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Lerner, Mitchell B., The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2002. 320pp. $34.95
Finally, an author has done a hard-- hitting analysis of the USS Pueblo incident of January 1968. Mitchell B. Lerner, an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University, does not exonerate the commanding officer of the Pueblo, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, for giving up the ship and crew, and the intelligence it had gathered. However, of all those who may have been culpable, Commander Bucher emerges a hero and is no longer the scapegoat his superiors made him out to be. Exhaustive research, including access to new information released from the Lyndon Johnson White House files, leads Lerner to place blame evenly on the shoulders of the Navy chain of command, the intelligence community, and Johnson's foreign policy advisors, due to their misunderstanding and underestimation of the North Korean-Soviet Union relationship.
Lerner asserts that the intelligence collection effort, code-named Operation CLICKBEETLE, was the idea of the National Security Agency and that it had been patterned after the efforts of the Soviet Union's intelligence-collection ships (AGIs) off the coast of the United States. Deciding that the Navy should be the operational commander for this strategic tasking, the National Security Agency turned the program over to it. Converting tired, old, and slow cargo ships into...