News - NM Governor tours USS Pueblo

Coincidence can be a strange thing. Only days after Iranian officials released the 15 British Marines and Sailors that they had held captive for 15 days, NM Governor Bill Richardson was taken on a tour of the USS Pueblo while on an official visit to North Korea.

(Crew of the Pueblo display their true feelings for their North Korean captors.)







Link to article about Gov. Richardson's trip:

http://www.chieftain.com/national/1176185110/1

On it's own, the Pueblo incident is another event in the history of the Cold War which could have turned into a much more dangerous escalation of hostilities which fortunately did not occur. Happening just 6 months after the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israeli Air Force and Navy, and in the midst of the Vietnam conflict, the Pueblo's seizure by North Korean forces was one more link in a chain of terrible events that the US Navy endured. Five months after the capture of the Pueblo the fast attack submarine Scorpion was lost with all hands in the Azores. Six months earlier a fire aboard the carrier Forrestal took the lives of 132 crewmen. As this was going on the Navy had no idea that a massive spy ring within it's ranks was in it's infancy.

In the years since the 1985 arrest of John Walker Jr. and the members of his spy ring there has been much debate as to whether or not his activities had a connection to the capture of the Pueblo. Walker claims that he began supplying the Soviet Union with documents after the Pueblo incident occurred. However, Maj. Laura Heath presented a thesis to the US Army Command and General Staff College in 2001 where she laid out the possibility that the Pueblo was captured because the Soviets wanted to study the equipment that was described in documents that Walker had already supplied to them. http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/heath.pdf I highly recommend reading this thesis for anyone who is interested in the Walker spy case and for people who are interested in the mechanisms of intelligence agencies.