Nation: In Pueblo's Wake

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At 1:45 p.m., Pueblo radioed Yokosuka that the North Koreans were aboard. Twenty-five minutes later, she reported that she had been "requested" to steam into Wonsan, a deep-draft port used by many Soviet submariners in preference to Vladivostok, where the continental shelf forces them to cruise uncomfortably close to the surface. At 2:32 p.m., barely 2½ hours after the first Communist PT boat hove into view, came Pueblo's last message. Engines were "all stop," Bucher reported; he was "going off the air."

From the time the boarding seemed imminent until the final message, Pueblo's communications were relayed simultaneously from Yokosuka through several command tiers to the office of the Commander in Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) in Honolulu and all the way to Washington. Yet there were some unaccountable lapses. At Yokosuka, Rear Admiral Frank L. Johnson got the messages quickly enough, but he knew that there were no naval aircraft available to help Pueblo. He turned at once to the Air Force's Lieut. General Seth J. McKee, who is commander of U.S. forces in Japan and chief of the Fifth Air Force, which has half a dozen bases in both Japan and South Korea. McKee, too, was strapped, for whatever planes were available were either unequipped or out of range for any rescue mission—even though it would take the Koreans a good two hours to tow Pueblo into Wonsan.

Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral John Hyland was summoned by news of the seizure from a dinner party at his Hawaii home. At the same moment, Hyland's boss, CINCPAC Commander Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, was on the opposite side of the Pacific, conferring in Danang with General William Westmoreland. Unaccountably, Sharp was not informed of Pueblo's plight until he had flown from Danang and landed on the carrier Kittyhawk—a lapse of 3 hrs. 15 min.

Act of War. In Washington, 14 hours behind Korean time, the news arrived before midnight. The reports were distributed simultaneously to the State Department's seventh-floor Operations Center, the Pentagon's basement National Military Command Center and the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. Duty officers immediately began calling second-echelon officials at their homes; Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was not alerted until 12:23 a.m. By 12:45, White House Aide Walt Rostow was convinced that the situation was serious and drove to the White House, arriving there at 1:15. Shortly after 2 a.m., he telephoned the President, who stayed in bed but was briefed during the next four hours as additional details flowed in.

By daybreak, controlled calm had given way to a growing sense of consternation. Here were 83 Americans and a ship crammed to the gunwales with electronic hardware, hostages to one of the Communist world's most belligerent and intransigent regimes (see THE WORLD). Though the Navy bravely tried to make light of the loss of the equipment aboard Pueblo, arguing that the Russians have comparable gear, few electronics experts were so blase. "This equipment is so esoteric that it verges on the unattainable," said one U.S. authority, who considers Pueblo's capture "a really major catastrophe." In purely political terms, it was also a crisis of the first magnitude.