Spy Ships To Fight Back

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32053, 30 July 1969, Page 17

Spy Ships To Fight Back

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

WASHINGTON, July 29.

United States spy ships had been ordered to fight back in future if they were threatened while on electronic intelligence missions, the Pentagon announced yesterday.

The Defence Secretary (Mr Melvin R. Laird) said that “defensive action guidance, directing utilisation of all measures available to protect the ships from search and seizure, has been promulgated.”

‘Tor patrols entering sensitive areas.”

In addition, closer contact would be maintained with spy ships during* their missions. The Defence Secretary said that the crew aboard a ship embarking on a spy mission had been reduced, as had the amount of secret or classified material carried aboard. “Urgent Overhaul” A House of Representatives armed services sub-committee, in a report yesterday, said that its investigation of North Korea’s capture of the Pueblo and the shooting down of an electronic spy plane showed that the United States military command structure needed an urgent overhaul. The report criticised the response to the emergencies by military commanders when the Pueblo was captured last year and the unarmed Navy ECI2I reconnaissance plane was shot down last April. . The sub-committee said the advantages of America’s sophisticated communications equipment were often offset by indecisive and inefficient handling of these communications by the various commands involved.

He disclosed the directive, as part of a 10-point follow-up to North Korea’s seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo, in a letter to Mr Mendel L. Rivers (Democrat, South Carolina), chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. Because of the Pueblo’s capture on January 23, 1968, and the detention of its crew by North Korea for 11 months Mr Laird said that the Pentagon had reviewed all intelli-gence-gathering activities. “Scuttling Devices”

If the spy ships could not protect themselves, Mr Laird said, “new scuttling devices have been installed and new procedures implemented” so that they could avert capture.

Mr Laird reported that escorts or forces which could come to the aid of an attacked ship were being arranged