The Pueblo began backing out of its berth shortly after nine a.m. on January 5, 1968.
Bucher perched proudly on the flying bridge; directly below him in the pilothouse, Schumacher called orders to the helmsman. Some of the skipper’s sub buddies had gathered in the wardroom earlier that morning to toast his departure with eggnog, and now they were waving good-bye from the dock. Bucher serenaded them with “The Lonely Bull.”
The captain had decided against taking the northern route, over the top of Hokkaido island, because of winter storms. Instead, the Pueblo would head southwest, sailing around Kyushu at the bottom of the Japanese archipelago. Bucher then would turn north, top off his tanks at the port of Sasebo, and continue through the Tsushima Strait toward North Korea.
Within hours of leaving Yokosuka, the Pueblo’s officers noticed the rapidly alternating swells and troughs of a “young sea,” the harbinger of a newborn storm. The weather deteriorated abruptly. The sun fled behind menacing dark clouds and the air temperature plummeted. Freezing salt spray whipped the faces of sailors mopping the open decks. The winds rose; the sea began to heave.
The Pueblo pitched and rolled madly as the storm overtook it. Over and over, the little ship staggered up the face of an oncoming wave, toppled over its crest, and slewed crazily down its back. Steering became so difficult that a second helmsman had to be summoned to help the first control the wheel. High winds and steep waves pushed the boat so far over that the railings on its main deck disappeared in the foaming water. The inclinometer recorded rolls of up to 57 degrees.
The wild seesawing created chaos belowdecks, flinging men, chairs, desks, and electronic gear around like toys. Thrown off balance by one sharp tilt, a young radioman hurtled down a passageway and crashed into Bucher, knocking him to the floor.
“Jesus Christ, sir, I’m sorry!” the sailor said with a gasp. “Are you hurt?”
The two men clung to each other as the ship careened over in another wide roll. Bucher said he was okay, that he was counting on the radioman to keep his equipment up and running in the storm.
The sailor gave a wan smile and adjusted his water-spattered glasses.
“Yes, sir, I’ll be ready. But right now—excuse me, sir, but I’ve got to puke.” He ran off along the lurching passageway.
Bucher saw fear in his men’s faces as they wondered whether their frail cockleshell of a boat could survive all this twisting and pounding. Almost everybody was throwing up, even experienced hands. One of the few exceptions was Quartermaster Charlie Law, who seemed steadied by some internal gyroscope as he calmly marked the ship’s slow progress on a chart.
The storm appeared to be moving in the same direction as the Pueblo. Bucher hoped to escape the worst of it when he swung north toward Sasebo. But the tempest, perversely, pivoted with him, tearing at his ship as it fought its way past the threatening shoals of Kyushu’s west coast. Waves surged higher as contrary currents in the area collided. Hail, rain, and snow pelted the ship, and the wind accelerated to 50 knots—a force-ten gale. A big antenna snapped off in the rising howl.
So loud was the storm that the men in the engine room had to communicate by hand signals. In the forward berthing compartment, fetid with vomit and anxiety, shoes and other personal items floated on several inches of sloshing water. Men’s heads, elbows, and knees slammed into hard metal objects, inducing shrieks of pain.
Communication technicians skittered across the SOD hut deck in unsecured chairs, banging into steel consoles and gauges. Someone on the bridge tried to warn the men below by yelling, “Roll!” over the public address system each time the ship started to shift. But the CTs got bashed anyway, since their chamber lacked a loudspeaker. Two generators supplying electricity to the hut went dead.
In the dizzily swaying pilothouse, Bucher struggled to keep the ship from skidding sideways in a trough and getting flipped over by the next wave. He applied power alternately to the port and starboard propellers, trying to keep moving in a relatively straight line. The steering engine was holding so far. But after another round of vertiginous rolls, the skipper ran for shelter in the lee of a coastal island.
A few hours later, as the big blow subsided and the crew recovered somewhat, Bucher ordered the Pueblo to get under way again for Sasebo, still 100 miles away. Weary from his exertions on the bridge, the captain turned the conn over to Tim Harris and descended to his stateroom for a brief rest. He’d dozed for no more than an hour when the buzzing telephone next to his bunk woke him. He picked it up and heard a heart-stopping report from his inexperienced ensign:
“Captain, we are on course, but I think I see breakers about a half mile dead ahead.”
It was one of a ship commander’s worst fears. The Pueblo was headed directly toward a large rock.
“Back down emergency full!” Bucher shouted into the phone, ordering the twin diesels thrown into reverse. “And come dead in the water! I’ll be right up there.”
He raced to the bridge. Sure enough, there was the deadly black mass, ringed by white breakers and looming out of the slanting rain 1,000 yards away. Bucher sweated blood for several minutes while he maneuvered away from the reef and took soundings to make certain the Pueblo had enough water under its keel to proceed safely.
Harris had been following a course plotted by Ed Murphy. If not for the ensign’s timely call to his captain, the ship might be getting battered and gouged to death right now. Bucher could barely contain his anger. He remained on the bridge just long enough to chart a new course for the shaken Harris. Then he returned to his quarters and summoned Murphy.
The captain demanded an explanation of what he viewed as a stupid and potentially fatal navigation error. The exec replied that it wasn’t his fault; his course had been accurate, but young Harris hadn’t followed it correctly. Bucher felt himself losing it.
“Jesus Christ, mister!” he yelled. “Don’t you think maybe you should get the hell out of this business? . . . Shit, man! After all the time and chances you’ve had, do you really expect me to take this kind of crap from you?”
Murphy stared in distress at his superior.
“I laid out the course as carefully as I could in these conditions, Captain,” he replied, a defiant note in his voice.
“You are my executive and navigation officer!” Bucher bellowed. “If I can’t rely on you in those duties, what the hell use are you?”
Murphy’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Yes, sir, Captain, I’m trying my best, but . . .”
“It’s not good enough!”
A pained silence followed, broken only by the moan of the wind and the crash of green seas on the decks above. Murphy made a stab at a formal exit, trying to come to attention in the rolling cabin and almost missing the door as he walked out. Bucher was convinced the time had finally come to get rid of his XO. But still he couldn’t bring himself to take such drastic action during this inaugural mission.
At least Bucher now knew exactly what the mission was. Admiral Johnson’s headquarters had radioed him the last details after the Pueblo left Yokosuka. The main objective was to collect fresh information on North Korean shore defenses. The hermetic communist state was believed to have both antiaircraft and antiship missile batteries along its mountainous east coast. Bucher’s crew was to sail to a point near North Korea’s border with the Soviet Union and then turn around and move slowly south, sampling the electronic environment and making visual observations. The Navy and the National Security Agency were particularly interested in coastal radar.
The Pueblo also was to observe North Korean naval activity, including any movements of the four Soviet-made submarines the North Koreans were suspected of operating out of the port of Mayang-do. After about two weeks, Bucher and his men would head back to Japan, photographing and listening to Soviet warships along the way.
Throughout the voyage the Pueblo was to maintain strict emission control, meaning its radar and radios were to be kept off unless Bucher was certain his ship had been identified. Only then was he to transmit situation reports to COMNAVFORJAPAN. At no time should the ferret creep closer than 13 nautical miles to the North Korean mainland or offshore islands; the Navy wanted to make sure it stayed outside the communists’ claimed 12-mile territorial limit.
Admiral Johnson also reiterated his verbal instruction that the machine guns be covered or stowed. The captain was to use them, in the terse language of his sailing order, “only in cases where threat to survival is obvious.” But since the ship would operate entirely in international waters, the order continued, the mission’s risk was rated “minimal.” Once again, Bucher was led to believe that a high-seas assault was unlikely.
The Pueblo arrived in Sasebo on January 9, already behind schedule due to the storm. For the first few hours most of the seamen simply rested, recovering from the stomach-inverting first leg of their journey. Then they began getting ready for the next segment. The boat had to be cleaned up and tossed-about gear put back in place. A hairline crack had appeared in the hull; Japanese divers went down to repair it.
Lieutenant Steve Harris offloaded more excess classified documents—15 sealed containers in all. But to his dismay he discovered that enough new paper was being delivered to the ship in Sasebo to more than offset what he’d gotten rid of. Why was it that seemingly every Navy command in the Pacific wanted to give him this stuff? So large was the volume of material, he realized, that it couldn’t possibly fit into the canvas bags in which it was supposed to be dumped overboard in an emergency.
Although Bucher had expected only a 12-hour layover in Sasebo, repairs and refitting took nearly two days.
The ship was to depart at six a.m. on January 11. At five a.m., a courier arrived with even more classified publications for Steve Harris’s heap. At 5:45 a.m., Bucher rushed aboard after a long night of drinking and playing cards ashore.
Less than half an hour later, the Pueblo edged out of Sasebo harbor. Despite his lack of sleep, Bucher had the conn. Nearby was Charlie Law, navigating in the chilly predawn darkness.
The captain had given Law more navigation watches after the near-miss with the reef, and that delighted the quartermaster. He loved the Navy and was proud to the point of cockiness of his talents as a course plotter. He also was grateful to Bucher for qualifying him as an officer of the deck, meaning Law could steer the ship on his own, a rare and exalted station for an enlisted man.
A tenth-grade dropout, the barrel-chested quartermaster had spent his adolescence in Tacoma, Washington, a blue-collar city permeated by the stench from surrounding mills that sawed and pulped the rich forests of the Olympic Peninsula into wood and paper products. His parents split up when he was four, and his no-nonsense mother raised him with money she made running a tiny greasy spoon. Law tried to enlist at 15, lying about his age and telling the recruiter the timeworn fable that his birth certificate had been destroyed in a fire at the county hospital. But his mother refused to sign the papers. The day he turned 17, he enlisted on his own.
He worked mostly as a deck ape, chipping paint and mopping decks aboard a Navy tug, an oil tanker, and a supply ship based in Japan. He was a brash kid, a smart-ass, but he learned fast. Somewhere along the line, a senior quartermaster took Law under his wing and taught him the fine points of shooting stars and fixing a ship’s position.
Law’s prowess with the sextant and pelorus made him someone aboard ship. He had exceptional vision, 20/13 in one eye, 20/14 in the other. He often competed with Bucher, himself an excellent navigator, to spot the first evening star, and Law usually won. He liked that officers depended on him, made important decisions based on his calculations. They simply took his word for where they were. “And I always knew where we were at,” he said in an interview many years later, his pride still evident. “It was the only thing I was really that good at in my life.”
In the eyes of many younger sailors, Law, at 26, was a respected old salt. He didn’t need chevrons on his sleeves to establish his authority; he was one of those men whose presence is more imposing than his rank. “He was a sailor first and foremost and made no bones about it,” said a shipmate. “I don’t recall anyone ever telling him a lifer joke.”
Law helped guide the Pueblo into the Tsushima Strait, where the imperial Japanese navy had crushed the Russian tsar’s fleet in a historic 1905 duel. Bucher intended to hug the Kyushu coast as long as possible, hiding among Japanese fishing boats and hoping Soviet naval units didn’t spot him. Then he’d angle north-by-northwest for the six-hundred-mile run across the Sea of Japan.
At first, the Pueblo encountered only moderate swells. But by nightfall, with land no longer in sight, the freezing Siberian wind grew stronger and snow flecked the air. It was so cold in the forward berths that one sailor crawled into bed wearing two shirts, two pairs of socks, pants, a work jacket, and a wool cap. Another rough winter storm was at hand.
The seas butting the bow head-on became so heavy that Bucher had to tack back and forth, as if he were beating upwind in a nineteenth-century schooner. Even on this zigzag course, the Pueblo rolled as badly as it had on the way to Sasebo. Seasickness again erupted among the crew, especially the greener CTs. A particularly steep pitch sent one of them clattering in his chair right out the door of the SOD hut.
Gradually the energy went out of the storm. The captain held drills on the machine guns, checking how long it took to uncover, load, and fire them. The shortest time was ten minutes, the longest more than an hour. The guns were difficult to aim and jammed frequently. Sailors heaved 50-gallon drums over the side and tried to hole them. Even at less than fifty yards, they often missed.
By January 13, the ship lay opposite Wonsan, the biggest and most heavily defended port on North Korea’s east coast. Bucher still was maintaining strict electronic silence. The Pueblo had dropped out of the Navy’s movement reporting system, so no one on Admiral Johnson’s staff knew exactly where it was. Bucher kept sailing north, paralleling the coast thirty to forty miles out to sea. At night, the spy boat cruised with its running lights doused.
So far the North Koreans hadn’t reacted, and the sailors settled into a daily rhythm. Breakfast was served at six a.m., lunch at eleven, and supper at five p.m. The food was plentiful but nothing to write home about. The chief cook, Harry Lewis, was pretty good, but the minuscule galley cramped his style. Movies were shown twice a day in the wardroom or crew’s mess. Among the available titles were Twelve Angry Men, The Desperate Hours, In Like Flint, and several romantic comedies.
A poker game went on day and night in the forward berth area, new players taking the place of those who had to go on watch. Unable to shake his seasickness, Tim Harris stayed in his bunk most of the time. Before dawn one morning, a sailor delivering a weather report found Bucher in the wardroom wearing a T-shirt, khaki pants, sneakers, and sunglasses. The old man never seemed to sleep.
The sharpest break in the routine came one day when Schumacher accidentally threw the ship into a 40-degree roll.
Bucher had decided that the Pueblo was too close to shore and told Schumacher to change course and get some sea room. It was lunchtime and belowdecks the cooks were serving spaghetti from big tubs.
Schumacher ordered left full rudder and immediately realized the ocean was rougher than he’d thought. “Stand by for heavy rolls!” he yelled into the voice tube. Halfway through the turn the ship stopped. It wouldn’t go any farther. Heavy seas struck it broadside, pushing it far over.
Spaghetti flew everywhere. In the wardroom, Ensign Harris toppled over in his chair and slid on his side right out the door. The captain’s books and Playboy magazines shot out of his stateroom into a passageway.
“What the hell’s going on up there, Skip?” Bucher shouted over the intercom.
“Trying to come around, Captain,” the stricken lieutenant replied. “It’s a little worse up here than I thought.”
“You realize you just cost us our lunch?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ten minutes later, Bucher joined Schumacher on the bridge and calmly explained how such turns should be executed. The crew wound up eating cold cuts and broken potato chips. Unwilling to face their wrath, Schumacher retreated to his cabin with a bag of peanuts.
—
On January 16, the Pueblo reached its first objective: the port of Chongjin, just south of the Soviet border. Bucher stopped about 15 miles offshore. The world seemed drained of color: The sky was a gray smear, the sea a vast sheet of hammered lead. In the distance rose black mountains, summits daubed white. Peering through the “big eyes,” twenty-two-inch binoculars mounted on the flying bridge, the captain and Schumacher could see smoke curling out of factory chimneys. They also saw North Korean torpedo boats patrolling the mouth of the nearby Tumen River.
In the SOD hut, the CTs straightened up and got to work. After weeks and in some cases months of idleness and menial tasks, they were excited about finally performing the top secret specialties they’d trained for. But their equipment picked up little military traffic. Only a few freighters and fishing boats ventured out of Chongjin in the frigid winter weather.
Its topsides coated with snow and ice, the Pueblo began to resemble a ghost ship. The growing weight made the captain uneasy. He calculated that his vessel could flip upside down with as little as four inches of ice on its superstructure and exposed decks. He ordered a work detail onto the main deck with steam hoses, but the melted ice refroze before it spilled over the sides. The men then attacked with scrapers, wooden mallets, and shovels.
Freezing air stung their lungs, but they made progress. Bucher joined in the chipping and, when the job was finished, goaded his men into a snowball fight. That evening, he made sure each member of the deicing party had a small bottle of brandy to warm up with.
After two days of surveillance, the intelligence take from Chongjin was negligible. Disappointed, Bucher headed south for his next stop, the port of Songjin. He kept the ship 13 to 16 miles from shore during daylight, and withdrew at night to 25 to 30 miles. The captain instructed Law to crosshatch the navigation charts with a red pencil to the west of the 13-mile barrier, and to draw a thick blue line at 14 miles from shore. Navigators were under orders to call Bucher to the bridge if they even approached the blue mark.
On the morning of January 19, the spy boat was 15 miles east of Songjin. Frustrated CTs were acquiring precious little data. They’d pick up an electronic signal and, after the ship traveled a bit farther, pick it up again. In theory, recording the same signal from two different angles pinpointed the sending station. On a chart, two lines were drawn toward the signal from the two points at which it was detected; the lines’ intersection indicated the signal’s point of origin. But the SOD hut receivers weren’t accurate and most of the lines didn’t cross. In cases where they did, the sending station was invariably marked on the charts already. Boredom again blossomed among the CTs.
The Pueblo drifted farther south. Steve Harris confided to Murphy that North Korean fire-control radar had locked on the ship. The XO knew that didn’t necessarily mean the Pueblo was in danger. But it was a little disconcerting that the communists were tracking them.
Bucher still hoped to photograph a North Korean submarine in the vicinity of Mayang-do. Such a coup would make the whole mission worthwhile. But no subs appeared, heightening the commander’s sense that he was wasting his time. He wrote in a report that the voyage to date had been “unproductive.” Schumacher wryly concluded that he’d learned an important lesson about the North Koreans: Unlike the half-frozen crew of the Pueblo, they knew better than to wander about the Sea of Japan in the dead of winter.
While the CTs’ annoyance grew, the two civilian oceanographers were quite pleased with the way their work was going.
Dunnie Tuck and Harry Iredale were a study in contrasts. Tuck, who’d served on the Banner the previous summer during trips to the USSR and China, was an almost maniacally gregarious Virginia native. Balding at 30, he was a funny, storytelling charmer who boasted of many romantic conquests. His nickname was, of course, Friar. His 24-year-old sidekick, Iredale, a bright, bespectacled former Penn State math major, was shy and fidgety, painfully aware of his short stature, and luckless at bedding women. He, too, had served briefly aboard the Banner.
Twice a day, the two men walked to the well deck and dropped over the side a dozen yellow Nansen bottles attached at intervals to a long wire. Later they winched the heavy brass canisters back up and tested the water samples from different depths for salinity, sound conductivity, and temperature. The measurements provided the veneer of peaceful research, but they had important military applications as well, particularly in submarine operations.
The Pueblo arrived off Wonsan early on the morning of January 22.
Besides having a busy harbor, the city served as a major railroad hub that American warships had shelled repeatedly during the Korean War. It was well defended by antiaircraft batteries and dozens of MiG fighters. In the SOD hut, the CTs finally began to get some interesting signals.
Shortly after lunch Gene Lacy called from the bridge to report two North Korean trawlers approaching. The captain hurried up for a look. He ordered Schumacher to join him and the CTs to tune in on the trawlers’ communications. The rest of the crew picked up on the ripple of activity; seamen rushed up to the main deck to watch the action.
Both boats carried nets and other fishing gear and appeared to be unarmed. Their smokestacks were emblazoned with a red star inside a white circle.
The trawlers began slowly circling the Pueblo from about five hundred yards away. Their crewmen all seemed to be on deck, pointing and talking excitedly. Suddenly one of the vessels changed course and charged toward the spy ship, veering off when it was just one hundred yards away.
Some Pueblo sailors raised their middle fingers at the passing North Koreans. Bucher ordered everyone below, hoping the communists wouldn’t wonder why so many men were on such a small boat. The two trawler captains then withdrew several miles and pulled close together, as if conferring. At about two p.m., they headed back toward the Pueblo. Fearing a ramming, Bucher fired up his engines. The trawlers steamed to within twenty-five yards and began circling again, their crews taking photographs. The communists’ faces were clearly visible and, as one Pueblo sailor noted, “They looked like they wanted to eat our livers.”
Bucher called one of the Marine translators, Bob Chicca, to the bridge to decipher the trawlers’ names. Armed with a Korean dictionary, Chicca gazed intently at the vessels.
“One of them is Rice Paddy and the other is Rice Paddy One, Captain,” he said.
Bucher still was observing emission control, but he figured the Pueblo—with “GER-2” painted on its hull in large white letters—had definitely been identified this time. At three p.m. both trawlers withdrew to the northeast. The captain began to prepare a situation report, or SITREP in Navy jargon, to inform COMNAVFORJAPAN of what had happened.
By about five p.m., the narrative was ready and a radioman opened a circuit to Kamiseya.
—
The North Korean commando stared through his field glasses at the big city spread out below him. He hadn’t expected Seoul to look so beautiful and prosperous.
The morning mist had lifted on Pibong Hill, north of the South Korean capital, where Second Lieutenant Kim Shin-jo and his thirty fellow guerrillas lay hidden. From the hillside they could see their target: the South Korean presidential mansion, known as the Blue House. Come nightfall, the infiltrators planned to shoot their way into the building and cut off the head of South Korea’s iron-fisted president, Park Chung Hee. Then they’d kill his family and staff, steal vehicles from the presidential motor pool, and escape.
It was Sunday, January 21.
Kim and his comrades were officers in North Korea’s highly trained 124th Army Unit, which specialized in unconventional warfare and political subversion. For two years they’d practiced behind-the-lines fighting as part of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung’s ruthless scheme to foment revolution in South Korea and reunify the peninsula by force. The communists hoped President Park’s assassination would create political chaos in the south, giving North Korean troops a pretext to march in and “stabilize” the country.
The members of Lieutenant Kim’s platoon were in superb physical condition and armed to the teeth. Their ages ranged from 24 to 28. With leg muscles hardened by running with several pounds of sand sewn into their trouser cuffs, the men could cover a herculean six miles of rugged terrain an hour with sixty pounds of equipment on their backs. Each officer carried a Russian-made submachine gun, a semiautomatic pistol, three hundred rounds of ammunition, eight antipersonnel grenades, and an antitank grenade. If their guns jammed, they’d fight with their bare hands and feet, every man having mastered judo and karate.
To prepare for the attack, the commandos had studied Blue House floor plans and staged mock assaults on a two-story North Korean army barracks. On the night of January 17, their unit was bused to a checkpoint in the demilitarized zone. From there guides led them to a chain-link fence recently erected to keep out North Korean intruders. The guerrillas cut through the barrier and slipped past soldiers from the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division who were supposed to guard that sector.
The North Koreans slept during the day and moved fast over snowy hills at night. On the afternoon of January 19, four South Korean brothers cutting firewood stumbled across them. Some squad members wanted to kill the brothers, but their leader, a 24-year-old captain, said no. Instead, the North Koreans harangued the woodcutters for several hours about the glories of socialism under Kim Il Sung. The brothers were released with a warning not to inform South Korean authorities, or the communists would return to kill their families and burn down their village.
The woodcutters, however, immediately alerted local police, who in turn informed the South Korean army. Security was tightened in Seoul, and South Korean and American troops began scouring the countryside north of the capital. Soon more than 6,000 soldiers and policemen were in the hunt. But the raiders were traveling faster than expected and eluded their pursuers.
On the night of January 21, wearing brown coats over South Korean army fatigues, the commandos slipped into Seoul. They’d tuned in on busy police and army radio frequencies and formulated a bold strategy for dodging the search operation. By ten p.m., they’d shed their overcoats and were brazenly marching through the streets in column formation.
Less than half a mile from the Blue House, a suspicious Seoul policeman challenged them. The North Koreans claimed they were southern troops, returning from an antiguerrilla patrol in the mountains, and kept marching. Unsatisfied, the cop called his superiors, and the district police chief hurried to the scene in a jeep.
When the chief asked for more identification, the commandos’ nerves snapped. They shot him and hurled grenades at nearby transit buses as a diversion, killing a driver, a conductor, and a 16-year-old boy on his way home from the library. Someone fired a flare into the night sky; its glare threw the cityscape into eerie relief. The communists fled in all directions.
Gunfire and grenade explosions punctuated the rest of that night and the next day as the infiltrators tried to claw their way out of Seoul. One of them hopped from rooftop to rooftop until he crashed through the tiles into the home of a 32-year-old man who worked for the South Korean information ministry. The man grappled with the guerrilla while his sister flailed at him with a rubber sandal. The struggle went on until the intruder finally shot and killed the South Korean man.
By the end of the first full day of the manhunt, five commandos had been killed. A sixth evidently committed suicide with a hidden grenade while under interrogation at National Police headquarters. Lieutenant Kim was captured.
Although it failed, the plot to murder President Park badly rattled South Koreans. Seoul was reported to be in a state of “extreme tension.” Hoarding by citizens afraid of more attacks or even war drove the price of rice sharply higher. The black-market value of the dollar jumped against the South Korean won as affluent southerners converted their assets into more stable U.S. currency.
South Korean authorities interrogated Lieutenant Kim and made him the star of a sensational press conference. He claimed he and his comrades originally had several targets in Seoul. Besides killing Park, they planned to murder the American ambassador and his wife, attack South Korean army headquarters, and blow open the gates of a prison that held communist agents. But shortly before leaving North Korea, the hit team decided to concentrate on the Blue House. Kim also revealed that 2,400 other North Korean soldiers were in training to carry out guerrilla attacks and instigate revolution in the south.
In the snow-blanketed countryside north of Seoul, meanwhile, the remorseless search for the remaining commandos went on. Allied soldiers pursued them with helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and dogs. They waited in ambush holes dug in the frozen earth and broke up ice covering the Imjin River near the DMZ, so no one could cross on foot.
One by one, the exhausted North Koreans still at large were cornered and killed. Troops shot one to death at a farmhouse where he’d stopped to beg for food. The young captain who’d led the assassination squad met his end on a rocky hilltop after refusing to surrender. Another infiltrator was slain just five miles south of the DMZ. Only two were believed to have made it home.
The attempted assault on the Blue House was an astonishing act of international savagery that might well have touched off a new Korean War had it succeeded. The South Korean army was placed on maximum alert; North Korea braced for possible retaliatory attacks by Park’s forces.
Bucher and his men arrived off Wonsan the morning after the Blue House raid was broken up. It was an extraordinarily tense moment. North Korea easily could have interpreted an intelligence ship lurking near a key port as a scout for a counterattack, a dire threat that must quickly be neutralized.
Yet no one bothered to inform Bucher of the incendiary events in Seoul, or of how the North Koreans might now be expected to react to his ship.