The Pueblo’s cover story was that it was conducting scientific research; really, it was on an espionage mission, a joint NSA-Navy operation with the goal of gathering signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In addition to the regular crew, there were twenty-eight signals intelligence specialists working behind locked doors in a separate and restricted part of the vessel. Parked 15.8 miles off North Korea’s Ung-do Island, technically the Pueblo was floating in international waters.
North Korea’s Communist regime did not see it that way. The ship was close enough to be eavesdropping on Wonson harbor, which made it an open target for the North Korean People’s Army, the KPA. After one of the Pueblo’s crew members picked up on radar that a KPA ship was approaching fast, Pueblo’s captain, Lloyd M. Bucher, went up to the bridge to have a look around. Through his binoculars, Bucher saw not just a military ship but one with its rocket launchers aimed directly at the Pueblo. Bucher ordered certain flags to be raised, ones that indicated the USS Pueblo was on a surveying mission, something the North Koreans obviously already did not buy. Within minutes, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Lacy spotted several small vessels on the horizon: torpedo boats coming from Wonson. Next, two MiG-21 fighter jets appeared on the scene.
Captain Bucher now had a national security nightmare on his hands. His boat was filled with thousands of classified papers, cryptographic manuals, and encryption machines. Most significantly, the Pueblo carried a KW-7 cipher machine, which was the veritable Rosetta stone of naval encryption. The captain considered sinking his ship, which would take forty-seven minutes, but later explained that he knew if he had done so a gun battle was certain to ensue. Most of the Pueblo’s life rafts would be shot at and destroyed. Without life rafts, the men would die in the icy waters in a matter of minutes, Bucher was certain. He made the decision to flee.
The North Korean ship raised a flag that signaled “Heave to or I will open fire on you.” Captain Bucher raised a signal flag in response: “Thank you for your consideration. I am departing the area.” But the North Koreans opened fire. Bucher himself was hit, taking shrapnel in his foot and backside. As the Pueblo took off, the North Koreans continued to fire, killing a U.S. sailor named Duane Hodges. Meanwhile, behind the secret door, SIGINT specialists smashed cipher equipment with axes and shoved documents into a small incinerator there. Despite the speed at which the analysts worked to burn the secret papers, 90 percent of the documents survived. Sixty-one minutes after being shot, Captain Bucher was no longer in control of his ship. The North Korean People’s Army stormed the Pueblo and took the captain and his eighty-two crew members hostage. For the first time in 160 years, an American vessel had been seized by a foreign nation. The timing could not have been worse. America was already losing one war.
President Johnson was outraged. Within hours of the Pueblo’s capture, the Pentagon began secretly preparing for war against North Korea. The following day, McNamara summoned the war council to lay out plans for a ground attack. “Our primary objective is to get the men of the Pueblo back,” McNamara said, emphasizing just how secret his plan was to remain: “No word of the discussion in this meeting should go beyond this room.” A stunning air attack over North Korea was laid out. An estimated fifteen thousand tons of bombs would be dropped from the air to complement the ground assault. Given the huge numbers of soldiers and airmen fighting in Vietnam, the war with North Korea would require a call-up of the reserves. A massive U.S. strategic airlift was set in motion, designated Operation Combat Fox. That the North Vietnamese were just six days from launching the sneak attack called the Tet Offensive was not yet known. A war with North Korea over the USS Pueblo would have been a war America could ill afford.
Richard Helms suggested an Oxcart be dispatched from nearby Kadena to photograph North Korea’s coast and try to locate the USS Pueblo before anyone even considered making a next move. As it stood, immediately after the Pueblo’s capture, there was no intelligence indicating exactly where the sailors were or where the ship was being held. Richard Helms counseled the president that if the goal was to get the eighty-two American sailors back, a ground attack or air attack couldn’t possibly achieve that end if no one knew where the USS Pueblo was. A reconnaissance mission would also enable the Pentagon to see if Pyongyang was mobilizing its troops for war over the event. Most important of all, it would give the crisis a necessary diplomatic pause.
Three days after the Pueblo’s capture, on January 26, Oxcart pilot Jack Weeks was dispatched on a sortie from Kadena to locate the missing ship. From the photographs Weeks took on that overflight, the United States pinpointed the Pueblo’s exact location as it floated in the dark-watered harbor in Changjahwan Bay. Before completing his mission but after taking the necessary photographs, Jack Weeks experienced aircraft problems. When he got back to base, he told his fellow pilots about the problems he’d had on the flight but not about his photographic success; detailed information regarding the USS Pueblo was so highly classified, very few individuals had any idea that Weeks’s mission had delivered photographs that had prevented war with North Korea.
“The [Oxcart] quickly located the captured Pueblo at anchor in Wonson harbor,” President Johnson’s national security adviser Walt Rostow revealed in 1994. “So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower. All that would accomplish would be to kill a lot of people including our own. But the [Oxcart’s] photo take provided proof that our ship and our men were being held. The Koreans couldn’t lie about that.” The Pentagon’s secret war plan against North Korea was called off. Instead, negotiations for the sailors’ return began. But the ever-suspicious administration, now deeply embroiled in political fallout from the Tet Offensive, worried the Pueblo incident could very well be another Communist double cross. What if North Korea was secretly mobilizing its troops for war? Three and a half weeks later, on February 19, 1968, Frank Murray was assigned to fly Oxcart’s second mission over North Korea. Murray’s photographs indicated that North Korea’s army was still not mobilizing for battle. But by then, the Pueblo was on its way to Pyongyang, where it remains today—the only American naval vessel held in captivity by a foreign power. Captain Bucher and his men were prisoners of North Korea for eleven months, tortured, put through mock executions, and made to confess espionage before finally being released. In 2008, a U.S. federal judge determined that North Korea should pay sixty-five million dollars in damages to several of the Pueblo’s crew, but North Korea has yet to respond.
