navigate:
Thursday 2006-09-07 - P’yŏngyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
The USS “Pueblo”
Back to P’yŏngyang from the West Sea Barrage is about 70km. Once there, we’re first having lunch in the revolving restaurant on top of the Yanggakdo hotel (the name means “Sheep’s horn island”: yang = sheep, gak = horn, do = island), so we can have a view of the city by daylight as well.
Our first visit today is to the USS “Pueblo”: an American spy ship captured on January 23, 1968 in territorial waters off Wŏnsan — the Americans deny the ship was in territorial waters but it certainly was not far off —; only after the Koreans fired a grenade (killing one officer) did they surrender. It was an embarrassing incident for the Americans, especially since the Koreans captured so much sensitive material (the crew had no time to destroy it all). President Johnson tried to deny it was a spy ship and vehemently accused the Koreans of illegal aggression but by then the crew had already admitted it was actually a spy ship while the equipment and records found on board told their own story. The crew wrote a letter to their president, and finally in December 1968, after exactly 11 months, the US sheepishly apologized and the crew was allowed to return.
The Koreans refused to return the captured ship itself though and kept it as booty. Our tour around the ship, originally kept in Wŏnsan but now docked in P’yŏngyang on the Taedong river as a floating museum, is actually very interesting.
I expect this is a little bit of history — with the first U.S. Navy ship to be hi-jacked on the high seas by a foreign military force in over 150 years — most Americans would rather forget… But there are more twists to the story (which naturally is different as told by each side); the official site of the USS PUEBLO Veteran’s Association makes interesting reading in this respect.
