"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. 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. 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
very intimate 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.
More than an account of misadventure, The Pueblo Incident is an
indictment of Cold War mentality that shows how the premises
underlying the Pueblo's risky mission and the ensuing efforts to
win the release of her crew were seriously flawed. Lerner argues
that had U.S. policymakers regarded the North Koreans as people
with a national agenda rather than one 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.
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