Kodak plant in Rochester, New York. But by the time the photographic intelligence got back to field commanders in Vietnam, the intelligence was already several days old. The North Vietnamese were moving missile sites and mock-ups of missile sites around faster than anyone could keep track of them. The CIA realized it needed a dramatically faster turnaround time, which resulted in a photo center being quickly set up on the mainland in Japan. Soon, field commanders had intel in their hands just twenty-four hours from the completion of an Oxcart mission over North Vietnam.
Still, that did not stop the North Vietnamese from moving their missiles around and avoiding bombing raids. They had help from the Soviet Union. “That was the reason for the Russian trawler parked at the end of the Kadena runway. Someone was watching and taking notes every time we flew,” recalls Roger Andersen, who was stationed in the command post on Kadena, which he’d been in charge of setting up. “It was almost identical to the command post at Area 51, except it was smaller,” Andersen says.
On Kadena, the operations officers tried to trick the Russian spies in the trawler by flying at night, and yet of the first seven Black Shield missions flown, four were “detected and tracked.” The North Vietnamese were able to predict Oxcart’s overhead pass based on the time the aircraft left the base. With this information relayed by the Russians, the Communists’ Fan Song guidance radar was able to lock on the A-12’s beacon. The first attempted shoot-down happened during Operation Black Shield’s sixteenth mission. In photographs taken by the Oxcart, contrails of surface-to-air missiles can be seen below. Fortunately for the pilots, the missiles could not get up as high as the Oxcart. In this newest round of cat and mouse, Oxcart was resulting in a draw. Oxcart was fast, high, and stealthy. The aircraft could not be shot down. But the enemy knew the plane was there, meaning it was a long way from being invisible as Richard Bissell and President Eisenhower had originally planned.
For American pilots flying over North Vietnam, the real danger remained down low, halfway between Oxcart and the earth, at around forty-five thousand feet. That was where the surface-to-air missiles and the MiG fighter jets were shooting down U.S. pilots at the horrifying nine-to-one rate. Ken Collins recalled what this felt like at the time: “During Black Shield, we, as pilots, were relatively safe at eighty-five thousand feet. It was the pilots who were flying lower than us who were really the ones in harm’s way. These were guys most of us had been in the Air Force with, before we got sheep-dipped and began flying for the CIA.”
Extraordinary pilots like Hervey Stockman. Stockman had been the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2, on July 4, 1956. Eleven years later, on June 11, 1967, Stockman was flying over North Vietnam, searching for information about North Vietnam weapons depots, when he was involved in a midair crash. A pilot of exceptional skill and remarkable courage, Stockman was on his 310th mission in a career that had covered three wars when his F-4 C Phantom fighter jet collided with another airplane in his wing. He and Ronald Webb both survived the bailout. Upon landing, they were captured by North Vietnamese soldiers, beaten, and taken prisoner. Stockman would spend the next five years and 268 days as a prisoner of war in a seven-by-seven-foot cell. First he was housed in the notoriously brutal Hanoi Hilton. Later, he was moved to other, equally grim prisons over the course of his incarceration. During Black Shield, the CIA tasked Oxcart pilots with search missions to find U.S. airmen who’d gone down over North Vietnam. The cameras on the Oxcarts took miles of photographs, seeking information on the prison complexes where American heroes like Hervey Stockman and hundreds of other POWs were being held, but to no avail. The North Vietnamese moved captured POWs around almost as often as they moved missile sites around.
The captured pilots became a purposeful part of Communist propaganda campaigns against the West. The POWs were beaten, tortured, chained, and dragged out in front of cameras, often forced to denounce the United States. If the Communists wanted to create unrest at home, which they did, they succeeded by using captured pilots for their own propaganda gains. All across America, opposition to the war was on the rise. The White House and the Pentagon fought back with propaganda and erroneous facts. “We are beginning to win this struggle,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey boasted on NBC’s Today show in November of 1967. While closed-door hearings for the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed that U.S. bombing campaigns were having little to no effect on winning the war, Humphrey told America that more Communists were laying down arms than picking them up. That our anti-Communist “purification” programs in Vietnam were going well. Later that same month, America’s top commander, General Westmoreland, dug his own grave. He told the National Press Club that the Communists were “unable to mount a major offensive.” That America might have been losing the war in 1965, but now America was winning in Vietnam. In an interview with Time magazine, Westmoreland taunted the Communists by calling them weak. “I hope they try something because we are looking for a fight,” he declared. Which is exactly what he got. At the end of January, the Communists pretended to agree to a three-day cease-fire to celebrate the new year, which in Vietnamese is called Tet Nguyen Dan. Instead, it was a double-cross. On January 31, 1968, the Communists launched a surprise attack on the U.S. military and the forces of South Vietnam. The notorious Tet Offensive stunned the Pentagon. It also resulted in violent antiwar protests. The Tet Offensive was a major turning point in America’s losing the Vietnam War.
It was at this same time that another major crisis occurred, one in which Oxcart played a secret role, the precise details of which were only made public in 2007. On the foggy morning of January 23, 1968, approximately two thousand miles to the northeast of Vietnam, the U.S. Navy ship USS Pueblo sailed into icy waters off the coast of North Korea and dropped anchor. The Pueblo’s cover story was that it was conducting scientific research; really, it was on an espionage mission, a joint NSA-Navy operation with the goal of gathering signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In addition to the regular crew, there were twenty-eight signals intelligence specialists working behind locked doors in a separate and restricted part of the vessel. Parked 15.8 miles off North Korea’s Ung-do Island, technically the Pueblo was floating in international waters.
North Korea’s Communist regime did not see it that way. The ship was close enough to be eavesdropping on Wonson harbor, which made it an open target for the North Korean People’s Army, the KPA. After one of the Pueblo’s crew members picked up on radar that a KPA ship was approaching fast, Pueblo’s captain, Lloyd M. Bucher, went up to the bridge to have a look around. Through his binoculars, Bucher saw not just a military ship but one with its rocket launchers aimed directly at the Pueblo. Bucher ordered certain flags to be raised, ones that indicated the USS Pueblo was on a surveying mission, something the North Koreans obviously already did not buy. Within minutes, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Lacy spotted several small vessels on the horizon: torpedo boats coming from Wonson. Next, two MiG-21 fighter jets appeared on the scene.
Captain Bucher now had a national security nightmare on his hands. His boat was filled with thousands of classified papers, cryptographic manuals, and encryption machines. Most significantly, the Pueblo carried a KW-7 cipher machine, which was the veritable Rosetta stone of naval encryption. The captain considered sinking his ship, which would take forty-seven minutes, but later explained that he knew if he had done so a gun battle was certain to ensue. Most of the Pueblo’s life rafts would be shot at and destroyed. Without life rafts, the men would die in the icy waters in a matter of minutes, Bucher was certain. He made the decision to flee.
The North Korean ship raised a flag that signaled “Heave to or I will open fire on you.” Captain Bucher raised a signal flag in response: “Thank you for your consideration. I am departing the area.” But the North Koreans opened fire. Bucher himself was hit, taking shrapnel in his foot and backside. As the Pueblo took off, the North Koreans continued to fire, killing a U.S. sailor named Duane Hodges.
Meanwhile, behind the secret door, SIGINT specialists smashed cipher equipment with axes and shoved documents into a small incinerator there. Despite the speed at which the analysts worked to burn the secret papers, 90 percent of the documents survived. Sixtyone minutes after being shot, Captain Bucher was no longer in control of his ship. The North Korean People’s Army stormed the Pueblo and took the captain and his eighty-two crew members hostage. For the first time in 160 years, an American vessel had been seized by a foreign nation. The timing could not have been worse. America was already losing one war.
President Johnson was outraged. Within hours of the Pueblo’s capture, the Pentagon began secretly preparing for war against North Korea. The following day, McNamara summoned the war council to lay out plans for a ground attack. “Our primary objective is to get the men of the Pueblo back,” McNamara said, emphasizing just how secret his plan was to remain: “No word of the discussion in this meeting should go beyond this room.” A stunning air attack over North Korea was laid out. An estimated fifteen thousand tons of bombs would be dropped from the air to complement the ground assault. Given the huge numbers of soldiers and airmen fighting in Vietnam, the war with North Korea would require a call-up of the reserves. A massive U.S. strategic airlift was set in motion, designated Operation Combat Fox. That the North Vietnamese were just six days from launching the sneak attack called the Tet Offensive was not yet known. A war with North Korea over the USS Pueblo would have been a war America could ill afford.
