New Interpretations of the 1968 USS Pueblo Incident

By Intelligence Operative Jay Holmes*

Most traditional beliefs about North Korea’s motives for hijacking the USS Pueblo and attacking South Korea’s Blue House in 1968 were formed without the benefit of the vast quantities of East Bloc diplomatic correspondence that are now available for review. These recently available documents support new interpretations and challenge well-accepted views about the reasons behind the incident.

After the North Korean navy pirated the USS Pueblo from international waters, the crew were taken prisoner and kept in North Korea until December 23, 1968. During captivity, they suffered brutal torture in the hands of the North Koreans. (See Spy Ships – The Surprise Attack on the USS Pueblo)

Repatriation of the USS Pueblo Crew, image from US Navy

When considering the US response, it’s important to remember that in 1968, in addition to the US forces stationed in and near Korea, the US military maintained a costly, well-equipped military force with over 300,000 soldiers in Europe. It was also engaged in the very expensive Vietnam “non-war” with the ground fighting at its most intense, including the ferocious battle of Khe San and the Tet Offensive.

The US Navy Seventh Fleet’s first reaction to the attack on the USS Pueblo was to move warships closer to North Korea. Simultaneously, the Seventh Fleet staff planned for various responses ranging from a helicopter assault accompanied by carrier-based air support and fire support from destroyers and a cruiser, to plans for interdicting and capturing a North Korean freighter in retaliation for the illegal seizure of the Pueblo. Also during the first few weeks, more Pacific Fleet ships reinforced the Seventh Fleet, and the US Air Force moved more combat aircraft to South Korea and northern Japan.

The US Navy Pacific Command, the Pentagon, and the White House all agreed that any rescue attempt would likely result in the immediate murder of the USS Pueblo crew so no rescue was attempted. After the CIA and Naval Intelligence informed the Pentagon that the North Korean merchant fleet consisted of seven small, low value freighters, the idea of a retaliatory seizure lost its appeal.

The White House formed a committee that included such lofty personages as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Wheeler, CIA Director Richard Helms, and Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara to manage the crisis and formulate an effective response. The majority of the American public was furious, but the Committee had to take into account that neither President Johnson nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted a major escalation of the long-smoldering conflict in Korea. The committee reviewed a wide range of military responses from air strikes against North Korean Air Force bases to mining of North Korean harbors.

The Committee naturally gravitated toward plans that sought to damage North Korea’s already feeble economy with scenarios that did not involve major military strikes. However, after looking at the basic facts about the North Korean economy, the general consensus was that mining North Korean harbors would have little effect because the majority of North Korean trade was entering overland from the USSR and China. In general, economic targets in North Korea seemed less than spectacular because the economy there was in such a shambles. In 1968, doing economic damage to North Korea would have been a bit like rushing to punch someone before they could complete their own suicide. There just wasn’t going to be much satisfaction involved in it, and it wasn’t likely to impact the thinking, or chronic lack of thinking, by the North Korean government.

Some members of the US Congress felt that a strong response was needed and that the North Koreans should be threatened with a nuclear strike if they did not promptly return the USS Pueblo and her crew. Fortunately, President Johnson and the leaders in both Houses quickly got everyone in Congress to focus on their shared priority, the safe return of the remainder of the USS Pueblo crew.

The US attempted diplomatic contact via the Soviet Union, but at first the Soviets responded coldly. They were busy extracting everything they could from the intelligence windfall that the Pueblo’s secret coding equipment had provided them. The North Koreans themselves lacked the expertise to extract much value from what they had captured and they happily turned it over to the USSR.

On the surface it might appear that the Soviets were thrilled about North Korea’s hijacking of the USS Pueblo. In fact, they were not as happy as most Western observers assumed they were in 1968. The USSR, communist China, and the rest of the Communist Bloc did their best to maintain an appearance of solidarity to their own citizens and to the Western world, but divisions within the Bloc were far more severe than most Western analysts knew at the time.

Due to Kim Il Sung’s government’s inability to actually perform the usual basic functions of government, North Korea’s day-to-day survival depended on the charity of communist China and the USSR. Communist China was, itself, suffering from the bloody and economically disastrous consequences of Mao’s “cultural revolution,” but in 1967 it had managed to send $150,000,000 in military aid to North Korea in addition to food and other commodities.

The figure seemed small to Western observers, but expenses incurred in helping the North Vietnamese burdened China. Millions of people in China were facing starvation. From 1958 to 1961, approximately 28,000,000 people starved as a result of China’s misguided agricultural reforms. China’s agricultural output still had not substantially recovered from the severe self-inflicted damage so what might have seemed like modest aid to Western observers actually represented a significant sacrifice on the part of communist China.

The USSR delivered significantly more aid to North Korea via direct aid and one-sided trade agreements that benefited North Korea. On the surface, relations between North Korea and the USSR seemed warm in 1968, but below the surface, Moscow was growing tired of Kim. Many were regretting that the USSR had not select a better and more “manageable” leader for North Korea.

By the late 1950s, communist China was challenging the “Soviet” model for international communism and wanted to assume a leadership role over existing and potential communist states in Asia. As far as the USSR was concerned, the Chinese were only to be tolerated and flattered as fraternal brothers in communism for the sake of the greater communist good.

The Soviets believed they were the only ones qualified to manage “world communism,” and they expected other communist nations and communist movements to respect their position of supreme authority. When China made it clear that it was not only not under Soviet control but was, in fact, attempting to lead its own communist bloc, the rift between China and the USSR became a great chasm.

North Korean Dictator Kim Il Sung’s response to the Chinese/Soviet rift was to try to maximize aid from both communist China and the USSR by pretending to be squarely in both of their camps simultaneously. In retrospect, we now know that from the point of view of the USSR, Kim was seen as an aggravating and troublesome “friend” and a complete liability to the Soviet agenda. What Mao’s assessment of Kim was remains more difficult to determine, but it appears that communist China viewed him as a difficult puppet to manage.

Mural of Kim Il Sung, image by John Pavelka, wikimedia commons

Both the USSR and China wanted North Korea in their own camp, and both wanted Korea unified as a communist nation. But both the Soviets and the Chinese were beginning to wonder if the usual “fraternal” struggle in the Korean peninsula was worth the cost.

For Kim, the hijacking of the USS Pueblo likely had little to do with his view of the US or his relations with South Korea and the West. He likely had more interest in creating an illusion of legitimacy for himself as a great, or at least believable, communist leader and player in the world communist struggle. He had every reason to assume that either China or the USSR was running out of reasons to continue supporting North Korea. If North Korea did not seem to be in danger of attack from the West, then there was still less reason to continue to pump money into a hopelessly useless North Korean system.

In the great poker game of international communism, Kim only had one card to play, and that was the “I oppose the US and the West” card. Beyond that, he wasn’t in the game and could have easily been replaced at the table by a less ridiculous and less troublesome North Korean. While to outsiders the kidnap of the USS Pueblo appears to be lacking in rational motive and devoid of any positive potential results for North Korea, in existential terms, hijacking the Pueblo and holding her crew gave Kim Il Sung both a reason to be alive and a method by which to remain alive within the international communist community.

Kim never understood China’s ongoing economic crisis or the limits of Soviet military might. With the help of his trained parrots in generals’ uniforms, he convinced himself that if he could start another fight with South Korea and the US, China and the USSR would pour massive amounts of military and financial aid into North Korea. Kim likely started to believe some of his own propaganda along with that generated by the governments of other communist nations. He dreamed that the next Korean War would result in him ruling over a unified Korea, and he believed that his dream was reality.

While these twisted motives were difficult to see from outside of North Korea in 1968, the growing mountain of available declassified documents from the collapsed USSR and Eastern European Communist Bloc concerning both the Blue House attack and the Pueblo incident now indicate gross miscalculations on the part of Kim. They make it abundantly obvious that the USSR and East Bloc nations viewed North Korea’s hijacking of the USS Pueblo as inconvenient to their own foreign policy agendas.

When neither China nor the USSR increased military or financial aid to North Korea in response to Kim’s urgent “call to arms,” Kim at some point must have realized that he miscalculated. After months of increasingly blunt diplomatic pressure from his fraternal communist pals, he agreed to release the crew of the USS Pueblo in exchange for a statement from the US saying it was spying on North Korea promising to not spy on them any more.

The US was no longer greatly concerned with the ship itself beyond its propaganda value because the Soviets had long since extracted all of the information that they could from the equipment and documents. Once the crew returned on December 23, 1968, the US considered the crisis to be over. As soon as the crew was safely out of North Korea, the US repudiated the statement.

The US Navy quickly convened a board of inquiry into the USS Pueblo incident. Although Captain Bucher and his entire crew had obeyed all orders and done their best to follow all prescribed procedures, the Board strangely recommended that Captain Bucher and the Pueblo’s Security Operations Group Commander Lt. Steve Harris face Courts Marshall. Wisely, Navy Secretary John Chafee rejected the Board’s recommendation with the excuse that they had “already suffered enough.”

While that was certainly true, Chafee was perhaps more motivated by the fact that a Court Marshall would have exposed the poor planning by the Pentagon and the NSA, along with the unworkable, indefinite, and divided command structure to which the USS Pueblo and all NSA-controlled US Navy ships reported. The fact that the Pueblo was allowed to operate 13 miles from the coast of North Korea in 1968 without proper protection from possible North Korean attack indicates an unworkable chain of command. Ships under clear Seventh Fleet control would not have been forced into in a similar situation.

During preparation for her mission, the USS Pueblo reported to the US Navy, but it received mission directives from the NSA and the White House via the Join Chiefs of Staff as well as by other informal and undefined channels of command. Lots of folks with no naval training were apparently in charge of directing the Pueblo, but no one in those multiple command chains seemed to be responsible for her safety or well being. This was a formula for disaster.

The NSA documents concerning the USS Pueblo are informative and paint a picture of an inadequate understanding of naval operations on the part of the NSA, but they are redacted and only a small portion of the relevant records have thus far been released.

The issues of chain of command might have never been cleared up, but signals intelligence operations were evolving quickly and the need for surface ship missions close to the shores of hostile nations was rapidly declining. Newer technologies in satellites and spy planes, along with the increasing capabilities of nuclear submarines, were revolutionizing signals intelligence gathering operations. Interestingly, the Air Force would soon face similar issues of divided command concerning their ever-more-sophisticated reconnaissance and signals intelligence planes, but those are stories for another day.

USS Pueblo, image from US Navy

North Korea has never returned the USS Pueblo to the US so the vessel has never been decommissioned. It now serves as a tourist attraction in North Korea. It also remains one of many reasons why the US and the West have no trust or respect for the government of the North Korean Kim Dynasty.

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*‘Jay Holmes’, is an intelligence veteran of the Cold War and remains an anonymous member of the intelligence community. His writing partner, Piper Bayard, is the public face of their partnership.

You may contact them in blog comments, on Twitter at@piperbayard, on Facebook at Piper Bayard, or by email at piperbayard@yahoo.com. 

© 2012 Jay Holmes. All content on this page is protected by copyright. If you would like to use any part of this, please contact us at the above links to request permission.

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