Act of War
Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo
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کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
Narrator Jeffrey Kafer take listeners back to the Cold War and the soldiers and sailors who were drawn into it. This is the story of the crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo, a spy ship sent to the edges of North Korea in 1968. Inept planning by the Navy made its capture a major problem for the U.S., as top-secret equipment and codebooks were compromised. Portraying the ship's crew, Kafer sounds young and clipped, as if he's about to shout "Yes, SIR!" His matter-of-fact descriptions of how Captain Bucher and his men were treated are often painful to hear. D.R.W © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
October 7, 2013
In 1968 North Korea seized an American intelligence-gathering ship, the U.S.S. Pueblo, in international waters. Journalist Cheevers combines interviews with recently released government documents to tell the story of a slipshod operation that nearly led to the crew’s execution and a return to war footing with Korea. The Pueblo was meant to be unobtrusive, but the shabby, virtually unarmed cargo ship was packed with top-secret code machines and documents; dispatched to international waters off North Korea’s coast without the North Korean government’s knowledge and no more protection than “the centuries-old body of law and custom that guaranteed free passage on the high seas.” When the Pueblo was intercepted the commander prudently surrendered. The Johnson administration, concerned about “reactions in the court of public opinion,” merely mounted a diplomatic reply to this act of war. Meanwhile, the captured sailors were brutalized into signing an admission of spying—a “handy pretext to shoot them all.” Pyongyang demanded an unconditional apology, which the U.S. eventually signed, though that apology had been “prerepudiated”—disavowed in advance. The ship remains in North Korean hands; the released crew was eventually recognized as prisoners of war. Cheever’s account of “false assumptions, negligent planning..., excessive risk taking” is a useful reminder in today’s world of surveillance and diplomatic brinksmanship.
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