Jack Cheevers: Act of War

The captain loved the adventure and camaraderie of subs and longed to command one of his own. Instead, the Navy “surfaced” him—removed him from the submarine corps—and made him skipper of the Pueblo in 1966. Bucher was bitterly disappointed, but he resolved to do his best with the intelligence ship. Before long he realized how similar the Pueblo ’s cruises would be to his old sub missions—a lone vessel patrolling a hostile coast for days or weeks at a time. The big difference was that now he’d travel on the surface.

Shortly after taking command of the Pueblo , Bucher flew to Washington, D.C., for ten days of classified briefings on his upcoming missions. Following a series of security checks, he was ushered into the Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the National Security Agency, the secretive government organization that monitored radio transmissions, telephone traffic, and radar signals worldwide. The NSA also developed the complex code machines used by the American military to send encrypted messages. In conjunction with the Navy, the NSA would assign the Pueblo specific eavesdropping targets. Bucher also paid a visit to the Naval Security Group, which ran the Navy’s own global network of electronic surveillance.

The Pueblo was to be home-ported in Japan, within cruising range of three potential wartime foes: the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. Bucher wouldn’t find out until later which nation he’d sail against first, though he suspected it was the USSR, which was doing its level best to discourage U.S. seaborne reconnaissance. When the first unarmed spy boat, the USS Banner , was sent out under Operation Clickbeetle, the Russians had tried to scare it away from their shores by playing hair-raising games of chicken. Soviet destroyers trained their guns on the Banner and raced directly at it, as if intending to ram, before veering away at the last moment. During night maneuvers at close quarters, they tried to blind the Banner ’s skipper by aiming powerful searchlights at his bridge.

But Bucher’s briefers told him there was little chance that he and his vessel would actually be harmed. His best protection, they said, was the centuries-old body of international law and custom that guaranteed free passage on the high seas to ships of all nations. The Pueblo had a legal right to patrol foreign coasts as long as it didn’t violate territorial waters. While the United States enforced only a three-mile offshore limit, most communist nations claimed 12 miles. As a precaution, the Pueblo was ordered to stay at least 13 miles from land at all times. The captain also was advised that he could take comfort in a much older and far less civilized doctrine: an eye for an eye. Because if the Soviets were foolish enough to attack his vulnerable, solitary spy ship, the United States could just as easily go after one of theirs.

Bucher enjoyed his stay in Washington, but was unimpressed by the NSA bureaucrats, who struck him as “pipe-smoking characters” trying to act like Ivy League professors. As he wrote later, he couldn’t help but wonder whether any of these men had ever “enjoyed a wild Saturday night drunk, got into a good fight over a poker game, abandoned themselves to a hot extramarital affair, or, for that matter, brazenly run a stop light before the eyes of a traffic cop.”

His briefings finished, the captain departed for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, where he expected to oversee the finishing touches on the Pueblo ’s metamorphosis from washed-up cargo hauler to cutting-edge intelligence platform.

The great yard was roaring with activity when he arrived in January 1967. Welders, pipe fitters, electricians, and other workers swarmed over sleek warships, readying them for action off Vietnam. But Bucher felt a stab of dismay when he spotted his new boat bobbing forlornly among much bigger and grander cruisers, missile frigates, and nuclear submarines. Dusted off from the Navy’s mothball fleet near San Francisco and towed north to Bremerton, the dilapidated old freighter had been subjected to months of hammering and drilling, yet its conversion was far from complete. Rust streaked its hull. Scaffolding, shipping crates, tools, and random wires clogged its decks. Bucher thought it resembled nothing so much as an abandoned derelict.

A small group of officers and enlisted men already had reported aboard to help civilian contractors build out the ship’s most important section, the Special Operations Department, or “SOD hut.” The claustrophobic hut, also known innocuously as “the research spaces,” housed the radar detectors, radio receivers, oscillators, spectrum analyzers, amplifiers, dosimeters, and four-channel demultiplexers that gave the Pueblo its purpose. Behind a triple-locked steel door, highly trained Navy communication technicians, or CTs, would operate the top secret eavesdropping hardware.

The amount of work still to be done stunned Bucher. Dozens of problems in the engine room, berthing areas, mess decks, and elsewhere needed to be fixed. With few sealable hatches between compartments, the ship’s watertight integrity was questionable. Its windlass, which raised and lowered the anchor, was unreliable, meaning that the Pueblo might drift helplessly into communist waters in the event of engine failure. Instead of an intercom to transmit orders from bridge to engine room, the skipper had to rely on an antiquated system of bells installed by the Army. A subsequent inspection by Navy experts counted no fewer than 462 mechanical and design deficiencies.

The captain began haunting shipyard managers, vociferously demanding improvements to the Pueblo ’s operating equipment and living areas. He clashed so often with the superintendent that he was criticized in a fitness report as “overzealous.”

Part of the problem was that few people working on the spy ship had high enough security clearances to be told of its true function. They treated it according to its old designation as an auxiliary cargo ship, light, or AKL. An AKL carried a crew of 27, but the reconfigured surveillance vessel would bear 83 men, including 30 communication technicians. Bucher had to fight for more berths and better hygiene facilities for his unusually large crew. After long days of wrangling, he characteristically invited the shipyard boss to the officers’ club for conciliatory cocktails.

By June 2, the Pueblo finally was ready for sea trials in Puget Sound.

The first exercise involved the basic task of dropping anchor, but the anchor chain jumped off the faulty windlass. Next were maneuverability tests. Cruising in reverse, Bucher ordered left full rudder. That caused the cable connecting the rudder to the steering engine to snap, freezing the rudder in its turned position. The Pueblo could only sail in circles until Bucher made a humiliating call for a tugboat to tow his new ship home.

Three days later, the cable parted again. Grunting and cursing, Bucher’s men fitted a heavy cast-iron tiller to the rudder in order to manually turn it. The sight of men pulling mightily on ropes to swing the big tiller back and forth made one sailor wonder what it was like to be a galley slave in the fourth century B.C. But spare parts were no longer available for the steering engine, manufactured during World War II by a now-defunct Wisconsin elevator company, and the Navy decided the cost of replacing it was prohibitive. By the time the Pueblo completed its sea trials, the steering engine had failed 180 times.

Bucher knew his new ship was unlikely to ever be much more than a balky, patched-together tub. Yet he found himself developing a distinct affection for the Pueblo ; it was his first command, after all. He also held many of his men in high regard, especially his taciturn chief engineer, Gene Lacy, a 36-year-old from Seattle who was fast becoming the captain’s best friend aboard.