THE MOST IMPORTANT question to be answered about the Pueblo incident is what led the North Koreans to carry out their daring and successful raid on a U.S. Navy ship. This question is heightened by the fact that North Korea, in spite of its sizable land forces and its Soviet-built air force, remains a third-rate conventional military power only recently recovered from the destruction of the Korean War. Its factories, hydroelectric plants, railways, and airfields are highly concentrated and vulnerable targets well known to American intelligence. There is, of course, no complete and satisfactory answer; but a close look at North Korea's current position in the international Communist movement, the country's domestic problems, and the views of its leaders on the problem of Korean reunification can give some insight into the origins of the episode.

North Korea's stand in the international Communist movement has been characterized by its striving for noncommitment between the Soviet Union and China. But noncommitment has been elusive because of a variety of factors: the country's size (a territory of only 46,800 square miles with a population of less than thirteen million), its location (the only Communist country besides Mongolia having common borders with both China and the Soviet Union), and its status as a divided country with U.S. forces stationed immediately to the south.

In the face of this American presence, the North Korean regime could only have been irritated by Khrushchev's views on peaceful coexistence as enunciated at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. Pyongyang-Moscow relations were worsened, too, by Khrushchev's advocacy at the same meeting of the elimination of the cult of personality, which prompted a number of ambitious North Korean Communists to attempt in vain to undermine the position of party boss Kim 11 Sung. And in the example of Khrushchev's roughness toward smaller Communist parties such as the Albanian, the North Korean leadership saw a potential menace to the independence of the Korean Workers' Party (KWP).

In 1962, shortly after Albania's exclusion from the Communist commonwealth and under the direct impact of Khrushchev's Cuban fiasco, the North Korean Communists began to follow a pro-Chinese (and consequently anti-Soviet) line. For the next two years or so, they were China's staunchest ideological allies except for the Albanians.

The Soviet Predicament

With the ouster of Khrushchev in October, 1964, North Korean politics entered a new phase. In the emergence of the new Soviet leadership, the Pyongyang regime saw an opportunity to steer the country back toward what it considered to be an uncommitted stand. Soviet military aid was soon resumed, and trade relations between North Korea and the Soviet Union were normalized. But the balance had just been regained when the Chinese Cultural Revolution intervened. Maoist extremism in China and Peking's growing pressure on other parties for ideological allegiance inevitably alienated the North Koreans. Thus, somewhat unwillingly, North Korea began to lean even more toward Moscow, forming closer ties economically, politically, and in party affairs.
This change, however, does not necessarily mean that the Russians are now "in" in Pyongyang. When advising the North Korean regime on delicate political situations such as the one arising from the Pueblo seizure, Moscow may have some difficulty in recommending caution, for the dogmatists in Pyongyang would be ready to cite such advice as new evidence of Moscow's inclination "to preach class collaboration and to give up fighting imperialism." In order to avoid that stigma, the Soviet leaders are careful not to take the role of peacemaker. Yet at the, same time they must be aware that relatively small incidents may easily lead to regional conflicts or even to a world conflagration.

All this shows that on a number of fundamental issues the differences between the North Korean and the Soviet leaders remain substantial. North Korea continues to profess an attitude of plain hatred toward the United States equaled only by that of Cuba. This policy has been mainly a response to the presence of American troops south of the Demilitarized Zone, which the North
Korean leadership apparently believes to be the mainstay of the present South Korean government. Despite evidence to the contrary, Pyongyang seems convinced that were it not for the U.S. troops, the South Korean people would be both willing and able to overthrow the government. Thus North Korea's task is not only to encourage but also actively to stir up the Koreans in the South to opposition against their government and its American ally.

Kim Il Sung believes that the North Korea should form a "powerful revolutionary base" that would guarantee the eventual reunification of Korea. But in spite of tremendous economic assistance furnished to North Korea by other members of the Communist bloc after the Korean War and the relative success it has achieved in the construction of an industrial base, its economy is still beset with difficulties.

North Korea's siding with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute led to Soviet economic retaliation. The need to build up a domestic weapons industry created by the discontinuation of Soviet military assistance severely affected the country's overall economic development. The ambitious targets of the Seven-Year Plan (1961-1967) remain unfulfilled. In October, 1966, the party openly admitted its failure and, while blaming the difficulties on the Sino-Soviet conflict, announced the prolongation of the plan for another three years. The building of a defense industry remains the regime’s major preoccupation and continues to retard the development of the economy. October, 1966, also marked the beginning of Pyongyang's more belligerent policy toward South Korea. At the party conference held in that month, Kim Il Sung called reunification a supreme national task and an urgent question "that brooks no further delay."

Since then, the time limit has been even more closely defined. "We must accomplish the South Korean revolution, unify the fatherland in our generation," Kim pledged at a session of the North Korean "parliament" last December. "The people in the northern half of the republic should always remember their brothers in the South and be determined to liberate them at all costs . . . . They should be firmly prepared ... to accomplish the cause of unification by joining hands with the South Korean people whenever called upon to come to their aid as the struggle of the people surges forward and the revolutionary situation ripens in South Korea."

The primary cause for this urgency is Pyongyang 's expressed concern over the fact that after more than twenty years of separation, "the gulf between North and South Korea is growing wider in the political, economic, and cultural spheres." In Kim's words: "The national community of our people formed through long history is gradually fading away.

Trained for Action

The stress placed on the speedy reunification of the two halves of Korea at the last conference of the KWP almost immediately resulted in a numerical increase in North Korean infiltrators in the South. But it was not only a matter of numbers: the character of the infiltration activity changed from action-agent espionage into a plainly military enterprise. In newly established training centers in North Korea, handpicked military personnel (preferably with family connections in the South) are being trained to slip into South Korea and to carry out subversive activities ranging from sabotage to assassination.

The band of North Korean infiltrators that was captured some five hundred yards from the South Korean Presidential Palace on the night of January 21 possessed all the characteristics of a well-trained infiltration unit. Among its members were regular officers of the (North) Korean People's Army (KPA). Consisting of thirty-one members, the unit was divided into three teams armed with modern infantry weapons, including anti-tank grenades. It was dispatched to assassinate South Korean President Chung Hee Park and other political figures. Unlike the infiltrators into South Vietnam, however, the North Korean teams have found no underground support in South Korea, whose citizens feel they have a stake in their country's development. In fact, they have turned in many of the infiltrators.

Simultaneously with the increase of infiltration activity there has been a noticeable increase in the number of border incidents along the 155 mile-long Demilitarized Zone. According to frequently quoted figures, the number of incidents rose from fifty in 1966 to some 550 in 1967. Significantly, one of the sharpest of such incidents, signaling the beginning of a new phase of activity, took place during President Johnson's visit to Seoul in November, 1966 less than a month after the last KWP conference.

The sudden increase in North Korean belligerence was clearly connected with the changes that occurred in the leadership of the KWP at that conference. Of the eleven full and alternate members newly elected to the Politburo, six held the rank of general. They included such high-ranking military figures as the chief of the KPA'S general staff, General Choe Kwang; the director of the KPA General Political Bureau, General 0 Chin U; and the Minister of Public Security, General Sok San. The Minister of Defense, General Kim Chang Pong, was promoted from alternate to full membership in the Politburo.

What moved Marshal Kim 11 Sung and his military followers to adopt such a belligerent policy immediately after the party conference? The stepping up of North Korean infiltration into the South is undoubtedly designed to slow the spectacular economic progress of South Korea and to spread uneasiness and fear among the population. In contrast to the setbacks in North Korea, during the first South Korean Five-Year Plan (1962-1966) agricultural production rose thirty-seven per cent and the gross national product grew some 8.5 per cent a year. Historically, South Korea, with forty-five per cent of the land area and over two-thirds of the population of the peninsula, has been the poorer region. Thanks to some $4.5 billion in U.S. aid and the energy of the people in a revitalized economy, this is not true today, and the picture of progress in the South is rankling to the regime in Pyongyang.

The increase in the incidents along the Demilitarized Zone is aimed at assisting the Vietnamese Communists by diverting the attention of the United States and by making it difficult for South Korea to send additional troops to South Vietnam. And the North Korean Communists take advantage of the incidents they provoke along the Demilitarized Zone to remind their own population of the constant danger of "imperialist aggression," and to demand of them more vigilance, higher work efficiency, and more production.

Creators of Consternation

The bellicose leaders in Pyongyang have on the whole been successful in their calculations. While the damage caused to the South Korean economy by direct sabotage can hardly be measured in absolute terms, the Republic's economy has undoubtedly been strained by the expense of maintaining an army of 550,000 men, an estimated 200,000 more than the North Koreans have under arms. The recent commando attempt on Seoul, the first since the Korean War, was aimed at spreading confusion not only among the population but in the government as well. The growing intensity of infiltration from the North has induced the government to delay any increase in the number of South Korean units already in Vietnam. Further intensification of the raids could even lead to the recall of some or all of the 47,000 Koreans now serving in South Vietnam.

Finally, the partial success of the commando raid has created serious discord between the United States and the South Korean government. The South Koreans resent American preoccupation with the fate of the eighty-two captured crew members of the Pueblo at a time when, in their opinion, a much larger issue is at stake. The direct secret negotiations held over the Pueblo affair between American and North Korean representatives (from which the South Koreans were excluded) did not strengthen the confidence of the Republic's authorities in the solidarity of its partnership with the United States.

While the seizure of the Pueblo was not directly connected with the increase of North Korean infiltration in the South, it was by no means accidental. The North Korean leadership knows that the United States is deeply preoccupied with the war in Vietnam. Already under attack by domestic and foreign critics of the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. administration would think carefully before getting involved in a war with North Korea for the sake of rescuing an intelligence ship and its crew.

The North Koreans did not miscalculate. The seizure of the Pueblo took the United States by surprise. And it so happened that this diversion coincided with the Vietcong assault in the cities of South Vietnam. American attempts to prevent the capture, undoubtedly expected by the North Korean military who sent out eight MIG-21s to cover the maneuver, failed to materialize. Whether the capture of the Pueblo was a long premeditated action or was prompted by Pyongyang's firm belief that the U.S. intruded into North Korean territorial waters, the ease with which the seizure was executed and the lack of American retaliation can only lead to further experiments in what the Communists call "adventurism" and silence the more cautious elements, if any exist.

The Pueblo case has undoubtedly strengthened the influence of the North Korean military. It must also have reinforced their conviction that while involved in a war in Vietnam, the United States cannot afford to open a second front in Korea. But if not a second front, North Korea has now become a second source of major disturbances.