Nation: In Pueblo's Wake

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A native of Pocatello, Idaho, Bucher was an orphan who was schooled first at a local Catholic orphanage and then sent to Boys Town, Neb. At Boys Town, he picked up the nickname Pete, after an upper-class football player he admired, along with a couple of letters for football, the vice-presidency of his class and a solid, tough-minded approach to life that was devoid of self-pity. Too poor to attend college, he joined the Navy, later entered the University of Nebraska on the G.I. bill, also enrolled in the Naval Reserve officer program to help pay his way. He left Nebraska with a degree in geology, a pretty, brown-haired wife and a Navy commission. He joined the elite Submarine Service, still favors subs, though the duty has kept him away from Rose and their sons Mark, 15, and Michael, 13, more than 50% of the time.

A tough, 5-ft. 10-in. 195-pounder, Bucher strikes one of his closest friends, Navy Lieut. Commander Alan Hemphill, as "a very patriotic person. Today it doesn't seem fashionable to believe in God, country, Mother and apple pie, but Pete does, and he isn't embarrassed to tell people about it."

That was one reason why his friends scoffed when Pyongyang radio broadcast a patently fake confession by Bucher. "If Pete Bucher said anything to the North Koreans beyond his name, rank and serial number," said Hemphill, "you can bet it wouldn't be something that would be printable."

Indelible & Inedible. The "confession," delivered in a strangled voice, was in the dialectic pidgin prose favored by Communist writers. At one point, it claimed that the CIA promised "a lot of dollars would be offered to the whole crew members of my ship and particularly I myself would be honored" for a good job. Another sample: "I have no excuse whatsoever for my criminal act as my ship intruded deep into the territorial waters of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and was captured by the naval patrol crafts of the Korean People's Army in their self-defense action while conducting the criminal espionage activities. My crime committed by me and my men is entirely indelible."

Even Radio Prague found Bucher's confession inedible rather than indelible, and refused to swallow it. The Pentagon dismissed it as "a travesty on the facts" and added that "the style and wording of the document provide unmistakable evidence in themselves that this was not written or prepared by any American." When Rose Bucher heard a garbled tape of him supposedly reading the confession, she declared: "That is not my husband's voice. It does not sound in any remote way like my husband. The inflections and the sounds were not his." An obvious conclusion from the slurred speech was that Bucher had been drugged. Shown a photo of her husband allegedly writing his confession and a sample of the handwriting from that confession, Mrs. Bucher said: "That can't be Pete's. He writes a terrible scrawl."