Pueblo was taken into port at
Wonsan and the crew was moved twice to
prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. The crew members reported upon release that they were starved and regularly tortured while in North Korean custody. This treatment turned worse when the North Koreans realized that crewmen were secretly giving them "
the finger" in staged propaganda photos. '' article that exposed the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign secret. The sailors were flipping the middle finger, as a way to covertly protest their captivity in North Korea, and the propaganda on their treatment and guilt. The North Koreans for months photographed them without knowing the real meaning of flipping the middle finger, while the sailors explained that the sign meant good luck in Hawaii. Commander
Lloyd M. Bucher was psychologically tortured, including being put through a
mock firing squad in an effort to make him confess. Eventually the North 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 [North Korea]. We paean their great leader
Kim Il Sung". (Bucher pronounced "
paean" as "
pee on.") Negotiations for the release of the crew took place at
Panmunjom. At the same time, U.S. officials were concerned with conciliating the South Koreans, who expressed discontent about being left out of the negotiations. Richard A. Ericson, a political counselor for the
American embassy in Seoul and operating officer for the
Pueblo negotiations, notes in his oral history: The South Koreans were absolutely furious and suspicious of what we might do. They anticipated that the North Koreans would try to exploit the situation to the ROK's disadvantage in every way possible, and they were rapidly growing distrustful of us and losing faith in their great ally. Of course, we had this other problem of how to ensure that the ROK would not retaliate for the Blue House Raid and to ease their growing feelings of insecurity. They began to realize that the DMZ was porous and they wanted more equipment and aid. So, we were juggling a number of problems. He also noted how the meetings at Panmunjom were usually unproductive because of the particular negotiating style of the North Koreans: As one example, we would go up with a proposal of some sort on the release of the crew and they would be sitting there with a card catalog ... If the answer to the particular proposal we presented wasn't in the cards, they would say something that was totally unresponsive and then go off and come back to the next meeting with an answer that was directed to the question. But there was rarely an immediate answer. That happened all through the negotiations. Their negotiators obviously were never empowered to act or speak on the basis of personal judgment or general instructions. They always had to defer a reply and presumably they went over it up in Pyongyang and passed it around and then decided on it. Sometimes we would get totally nonsensical responses if they didn't have something in the card file that corresponded to the proposal at hand. On 23 December 1968, the crew was taken by buses to the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) border with South Korea and crossing at the "
Bridge of No Return", carrying with them the body of Fireman Duane D. Hodges, who was killed during the capture. Exactly 11 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. Bucher and all of the officers and crew subsequently appeared before a
Navy Court of Inquiry. A
court-martial was recommended for Bucher and the officer in charge of the research department, Lieutenant Steve Harris, for surrendering without a fight and for failing to destroy classified material, but
Secretary of the Navy John 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 that Bucher suffered during his time in North Korea contributed to his death. Along with the
Battle of Khe Sanh and the
Tet Offensive, the
Pueblo incident was a key factor in turning U.S. public opinion against the
Vietnam War and influencing
Lyndon B. Johnson into withdrawing from the
1968 presidential election. USS
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 port of
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
Pyongyang. After the stop at the
Nampo shipyard,
Pueblo was relocated to Pyongyang and moored on the
Taedong River near the spot where the
General Sherman incident is believed to have taken place. In late 2012,
Pueblo was moved again to the
Pothonggang Canal in Pyongyang, next to a new addition to the
Fatherland Liberation War Museum.) that the seizure of
Pueblo was executed specifically to capture the encryption devices aboard. Without them, it was difficult for the Soviets to make full use of Walker's information. Mitchell Lerner and Jong-Dae Shin argue that Soviet-bloc Romanian dossiers demonstrate that the Soviets had no knowledge of the capture of the ship and were taken by surprise when it happened. After debriefing the released crew, the U.S. prepared a "Cryptographic Damage Assessment" that was declassified in late 2006. The report concluded that, while the crew made a diligent effort to destroy sensitive material, most of them were not familiar with cryptographic equipment and publications, had not received training in their proper destruction, and that their efforts were not sufficient to prevent the North Koreans from recovering most of the sensitive material. The crew itself thought the North Koreans would be able to rebuild much of the equipment. Cryptographic equipment on board at the time of capture included "one
KL-47 for off-line encryption, two KW-7s for on-line encryption, three
KWR-37s for receiving the Navy Operational Intelligence Broadcast, and four KG-14s which are used in conjunction with the KW-37 for receiving the Fleet Broadcasts." Additional tactical systems and
one-time pads were captured, but they were considered of little significance since most messages sent using them would be of value for only a short time. The ship's cryptographic personnel were subject to intense interrogation by what they felt were highly knowledgeable electronics experts. When crew members attempted to withhold details, they were later confronted with pages from captured manuals and told to correct their earlier accounts. The report concluded that the information gained from the interrogations saved the North Koreans three to six months of effort, but that they would have eventually understood everything from the captured equipment and accompanying technical manuals alone. The crew members were also asked about many U.S. cryptographic systems that were not on board the
Pueblo, but only supplied superficial information. The
Pueblo carried
key lists for January, February and March 1968, but immediately after the
Pueblo was captured, instructions were sent to other holders of those keys not to use them, so damage was limited. However it was discovered in the debriefing that the
Pueblo had onboard superseded key lists for November and December 1967 which should have been destroyed by 15 January, well before the
Pueblo arrived on station, according to standing orders. Furthermore,
Soviet archives reveal that the Soviet leadership was particularly displeased that North Korean leader Kim Il-sung had contradicted the assurances he previously gave Moscow that he would avoid a military escalation in Korea. Previously secret documents suggest the Soviets were surprised by the
Pueblo incident, first learning of it in the press. The same documents reveal that the North Koreans also kept the Soviets completely in the dark regarding ongoing negotiations with the Americans for the crew's release, which was another bone of contention. The Soviet reluctance at a reopening of hostilities in Korea was partly motivated by the fact that they had a
1961 treaty with North Korea that obliged them to intervene in case the latter got attacked. Brezhnev however had made it clear in 1966 that just as in the case of the
similar treaty they had with China, the Soviets were prepared to ignore it rather than go to all-out war with the United States. Given that Chinese and North Korean archives surrounding the incident remain secret, Kim Il-sung's intentions cannot be known with certainty. The Soviets revealed however that Kim Il-sung sent a letter to
Alexei Kosygin on 31 January 1968 demanding further military and economic aid, which was interpreted by the Soviets as the price they would have to pay to restrain Kim Il-sung's bellicosity. Consequently, Kim Il-sung was invited to Moscow, but he refused to go in person owing to "increased defense preparations" he had to attend to, sending instead his defense minister,
Kim Chang-bong, who arrived on 26 February 1968. During a long meeting with Brezhnev, the Soviet leader made it clear that they were not willing to go to war with the United States, but agreed to an increase in subsidies for North Korea, which did happen in subsequent years. ==Timeline of negotiations==