Act of War Read online

  By the time the harrowing attack ended, 34 Americans lay dead or dying. Another 171 were wounded, many grievously. The Liberty’s skipper, William McGonagle, weakened by blood loss from a severe leg wound, calmly directed firefighting and damage-control efforts for the next 17 hours. With his compass ruined, McGonagle lay on his back on an open deck that night and navigated by the stars toward a dawn rendezvous with two U.S. destroyers racing to deliver medical aid; he subsequently was awarded the Medal of Honor. Israel’s government claimed its forces had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian warship shelling Israeli troops in the Sinai Peninsula. Although many crewmen and some top Navy officers believed the attack was deliberate, President Lyndon Johnson accepted Israel’s apology and indemnification.

  Israeli gunfire had made it impossible for Liberty sailors to burn classified documents in a topside incinerator. Instead, they were forced to feed codes and other paper materials into fires lit in wastebaskets. Weighted ditch bags stuffed with thick manuals and other publications proved too heavy to throw overboard, and in any event the water was too shallow for jettisoning.

  The destruction problem nagged at Bucher, but he couldn’t do much more about it. Several months behind schedule due to construction delays, he and his crew finally set sail in early September 1967 from Bremerton to the massive San Diego naval base, where the Pueblo was to undergo readiness tests. From there it would head for Hawaii to refuel before continuing on to its new home port of Yokosuka, near Tokyo.

  Bucher also was concerned about his young crew’s lack of experience. About half of the men had never been to sea. The seamanship skills of his new executive officer, Lieutenant Edward R. Murphy Jr., didn’t impress him. Schumacher, though smart and capable, had been in the Navy only two years. The ship’s other ensign, 21-year-old Tim Harris, had been commissioned just four months before stepping aboard the Pueblo. Bucher viewed Lacy, the veteran chief engineer, as his only truly experienced, reliable officer.

  By the time the Pueblo reached San Diego, the captain had made up his mind to teach his officers everything he could about ship handling.

  A few days after pulling up to the pier in his Porsche, Schumacher was invited to demonstrate his stuff. He stood on the flying bridge as Bucher observed from a chair behind him. Calling commands to the helmsman in the pilothouse below, Schumacher managed to back away from the dock without incident and head for the busy San Diego ship channel. Then he tried to make what he thought was a slight course correction.

  “Left five-degree rudder,” he ordered, and the Pueblo began turning to port. Within seconds, however, the ship had swerved not five degrees but 30—and was barreling straight toward a sandbar. Bucher leaped up and shouted a new bearing, averting a mortifying gaffe in full view of numerous Navy officers on nearby vessels. Schumacher expected a high-decibel reaming, but the captain quietly gave him back the conn.

  “I guess that was a little unfair of me,” he told the chagrined ensign. “This ship’s got a rudder as large as a damn barn door. All you ever need to use for this kind of maneuvering is two- or three-degree rudder.”

  Schumacher began to like his rambunctious boss more and more. Bucher enjoyed playing with ideas and seemed curious about almost everything. When the Pueblo paused on its way to San Diego for a weekend liberty in San Francisco, he took the fun-loving Tim Harris to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to check out the hippies and their Summer of Love. The skipper could talk knowledgeably about anything from the prospects of the San Diego Chargers to U.S. naval tactics in Vietnam to the novels of Lawrence Durrell. Schumacher subscribed to Esquire and National Review, which turned out to be two of Bucher’s favorite magazines.

  Schumacher also appreciated his new commander’s directness and informal submariner’s ways. If the captain had a question about radio communications, he went straight to the radio operator for an answer, bypassing—and sometimes angering—the man’s immediate supervisor, usually a senior petty officer. Although he was a demon about enforcing spit-and-polish rules while his ship was in port, the skipper didn’t much care what his men wore at sea. Bucher himself was a bit of a slob, showing up for work in shabby khakis and a tatty straw hat, or for lunch in the wardroom in a T-shirt and flip-flops.

  Like many men who’d served beneath the waves, Bucher enjoyed being a little different. One manifestation of that trait was his adoption of a theme song for the Pueblo: “The Lonely Bull,” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The melancholy, Spanish-accented tune blared from the ship’s loudspeakers whenever it entered or left port, much to the amusement of onlookers. Many Navy ships had their own insignias and letterhead, but not their own song. The captain, however, considered “The Lonely Bull” a morale booster; it gave his men something special to take pride in. He also felt the song’s title reflected the Pueblo’s unique charter as a solitary sentinel on the immense gray wilderness of the sea.

  His casual clothes and eccentric flourishes aside, Bucher was a demanding leader. He set high standards and vocally enforced them. To Schumacher, he seemed to possess an amazingly detailed knowledge of his vessel’s mechanical innards. He didn’t view the Pueblo as just another career stepping-stone, as some officers might, but rather as a serious assignment to be executed well for its own sake.

  Despite his devotion to running a tight ship, the captain had no problem with his men cutting loose now and then. Indeed, Bucher, himself a former enlisted man and connoisseur of good times, often led the pack. When he, Lacy, and Harris hit the beach for drinks after work, Schumacher could barely keep up.

  At an officers’ club or civilian bar, the gregarious captain was marvelous company, singing and telling jokes and attracting knots of revelers, male and female alike. “You’d get a couple of nice-looking babes walk into the place, and inside of three minutes he’d have ’em smoking and joking and laughing,” Schumacher recalled in an interview 35 years later. “He’d start telling his corny jokes; he was really something.”

  Bucher particularly enjoyed the companionship of Lacy, who of all his officers most closely matched him in age and Navy tenure.

  Schumacher was drinking with Bucher at the starchy Admiral Kidd Club in San Diego one day when the captain issued a typically unorthodox summons for Lacy to join them. Bucher lunged onto the terrace and, with no warning to the high-ranking brass tippling around him, unleashed an ear-piercing, double-fingered whistle in the direction of the Pueblo, tied up nearby. When he had the attention of the ship’s watch, he began rapidly flapping and windmilling his arms, as if he were trying to take off and fly. Other officers stared at him, transfixed. Bucher was signaling in semaphore for Lacy to come ashore. The chief engineer showed up a few minutes later.

  Reserved and self-assured, Lacy had enlisted out of high school and spent so much time amid pounding pistons and screeching drive shafts that he was partially deaf. He’d served on a variety of ships, including Navy icebreakers, and had seen action in the Korean War. With his chiseled face, brush-cut dark hair, and dignified bearing, he was often mistaken for a captain himself. Though he was a tough disciplinarian, his fairness earned him the respect of the men under him in the engine room.

  Bucher bonded further with the engineering officer when they conspired to steal a large painting of a nude woman that adorned the submarine officers’ club in San Diego.

  The generously endowed beauty, enticingly supine, hung behind the bar at the Ballast Tank, a small, lively hangout that rang with the shouts and good-natured taunts of many of Bucher’s old sub mates. One slow night, Bucher, Lacy, and Harris played pool at the club as they waited for the right moment. When the bartender went to collect empty glasses in the next room, Bucher followed and delayed him with small talk. As Lacy distracted other customers, Harris vaulted the bar, grabbed the nude, and scampered out a side door. He deposited the booty in his car trunk and sauntered back into the club as if nothing had happened. The bartender somehow failed to notice the glaringly empty spo
t above a row of bottles, and the grinning thieves slipped away undetected.

  Bucher displayed the prize in the Pueblo’s wardroom and encouraged everyone from officers to mess cooks to come in and savor it. The Ballast Tank, meanwhile, buzzed with theories about the identities of the malefactors who’d lifted the beloved nude; sitting at the bar again, Bucher gleefully speculated about various suspects. When he learned that Navy criminal investigators were on the case, the painting discreetly reappeared in the submariners’ haunt.

  The Great Naked Art Heist endeared the captain to many in his crew. But after witnessing his reaction when the shore patrol arrested three of his men, some sailors were ready to run him for Congress.

  The three, all young communication technicians, had seen a movie in downtown San Diego and were looking for a bar to knock back a few beers in before calling it a night. A shore patrol truck pulled up and a policeman accused them of being drunk. Despite their denials, they were hauled to the SP station and booked for violating a Navy rule against wearing “inappropriate clothing” off duty—specifically, jeans and sport shirts.

  Late that night, the trio returned to the Pueblo. Their sleeping captain was roused and informed of his men’s misfortune. Bucher thought back to his enlisted days, when overly aggressive cops had often ruined a good night out. Furious, he gathered up the three CTs along with Ensign Harris and drove to the police station.

  The duty officer, a lieutenant junior grade, was clearly displeased at being confronted by an angry superior in the middle of the night. When he pulled out a thick manual and quoted the regulation under which the sailors had been picked up, Bucher began loudly chewing him out. The captain noted that the regulation also prohibited wearing Bermuda shorts in public places. Yet he’d seen high-ranking officers in such attire at the post exchange; why weren’t admirals getting busted along with swabbies? Bucher demanded that the lieutenant get his boss on the phone.

  The hapless SP man eyed Bucher as if he were from another planet. “It’s zero two ten, sir,” he said, using the military time for 2:10 a.m. “The district shore patrol commander is at home, asleep.”

  “I know what goddamn time it is, mister!” Bucher exploded. “I took the trouble to leave my ship in the middle of the night and come down here to deal with the harassment of my crew. So get your CO on the line right now!”

  The outranked lieutenant had no choice but to call. When the drowsy police commander answered, Bucher snatched the phone and gave him a tart summary of the evening’s events. The SP chief replied that he resented being awakened at such a grim hour over a “trifling” matter; Bucher barked that the unjustified detention of his men was a serious issue to him and hung up.

  Still fuming, the captain later banged out a letter of complaint to the admiral in charge of the Eleventh Naval District, which encompassed the San Diego base. Almost immediately, he was ordered to report to the admiral’s chief of staff.

  The staff chief, a grizzled senior captain, told Bucher he’d been put on report after the outraged SP commander raised a ruckus. Bucher emphatically restated his belief that his men had been hassled for no good reason. “If they’d gotten drunk and broken up some joint, I’d personally bust them,” he said. “But for wearing Levi’s and loud shirts?”

  The senior officer regarded him carefully. The shore patrol duty officer, he said, had reported that Bucher was inebriated when he barged into police headquarters.

  “Negative, sir!” snapped Bucher, although some of the sailors with him that night might have disagreed.

  The senior captain drummed his fingers thoughtfully on his desk. “Well, all right,” he said finally. “I can sympathize with your grievance. But on the other hand, we can’t compromise discipline by ignoring a dress regulation that does not suit us.” He promised to relate their discussion to the admiral, and he hoped the matter would end there. He closed by urging Bucher to “show a little more discretion in the future.”

  Bucher told no one on the Pueblo about being called on the carpet. His sailors had their own sources, however, and found out. They were astonished that he’d stuck his neck out so far for enlisted men. Most officers would never risk such a potentially career-damaging clash with higher-ups. “When he stood up for us like that,” said one of the arrestees, “we figured we had the captain of all captains.” The episode convinced Schumacher of something else: that on some deep psychological level Bucher, who’d grown up as an orphan, viewed his men as the brothers he never had.

  The sailors, meanwhile, threw themselves into preparing for the readiness tests.

  Navy crews had to pass tests that applied to all ships as well as those designed for their particular type. But again there was a complication with the Pueblo: nothing in the voluminous training books covered drills for this new kind of spy ship. As a result, training officers treated the vessel like the freighter it once was. They wanted the crew to demonstrate proficiency in taking aboard stores and transferring them to other ships while under way.

  For the same reason, the sailors received no training in maneuvers with particular relevance to the Pueblo, like coping with Soviet harassment. Bucher approached the admiral in charge of training with his dilemma, but even he had never been informed of the Pueblo’s actual purpose and offered little help in tailoring special exercises.

  Nor were there any tests designed specifically for communication technicians working in the all-important SOD hut, a 20-foot-long, ten-foot-wide metal bread box that sat on the main deck forward of the bridge.

  Flooded with cold fluorescent light, the hut was manned 24 hours a day. The CTs sat back-to-back along a narrow aisle, working on floor-to-ceiling racks of gadgets. Most of the men were in their twenties, and much brighter than the average enlistee. Twenty-two-year-old Peter Langenberg, for example, had dropped out of Princeton because he was bored. Like Schumacher, the polite, slightly built Langenberg hailed from St. Louis and had joined the Navy to avoid getting drafted into the Army. Schooled as a Russian translator, he previously was attached to the top secret Kamiseya communication station in Japan, where his job was to monitor Soviet navy radio traffic.

  There was a certain amount of tension between the regular sailors and the CTs, sealed inside their special chamber like some secretive priesthood. The whiz kids wore their own arm patch—a quill crossed with a lightning bolt—and refused to let ordinary seamen through their triple-locked door or to discuss anything that went on behind it. That bugged Bucher, who, though cleared to know the lock combinations, preferred to pound on the door with his fist until someone inside opened it.

  The officer in charge of the CTs was Lieutenant Stephen R. Harris, a Harvard graduate and fluent Russian linguist. Harris had been given responsibility for the SOD hut despite his relatively youthful age of 29. With his beaklike nose, incipient double chin, and self-effacing manner, the lieutenant seemed more like a shy academic than a naval officer. The only child of two Boston-area schoolteachers, he loved the romantic concertos of Rachmaninoff and belonged to a club devoted to preserving electric streetcars. He seemed to write a letter every night to his new wife, a lovely blond secretary named Esther. A devout Presbyterian and born-again Christian, Harris had met her through her brother, a fellow member of the Officers’ Christian Union.

  Bucher instinctively liked Steve Harris, even though the CT commander was unlike any Navy officer he’d ever met.

  The crewmen passed their readiness exams and, on the misty morning of November 6, 1967, the spy ship cast off for Hawaii, its loudspeakers streaming “The Lonely Bull.”

  Going back to sea thrilled Bucher. He was enjoying his two young ensigns, especially Schumacher, who, with his natural competence and irreverence, was proving to be an excellent shipmate. Despite its mechanical problems, the Pueblo handled well at sea, although it had a small ship’s tendency to roll and buck. But good weather prevailed, and Bucher relished all the sensations of an ocean passage: the sati
sfying whump of the bow plowing into gray rollers, the reassuring throb of Lacy’s two diesel main engines, the mouthwatering smell of pork chops frying in the galley.

  Not everyone found the trip as pleasurable.

  Some CTs got so seasick they wondered whether they’d live to see the sunrise. Even veterans remarked how roughly the ship sailed, shuddering from bow to transom as it bashed into wave after wave. In the forward berthing compartment, enlisted men tried to get some sleep on bunks stacked three and four high amid the fusty odor of never-quite-clean bodies and clothes. About two feet of headroom separated each bunk. Gulping Dramamine but unable to keep his food down, Langenberg wedged himself into his rack and just tried to endure. “I was seasick the whole time,” he recalled. “To get horizontal was wonderful. You just kind of lie there and moan and wish you were dead.”

  The crew also had to deal with the dysfunctional steering engine, which was now dying an average of two times per four-hour watch. Most Navy ships had hydraulic steering; the Pueblo’s was electromechanical. An entry in the ship’s deck log for November 12 demonstrated the persistence of the problem:

  0825 [8:25 a.m.]: Lost electrical steering, all engines stop. 0826: Regained electrical steering, all ahead full. 0829: Lost electrical steering. 0830: All stop. 0833: Shifted to manual steering. 0834: All ahead standard, shifted to electrical steering. 0839: All ahead full. 0909: Lost electrical steering, all stop. 0910: Shifted to manual steering. 0910: Regained electrical steering. 0911: All ahead standard. 0913: All ahead full. 0914: Lost electrical steering, all stop.

  In spite of its fitful steering, the ship reached Pearl Harbor eight days after leaving San Diego. Bucher tied up at the submarine base; old sub buddies, he figured, were probably lurking at the local officers’ club. He spent several hours making sure the Pueblo and its intractable steering engine received priority at the repair yard. Later he paid a visit to the headquarters of the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet—CINCPACFLT, in Navy acronym-ese.