The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Read online

  The showdown on the withdrawal issue came on April 11, when Brzezinski met with the secretaries of state and defense and the administration’s senior Asia experts. Brzezinski informed Carter in advance that based on his soundings, “everybody, even Vance, is against you” on the troop withdrawal. Carter pleaded with his subordinate, “Zbig, you’ve got to protect me. This is my last foreign policy proposal from the campaign I haven’t walked away from.”

  Although most of the policy advisers privately had grave doubts about the US troop withdrawal, none was so bold as to say so in the White House Situation Room. They believed, as Brown acknowledged later, that officials “had either to support [Carter’s] decision or resign.” Instead, the officials made a case for delaying the withdrawal because of the unwillingness of Congress to approve funds to compensate South Korea as promised. “The issue is not the withdrawal but the Park Tong Sun affair,” Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke told the meeting. “Because of ‘Koreagate,’ congressmen fear political retribution at the polls if they vote for any sort of aid to Korea this year.” Moreover, Holbrooke said, to proceed with withdrawal without the aid package would be seen “as part of a retreat from East Asia” and could torpedo the administration’s plans to normalize American relations with China. Michael Armacost, then a National Security Council staff member and later US ambassador to Tokyo, warned of “extraordinarily adverse consequences in Japan” if troops were withdrawn without providing compensating aid as promised. The Defense Department’s Morton Abramowitz said that proceeding without the compensation package would likely bring about the resignation of General Vessey, the US military commander in Korea. He added that such a move “will lose the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” which had reluctantly accepted the withdrawal policy.

  With Brown, Vance, and most of the others counseling delay or cancellation of the next withdrawal element, only Brzezinski addressed the real but unspoken issue. “This [withdrawal policy] may have been the wrong decision, but now it has been made. We cannot afford to go back on it,” the NSC adviser said. In the end, Brzezinski devised and sold Carter on a plan to water down rather than delay the first pullout of combat troops, limiting the immediate withdrawal to only one battalion of troops, about eight hundred men, plus about twenty-six hundred noncombat personnel, instead of the planned six thousand combat troops, with the rest theoretically to come out later. As many in the meeting hoped and assumed, the administration’s rollback signaled that further withdrawals were much less likely.

  Carter reluctantly accepted the face-saving maneuver. In private he bitterly upbraided Brown for seeking to stymie his program. He expected more loyalty, he told his defense secretary heatedly. Brown was surprised at Carter’s outburst but stood his ground, saying he felt obligated to give his best advice and judgment in private, especially since he had been the administration’s point man in defending the withdrawal in congressional testimony. Having found himself earlier in his long governmental career intimidated by the powerful opinions of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Brown was determined to tell Carter what he really thought despite potential damage to their relationship. “Carter felt he was up against the establishment” on the touchy withdrawal issue, said Brown, “whereas we felt we were trying to save him from doing things that would cause big trouble with allies.”

  THE VIEW FROM PYONGYANG

  In Pyongyang Kim Il Sung was keenly aware of Carter’s proposal to withdraw American troops from South Korea. Such a move had long been one of Kim’s central goals, in the belief that this would lead inevitably to reuniting the peninsula under his leadership, whether by peaceful or violent means. In public and in private, Kim had made Washington enemy number one, harshly condemning the United States for a variety of real or imagined sins, from dividing the peninsula in 1945 to sustaining Park Chung Hee as a military dictator. On the eve of Carter’s inauguration, however, the harsh rhetoric softened, and the “American imperialist aggressor army” became simply “American forces” in Pyongyang’s statements. The Panmunjom incident was blamed specifically on the outgoing Ford administration rather than on the US generally, giving the incoming president a clean slate in Pyongyang.

  Behind the scenes, Kim made energetic efforts to engage Carter directly. In November 1976, immediately after Carter’s election, Kim sent a personal letter through the president of Pakistan to the US president-elect at Plains, Georgia, asking for direct contact. This was followed in February 1977 by a message to Secretary of State Vance from North Korean foreign minister Ho Dam, through the US Embassy in Pakistan, expressing Pyongyang’s desire to avoid confrontation with the United States, to pursue reunification peacefully, and to open direct US-DPRK peace talks, which at least initially would exclude South Korea. The American reply expressed interest in discussions with the North, including discussions of “more permanent Armistice arrangements,” but only if Seoul was permitted to participate fully.* At the time, this was a nonstarter in Pyongyang. In gestures to Pyongyang, Carter lifted the ban on travel to North Korea by US citizens in March and for the first time invited North Korea’s UN representative to an official US reception.

  In July 1977, in this era of high expectations, a US Army helicopter strayed over the northern side of the DMZ and was shot down, killing three crewmen and leaving the fourth a captive. In a remarkably mild reaction, Carter described the flight as a mistake and played down the conflict. In response, North Korea returned the bodies and the captured American within three days, an unprecedentedly short time for such a move.

  Yet as Carter was forced to modify and stretch out his program of American withdrawal, Kim became increasingly critical. “Carter has not kept his election pledges,” Kim told visitors, charging that the withdrawal pledges were “aimed at deceiving the world.” In a talk with a Japanese editor, Kim bitterly called the US president “a con man” because of his changing stance on Korean issues.

  In early-December 1977, Kim received a visit from Erich Honecker, the general secretary of the East German Socialist Unity (Communist) Party, who came to be one of Kim’s closest and most useful overseas friends. Both were lifelong revolutionaries who had advanced to high places with Soviet backing. Like Korea, Germany had been divided as a result of World War II. East Germany, like North Korea, was struggling to survive against a more populous and more prosperous capitalistic regime across a heavily militarized dividing line. Encouraged by the Soviet Union and recognizing the similarities, East Germany had been an important source of economic aid during all of North Korea’s existence. The major difference, and one that apparently worried Kim, was that East Germany was half of a divided country but did not pursue unification—the USSR’s view was that a unified Germany was a threat to the peace—whereas Pyongyang’s strongly held position was that Korea had offended no one and had been divided arbitrarily and unjustly after the war.

  Kim prepared meticulously to receive Honecker, whom he had never met. To flatter his guest, he staged a mass rally of close to a half-million people, including North Korean musicians performing revolutionary German songs from Honecker’s glory days as a youth leader. “It was the biggest reception of his lifetime. This old man was in tears,” said an East German diplomat who was present.

  The transcript of the confidential discussions with Honecker on December 10 provides a window into Kim’s private views in the late 1970s. While acknowledging that his country faced problems, many of which he attributed to “American imperialism,” Kim was supremely confident of his position and the ascendancy of his self-reliant juche ideology. Kim declared that his number-one priority was unification of the country, and he outlined three strategic directions that he had set forth in the early 1960s and adhered to for the rest of his life: “first, to successfully carry out the organization of socialism in the northern part of the country; second, to support the revolutionary struggle in South Korea; third, to develop solidarity and unity with the international revolutionary forces.”

  Kim first described
for his guest the extraordinary mobilization of the population, something he justified as necessary to create a powerful revolutionary base for the Korean peninsula and beyond. He told Honecker without overstatement that “everyone, apart from infants, is included in the organizational life” of the nation. Of North Korea’s 17 million people, at that time 2.2 million were in the Workers Party (a relatively high percentage compared with other communist countries),* and except for infants all the others belonged to various organizations of children, youths, women, farmers, or workers.

  Kim also described the social engineering that was so much a part of North Korea. To “revolutionize and reform women, according to the example of the working class,” according to Kim, they were being “freed from heavy domestic work” and placed in jobs outside the home. About 80 percent of farmworkers were women, he said, and over 90 percent of workers in light industry. Without giving numbers, he explained that this was necessary because “many young people in our country are in the army.” To compensate for the absence of mothers and to start inculcating its ideology early, North Korea had built nurseries and kindergartens for 3.5 million children so they could be “taken care of and educated by society.”

  Absent from Kim’s briefing was mention of the fact that despite North Korea’s strenuous efforts, by 1977 the balance of economic power on the peninsula was shifting decisively in favor of the South. In the first decades after the Korean War, the North’s centrally directed economy had recovered from the destruction and grown faster than the South’s. But in the early 1960s, the two economies took decisive turns: the North opted for an inner-directed one, centered on building heavy industry at home and shying away from integration with the outside; the South, guided by American-trained Korean economists and the promise of a share in the American and Japanese markets, turned toward an externally directed economy centered on exports and initially on light industry. These fateful turns eventually determined the outcome of the economic race on the peninsula, and they deeply affected the political and diplomatic spheres as well.

  By the mid-1970s, by most outside estimates, the North’s juche economy was falling behind. The North’s GNP, adjusted for inflation, doubled between 1965 and 1976, a highly creditable performance for a developing economy. But at the same time, South Korea’s real GNP more than tripled. In the mid-1970s, as poverty was reduced below the thirty-eighth parallel, South Korea passed the North in per capita GNP for the first time since the division of the country.

  Part of North Korea’s economic problem was its heavy spending for military purposes. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the North devoted an estimated 15 to 20 percent of its economy to its military. The South spent an average of 5 percent on its military, though due to Park’s massive armament program the proportion briefly jumped to near 10 percent in the mid-1970s.

  In the early 1970s, with the bad timing that has often plagued its decisions, Pyongyang abruptly shifted its autarkic policies to a “great leap outward,” purchasing entire factories from Western Europe and Japan, in a burst of economic activity that matched its sudden outwardly directed drive for negotiations with the South. One Japanese-Danish venture, for example, was to provide North Korea with the largest cement factory in the world. But in the worldwide economic dislocation following the 1973 Middle East war and oil embargo, North Korea found itself unable to meet the fast-rising payments on its external debts. As a result, its access to international credit was severely restricted, whereas South Korea’s growing international trade made it a major player on the global scene.

  Soft-pedaling these troubling trends, Kim reiterated his belief in the superiority of the North, notably in regard to the revolutionary struggle in the South. Referring to the fight that he and his guerrilla band had waged against the Japanese, while Park Chung Hee and others were serving in the Japanese army, Kim expressed confidence in his superiority because “the leading circles of South Korea are traitors, whereas we here are patriots.” Contrary to existing evidence and belief in the South, Kim claimed that North Korean communists had been behind the student revolution that overthrew the regime of Syngman Rhee in 1960 and that the United States had organized the military junta headed by General Park Chung Hee that took power in 1961. In all these years, said Kim, the South Korean students had supported North Korea and “have not demonstrated against us even a single time,” although they had demonstrated repeatedly against “the puppet regime.”

  Kim expressed to Honecker a hoary tenet of North Korean policy, that after the withdrawal of US troops, when the South Korean people chose their own way, “then they would choose the way of socialism.” In the meantime, he said, the crucial objective for the North was to isolate Park and his government rather than return to the 1972–1973 era of North-South dialogue. The Americans hoped to see dialogue restarted, he said, but “if we get together with Park Chung Hee and hold negotiations, there is the danger of weakening the South Korean political forces who are opposing Park Chung Hee.” This belief that their own policies had a significant impact on the possibility of revolution in the South was more central to Pyongyang’s calculations than most outsiders realized.

  On the first day of his visit, Honecker committed East Germany to having “no relations” with South Korea, but Kim continued to stress the need to isolate the South, perhaps in hopes that his visitor would pass along his views to Moscow, which Pyongyang always watched nervously for signs of apostasy on the Korean question. Honecker’s pledge would prove to be costly to East Germany; over the years that followed, each time the GDR was tempted to trade with the South, a sharp protest from Pyongyang reminded Honecker of his commitment, and the proposed deal was squelched.

  Honecker at the time was considered a slavish follower of Soviet leadership, and thus Kim made special efforts to persuade him that he was not leaning to the Chinese side in the decades-long Sino-Soviet split. The North Korean leader emphasized his troubles with Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, complaining that the Chinese had set up giant loudspeakers at the Sino-Korean border and delivered deafening attacks on “Korean revisionists” from 5:00 A.M. to midnight every day. Since those days, relations had been repaired, but “we do not follow China blindly,” Kim emphasized. On the other hand, he added, “We also do not participate in the Soviet Union’s polemics against China.” Opting out of the Sino–Soviet conflict “does not mean that we are opportunists, but that the situation does not allow us anything else.”

  Finally, talks dealt with Kim’s views of Japan and the United States. Although he was concerned about the danger of a revival of Japanese militarism, Kim conceded that “the Japanese nation is not as it was before” due to the lessons learned from World War II and the US atomic bomb attacks. Looking to the future, he declared that a triumph of communism on the Korean peninsula would be “beneficial for stimulating the revolution in Japan.”

  As for the United States, after nearly a year of trying to make contact with the new American president, Kim was scornful about Carter. The decision to stretch out the US troop withdrawal from South Korea was “a deceitful maneuver against the people” and an attempt to manipulate public opinion, Kim told Honecker.

  Kim confided that his military reconnaissance teams constantly observed US maneuvers in South Korea. American officers were uncomfortably aware of this aspect of the secret war on the divided peninsula. In 1975 a North Korean reconnaissance team was discovered while photographing and sketching the US air base at Kwangju and a nearby ROK missile site, and in 1976 a North Korean team wearing ROK-style uniforms covered sixty to seventy miles on foot south of the DMZ before being caught. By the time of the Kim-Honecker meeting, the US Command in Seoul had acknowledged in a confidential report that “the North can infiltrate or exfiltrate its agents or special warfare units by land, sea or air to virtually any location within the ROK.” On the other hand, American and South Korean operations inside North Korea were extremely limited. US knowledge of North Korean military affairs, however, was beginning
to receive much higher priority.

  END OF THE CARTER WITHDRAWAL

  An important assumption underlying Carter’s plan was that during and after the departure of American ground troops, the military balance on the peninsula would remain favorable to the South. Even before Carter came to office, however, this assumption was being thrown into doubt by new US intelligence estimates that depicted the North’s military forces as much more numerous and better armed than previously believed. The new estimates proved to be a fatal blow to Carter’s already embattled withdrawal plan.

  The beginning of the end started with a twenty-nine-year-old intelligence analyst named John Armstrong, who in May 1975 was bent over a light table at Fort Meade, Maryland, scrutinizing aerial photographs of North Korean tanks. Armstrong, a West Point graduate who had served in Vietnam before becoming a civilian analyst for the army, had been laboriously counting the tanks when he reached a surprising conclusion: there were many more than expected on the basis of earlier reports. Within a few weeks, Armstrong identified an entirely new tank division (about 270 tanks and 100 armored personnel carriers) in a valley about fifty miles north of the DMZ.

  For many years, the principal source of intelligence on North Korea had been aerial photography from American spy planes and reconnaissance satellites, augmented by electronic eavesdropping. Because the central US military concern was a surprise attack, the photographs were carefully examined for evidence of southward movement or other signs of impending assault, then filed away. Until Armstrong came along, there was little effort to compare the overall strength of North Korean units in the latest pictures with those of previous months or years.