Asian Trips - The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy (Modern War Studies)

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.

He begnis, early on, to lament the failures of the "KW-7 Transmitter". True enough...the KW-7 was a dog, but it was a dog of an encryption system, not a transmitter. One would indeed be hard pressed to raise a shore station on a KW-7! The '7 encrypyed radio teletype signals which only then were fed to a transmitter...on Pueblo, a AN/URT-32, manufactured by Collins Radio in Texas. He later refers to a crew member as a "Seaman First Class"....a rate which was disestablished in the late 1940's. You can be a seaman recruit, seaman apprentice or a seaman, but no seaman first class sailed on Pueblo, or any ship in the Vietnam era. There are many other errors, both describing procedure and policy, which are cause for disappointment.

And here's the rub. I'd be willing to give any author the benefit of the doubt on areas I've never experienced personally...say, the policy making, geopolitical or even historical factors surrounding Pueblo's capture. (I was working at Navcomsta Guam that afternoon, by the way, so my interest is more than casual). But, if he gets basic things, which I DO understand, wrong, how could I believe the other arguments he makes? Too bad. Lots of brave guys suffered when Pueblo was taken....and the skipper, XO and NavSecGru guys have all written pretty darn good books about the event...perhaps this "historian and college professor" might do well to go back and check out the primary source data before talking about things about which he obviously knows little.

Keven Memori, RMCM USN (retired)

As someone who has lived and traveled to Korea many times, I am amazed at how ignorant Americans are about that country. In 1950 two regimes went to war to determine which one of them would be the sole government of the entire nation. The Korean War was a civil war that settled nothing. To this day, both capitals claim to be the only government of Korea, want unification on their terms, and are still willing to use force to reach their goals. Lerner shows that policy makers in the 1960s were ignorant of these basic facts and looked at Korea from the perspective of the American-Soviet confrontation that was the Cold War. Simply put, Americans looked at North Korea as a Soviet puppet rather than as a free agent that might take actions without telling their "friends" in Moscow.

Lerner gives the reader an even-handed account of the various players that influenced the course of events. He gives President Lyndon Johnson good marks for handling a difficult crisis in which he had a weak hand and the North Koreans held all the aces. He explains the North Korean perspective without offering apologies for the nasty fellows that govern the northern half of the peninsula. He also does justice to the crew of the Pueblo, recounting the beatings and torture they endured at the tender hands of their hands.

Many people in the U.S. Navy will not like this book. The Pueblo was sent out on a fool's errand. The Navy provided no escorts or air cover to protect this ship. The admirals expected that as long as the ship stayed in international waters, the North Koreans would respect the unwritten rules of the Cold War that allowed the Soviets to send "fishing boats" to sail off the coast of Florida and Virginia. The only problem was that the North Koreans were not the Soviets. In the two years before the Pueblo sailed, North Korea was waging an undeclared border war with the South, attacking and killing American and South Korean soldiers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff considered Korea a war zone and were giving out hero medals for combat engagements with the enemy. The Navy apparently thought nothing of this little war and sent the Pueblo out without any protection. In a covering exercise, the Navy tried to court martial the captain of the ship to cover up the fact that the service had failed to provide any protection or even any means to destroy all the sensitive material on board. Lerner stays balanced as he covers this disgraceful period and refuses to blast the high command of the Navy for its shameful treatment of the crew. Still, there is no hiding who the heroes are in this story. Read this book; it is a good story; it is an important story.

The book really has 3 parts. In the first section, Lerner looks at the background of this intelligence program (operation clickbeetle), the history of the program, the specific preparation of this ship and mission, the background of the men who operated the ship, and the situation in Korea. Then, in the next part, he looks at the mission itself, focusing mostly on the events the day that North Korea captured the Pueblo on the high seas, and what that meant for the US and the Cold War. Finally, he looks at the way the Lyndon Johnson administration decided to turn to diplomacy rather than a military response, and how that developed over a year of negotiations, until the men were finally released just before Christmas in a somewhat bizarre solution in which the US signed an apology letter that they had already publicly denounced. The ship, shockingly, still is in North Korea, serving as a tourist attraction.

This is really a good book. First of all, Lerner writes beautifully. This book reads so smoothly, and the story is so intense, that you almost can't put it down. His research is also very impressive. It looks like he has been to every archive, and talked to every person, related to the event. And he looks at every aspect of the incident. There is a look at the military side of the story, a lot about the diplomacy, a chapter about the public reaction in the US, details about the treatment of the men in captivity (one year in North Korean prisons--just brutal stuff), even a discussion of the intelligence loss involved here.

There are a few things that I liked particularly. He brings North Korea into the picture, showing how they were not simply taking orders from the Soviets but were a nation struggling with their own problems, and in order to distract the people from his failed communist leadership, Kim Il Sung tried to show them how tough he was by going after America. Lerner also shows how Americans everywhere: in the government, in the military, in the general population, in congress, saw this as part of the cold war, and refused to recognize that North Korea mattered. So I was shocked to see how Johnson immediately tried to solve the problem by going to the USSR, and the UN and China, but not to North Korea. He also does a good job showing how the Navy let the men down, and then tried to scapegoat the officers by blaming them for not going down with the ship, when Lerner shows that the Navy had let the men down on so many support levels. For example, the condition of the ship was horrible, it didn't even have a reliable steering system or a good self-destruct system or a working communication system, the Pueblo was slow and unstable, had bad navigation equipment, and almost no guns. Pre-mission trials showed this to everyone in the Navy, but still, they ignored the commander's requests to fix anything. Finally, as a former soldier, I was really impressed by his discussion of the crew. He shows how the Navy let them down by not giving them the right support, training, and information. He also shows how they hung together in North Korea, despite some pretty rough times.

There are a few problems I should mention. Some maps would have been helpful. The military details were fine for me, but people without a military background might find some of it tough reading. And I did wonder if Lerner could have told us more about the views of the common soldier who was wondering if we were going to go to war over this, especially the grunts in Vietnam. Still, this is overall a really, really, good book. It shows how the US during the Cold War sometimes overlooked the complexity of the world, and just looked for easy answers that saw everything as part of a Soviet conspiracy. I would recommend it highly to anyone.

Prof. Lerner has made some useful contributions to our understanding of the Pueblo incident. In addition, he has proven to be both a careful researcher and presents a most convincing case that Pueblo was ill suited for both the open sea and for a hazardous mission in hostile waters.

The central thesis of this work, however, is badly flawed. Lerner argues that the Pueblo's loss can be attributed to US myopia during the Cold War, a vision that saw a Soviet conspiracy behind the action of every communist nation. "In designing the Pueblo's mission," Lerner writes, "preparing the ship for launch, and attempting to resolve the crisis, American policy makers consistently failed to treat the North Koreans as North Koreans, instead viewing them as one cog in a greater communist conspiracy that consisted or virtually interchangeable parts . . . . they clung to this comfortable worldview that reduced complex events to simplistic shades of black and white and saw everything as a zero-sum contest for world domination."

As such, Lerner argues that the loss of the ship and the imprisonment of the crew represented a foreign policy failure.

Unfortunately, Lerner has made a jumble of grand strategy, policy, operations, strategy and tactics. American grand strategy during the Cold War era, and arguably a successful strategy, was one of Containment. Regardless of the American perceptions of the Soviet Union that shaped the strategy, its implementation resulted in the adoption of several foreign policies. One of those pollicies was to collect foreign intelligence information on the Soviet Union, the Soviet Bloc and on communist nations. This policy was made operational with the use of intelligence collection aircraft and ships.

One strategy for the operation was to outfit nondescript ships for signals intelligence (SIGINT) missions. The Pueblo, its SIGINT refit, and mission, was simply the tactical implementation of that strategy.

Pueblo's loss was attributable to flawed risk assessments of the mission and a now classic case of an intelligence warning failure. In short, Pueblo was lost -- not because of a massive failure of US foreign policy -- but because of tactical errors made in attempting to implement a sound strategy.

There are other shortcomings in this book, too. Lerner's discussion and assessment of the loss of Pueblo's intelligence gear and publications is limited to five paragraphs. He fails to probe and examine the severity and consequences of the loss in the detail really required or offer any new assessments. The chapter devoted to an terribly out-of-place discussion of American culture in the 1960s - replete with its meandering references to the Beatles, Broadway plays, and Star Trek episodes - should have been excised to make room for an insightful analysis of the severity of the intelligence losses from the incident.