[EggsAckley]

I remember this vividly. A very tense situation.

[Red Badger]

Johnson had a REAL incident on his hands and couldn't do a thing because of his FAKE TONKIN GULF INCIDENT.............The persident LIED and 50,000 DIED........

[American Quilter]

Interesting article. I remember the day the Pueblo was captured.

[ansel12]

Good info, but I do wish we had given some token resistance, even had it resulted in additional casualties. The total lack of return fire made this the most embarassing defeat in U.S. Navy history.

[ozzymandus]

Interesting. I had never heard about the N Korean pilots in Vietnam. However, it still doesn't explain why the US didn't retaliate against the act of war committed by N Korea against the Pueblo.

[darkwing104]

Wow...Good Stuff. Thanks for the history lesson. I've never heard about most of this stuff.

[A.A. Cunningham]

The Texas Turd

[1Old Pro]

I read this article but really didn't learn much. I was hoping to find out why we didn't firebomb N. Korea when they refused to let this ship go.

[A.A. Cunningham]

James G. Zumwalt, a Marine veteran of the Persian Gulf and Vietnam wars, is a contributor to The Washington Times.

Son of former CNO Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.

James G. Zumwalt is a retired U.S. Marine lieutenant-colonel and former senior adviser to the assistant secretary of state on human rights and humanitarian affairs under President George W. Bush. Since 1994, he has visited North Korea 10 times to help bridge the gap between the U.S. and the DPRK. A Vietnam and Persian Gulf war veteran, Zumwalt now acts globally as a private consultant to clients for market investment. He received a Juris Doctorate degree from Villanova University in 1979, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa from Mercy College in New York in 1991.

[Junior]

My father was a CTM stationed in Yokosuka at the time and knew a number of the guys in the crypto shack aboard Pueblo. He was personally involved in a lot of the stuff going on in Japan at the time of the capture and during the subsequent months of captivity.

Unfortunately, he's no longer alive to ask for additional details, or for his opinion on this article.

[gaijin]

I believe that Richard Marcinko (the former S.E.A.L. author of, "Red Cell", and many others) was dispatched right after the Pueblo's capture to attempt to destroy any cryptography equipment that remained onboard.

I vaguely recall that they did get aboard, but found that the equipment had already been removed. The vessel was being kept tied-up dockside in a very obvious place, amazingly.

They had to boogy out of their real quick, and I remember that there was a little bit of shooting.

[ASA Vet]

MI Ping

[albee]

bump for later read

[ThanhPhero]

There was a book a few years ago that made the case that the Pueblo was deliberately put in an enticing position and allowed to be captured in order to permit the capture of certain American code equipment. The Russians and their proxies felt they had a bonanza in the captured equipment but did not have the capabilities to reverse engineer it so they just used it and copied it to use throughout their empire. It should have given them breakproof coding abilities except that the equipment had a flaw addded in that permitted our side to read all the traffic encoded with that gear. It is a fact that equipment was NOT destroyed prior to capture as the ops on that ship were intensely trained to do. I did that work in the AF on RC135s and I know what the training and directives were and it was an easy thing to do. Apparently the Red radio traffic that went through this equipment was, indeed read by our NSA for some years after the Pueblo incident. I cannot remember the name of the book or the author and cannot find it online.

The Blues Image song Mystery Ship was about that incident and I always wondered if one of those boys was on the Pueblo or another such ship or A/C. I still play that asong when I get nostalgic .

[Semper Paratus]

Governor Reagan said at the time we should have went in and towed it out.

[Bender2]

What really gets my goat is the North Koreans moved the USS Pueblo from their east coast to their west coast and up to Pyongyang and Clinton did not do a damned thing about it!

[NY Attitude]

There may have been a different outcome if the CO were cleared and if he and the SSO got along.

[killjoy]

The discovery of North Korea's secret, and short, participation in the Vietnam War nine months earlier may, therefore, be relevant.

Ummm... no. The reason, AFAIK, for the North Korean attack on the Pueblo had to do with John Walker. Walker had been supplying keying material to the Soviets and they needed to get their hands on the actual crypto equipment. The North Koreans, through taking the Pueblo, were able to supply this to them.