The Americans shuffled to their chairs and sat down. The general said nothing, letting the tension in the room build until it became almost unbearable. He rocked back and forth in his chair, glaring at his prisoners one by one. The tang of garlic wafted through the air.
Finally, the general launched into an angry harangue in Korean, with Max translating as fast as he could.
“You are guilty of heinous crimes against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” he shouted, using the communists’ preferred name for their country. “You are spies; you shall be treated as spies!”
The tirade went on for at least 15 minutes. At the end of it the general fixed his eyes on Bucher.
“What is your name and what is your job on the ship?”
The captain started to answer, but Max cut him off.
“Don’t you know to stand up when addressing a senior officer?”
Bucher gave him a tired look and slowly got to his feet. He stated his name and rank.
“What was your ship doing?” the general demanded.
“My ship,” the skipper answered in a strong, clear voice, “was conducting oceanographic research in international waters. I demand that my ship and my crew …” Max motioned for him to stop. The general snorted contemptuously. The rest of the Pueblo officers were asked the same question in turn, and each repeated the cover story. The general muttered gutturally and signaled the men to sit down.
“You were spying!” he exploded. “Spying against the peace-loving Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Captain, will you admit to that? Will you admit you were spying, that you violated our coastal waters?”
So that was their game, to justify their piracy by falsely claiming an intrusion into their territorial waters. Bucher leaped to his feet, shouting that the Pueblo had never come closer than 15 miles.
The general then demanded to know why the imperialist, warmongering United States had 50,000 troops in South Korea.
“Because the government of South Korea found it necessary to ask our help in defending their country,” Bucher replied calmly.
A communist colonel seated a few feet from the captain reacted to this heresy by lunging at him and throwing a wild punch that barely missed his head. The general told his livid subordinate to calm down and turned again to the Americans.
“You have no rights under any Geneva convention rules as criminal spies and agents making provocations in time of peace against us! Do you not admit this is why you are here? Answer now!”
One by one, the Pueblo officers denied they were spies.
The general then leaned forward and spread his hands, palms up, as if events were now beyond his control.
“You are espionage agents,” he said matter-of-factly. “How do you want to be shot? One at a time or all together at sundown?”
Bucher again jumped to his feet and did something astonishingly, almost insanely brave.
“Shoot me!” he yelled. “But let my officers and crew return to their ship and take it home.”
“No, Captain! Because we caught you spying, ship now belongs to us.”
“You seized us in international waters, where we had every right to be, dammit!” Bucher argued. “You’ve committed an act of war against the United States!”
“It is you who commit act of war by spying!” the general shouted back. “You will be shot this afternoon!”
The Americans were lined up in the hall again, heads bowed, and taken back to their cells. They had no chance to talk among themselves about the surreal, kangaroo court sentence that had just been imposed on them.
Schumacher tried tidying up to keep his mind occupied but wound up staring dumbly at his ceiling light. Murphy was sharing a room with three enlisted sailors, and they wanted to know what was going to happen to them. He told them about the general’s interrogation but decided not to mention the promised executions, since he didn’t want to scare them any more than they already were.
Steve Harris also was billeted with three seamen but took the opposite tack, telling them their officers were to be shot within hours. The men stared at him in shock, pinpoints of sweat emerging on their foreheads.
A guard pushed his way into Bucher’s room bearing, of all things, a tray of milk and cookies. This time when the skipper refused to eat he was slugged. Shortly afterward, he was taken from his cell for what he thought might be an appointment with a firing squad. But it was another interrogation, conducted this time by the colonel who’d tried to punch him earlier.
The North Korean promptly flew into a screaming diatribe, with a translator frantically trying to match his decibel level and manic pace. The effect might have been comical had the colonel’s anger not been so ferocious. Bucher’s first impulse was to cower, but he checked his fear by forcing himself to study the North Korean. For all its venom and wild energy, the colonel’s outburst had a choreographed feel to it. Bucher sensed he’d given this kind of performance before.
The captain watched, riveted, as the communist officer pounded the table with his fist and stamped his boots. Finally, he shoved a typewritten statement at Bucher.
“You will sign confession now!”
The skipper’s refusal led to his worst beating yet. Guards took him back to his cell and slammed him into the walls over and over until he lay semiconscious on the floor. When he was later offered more food, the captain began to doubt that the communists intended to kill him, at least right away. And if they didn’t, was he in for even more nightmarish treatment at the hands of well-practiced torturers?
Sometime between noon and one p.m., Bucher was again taken down the hall to the dimly lit interrogation room. Again he faced the narrow-eyed major, sitting at a table that now was piled with classified documents from the Pueblo. Stunned by the profusion, Bucher could only hope most of them were relatively routine operating manuals. He tried to conceal his alarm as he slid into his seat.
The captain couldn’t read the titles on most of the papers from where he sat. But he did spot the Banner cruise reports he’d picked up in Honolulu. Those could be highly compromising. The Banner and the Pueblo were nearly identical vessels. Since the captured reports detailed the Banner’s surveillance of the Soviet Union and China, it was reasonable to assume its sister ship was doing the same thing off North Korea.
“Do these belong to your ship?” the interrogator asked.
“Yes, obviously. So what?”
“Are they official American Navy documents?”
“Yes, obviously. We are an official U.S. Navy ship operating on the high seas.”
“Do you deny they prove you were spying?”
Bucher answered that the documents demonstrated only that his ship had collected some incidental intelligence while carrying out scientific research.
“Ah, then you will sign this confession!” the major exclaimed, producing the typewritten document that the angry colonel had earlier pressured Bucher to sign.
The skipper scanned the statement. He was struck by its stilted phrasing and mangled grammar. Among other things, it claimed the CIA was in charge of the Pueblo’s mission and had promised Bucher that if he succeeded, “a lot of dollars would be offered to the whole crew members of my ship and particularly I myself would be honored.” The captain realized later he should’ve signed right then and there; the “confession” obviously hadn’t been written by a native English speaker. If the North Koreans tried to claim that a U.S. naval commander had signed it without coercion, they’d look ridiculous in the eyes of the world. But Bucher, determined not to yield to his captors, still refused to put his name on it.