“That’s nonsense. I am sure Japanese Prime Minister Sato and Foreign Minister Miki were not on board our ship,” he replied earnestly. “If they were on board, they would have been captured together with us and detained in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, wouldn’t they?” The absurdity of Bucher’s denial that a pair of internationally known Japanese politicians had been his passengers underlined the inanity of the entire press confab—especially the notion that the Americans were speaking of their own free will.
Unperturbed, Super C pronounced the event a great success. A few days later, he again summoned the Pueblo officers and demanded that they now write a letter of apology to the North Korean people. The apology, the colonel said, must be completely sincere if the Americans ever hoped to win the people’s forgiveness. Otherwise, he threatened, the crew would face the full fury of socialist justice.
Super C turned over the letter project to Colonel Scar, who laid down the general line he wanted followed. The Americans were ordered to sit at a table, issued pencils and paper, and told to start writing. Again Bucher saw an opening. If he and his men could twist the letter’s phrasing the right way, they could signal those in the United States who read it that their “apology” was just another bucket of bilge.
Armed guards stood outside the room. The Americans were told not to talk about anything not directly related to the letter. A new translator, quickly dubbed Silver Lips because of his relative fluency in English, accompanied Scar. Silver Lips listened to everything the Pueblo officers said and scrutinized everything they wrote.
Bucher and his men tried to stall the writing process as long as possible. They debated the exact meaning of various words. They argued about the best synonyms for those words. They consulted a dictionary, and consulted it again. They deliberately misspelled words so it took longer to find them in the dictionary. The exercise turned into something akin to an unending game of Scrabble played by patients in a lunatic asylum. Bucher’s group wrote a draft apology, then rewrote it, then rewrote the rewrite. Days passed. The Americans enjoyed one another’s company, and they especially liked jerking around Colonel Scar and his minions.
Finally Scar began to lose patience. Hoping to streamline the writing committee, he sent all of the Americans back to their cells except the captain and Schumacher. That was a mistake. No one in the wardroom was more adept at word games than Schumacher, who’d majored in religion in college. With his brains and command of Old Testament language, Schumacher uncorked long, baroquely tangled sentences that sounded grand but on closer examination were meaningless.
After nearly a week of this literary burlesque, the communists had had enough. They drafted the apology themselves and handed it to Bucher. Though riddled with the usual leaden propaganda slogans, it was reasonably well written and made good use of American idiom. The captain argued for changes but was overruled.
At two a.m. on February 15, guards rousted all of the Americans from their beds for a mass signing of the apology. Bucher and his officers were taken to the third-floor interrogation room, and then the enlisted men were brought in, about 20 at a time.
They looked gaunt and fearful. Many exhibited signs of abuse: black eyes, lumpy jaws, and stiff, painful gaits. They made no attempt to communicate with their officers. Hammond seemed in the worst shape: pale, his face badly swollen, his body quivering with pain.
The sight of his bedraggled men made Bucher’s throat constrict with pride and affection. Many sailors in turn seemed surprised and relieved to see him alive. The captain wanted to assure them that in spite of his devastated appearance, he was all right and ready to resume his role as their leader. But no talking was allowed and the North Koreans kept the officers and men apart.
Cynically, Super C had handed Bucher the task of persuading his crew to sign the apology—and thus violate the Code of Conduct. Article V of the code specifically called on POWs to “make no oral or written statements disloyal to [their] country … or harmful to [its] cause.” The skipper figured some of his people would refuse and suffer awful punishment as a result; a few, including the steel-willed Hammond, might die while resisting. Bucher couldn’t bear the thought of that. Surely his country didn’t expect men to perish over a piece of paper. And ultimately, the captain knew, the communists could and would force every member of the crew to sign.
He decided to let them all off the hook.
Jack Warner switched on his lights and started filming. Bucher broke into a sweat as he faced his men to speak. The last thing he wanted them to think was that he was pressuring them to collaborate. Super C watched him closely.
“Men, I’m delighted to see all of you looking so well,” he said, using a flat tone to disguise his sarcasm. He wanted to underscore his point with a wink, but the communists would pick up on that. He let his body sag slightly instead.
“As you can see, I’m still with you, and have been given the same humane treatment by the marvelous peace-loving Korean people, regular chow to keep me fit, and a room all to myself—which is why we haven’t seen each other for a while.”
A collective apology, the captain said, could help expedite their release from prison. He also insisted that he was the only man on the Pueblo who knew for sure whether the ship had actually violated North Korean waters.
He wasn’t asking them to sign, he said grimly. “I’m telling you to sign.”
It occurred to Bucher that by ordering subordinates to ignore the Code of Conduct, he might be exposing himself to Navy discipline if he ever got home. He wasn’t going to worry about that now, though. Getting the crew’s signatures on the apology was the only way he could think of to shield them from beatings or worse.
But in trying to keep his men’s heads off one chopping block, the captain was potentially placing them on another. The apology made the entire crew culpable for entering North Korean waters for the purpose of spying, giving the communists a handy pretext to shoot them all. It also contained additional “admissions” shrewdly calculated to tie Washington’s hands in dealing with the crisis. For example, the letter said the Pueblo intrusions weren’t due to technical problems, making it more difficult for the Johnson administration to claim that navigational error was behind any inadvertent violations.
The signing exercise made clear that Pyongyang’s goal was to squeeze a mea culpa not just from the sailors but from the U.S. government—and that the communists had no compunction about using the crew as hostages to get what they wanted. “Our fate,” the crew’s letter said, “depends largely on whether or not the government of the United States, which has forced us into espionage, makes public the facts of crimes to the fair world opinion and apologizes to the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
One by one, the sailors approached the table where the document lay. Some gazed intently at their commander; others wouldn’t meet his eyes. Some signed hesitantly, others with indifference. Still others tried to obscure their signatures with wild flourishes or by slanting the letters too much. When the first group finished, the next 20 were prodded in. Bucher repeated his speech and they signed, too.
And so, in only a few weeks, the North Koreans had broken a large group of American fighting men. They’d done so with a combination of physical pain; food, sleep, and heat deprivation; and, most of all, fear. No one had been killed or maimed in prison. No one had his fingernails pulled out, his legs broken, or his brain washed. Yet all had succumbed, becoming fresh proof of the barbarous old adage that, if subjected to enough pressure, a man can be made to do anything.