I agree, and I think we also wanted to find out who is buying Scuds from North Korea. Why is that so difficult for Safire to figure out?
This statement is the one that bothers me. We simply could have followed the ship to port to learn a destination, but did we learn the true recipient? We could have easily spooked that out over time without the ship side intervention.
I do agree that sending Pyongyang a message was perhaps the key element of this exercise, but to many Americans the action looked like a SNAFU. I wonder how this exercise was portrayed in the Spanish media.