THE RETURN OF THE PUEBLO'S CREW

WHAT began as a bizarre incident on the high seas last January came to an end last week after an equally bizarre series of diplomatic maneuvers. Held captive in North Korea for eleven months, the crew members of the surveillance ship U.S.S. Pueblo were released and flown home to the U.S. The episode will not end there. The crewmen, some of whom said they had been beaten and tortured by their captors, now face a formal court of inquiry that will raise some serious questions. Did the Pueblo at any time stray into North Korean waters? Should the ship have been surrendered without a fight? Why did the men sign "confessions" that they had spied?

It was a chilly, hazy morning last week when the men walked one by one through light snow that dusted the 250-ft. Bridge of No Return from North to South Korea. In quilted blue coats, grey shirts, flannel trousers and white-soled black sneakers, the 82 surviving crew members filed over the bridge at ten-foot intervals. The body of the 83rd, Fireman Duane Hodges, mortally wounded during the hijacking by North Korean patrol boats, was brought to mid-bridge in a North Korean ambulance and his coffin transferred to a waiting U.S. truck.

Led by Pueblo's skipper, Commander Lloyd Bucher, who looked a decade older than his 41 years, they were bundled into three olive-drab U.S Army buses and driven to the United Nations Command's advance camp in the Korean demilitarized zone. They were fed and given field jackets and toilet kits. Eventually pronounced fit to travel to the U.S., they boarded two giant C-141

StarLifter transports near Seoul for the long flight to San Diego, where the Navy had assembled their families from all over the U.S. One day before Christmas, the big jets landed at Miramar Naval Air Station, taxiing up to nestle their big black noses against ropes holding back the crewmen's families. The men disembarked, Bucher in the lead. "It's so great. You'll never know how great it is," he called out as he limped toward his wife. Then he embraced her for a long moment, tears running down his cheeks. When Hodges' coffin was removed from the lead plane, the happy families abruptly fell silent while a band played the Navy Hymn.

Yes and No. The prisoners' long-sought release came only hours after the enactment of a scene that belongs in the weirder annals of diplomacy. In the one-story hut in Panmunjom that has seen hundreds of meetings since the 1953 truce that ended the Korean War, U.S. Army Major General Gilbert H. Woodward sat down opposite North Korean Major General Pak Chung Kuk. "The position of the U.S.," said General Woodward, the top U.N. member of the armistice commission, "has been that the ship was not engaged in illegal activities, that there is no convincing evidence that the ship at any time intruded into territorial waters claimed by North Korea, and that we could not apologize for actions we did not believe took place." He added: "My signature will not and cannot alter the facts. I will sign the document to free the crew and only to free the crew."

With that, he put his name to a document prepared by the North Koreans which said that 1) Pueblo "had illegally intruded into the territorial waters of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on many occasions," 2) the U.S. "solemnly apologizes for grave acts of espionage," and 3) Pueblo's crew members "have confessed honestly to their crimes." The U.S. said one thing, then signed quite another.

U.S. Admission. "I know of no precedent in my 19 years of public service," Secretary of State Dean Rusk admitted in describing what he called the "strange procedure" that led to the release of Pueblo's 82 crewmen. For a long period after the vessel's capture, no progress was made in negotiating her crew's release. The first breakthrough did not come until Sept. 30, after a long summer of hassling. The North Koreans agreed in principle to set the crew free once the U.S. signed a satisfactory paper. Notes one U.S. negotiator: "The most they had been willing to do before was to say, 'If you sign the document, then we can talk about the release of the crew.' "

The U.S. then revived what came to be called "the overwrite proposal," used once before to free American helicopter crewmen who fell into North Korean hands: the U.S. would sign, giving the North Koreans the American admission they wanted, but would simultaneously denounce the agreement, thus saving U.S. face. The North Koreans did not say yes at once, but they did not say no. On Dec. 17, during the 26th meeting on the Pueblo, a Dec. 23 deadline was set for release of the crew. There would be no further discussions under the Johnson Administration.

Moral Position. The North Koreans probably concluded that they had little to gain by keeping Pueblo's crew captive any longer. Two days later, Pak announced impassively: "Now we have reached agreement." Bizarre as the U.S. ploy had been, Rusk insisted: "The simple fact is that the men are free, and our position on the facts of the case is unchanged."

Predictably, Communist propagandists ballyhooed the agreement as "an ignominious defeat for the U.S. imperialist aggressors" and ignored the disclaimer. Whatever use the Communists chose to make of the solution, the U.S. had backed itself into an awkward corner. A high-ranking U.S. representative had openly said his signature was worthless. If the Navy tries to punish any of Pueblo's crew for signing "confessions," an obvious defense is that the U.S. Government itself has done exactly that.

Back Pay. If there was concern in Washington, there was joy in San Diego. The crewmen were installed in a four-story pink stucco building normally used by students at the Navy's Hospital Corps school; their families checked into the El Cortez Hotel atop a hill in the city's center, their bills to be paid with a $40,000 fund raised by the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. The men got some $200,000 in back pay and promptly unloaded some of it in the PX, opened for an hour despite the holiday. After a Christmas dinner, Bucher read a message from the families of Apollo 8's astronauts: "Your reunion has brought great joy into our hearts this Christmas Day." The Pueblo crew members reciprocated. After the space capsule's successful splashdown, they sent the three astronauts a telegram reading: "Although we 82 tried to monopolize the headlines, you three were just too much. We gladly relinquish the limelight."

Off and on, often reluctantly, the crewmen spoke of their captivity. There was even one light moment. Seaman Edward Russell said one North Korean guard asked him, "Do you have a car?" "Yes," Russell replied. "You lie!" the guard blurted. "President Johnson has all the cars!"

The North Koreans threatened and often beat the men in order to extract "confessions." At one point, said Bucher, "they threatened to commence shooting the most junior members of my crew." He added: "I was rarely beaten in the face because I was subjected to a lot of camera ordeals, and they wanted me to look at least presentable. But this didn't prevent them from caving in my ribs, or kicking me in the tailbone to the point where I was almost unable to walk for weeks."

Treatment Worsened. Bucher said one of his men had been clubbed repeatedly with a four-by-four timber only a week before their release. Bradley Crowe, 21, a communications technician third class, said treatment of the crew worsened in September, when a U.S. apology expected by the North Koreans failed to materialize. Fed little besides soup and kimchi, a garlic-laden cabbage dish, all of the men lost weight--one as much as 70 Ibs.

Throughout the ordeal, said Bucher, "we were trying to tell you we'd been had." The most famous example: a North Korean photograph of the crew, with some of them visibly giving the photographer what was variously interpreted as the word "help" in sign language and the well-known U.S. sign of disrespect (TIME, Oct. 18). One crewman wrote his family that his captors were gentle people, the nicest he'd seen since his last visit to St. Elizabeth's--a U.S. mental hospital in Washington, D.C.

Fresh details about the circumstances of the Pueblo's capture came to light. Navy officers said the vessel had secret orders to remain at least 13 miles from North Korean territory and at least 500 yards from any Soviet ships that she might encounter during her mission in the Sea of Japan. The Navy maintained that when a North Korean subchaser and three torpedo boats surrounded the U.S. ship, she was lying dead in the water, 16 miles from land, conducting tests. Before and during the boarding, the Koreans opened fire, wounding Bucher and felling ten crewmen, including Hodges. The U.S. crew desperately tried to destroy the highly classified equipment and documents aboard Pueblo but, Bucher conceded, "truthfully we did not complete it."

Bucher said he surrendered the ship "because it was nothing but a slaughter out there." It was not unusual for North Korean boats to harass U.S. spy ships and then suddenly vanish, so Bucher felt no particular concern when they first appeared on the day of the seizure. He had orders not to uncover his three .50-cal. machine guns; there was thus no way to fight back.

Six Miles Aground. Pueblo's navigator and executive officer, Lieut. Edward Murphy Jr., told of his success at befuddling a North Korean army officer about where the ship had been. In a part of the Pueblo's log that was doctored by the North Koreans, two entries showed the ship to have covered 500 nautical miles in twelve minutes--which would have required a speed of 2,500 knots. Pueblo, a converted freighter, has a maximum speed of 12.2 knots. North Korean charts gave pairs of coordinates for Pueblo's position just before capture that would have put the ship variously 32 miles inland in North Korea, and six miles aground on the Japanese island of Kyushu--400 miles from the spot where Pueblo was captured. "Maybe the army doesn't do much navigating there," said Murphy.

In the next two weeks, Pueblo's crewmen will undergo further physical examinations and searching debriefing by naval intelligence experts. In the subsequent court of inquiry, the questions of how the men reacted in captivity and whether their behavior was consistent with the provisions of the military Code of Conduct (see box) will be raised.

Pueblo is doubtless still tied up in North Korea, some of her electronic gear smashed by the crew, some of it still intact. The U.S., wholeheartedly relieved to have the men back, seems to have given up hope of her return.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.