[Cryptography] USS Pueblo and crypto

[Jonathan Thornburg]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 12:12:37PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> In 1968 the spy ship USS Pueblo was captured by North Korea, allegedly in 
> their waters (but the Americans dispute this) after a 2-hour chase and the 
> death of a crew member; there was no time to destroy the classified 
> material.  The crew were held prisoner for 11 months, but the Pueblo 
> remains in North Korea as a war museum exhibit, and still remains a 
> commissioned USN ship (the only one still held in captivity).
> 
> Dunno what happened to the crypto stuff, but I'll bet that the Chinese were 
> slavering over it...

Laura Heath's thesis on John A Walker's spying (for the USSR),
  http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/heath.pdf
says there's some evidence (of course, not conclusive) that the Pueblo
seisure was orchestrated by the USSR, and that 792 pounds of equipment
and documents captured from the Pueblo were shipped to the USSR shortly
after the capture.

["792 pounds" strikes me as an odd value, since a USSR source would
probably quote a round number in kilograms, but 360kg = 793.4lbs.]

David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" says there were a fair number of warning
signs which the NSA missed/overlooked/ignored that the Pueblo's mission
might provoke a serious North-Korean response.  After the Pueblo's capture,
the NSA quietly ended the AGER spy-ship program (of which the Pueblo was
a member).

-- 
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <jthorn at astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
   Dept of Astronomy & IUCSS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
   "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched
    at any given moment.  How often, or on what system, the Thought Police
    plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.  It was even conceivable
    that they watched everybody all the time."  -- George Orwell, "1984"