Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
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In December 1982, Kim was released from confinement and permitted to fly to exile in the United States.
F
AMILIES AND FRIENDS OF
the passengers of Korean Air Lines flight 007 waited with growing apprehension at Seoul’s Kimpo airport on the morning of September 1, 1983. The flight, which originated in New York and refueled in Alaska, had mysteriously disappeared from the skies overnight en route to Seoul. Within a few hours, American intelligence agencies pieced together radio intercepts that revealed a story of the discovery, tracking, pursuit, and destruction of the civilian airliner by Soviet air defense forces as it strayed over Soviet territory north of Japan. Playing back the tapes of transmissions recorded during the night, officials at an American-Japanese listening post heard the chilling report of a Russian fighter pilot to his headquarters: “The target is destroyed.”
The first public revelation of the fate of KAL 007 came when Secretary of State George Shultz grimly announced that a Soviet fighter plane had shot down the airliner. Shultz called this “an appalling act” for which there was no excuse. President Reagan in subsequent statements called the action a “massacre,” an “atrocity,” and a “crime against humanity.” The Soviet Union initially denied destroying the plane but later admitted it and justified the action on grounds that the airliner had violated its “sacred” borders on an espionage mission concocted by the United States and its South Korean ally.
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The KAL 007 shoot-down soon became a white-hot issue in international politics. It drove US-Soviet relations to new depths at a moment when relations were already extremely tense due to the imminent deployment of American missiles in Europe. For a time, it also slowed progress toward healing the breach between the Soviet Union and South Korea. Prior to the shoot-down, the Soviet government, over the passionate objections of the North Koreans, had for the first time quietly decided to permit Soviet trading companies to deal with South Korean firms through third parties. In a bolder move, a delegation of Soviet parliamentarians had been preparing to travel to Seoul to participate in the International Parliamentary Union convention when KAL 007 was shot down. Due to the international furor, and the bitterness in South Korea, the trip was canceled. For the time being, improvement in Soviet-South Korean ties was put on the back burner.
A second severe shock to South Korea came only a few weeks later, October 9, 1983, during the state visit of President Chun Doo Hwan to Rangoon, Burma. At the ceremonial beginning of the visit, the best and the brightest of the South Korean government stood side by side in the Martyr’s Mausoleum at the National Cemetery, awaiting Chun’s arrival for a wreath-laying in honor of Burma’s founder. Some of the Korean officials were chatting, and a few were standing with their hands by their sides, looking off in the distance. The Korean ambassador arrived ahead of the president in his official car, with its ROK flag flapping in the breeze, and an anxious Burmese trumpeter decided to practice his part in the ceremony to follow.
At that moment, North Korean army major Zin Mo, mistaking the beflagged car for the South Korean president’s and the bugler’s call as the start of the ceremony, detonated a powerful bomb that he and two other North Korean operatives had planted two days previously in the roof of the mausoleum. In the thunderous explosion, four members of the South Korean cabinet, two senior presidential advisers, and the ambassador to Burma were blown to bits by shrapnel and deadly steel pellets. Among those killed were Foreign Minister Lee Bum Suk, who as chief of the South Korean Red Cross delegation had welcomed and hosted the North Koreans in Seoul in September 1972; Presidential Secretary-General Hahm Pyong Choon, former ROK ambassador to Washington and a leading foreign-policy intellectual; and Presidential Secretary Kim Jae Ik, an architect of South Korea’s economic development. President Chun, still on his way to the site, escaped injury.
Before the explosion, reclusive Burma and reclusive North Korea, each pursuing a distinctive brand of Asian socialism, had been the best of friends. This collegiality vanished as the truth of what happened emerged. Burmese police quickly apprehended the North Korean agents responsible.
One of them, Captain Kang Min Chul, confessed, exposing the elaborate planning in Pyongyang that had gone into the attack. In response, the Burmese, furious and embarrassed over the deaths of seventeen visiting South Koreans and four Burmese at the nation’s most revered ceremonial site, derecognized North Korea—a decisive step beyond simply breaking diplomatic relations.
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Pyongyang denied all complicity, but its denials were unconvincing in view of physical evidence linking it to the bombing and Captain Kang’s confession.
This was not the first North Korean attempt on Chun’s life. In 1982 plans had been made to kill Chun in Gabon while he was on a state visit to Africa. According to Koh Yong Hwan, a North Korean diplomat who took part in the plot but later defected to the South, the operation was called off at the last minute on the personal instructions of Kim Jong Il, who had recently been given control of the North’s clandestine operations.
A sophisticated man who later became Kim Il Sung’s French-language interpreter, Koh said he believed the cancellation was ordered because the assassination of the South Korean president in an African country could have devastated North Korea’s important African support in the UN General Assembly.
South Korea did not know of the Gabon plot at the time, but concerns about Chun’s safety in his overseas travels may have saved his life in Rangoon in 1983. Asked to provide surveillance of Chun’s plane by airborne-radar aircraft during his trip, US experts suggested that the route be moved farther away from the Vietnamese and Chinese coastlines, causing a change in the ROK president’s planned schedule. Instead of arriving at 4:00
P.M.
and going by motorcade directly to the ceremony at the Martyr’s Mausoleum, where a mix-up like the one the next day might not have occurred, Chun arrived in Rangoon after 6:00
P.M
., putting off the wreath-laying ceremony to the following morning.
The sudden deaths of South Korea’s leading high officials caused a new outpouring of anger and grief in Seoul, and much of the same in official Washington, where the Rangoon victims were all well known. As a show of resolve and warning to North Korea, the aircraft carrier USS
Carl Vinson
and its battle group were kept in Korean waters beyond their scheduled departure date, and heightened security measures were taken along the DMZ. No unusual North Korean troop movements were observed, but a few weeks later South Korean officials charged that Pyongyang had planned to launch commando raids after what they thought would be Chun’s assassination.
A shaken Chun flew home with what was left of the elite governmental team he had taken to Rangoon. He traveled directly from the airport to a meeting of the surviving members of his cabinet and security team at the Blue House. At the meeting, Minister of Defense Yun Song Min proposed that the South Korean air force bomb the North in retaliation, but Chun rejected the proposal. US intelligence learned that a senior South Korean commander at the DMZ was also advocating a punitive response. Chun said later he met with commanders who were eager to attack the North and declared that only he would decide whether to take military action—and that anyone who jumped the gun would be guilty of disloyalty. In a visit to Chun, Ambassador Richard Walker prepared to make a strong argument against retaliation, even though he said the United States had no doubt that North Korea was behind the attack. Chun responded, “I want to assure your president that I’m in full control of this government and military officers, who report to me. I have no intention of doing anything foolish or anything without full consultation with your government.” When President Reagan visited Seoul the following month, he made a point of telling Chun in a private meeting that “we and the whole world admired your restraint in the face of the provocations in Rangoon and over Sakhalin Island [referring to the downing of KAL 007].”
Oddly enough, as the Rangoon bombing plot developed, North Korea was simultaneously pursuing its most important diplomatic initiative toward the South in more than a decade. On October 8, 1983, the day before the bombing, Chinese diplomats passed a message to Washington from North Korea saying for the first time that it would take part in three-way talks with the United States and South Korea to bring peace to the peninsula, accepting Seoul as a full participant. For Pyongyang, this was a major departure from long-standing policies, and it established the basis for much of its diplomacy for the rest of the decade.
It was hardly surprising that Kim Il Sung decided to use the Beijing channel for his initiative toward the United States and South Korea. Since the initial breakthrough between the United States and China in 1971, Beijing had consistently played the role of diplomatic messenger between Washington and Pyongyang. Henry Kissinger had discussed Korea with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai or other officials on at least eleven occasions during the Nixon and Ford administrations. In the mid-1970s, Kissinger sought secretly but unsuccessfully to use the Chinese contacts to persuade North Korea to accept the continued presence of American troops in the South “for at least the short term,” in return for a commitment “to
reduce and ultimately withdraw U.S. forces as the security situation on the peninsula is stabilized.”
In September 1983, Kim paved the way for his diplomatic bid with a speech in which he dropped his previously standard condition that the Chun regime be replaced before talks begin. Later that month, in a conversation with US secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping proposed that the United States and China work together to reduce tension and promote peaceful reunification on the Korean peninsula. Deng said that North Korea had “neither the intention nor the capability” to attack the South but that if the South attacked the North, “China will not be able to stay out.” American policy makers may have been mindful of this warning when they insisted that Chun not permit military retaliation for the Rangoon bombing.
In the aftermath of Rangoon, Deng was furious at Pyongyang for staging the bombing immediately after he had passed along Pyongyang’s conciliatory initiative to the Americans. For weeks afterward, Deng refused to see any North Koreans. He was especially angry at Kim Jong Il, whom he apparently thought was behind the bombing, and refused to meet with the younger Kim for the rest of his life.
The overlapping of Pyongyang’s peace initiative and act of bloody terrorism is a puzzle that has never been conclusively solved. If the North Korean military had, indeed, been making preparations months in advance, the peace proposal would seem to be an elaborate smoke screen. On the other hand, the key element of the proposal—accepting Chun as an interlocutor—was in a very authoritative article in an important North Korean party journal in early October, suggesting Kim’s subtle signal on the possibility of meeting with Chun was serious. It was not the first time the North acted in contradictory ways, nor the last.
The idea of three-way peace talks involving the United States and the two Koreas had been discussed in Washington in the spring of 1978 by two maverick communists close to Kim Il Sung, Yugoslavia’s president, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, and Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu, in separate conversations with President Carter. The idea had received a big boost during Carter’s 1979 trip to Seoul, when President Park Chung Hee agreed to back the proposal despite the misgivings of nearly everyone else in his government. The fear of a repetition of the Paris talks on Vietnam, where the South Vietnamese had been overshadowed by Hanoi and Washington and relegated to a devastating secondary role, was still strong in Seoul and lingered for years after.
At the beginning of the Reagan administration in 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig had rejected the idea of three-way talks and instructed the State Department to oppose them. However, a number of
American diplomats did not agree, and the American Embassy in Beijing continued to promote the plan in discussions with the Chinese. Moreover, a US démarche to North Korea through Beijing in September 1983, not long before Deng Xiaoping passed Kim Il Sung’s message to Washington, mentioned trilateral talks among a list of items that could improve relations with the United States.
The Rangoon bombing would have seemed to kill the North’s proposal for three-way talks. Pyongyang must have been astonished when the following month, Reagan, addressing the South Korean National Assembly during a visit to Seoul, declared that “we would, as we’ve often stressed, be willing to participate in discussions with North Korea in any forum in which the Republic of Korea is equally represented.” The phrase was boilerplate, and certainly was not in the speech as a signal to the North. But it was too good for the North Koreans to pass up, and they jumped on the president’s words as their ticket out of their Rangoon problem.
In December the North picked up where it had left off on October 8, and in January 1984 it put forth a proposal for tripartite talks in very high-level and high-profile fashion: during an official visit to Washington, Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang brought it in writing to Reagan and Shultz at the White House. Hours after Zhao’s presentation, North Korea broadcast the full text.
Once Pyongyang endorsed three-way talks, however, Washington rejected the very idea it had previously espoused. Reagan counterproposed, in discussions with Zhao, that peace talks on the peninsula should begin with North-South bilateral negotiations, and if that did not suffice, four-way talks that also involved China should begin. South Korea took the same position and also declared that Pyongyang must apologize for the Rangoon bombing before talks could begin. China seemed to be interested in participation in four-way talks, but the North strongly opposed China’s entry.