incinerator, an irritated Bucher went out and bought a smaller commercial model, dipping into the crew’s recreation fund for the $1,300 purchase price.

  —

  The need for rapid destruction was tragically underscored when Israeli jets and torpedo boats attacked a much larger intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, in the Mediterranean Sea during the Six-Day War of June 1967. A pair of Israeli fighters strafed the lightly armed Liberty with 30-millimeter cannon, shattering its bridge and badly wounding a number of officers. After the jets ran out of ammunition, two more swept in and dropped napalm. Crewmen screamed in pain, gaped at hemorrhaging wounds, and struggled to control spreading fires. In the research spaces, communication technicians worked feverishly to destroy secret equipment.

  A trio of Israeli torpedo boats moved in to finish off the smoking, blood-smeared American vessel. One torpedo blew a forty-foot hole in the Liberty’s hull. The explosion killed a number of sailors outright; others, trapped in damaged compartments, drowned in terrifying darkness as seawater flooded in. A crewman later reported that an Israeli boat machine-gunned several of the Liberty’s life rafts in the water.