The sledgehammers broke before the equipment did.

There were axes too. Chipping hammers. Two paper shredders. A small incinerator Commander Lloyd Bucher had reportedly bought with money from the ship’s morale fund because the Navy had not provided one.

None of it was remotely adequate for what USS Pueblo needed to do on the afternoon of January 23, 1968.

North Korean warships were firing into the vessel. Sailors below deck were trying to destroy cryptologic equipment, technical publications, logs, manuals and other classified material before armed men came aboard. Some smashed electronics. Some burned paper. Some tried stuffing sensitive material into weighted bags for disposal over the side.

The ship was built to gather information.

At that moment it needed to forget.

A quiet ship with an unusual room

Pueblo had started life as an Army cargo vessel during World War II. The Navy acquired her in 1966, converted her into an Auxiliary General Environmental Research vessel and commissioned her in May 1967. Officially the designation sounded innocuous. Her actual mission included signals-intelligence collection against Communist military activity in the Far East.

The collection equipment lived largely in a restricted research space.

That created an organizational peculiarity before anybody fired a shot.

Bucher commanded the ship, but he was not cleared to know everything carried inside the intelligence compartment. Naval History and Heritage Command’s later reconstruction notes that the boundary between the ship’s command structure and the officer running the research detachment had never been fully resolved. Secure communication between the research space and bridge was inadequate as well.

Those arrangements could function during an ordinary patrol.

Emergency destruction was not ordinary.

It required the captain to know what had to disappear, the people below to know when, the equipment to destroy it fast enough, and somebody to keep track of whether the job was actually being completed.

All four became problems.

January 23

U.S. Navy records place Pueblo outside the internationally recognized twelve-nautical-mile territorial limit when North Korean forces confronted her, at roughly fifteen to sixteen nautical miles from the nearest North Korean land. North Korea maintained that the ship had entered its territorial waters and later displayed maps and navigation documents in support of that claim. The United States rejected it.

The political argument would last much longer than the encounter.

The immediate problem was easier to see.

North Korean patrol vessels surrounded Pueblo. MiG-21 fighters appeared overhead. The ship could make only a little over twelve knots and could not outrun the faster craft around her. When the North Koreans opened fire, 57-millimeter shells and machine-gun rounds struck the vessel from close range. Bucher and other crewmen were wounded.

Bucher ordered emergency destruction.

That was when the paper became heavier than it had looked.

Twenty-five pounds an hour

The incinerator could handle about twenty-five pounds per hour.

The two shredders together could process only about two reams of paper per hour.

There was vastly more than that aboard.

NHHC says Pueblo carried an excessive quantity of classified publications because the crew had not been able to offload material before the mission. The little incinerator was also exposed to enemy fire, making regular use increasingly dangerous.

The obvious alternative was to burn paper elsewhere.

That created another problem.

General Quarters required ventilation to be secured against fire, contamination and flooding. Burning documents inside sealed compartments filled the spaces with smoke. The people doing the destruction now had to work inside the by-product of their own effort.

This is the sort of systems problem that looks almost ridiculous written afterward.

Keep the ship sealed because it is under attack.

Burn the classified material because the ship may be boarded.

Discover that burning the material makes the sealed compartment difficult to work in.

There was no procedure that made those facts stop conflicting.

Then came the hardware

Paper at least had the decency to burn.

Electronic intelligence equipment did not.

Sailors went after collection gear with hand tools. NHHC’s reconstruction says sledgehammers broke against some of the equipment. Axes worked somewhat better.

Not well.

Better.

The physical mismatch is almost comic until the gunfire is put back into the room.

These were not demolition specialists operating in a warehouse with an afternoon available. Men were swinging hand tools at hardened electronic equipment while an enemy force was shooting into their ship and preparing to board it.

A destruction plan built around manpower becomes very different once the manpower is bleeding, smoke-filled compartments are difficult to occupy and somebody has to decide how many minutes of additional resistance are worth the lives exposed above deck.

The bags

Pueblo also carried weighted bags intended for classified material.

Here the official histories themselves are worth leaving slightly untidy.

NHHC’s H-Gram account says the surrounding water was considered too shallow under existing regulations for simply dumping the material in weighted bags, because hostile forces might later recover it. Men attempting to throw equipment through openings also drew North Korean fire.

The later court of inquiry was less forgiving. Its findings, summarized in the Navy’s ship history, argued that more material could have been bagged and jettisoned and that the crew could have accepted limited exposure at the openings to accomplish more destruction.

Both perspectives belong here.

People aboard were trying to comply with procedures designed to keep secret material unrecoverable.

The court later judged that they should have violated some of the caution those procedures encouraged because capture had become the greater danger.

The useful question is not which sentence makes the crew look better.

It is why the emergency plan required that judgment to be invented under fire.

The second burst

Bucher stopped Pueblo during the engagement, checked on the destruction and then attempted to get the ship moving again.

North Korean forces opened fire once more.

Fireman Duane Hodges was mortally wounded. Several other sailors were badly hurt.

The crew continued trying to destroy material.

Shortly before the boarding party came alongside, Pueblo transmitted that she was being boarded and going off the air while the crew destroyed its gear. Official Navy summaries differ slightly on the exact minute assigned to that final transmission, but agree on the larger sequence: the destruction effort was still underway when armed North Korean personnel entered the ship.

They were not entering an empty intelligence compartment.

What remained

The exact inventory of everything captured became an intelligence problem in itself.

NSA opened extensive damage assessments almost immediately. Its declassified Pueblo archive now contains dedicated studies of cryptologic compromise, communications-security losses, compromised technical equipment, operational intelligence messages and broader effects on U.S. signals-intelligence operations.

The National Cryptologic Museum now describes Pueblo as representing the largest single loss of this kind of sensitive material and says the capture compromised a wide range of cryptologic documents and equipment.

I would stop there rather than attach every later Cold War intelligence setback to the ship.

There has long been speculation that Soviet intelligence somehow orchestrated or encouraged the seizure so captured cryptographic hardware could complement material obtained through espionage inside the United States. NHHC calls the idea intriguing but says the stronger evidence indicates the Soviets themselves were surprised by what North Korea had done.

The compromise was serious enough without improving the conspiracy.

Then came eleven months

The ship’s capture was only the beginning for the people aboard.

Hodges died. The surviving eighty-two men were taken prisoner. They endured beatings, torture, inadequate food and medical treatment, forced propaganda appearances and coerced confessions during eleven months of captivity.

Bucher initially resisted signing a confession for roughly thirty-six hours. NHHC says he finally yielded after his captors threatened to execute his crew one by one and brought the youngest sailor before him at gunpoint.

The crew resisted in smaller ways afterward, famously telling their captors that the raised middle finger displayed in staged photographs was a Hawaiian sign of good luck. The joke lasted until an American press account explained its meaning. The discovery brought another period of severe beatings and deprivation.

That belongs in the story because emergency destruction did not end when the North Koreans took the files.

Once the ship, its documents and the crew were in custody, people themselves became sources of information.

The captors had personnel files.

They had classified material.

They had the men.

Information security had become human.

The court

When the crew returned in December, the Navy had to examine another uncomfortable question.

Who had failed?

A five-admiral court of inquiry recommended that Bucher face court-martial on several charges, including allowing the ship to be seized, failing to take sufficiently aggressive defensive action, following North Korean orders into port, failing to complete destruction of classified material, and failing to ensure the crew was properly trained and organized for emergency destruction.

The findings did not end there.

The same record identified serious deficiencies above the ship: inadequate defensive capability, poor emergency-destruction facilities, excessive classified holdings, ambiguity in command responsibility and inadequate contingency support.

Secretary of the Navy John Chafee ultimately declined to impose disciplinary action on Bucher or his crew, saying in effect that eleven months of captivity and torture were enough and that responsibility for the affair extended well beyond the ship.

That is a better ending to the inquiry than a hero/villain verdict.

The crew had made errors.

The system had given them an emergency it was badly prepared to execute.

The sister ship changed

The Navy did not leave the physical lesson abstract.

Pueblo’s sister ship USS Banner was modified after the court’s work. Two 20-millimeter guns were installed. So were emergency-destruction and scuttling equipment. Her crew received clearer defensive and scuttling guidance. The Navy created stricter procedures for reducing and controlling classified material aboard such ships, and regional commands developed a contingency-support plan.

That sequence tells us what the Navy thought the important problems had been.

Too little defensive capability.

No practical way to destroy the ship quickly.

Too much sensitive material.

No good way to destroy that material quickly.

No sufficiently defined rescue or support plan.

The sledgehammer did not appear on the list.

Hainan

More than three decades later, a different American intelligence platform faced an unpleasantly familiar problem.

On April 1, 2001, a Navy EP-3 signals-intelligence aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea. The damaged American aircraft made an emergency landing on Hainan Island. Its twenty-four crew members began emergency destruction of classified intelligence and equipment before landing.

They destroyed a great deal.

They did not destroy everything.

NHHC’s archive history says Chinese authorities subsequently removed substantial classified material from the aircraft while they held it.

I would not describe Hainan as proof the Navy had learned nothing from Pueblo.

The aircraft landed under different circumstances, with different equipment, procedures and time constraints. Its crew was able to carry out a much more deliberate destruction effort.

The comparison is useful for another reason.

Emergency destruction is a throughput problem.

The amount of sensitive information people carry tends to grow faster than the number of minutes an emergency agrees to give them.

There is a useful Final Vestige connection here to The Rock Had to Be Real. Both stories live inside the material side of Cold War intelligence: one concerns recovering Soviet hardware from the ocean; the other concerns what happens when your own hardware falls intact enough into someone else’s hands.

The ship is still there

The strangest vestige of the incident is not hidden.

It is the ship.

North Korea retained Pueblo and eventually placed her on display in Pyongyang. Current Navy historical material says the vessel remains U.S. Navy property while physically held as a museum ship in North Korea.

There are photographs of Pueblo before the patrol that are almost aggressively ordinary.

A sailor drawing a cup of coffee in the mess.

Men eating.

The ship sitting quietly at a pier.

Nobody in those photographs is swinging an axe at electronics or feeding classified paper into an incinerator twenty-five pounds at a time.

The ship collected information very efficiently.

Destroying it required smoke, weighted bags and hand tools.

The sledgehammers broke first.

Sources & Further Reading

• Naval History and Heritage Command, H-Gram 014 and H-014-1, “The Seizure of USS Pueblo.” The strongest narrative reconstruction of the attack, emergency-destruction deficiencies, command problems, court of inquiry and later reforms.
• NHHC Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, USS Pueblo. Detailed institutional history of the ship, destruction effort, court findings and modifications made afterward to USS Banner.
• National Security Agency, USS Pueblo declassification collection. Primary documents covering the mission, cryptologic damage assessments, compromise studies, crew release and corrective work.
• NSA National Cryptologic Museum, “Cold War: U.S.S. Pueblo.” Institutional account of the cryptologic loss and continuing significance of the captured material.
• NHHC Bureau of Personnel USS Pueblo Incident Collection. Records of captivity, forced propaganda, crew treatment and the post-release inquiry.
• NHHC, “EP-3 Collision, Crew Detainment and Homecoming.” Used for the narrower comparison with emergency intelligence destruction during the 2001 Hainan incident.