It was Sunday, January 21.
Kim and his comrades were officers in North Korea’s highly trained 124th Army Unit, which specialized in unconventional warfare and political subversion. For two years they’d practiced behind-the-lines fighting as part of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung’s ruthless scheme to foment revolution in South Korea and reunify the peninsula by force. The communists hoped President Park’s assassination would create political chaos in the south, giving North Korean troops a pretext to march in and “stabilize” the country.
The members of Lieutenant Kim’s platoon were in superb physical condition and armed to the teeth. Their ages ranged from 24 to 28. With leg muscles hardened by running with several pounds of sand sewn into their trouser cuffs, the men could cover a herculean six miles of rugged terrain an hour with sixty pounds of equipment on their backs. Each officer carried a Russian-made submachine gun, a semiautomatic pistol, three hundred rounds of ammunition, eight antipersonnel grenades, and an antitank grenade. If their guns jammed, they’d fight with their bare hands and feet, every man having mastered judo and karate.
To prepare for the attack, the commandos had studied Blue House floor plans and staged mock assaults on a two-story North Korean army barracks. On the night of January 17, their unit was bused to a checkpoint in the demilitarized zone. From there guides led them to a chain-link fence recently erected to keep out North Korean intruders. The guerrillas cut through the barrier and slipped past soldiers from the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division who were supposed to guard that sector.
The North Koreans slept during the day and moved fast over snowy hills at night. On the afternoon of January 19, four South Korean brothers cutting firewood stumbled across them. Some squad members wanted to kill the brothers, but their leader, a 24-year-old captain, said no. Instead, the North Koreans harangued the woodcutters for several hours about the glories of socialism under Kim Il Sung. The brothers were released with a warning not to inform South Korean authorities, or the communists would return to kill their families and burn down their village.
The woodcutters, however, immediately alerted local police, who in turn informed the South Korean army. Security was tightened in Seoul, and South Korean and American troops began scouring the countryside north of the capital. Soon more than 6,000 soldiers and policemen were in the hunt. But the raiders were traveling faster than expected and eluded their pursuers.
On the night of January 21, wearing brown coats over South Korean army fatigues, the commandos slipped into Seoul. They’d tuned in on busy police and army radio frequencies and formulated a bold strategy for dodging the search operation. By ten p.m., they’d shed their overcoats and were brazenly marching through the streets in column formation.
Less than half a mile from the Blue House, a suspicious Seoul policeman challenged them. The North Koreans claimed they were southern troops, returning from an antiguerrilla patrol in the mountains, and kept marching. Unsatisfied, the cop called his superiors, and the district police chief hurried to the scene in a jeep.
When the chief asked for more identification, the commandos’ nerves snapped. They shot him and hurled grenades at nearby transit buses as a diversion, killing a driver, a conductor, and a 16-year-old boy on his way home from the library. Someone fired a flare into the night sky; its glare threw the cityscape into eerie relief. The communists fled in all directions.
Gunfire and grenade explosions punctuated the rest of that night and the next day as the infiltrators tried to claw their way out of Seoul. One of them hopped from rooftop to rooftop until he crashed through the tiles into the home of a 32-year-old man who worked for the South Korean information ministry. The man grappled with the guerrilla while his sister flailed at him with a rubber sandal. The struggle went on until the intruder finally shot and killed the South Korean man.
By the end of the first full day of the manhunt, five commandos had been killed. A sixth evidently committed suicide with a hidden grenade while under interrogation at National Police headquarters. Lieutenant Kim was captured.
Although it failed, the plot to murder President Park badly rattled South Koreans. Seoul was reported to be in a state of “extreme tension.” Hoarding by citizens afraid of more attacks or even war drove the price of rice sharply higher. The black-market value of the dollar jumped against the South Korean won as affluent southerners converted their assets into more stable U.S. currency.
South Korean authorities interrogated Lieutenant Kim and made him the star of a sensational press conference. He claimed he and his comrades originally had several targets in Seoul. Besides killing Park, they planned to murder the American ambassador and his wife, attack South Korean army headquarters, and blow open the gates of a prison that held communist agents. But shortly before leaving North Korea, the hit team decided to concentrate on the Blue House. Kim also revealed that 2,400 other North Korean soldiers were in training to carry out guerrilla attacks and instigate revolution in the south.
In the snow-blanketed countryside north of Seoul, meanwhile, the remorseless search for the remaining commandos went on. Allied soldiers pursued them with helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and dogs. They waited in ambush holes dug in the frozen earth and broke up ice covering the Imjin River near the DMZ, so no one could cross on foot.
One by one, the exhausted North Koreans still at large were cornered and killed. Troops shot one to death at a farmhouse where he’d stopped to beg for food. The young captain who’d led the assassination squad met his end on a rocky hilltop after refusing to surrender. Another infiltrator was slain just five miles south of the DMZ. Only two were believed to have made it home.
The attempted assault on the Blue House was an astonishing act of international savagery that might well have touched off a new Korean War had it succeeded. The South Korean army was placed on maximum alert; North Korea braced for possible retaliatory attacks by Park’s forces.
Bucher and his men arrived off Wonsan the morning after the Blue House raid was broken up. It was an extraordinarily tense moment. North Korea easily could have interpreted an intelligence ship lurking near a key port as a scout for a counterattack, a dire threat that must quickly be neutralized.
Yet no one bothered to inform Bucher of the incendiary events in Seoul, or of how the North Koreans might now be expected to react to his ship.
CHAPTER 4
SOS SOS SOS
Bucher rolled out of bed just before seven a.m. on January 23. He hadn’t slept much. It had taken nearly 14 hours for his SITREP of the previous afternoon to reach Kamiseya, in part because of heavy traffic on frequencies the Pueblo used. The captain had anxiously checked with his radiomen during the night; any communications delay was worrisome, but one this long was dangerous. Now, feeling tired and stiff, he shuffled into the wardroom for a cup of coffee. The ship smelled sour; Bucher resolved to tell the men to air out their bedding.
Fortified with caffeine, the skipper pulled himself up the ladder to the flying bridge and joined Gene Lacy, that morning’s officer of the deck. The weather was improving. The temperature had risen to a tolerable 20 degrees, and a four-knot wind was blowing out of the northwest. The sea undulated with gentle swells; high, thin clouds reflected the first pale fingers of dawn.
Bucher checked the ship’s position: 25 miles out. He told Lacy to close to 15 miles, making it easier for the CTs to detect radio or radar emanations from Wonsan. Then he went back down to the wardroom for breakfast, convinced this was to be another routine day in the Sea of Japan.