The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Read online

  With the plans drawn up and already in motion, Habib reported to Washington that “only the most drastic, positive and immediate actions by the U.S. might turn Park from the course on which he has embarked.” In a pivotal judgment that established the limits of American engagement, Habib declared that “it is not incumbent upon the U.S. to take on the responsibility of getting Park to reverse his course within the next few hours. Nevertheless, we believe that in the long run, Park is creating major problems for himself and for his relationship with us and with others.” Habib recommended that “we should be extremely circumspect in our public comments while making it clear that we are not in any way associated with the government’s internal actions.”

  Washington accepted the advice of its ambassador and decided not to oppose Park’s actions. The State Department cabled Habib, “We agree that [Park’s] contemplated measures are unnecessary, and have grave reservations about the course he has embarked upon.” Habib was instructed to tell Park that taking such a far-reaching decision without a serious exchange of views with the United States was “incomprehensible in light of the past sacrifices and present support which we have given to the Republic of Korea and specifically to the present government.” Nevertheless, no action was recommended to change Park’s mind. If he were asked whether the United States would recommend against imposing martial law, Habib was instructed to answer that “this is an internal matter. . . . It is up to him to decide.”

  Washington’s main concern seemed to be the proposed public statement accompanying the announcement, citing the American rapprochement with China and the resulting international fluidity as among the new perils to the Republic of Korea that justified drastic action. Habib was instructed to protest these statements, and in Washington Secretary of State William Rogers took them up personally with Korean ambassador Kim Dong Jo—all before the bombshell declaration was made public in Seoul. The references to US policy in the prepared announcement were dropped, although to Washington’s displeasure some references to maneuvering by “big powers” were retained. The Korean foreign minister solemnly told Habib that the phrase “big powers” was not intended to include the United States.

  After Park’s announcement had been made and tanks and troops had been put into the streets to implement martial law, after political figures had been arrested or silenced and the sometimes-feisty Korean press had been placed under heavy censorship, Habib took a more careful look at the implications of what was being done. In an October 23 cable to Washington, the ambassador reported:

  It is clear that Park has turned away from the political philosophy which we have been advocating and supporting in Korea for 27 years. The characteristics of the discarded system which he regarded as weaknesses—the limitations on executive powers, the dissent and inherent uncertainties which arise in direct presidential elections—we regard as strengths. Because of our historic relationship with Korea, our security commitments, and the presence of a substantial number of American troops, we are confronted with the problem of our reaction to these developments.

  Habib reported that attempting to dissuade Park from the course of action he had chosen would be “impractical,” but that seeking to soften the repressive aspects of new policies would be seen as giving tacit US endorsement to the yushin plan as a whole. What remained, Habib concluded, was “a policy of disassociation,” in which the United States would say it had not been consulted or involved in Park’s actions and would stay clear of involvement in the reorganization of the Korean political system. In his cable, the ambassador faced squarely the consequences of the hands-off policy he recommended:

  In following such a course we would be accepting the fact that the U.S. cannot and should no longer try to determine the course of internal political development in Korea. We have already begun a process of progressively lower levels of U.S. engagement with Korea. The process of disengagement should be accelerated. The policy we propose would be consistent with the disengagement trend, and Park’s actions will contribute to the process.

  Three days later Washington responded: “We agree with the Embassy’s preference for a posture of disassociation. . . . In furtherance of this policy, we intend to refrain from arguing with the ROK in public, and seek to advance our counsel privately only where necessary and appropriate.” When Prime Minister Kim Jong Pil visited the US capital three months later, President Nixon told him privately that “unlike other presidents, it is not my intention to interfere in the internal affairs of your country.” With these decisions, most of which were never announced, the United States acquiesced in a diminished role in South Korea’s political future.

  North Korea did not seem to mind Park’s shift to a more authoritarian system that was more like its own arrangements, possibly believing that this would make it easier to negotiate accords with him. On October 21, in the immediate aftermath of martial law, the two Koreas jointly announced that KCIA chief Lee Hu Rak would travel to Pyongyang on November 2 for another meeting with Kim Il Sung and that North Korea would send a top-level negotiator to Seoul shortly thereafter. The joint announcement was taken as a sign that the North-South dialogue remained on track.

  THE IMPACT OF YUSHIN

  Within the South Korean body politic, the imposition of Park’s yushin system provoked intense opposition from many quarters. Acting through the KCIA, the Army Security Command, and his increasingly powerful personal bodyguards, Park sought to silence all those who interfered or disagreed with his policies by temporary detention, arrest, or imprisonment. In a brutal procedure known as the Korean barbecue, some opponents were strung up by their wrists and ankles and spread-eagled over a flame in KCIA torture chambers; others were subjected to water torture by repeated dunking or the forcing of water down their throats.

  Chang Chun Ha, a distinguished Korean nationalist, told me how he had been seized on his way downtown and taken to a KCIA jail for a week of nearly continuous interrogation, in an unsuccessful effort to persuade him to endorse Park’s martial-law “reforms.” Meanwhile, his distraught family, as his captors repeatedly pointed out to him, did not know what had happened to him or if he would ever return. Three years later, Chang, an independent-minded man who had fought for Korean independence while Park was in the Japanese army, was killed under mysterious circumstances that the government attributed to a mountain-climbing mishap but that his family and friends believed was political assassination. A doctor who examined Chang’s body was beaten and intimidated by the secret police, but he broke his silence many years later to declare that Chang’s wounds were inconsistent with a fall from a cliff and to suggest that he had been murdered. (The case was back in the news again in 2012, an old wound reopened, when the body was exhumed and his remains relocated.)

  Security organs worked hard to stifle the Korean press. For more than a year following the yushin decree, KCIA operatives came daily to major Korean newspapers and broadcast stations to tell them what news they could or could not report, at times specifying the size of the headlines and the prominence of the display to be given to particular items. Due to this system, Park’s picture and activities dominated the news. If Korean editors or reporters resisted, they were called in for grilling and often beaten.

  Not all dissent was silenced. The most articulate, authoritative, and unbridled voice of opposition was Kim Dae Jung, Park’s opponent in the hotly contested 1971 presidential race and a favorite son of the rebellious southwestern provinces of Cholla, where long ago an independent Korean kingdom had existed. Before the voting, Kim accurately predicted that if Park won, he would become a “generalissimo” and arrange to be in office forever. Kim escaped being silenced with other political leaders in October 1972 because he happened to be in Japan when martial law was imposed. He immediately condemned the action as dictatorial, unconstitutional, and unjustified. Rather than return home to be arrested, Kim kept up his caustic criticism from abroad.

  On August 8, 1973, Kim was lured to a luncheon meeting with two visiti
ng Korean parliamentarians in a suite at a Tokyo hotel. As he said good-bye in the corridor, he was shoved into a nearby room by three men in dark suits, then punched, kicked, and anesthetized. He was taken by car down an expressway to a port and placed aboard a motorboat and then a large ship, where he was tightly trussed and weights placed on his hands and legs.

  Kim’s abduction was sensational news in Japan, where externally directed political violence was rare and, coming from Korea, a particularly painful affront to Japanese sovereignty. In Seoul, Ambassador Habib decided that strong and immediate action was necessary to save Kim’s life and avert a serious crisis within South Korea and between South Korea and Japan. Calling in senior embassy officials, Habib instructed them to find out within twenty-four hours who had kidnapped Kim. US intelligence officers quickly identified the KCIA as the culprit, whereupon the ambassador, in his characteristically blunt and salty language, laid down the law to the high command of Park’s government, declaring that there would be grave consequences for relations with the United States if Kim did not turn up alive.

  Habib’s quick action probably saved Kim’s life. After a few hours at sea, the weights were suddenly taken off Kim’s body, and his bonds were loosened. Five days after his abduction, he was released, battered and dazed, a few blocks from his residence in Seoul. After thirty-six hours during which Kim was permitted to speak publicly of his ordeal, he was placed under house arrest. Park’s government made no effort to identify or penalize his abductors.

  Three weeks after Kim’s kidnapping, North Korea suspended both the North-South political-level talks and the Red Cross talks, invoking the kidnapping of the popular opposition politician as the reason for its action. However, Pyongyang had been losing interest in the dialogue even in the months before the kidnapping. It was increasingly clear that the inter-Korean talks were not leading to the withdrawal of US military forces. Moreover, the exposure of North Korean delegates to the more prosperous South was making Pyongyang’s leaders uncomfortable. According to a report from the Hungarian Embassy in Pyongyang, opposition from the North Korean military to the shift toward a “peaceful unification” line had been so strong that Kim Il Sung had to convene a special meeting of the army in the autumn of 1972 in order to explain and justify the change in approach.

  Park’s regime, which had used the North-South talks to justify its brutal political coup, now sought to salvage the talks. Late in the year, the South proposed a series of meetings of the vice chairmen of the political-level North-South Coordinating Committee. The first meeting coincided with a major event in the South—the ouster of the powerful KCIA director, Lee Hu Rak, who had negotiated with Kim Il Sung but had also engineered the kidnapping of Kim Dae Jung.

  After a prominent Seoul National University law professor was tortured to death in October 1973, CIA station chief Donald Gregg protested the killing and told the Blue House he found it personally difficult to work further with Lee. A week later, Lee was fired by President Park and replaced with a former justice minister, who initiated reforms in KCIA operations. With Lee out of the picture as chief contact with the North, the prospects seemed better to revive the discussions with Pyongyang. From December 1973 to March 1975, ten North-South vice-chairmen meetings were held under the aegis of the North-South Coordinating Committee, at Panmunjom, but they accomplished little.

  Why did the initial attempt at North-South dialogue flower and then wither? How sincere were Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung? What did their initial contacts suggest for the future?

  From a historical perspective, it seems clear that both Korean leaders had been jarred out of their previous patterns of inflexibility by fast-moving international developments. Whether through hope or fear, each had decided he had more to gain than to lose by dealing directly with the opposing state, something that had never been done before. As it turned out, both benefited in important ways from the experiment in coexistence, even though the practical results were nil.

  The dialogue proved extremely useful to Park. It was helpful to his regime internationally, especially in the United States, whose previous ambassador, William J. Porter, had been promoting the case for dialogue for several years. Domestically, the opening to the North was broadly popular with the South Korean public, raising hopes for family reunions, a lowering of tension, and eventual unification, all of which were held out as potential benefits by Park’s government. Most important, Park used the requirement for national strength and unity in dealing with the North to justify his yushin regime, which gave him the upper hand against the civilian politicians whom he despised and guaranteed him an unlimited tenure in the presidency.

  Kim Il Sung also found the dialogue with the South to be beneficial, especially in breaking out of his diplomatic isolation. At the end of 1970, before the move toward talks began, North Korea had diplomatic relations with only thirty-five countries, nearly all of them socialist regimes, while South Korea had diplomatic relations with eighty-one countries. Immediately following the start of North-South dialogue, Pyongyang gained recognition from five Western European nations and many more neutral countries. Within four years, North Korea was recognized by ninety-three countries, on a par with South Korea’s relations with ninety-six. The North also gained entry for the first time to the UN’s World Health Organization and, as a result, sent its first permanent UN observer missions to New York and Geneva.

  Also for the first time, as part of its peace offensive, North Korea communicated directly with the United States, initially by inviting journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post to Pyongyang for extensive interviews and then by addressing a diplomatic message directly to Washington. In April 1973, North Korea’s legislature, the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), sent a telegram to the US Congress referring to the developments on the divided peninsula and asking the American lawmakers for help in removing US troops from South Korea, as they had just been removed from South Vietnam. Congress did not reply, but this letter set the stage for a succession of direct and indirect communications to Washington in the years to come.

  Near the end of 1972, both Park and Kim reaped some personal rewards from their headline-making interaction. In November, using the dialogue with the North as his justification, Park won approval, through a nationwide referendum, of the new constitution, granting him virtually unchecked and unlimited power. The charter was approved after an extensive sales campaign that took place under martial law, with newspapers censored and the opposition unable to be heard. In December Park was elected unanimously, with no debate permitted, to a new six-year term as president by the handpicked National Conference for Unification.

  Not to be outdone, Kim put through a new constitution in the North, also without objection or dissent. Under the new charter, the nation was to be guided by the juche idea “as a creative application of Marxism-Leninism.” Kim, who had held the title of prime minister as well as general secretary of the ruling Workers Party, promoted himself to president. Although this did not increase his already all-encompassing power, the new title put him on a semantic par with the leader of the South.

  Neither Kim Il Sung nor Park Chung Hee harbored the belief that his indirect dialogue would lead to unification of the divided peninsula, although this hopeful prospect was, at least briefly, widespread among the respective publics of both men. Neither leader was willing to seriously compromise the policies and interest groups on which their respective regimes were based to pursue the long-term goal of national unity. To a great degree, the military-backed governments of both the North and the South had been shaped by the rivalry between them. Although both Kim and Park were in favor of unification, each was fiercely opposed to a merger on the other leader’s terms. Without a strong push from the outside powers, who had conflicting interests and were paying little attention to the Korean peninsula, the two rival states were incapable of sustaining their dialogue.

  Nonetheless, the exchanges of the early 1970s were a turning point in the Cold War on th
e Korean peninsula, holding out the possibility, for the first time, of mutual cooperation and eventual peaceful reunification. An aspiration of immense appeal on both sides had flickered into life in tangible and tantalizing fashion. It would never be entirely extinguished, despite the many trials to come.

  3

  THE TROUBLE DEEPENS

  PRESIDENT PARK CHUNG HEE was droning on, reading his prepared speech in Korean without flourishes or gestures, rarely pausing to look up from his papers at the audience of distinguished citizens and foreign diplomats. I was nodding off from boredom. The scene was the National Theater in Seoul, on a national holiday, August 15, 1974—the twenty-ninth anniversary of the country’s liberation from Japan. Suddenly, a loud pop from the back of the hall broke the monotony, and I turned to see a figure in a dark suit running down the center aisle of the theater, firing a weapon as he ran. More shots rang out, and presidential security guards raced onto the stage from the wings, guns drawn, some blazing. Amid the pandemonium in the hall, Korea’s first lady slumped to the floor from her seat on the stage and was carried out by attendants, her bright-orange hanbok, the traditional flowing Korean gown, stained with blood. She would die within hours from a bullet wound to her head.

  As the final shots were heard, the assassin was lost from view in a pileup of security men, then hustled from the hall. A high school girl, who was part of the chorus singing for this state occasion, was also carried out. She later died of her wounds, apparently from a presidential bodyguard’s wild shot.

  Startled by the eruption of violence, I had lost sight of Park during the melee. But now, as it subsided, he reappeared from behind the bulky—and bulletproof—lectern, where he had taken refuge when the shooting began. As he rose, he waved his hand to the stunned crowd, which broke into loud applause. Park told an aide later that he never saw the assassin’s face.