Pueblo plea
Ex-NoKo POW wants Trump to reclaim ’68 ship
TOM Massie has a simple request for President Trump ahead of the scheduled June 12 summit with North Korean strongman Kim Jung-un: Bring back the USS Pueblo.
Massie was a 19-year-old sailor in January 1968, one of 83 crew members aboard the 117-foot Pueblo as it sailed in international waters in the Sea of Japan — 15.8 miles off the North Korean coast — when gunships suddenly approached and MiG jets screeched overhead.
Quickly, the Pueblo, an“ocean ographic research vessel ,” aka spy ship, armed only with two 50-caliber machine guns, was taking fire. It was the height of the Cold War, just 15 years after the US conflict in Korea.
For two hours, incredibly outgunned, it withstood the attack — even radioing for help more than once.
Meanwhile, below deck, sailors scurried about burning sensitive papers they didn’t want to fall into the hands of North Korea.
They weren’t finished with the task when the ship’s commander, Capt. Lloyd “Pete” Bucher, knew he had no chance and surrendered. The crew was captured.
Over the next 11 months, the sailors were held captive. Massie, like many others, was severely tortured, both physically and mentally. They were released on Dec. 23.
North Korea, however, kept the Pueblo. It is docked on the Taedong River in the capital of Pyongyang, and the government uses it as a war museum for propaganda purposes. Now, 50 years later, it remains the only commissioned ship in the US Navy to be held by a foreign country.
“Yes, I would like to see it returned because it is a part of our history,” Massie told The Post in an exclusive interview this week. He says that the upcoming summit could provide the best opportunity ever to get the ship back.
MASSIE, 70, lives in western Illinois and still carries some of the psychological scars from his months of brutal torture.
North Korean guards would tie his hands behind his back and kick him endlessly in the groin and ankles — then smash his face with their fists, the butts of their rifles or even two-by-fours.
He remembers getting hit so hard one time that he saw a bright light and then blacked out. The other sailors, too, were tortured.
Time and again, the guards demanded that Massie and the others confess to being spies. They refused. So the tor- ture continued. He got kicked in the groin so hard and so often that he urinated blood. He lost 51 pounds.
Once, the guards took Capt. Bucher away from the group for an especially vicious round of torture — returning him to the room with one eye seemingly plucked out and gray matter oozing down his cheek, Massie recalls, saying, “There was a bone sticking out of his arm.” The guards demanded then that Bucher sign a confession that he was spying. He refused.
So they put a gun to his head and said they were going to kill him — and started counting down, 3 . . .2 . . .
“Pete was saying, ‘I love you, Rose,’ ‘I love you Rose,’ ” about his wife back home, as they went from 3 to 2 to 1 and then pulled the trigger. The chamber was empty,” Massie recounted.
One guard then asked another to fetch the youngest prisoner, saying that the man would be summarily executed.
It was only then that Bucher, in obvious excruciating pain, agreed to sign a confession, Massie said. That opened the door for the sailors’ eventual release.
Amid the torture, the sailors didn’t lose hope — or their sense of humor. In a series of well-publicized propaganda photos the men were forced to take, the sailors, posing nicely for the camera, subtly flipped the soldiers the bird. When the gentle jab made news and filtered back to North Korea, the men made up a story — telling the guards that it was a Hawaiian good-luck sign.
DANIEL Gilbert is a Chicago-area lawyer, now retired, who in 2006 got a phone call from Massie asking him to take the Pueblo torture case.
“It was a billion-to-1 shot,” Gilbert said in a recent interview.
The lawyer was a partner in a very small firm and had just sued Iran over the 1985 TWA Flight 847 hijacking — winning a $309 million judgment in federal court for his clients, several military personnel aboard the plane.
For the public, the case is memorable because of the murder of Navy diver Robert Stethem, whose badly beaten and mortally wounded body was thrown from the Boeing 727 onto the tarmac at the airport in Beirut.
The horrible scene of Stethem’s body on the ground was on every news broadcast in the United States.
Legally, the case was important because Gilbert was able to win, for the first time, PTSD damages for military personnel. That created a precedent for the Pueblo victims and all other such victims to follow.
It was a long and tiresome case and, quite frankly, Gilbert was worn out.
“So I turned him down.” Gilbert said. Twice.
But the third time was the charm. Massie wouldn’t give up and Gilbert finally agreed to take the case.
The ex-sailor reached out to every former crew member to see if they wanted to join his fight for justice. Only three said yes — the rest likely believed the chances of collecting anything from North Korea were beyond fanciful, Gilbert said.
So Massie, Dunnie “Friar” Tuck, Donald McClarren and Rose Bucher, the widow of the deceased commander of the Pueblo, who died in 2004, set sail on the longshot legal voyage.
The suit, filed on April 24, 2006, asked for $325 million.
After two long years of legal battles, Judge Henry Kennedy ruled in December 2008 that the four were entitled to $16.75 million apiece, or $67 million.
But how to collect? North Korea didn’t exactly have $67 million in assets in the US that Gilbert could claim.
Undaunted, the lawyer pressed on, looking under every legal rock and couch cushion.
“We were just about to give up when we learned that roughly $2 billion in Iranian assets were being unfrozen,” Gilbert said. Hoping to find a link between North Korea and Iran, the lawyer brought in lawyers from Chicago’s Winston & Strawn who had experience snagging assets from bankrupt nations.
Declassified government documents showed a link between the two nations. “There was a lot of arms trading and technology trading going on between the countries,” Gilbert said.
When Congress in 2015 passed the US Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Act and established a $1 billion-plus fund to compensate victims like Massie, a window opened.
Weeks later, Kenneth Feinberg, who rose to prominence when he was put in charge of distributing compensation for victims of 9/11, was named the special master of the USVSST fund.
Gilbert filed hundreds of pages of medical and legal records with Feinberg.
As it turned out, he really needed only the 2008 certified judgment against North Korea. In March 2017, finally — a decade after the lawyer filed the case and 49 years after Massie and the crew were let free of their hellhole — justice was served.
Massie was awarded $1.9 million and the other three plaintiffs got similar amounts.
“Feinberg was legally brilliant and fair in his award to my clients based on the facts and the justice-enabling statues and guidelines,” Gilbert said.
TODAY, Massie, who would remind you of the actor Wilford Brimley, lives in a modest three-bedroom ranch house in the country, and despite a few recent physical setbacks — he’s had an aortic valve replaced — he is doing well.
The nightmares of his torture come a lot less frequently now and, most importantly, he’s learned how to forgive.
In April, he was baptized into the Christian faith and is a member of an Evangelical Bible Church.
“I no longer hold any grudges against North Korea,” Massie said. “I have learned to have faith and forgiveness. I feel so much better.”
While Massie certainly wants the Pueblo returned to the US, he doesn’t want any Trump effort to retrieve the ship to interfere with the president’s more important mission — to denuclearize North Korea.
“I don’t want anything to get in the way of bringing peace and prosperity to the people of North Korea,” Massie said. “It is not nice over there.”
Massie is a private man and asked that the name of his town not be mentioned. The $1.9 million reward from North Korea, via Iran, would seem to close the book on the veteran’s 50-year ordeal and bring happy closure to a proud man.
“The money is nice, to inflict a little pain on the government of North Korea, but I didn’t do it for the money,” Massie said. “I did it for Pete,” the Pueblo commander.
“I didn’t want to get up to St. Peter’s gate and face him without him knowing I did my best to make him proud.”