09-151.pdf

estimated its risks. His view is shared by Gallery, who writes that the
Pueblo was regarded as a “minimal risk mission.” However, the Naval
Security Agency had sent a warning to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the
mission might not be a “minimal risk” as they had declared it to be, but
the warning only reached the lower staff levels and none of the chiefs.
Lerner records warnings made by the North Koreans, among which
the one given on January 20 at the 260th MAC meeting requested by
the KPA/CPV is worth quoting:
“It is quite obvious that if one continues, as you have done, the provocative
act of dispatching spy boats and espionage bandits to the coastal waters of
the other side under the cover of naval craft, it will only result in disrupting
the armistice and inducing another war....We have the right to make a due
response to your thoughtless play with fire. We will fully exercise our
rights.” 163
According to Lerner, the warning had not been reported to
Washington when the Pueblo was seized. He also records that the
officers and the crew were “... somewhat unprepared.” There were also
problems in communications and defence. Gallery writes “...that no
one on the Pueblo had ever given serious thought to the idea that they
might be boarded and captured.” He regards the failure to “...conceive
of piracy as being an even remote possibility” as the main blunder with
regard to the Pueblo debacle.
The ship that lay still in the sea would, according to Mobley
163_ Downs, ibid., pp. 122, 304: fn. 7; Gallery, The Pueblo Incident (New York: Doubleday
& Company Inc., 1970), pp. 2, 12, 13; Hong, “Wigi sog-ûi chôngjôn hyôpchông
- P’uebûllo sakôn-gwa P’anmunjôm tokki sarhae’ sakôn -,” Yôksa pip’yông
(no. 63), 2003, p. 59; Kukpang chôngbo ponbu, op. cit., 1993, p. 143; Lee, ibid.,
1998(c), p. 2; Lerner, ibid., pp. 1, 17, 27, 61; Yi, op. cit., May 2006, pp. 161, 169.
Original quotation marks except the first quotation from Gallery.
200 Peace-keeping in the Korean Peninsula