In the long history of Cold War back-and-forth spy games between the U.S. and Russia, one of the most notable incidents came with the capture by North Korea of an American research destroyer off the North Korean coast. The USS Pueblo was stationed in what they considered international waters, listening in on communist radio transmissions, when it was approached by several armed North Korean vessels and ordered to surrender. Outgunned and outmaneuvered, the Pueblo had no choice but to comply.

On this day, January 23rd, in 1968, the USS Pueblo officially surrendered to the North Koreans. Air support was promised (the ship was in constant radio contact with headquarters during the incident) but could not be scrambled in time. Worse than the loss of the ship and its men was the amount of sensitive intelligence that was captured with it – documents and data as well as a code machine that was used for top-secret American communication.

The crew of the Pueblo, though treated harshly as prisoners of war, were unrepentant. They snuck in secret jabs against their captors wherever they could: in a number of staged propaganda photos, a service-member or two had their middle finger extended. Their captain, in a forced confession wrote “We paean (praise) the DPRK [North Korea]. We paean the Korean people. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung.”