There was a book a few years ago that made the case that the Pueblo was deliberately put in an enticing position and allowed to be captured in order to permit the capture of certain American code equipment. The Russians and their proxies felt they had a bonanza in the captured equipment but did not have the capabilities to reverse engineer it so they just used it and copied it to use throughout their empire. It should have given them breakproof coding abilities except that the equipment had a flaw addded in that permitted our side to read all the traffic encoded with that gear. It is a fact that equipment was NOT destroyed prior to capture as the ops on that ship were intensely trained to do. I did that work in the AF on RC135s and I know what the training and directives were and it was an easy thing to do. Apparently the Red radio traffic that went through this equipment was, indeed read by our NSA for some years after the Pueblo incident. I cannot remember the name of the book or the author and cannot find it online.
The Blues Image song Mystery Ship was about that incident and I always wondered if one of those boys was on the Pueblo or another such ship or A/C. I still play that song when I get nostalgic .
We lived in Yokohama in the 1950s-60s and had a friend of the family who worked for NSA. "No Such Agency," he always called it.
Ride Captain Ride
Open
1970 mp3
Seventy-three men sailed up
From the San Francisco Bay,
Rolled off of their ship
And here's what they had to say.
"We're callin' everyone to ride along
To another shore,
We can laugh our lives away
and be free once more."
But no one heard them callin',
No one came at all,
'Cause they were too busy watchin'
Those old raindrops fall.
As a storm was blowin'
Out on the peaceful sea,
Seventy-three men sailed off
To history.
Ride, captain ride
Upon your mystery ship,
Be amazed at the friends
You have here on your trip.
Ride captain ride
Upon your mystery ship,
On your way to a world
That others might have missed.
(Instrumental)
Seventy-three men sailed up
From the San Francisco Bay,
Got off their ship
And here's what they had to say.
"We're callin' everyone to ride along
To another shore,
We can laugh our lives away
And be free once more."
Ride, captain ride
Upon your mystery ship,
Be amazed at the friends
You have here on your trip.
Ride, captain ride
Upon your mystery ship,
On your way to a world
That others might have missed.
Ride, captain ride
Upon your mystery ship,
Be amazed at the friends
You have here on your trip