Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
It is questionable how much sincerity was behind this maze of proposals and counterproposals in any of the capitals. Both the Reagan administration in Washington and Chun Doo Hwan’s government in Seoul were leery of becoming involved in formal talks with Pyongyang. In May 1984, during a visit to Berlin, Kim Il Sung told Erich Honecker that a major aim of his tripartite-talks proposal had been to make it more difficult for Reagan to increase US troop strength in South Korea. Besides, he told Honecker, “with these talks [proposals] we want to expose the United States excuses” for staying in Korea. “To show the world that the United States does not want reunification, it is necessary to keep making new peace proposals.” And again reflecting the North’s misperceptions of the situation south of the thirty-eighth parallel, he stated, “This is also necessary to encourage the South Korean population in their struggle.”
The leaderships and publics of both North and South Korea saw the struggle for influence and supremacy on the peninsula as a zero-sum game, in which any gain for the South was a loss for the North and vice versa. Moreover, for both regimes, considerations of “face” or prestige were often more important than issues of substance. Thus, North-South discussions in the public arena tended to bear fruit only when both countries could credibly claim victory, which was uncommon. A parallel secret dialogue between Pyongyang and Seoul, only hints of which were made public when they occurred, was less constrained but often even more difficult, because the issues involved were more important.
In early-September 1984, discussions between North and South were given sudden and unexpected momentum by an act of nature—torrential rains and landslides in the region near Seoul that killed 190 people and left 200,000 homeless. North Korea, in a gesture implying superiority, grandly offered to send relief supplies to its better-heeled cousins in the South. To everyone’s surprise, Chun’s government did not spurn the offer but prepared to receive rice, cement, textiles, and medical supplies. “Along a worn concrete road gone to weeds, hundreds of North Korean trucks entered South Korean territory today carrying the first supplies to pass between the two countries since the Korean war ended 31 years ago,” wrote the
New York Times’
s Clyde Haberman, who was on the scene at the DMZ. Some of the rice turned out to be wormy and the cement nearly unusable, but the South did not highlight the deficiencies or complain, even as Pyongyang hailed the flood relief in
Rodong Sinmun
headlines as a “Great Event, the First in the History of Nearly 40 Years of Division.”
As the relief goods were delivered, the chairman of the North Korean Red Cross Society urged that success in this venture be used to launch “multisided collaboration and exchange.” Capitalizing on the moment, the South proposed, and the North accepted, the opening of North-South economic talks and the resumption of the Red Cross talks.
With this surprising beginning, the North and South in a period of a little more than a year held thirteen public discussions, including five economic meetings, three Red Cross meetings, three working-level Red Cross contacts, and two preliminary contacts for a North-South parliamentary exchange proposed by Pyongyang. In September 1985, thirty-five South Koreans crossed the DMZ to visit family members in Pyongyang, and thirty North Koreans crossed in the other direction to meet family members in Seoul. After years of formal meetings, most of them sterile recitations of fixed positions, the emotional reunions of even a few divided families seemed at last to be a tangible payoff for the inter-Korean talks and a promise of better times to come.
Unknown to all but a few on each side, the progress was facilitated by secret talks at a high level, which had also resumed late in 1984 and reached a peak in the fall of 1985 as the family reunions were taking place. One of the lessons of the quarter century of North-South dialogue is that it rarely made progress unless the top leaders were involved. In the early 1970s and mid-1980s, most of the involvement of the heads of state was in secret; exchanges involving top leaders would emerge in the public arena only in the early 1990s.
The mid-1980s secret diplomacy began on the day after Christmas 1984, when a tall, urbane Korean who had lived in the United States for many years sat down to a four-hour meeting and luncheon with Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. Channing Liem, who at seventy-four was two years older than the Great Leader, had been the South Korean delegate to the United Nations under the short-lived reform government that was toppled by the 1961 military coup. After the coup, he became a political science professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a vocal critic of the Park regime. Liem had previously visited Pyongyang in 1977 as a private citizen. This time, however, he came as an emissary of South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan, recruited for the task by Sohn Jang Nae, the activist intelligence chief in the ROK Embassy in Washington who had played a key role in negotiating Chun’s triumphal visit to Reagan.
In his discussion with Liem, Kim Il Sung agreed to explore a North-South summit. The following week, Kim used his annual New Year’s message to the Korean people to make a pointed endorsement of North-South dialogue, saying that success in the ongoing rounds of lower-level public talks could lead gradually to higher-level talks and “culminate in high-level political negotiations between North and South.”
The meeting with Liem was unpublicized and known only to senior echelons in North and South. But the very next day, in one of those incidents that suggest pulling and hauling in influential circles in Pyongyang,
Rodong Sinmun
carried an oblique and, at the time, puzzling attack on accommodation with the South. “Sacrifice” and “struggle” are the keys to the victory of the revolution, said the paper, arguing that those who retreat from this road “in fear of being sacrificed” will inevitably “surrender” or become “turncoats.”
In Seoul the secret meeting with Kim whetted the appetite of those few who were aware of it. This was especially true of Chang Se Dong, another former general and chief presidential bodyguard who became chief of the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP), the renamed South Korean intelligence agency, in February 1985. With the confidential contacts with the North beginning to show promise, he took them under his direct control.
To aid him in this delicate work, Chang in March 1985 brought in a rising young star from the Blue House staff, the forty-two-year-old
presidential secretary for political affairs, Park Chul Un. Park soon became the South’s most energetic practitioner of secret diplomacy, not only in North Korea but in Hungary, the Soviet Union, and other countries as well, eventually earning acclaim in the Seoul newspapers as “the Korean Henry Kissinger.” Park was bright, having graduated from Seoul National University Law School at the top of his class, and also well connected, being a cousin of the wife of General Roh Tae Woo, Chun’s classmate, comrade, and eventual successor. Bold and ambitious—traits in short supply among South Korea’s cautious senior bureaucrats—Park quickly made contact with senior figures in the North.
Within a short time, Park was authorized by Chun, and later by Roh, to be the South Korean secret channel to the North. His counterpart in Pyongyang was Han Se Hae, a fifty-year-old graduate of Kim Il Sung University who had taken part in the Red Cross talks in 1972 under an assumed name and subsequently was vice minister of foreign affairs and DPRK ambassador at the United Nations. A fluent English speaker who was considered one of the North’s most urbane and accomplished diplomats, Han became attached to the staff of the Central Committee of the Workers Party to pursue his contacts with the South.
Park and Han established a direct telephone connection between their desks in Seoul and Pyongyang, on which they had frequent conversations. The two met face-to-face a total of forty-two times between May 1985 and November 1991 in a wide variety of places, including Pyongyang, Seoul, Panmunjom, Paektu Mountain in North Korea, Cheju Island in South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere. Some of the meetings lasted as long as five days, but except for a few sightings, most of this diplomacy remained secret.
Chun had repeatedly proposed a summit meeting with Kim Il Sung and recently had said he was willing to meet Kim anywhere in the North, South, or a third country, except for Panmunjom. To advance the summit diplomacy, a five-member North Korean delegation headed by Ho Dam, who had been put in charge of the Workers Party department handling South Korean affairs in a shakeup following the Rangoon debacle, and special envoy Han Se Hae secretly visited the South on September 4–6, 1985, and met Chun Doo Hwan at the private mansion of a Korean industrialist on the outskirts of Seoul. Chun had heard that Kim had seven presidential mansions in the North and wanted to show that luxurious accommodations outside the Blue House were available to him as well. The North Korean emissaries brought a letter from Kim Il Sung to Chun sending “warm regards” and saying, “I sincerely hope to see you in Pyongyang.” The letter from Kim to the man who had narrowly missed assassination by a North Korean bomb two years earlier ended, “Be well.” In the secret talks, Ho Dam insisted that the Rangoon killings “had nothing to
do with us” and warned that if Pyongyang were required to apologize, it would mean the end of the talks.
The South Korean president spoke at length in the secret discussions about the military situation on the peninsula, including its nuclear dimensions. After taking power in 1980, Chun had decisively—some say harshly—shut down the clandestine South Korean nuclear program, dispersing its scientists and engineers, in response to intense American concern about the project. However, he told Ho it would not be technically difficult for either the North or the South to produce nuclear weapons, should it decide to do so. The restraining factor, he declared, was the strong desire of both the Soviet Union and the United States to prevent nuclear wars involving small countries, which inevitably would spread to the great powers. Chun urged that Kim Il Sung, then seventy-three years old, turn away from conflict so that North-South issues could be resolved while he was still alive.
In a return visit the following month, Chang Se Dong, senior emissary Park Chul Un, and three others secretly visited the North Korean president. The southerners brought a letter from Chun calling for an early summit meeting “as a shortcut to peace where both of us meet face to face and open hearts to exchange conversation, build up trust and prevent a war.” Kim appeared appreciative and friendly, but on the final day of talks, his aides presented their draft of a North-South nonaggression pact, which the southerners considered full of unacceptable rhetoric. The North also demanded, as it had the previous month, that the coming US-ROK military exercise, Team Spirit ’86, be called off. The South rejected both proposals.
After the October meeting, the prospects of an early summit meeting between Kim Il Sung and Chun Doo Hwan rapidly diminished. According to Sohn Jang Nae, who had returned to Seoul as a deputy director of South Korean intelligence, the summit negotiations failed because Chun lacked the will to proceed in the face of North Korean demands and bureaucratic rivalries in the South. “The talks bogged down in arguments over details,” Sohn said in an interview for this book. An American intelligence official, who was given full access to the transcripts of the talks by Chun’s government around the time that they took place, said that the two sides “got tied up in all sorts of linguistic tangles” such as what words to use to describe the level and nature of the proposed summit meeting. It seemed from the transcripts, the US official said, that “the North was not very interested in making progress, and the South was also bringing up things that would irritate the North.”
The final blow was the approach of the Team Spirit exercise, which under Chun had been built up to a powerful array of about two hundred thousand US and ROK troops in increasingly realistic—and threatening—
military maneuvers south of the DMZ, involving ground, sea, and air forces. Chun’s intention in working with the Americans to enlarge Team Spirit, according to a former aide, was to scare the North Koreans. If so, he succeeded. Pyongyang in most years put its own forces on full alert during the maneuvers, which lasted up to two months, and acted as if it feared a real attack. “Every time the opponent carries out such a maneuver we must take counteractions,” Kim Il Sung told Erich Honecker. Citing the need to mobilize large numbers of reservists to supplement regular troops on guard against attack, Kim estimated that these annual mobilization exercises cost the country “one and a half months of working shifts . . . a great loss.” Beyond the practical considerations, the North Korean leader considered the US-ROK exercises an effort to intimidate him, and he reacted bitterly.
On January 20, Pyongyang issued a joint statement in the name of all its public negotiating teams—economic, Red Cross, and parliamentary exchange—denouncing this “nuclear war maneuver intended against North Korea” and indefinitely postponing all further discussions. With that, talk of an early summit meeting faded from view.
KIM IL SUNG AND THE SOVIET CONNECTION
When Kim Il Sung boarded his special train on May 16, 1984, for an eight-day ride to Moscow, it was his first official trip to the Soviet Union since 1961. The Great Leader traveled in imperial fashion, leading a huge entourage of 250 members, including bodyguards, interpreters, pretty young female aides, and even a masseuse, as well as his prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, and other officials. His train resembled those of American tycoons earlier in the twentieth century—one railroad car was set aside for Kim’s meetings, another for his dinners, still another as his bedroom. Internal security troops were posted at frequent intervals along the route of thousands of miles in the Soviet Union, after which Kim went on by rail to Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania.