Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (41 page)

Despite
the growing storm clouds, the approval process for the
Pueblo's
first mission
was moving ahead like a chain letter. The outline for the operation was
contained in a fat three-ring binder, the Monthly Reconnaissance Schedule for
January 1968. Full of classification markings and codewords, it was put
together by the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Joint Reconnaissance Center. Inside the
black notebook was a menu of all of the next month's technical espionage
operations, from U-2 missions over China to patrols by the USNS
Muller
off
Cuba to deep penetrations into Russia's White Sea by the attack submarine USS
Scorpion.
The Navy had evaluated the
Pueblo's
mission, a dozen miles off the
North Korean coast, as presenting a minimal risk.

On
December 27, at 11:00 in the morning, middle-ranking officials from an alphabet
of agencies gathered in the Pentagon's "tank," Room 2E924, to work
out any differences concerning the various platforms and their targets. The
action officers from the CIA, NSA, DIA, JCS, and other agencies routinely gave
their approvals, and the binder—"the size of a Sears, Roebuck
catalogue," said one former official—was sent on its way. Two days later,
a courier hand-carried it around to the various agencies for final approval. At
the Pentagon, Paul H. Nitze, the deputy secretary of defense, signed off on it,
and at the White House, the National Security Council's secret 303 Committee,
which reviews covert operations, gave the
Pueblo
mission an okay. There
were no comments and no disapprovals.

But at
NSA, one analyst did have some concerns. A retired Navy chief petty officer assigned
to B Group, the section that analyzed Sigint from Communist Asia, knew that
North Korea had little tolerance for electronic eavesdropping missions. Three
years earlier, they had attempted to blast an RB-47 Strato-Spy out of the air
while it was flying in international airspace about eighty miles east of the
North Korean port of Wonsan. This was the same area where the
Pueblo
was
to loiter—only much closer, about thirteen miles off the coast.

Codenamed
Box Top, the RB-47 flight was a routine Peacetime Airborne Reconnaissance
Program (PARPRO) mission. It departed from Yokota Air Base in Japan on April
28, 1965, and headed over the Sea of Japan toward its target area. "We
were about six hours into one of those ho-hum missions on a leg heading toward
Wonsan harbor, approximately eighty nautical miles out," recalled one of
the Ravens, First Lieutenant George V. Back, "when the hours of boredom
suddenly turned into the seconds of terror." Raven One, Air Force Captain
Robert C. Winters, intercepted a very weak, unidentifiable airborne intercept
(AI) signal that he thought might have come from somewhere off his tail.
"At approximately the same time," said Back, "we received a
message that there were 'bogies' in the area. Neither the pilot nor the copilot
observed any aircraft and we continued the mission."

A short
while later, Back, down in the cramped, windowless Sigint spaces, intercepted a
signal from a ground control radar and began recording it. By then the plane
was about thirty-five to forty miles off Wonsan Harbor. "Suddenly the
aircraft pitched nose down and began losing altitude," he said. "The
altimeter was reading about twenty-seven thousand feet and unwinding."
"They are shooting at us," yelled Henry E. Dubuy, the co-pilot, over
the intercom. "We are hit and going down." Back began initiating the
ejection process and depressurized the Raven compartment. Next the co-pilot
requested permission to fire. "Shoot the bastard down," shouted
Lieutenant Colonel Hobart D. Mattison, the pilot, as he made repeated Mayday
calls into his radio. He then asked for a heading "to get the hell out of
here."

"By
this time," recalled Back, "all hell had broken loose. The pilot had
his hands full with the rapidly deteriorating airplane; the co-pilot was trying
to shoot the bastards visually; the navigator was trying to give the pilot a
heading; the Raven One was dumping chaff, and the second MiG-17 was
moving in for his gunnery practice." The two North Korean MiG-17s came in
shooting. "There was no warning, ID pass, or intimidation," said
Back, "just cannon fire." The planes were too close for the RB-47's
fire control radar to lock on to them.

By now the
Strato-Spy was severely wounded. The hydraulic system failed and fire was
coming from the aft main tank. Two engines had also been hit, and shrapnel from
number three engine exploded into the fuselage. Nevertheless, said Back,
"both engines continued to operate but number three vibrated like an old
car with no universal joints."

Dubuy, the
co-pilot, fired away at the MiGs but without tracers it was hard to tell where
he was shooting. The MiGs would dive down, then quickly bring their nose up and
attempt to rake the underside of the plane with cannon fire. Down in the Raven
compartment, Robert Winters released a five-second burst of chaff during one of
the firing passes, hoping to throw off the MiG's radar. Dubuy watched as the
MiG nearly disappeared in the chaff cloud before breaking off. Finally the MiGs
began taking some fire. One suddenly turned completely vertical and headed
toward the sea, nose down. The other MiG headed back toward Wonsan.

As Colonel
Mattison leveled out at 14,000 feet, the plane was still trailing smoke. The
aft wheel well bulkhead was blackened and nearly buckled from the heat of the
fire, and the aircraft was flying in a nose-down attitude because of the loss
of the aft main fuel tank. Mattison assured the crew that he had the plane
under control but told them to be ready to bail out. Despite the heavy damage,
the Strato-Spy made it back to Yokota and hit hard on the runway. "We
porpoised about eighty feet back into the air where we nearly hit the fire
suppression helicopter flying above us," said Back. Once the plane had
come to a stop, he added, "we exited, dodging emergency equipment as we headed
for the edge of the runway."

With that
incident and others clearly in mind, the Navy chief in B Group went down to the
operation managers in K Group. "This young fellow had a message
drafted," said Gene Sheck of K-12, "that said, 'Boy, you people have
got to be complete blithering idiots to put that ship off North Korea, because
all kinds of bad things are going to happen. Therefore cancel it.' It had very
strong [language], not the kind of political message you'd ever get out of the
building." An official from K Group therefore rewrote the message, the
first warning message Sheck had ever sent out:

The
following information is provided to aid in your assessment of CINCPAC's
[Commander-in-Chief, Pacific] estimate of risk:

1.  The
North Korean Air Force has been extremely sensitive to peripheral
reconnaissance flights in the area since early 1965. (This sensitivity was
emphasized on April 28, 1965, when a U.S. Air Force RB-47 was fired on and
severely damaged 35 to 40 nautical miles from the coast.)

2.  The
North Korean Air Force has assumed an additional role of naval support since
late 1966.

3.  The
North Korean Navy reacts to any ROK [Republic of Korea] naval vessel or ROK
fishing vessel near the North Korean coast line.

4. 
Internationally recognized boundaries as they relate to airborne activities are
generally not honored by North Korea on the East Coast of North Korea. But
there is no [Sigint] evidence of provocative harassing activities by North
Korean vessels beyond 12 nautical miles from the coast.

The above
is provided to aid in evaluating the requirements for ship protective measures
and is not intended to reflect adversely on CINCPACFLT [Commander-in-Chief,
Pacific Fleet] deployment proposal.

Marshall
Carter approved the message and at 10:28 that Friday night it rattled onto a
cipher machine at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Signal Office in the
Pentagon. There a clerk routed it up to the War Room, where a watch officer
sent a copy to the chief of the JCS's Joint Reconnaissance Center, Brigadier
General Ralph Steakley.

"This
was the first voyage in which we were having a vessel linger for a long period
of time near North Korean waters," Carter recalled. "It therefore was
a special mission as we saw it. We knew that she was going to stay in international
waters. We had no evidence that the North Koreans at sea had ever interfered
with or had any intentions to interfere with a U.S. vessel outside of their
acknowledged territorial waters. Nevertheless, our people felt that even though
all of this information was already available in intelligence community reports
it would be helpful if we summed them up and gave them to the Joint Chiefs of
Staff for whatever use they might make of them or assistance in evaluating this
particular mission."

Had NSA
wished, it could have called off the entire mission. But because this first
Pueblo
operation was being run solely by the Navy, officials were reluctant to use
their big foot. "NSA has a pretty strong voice," said Sheck. "If
NSA had gone out with a message or a position on that book [the monthly
reconnaissance schedule] in that time frame, I'm sure the mission probably
would not have gone. . . . There have been a few cases where NSA has done that.
An airborne mission that might provoke the director of NSA to say, 'We don't
want to do that.'... But nobody did that. Even this message is a little
wishy-washy, because of the position NSA's in. It was a Navy patrol proposed by
Navy people in response to Navy tasking, and we
were an outsider saying,
'You really ought to look at that again, guys. If that's what you want, think
about it.'"

On January
2, 1968, after the New Year's holiday, General Steakley found his copy of the
warning message when he returned to his office. But rather than immediately
bringing it to the attention of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA, and the 303
Committee, which had only a few days earlier approved the mission, he buried
it. First he changed its NSA designation from "action"—which would
have required someone to actually do something about it—to
"information," which basically meant "You might find this
interesting." Then, instead of sending it back to the people who had just
signed off on the mission, he pushed it routinely on its way to the office of
the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, in Hawaii. At CINCPAC headquarters, the
message was first confused with the
Pueblo
approval message, which
arrived at about the same time, and then ignored because of the
"information" tag.

An earlier
"action" copy had also been sent to the Chief of Naval Operations,
Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, but because the DIA Signal Office mistakenly attached
the wrong designator, it wound up in limbo and was lost for the next month.

There was
still one last chance for NSA's warning message to have an impact. One copy had
been passed through back channels to the head of the Naval Security Group in
Washington. When Captain Ralph E. Cook saw the "action" priority tag,
he assumed that the matter would be debated among senior officials in Hawaii,
among them his own representative, Navy Captain Everett B. (Pete) Gladding.
Nevertheless, he passed a copy on to Gladding to give him a heads-up.

With rosy
cheeks and a web belt that stretched wide around his middle, Gladding looked
more like Santa Glaus than an electronic spy. As director of the Naval Security
Group, Pacific, he managed a broad range of signals intelligence missions,
including those involving the
Banner
and the
Pueblo.
Located
behind a cipher-locked door on the top floor of the old U.S. Pacific Fleet
Headquarters at Pearl Harbor, his offices were close to the World War II
codebreaking center. And as in the disastrous series of events that led to the
devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, once again a warning message was lost or
ignored and men would be put in peril. Although Gladding later denied ever
having received the message, other officers said he did get it. In any case,
rather than NSA's warning, the approval with its "minimal risk"
advisory was sent from Hawaii to Japan, and the
Pueblo
made preparations
to get under way.

The highly
secret operations order instructed the
Pueblo
to:

•  
Determine the nature and extent of naval activity [in the] vicinity of North
Korean ports of Chongjin, Song) in, Mayang Do and Wonsan.

•   Sample
electronic environment of East Coast North Korea, with emphasis on
intercept/fixing of coastal radars.

•  
Intercept and conduct surveillance of Soviet naval units.

•  
Determine Korcom [Korean Communist] and Soviet reaction respectively to an
overt intelligence collector operating near Korcom periphery and actively
conducting surveillance of USSR naval units.

•  
Evaluate USS
Pueblo's
(AGER-2) capabilities as a naval intelligence
collection and tactical surveillance ship.

•   Report
any deployment of Korcom/Soviet units which may be indicative of pending
hostilities or offensive actions against U.S. forces.

Finally,
the order added: "Estimate of risk: Minimal."

Lieutenant
Stephen Harris, in charge of the signals intelligence operation on the ship,
was disappointed when he read the
Pueblo's
operational order a few weeks
before departure. "I was very upset when we found out we were going to
North Korea," he said, "because we were configured to cruise off the
[Soviet Union's] Kamchatka Peninsula . . . primarily Vladivostok and
secondarily Petropavlovsk. That's where we were supposed to be going, and
that's where all the training for our guys came from. And then to find out we
were going to North Korea, I thought what a waste ... It was our first mission
and somebody thought, Well, this will give these guys a chance to learn how to
do it. Well, we had all done this before.