spy and that no such intrusions would occur again. 10 The American position was that the surveillance ship was performing a military mission on the high seas and had done nothing wrong under international law. The stalemate was broken when the North Koreans unexpectedly accepted a last-ditch U.S. offer to sign a confession only after publicly repudiating it. Bucher and his men finally were released and arrived in San Diego on Christmas Eve 1968 to cheering crowds of well-wishers.

Surviving the Court of Inquiry

Within weeks, however, the Navy convened a court of inquiry to examine the circumstances that led to the Pueblo disaster. The five admirals on the court heard eight weeks of often emotional testimony in an auditorium at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California. The auditoriumwas typically crowded with newspaper and television reporters, since the widely publicized sufferings of Bucher and his men had struck a deep chord of sympathy with the American public. The president of the court was Vice Admiral Harold G. Bowen Jr., the patrician-looking, sharp-witted commander of U.S. antisubmarine warfare forces in the Pacific.

After an emaciated Bucher delivered a spellbinding account of the attack on his ship and his travails in prison, a Navy lawyer warned that he faced a possible court-martial under Article 0730 of Navy regulations, which forbade a commander from allowing a foreign power to search his ship or remove any of his sailors “so long as he has the power to resist.” 11 The warning provoked a tornado of protest from newspaper commentators, members of