Intercepted radio traffic indicated that North Korea had fully mobilized its armed forces. American troops in South Korea were brought to full alert and their ammunition stocks replenished. General Bonesteel, the U.N. commander, worried about possible commando attacks on isolated Nike-Hercules missile sites, where tactical nuclear warheads were stored. His men hastily built bunkers to protect the missiles and threw up chain-link fences capable of stopping rocket-propelled grenades. Extra military police were brought in to guard the sites.
The Pentagon didn’t advertise the buildup, although it transmitted relevant radio messages in the clear to make sure Pyongyang got the point. But the massive influx of weapons and men generated its own fearful momentum: The greater the preparations for war, the greater the chances war would break out, perhaps by mistake.
At the same time, LBJ was trying to get a handle on the extent to which the loss of the Pueblo had jeopardized national security. Bucher’s final broadcast said he was destroying secret codes and as much surveillance equipment as possible. But how much had he actually gotten rid of? Even if he’d burned all the code material, the ship carried many other classified documents. Had the communists gotten their hands on them?
McNamara informed the president that “some equipment had been compromised,” but that American units worldwide had switched to new codes immediately after the capture, so the intelligence loss probably wasn’t too bad. A few days later, however, General Maxwell Taylor, a top White House military adviser, told congressional leaders that “we have sustained a rather serious loss in the equipment, which has gone into the hands of the enemy.”
That wasn’t the only issue Congress wanted addressed, however. The Pueblo affair marked the first time since 1807 that an American naval commander had surrendered his ship without a fight, and it raised a host of nettlesome questions. The prior episode involved the capture of the unprepared frigate USS Chesapeake off Cape Henry, Virginia, by the British man-of-war Leopard amid the Napoleonic Wars. But at least the Chesapeake had been taken by what was then the world’s preeminent sea power. A small communist country with a bathtub navy had picked off the Pueblo. How had this national mortification come to pass? Why hadn’t the ship been rescued? Did the potential gains of seaborne surveillance justify the risks?
Indeed, at a closed-door hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 26, Secretary Rusk had been raked over the coals for excessive risk taking by Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota. Though a Republican, Mundt was a strong supporter of President Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Rusk tried to explain that a recent sharp rise in armed clashes along the demilitarized zone made it imperative for the United States to acquire fresh intelligence about North Korean military capabilities and intentions. But Mundt rejected that rationale, saying the risk of igniting another Asian war far outweighed the “very small amount of information” the Pueblo might collect.
“This is a very serious blunder on the part of the government in these times when we have got this [Vietnam] war on our hands,” said the senator. “I just don’t see any value at all of sending a ship close enough to provoke the enemy to do what it did.”
Johnson, himself a veteran of Congress, knew what to expect next on Capitol Hilclass="underline" a high-visibility hunt for those responsible for the fiasco, complete with public hearings and embarrassing questions in the glare of TV lights. “All of the committees will begin investigations of this incident once it cools down,” he warned aides.
In an attempt to forestall such probes, LBJ repeatedly called ranking members of key congressional committees to the White House for detailed private briefings by McNamara; Army General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and others. The president’s experts explained that no U.S. warships had been close enough to help the Pueblo, no planes could have arrived in time to make a difference, and the costs of combat ships escorting spy ships were prohibitive.
But some Republican congressmen were deeply angry over the hijacking, which they saw as prima facie evidence of colossal bungling by the administration. “All of you seem to have a good reason for not doing something,” House Minority Leader Gerald Ford of Michigan snapped at LBJ and his top men during one briefing.
Johnson also promised to appoint international lawyer George Ball to get to the bottom of the Pueblo incident and report his findings to Congress. Ball, who’d once served as LBJ’s under secretary of state, was widely respected in Washington for his persistent internal criticism of the administration’s Vietnam policies. But the president, speaking to congressional leaders on January 31, pointed out an unpleasant truth underlying all covert intelligence operations: The men who carried them out were expendable.
“When you send out a spy,” said LBJ, “he sometimes does not come back.”
With American reinforcements almost completely in place in South Korea, the president faced his most important decision: What should be done with them?
Since the start of the crisis, an interagency team of government specialists dubbed the Korean Task Force had worked furiously to give him some feasible options. The group was headed by Sam Berger, a hard-driving former ambassador to South Korea known for his candor and strong distaste for traditional diplomatic bowing and scraping.
Berger and his people labored in the State Department’s locked-door operations center, where Teletypes clattered nonstop with the latest cables from American embassies around the world. Berger often put in ten-hour days, six or seven days a week, racking his brains for ways to deal with the Pueblo.
“With Sam, you could almost feel the tension bouncing off the walls,” recollected one task force member. “His mind was always churning over, over, over.”
The pressure on Berger and his staff was enormous. His chief deputy soon developed heart-attack symptoms and had to be replaced. On January 29, the task force presented LBJ with ten possible courses of action. The trouble was that each one risked escalating the crisis—and none offered much hope of getting back the ship and its crew.
One possibility was to capture a North Korean naval vessel and swap it for the Pueblo. But most of Kim Il Sung’s combat ships were high-speed patrol boats, equipped with radar and difficult to surprise at sea. Most also were based near Wonsan, meaning that even if the U.S. Navy did manage to grab one in that area, it would have to be sailed to the nearest port in South Korea, Mukho, 129 miles away. North Korean MiGs could be expected to pounce on U.S. forces every step of the way, inflicting significant losses. Nearby Russian men-of-war might try to interfere, directly involving the Soviet Union in the conflict. Moreover, such a “reciprocal” abduction amounted to a reprisal, a violation of the U.N. Charter that would make the United States appear as ruthless and piratical as North Korea. And in any event, Pyongyang was unlikely to trade its great propaganda prize, the Pueblo, for a mere patrol boat.
A far more aggressive option was an air strike against the big MiG base and the Munpyong Ni naval station near Wonsan. Ninety-two American and South Korean jets would hit the two installations, with the aim of punishing Kim Il Sung for both the Pueblo and guerrilla raids on South Korea. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that in order to minimize U.S. losses, the entire North Korean air force had to be wiped out at the same time.