Pueblo Reunuion

The Associated Press has an interesting piece up about the 40th re-union of the crew of the ill-fated USS Pueblo, now (still)  displayed by the NORKS as a war trophy and an incitement to anti-Americanism more than 40 years after the NORKS seized the unarmed vessel in international waters on January 23, 1968.

The NORKS moved it out of Pyeongyang to Nampo when Ambassador James Kelly visited in 1999, but returned it to Pyeongyang later, where it is moored in the Daedong River in the center of the city.  The NORKS reportedly also more recently made an offer to repatriate the Pueblo in exchange for the obeisance visit of another senior US Government official and the remittance of suitable tribute extortion aid.

Some interesting context:

According to the Wikipedia article referenced earlier,

facts have come to light that indicate that USS Pueblo was captured by North Korea at the instigation of the Soviet Union, which was seeking a cryptographic machine onboard to match with a key provided to the Soviets by the spy John Walker.

And, further historically-speaking, the Pueblo Incident has been played by the NORKS for all its worth as an echo of the infamous M/S [S/S ?] General Sherman Incident.    In 1866 a privately-owned American-registered merchantman, the General Sherman, sailed uninvited up the Taedong River toward Pyongyang, where she ran aground and was destroyed by Korean shore batteries and troops, who burned the ship and killed the entire crew.  Kim Il Sung claimed that his great-grandfather was involved, fabricating a tale that portrays his great grandfather Kim Ung-u as a brave fighter against the “U.S. imperialists,” who led the attack on the General Sherman, and thereby purportedly initiated Korean anti-American struggles in the 1880s.  Apart from the absence of any tenable evidence of Kim’s grandfather’s involvement, another small problem with that account is that the General Sherman, although owned by a private US commercial shipping firm, was operating under charter to the British trading firm Meadows and Co., based in Tientsin (present day Tianjin), China.  So it was the Brits, not the Americans, and certainly no US government entity, who actually initiated and provided the motive for this ill-begotten commercial foray into Korea that, by all accounts, was as much an attempt to extort as offer trade.

Because the General Sherman was US-flagged, however, the Korean destruction of the ship and killing of its crew resulted in a US inquiry into the matter under color of the well-established right of nations to protect their commercial shipping.  And that first brought Korea to the attention of  Admiral (then Captain) Robert J. Schufeldt who was detailed six months later in 1867 to take the USS Wachusett to investigate the fate of the General SHerman and its crew.  Schufeldt’s voyage was hampered and then abandoned on account of bad weather; but later he  posed  as the very self-consciously styled “Perry of Korea”, “opening” Korea to the United States by negotiating the May 1882 (Chemulpo) Treaty of Amity and Commerce that laid the basis for the subsequent very checkered history of US - Korean relations.