The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy FROM THE PUBLISHER
"The Pueblo was an aging cargo ship poorly refurbished as a signals intelligence collector for the top secret Operation Clickbeetle. It was sent off with a first-time captain, an inexperienced crew, and no backup, and was captured well before the completion of its first mission. Ignored for a quarter of a century, the Pueblo Incident has been the subject of much polemic but no scholarly scrutiny. Mitchell Lerner now examines for the first time the details of this crisis and uses the incident as a window through which to better understand the limitations of American foreign policy during the Cold War." Drawing on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents from President Lyndon Johnson's administration, along with dozens of interviews with those involved, Lerner provides the most complete and accurate account of the Pueblo incident to date.
SYNOPSIS
"Remember, you are not going out there to start a war," Rear Admiral Frank Johnson reminded Commander Pete Bucher just prior to the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. Pueblo. And yet a war—one that might have gone nuclear—was what nearly happened when the Pueblo was attacked and captured by North Korean gunships in January 1968. Diplomacy prevailed in the end, but not without great cost to the lives of the imprisoned crew and to a nation already mired in an unwinnable war in Vietnam.
The Pueblo was an aging cargo ship poorly refurbished as a signals intelligence collector for the top-secret Operation Clickbeetle. It was sent off with a first-time captain, an inexperienced crew, and no back-up, and was captured well before the completion of its first mission.
Drawing on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents from President Lyndon Johnson's administration, along with dozens of interviews with those involved, Mitchell Lerner provides the most complete and accurate account of the Pueblo incident yet available. He weaves on a grand scale a dramatic story of international relations, presidential politics, covert intelligence, capture on the high seas, and secret negotiations. At the same time, he highlights the personal struggles of the Pueblo's crew—through capture, imprisonment, indoctrination, torture, and release—and the still smoldering controversy over Commander Bucher's actions. In fact, Bucher emerges here for the first time as the truly steadfast hero his men have always considered him to be.
More than an account of misadventure, The Pueblo Incident is an indictment of America's Cold War mentality. Lerner argues that had U.S. policymakers regarded the North Koreans as people with a national agenda, rather than as serving a global Communist conspiracy, they might have avoided the crisis or resolved it more effectively. He also addresses such unanswered questions as what the Pueblo's mission exactly was, why the ship had no military support, and how damaging the intelligence loss was to national security.
With North Korea still seen as a rogue state by some policymakers, The Pueblo Incident provides key insights into the domestic imperatives behind that country's foreign relations. It astutely assesses the place of gunboat diplomacy in the modern world and is vital for understanding American foreign policy failures in the Cold War.
This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The January 1968 North Korean seizure of the intelligence-collecting ship USS Pueblo came close to sparking a second Korean War. Lerner, an assistant professor of history, synthesizes newly available documents and a large number of participant interviews to attribute the crisis to the Johnson administration's unsophisticated interpretation of contemporary international relations as bipolar global rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Sending the Pueblo to monitor electronic communications and naval activity off North Korea's coast was regarded as a routine mission in the general context of the Cold War. The ship, its crew and captain were poorly prepared for any unexpected occurrences, able neither to resist nor escape the North Korean gunboats. Johnson and his advisers processed the seizure as having been orchestrated by the Soviet Union. U.S. responses focused on Moscow and on international agencies like the Red Cross and the World Court. Lerner, however, offers extensive documentary evidence that the U.S.S.R. was not involved in the Pueblo's seizure. Instead, he makes a convincing case that North Korea acted on its own and for domestic reasons. Kim II Sung, according to Lerner, was increasingly committed to structuring North Korea around the ideological principle of juche, or "self-identity." Juche required the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea to act in all areas without regard for external influence. Even in its early stages, attempts to apply the concept had generated economic shortages and political dissent sufficient to impel Kim to assert "self-identity" in another way: seizing a ship whose presence, even in international waters, was in any case provocative. American efforts to resolve the crisis, pointed as they were in the wrong direction, only exacerbated it. In the absence of North Korean documents, Lerner's argument cannot be regarded as definitively proven, but expect it to get serious (if quiet) play among historians and policy makers. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
Lerner has rescued from hazy memories what seemed to be at the time an extremely dangerous incident. In January 1968, the U.S.S. Pueblo, a rickety spy ship gathering signals intelligence, was obliged to surrender in North Korean waters after facing gunfire from warships that left one dead and four wounded. By the end of the year, the crew was returned home — but not the ship. This lively account, backed by extensive research, demonstrates the multiple flaws in the mission's planning that put the crew in such a parlous position. Even though blame was eventually targeted at Commander Pete Bucher, the author points out, the Navy was really at fault. Lerner also describes the impact of Cold War assumptions on the management of the crisis, particularly in the failure to appreciate the singularity of North Korea. But he also credits Lyndon Johnson with the patient diplomacy that brought about the eventual resolution.
Library Journal
The title of this study by Lerner (history, Ohio State Univ.) refers to the capture of the intelligence gathering ship, the U.S.S. Pueblo, by the North Koreans in January 1968. The Pueblo was nothing more than a made-over cargo vessel with the addition of an electronic shack for eavesdropping. It was prone to steering loss and engine failure, and its crew and captain were new and untrained. Unarmed except for two machine guns and some small arms, the ship was in no condition to attempt an intelligence mission off the North Korean coast. Unfortunately for the captain and crew, that is exactly where they were captured. Lerner does an excellent job of detailing the crew's torture and imprisonment for almost a year. He draws on interviews with those involved, as well as recently released documents relating to the Johnson administration, to show how badly the administration handled foreign policy challenges during the 1960s. This excellent read sheds light on the incident, which is still debated in some circles today. Recommended for both public and academic libraries. Mark Ellis, Albany State Univ. Lib., GA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A detailed history and analysis of the U.S.S. Pueblo's capture by North Korean gunships in January 1968 and the American government's chaotic attempts to recover its crew. President Bush's recent declaration that North Korea is a key member of an "axis of evil" establishes this study as both timely and compelling. Lerner (History/Ohio State Univ.) argues that the Johnson administration's view of North Korea as a mere satellite of the Soviet empire was a dramatic miscalculation. He clearly connects the design and outfitting of the Pueblo to an American-Soviet paradigm that tolerated electronic eavesdropping in international waters. That assumption, Lerner asserts, failed to account for North Korean leader Kim Il Sung's nationalistic determination to remain as independent as possible from both Soviet and Chinese domination. This serious shortsightedness in American policy resulted in a confrontation: the North Korean navy crippled the Pueblo with automatic-weapons fire, killing one sailor and taking Commander Lloyd Bucher and his crew prisoners. Lerner details how growing public pressure to open up a new Asian conflict over the release of the crew caused Johnson to waver between hawkish bluster and timid placating of the North Korean government. While the administration stumbled towards a resolution with negotiators, he argues, the American sailors endured more than 300 days of systematic torture and abuse during which their captors coerced them into confessing to spying and other crimes against the North Korean people. Upon his repatriation to the US, the Navy pinned the blame for the incident on Commander Bucher, transforming him, according to Lerner, into a symbol of American Cold Warblindness. Engrossing analysis of Vietnam-era diplomacy, naval history, and Cold War politics-embedded with fascinating parallels between the events of 1968 and today's crisis over terrorism. (21 photos, 1 map)
Home
