Court of Inquiry

[Provided by Ralph McClintock]

The Court of Inquiry was called to order January 20, 1969 by Vice Admiral Harold G. Bowen, Jr. At the U.S. Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado, CA. Counsel to the Court was Captain William G. Newsome. Cdr. Bucher’s counsel was E. Miles Harvey, a civilian attorney. Cdr. Bucher presented the most detailed testimony of anyone over many days, covering the time from when he assumed command in Bremerton, WA, until repatriation. All the officers, petty officers, civilian oceanographers and enlisted men were called to testify.

Cdr. Bucher described the condition of the Pueblo when he arrived at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Bremerton, WA in January 1967. He recommended that a destruction system be installed for the ship’s electronic and cryptographic areas. He stated that the ship’s telephone system permitted use by too many persons simultaneously and that scuttling the ship would have taken 21/2 hours.

While in port in Pearl Harbor he was told if a situation developed that was worse than harassment, assistance may not arrive as soon as desired, but retaliatory plans existed. When in Japan two .50-caliber machine guns and three gun mounts were installed.

In Cdr. Bucher’s further testimony he discussed Pueblo’s trip from Sasebo to the operational area, navigational procedures, oceanographic operations, observation by North Korean fishing trawlers, the attempt to send a radio message, and specifically denied the 17 intrusions into territorial waters claimed by the North Korean propaganda. He then presented details of the seizure of Pueblo by the naval forces of the North Korean Peoples Army. See Pueblo Incident Attacked Subsection for details. Counsel for the court asked Cdr. Bucher questions about his decisions, power to resist, and the destruction of classified materials while Pueblo was under attack.

After he stated that the North Koreans had boarded Pueblo, he was told by counsel for the court that we was suspected of violating Navy Regulations, Article 0730. He was asked by the North Koreans what his mission was and said he responded that it was performing oceanographic research and the electromagnetic study of sunspots. The North Koreans accused him of spying, asked if the crew belonged to the CIA, and asked if he were trying to start another war between the U. S. and North Korea. He was told that he and his men were civilian espionage agents and would be tried and shot.

Some of Commander Bucher’s Testimony

Note of encouragement given to Captain Bucher by the crew.

At his press conference on January 13 Captain Newsome had said that the Code of Conduct was "inapplicable" to the Pueblo crew. Now, on February 20, he declared, "It's become obvious that the code is applicable in this situation. . . . One of the tasks of the court is to examine the code to see whether or not it meets our present needs, to see whether or not it's adequate under all circumstances, to see whether we can propose any revisions to it. We have an excellent vehicle for doing that right now." (Armbrister)

Why was the Navy reversing its position? "We have had long and learned dissertations from other sources," Captain Newsome replied. Which sources? No comment. What had happened, in fact, was that the Navy had simply decided to protect its flank. The original plan to call fifteen or twenty witnesses during the court's final phase clearly wouldn't suffice. Someone might complain later that he had not been given a chance to testify openly. So the decision had been made: Every member of the crew would have his day in court. And if this additional testimony shed any new light on the Code of Conduct, well, that would be all to the good. (Armbrister)

Testimony of Lt. (jg) F. Carl Schumacher:

Admiral Bowen turned to Schumacher, "Did you believe in the Code of Conduct when you were captured?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you still?"

"I'm just not sure," he said to Admiral Bowen ... "I think we were in a unique situation. They had our service records, documents from the ship; they had the ship itself."

"Are you telling me that you believe in the Code of Conduct but you would interpret it to fit the situation in which you found your self?"

"Yes, sir," Schumacher said. "It was a guideline, and we deviated from it knowingly. . . . None of us wanted to do what we had to do over there. It became a question of what we could do in the form of resistance. The commanding officer was the one who first hit upon all the subtleties and doubletalk . . . a lesser man, it would probably have driven him out of his mind. The commanding officer had enough sense to know that what ad happened was done and the most important thing was to keep the crew alive . . ."

The admirals stared at him. Schumacher's hand gripped the water glass. "It's very difficult," he said, "to take an eleven-month period and try to compress it in a couple of hours' testimony and have it come out the way it was. I . . . I regret I haven't the capability to convey fully what it was like." (Armbrister)

Testmony of Naval Experts:

Since January 20 the court had met for more than two hundred hours to hear one hundred and four witnesses (eighty-one in open session) provide 3,392 single-spaced, legal-sized pages of testimony. The admirals had flown to Norfolk, Virginia, to inspect Pueblo's sister ship, Palm Beach. To be sure, they had not dug into "all the facts and circumstances" surrounding the incident, They had not summoned shipyard officials from Bremerton or the Commander, Service Force, Pacific Fleet, Rear Admiral Edwin B. Hooper, from Hawaii, or even the former Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, who was living in retirement in San Diego. Nor had they solicited testimony from anyone at the Naval Ships Systems Command, or the National Security Agency, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "These agencies were simply beyond my cognizance," Admiral Bowen remembers. "I didn't have the horsepower to take on the entire U.S. Government." He and his colleagues had assumed from the beginning-correctly, as it turned out Congress would probe into the "why" of the Pueblo affair, that their job was simply to determine what happened. (Armbrister)

So now they began the arduous task of adding it all together: the facts, opinions and recommendations which they would have to submit to the convening authority, Admiral John J. Hyland, in Honolulu. There had been conflicts in the testimony, of course: the number of bags of documents jettisoned over the side; the actual state of the sea at the time of the seizure; the various estimates as to how long it would have taken to remove the tarps from the machine guns and open fire. What seemed surprising, though-given the capriciousness of human nature and the fact that all of this had happened more than a year before-was there were so very few significant discrepancies.

…"Their allegiance to each other was remarkable," one admiral says. "It outweighed any other considerations."

[The previous was paraphrased and extracted verbatim from selected available documents (Armbrister and the Press Releases of the USS PUEBLO Command Information Bureau, U. S. Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado California). In the future, if complete documentation of the testimony can be located and time permits, a detailed account will be prepared.]

"The major factor which led to the PUEBLO's lonely confrontation by unanticipatedly bold and hostile forces was the sudden collapse of a premise which had been assumed at every level of responsibility and upon which every other aspect of the mission had been based -- freedom of the high seas. At that particular point in history, the common confidence in the historic inviolability of a sovereign ship on the high seas in peacetime was shown to have been misplaced. The consequences must in fairness be borne by all, rather than by one or two individuals whom circumstances had placed closer to the crucial event."