Jack Cheevers

The latest literature on the USS Pueblo incident from January, 1968--a commissioned US warship was suddenly attacked and captured by forces of North Korea in the Sea of Japan...still held in North Korea.
Jack Cheevers' description of the incident and it's aftermath was a good one, with as little prejudice as is possible. Knowing something about the incident, I knew nothing of the author. So, when I tried a web search for him, I could find nothing except a marketing web site for the book. How does one judge the author's bona fides?
As an audiobook, it sucked badly. Jeffrey Kafer's performance was very poor. He mangled words, especially the Korean and Japanese place names as well as military acronyms and jargon that Cheevers defined whenever there was a need.
The book centers on Cdr "Pete" Bucher, Pueblo's CO, and draws upon other crew experience. Bucher performed masterfully in captivity but was criticized for surrendering without a fight. Bucher was also accused of code of conduct violations by "confessions" made to NK. No mention was made of the the changes in the code of conduct as a result of POW experiences of the Pueblo crew and others during this time.
While the book did an excellent job describing the plight of the crew, I thought it could have spent additional time on the political environment. President Lyndon Johnson, for example, is mentioned in the title, but not much space is devoted to LBJ's actions. Because of the ways that LBJ "fought" the Vietnam Conflict, did LBJ prevent military reaction during the hijacking and delay recovery of the crew in a timely way?
All in all, a good summary of the incident. The book demonstrates that we continue to not learn from our mistakes and reenact "Murphy's Law" time and again. It also illustrates that for every tragedy, there is a scapegoat . Read the book!
.… (mais)

A detailed and often engrossing retelling of the Pueblo incident of 1967-68. I'd never heard of the Pueblo before, but the situation sounded crazy enough to warrant learning more. North Korea is now showcasing the mothballed ship to every Western visitor to Pyongyang, they've turned it into a museum of greatest triumph against imperialist dogs. The book combines the best of creative non-fiction writing with a strong narrative and leading hero, but also serious history with original research and new facts, bringing events up to the current time. If it wasn't for everything else that happened in 1968, one of the most dramatic years in American history, the Pueblo might still be a household word like the Cuban Missile Crisis. It could have been WWIII, the real success was that rational leadership prevailed.… (mais)

Among what are sometimes known as “rogue states”, North Korea has a particularly long and ambitious record. Besides being the world’s longest lived communist state, it has sent foreign hit teams abroad, conducted international bombings, nabbed Japanese citizens off the shores of their country, and shot down aircraft in international airspace. But one of their more infamous acts outside the Korean War was the capture of the US spy ship Pueblo in 1968.

This is hardly the first book about the subject. Both survivors from the Pueblo mission and others have written about it. A movie was made with Hal Holbrook playing the ship’s commander, Lloyd Bucher. It is Bucher that Cheevers organizes his book around. What he brings to his account, besides an easy narrative skill at weaving international diplomacy, espionage, military culture, and biography together, is material from government documents that he got declassified and an updating of the story of the ship and its one time crew.

The broad details are that the Pueblo was violently attacked in international waters, its crew imprisoned for 11 months. They endured a disorienting mixture of brutal torture, physical deprivation, ideological berating, exploitation as crude propaganda tools at press conferences, and even clumsy attempts by the North Koreans, in the prisoners’ final days of captivity, to recruit them as spies. After North Korea agreed to release the prisoners after the US government “prerefuted” its confession to bogus charges of violating North Korean sovereignty, the crew of the ship returned home to popular acclaim. But its officers faced possible court martial.

Stateside, the drama became a conflict of Navy culture – captains are expected to not surrender their ship – with practical considerations. Resistance, Captain Bucher argued at a court of inquiry, would only have gotten more of his crew killed to no point. (One sailor did die in the attack.) Besides showing some of the behind the scenes efforts to free the crew, the declassified documents Cheevers uncovered show the unheeded warnings issued by the joint sponsor of the Pueblo’s mission, the National Security Agency. They doubted the wisdom of the ship venturing so close to the shore of the erratic North Korean regime. (As it happened, the North Koreans were at a high state of alert after launching a spectacular raid to kill the South Korean president in Seoul.) Aggravating the problem, inadequate preparations were made to destroy the secret documents and cypher equipment aboard the ship. Coupled with the activities of the John Walker spy ring, which began about a month before the Pueblo was taken, the ship’s loss made United States fleet operations dangerously transparent to the Soviet Union.

While Cheevers clearly sympathizes with Bucher’s dilemma – no means to protect his ship, no protection offered by other ships, and an expectation not to provoke a war with North Korea versus an expectation to keep his vessel, he notes inconsistencies in the captain’s testimony, things he could have done to lessen the damage caused by the ship’s capture. But Cheevers and the harshest critics of the captain agreed that his leadership of his men in captivity was exemplary.

Cheevers’ final chapter tells us of the ship’s fate (it’s still afloat), Bucher’s life after regaining his freedom, and the place of the ship in the life of its namesake city in Colorado. The book also reminds us that North Korea has long been a problem no US president has figured out how to solve, an example of the dangers of appeasement and the dangers of confrontation.

All in all, a very readable update on an important chapter in the unresolved story of US-North Korean relations.… (mais)