The Cold War Museum, in cooperation with Old Bust Head Brewing Company, invites you to attend a presentation by Ohio State University Cold War Historian Mitchell Lerner on THE PUEBLO INCIDENT: A SPY SHIP AND THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
The capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo, American signals intelligence (SIGINT) ship, by North Korean gunships in January 1968 set off an international incident and led to the crew’s imprisonment in North Korea.
Drawing on thousands of pages of declassified documents from the Johnson Administration, along with dozens of interviews with those involved, Prof. Mitchell Lerner, an historian at Ohio State University and expert on the Cold War history of Korea, provides the most complete and accurate account available of the Pueblo incident. Those documents allow a detailed recounting and assessment of the capture of the ship, covert intelligence, the relevant political stakes, and the secret negotiations that led to the crew’s release. Lerner argues that the North Koreans were operating with a domestic agenda rather than serving a global Communist conspiracy, and that the U.S. misunderstanding of this amplified the crisis.
With North Korea still seen as a rogue state by much of the world, The Pueblo Incident provides key insights into the domestic imperatives behind that country's foreign relations.
This book won the 2002 John Lyman Book Award for the best work of US Naval History, and was named by the American Library Association as one of fifty "historically significant works" that would not have been published after the passage of Executive Order 13233. It was also nominated for the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes. Purchase tickets here
