The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy [Hardcover]

He begnis, early on, to lament the failures of the "KW-7 Transmitter". True enough...the KW-7 was a dog, but it was a dog of an encryption system, not a transmitter. One would indeed be hard pressed to raise a shore station on a KW-7! The '7 encrypyed radio teletype signals which only then were fed to a transmitter...on Pueblo, a AN/URT-32, manufactured by Collins Radio in Texas. He later refers to a crew member as a "Seaman First Class"....a rate which was disestablished in the late 1940's. You can be a seaman recruit, seaman apprentice or a seaman, but no seaman first class sailed on Pueblo, or any ship in the Vietnam era. There are many other errors, both describing procedure and policy, which are cause for disappointment.

And here's the rub. I'd be willing to give any author the benefit of the doubt on areas I've never experienced personally...say, the policy making, geopolitical or even historical factors surrounding Pueblo's capture. (I was working at Navcomsta Guam that afternoon, by the way, so my interest is more than casual). But, if he gets basic things, which I DO understand, wrong, how could I believe the other arguments he makes? Too bad. Lots of brave guys suffered when Pueblo was taken....and the skipper, XO and NavSecGru guys have all written pretty darn good books about the event...perhaps this "historian and college professor" might do well to go back and check out the primary source data before talking about things about which he obviously knows little.

Keven Memori, RMCM USN (retired)

Prof. Lerner has made some useful contributions to our understanding of the Pueblo incident. In addition, he has proven to be both a careful researcher and presents a most convincing case that Pueblo was ill suited for both the open sea and for a hazardous mission in hostile waters.

The central thesis of this work, however, is badly flawed. Lerner argues that the Pueblo's loss can be attributed to US myopia during the Cold War, a vision that saw a Soviet conspiracy behind the action of every communist nation. "In designing the Pueblo's mission," Lerner writes, "preparing the ship for launch, and attempting to resolve the crisis, American policy makers consistently failed to treat the North Koreans as North Koreans, instead viewing them as one cog in a greater communist conspiracy that consisted or virtually interchangeable parts . . . . they clung to this comfortable worldview that reduced complex events to simplistic shades of black and white and saw everything as a zero-sum contest for world domination."

As such, Lerner argues that the loss of the ship and the imprisonment of the crew represented a foreign policy failure.

Unfortunately, Lerner has made a jumble of grand strategy, policy, operations, strategy and tactics. American grand strategy during the Cold War era, and arguably a successful strategy, was one of Containment. Regardless of the American perceptions of the Soviet Union that shaped the strategy, its implementation resulted in the adoption of several foreign policies. One of those pollicies was to collect foreign intelligence information on the Soviet Union, the Soviet Bloc and on communist nations. This policy was made operational with the use of intelligence collection aircraft and ships.

One strategy for the operation was to outfit nondescript ships for signals intelligence (SIGINT) missions. The Pueblo, its SIGINT refit, and mission, was simply the tactical implementation of that strategy.

Pueblo's loss was attributable to flawed risk assessments of the mission and a now classic case of an intelligence warning failure. In short, Pueblo was lost -- not because of a massive failure of US foreign policy -- but because of tactical errors made in attempting to implement a sound strategy.

There are other shortcomings in this book, too. Lerner's discussion and assessment of the loss of Pueblo's intelligence gear and publications is limited to five paragraphs. He fails to probe and examine the severity and consequences of the loss in the detail really required or offer any new assessments. The chapter devoted to an terribly out-of-place discussion of American culture in the 1960s - replete with its meandering references to the Beatles, Broadway plays, and Star Trek episodes - should have been excised to make room for an insightful analysis of the severity of the intelligence losses from the incident.

Instead, Professor Lerner focuses on the "failure of American policy" and the notion that the "Cold War mentality directing (United States) policy decisions" caused the United States to incorrectly focus on the Pueblo seizure as part of the international communist conspiracy. Professor Lerner assets, unconvincingly in my opinion, that North Korea's attack on the Pueblo was motivated solely by an indigenous ideological concept called "juche", an extreme form of "self-reliance" which Lerner says North Korea espoused from 1955 onward.

In other words, the attack on the Pueblo was just North Korea's way of asking to be left alone so they could build a peoples' paradise based on "having an attitude of a master toward the revolution and construction of one's own country"(??). Professor Lerner further asserts that despite the Pueblo attack occurring just eight days before the launch of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, any notion that North Korea ever participated in a concerted effort to support North Vietnam's imposition of totalitarian socialism on South Vietnam was just the result of a tendency by the United States' military to see pro-North Vietnamese adversaries behind every tree. "Other evidence (none of which Professor Lerner specifically cites) suggests a lack of cooperation between (North Korea) and Vietnam." Also, Professor Lerner argues that the Russians certainly had no involvement because a former KGB officer told him so in an interview (!) and "Soviet complicity might also have threatened ... superpower rapprochement" that was allegedly occurring. Finally, he says North Koreans would never act in concert with other totalitarian socialist regimes because such an action might backfire and result in "strengthening the position of American 'hawks'".

The arguments and theories in The Pueblo Incident - A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy are unconvincing.

First, Korea practiced "juche" for hundreds of years as evidenced by the 19th Century characterization of Korea as the "Hermit Kingdom" for its tendency to attack foreign ships that entered its harbors as well as execute shipwrecked sailors who washed ashore. So what? South Korean society evolved from their isolationist tradition, and even socialist states like Albania and Romania practiced forms of "juche" from the 1950s through 1990s without attacking, everyone who ventured near their borders. "Juche" doesn't explain the North Korean need to attack and murder 31 men on a US Navy plane more than 90 miles off their coast in April 1969, their large-scale commando raid on a South Korean island hundreds of miles south of the DMZ, stepped up North Korean aggression that caused more than a 1,000 U.S. and South Korean casualties along the DMZ from 1967 -69, etc. etc.

Second, North Koreans have publicly and proudly announced that they collaborated with the North Vietnamese in the 1960s. Their most significant involvement was sending North Korean pilots to fly MIG jet fighters in opposition to American pilots in Vietnam, just as Russians had flown against American pilots in Korea 15 years earlier. There really is evidence to refute assertions of non-involvement by North Korea in Vietnam.

Third, no doubt North Korea was something of a renegade to the Soviets and the Russians probably did not know in advance about the attack on the Pueblo. Nevertheless, supporting North Korea was clearly an element of Soviet policy. When the U.S. Navy assembled carrier battle groups in the Sea of Japan the USSR positioned 16 of its surface warships between the US fleet and the North Korean coast, as well as deployed a number of submarines in the area.

Yes, the record shows that in many instances the United States misjudged the intention and capability and motivation of our Cold War adversaries (as they did ours). In the aftermath of the attack on the Pueblo the United States assembled a large naval task force and deployed additional Air Force units in the Korean theater which was a prudent response given our commitment to protecting South Korea and Japan and the fact that a state of war still existed in Korea. Once it was determined the Pueblo attack was not a prelude to greater hostilities, the United States withdrew most of those forces and patiently sought the crew's release through diplomacy and negotiation. Was that a foreign policy failure?

This book has a few interesting photographs I hadn't seen before. I recommend it to people interested in the Cold War and the ongoing Korean conflict history as long as they consult other sources to get a more balanced and complete view of the incident.