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 to date."--BOOK JACKET.

A composite documentary by fifteen crew members of the USS Pueblo after eleven brutal months of imprisonment by the North Koreans.

For President Lyndon Johnson, 1968 was a year of calamity, including the hijacking of the USS Pueblo in international waters off North Korea. After a fierce attack by the North Korean Navy, the lightly armed spy ship was captured and its 83 crewmen taken hostage, imprisoned and tortured for nearly a year before being released. How and why did the Navy, the National Security Agency and the Johnson administration place the Pueblo in such an untenable situation? What drove Kim Il-sung, North Korea's autocrat, to gamble on hijacking a ship belonging to the world's most powerful nation? Drawing on extensive research, including summaries of White House meetings and conversations, the author answers these questions and reviews the events and flawed decisions that led to Pueblo's capture.

The story of the Pueblo incident of 1968 is inherently a distasteful one for intelligence professionals, but the factors which make it unpleasant at the same time make it imperative reading. The lessons to be leamed from failed operations in general and this incident in particular are many and should be widely studied throughout the intelligence community so that we may prevent similar disasters from occurring in the future. Indeed, as the present monograph makes clear, the components of the intelligence community conducted reviews, postmortems, and "lessons leamed" exercises of many types in the aftermath of the Pueblo incident and made numerous beneficial changes in the policy and procedure as a result. What we must recognize, however, is that the lessons to be leamed go beyond the mechanical, i.e., that intelligence officers must remain flexible in their thinking and skeptical in their approach to any problem. It is arguable that some of the fundamental problems in the case of the Pueblo were the great haste to get the operation under way and an unwillingness to challenge preconceived assumptions about the way operations should be conducted. This was compounded by a failure to communicate fully to all who needed to know about the operation - and by a failure to communicate candidly when problems or doubts appeared. Mr. Robert Newton's monograph, The Capture of the USS Pueblo and Its Effect on BIGINT Operations, presents a thorough discussion of the incident, including the details of the ship's commissioning, its mission, the capture of ship and crew in waters adjacent to North Korea, official reactions in Washington and overseas, and the release of the crew. Mr. Newton also discusses the reaction of the cryptologic community and assesses carefully the serious damage done to the U.S. SIGINT effort by the North Korean capture of equipment, publications, and personnel.

The Free Sea offers a unique, single-volume analysis of incidents in American history that affected U.S. freedom of navigation at sea. The book spans more than 200 years, beginning in the Colonial era with the Quasi-War with France in 1798 and extending to contemporary Freedom of Navigation operations in the South China Sea. Through wars and numerous crises with North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Russia and China, freedom of navigation has been a persistent challenge for the United States, a nation reliant on open seas for economic prosperity, military security and global order. This volume focuses on the struggle to retain freedom of the seas. Challenges to U.S. warships and maritime commerce have pushed, and continue to challenge, the United States to vindicate its rights through diplomatic, legal, and military means, underscoring the need for the strategic resolve in the global maritime commons.

"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.

North Korea and the United States have been officially at war for over 70 years, one of the longest lasting and most unbalanced conflicts in world history, in which a small East Asian state has held its own against a Western superpower for over three generations. With the Western world increasingly pivoting its attention towards Northeast Asia, and the region likely to play a more central role in the global economy, North Korea’s importance as a strategically located country, potential economic powerhouse and major opponent of Western regional hegemony will only grow over the coming decades. This work is the first fully comprehensive study of the ongoing war between the two parties, and covers the history of the conflict from the first American clashes with Korea’s nationalist movement in 1945 and imposition of its military rule over southern Korea to North Korea’s nuclear deterrence program and ongoing tensions with the U.S. today. The nature of the antagonism between the two states, one profoundly influenced by both decolonisation and wartime memory, and the other uncompromising in its attempts to globally impose its leadership and ideology, is covered in detail. Northern Korea is one of very few inhabited parts of the world never to have been placed under Western rule, and its fiercely nationalist identity as a deeply Confucian civilization state has made it considerably more difficult to tackle than almost any other American adversary. This work elucidates the conflicting ideologies and the discordant designs for the Korean nation which have fueled the war, and explores emerging fields of conflict which have become increasingly central in recent years such as economic and information warfare. Prevailing trends in the conflict and its global implications, including the multiple wars that have been waged by proxy, are also examined in detail. An in-depth assessment of the past provides context key to understanding the future trajectories this relationship could take, and how a continuing shift in global order away from Western unipolarity is likely to influence its future. "To understand where the Korean Peninsula might go in the rest of the 21st century, Abrams’ telling of the story of how the two countries got to where they are today is essential.” – ANKIT PANDA, senior editor, The Diplomat "...even those who find his conclusions unpalatable will be forced to weigh them carefully.”– JOHN EVERARD, former British Ambassador to North Korea

A comprehensive history of the Korean War that explains how it started and why it still has not technically ended, and describes how North Korea continues to stockpile weapons while its people go without the basic necessities of life.