The Pueblo and the Code

...Its sense is that the pow may fence with his captors, may carry on a conversation with them, but must find some way to parry questions where the security of United States interests is truly at stake...

...It can be interpreted in such a way that one service or another may not carry out your intent or understand what you have resolved...

...The key word here is "evade," which is quite different from "avoid" or "refuse...

...Article V was therefore intended to give breadth to the new training, instead of permitting it to be constricted by traditional but futile limits...

...But I did, in the presence of the full committee, raise an initial objection to the language...

...In the same staff study, I took up the issue on which the all-service committee had brooded and disagreed...

...During the first 48 hours, I represented General Mark W. Clark on the ramp at Panmun-jom...

...Further, if we are too explicit, we may open the flood gates...

...The Army programmed and spent much money on training, but not in accordance with what the committee intended...

...I recommended, among other things, that we drop the requirement that a pow behave like an Egyptian mummy after giving his captors the four points of information that were mandatory...

...Before we set to work, General Hull handed me a set of notes written on perhaps a dozen pieces of paper in longhand...

...We knew, the paper said, that about 96 per cent of soldiers, of whatever nation, must find some release in talk under intense interrogation...

...That staff study landed in the lap of the second all-service commission appointed to examine the issue...

...Marshall wanted it to mean, neither more nor less...

...Hence they felt that the exchange might amplify the argument...

...That they chanced to be wrong is more excusable than that they made no effort to find out what was right...

...There is nothing wrong with the code...

...In presenting me, General Hull explained that I had been called down for a morning of questions and answers because the members had read the staff paper and agreed with the reasoning...

...The whole discussion of the morning session had made unmistakably clear that the committee understood the pow could be tricked or coerced into going far beyond the Geneva requirement...

...It was a unique shop, as fine an experimental laboratory as I have ever seen in the services, making the most out of very little, though later, for reasons of economy, it was wiped out by Robert S. McNamara...

...Since this was months before the code was written, my task was largely one of inspecting what sort of training was already being done, consequent to the revelation of misbehavior in the North Korean pow camps...

...We worked through the afternoon on the code, and late in the day reported back to the full committee...

...That group finally dissolved out of disagreement over whether to hold to the old Spartan code, "give name, rank, service number and date of birth only...

...The one that does appear is there because Carter Burgess, nominal chairman of the committee in whole, popped into the subcommittee room at the last moment and insisted on throwing a sop to the press and public...

...That office simply winked its eye and left the problem to Heaven...

...This has been mistaken as meaning that the pow may recite only these things and then must clam up...

...Further, we knew that the average U.S...

...The paper further stressed that the problems of Strategic Air Command crews were acute and required a highly sophisticated type of training as to what information might be imparted without breaching security...

...My associates were Vice Admiral C. A. Lockwood (Ret...

...In this same period, the late Charles E. Wilson, then Secretary of Defense, appointed an all-service commission to study the matter...

...But minds great and small have become confused by one article of the code that contains an ambiguity...

...They had not studied the code, either to learn how to resist interrogation as prisoners of war or to learn how much latitude its wording and philosophy gave them...

...The following year, I was named to the Special Operations Panel of the Department of Defense, an advisory group on Special Forces, psychological warfare, and escape and evasion...

...At noon, General Hull asked me to sit through the afternoon as a member of the subcommittee appointed to draft the code of conduct...

...The fault is that the services, with the exception of the Air Force, did not try to make it work...

...So I recommended that all instructor training in resistance be centered there, both to save money and to beget uniformity, though I did not expect the Army and Navy to concur in such a sensible solution...

...General Hull replied: "We are aware of the ambiguity but feel we must risk it...

...Congressmen and editorialists have been raising the cry that the code either has to be dropped or rewritten, the Pueblo incident having demonstrated its inadequacy...

...it marched deliberately in the opposite direction...

...On July 1, 1955, I was called by General John E. Hull, the vice chairman who actively chaired most of the proceedings, and four days later I appeared as the final witness...

...Each service, as we have already agreed, has its own peculiar training problem in line with the general principle, and I think we will be understood because we are already writing training guidance to insure that very point...

...The article reads, "I am bound to give only name, rank and service number...

...I said: "When I come to the words, 'I am bound to give only name, rank, service number and date of birth,' I find this ambiguous, though the next sentence helps clarify it...

...I did the actual writing...

...In the course of our going over this material, we got to what is now called Article V. On this point the committee had composed its views and resolved the language...

...The next sentence in the same article says: "I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability...

...Some of the ideas were roughly stated, and I discussed my doubts about them prior to leaving the committee room...

...My very special interest in the whole problem dates from Operation Little Switch (April 1953), the initial exchange of prisoners in the Korean War...

...The article literally quotes the Geneva Convention, and because the exact verb had to be used there was no way around the ambiguity...

...We were already aware, or rather we felt, that the ice was breaking and a truce was coming...

...MISSING THE MESSAGE One thing cannot be taken away from the Pueblo incident and all hands involved with it: There was consistency throughout in this spectacle of human error, replete with the half done or little understood...

...With the five admirals who made up the military court of inquiry sitting in silence just before he made his exit, he loosed his fire against the military code of conduct...

...It was written in 1955 specifically to give the pow this much freedom of action, and to cut away from the former demanding requirement that was both unworkable and contrary to nature...

...The whimsy in all this is that if the hearing proved anything conclusively, it was that Bucher and his men did not understand the code of conduct...

...The Pueblo experience, he said, proved the necessity for its revision...

...So while the services could hold to one principle, the details of how to apply it in training would differ from one to the other...

...My six colleagues all being social scientists, I was given sole responsibility for escape and evasion, which included resistance to interrogation...

...I had nothing to do with the form or substance subsequently...

...We have had nothing like it since the Bay of Pigs...

...At the end, Commander Lloyd Bucher fired one parting shot, so far as the record shows the only round he delivered in the year after his ship was first engaged...

...Their contents is best described as a set of ideas that the various members thought should be part of the code...

...rifleman, as an example, knew little or nothing that would help the enemy...

...In the committee's long report, a pamphlet titled POW, its main recommendation was that to insure standardization, responsibility for training under the code and for inspecting to see that the services were doing their part be placed in the office of the Secretary of Defense...

...We also knew that our ablest resistors in the Korean camps were fabulous talkers if not great liars...

...What it means it that he is compelled to give this much information...

...Far from limiting the American pow to name, rank, serial number, and age when under interrogation, the code frees him to resist by discussing almost anything with his captors, provided he does not betray the interests of the United States or its allies, or do anything to hurt his fellow prisoners...

...And no one said him nay...

...That the five admirals seemed to be equally ignorant of the code merely put them at one with the country...

...The schooling at Stead was extremely rigorous and realistic, and the doctrine as well as most of the method was as applicable to other services as to Air Force...

...But the heaviest default was at a higher level still...

...At the request of the late Secretary of the Air Force Donald A. Quarks, I inspected Stead Air Force Base north of Reno, Nevada, where Air Force resistance training was centered...

...During five days there I became convinced that Air Force had most of the answers...

...The Navy practically ignored the recommendations, and such training as it did might better have been left undone...

...All alike, they were playing Humpty-Dumpty, interpreting the code to mean exactly what they The Pueblo and the Code By S.L.A...

...and Major General Merritt A. Ed-son, USMC (Ret...

...My main problem with my colleagues was keeping their purple phrases out of the code...

...The code as now published is to the last word exactly as it came from our hands...

...For one thing, we are using the words of the Geneva Convention...