If you should find yourself in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, you might be surprised to discover a U.S. naval vessel moored on the Pothong River near the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum. It is the USS Pueblo, a modest craft launched in World War II, recommissioned by the Navy in 1966 as a spy ship, and resting in Pyongyang for the past half-century.
After the USS Constitution of Revolutionary War fame, the Pueblo is the oldest commissioned ship in the Navy. And how and why it’s in North Korea is an interesting story. Interesting, that is, partly for the reasons it’s in Pyongyang, and partly for the fact that the 50th anniversary of its seizure by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has passed by so quietly.
From the American perspective, the Pueblo incident, as it quickly came to be called, occurred at the convergence of a number of delicate episodes. The Pueblo, on a routine mission off the North Korean coast monitoring radio transmissions, was well outside that country’s territorial waters when, on January 23, 1968, it was attacked and seized by North Korean sea and air forces.
The Pueblo was ill-equipped to resist, and even at the height of the Vietnam war in the near neighborhood, American forces in the western Pacific were unprepared to respond to what amounted to an act of piracy more redolent of the Barbary Wars than the mid-20th century. In the 50 years since, there has been much discussion of why the Pueblo came to be as vulnerable as it was; and at the time, there was heated debate about the fact that its skipper, Cdr. Lloyd Bucher, chose to cut his losses, give up the ship, and be taken into North Korean captivity along with his 82-man crew. (One seaman had been killed in an air attack.)
In retrospect, Bucher’s decision was the right one, even a wise one, and understandable: While North Korea was, and remains, officially at war with the United States—and by extension, with the United Nations, under whose auspices the freedom and independence of South Korea are guaranteed—there was a 15-year-old armistice in the conflict that, 65 years later, remains in place. The seizure of the Pueblo did not require a mass sacrifice.
The larger question is why the North Koreans chose to provoke the United States. And while the North Korean tyrant of the time, Kim Il-sung, was the grandfather of its current strongman Kim Jong-un, the memory of Kim Il-sung’s sudden, dramatic gesture might offer some guidance about the instincts of the grandson.
For just a few days before the Pueblo seizure, there had been an audacious—and very nearly successful—attack in Seoul by North Korean commandos aimed at the ceremonial residence of the South Korean president, Park Chung-hee. As it happened, most of the North Koreans were killed or captured in the vicinity of the Blue House, and there were dozens of South Korean casualties, civilian and military, as well as four Americans killed at the DMZ in pursuit of fleeing commandos. But as the Duke of Wellington said of the Battle of Waterloo, by any measure the raid had been a damned close-run thing, and South Korea’s Park Chung-hee, an imperious ex-general, was furious with Washington while North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung was clearly feeling his oats.
Moreover, from the American standpoint, the Blue House raid could not have come at a less opportune moment. In South Vietnam, the climactic Marine battle to defend Khe Sanh along the Laotian border—with its uncomfortable echoes of the French catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu in 1954—began on the very day of the raid; and just a week after the Pueblo seizure, the Tet offensive commenced with a North Vietnamese assault on the old imperial capital of Hue.
As we have since been instructed, the Tet offensive was a tactical victory for American forces but a strategic defeat, inasmuch as it adversely affected public opinion—not as much as mythology would have it but sufficiently to prompt Lyndon Johnson, two months hence, to withdraw from the 1968 presidential campaign and initiate peace talks with Hanoi.
Commander Bucher and his crew had the bad luck not only to find themselves within Kim Il-sung’s grasp but to constitute an embarrassment—certainly a predicament—for the United States. Short of death, the officers and men of the Pueblo were subject to the worst North Korea could inflict—petty mistreatment and physical abuse, torture, public humiliation, coerced confessions—while Washington was dangerously distracted. Moreover, in the midst of a turning-point in the Vietnam war, it is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the Pueblo crew was not a dominant concern.
Indeed, it is difficult at this juncture to recall the extent to which antiwar sentiment in those days affected public attitudes toward the armed forces—and despite the occasional “Remember the Pueblo” bumper sticker and ritual mention in news reports and official statements, the crew essentially evaporated from national consciousness for the next 11 months.
When, in December 1968, North Korea concluded that it had gained all it could from high-seas piracy and hostage-keeping, and released the Pueblo crew, a naval court of inquiry recommended court-martial charges against Bucher and one other officer, for dereliction of duty. But in January 1969, Richard Nixon had taken office as president and his Navy secretary, John Chafee, overruled the court of inquiry, declaring that Bucher—whose behavior in captivity seems to have been exemplary—and his crew had “suffered enough.”
A half-century later, the Pueblo incident remains largely an artifact of its troublesome times, a source of discourse and discord among American military buffs, and a footnote to the Vietnam era. But as the Pueblo itself lies anchored on public display in Pyongyang, it clearly means something else to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. What does Kim Jong-un—armed with weaponry beyond the gunboats and fighter planes that subdued the Pueblo—think of his grandfather’s daring and the relative costs of provoking America?
