Former US spy ship now a tourist attraction

[William Knowles <erehwon@dis.org>]

TOKYO (Reuters) [1.26.98] North Korea has turned the Pueblo, 
a U.S. navy intelligence ship captured 30 years ago, into a 
tourist attraction to attract badly needed foreign exchange, 
a Japanese scholar said Monday.
 
Shinobu Oe, professor emeritus of contemporary history at 
Ibaraki University, told Reuters he visited the North Korean 
port of Wonsan, where the vessel is docked, on October 29.
 
"As far as I know the North Koreans have been showing the 
ship to Japanese tourists since August," Oe said. "They tell 
tourists it's the Pueblo."
 
The capture of the Pueblo and its crew by North Korean patrol 
boats off Wonsan in January 1968 held the administration of 
then-U.S. President Lyndon Johnson at bay for months.
 
Japan's Asahi newspaper Monday published a photograph Oe took 
of the ship, which showed it bristling with antennae and wires. 
The professor said he could only view the ship from the dock.
 
"It sure looks like the Pueblo," said a U.S. embassy naval 
attache in Tokyo who saw the photograph.
 
Oe said North Koreans at the port gave no information about 
the ship or how it had been used for the past 30 years.
 
Attracting foreign currency has become increasingly important 
to North Korea after years of economic decline and failed 
harvests that have left the isolated Stalinist nation 
struggling to feed its people.
 
The standoff prompted by Pyongyang's seizure of the Pueblo 
30 years ago led to a U.S. state of naval alert rivalling 
the Cuban missile crisis in 1963.
 
The crew was finally released in December 1968, but the 
ship stayed in North Korean hands.

Pyongyang portrayed the incident as a huge blow to the 
prestige of the U.S. superpower, which was then in the 
throes of the controversial Vietnam War.


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