Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (42 page)

"Supposedly
our inventory of intelligence information on North Korea was not very current
so they thought, Well, here's a chance to update that. But it just caused no
end of trouble for us, I mean even before we got under way, because I had a
bunch of Russian linguists on board. We had to get these two Marines from [the
naval listening post at] Kamiseya who, they knew about ten words of Korean
[Hongul] between the two of them. . . . They were good guys but they had not
been really seasoned in the language and this type of collection."

"Answer
all bells," shouted the officer of the deck. "Single up." In the
pilothouse, Boatswain's Mate Second Class Ronald L. Berens held the ship's
wheel in his two hands and gently turned it to port. Heavy, low-hanging clouds
seemed to merge with the gray seas on the morning of January 5, 1968, as the
Pueblo
slipped away from her berth. Over the loudspeaker came the sounds of a
guitar—Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass playing "The Lonely Bull,"
adopted by Commander Bucher as the ship's theme song. It would be the most
prescient act of the entire voyage. As the
Pueblo
disappeared over the
horizon, the North Korean volcano began to erupt.

One of the
Sigint technicians, Earl M. Kisler, later began a long poem:

Out of
Japan on the fifth of Jan.

The
Pueblo
came
a-steamin'.

Round
Kyushu's toe, past Sasebo,

You could
hear the captain a-screamin',

"XO!"
he said,

"Full
speed ahead! We've got us some spyin' to do!

Timmy, be
sharp!" Then with Charley Law's

charts,

Away like
a turtle we flew.

For
several months now, Pyongyang KCNA International had been broadcasting frequent
warnings in English about U.S. "espionage boats" penetrating North
Korean territorial waters. These messages had been picked up by the CIA's
Foreign Broadcast Information Service. "It [the United States] infiltrated
scores of armed boats into the waters of our side, east of Chongjin port on the
eastern coast to conduct vicious reconnaissance," said one broadcast on
November 27. Chongjin was to be one of the
Pueblo's
key targets. Another
report, on November 10, quoted a "confession" by a "spy"
caught from one of the boats. "Drawn into the spy ring of the Central
Intelligence Agency," he said, "I had long undergone training mainly
to infiltrate into the north in the guise of a fisherman."

As the
weeks and months progressed, the warnings grew more belligerent. Often they
quoted the accusations of North Korean major general Pak Chung Kuk. "As
our side has declared time and again," he said in a report on December 1,
"it had no alternative but to detain the ships involved in hostile acts,
as a due self-defense step." In January, a warning aimed directly at the
Pueblo
was even quoted in a Japanese newspaper, the
Sankei Shimbun:  
North
Korean forces would take action against the
Pueblo
if it continued to
loiter near territorial waters. All of this "open source
intelligence" was readily available to NSA and Naval Security Group
officials in Hawaii and Japan.

One day
after the
Pueblo
parked herself little more than a gull's breath outside
North Korea's twelve-mile limit, still another warning was issued. "The
U.S. imperialist aggressor troops again dispatched from early this morning . .
. spy boats disguised as fishing boats into the coastal waters of our side off
the eastern coast to perpetrate hostile acts. As long as the U.S. imperialist
aggressor troops conduct reconnaissance by sending spy boats, our naval ships
will continue to take determined countermeasures." The
Pueblo
had
sailed into a spider's web.

Late on
the evening of January 19, a group of thirty-one North Korean army lieutenants
quickly navigated their way through a labyrinth of mines, brush, barbed wire,
fences, and other obstacles. They were penetrating the formidable demilitarized
zone, a machetelike scar that sliced North from South Korea. For weeks they had
been training with sixty-pound packs on their backs, mapping the route, and
clearing a path. Now, armed with submachine guns, nine-inch daggers, and grenades
that hung from their South Korean army fatigues, they were heading in the
direction of Seoul at about six miles an hour.

At that
moment the
Pueblo,
unaware of the tremors taking place little more than
a dozen miles to the west, was sailing slowly south toward Wonsan. After
leaving Japan, the ship had been hammered by a fierce winter storm and had
taken several dangerous rolls while tacking. By the time she reached her
northernmost point, an area where North Korea meets Russia, the weather was so
cold that ice covered the ship's deck and superstructure. Wearing the warmest
clothing he could find, Seaman Stu Russell ventured on deck to take a look
around. "Although the seas were calm, the humidity was rising, and as a
result, ice was forming on every surface of the ship," he recalled.
"Had anyone seen the ship in this condition it would have appeared to be a
ghost ship floating on a gray sea." Then Russell turned his attention
toward the bleak shoreline. "The world looked black and white with shades
of gray," he said. "There was no color to it. The sky was overcast,
the sea had a leadlike sheen to it, and the mountains in the distance were
black, with a coating of white on their northern flanks . . . . Few if any of
us had ever experienced cold such as this, and we were ill prepared for
it." The heavy ice worried Bucher, and he ordered the crew to begin
chipping it away with sledgehammers, picks, whatever they could find.

From
morning til dark,

A gray
Noah's ark,

We bounced
and quivered along.

But instead
of a pair of all animals rare,

We carried
agents, about 83 strong.

The
mercury dropped the further north that we got,

So cold,
frost covered my glasses,

So cold,
ice covered the fo'c'sle and bridge,

So cold we
froze off our asses.

The
Pueblo
was hardly bigger than an expensive yacht; space was tight, and within the
Sigint area it was at a premium. In addition to the KW-7, one of the most
modern cipher machines in the U.S. government, the space held a WLR-1 intercept
receiver, an assortment of typewriters, and nearly five hundred pounds of
highly secret documents. Another hundred pounds were generated during the
voyage. About twenty-two weighted and perforated ditching bags were stored on
board—not enough to hold all the documents in the event of an emergency. For
routine destruction of documents at sea, a small incinerator was installed
against the smokestack. Since it could only handle about three or four pounds
of paper at a time, it was not considered useful for emergency destruction. The
ship also had two shredders that could slice an eight-inch stack of paper in
about fifteen minutes. To destroy equipment, there were sledgehammers and axes
in both the Sigint and cipher spaces.

Because
the twenty-eight enlisted Sigint specialists labored mysteriously behind a
locked door and seldom socialized with the other members of the crew, friction
occasionally developed. "We had a crew meeting and we were told that the
mission of this ship was none of our business," said one member of the ship's
crew, "and we were not to discuss anything about it or speculate about it.
And if we went by the operations spaces and the door was open we were to look
the other way. And these guys were all prima donnas and they reported to NSA
and there was always friction between the guys that had to do the hard work and
the [Sigint crew]."

On January
20, the warnings of General Pak once again vibrated through the ether. "In
the New Year, the U.S. imperialist aggressors continued the criminal act of
infiltrating armed vessels and spy bandits, mingled with South Korean fishing
boats, into the coastal waters of our side. . . . Major General Pak Chung Kuk
strongly demanded that the enemy side take immediate measures for stopping the
hostile acts of infiltrating fishing boats including armed vessels and spy
boats into the coastal waters of our side." The messages, broadcast in
English, were repeated ten times in Hongul, the Korean language, creating great
public anxiety in North Korea about unidentified ships. But Bucher was never informed
of the warnings.

As Bucher
maintained radio silence off the North Korean coast, the clandestine force of
North Korean lieutenants dressed as South Korean soldiers reached the outskirts
of Seoul. Three hours later they arrived at a checkpoint a mile from the
entrance to the Blue House, the residence of South Korean president Park Chung
Hee. When questioned by a guard, the lead lieutenant said that his men belonged
to a counterintelligence unit and were returning from operations in the
mountains. They were allowed to pass, but the guard telephoned his superior to
check out the story. Minutes later the night lit up with muzzle flashes and the
still air exploded with the sounds of automatic weapons. Through much of the
early morning the fighting went on. The guerrillas were massively outnumbered;
most were killed and a few surrendered. Had they succeeded, the assassination
might have triggered an all-out invasion from the North. The calls for
retaliation were quick and strong.

By noon
the next day, January 22, the
Pueblo
lay dead in calm waters. A short
twenty miles to the south and west was Wonsan.

On the way
to this spot, the ship had begun trolling for signals through its three
operational areas, codenamed on the map Pluto, Venus, and Mars. In the Sigint
spaces, the technicians, under the command of Stephen Harris, worked
twenty-four hours a day in three shifts. But the electronic pickings were slim
near two of their key targets, the ports of Chongjin and Songjin. Adding to the
problems, the two Hongul linguists weren't fully qualified and some of the
equipment had been malfunctioning. As the men fought off boredom, Bucher began
thinking the entire mission was going to be a bust.

Then, as
they approached their third key target, Wonsan, the activity suddenly began
picking up. Signals were logged, recorded, and (if any words were recognizable)
gisted.

From
"Venus" to "Mars,"

Charley
shootin' the stars,

Songjin,
Chongjin, and Wonsan,

The
Pueblo
a-bobbin',

Our receivers
a-throbbin',

Us sly
secret agents sailed along.

If a ship
passing by were to see us they'd die.

"Ha!
A harmless and leaky ill craft."

Our ship
may be leaky,

But by God
we 're sneaky,

In the end
we'll have the last laugh.

Soon the
Pueblo
had company. A pair of North Korean fishing boats approached, and one made
a close circle around the ship. There was no question; they were had. "We
were close enough to see the crew looking back at us," recalled Stu
Russell, "and they looked upset. On the bridge we could make out what
looked like several military personnel who were looking back at us with
binoculars. Maybe they were political commissars who kept an eye on the
crewmembers to make certain they didn't defect. But this group didn't look like
they wanted to defect, they looked like they wanted to eat our livers."

Bucher
ordered photographs taken of the boats and then decided it was time to break
radio silence. He drafted a situation report and gave it to his radioman to
send out immediately. But because of the
Pueblo's
weak transmitting
power and low antenna, as well as difficult propagation conditions in the Sea
of Japan, the message was not going through.

That night
the crew watched Jimmy Stewart in
The Flight of the Phoenix,
about a
group of people stranded in the Sahara Desert after a plane crash. Others
played endless games of poker or read in the berthing compartment.

In South
Korea, television viewers watched as the one live captive from the failed Blue
House raid was paraded on national television—a great humiliation for North
Korea. Although most of the people of North Korea did not have televisions,
their officials at Panmunjom, where northern, southern, and American
negotiators met, had access to TVs and witnessed the spectacle. They may have
been left with the feeling that one humiliation deserves another.

The next
morning, January 23, a hazy mist obscured the North Korean island of Ung-do,
sixteen miles west. Bucher considered it the best place from which to sit and
eavesdrop on Wonsan. From there, the sensitive Sigint equipment could pick up
some of the more difficult signals as far inland as fifteen miles. About 10:30
A.M., an Elint specialist in the Sigint spaces sat up, adjusted his earphones,
and began listening intensely as he studied the green scope in front of him. He
had just intercepted two radar signals from subchasers although he could not
determine their range or bearing.