Word: ferret
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...events in Viet Nam, talks between U.S. and North Korean negotiators on the fate of Pueblo and her 82 surviving crewmen moved at a glacial pace in Panmunjom last week. The U.S. had little choice but to pursue the painstaking diplomatic route that it has been following since the ferret ship was seized at sea three weeks ago. "I don't know any way of getting them out alive by military action," said a top-echelon State Department official. "You might get them out as corpses...
Blandly classified as an "environmental research" vessel, the U.S.S. Pueblo is actually one of more than 80 immensely sophisticated ELINT (for electronic intelligence) ships in the U.S. Navy. That ferret fleet is intended as a counterforce to Russia's 60-vessel ELINT armada, made up mostly of converted trawlers and hydrographic craft, all bristling with antennas and sensitive snooping gear. Just as the Pueblo and her kin prowl the international waters off China, North Korea and the Soviet Union, Russian trawlers are stationed off California, South Carolina, Florida's Cape Kennedy, Guam and Alaska. A Soviet spy ship...
Vietnamese units remain in the country, stretched from the outskirts of Hue and Danang in the north, southward to Quang Ngai, Binh Dinh and Phu Yen provinces, and northwest of Saigon in Hau Nghia and Tay Ninh provinces. To ferret them out, says Westmoreland, will take twice the time and twice the cost in casualties it would have taken to stop them at the frontier...
Need spiritual help in stealing a woman's garter? Try a prayerful summons to the angel Baltazard, who, according to the Jewish cabala, has a special gift for such pranks. In case he fails, other spirits might help-perhaps Vassago, an angel with unique ability to ferret out a lady's secrets...
Other over-interpreters include the listeners who-like literary critics dissecting a sonnet-ferret out indirect references in Beatle lyrics and persist in catching a whiff of drugs in such innocuous songs as Yellow Submarine. And there is still the hardy minority that insists on viewing the Beatles as the great put-on of the century...