Word: puebloed
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With the capture of Pueblo, Kim went a long way toward achieving one of his goals. He also had possession of a U.S. spook ship packed with supersecret gear and if he did not have Lyndon Johnson for burning, he did have the hapless Commander Bucher. Nobody can be certain what happened to Bucher, but the Pyongyang regime was plainly making every effort to exploit him. It was a sad conclusion to Lloyd Bucher's first command...
There was some suspicion that Pyongyang might be planning to use Bucher's confession and interview as grounds for a trial of Pueblo's crew. "The criminals who encroach upon others' sovereignty and commit provocative acts must receive deserving punishment," said the party newspaper Nodong Sinmun. "These criminals must be punished by law." Warned State Department Spokesman Robert McCloskey: "The U.S. Government would consider any such moves by North Korea to be a deliberate aggravation of an already serious situation...
...nearly 15 years of an uneasy armistice-peace has yet to return formally to the ravaged peninsula-the two forces have glared at one another across the 2½-mile-deep DMZ, constantly exchanging insults, often bullets. It would take a small spark to ignite such tinder, and the Pueblo incident came very close to providing such a spark...
That it did not was no tribute to Washington's wisdom. What the piracy of Pueblo did rehearse for the nation -and its adversaries-was a dismaying litany of military procedures and political assumptions that proved in the crunch to be inadequate, unimaginative and unbelievably overconfident. It will probably take years to dissect and document all the slippages and oversights that have led the U.S. to the brink of a second front in Asia. It is already apparent that this was a casus belli that need never have arisen...
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...