Nation: In Pueblo's Wake

• Share

(3 of 8)

In his first comment on the capture, Secretary of State Dean Rusk called it "a matter of the utmost gravity." Later, he termed it an "act of war."

New Rules. But what to do? The Navy reacted in classic style by ordering the 85,000-ton nuclear-powered carrier Enterprise to show the flag in the Sea of Japan. En route at the time to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin after a stop in southern Japan, the carrier headed north instead, accompanied by the nuclear frigate Truxtun and several other escort vessels. Six or seven other warships put out of Yokosuka later in the week, presumably bound for the same area. Shadowing Enterprise, sometimes at the dangerously close range of 800 yards, was the Soviet trawler Gidrolog, a gadget-crammed spy ship of the same genre as Pueblo.

It would have been easy enough for the U.S. flotilla to harass the Soviet trawler, but that would have invited similar treatment for any U.S. ELINT, or electronic intelligence-gathering vessel, in any other part of the world. Even in the seamy business of espionage, some gentlemanly rules prevail, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as first-rate maritime powers, generally try to observe them scrupulously. North Korea, with only a bathtub navy, obviously feels no such compunction. "The North Koreans have made their own rules," said Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer, "and they are new rules."

In any event, Gidrolog was not the only party curious about the whereabouts of the U.S. armada. The day after Enterprise headed toward Wonsan, North Korean MIGS flew more than 40 sorties around the port, and U.S. listening posts intercepted a steady stream of chatter from Pyongyang to the pilots: "Where is the Enterprise? What is the position of Enterprise?" Either the leviathan was making North Korea nervous, or Pyongyang, in the wake of its success at swiping Pueblo, was thinking of bigger things.

About eight hours after Pueblo was towed into Wonsan, the Pentagon released word of her capture. In Yokosuka, the pregnant wife of Pueblo's executive officer, Lieut. Edward R. Murphy, heard about it from a neighbor, who heard it from her radio. As for the wounded crewmen, the Pentagon could not say which of Pueblo's complement of six officers, 75 enlisted men and two civilian hydrographers had been injured—or how.

To most Americans, it seemed unbelievable that a U.S. vessel could be brazenly held up and taken captive on the high seas. Nothing remotely like it had happened since 1807, during the Napoleonic wars, when a British man o' war overtook the U.S.S. Chesapeake, searched her for deserters and shanghaied four seamen. An even more dramatic depredation occurred in 1804, four months after Barbary pirates captured the grounded U.S. frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor and clapped her crewmen into prison. Lieut. Stephen ("Our country, right or wrong") Decatur sailed into the port aboard a vessel disguised as a blockade-runner from Malta, boarded Philadelphia and, with a crew of 84, routed the 200 Tripolitan crewmen who had been put aboard. Decatur set Philadelphia ablaze, and just as his aptly named Intrepid darted out of the harbor, the captured ship exploded.