The Cold War had not yet begun,1 but already strategists in Washington were supposing, correctly, that the Communists had ambitions to mop up territories for themselves along the Pacific periphery.
Marshall’s staff officers decided that night that they must come up with immediate recommendations—for the White House, for the Joint Chiefs of Staff—for halting the Soviets’ advance. They first decided to establish a series of checkpoints around the region where the onrushing expansion might be stopped. One of these young officers then walked over to the wall map and pointed to the scantily known and, of late, Japanese-governed peninsula of Korea.
The officer was thirty-six-year-old Colonel Charles Hartwell Bonesteel III, a third-generation soldier, a West Point graduate, and a Rhodes Scholar. Standing before the blue-washed expanses of the National Geographic map, he traced his index finger east and west across the entire breadth of the ocean, along a line of latitude that almost precisely joined the cities of San Francisco and the Korean capital, Seoul. Both of them lay some thirty-seven and a half degrees north of the equator, he observed—an uncanny coincidence.
Born into an esteemed American soldiering family, Colonel Charles Bonesteel III—seen here after eye surgery—famously drew the line in August 1945 that divided the Korean Peninsula along the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, creating North Korea.* [U.S. Army.]
He promptly declared that it was important for the city of Seoul, Korea’s capital, to remain in American hands. He told his two colleagues in the room—one of whom, Dean Rusk, would become President Kennedy’s secretary of state—that the Soviet army should be requested to stop its advance just north of the capital. Since Seoul lay at thirty-seven and a half degrees, then “the Thirty-Eighth Parallel should do it,” Bonesteel remarked with studied casualness. Then, using a grease pencil, he promptly drew a line clear across the map, from Asia to California, along the latitude line thirty-eight degrees north of the equator. The officers told General Marshall what they recommended.
Marshall thought the latitude line was perfectly reasonable and logical. Diplomats were told, and within hours, Moscow, to the astonishment of all, Teletyped back the Soviets’ concurrence. The Red Army would continue its sweep down into Korea, the message said, and would accept the surrender of all those Japanese forces on the peninsula stationed to the north of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. The United States could land its troops elsewhere, and confront the Japanese occupiers to this line’s immediate south.
This was all written swiftly into General Order No. 1, the surrender demand that was handed formally to the Japanese the very next day. The two relevant paragraphs of this historic document were the second (“The senior Japanese commanders and all ground, sea, air and auxiliary forces within Manchuria, Korea north of 38 north latitude and Karafuto shall surrender to the Commander in Chief of Soviet Forces in the Far East”) and the fifth (“The Imperial General Headquarters, its senior commanders, and all ground, sea, air and auxiliary forces in the main islands of Japan, minor islands adjacent thereto, Korea south of 38 north latitude, and the Philippines shall surrender to the Commander in Chief, U. S. Army Forces in the Pacific”).
Immediately, and with this succinct command, two quite new and separate spheres of influence were created in the world. One would in time come to be called South Korea, and would fall under the general influence of the Americans; and the second, known as North Korea, would come under the influence and direction, first, of the Soviets and, later, of the Chinese Communists.
In due course the latter would become the oxymoronically named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Within a decade, these two separate, distinct, and mutually hostile states would be riven by a disastrous three-year war, which would reach an uneasy conclusion in 1953 that has separated them ever since by the most dangerous and heavily armed international border on the planet.
Many military strategists have speculated that the world might have been a far safer place if postwar Korea had been divided four ways, among the United States, the Soviet Union, the Republic of China, and the United Kingdom, as was first proposed. Or if the Soviets had been given free rein to invade all of Korea, and be done with it. In this latter instance, there would have been no Korean War, for certain—merely a Leninist satrapy in the Far East that, most probably, would have withered and died, as did other Soviet satellite states.
Instead, the Pacific Ocean’s most volatile choke point was created, innocently and unthinkingly, by one swift sweep of a grease pencil held by Charles Hartwell Bonesteel III, a man who had been known since childhood by the nickname Tick. Like so many other all-too-swift border creations—the one between India and Pakistan comes to mind—his would leave a legacy both unimagined and unimaginable. Bonesteel would live until 1977 and would see the many consequences of his casual defacement of that National Geographic map, not least the horrendously lethal war that erupted five years later, and then the thousands of subsequent cross-border shootings, kidnappings, incursions, tunneling, and myriad other nuisances for which the Thirty-Eighth Parallel is still known today—one of the most egregious being the capture in 1968 of the U.S. Navy spy ship USS Pueblo.
This shabby little ship, a vessel akin more to the USS Caine than to the USS Constitution, was part of a secret navy spying program of the 1950s named Operation Clickbeetle. Initially the plan was supposed to involve the recruitment of as many as seventy similarly elderly, clapped-out, and inexpensive vessels, most of them deemed useless for anything more than being melted down and made into razor blades. They were to be stuffed to the gills with electronic espionage apparatus and ordered to hug the coastlines of countries that Washington thought were troublesome, told to run out their aerials and to listen to radio chatter. But the budget couldn’t stretch to seventy ships, and in the end the Pentagon got only three, the USS Palm Beach, the USS Banner, and the USS Pueblo.
This last was the mothballed runt of the litter, and she was handed the trickiest assignment of the trio. She was to be the eyes and ears in the far western Pacific for the National Security Agency (NSA), then as now the most secret of all major American espionage organizations.
Though nothing like the omnivorous Gargantua of electronic spying it is today, the NSA in 1968 was nonetheless an immense, powerful, and expensive agency. I remember all too well being shooed away by guards when I drove too close to its triple-fenced compound in Fort Meade, Maryland. It also had secret and well-guarded outstations around the globe, from which I was also turned away whenever I tried to visit. Some were static—in Britain, in Hong Kong, on Ascension Island, in Gibraltar, on Hawaii, on Diego Garcia. Others were mobile: airborne or seaborne; some of the latter were submarines. Still others, such as the three starveling ships of Operation Clickbeetle, rode the surface waters, always isolated from other vessels, their role in espionage publicly denied, their official capacity spoken about as softly as their budget requests were hidden, even though their tasks were seen as crucial to the fast-growing empire of intelligence gathering.
The tugboat-size Pueblo, which had a couple of small tarp-covered, downward-pointing machine guns on deck under a canvas awning that made her look more like a Pacific islands tramp steamer than a fighting vessel, was supposedly, ostensibly, officially conducting innocent oceanographic research. Improbably, and in an attempt to bolster the vessel’s cover story, a college professor of nutrition was on hand at the commissioning ceremony in the Port of Bremerton, in Washington State, to tell reporters that the Pueblo’s work might involve extracting new high-tech foodstuffs from oceanic waters. This was still, after all, the time of TV dinners, and people liked to believe such things.
The Pueblo’s chosen commander was to be a hard-drinking, fast-talking, loud, chess-playing, Shakespeare-loving muscleman and former submariner named Lloyd Bucher (Pete to his friends). Bucher was initially disappointed that he was being given command of such an undistinguished vessel. But he changed his mind after ten days of briefings at the Pentagon and at Fort Meade. This was because his litt
le ship, which would be homeported in Japan, was not going to work along the stoutly defended coasts of the Soviet Union or China. Instead, she would venture out northwestward, across the six hundred miles of the Sea of Japan, and patrol along the little-known coastline of North Korea, a ragged line never less than thirteen miles from shore—twelve miles being the territorial limit declared by most Communist nations of the time. From there she would intercept, listen to, and decipher all the radio transmissions and other electronic chatter that emanated from this most secretive of Asian states.
Built on Lake Michigan in 1944 as an army freighter and transferred to the U.S. Navy as an environmental research vessel, the USS Pueblo was captured by North Korea in 1968 while on a spy mission. She remains captive, as a museum.* [U.S. Navy.]
It was all very hush-hush, considered by Washington to be of critical importance. This, coupled with Bucher’s understanding that he would be performing his work all alone, and that the full might of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific might well not be able to reach him should he ever get himself into trouble, thrilled the young captain’s gung-ho side. He was a man eternally eager for adventure, a show-off notoriously given to braggadocio and fond of derring-do.
There was at the time a rough-and-ready code applying to the Cold War’s spy ships, born partly of the belief among naval officers that the sea is the only true enemy, and that human arguments are subordinate to the sea’s dangers and demands. So there was at the time, for instance, a gentleman’s agreement that governed spying on the Soviet Union, each side accepting that espionage was a necessary evil, and therefore tolerating the fact that ships involved in such business were deployed by the other’s navy. But Bucher was rather more fascinated to be told, and most forcefully, that no such agreement covered espionage against North Korea. True, Pyongyang was perhaps less of a threat. Its navy was small, with just a number of small coastal craft, and it had no blue-water ships of the kind operated by Moscow. But the North Koreans could be nasty and dangerous; moreover, they played outside the rules. This also thrilled Bucher, who was entirely undaunted by the dangers. So he flew off to his ship’s fitting-out in Washington State wholly excited by his coming duties.
It was in Bremerton that the highly sensitive interception equipment (to be manned by technicians who worked in code-locked cabins) was installed on the ship and tested by NSA engineers. Dozens of radio aerials and radar dishes, some familiar, others ungainly and of strange shape, were mounted all over the ship, most of them sprouting from two high masts built amidships. Once this work was completed, Bucher was ordered to sail his technologically festooned little craft (which rolled mercilessly on the ocean swells, to the crew’s discomfort and chagrin, causing Bucher to wonder if all the added gear might make the boat dangerously top-heavy) across to Hawaii. There, he would be given further secret and more specific briefings by the chiefs of the Pacific Fleet. At the end of 1967, the Pueblo finally set off for the naval station at the Japanese port of Yokosuka, on the western side of Tokyo Bay, where she would be based and from where she would eventually commence her duties.
On January 5, 1968, after spending the Christmas holidays of 1967 in port, the tiny vessel, a plague of mechanical problems all half-resolved, headed out for what would be her first real-world operation. The forecasters said the temperature would be cold, the sea state moderate.2 A number of North Korean trawlers were noted to be operating in the region where the Pueblo would be patrolling, but Bucher was reassured by his commanders that they would be likely to do no more than pester a sovereign ship of the U.S. Navy.
The presailing orders had been quite specific: the Pueblo was to spend two weeks sailing up and down the North Korean coast from the frontier with the Soviet Union down to the DMZ that marked the border with South Korea. She was to be on the lookout for two things: a series of newly built coastal antiaircraft batteries that America believed the North Koreans had been constructing, and any of four new submarines that Moscow had recently handed over to the North’s fledgling navy. After two weeks of this, the ship was to turn about and head back to Japan. For the entire journey, the Pueblo was to keep strict radio silence, except in the event of a real emergency.
Bucher clearly relished the instructions. He eased away from the dock and out into the fairway, and as he set sail on a southbound course he stood ostentatiously out on the Pueblo’s flying bridge. He was in fine, exuberant form: as his men toasted him with eggnog, he decided to show off his singing talents, booming down to them, and to all the mystified crews of passing Japanese fishing boats, a jazz number popular at the time, “The Lonely Bull.” It turned out to be an apposite choice.
After a storm-tossed but otherwise uneventful crossing, the Pueblo arrived off the North Korean port of Wonsan on January 13, and began her ferreting duties. As ordered, she kept well away from the coast, and to minimize her chances of being seen, she sailed dangerously through the nights with all her lights dimmed or doused. As instructed, she also maintained her radio silence, and with religious determination. Bucher would not even transmit the brief coded messages that all other American vessels sent daily, allowing Pacific Fleet headquarters to know where all its ships were, all the time.
The crew, alone and unleashed from authority, then fell into a simple patrol routine. With North Korea lying gray and cold and mountainous off to their west, and the Sea of Japan lying gray and cold and empty off to their east, there commenced a plodding sameness to every day: a lumbering, swell-tossed progress up and down the coast, the ship’s bristle of aerials listening out for any transmissions, the sailors’ watching eyes trained for anything unusual that might be observed. Other than that, a good deal of time was spent in the hammock, eating three plain meals a day, watching movies such as Twelve Angry Men and In Like Flint, and doing secret work for the codebreakers and the monitoring teams locked behind their blast-proof door with all their mysterious NSA machinery. The only work that kept the men physically active was chipping away ice from the superstructure. Bucher was worried that his already unstable ship could well founder if too much ice accumulated. This was work that all of them loathed.
Nine days of this zigzagging back and forth off the frigid Korean coast, and they were off the port of Wonsan once again on January 22, a Monday. Bucher and his crew had every reason to suppose that this day and the next would be as routine and as dull as the nine before. What they did not realize, because no one had seen fit to tell them, was that a series of events had unfolded on land the previous weekend that made their presence so close to North Korean waters particularly dangerous.
A heavily armed North Korean commando unit had been smuggled south of the border a week previously, with orders to mount a daring raid on the presidential palace in Seoul. The plan had been to execute the South Korean president, Park Chung Hee, to kill his family and personal staff, and to flee back across the border. Thirty-one tough young members of the 124th Army Unit, a North Korean special forces team, had cut their way through the fences, and then managed to get all the way into Seoul and to within half a mile of the palace, before being intercepted.
A massive weekend firefight had taken place on the capital’s streets, watched with amazement and horror by civilian city dwellers. The surviving North Korean commandos fled into the surrounding hills, and were picked off one by one by some of the six thousand South Korean troops who had been mobilized to find them. Come Monday morning the team from the North had all been killed, and the episode was all but over. But the atmosphere was still electric, and incredibly tense—and it is almost impossible to believe that no one at U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters bothered to tell the Pueblo that its presence so close to North Korean waters was likely to be even less welcome than normal.
That Monday morning was uneventful and peaceful for the ship. Just after lunch, however, Captain Bucher was summoned to the bridge. Two North Korean trawlers had been spotted steaming toward them, and they were closing in fast. The craft halted less than twenty-five yards from the American ship, an
d their crew members, armed with more cameras than ordinary fishermen might need, took scores of photographs. The men had extremely fierce expressions. One Pueblo sailor remarked that “they looked like they wanted to eat our livers.”
An alarmed Bucher, deciding to break radio silence, told Japanese Fleet HQ that his ship had been identified. It took the better part of half a day to compose the heavily encrypted message and then send it on the one secret channel available to the ship.
Nothing more happened that day: the two trawlers left and headed back to shore. The next morning, only an unusual amount of North Korean coastal radio chatter suggested anything abnormal; as on Monday, the morning seas were quite empty, and the Pueblo, stopped dead in the water fifteen miles off the coast, seemed to be alone in the ocean. Then, around lunchtime, a small North Korean naval vessel, a lightly armed submarine chaser, suddenly appeared out of nowhere, heading toward the Pueblo at what American sailors call flank speed, the highest its engines could command. Its crew, all wearing helmets, raised signal flags, one after another: “What nationality?” demanded the first. “Heave to or I will fire” was the second.
The oncoming ship then radioed a flotilla of other fast patrol boats that were appearing over the horizon. “It is U.S. Did you get it? It looks like it’s armed now. It looks like it’s a radar ship. It also has radio antennae. It has a lot of antennae and, looking at the wavelength, I think it’s a ship used for detecting something.” This particular message—intelligent, articulate, savvy, but unheard aboard the Pueblo—happened to be intercepted by an American C-130 Hercules aircraft that was operating high above the North Korean coast as a direct consequence of the failed attack on the palace in Seoul three days before. The U.S. Air Force signals officer, alarmed by a drama that suddenly seemed to be enveloping an unwitting American ship far below, radioed promptly back to Japan, urging the staff there to warn the ship’s captain of what now seemed about to happen.