rising sharply between North and South Korea. Just two days before the Pueblo seizure, North Korean commandos had nearly succeeded in assassinating South Korea’s iron-fisted president, Park Chung Hee. Seething with anger and drinking heavily, Park secretly instructed his generals to prepare to march north. 4 Both countries put their militaries on high alert. Terrified South Koreans hoarded rice and swapped their currency for black-market U.S. dollars as rumors of war multiplied.

Johnson responded to the ship seizure with a massive buildup of American military power in and around the Sea of Japan, dispatching more than 350 U.S. warplanes and 25 warships led by the carrier USS Enterprise (CVAN-65). The president also called up 14,000 Air Force and Navy reservists—the largest mobilization of American military personnel since the Cubanconduct an in-depth background investigation of the captain. 6

Agents of the Naval Investigative Service soon fanned out in the United States and Japan, where Bucher had been stationed during his submarine days in the early 1960s. The military gumshoes checked his bank records and grilled friends, relatives, and old shipmates about his “morals.” One officer who had served with Bucher grew so incensed at the intrusive questioning that he threw a punch at his interrogator.

Born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1927, Bucher had been orphaned as a toddler. A couple that ran a local restaurant adopted him, but his new mother soon died and his father was imprisoned for bootlegging. By age 7 the boy found himself without parents or a home and survived by foraging for food in