How to Respond to North Korean Attacks? Lessons from the Deadly Shootdown of an American EC-121
USN EC-121 — Similar to Downed Plane
[2023 Update: The US Department of State has released a formerly top secret 1981 memo from Secretary of State Al Haig to President Reagan advocating a tougher attitude toward the Soviet Union and its communist allies. Haig slammed to the American response to the 1969 North Korean shoot down of a US EC-121 surveillance plane. Wrote Haig: “I believe that our failure to respond adequately to that clear provocation set the course of the Soviet Union and its proxies for the duration of the Nixon Administration, a course that was, in the final analysis, more damaging than Watergate. The timidity that we displayed at that time invited new provocations elsewhere, particularly in Vietnam, that we were forced to deal with from an increasing position of weakness.” Given President Reagan’s approach to the Soviets, it seems likely he agreed with Haig’s analysis. See the full text of the memo at the bottom of this page.]
American Administrations have struggled to response to provocations from North Korea. “They caused a lot of damage, and we will respond. We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose,” President Obama promised on Dec. 19, 2014, responding to the cyber attack on Sony and threats of a 9/11-style attack, which the President attributed to North Korea.
Decades ago a different Administration promised to make North Korea pay after an even more serious attack, one that killed 31 Americans. The results of that face-off offer insights for today’s confrontation with Pyongyang. Then, as now, the U.S. was focused on conflicts outside Korea; in 1969 with North Vietnam (a North Korean ally) and today Iran and Syria (North Korean allies). Then, as now, the White House was intent on reducing U.S. military entanglements, not opening new battlefields. Then, as now, U.S. planners had to cut through Pyongyang’s bluster to divine actual intent; find tactical responses both effective and unlikely to spark a major conflict; and reassure Asian allies of American resolve. Then, as now, North Korea wanted to display its power, foment a sense of crisis and test American alliances. Then as now, the US struggled to find a way to respond to North Korea without creating worse problems or playing into Pyongyang’s hands.
On April 15, 1969, a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane helmed by Lt. Cmdr. James Overstreet was conducting a routine patrol over the Sea of Japan in international airspace, Korean and Russian linguists aboard to collect intelligence. Then American radar operators warned that two North Korean MiG fighters were streaking toward the plane. Before the slow-moving EC-121 could escape, the radar images merged. It soon became clear North Korea had shot down the plane, killing 31 Americans; Overstreet was one of 29 crewmembers never recovered and presumed dead. See source documents on the incident here.
While unremembered by many Americans today, the attack continues to generate bragging by North Korea’s official news service, which still claims the EC-121 violated DPRK airspace. “At the end of the 1960s, the air force of the KPA smashed U.S. large spy plane ‘EC-121’ into smithereens in the air to demonstrate its power again,” stated the (North) Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in 2012.
“It is probably more than coincidence that the downing occurred on Kim Il-song’s 57th birthday,” reported the State Department’s senior intelligence official on April 16, 1969. “(T)he most likely North Korean motivation, then, is self gratification and increased prestige for Kim Il-sung at the expense of the United States following a plan based on Pyongyang’s Pueblo experience.” [Note: the Sony hacking comes around the end of the three-year mourning period for former North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung and father of current leader Kim Jong Un.]
The Pueblo was a U.S. spy ship seized by North Korea the year before, during a campaign that included deadly attacks on U.S. ground troops and an unsuccessful attempt by a suicide squad to kill the South Korean president. The U.S., afraid to attack North Korea while it held the crew hostage, had been forced to apologize to Pyongyang in return for the Pueblo’s sailors.
These tensions with Pyongyang, though they seemed to be easing some by 1969, demanded increased U.S. intelligence collection, which had the paradoxical effect of keeping American reconnaissance assets in harm’s way (this issue, along with bungled risk analysis before the Pueblo and EC-121 incidents, is well explored in Flash Point North Korea: The Pueblo and EC-121 Crises, by Richard A. Mobley.)
Trying to extricate itself from Vietnam, and embarrassed by the Pueblo incident, the U.S. appeared to have limited stomach, and resources, for new battles. Soon after getting word of the EC-121 shoot down, President Nixon was also informed “there was an intelligence report of [Egyptian President] Nasser’s conversation with [Jordanian King] Hussein to the effect, ‘After all, it isn’t so risky to defy the United States — look at North Korea and the Pueblo,’ ” State Department records show.
“Kim Il-sung evidently has persuaded himself that the U.S. is overextended in Vietnam and elsewhere and that North Korea therefore can engage in such deliberate acts of defiance with relative impunity,” the CIA concluded on April 17, 1969. “The North Koreans probably made the decision to attack the reconnaissance aircraft on the assumption that there would either be no U.S. military response or at the most only a limited one, in the nature of a one-time retaliatory action.”
The North Koreans were right. U.S. forces did go on alert, including some with nuclear weapons, according to later reports. Planners soon suggested everything from military feints to naval bombardment of North Korea, along with a range of air strike options. One of the President’s first reactions was to seize a North Korean ship, which could be traded for the Pueblo, still in North Korean hands. The problem was the ship carried a Dutch crew and was registered in that country, raising complex diplomatic and legal issues.
“The President said to find a way that international law can be breached. The U.S. became a great nation by breaking international law,” according to State Department records of an April 15 telephone call between Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Assistant for National Security Affairs.
After much internal debate and public controversy, President Nixon decided not to grab the ship or launch a retaliatory air strike against the DPRK. Most of his military options raised the potential of a massive North Korean response and went against the “tide of general disenchantment (among Americans) with matters of a military nature,” as the Defense Secretary advised the President. Nixon instead settled for a naval show of strength and resumption of reconnaissance flights, with fighter cover. [The incident did prompt the White House to develop plans for responding to future North Korean attacks, including the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons. See more at this fascinating National Security Archive site.]
Once again Pyongyang had gotten away with attacking Americans at no significant cost. Back then, North Korea had a formidable military, but no advanced missiles or nuclear weapons as it does today. One wonders what lessons current leader Kim Jong Un takes from his grandfather’s 1969 “success.” Certainly Pyongyang’s cyber attack and nuclear threats to the American homeland mark a new level of threat (along with the potential of North Korean terrorists in the US, whose reported missions we revealed here.)
As for Nixon, he grew to regret not following his immediate instinct to bomb North Korea. The communist strategy, he later said, is: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw. I had feared in our handling of the EC-121 incident in 1969 the Communists may have thought they encountered mush.”
We’re not sure President Obama’s response in 2014, or most of the responses by other Presidents to North Korea, seemed any firmer to Pyongyang.
“36. Memorandum From Secretary of State Haig to President Reagan 1
SUBJECT
- Immediate Critical Choices in Foreign Policy
The success and future viability of your Presidency will be determined by foreign policy decisions you must make in the next few weeks. We are, right now, faced with several challenges from the Soviets and their surrogates which cannot be ignored or wished away. We did not seek the confrontation but we cannot now shirk it. If we respond with strength, wisdom, and skill, we will have set the stage for a decade of stability and peace. If we fail to respond—or respond with weakness—the Reagan Presidency will be marked by the same deterioration of international stability and the resulting loss of domestic support that brought Richard Nixon, Jerry Ford, and Jimmy Carter to their knees.
In April of 1969 Richard Nixon faced the first test of his Presidency when North Korea shot down an unarmed EC–121 aircraft over international waters.2 Henry Kissinger, whose own involvement in the U.S. response to that crisis prevents him from acknowledging the full magnitude of the disaster, nevertheless does say that:
I judge our conduct in the EC–121 crisis as weak, indecisive and disorganized—though it was much praised then. I believe we paid for it in many intangible ways, in demoralized friends and emboldened adversaries.3
My own judgment is even harsher than that. I believe that our failure to respond adequately to that clear provocation set the course of the Soviet Union and its proxies for the duration of the Nixon Administration, a course that was, in the final analysis, more damaging than [Page 120]Watergate. The timidity that we displayed at that time invited new provocations elsewhere, particularly in Vietnam, that we were forced to deal with from an increasing position of weakness. Having displayed our inability to confront the Soviets and their allies on the ground with anything more than the business-as-usual incrementalism which marked the McNamara approach to Vietnam, Nixon was forced to deal with the Soviet Union on highly unfavorable terms—including the signing of an unsatisfactory SALT treaty.4
The challenge today is more fundamental, and far broader. The world is waiting—friends and enemies alike—to see whether the United States will have the ability to confront the Soviets when there are costs involved. Great hopes have been placed on the new Administration, and on you personally, Mr. President, to reverse the retreat of the Free World in the face of the advances that the Soviet Union and its proxies have made over the last decade.
The Soviet invasion and continuing occupation of Afghanistan is the most flagrant and obvious manifestation of this move to encircle and divide its potential opponents, in the East as well as the West. However, Afghanistan was not the isolated episode that the Carter Administration sought to portray it as. It was a continuation of an historic trend of increasingly bold Soviet adventurism, continuing from the end of World War II through Vietnam and into the beginning of the Carter Presidency with the Ethiopian adventure.5 Carter’s failure to respond to this, the first instance of Soviet combat advisers being dispatched overseas, set the course of his disastrous relations with the Soviet Union.
The Soviets not only continue to occupy Afghanistan, but the increasing challenges continue. During the transition to your Presidency we have seen an unprecedented intervention by Cuba and other Soviet proxies in our own hemisphere. And after your inauguration the Soviets broke new ground with the dispatch of advisers to Chad, not in support of the government in power but in support of a Libyan invasion of an innocent neighbor.6
Because the hopes for your Presidency are so great, the consequences will be even more momentous if we fail or if we permit [Page 121]ourselves to be bullied into a “business as usual” pattern of behavior. The world might believe that the weakness of the Carter Administration could be corrected with an election, and that possibility must also have instilled the Soviets with some caution. But if this Administration, with this electoral mandate, cannot restore the United States to a position of world leadership, there will be no more hope that someone else might do the job four years from now. The hopes of our friends will be dashed; the ambitions of our enemies will become boundless. And the world could unravel with a speed that would make the events of the last decade seem benign by comparison.
You must very soon decide how the United States will respond to Soviet-inspired proxy adventurism, whether it be in Chad, El Salvador, Angola, Ethiopia, or elsewhere.
The USSR
The common denominator in each case is the USSR; thus you must begin by insisting that all members of your Administration follow a course best calculated to send Moscow signals of our determination to resist its challenge. We are, clearly, not yet ready to decide how we proceed with the USSR over the longer term. Too much has yet to be studied and decided. Above all, relative military trends must be reversed. We still have a strategic edge over the Soviets; but it is an edge that, no matter what we do, will be eroded by the middle of the decade. Today we can still deal with the Russians with some confidence that their perception of our military advantages will lead them to fall back when confronted. We may not have that card in our deck by 1985.
In these circumstances we must not take steps now that will foreclose options or make achievement of your goals over the next several years more difficult. It would, for example, be a major tactical and strategic error to lift the grain embargo now.7 The embargo was certainly an inadequate response to the strategic challenge of Afghanistan, and the broader challenge of Soviet and proxy adventurism. But it was the only meaningful U.S. response. To withdraw it now—with no new and more serious response in place—would signify the end of U.S. censure of Soviet behavior in Afghanistan, might well invite increased pressure on Poland, and would raise serious doubts about the will of the United States to confront the Soviets when there are costs involved. It would bring the concept of linkage into doubt at the outset of your Administration, and thoroughly confuse our Allies, who might well respond by relaxing their already minimal trade restrictions against the USSR.
Facing up to the Soviet proxy challenge cannot be postponed to a time when we have thought through the broader question of our relations with the Soviets. [Page 122]Indeed, how we respond to this adventurism will determine the future course of our relations with Moscow.
Cuba
The most obvious immediate issue you and your new Administration must face is how to respond to Cuban interventionism, most recently in El Salvador.8
We have been trying, through the interdepartmental process, to prepare for you a range of possible political and military responses to Cuban aggression. We have failed. So long as we leave it to the bureaucracy—no matter at what level—to recommend courses of action, we will get just what we now have: an insipid set of incremental steps that are, at one and the same time, too cautious and too dangerous. The modest steps suggested would demonstrate weakness and indecision, thereby sending our opponents a clear signal of our own weakness, while inviting an escalatory response. We, in turn, would then have to escalate, etc., etc. That is how we got into—and lost—Vietnam.
Cuba has been the Soviet instrument for intervention in Angola, Ethiopia, and now El Salvador. In every previous case we have chosen to object but not to act. This time, however, we have begun to counterattack in El Salvador. That effort must continue, but we must carry the El Salvador battle to its source: Cuba. Nor should we restrict our response wholly to this Hemisphere (discussed below). And to do that we must be prepared to act decisively politically, economically, and militarily. We must be prepared to demonstrate to the Cubans and Soviets that we are deadly serious through the imposition of a series of calculated steps ranging from diplomatic initiatives with Latin American and European Governments (which will leak) through strengthening our land, sea, and air forces in the Southeast United States, to the imposition of a blockade if necessary, and, finally, to a willingness to use force to carry out the blockade if we must.
Our objective ought to be to force Castro to foreswear intervention, whether in Central America or elsewhere, and to bring his troops home. I do not suggest that decisive action on our part would be cost-free. It would not. In the best of circumstances we would pay a price—temporary though it might be—in the Third World and initially with some of our Allies. And if our early threatening moves do not bring the desired results, then escalation must be inevitable, with all that would mean in terms of potential confrontation, allied concern, and domestic opposition.
But the cards are not all stacked against us. Cuba is an island off our shores, not a land-mass bordering on a neighbor ready to supply arms. It is engaged in propping up governments far from its own shores, against strong internal opposition. It is the Soviets and their proxies who have the supply and communications problem—and the political liability of suppressing internal opposition. And finally, it is the Soviet Union and Cuba who, when they see we are serious, will be put on the defensive, with the possibility that Moscow will tell Castro that he is on his own. And, should that happen, it is likely that Castro will blink before we have carried our threats very far.
Soviet flexibility right now is sharply limited because of the deep involvement in Afghanistan, events in Poland, an economy in deep and growing trouble, the continuing Chinese threat, and centrifugal pressures in Eastern Europe. Moscow will be hard pressed to respond with vigor. Dobrynin’s recent remarks to me about Cuba suggest that the Soviets are prepared, within certain limits, to see us reply to Castro’s provocations without becoming directly involved themselves. Thus, it is my belief that we have substantial room to maneuver against Cuba before the Soviets will feel forced to respond with much more than a propaganda campaign.
Libya
Qadhafi poses an equally real threat to the stability of the West. His intervention in the Chad, now augmented by Soviet advisers, presages a campaign of subversion in Northern Africa that poses another and related major challenge to vital Western interests. Here, too, we must act. But in this case, we have others who will act with us. The French, Sadat, and perhaps the British have had enough. Working with and through them, perhaps with the French and Egyptians in the lead, we can develop a scenario for reversing recent trends in and around Libya. Our objective would be to remove Qadhafi from power; our contribution to the common effort would be materiel support, but limited direct involvement.
There is an additional benefit, other than the obvious one, to acting against Qadhafi. It is already clear that there can be no solution, or substantial movement, for now to the Arab-Israeli problem; we are faced with some months of stalemate in the best of circumstances. [Page 124]And we are also faced with a nervous Western Europe that will surely take steps before the year is out that will strengthen the international role of the PLO, thereby making Arafat all the more intractable. Action against Qadhafi would deflect preoccupation in the area with the Israeli issue, while strengthening Sadat, the Saudis, and Israel at the same time.
Conclusion
I propose, not a direct confrontation with Moscow, but a series of measures aimed at forcing Moscow’s two most dangerous non-bloc proxies to cease and desist their incitement and support for revolution, whether it be in Central America, the Caribbean, Angola, Ethiopia, Chad or elsewhere. Cuba and Libya must be stopped now; if we delay today we will have to face them tomorrow, at far greater coast, and from a position of growing weakness.
But confrontation there might be, although I personally believe the Soviets will back off when confronted by a determined United States. If we are to show that determination we will have to act with skill on a range of issues including, but not limited to, Cuba and Libya. We will need an integrated program that includes support for Pakistan and the Afghan freedom fighters, makes effective use of the Egyptians, the French, the Israelis and others of like mind on Libya, and involves those in Latin America such as Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, who share our view on Cuba.
I would like to discuss with you the specific steps I have in mind. Thereafter, if you agree, I would ask that you instruct Cap Weinberger and Bill Casey to work with me in establishing several highly secret task forces to flesh out the details of operational political, economic, and military plans to implement the strategy I have described.
I would also like your authority to discuss with the French, and with President Sadat, the Israelis, and the Saudis, while on my Middle East trip, our thinking on Libya.9
In the meantime, I will be seeing Dobrynin soon, and will make it clear to him that whatever we do with regard to the challenges Moscow and Havana have imposed upon us will be a case of the punishment fitting the crime.10 Equally, I will emphasize that we have carrots as well as sticks available, and that Soviet moderation will be rewarded appropriately. But I will also make it clear that challenges by Soviet surrogates will be met in kind, that the USSR cannot escape [Page 125]responsibility for its indirect acts any more than for what it does directly, and that the course of U.S.-Soviet relations over the coming years will be determined by Moscow’s conduct.
That must be our strong and consistent message to Moscow and to those who do Moscow’s bidding. But a message without acts is an empty gesture that but proves the weakness of will of the messenger. You, and your country, will be judged in the years to come by how you act now.”
Distraught Villager Restrained Trying to Eat Heart from Dead NK Soldier Seven Members of this Man’s Family Killed by NK Team
