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The Price of Command
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16518 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1989 |
3,126 Words |
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Ross Weiner
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THE PUEBLO SURRENDER
A Covert Action by the National Security Agency
Robert A. Liston
New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc., 1988
294 pp., $18.95
When the U.S.S. Pueblo was seized off the coast of North Korea on January 23, 1968, it became the first U.S. warship to surrender without defending itself since 1807. In The Pueblo Surrender, journalist Robert Liston claims that by examining the evidence like a "detective story" he has revealed a conspiracy by the National Security Agency (NSA) to engineer the capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo and induce the North Koreans to place one of their computer cards in a rigged code machine to break Russia's most secret codes. Liston claims that the Chinese army boarded the Pueblo, and a Russian ship subsequently shelled it to prevent the Chinese from seizing evidence, supposedly onboard, of an imminent Soviet invasion of China. The problem with Liston's convoluted theory isn't just that it is unprovable or wrong, but that it provides an excuse for avoiding the less exciting business of fixing entrenched flaws in the naval command system.
Several problems could have been explored if Liston had been willing to forgo or at least postpone arguing the unprovable. Liston had the beginnings of a story in the inconsistencies among crewmen's testimonies and Commander Lloyd Bucher's efforts to force them into one consistent story. Liston ascribes this pressure to an NSA-engineered cover up. The real questions are:
·Did the crew feel pressured formally or informally to gloss over individual perceptions in the name of consistency?
·How and why did this happen? What does it tell us about complex group dynamics and witness reliability in criminal or hostage situations?
·What is the proper role of a naval officer, especially the commanding officer? Did the captain of the Pueblo fulfill that role?
The Pueblo Surrender does have the potential for a believable, interesting, and useful study of group dynamics. Perception and reality are slippery under even the most controlled conditions. Lawyers and psychologists have long wrestled with the often dubious reliability of even well meaning witnesses. A careful application of relevant sociological theory by a knowledgeable investigator might have done more to approach the truth in the Pueblo case than Liston's journalism.
The evidence
The book is based largely upon apparent contradictions about enemy uniforms, navigation, communications, and personnel turnover found in the memoirs of some of the Pueblo's officers, two books written shortly after the crew was released, one interview with a crewman, and an anonymous informant's story. The NSA conspiracy theory is largely based on the anonymous informant. Liston claims that contradictions regarding enemy uniforms cited in the two former books and the sighting of a "large warship" by two crewmen are fatally incompatible with the official Navy version of what happened and are therefore evidence of a massive
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