USS Pueblo (AGER-2) - Aftermath

Aftermath

Pueblo was taken into port at Wonsan and the crew was moved twice to POW camps. Some of the crew reported upon release that they were starved and regularly tortured while in North Korean custody. This treatment allegedly turned worse when the North Koreans realized that crewmen were secretly giving them "the finger" in staged propaganda photos.

Commander Lloyd M. Bucher was psychologically tortured, such as being put through a mock firing squad in an effort to make him confess. Eventually the Koreans threatened to execute his men in front of him, and Bucher relented and agreed to 'confess to his and the crew's transgression.' Bucher wrote the confession since a 'confession' by definition needed to be written by the confessor himself. They verified the meaning of what he wrote, but failed to catch the pun when he said "We paean the DPRK . We paean the Korean people. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung". (The word "paean" sounds identical to the term pee on.)

Following an apology, a written admission by the U.S. that Pueblo had been spying, and an assurance that the U.S. would not spy in the future, the North Korean government decided to release the 82 remaining crew members, although the written apology was preceded by a verbal statement that it was done only to secure the release. On 23 December 1968, the crew was taken by buses to the DMZ border with South Korea and ordered to walk south one by one across the "Bridge of No Return". Exactly eleven months after being taken prisoner, the Captain led the long line of crewmen, followed at the end by the Executive Officer, Lieutenant Ed Murphy, the last man across the bridge. The U.S. then verbally retracted the ransom admission, apology, and assurance. Meanwhile the North Koreans blanked out the paragraph above the signature which read: "and this hereby receipts for eighty two crewmen and one dead body".

Bucher and all the officers and crew subsequently appeared before a Navy Court of Inquiry. A court martial was recommended for the CO and the Officer in Charge of the Research Department, Lt Steve Harris. But the Secretary of the Navy, John H. Chafee, rejected the recommendation, stating, "They have suffered enough." Commander Bucher was never found guilty of any indiscretions and continued his Navy career until retirement.

In 1970, Bucher published an autobiographical account of the USS Pueblo incident entitled Bucher: My Story. Bucher died in San Diego on 28 January 2004, at the age of 76. James Kell, a former sailor under his command, suggested that the injuries suffered by Bucher during his time in North Korea contributed to his death.

Pueblo is still held by North Korea. In October 1999, she was towed from Wonsan on the east coast, around the Korean Peninsula, to the Nampo on the west coast. This required moving the vessel through international waters, and was undertaken just before the visit of U.S. presidential envoy James Kelly to the capital Pyongyang. The Pueblo was again relocated to Pyongyang and is moored on the Taedong River at the spot that the General Sherman incident is believed to have taken place. Pueblo is next to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, as a museum ship.

Today Pueblo remains the third-oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy, behind USS Constitution ("Old Ironsides"), and the USS Enterprise (CVN-65). Pueblo is widely, but incorrectly, believed to be the first American ship to have been captured since the wars in Tripoli. (On 8 December 1941, the river gunboat USS Wake was captured by Japanese forces while moored in Shanghai.)