The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (19 page)

In order to avoid disclosing their real intent or backing Carter into a corner, his senior lieutenants conducted the “review” in extraordinary secrecy worthy of the most sensitive covert operation. Usual interagency channels of communication for classified information were bypassed in favor of hand-carried memoranda between the offices of the top national security officials of government. For once, news of a major policy-making enterprise did not leak.

In the spring, aides recommended an idea that had been under discussion for many months: Carter should visit Korea, following his trip to Tokyo for the June summit meeting of the Group of Seven (G-7) industrialized nations. The advisers saw the trip as an integral part of a scenario leading inexorably to further adjustment of the withdrawal plans: first absorb the new intelligence, then discuss it with leaders in Tokyo and
Seoul, and then report back to the US congressional leadership on changes required by the altered circumstances. Carter reluctantly agreed to the visit, realizing it would probably be the occasion for reconsideration of his plan. He made it clear, however, that he did not wish to discuss the withdrawal issue with President Park, whom he had never met but whose record and regime were distasteful to him.

As the trip preparations were under way, Carter arrived at the Oval Office one morning with a novel—and startling—idea. Following the precedent of the Camp David accords the previous September between the leaders of Egypt and Israel, the president proposed to invite Park and Kim Il Sung to meet him in the demilitarized zone during his forthcoming trip, to establish a path toward peace. The Asia experts among the aides were horrified. They thought Park and Kim would not agree to meet, and the proposal would be seen as a “flaky” stunt. The plan also met massive resistance from the US ambassador in Seoul, William Gleysteen. A career Foreign Service expert on Asia who had grown up in China, the son of missionary parents, Gleysteen “just fell out of my chair” when informed of it. The experts persuaded Brzezinski and, through him, Carter to abandon the scheme. The idea was quietly dropped, without the South Korean leadership or anyone else getting wind of it.

As this incident suggests, Carter had been turning over in his mind the possibility that US diplomacy could encourage a North-South settlement that would make long-term presence of American troops unnecessary. The four-power talks involving China, the United States, and the two Koreas that Vance had suggested early in the administration had gone nowhere. However, the establishment of full US diplomatic relations with China on January 1, 1979—a major accomplishment of the Carter administration—revived the possibility that Beijing might help to defuse the conflict on the divided peninsula. At the end of January, when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited Washington, Carter asked him to help arrange North-South talks. Deng responded that the North was ready to talk to Americans, the Park government, and others in the South on the terms that it had previously proposed (which were unacceptable in Seoul and Washington). Deng said China would not pressure North Korea, lest it lose its influence there, but he assured Carter there was absolutely no danger of a North Korean attack.

Rebuffed in his plan for a grand three-way summit meeting in the DMZ, Carter settled for proposing tripartite talks of lesser diplomats. The South Koreans had strongly resisted such an idea for many months, fearing a sellout by the United States in the pattern of Vietnam diplomacy. Ambassador Gleysteen, directed by Washington to obtain agreement in Seoul, found that the entire South Korean government was adamantly opposed to three-way talks except for Park himself, who was persuaded
to consider it in the context of ending the US withdrawal program. In the end, Park ordered his government to accept the proposal, possibly believing that he would win points with Carter and that Pyongyang would reject it anyway. The proposal, which was announced during Carter’s trip to Seoul, appeared to be stillborn when North Korea lodged the expected objections. But as Korean diplomacy developed later on, the idea of three-way talks came back to life in a variety of circumstances.

On the evening of June 29, Carter arrived in Seoul aboard Air Force One from the G-7 summit meeting in Tokyo and immediately helicoptered to Camp Casey, the headquarters of the Second Infantry Division, to spend the night. After jogging with and addressing the troops, he traveled back to Seoul for a rousing official welcome by an estimated half-million people and bands playing such Carter favorites as “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” lining the route to the Blue House.

Inside the presidential palace, the meeting between the two delegations quickly went off track. The South Korean president had been asked in advance by American officials to say little or nothing about the withdrawal issue so as not to upset the delicate minuet they had devised for Carter, but Park had his own ideas. The former schoolteacher had written out in his neat hand a lengthy presentation of the strategic reasons why withdrawing American troops would be a cataclysmic mistake in view of the North’s growing strength, and he boldly delivered it to the increasingly furious American president.

Nicholas Platt, the National Security Council expert on Asia, could see Carter silently working his jaw muscles, as he tended to do under great tension, and on the other side of the table he observed Park snapping his fingers to make his points, as he did unconsciously under extraordinary stress. Vance could feel the temperature in the room drop with Carter’s cold fury. As Park continued his forty-five-minute oration, the president passed a note to Vance and Defense Secretary Brown: “If he goes on like this much longer I’m going to pull every troop out of the country.” Instead of responding at once, Carter adjourned with Park to the next room for a private talk where he brought up human rights issues and demanded to know why the ROK, with a far bigger economy, did not match the North militarily. It was, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke later observed, “as terrible a bilateral meeting between treaty allies as you can have.”

When the meeting was over, Carter, Vance, Brown, and Brzezinski climbed into the presidential limousine for the short ride to the US ambassador’s residence. Gleysteen, summoned by Carter to join them, sat on a jump seat facing the president. Berating Park, Carter threatened to continue the withdrawal despite all opposition and accused his aides of conspiring against him. Gleysteen, who barely knew the president and had never had a serious discussion with him before, took the brunt of Carter’s
anger, responding in strong terms about the vast difficulties of continuing the pullout and the benefits that might be gained by calling it off. After what seemed to Gleysteen an eternity, with the angry president wagging his finger in his face, Vance and Brown joined the argument on his side. Brzezinski remained silent. For more than ten minutes, the top policy makers of the Carter administration continued their heated debate in the closed car, sitting under the front portico at the ambassador’s residence, with a long motorcade of puzzled officials stalled and stretched out behind them. In the second car, which could see but not hear the animated argument, Holbrooke turned to Platt and said, “I guess the meeting on Korea that we’ve been trying to arrange all this time is finally taking place.”

When he cooled off, Carter agreed to return to the previously suggested scenario for reconsidering the withdrawal program, on two conditions: first, that Park order a substantial increase in ROK military expenditures along the lines the two presidents had discussed in their contentious private meeting and, second, that Park make a significant move in the human rights field, such as release of a large number of jailed dissidents. That afternoon, Vance wrote later, “our Korean policy hung in the balance,” while the US team sought and won agreement to Carter’s demands from Park’s government. Ironically in view of later events, the aide designated by Park to negotiate with the Americans on the prisoner release, which ultimately involved eighty-seven dissidents, was KCIA director Kim Jae Kyu.

By the time Carter left Seoul, his demands had been agreed to, a Korean band had serenaded the first family with “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and the withdrawal minuet was back on track. In the limousine en route to the airport, Carter tried in a most unusual way to reach out to Park. The devout US president asked his counterpart about his religious beliefs. When Park replied that he had none, Carter said, “I would like you to know about Christ.” He proposed to send Chang Hwan (Billy) Kim, an American-educated Baptist evangelist who fashioned himself as the Korean Billy Graham, “to explain our faith.” The Korean president agreed to receive him and did so shortly thereafter.

On July 20, three weeks later, Brzezinski announced at the White House that further withdrawal of US combat elements was being suspended until 1981, which would have been the start of Carter’s second presidential term, to “await credible indications that a satisfactory military balance has been restored and a reduction in tension is under way.” Carter had no second term. In 1981, having been defeated for reelection, he was on his way home.

In the two and a half years of the withdrawal program, only one combat battalion of 674 ground troops actually left Korea, while twelve more air force F-4 fighters and their crews, totaling 900 troops, had been sent to
augment those already in Korea. Including various noncombat units and some that had previously been scheduled for reduction, Carter reduced the total US military strength in Korea by only about 3,000 troops, leaving nearly 37,000 in place. Although he did not achieve his fervent aim of eliminating all US nuclear weapons from Korean soil, Carter did reduce their number from nearly 700 to around 250 and consolidated them all at a single site, Kunsan Air Base, rather than having them spread around several locations.

In his haste and lack of finesse, an inexperienced president had transformed a general impulse to reduce US military forces in South Korea into a highly controversial policy with which he was personally, and negatively, identified. Many of the American diplomatic and military officials dealing with the issue were not opposed to substantial reductions if pursued in well-planned fashion, but they were horrified by the peremptory and damaging way the issue was pursued by the Carter White House. By refusing to heed or even hear the objections until he had backed himself against the wall, Carter undermined his own position.

Even a determined president proved unable to decouple the United States from the high-stakes military standoff on the Korean peninsula. The major impact of Carter’s unsuccessful effort was to intensify among his Asian allies concerns that had been generated by the American withdrawal from Vietnam. In Seoul Carter’s conflict with Park inadvertently diminished the standing of the South Korean president. The consequences were soon to come.

__________

*
Over the succeeding months, Kim Il Sung sent messages to Carter through President Omar Bongo of Gabon in May 1977, Yugoslav president Marshal Tito in October 1977, and President Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania in April 1978. In each case, Kim declined to deal with the ROK government while it was under Park’s leadership; in each case, Carter replied that he would negotiate with the North only with South Korean participation.

*
In June 1971, according to an official Romanian document, Kim told Romanian party head Ceauşescu that the Workers Party had 1.6 million members as of its Fifth Party Congress in October 1970. If that figure was right, it means the party grew by more than a half-million members in seven years. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, North Korea International Documentation Project,
New Evidence of Inter-Korean Relations, 1971–1972
, Document Reader 3, September 2009, Document no. 1.

5

ASSASSINATION AND AFTERMATH

O
N THE EVENING OF
October 26, 1979, President Park Chung Hee dined with KCIA director Kim Jae Kyu, with whom he was increasingly at odds, in a new KCIA operations building on the grounds of the Blue House. The president was accompanied by the powerful chief of presidential security, Cha Chi Chol, and the chief of the Blue House secretariat, Kim Kye Won. Sitting on the floor on either side of Park at a traditional Korean low dining table and pouring liberally from a bottle of Chivas Regal were two young women—a university student and a well-known singer.

As the dinner proceeded, Park criticized KCIA director Kim for failing to keep abreast of the massive domestic disorders that had erupted over political and economic issues. Security chief Cha, who was advocating a harsher crackdown on students and strikers, also berated the KCIA director for contributing to the unrest by espousing policies that were too conciliatory. After a few minutes of abuse, the intelligence chief left the dining room. He returned with a .38 Smith & Wesson pistol hidden in his pocket, pausing to instruct his own guards to shoot the presidential bodyguards, who were waiting outside the dining room, if shots were fired inside.

After checking to make sure his aides were ready, Kim pulled out his pistol and demanded of Park, “How can you have such a miserable worm as your adviser?” Then he fired at point-blank range, first at Cha, then at Park, severely wounding them both. When the gun jammed, he borrowed another from a KCIA guard and finished the two men off. KCIA aides took the shooting as their signal to attack, killing several presidential bodyguards. Within minutes, the turbulent and historic eighteen-year reign of Park Chung Hee ended in a blaze of gunfire.

The assassination of Park opened a new era of uncertainty, during which the United States sought unsuccessfully to nudge South Korean leaders toward a more democratic and participatory system to replace the
authoritarianism of the past. US influence had some small successes, but as American officials had already learned, their power to affect Korean politics was limited when the stakes were high for the domestic actors involved.