09-151.pdf

Memorial Museum in P’yôngyang saw an enlarged picture of the
signed document with a photo of Woodward signing it. The North
Koreans had doctored the document by removing the last paragraph,
that is, the receipt clause; since the US had rejected the document
there was no need to make a noise about the manipulation. In
America, Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, pointed out that after the US
had “made every sort of reasonable offer, all of which were harshly
rejected, we had come squarely up against a most painful problem:
how to obtain the release of the crew without having this Government
seem to attest to a statement which simply is not true.” He described
the Woodward agreement as “a strange procedure.... Apparently the
North Koreans believe there is propaganda value even in a worthless
document which General Woodward publicly labelled false before he
signed it.”
However, the agreement was welcomed with relief by both the
US Secretary of State and President Johnson at time when the US
wanted to resolve the issue because of the installation of President
Nixon in 1969. In contrast, as quoted by Lerner (2003), the South
Korean daily Donga Ilbo called the agreement “dishonorable” and Chosun
Ilbo lamented the decision to make “a secret deal... with an insignificant
communist group in North Korea instead of punishing them.”
One South Korean official claimed “The US”... “seems to be engrossed
more in the release of the Pueblo crewmen than in the security of the
free world.” The crew attended naval hearings from January 20-March
13, 1969, but no one was sentenced thanks to the Secretary of the
Navy’s recommendation in May “...they have suffered enough, and
further punishment would not be justified.” Commander Bucher
asserted that the Pueblo had never entered the twelve-mile territorial
Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula during the 1960s
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