TOKYO (Reuters) [1.26.98] North Korea has turned the Pueblo, a U.S. navy intelligence ship captured 30 years ago, into a tourist attraction to attract badly needed foreign exchange, a Japanese scholar said Monday. Shinobu Oe, professor emeritus of contemporary history at Ibaraki University, told Reuters he visited the North Korean port of Wonsan, where the vessel is docked, on October 29. "As far as I know the North Koreans have been showing the ship to Japanese tourists since August," Oe said. "They tell tourists it's the Pueblo." The capture of the Pueblo and its crew by North Korean patrol boats off Wonsan in January 1968 held the administration of then-U.S. President Lyndon Johnson at bay for months. Japan's Asahi newspaper Monday published a photograph Oe took of the ship, which showed it bristling with antennae and wires. The professor said he could only view the ship from the dock. "It sure looks like the Pueblo," said a U.S. embassy naval attache in Tokyo who saw the photograph. Oe said North Koreans at the port gave no information about the ship or how it had been used for the past 30 years. Attracting foreign currency has become increasingly important to North Korea after years of economic decline and failed harvests that have left the isolated Stalinist nation struggling to feed its people. The standoff prompted by Pyongyang's seizure of the Pueblo 30 years ago led to a U.S. state of naval alert rivalling the Cuban missile crisis in 1963. The crew was finally released in December 1968, but the ship stayed in North Korean hands. Pyongyang portrayed the incident as a huge blow to the prestige of the U.S. superpower, which was then in the throes of the controversial Vietnam War. == The information standard is more draconian than the gold standard, because the government has lost control of the marketplace. -- Walter Wriston == http://www.dis.org/erehwon/