Bucher knew his new ship was unlikely to ever be much more than a balky, patched-together tub. Yet he found himself developing a distinct affection for the Pueblo; it was his first command, after all. He also held many of his men in high regard, especially his taciturn chief engineer, Gene Lacy, a 36-year-old from Seattle who was fast becoming the captain’s best friend aboard.
Besides the fragile steering engine, Bucher worried about the large load of classified materials on board, and whether he’d be able to destroy it in an emergency. The Pueblo carried not only electronic surveillance gear and code machines but also hundreds of pounds of top secret paper: military plans, intelligence reports, repair and operating manuals for the encryption devices, and other sensitive documents.
Submarines he’d served on had crude but effective quick-destruction systems: dynamite canisters that could blow a hole in their hulls and send their secret contents to the bottom in minutes. But the Pueblo crew had only sledgehammers and fire axes to break up electronic devices. Documents could be fed into two small, sluggish shredders, burned in a 50-gallon drum, or torn up by hand and heaved overboard in weighted canvas bags. Busting up well-built machines and disposing of mounds of paper took time, however. If the ship lost propulsion near an unfriendly shore or ran aground in a storm, it might not be possible to get rid of everything in time. What if the Pueblo got stranded on, say, the Siberian coast? An impressive cache of national secrets easily could wind up in Soviet hands.
Bucher fired off a letter to his superiors, requesting, “in the strongest possible language,” a specially designed destruction system. The missive found its way to the office of the chief of naval operations, Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Navy’s highest-ranking uniformed official. Moorer’s office asked the Army whether putting explosives aboard its former freighter made sense. Many weeks later, Bucher was informed that such a system was too expensive.
Most of the captain’s other requested upgrades were denied as well. Acutely aware of the rising costs of the Vietnam War, the Navy slashed $1 million from the Pueblo’s $5.5 million makeover budget. When the bean counters turned down his requisition for a fuel-fed incinerator, an irritated Bucher went out and bought a smaller commercial model, dipping into the crew’s recreation fund for the $1,300 purchase price.
The need for rapid destruction was tragically underscored when Israeli jets and torpedo boats attacked a much larger intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, in the Mediterranean Sea during the Six-Day War of June 1967. A pair of Israeli fighters strafed the lightly armed Liberty with 30-millimeter cannon, shattering its bridge and badly wounding a number of officers. After the jets ran out of ammunition, two more swept in and dropped napalm. Crewmen screamed in pain, gaped at hemorrhaging wounds, and struggled to control spreading fires. In the research spaces, communication technicians worked feverishly to destroy secret equipment.
A trio of Israeli torpedo boats moved in to finish off the smoking, blood-smeared American vessel. One torpedo blew a forty-foot hole in the Liberty’s hull. The explosion killed a number of sailors outright; others, trapped in damaged compartments, drowned in terrifying darkness as seawater flooded in. A crewman later reported that an Israeli boat machine-gunned several of the Liberty’s life rafts in the water.
By the time the harrowing attack ended, 34 Americans lay dead or dying. Another 171 were wounded, many grievously. The Liberty’s skipper, William McGonagle, weakened by blood loss from a severe leg wound, calmly directed firefighting and damage-control efforts for the next 17 hours. With his compass ruined, McGonagle lay on his back on an open deck that night and navigated by the stars toward a dawn rendezvous with two U.S. destroyers racing to deliver medical aid; he subsequently was awarded the Medal of Honor. Israel’s government claimed its forces had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian warship shelling Israeli troops in the Sinai Peninsula. Although many crewmen and some top Navy officers believed the attack was deliberate, President Lyndon Johnson accepted Israel’s apology and indemnification.
Israeli gunfire had made it impossible for Liberty sailors to burn classified documents in a topside incinerator. Instead, they were forced to feed codes and other paper materials into fires lit in wastebaskets. Weighted ditch bags stuffed with thick manuals and other publications proved too heavy to throw overboard, and in any event the water was too shallow for jettisoning.
The destruction problem nagged at Bucher, but he couldn’t do much more about it. Several months behind schedule due to construction delays, he and his crew finally set sail in early September 1967 from Bremerton to the massive San Diego naval base, where the Pueblo was to undergo readiness tests. From there it would head for Hawaii to refuel before continuing on to its new home port of Yokosuka, near Tokyo.
Bucher also was concerned about his young crew’s lack of experience. About half of the men had never been to sea. The seamanship skills of his new executive officer, Lieutenant Edward R. Murphy Jr., didn’t impress him. Schumacher, though smart and capable, had been in the Navy only two years. The ship’s other ensign, 21-year-old Tim Harris, had been commissioned just four months before stepping aboard the Pueblo. Bucher viewed Lacy, the veteran chief engineer, as his only truly experienced, reliable officer.
By the time the Pueblo reached San Diego, the captain had made up his mind to teach his officers everything he could about ship handling.
A few days after pulling up to the pier in his Porsche, Schumacher was invited to demonstrate his stuff. He stood on the flying bridge as Bucher observed from a chair behind him. Calling commands to the helmsman in the pilothouse below, Schumacher managed to back away from the dock without incident and head for the busy San Diego ship channel. Then he tried to make what he thought was a slight course correction.
“Left five-degree rudder,” he ordered, and the Pueblo began turning to port. Within seconds, however, the ship had swerved not five degrees but 30—and was barreling straight toward a sandbar. Bucher leaped up and shouted a new bearing, averting a mortifying gaffe in full view of numerous Navy officers on nearby vessels. Schumacher expected a high-decibel reaming, but the captain quietly gave him back the conn.
“I guess that was a little unfair of me,” he told the chagrined ensign. “This ship’s got a rudder as large as a damn barn door. All you ever need to use for this kind of maneuvering is two- or three-degree rudder.”
Schumacher began to like his rambunctious boss more and more. Bucher enjoyed playing with ideas and seemed curious about almost everything. When the Pueblo paused on its way to San Diego for a weekend liberty in San Francisco, he took the fun-loving Tim Harris to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to check out the hippies and their Summer of Love. The skipper could talk knowledgeably about anything from the prospects of the San Diego Chargers to U.S. naval tactics in Vietnam to the novels of Lawrence Durrell. Schumacher subscribed to Esquire and National Review, which turned out to be two of Bucher’s favorite magazines.