On January 25, at a somber breakfast meeting and then again over lunch, LBJ peppered his advisers with Socratic questions about the wisdom of the impending U.S. buildup. He seemed to be having doubts.
Wouldn’t a huge infusion of American weaponry antagonize the Soviets, leading them to beef up their own forces in the Sea of Japan? How would the Chinese react? And once all of the U.S. aircraft and warships were in place, what then?
The president’s guests included Clark Clifford, a veteran Washington lawyer and Democratic Party power broker scheduled to replace McNamara as defense secretary in a few weeks. Clifford believed the military expansion would sharply escalate tensions in the Far East and was too risky; Johnson couldn’t raise such a big sword over Kim Il Sung’s head and then do nothing with it. Rather than send American ships and planes abroad, Clifford said, the president should assemble them at home and wait to see what the communists did next. Public anger over the Pueblo would die down; in the meantime the United States must proceed with great caution.
“I am deeply sorry about the ship and the eighty-three men,” he said, “but I do not think it is worth a resumption of the Korean War.”
Other advisers, however, argued that the United States needed much more military muscle in the region. Although the North Koreans weren’t gearing up to invade now, they could decide to do so at any moment. South Korea had a bigger army than the north, but Pyongyang possessed a stronger air force, including many newer MiG fighters. The United States had only a handful of aircraft in South Korea, and the two American army divisions stationed there were significantly understrength. If war came, a lack of readiness could spell disaster.
An increase in American combat power also would serve as psychic balm for the many South Koreans who were deeply upset by the double shock of the Blue House raid and the Pueblo attack. Some even wanted to invade the north as payback. The Johnson administration had sternly warned against such action, and South Korea’s President Park had pledged not to do so, at least for the time being. But Park believed counterattacks on North Korean “terrorist training camps” were necessary, and it seemed likely that he’d strike back hard if the north engaged in more aggression. Indeed, Washington learned that South Korean military leaders were secretly preparing “retaliatory raids.” Tellingly, they refused to show their plans to General Bonesteel, the U.N. commander who ostensibly controlled South Korea’s armed forces.
Johnson ultimately concluded that the buildup, though risky, was unavoidable. “We must move up our forces to awaken the people to the danger,” he told his advisers. “We have to get our hands out and our guard up.” But he also kept pressing them for a solution to his most immediate problem: how to get back the Pueblo and its crew. Rusk reiterated his recommendation to buy time at the United Nations. McNamara suggested giving South Korea another $100 million in military aid.
But no one knew how to save the 82 surviving sailors being held somewhere in North Korea.
The fog was so dense when Captain John Denham’s destroyer caught up with the Enterprise that even from 50 yards astern he couldn’t see the giant carrier.
He was close enough to hear loudspeaker announcements and jet engines revving on the flight deck. But it wasn’t until he was just 100 yards away that the Enterprise’s gray enormity finally materialized out of the mist. Denham pulled his vessel, the USS Ozbourn, alongside the carrier’s starboard beam. Admiral Epes, the air commander, waved to him.
Denham and his crew had been at Okinawa, taking on fuel and water while en route to Vietnam from Japan, when they received orders to join the Enterprise. The Ozbourn dashed out of port just past midnight on January 24, kicking up a six-foot-high rooster tail as it sped north. Denham rendezvoused with the carrier 14 hours later. When he heard of the dangerous plan to lasso the Pueblo and drag it out of Wonsan, he volunteered for the job.
The scheme might have seemed harebrained to some, but Denham thought it could work. The only question was how many of his sailors would die making that happen.
Many of them were battle-toughened veterans of Vietnam, where the Ozbourn had operated since the summer of 1966. Recently the destroyer had been active in Operation Sea Dragon, streaking in from the open ocean to shell bridges and highways along North Vietnam’s coast before scooting away in a hail of enemy fire.
A 43-year-old San Francisco native, Denham believed he and his men were uniquely qualified to go after the Pueblo. After lying his way into the merchant marine at age 16 during World War II, he’d worked on a variety of ships. As a tugboat hand, he learned how to tow other vessels. Later in his career he commanded a military cargo ship almost identical to the original Pueblo. As a destroyer navigator during the Korean War, he participated in naval bombardments of Wonsan, familiarizing himself with local waters. He was a top-notch ship handler and his men knew how to fight at close quarters, having used small arms to battle Vietcong guerrillas on the banks of the Mekong River, sometimes only 100 feet away.
As the Enterprise battle group steamed around and around, awaiting a green light for action, Denham’s men practiced taking back the Pueblo.
The Ozbourn was to rush into Wonsan harbor after other warships had laid down a punishing shore barrage. Clad in bulletproof vests, up to ten sailors and Marines would leap aboard the Pueblo as their shipmates raked surrounding areas with machine-gun, rifle, and mortar fire. When the boarding party had secured the ferret to the Ozbourn with polypropylene lines, Denham would reverse his engines, tearing the Pueblo from its moorings. While a second destroyer moved in to provide covering fire, the Ozbourn would hustle the spy vessel back to the high seas. Denham gave command of the boarding party to his executive officer, who, the destroyer skipper said, was “just crazy enough” to think the recovery plan was a good idea.
The snatch could unravel in a number of ways, however. For one thing, Denham had no information on the harbor’s winds and currents, which could push his destroyer off course as he slowed down and tried to stop next to the Pueblo. No one knew whether North Korean soldiers were aboard the spy boat or if it was booby-trapped. Its anchor chain might be wrapped around a concrete piling, making it harder to yank free than if it were moored only with ropes. And any delays could prove fatal to the boarders.
“I didn’t know what this would cost us, but I couldn’t see us getting out of there free,” recalled Denham.
He nevertheless forwarded his final plan to the Enterprise, and Epes approved it. Ozbourn’s sailors rehearsed every day, laying out where their lines would go and how they’d fight off enemy troops.
From his bridge Denham intently watched the dry runs and waited for the order to go.
On January 26, the White House received a reassuring message from an unexpected back-channel source: a Soviet KGB agent in India.
The Russians already had rejected LBJ’s second public entreaty for help in settling the Pueblo mess. In a letter hand-delivered to the Kremlin on January 25, the president warned Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin that the hijacking had “created a deep sense of outrage among the American people.” But Kosygin replied that the United States was on its own in dealing with Pyongyang. The spy boat, he declared, had violated North Korean waters and thus “responsibility for the incident falls entirely on the American military command.”