The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  In his cable, Shtykov explained what Kim wanted: “He thinks that he needs again to visit Comrade Stalin and receive an order and permission for offensive action. Kim said that he himself cannot begin an attack because he is a communist, a disciplined person, and for him the order of Comrade Stalin is law.”

  When Kim said that for him Stalin’s word was law, he was accurately acknowledging his status in the Communist pecking order. Still only thirty-seven years old, Kim was an exceedingly small potato in the Soviet Empire. Untraveled and unschooled, he led a poor, obscure, and strategically insignificant country that depended on Moscow for nearly everything.

  Stalin, by contrast, was the khozyain, the owner, the Boss, the “custodian-in-chief of the Soviet order.” He had dominated the largest nation on earth since the late 1920s. He had industrialized the Russian Empire, smashed Hitler’s eastern armies, and seized control of the eastern half of Europe. Along the way, of course, Stalin had become a mass-murdering psychopath: starving millions with collectivized farming, exiling millions to the Siberian gulag, and, in the Great Terror of the 1930s, executing his political enemies on an epic scale. He also nurtured a cult of personality that marketed him to all the people in the Soviet Union as an all-knowing father with a soft spot for children.

  When Kim wanted to talk war with him, Stalin was in his early seventies, playing what would be his last big game of geopolitical chess. His principal opponent was the United States, which he privately described as a “fascist” country. Although he had struck several international agreements with the United States, he viewed the promises he made in these treaties as short-term tactics in a long game of global Communist domination. Stalin still worked long days at his desk, still micromanaged the Communist brand around the world, and still took time to personally read cables from far-flung apparatchiks like Shtykov.

  The best measure of how large Stalin loomed in Kim’s imagination is slavish imitation. More than any leader of any Soviet satellite state, Kim swallowed Stalinism whole. Like Stalin, he collectivized agriculture, overbuilt heavy industry, created a gulag of political labor camps, murdered political enemies, geographically sorted civilians based on perceived loyalty, required people to obtain papers for internal travel, and incentivized citizens to spy on one another. Kim also copied Stalin’s cult of personality, raising it to a religion of the absurd. He sold himself to the North Korean people as a caring father who also happened to be the smartest, most important individual ever to walk the earth. And like Stalin, Kim apparently had an outsized appetite for comely, compliant, and disposable young women.

  In March 1949, ten months before his lunch with Shtykov, Kim had his first chance to meet his totalitarian role model when he led a North Korean delegation to Moscow. The visit did not go particularly well. For as much as Kim was eager to flatter Stalin, he was more eager to attack South Korea.

  “Comrade Stalin, we believe that the situation makes it necessary and possible to liberate the whole country through military means,” Kim said at one meeting. “The reactionary forces of the South will never agree on a peaceful unification and will perpetuate the division of the country until they feel themselves strong enough to attack the North.”

  He told Stalin that it was time to act because North Korea’s army was stronger, it would receive the support of a powerful guerrilla army in the South, and the people in the South would rise up to help because they hated Americans.

  Unconvinced, Stalin told Kim he did not have his facts straight.

  “You should not advance to the South,” Stalin said. “First of all, the Korean People’s Army does not have an overwhelming superiority over the troops of the South. Numerically, as I understand, you are even behind them.”

  More worrying for Stalin were the Americans. Stalin reminded Kim that American troops were still in the South (although they would withdraw in June 1949) and would bite back if the North attacked.

  “One should not forget that the agreement on the thirty-eighth parallel is in effect between the U.S.S.R. and the United States,” Stalin said. “If the agreement is broken by our side, it is more of a reason to believe that Americans will interfere.”

  Kim pouted.

  “Does this mean that there is no chance to reunify Korea in the near future?” he asked. “Our people are very anxious to be together again, to cast off the yoke of the reactionary regime and their American masters.”

  Stalin, in response, did not slam the door shut on war. He counseled watchful patience. If the South Koreans and the Americans “start the aggression,” Stalin said, then “you will have a good opportunity to launch a counterattack [and] your move will be understood and supported by everyone.”

  When Kim returned to Pyongyang, he was watchful but hardly patient. Not even personal tragedy weakened his desire for war. In September, his wife died from complications of childbirth, a loss he grieved for many years. That same month, though, he told Shtykov that his intelligence sources had received “reliable information” that the South Koreans were preparing an all-out attack. Kim claimed the invasion would begin on the Ongjin Peninsula, on the west coast of Korea just north of the thirty-eighth parallel. To head it off, Kim proposed a limited preemptive strike. If that blow seemed to demoralize the South Korean army, then Kim’s forces would move farther south. If not, the North would hold on to a new perimeter that would be easier to defend. Ever the advocate for Kim, Shtykov asked Stalin to consider the plan.

  Again, Stalin said no, scolding Kim as more eager than wise.

  “It is impossible to view this operation other than as the beginning of a war . . . for which North Korea is not prepared either militarily or politically,” the Soviet Politburo wrote in a message for Kim.

  An early draft of that message curtly dismissed Kim and his fever for war. It said that if the North attacked, “the Americans will certainly move their troops into South Korea, and you [Kim] cannot stop this, you cannot even defeat the South Korean army.”

  North-South border skirmishes in the fall of 1949 angered Stalin. In a telegram, he chided Shtykov for allowing Kim to incite these shoot-outs. “Such provocations are very dangerous for our interests and can induce the adversary to launch a big war,” he wrote.

  Between the Boss and his acolyte, the pattern seemed set: Kim begged for an invasion. His pleas produced forty-eight telegrams to the Kremlin. Each time, Stalin slapped Kim down, but not so hard that he did not dare beg again.

  The pattern changed, though, after the lunch with Shtykov at the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang, the meal at which Kim bemoaned his sleeplessness, rehashed his hunger for war, and importuned the Soviet ambassador for a chance to return to Moscow. Shtykov sent a cable recounting that lunch to Stalin on January 19, 1950. Eleven days later, Stalin cabled back. He said the international situation had tilted in favor of war.

  “I understand the unhappiness of Comrade Kim Il Sung,” Stalin wrote. “But he must understand that such a big step regarding South Korea, which he intends to undertake, requires thorough preparation. It has to be organized in such a way that there won’t be a large risk. If he wants to talk to me on this issue, then I’ll always be ready to receive him and talk to him. Tell this to Kim Il Sung and stress that I am ready to help him in this matter.”

  Stalin, though, did not want the world to know of his helpfulness. Two days after notifying Kim that he was ready to talk war, he sent a follow-up cable to Shtykov: “Explain to Comrade Kim Il Sung that at this point the question he wants to discuss with me must be completely confidential. It should not be shared with anyone in the North Korean leadership, as well as with the Chinese comrades. This is dictated by the preoccupation with keeping the topic unknown to the adversary.”

  II

  On an early spring morning in 1950, No Kum Sok and fifty other cadets from his class at the naval academy were sent down to the harbor at Chongjin. There, naval officers ordered them to unload wooden crates
from a newly arrived Soviet cargo ship.

  The unlabeled coffin-shaped boxes were extraordinarily heavy. It took four cadets to lug each one across the docks to waiting military trucks. The crates smelled of the shipping grease that firearms are packed in. Cadets guessed they contained rifles and machine guns.

  They were right. In early February, Stalin had approved North Korea’s request for enough arms to outfit three army divisions.

  Naval officers told the cadets nothing about what was in the boxes. Their work was secret, the officers said, and they should not mention it to anyone, including other cadets back at the naval academy.

  For No, classroom work at the academy had become much less mysterious. By reading the faces of his instructors, he had figured out how to be a successful naval officer for the Great Leader. Expertise in the hard sciences would not do it. Courses in calculus and physics, chemistry and navigation meant little to the apparatchiks who ran the academy. A gentleman’s C would suffice.

  The course that mattered was Soviet Communist Party history. If a cadet received a C or worse in this course, he would be given a formal reprimand. An A required long hours of memorization of a dull Korean translation of a dull Russian textbook, along with the ability to affect sincere enthusiasm while speaking in class about the invaluable life lessons to be found in Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism.

  Determined to impress his instructor and fearful that someone would eventually link him to his Communist-hating father, No stuffed his mind with party history. He became an expert on the doctrinal errors of Trotsky, explicated the schism between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and tracked the missteps of party hacks from Bukharin to Zinoviev. He memorized nearly every resolution of the Russian Communist Party dating back to 1898 and the First Party Congress in Minsk.

  The instructor gave No an A and told him he was a bright young Communist with a future. In other subjects, No kept up with his peers, usually managing a B. He was never reprimanded.

  III

  Kim arrived secretly in Moscow on March 30, 1950. He stayed there for nearly a month, meeting three times with Stalin at Blizhnyaya, the Boss’s heavily guarded dacha on the bank of the Moscow River. The dacha was only a few minutes by limousine from the Kremlin.

  By reputation, Stalin expected facts from underlings at meetings, not emotion or theatrics. So Kim came ready to answer questions about the capacity of his military to punch a hole in the South’s defenses and win a quick victory. Thanks to gifts from the departing Red Army and recent Soviet arms deliveries, Kim had already equipped a hundred-thousand-man army with small arms, tanks, and artillery. North Korean reconnaissance teams had captured soldiers from the South and learned through interrogation that the North had a huge advantage in men and machinery, while the South was ill-prepared for an attack. The North was clearly superior, with twice as many troops, seven times as many machine guns, and six and a half times as many tanks.

  After listening avidly to the operational details, Stalin advised Kim to supercharge his army with elite, highly mobile attack divisions. To assist with this, Stalin pledged delivery of more weapons, trucks, and tanks.

  But Stalin was up to something more devious and opportunistic than merely arming a client state for civil war. He wanted to isolate China from any possible deals it might make with the West and pressure Mao, whom he distrusted, into becoming an instrument of Soviet strategy in the Far East. He also wanted to embarrass and emasculate the Americans by crushing their new client state in Asia. All the while, Stalin wanted to operate in the shadows, minimizing his risk of being drawn into a full-blown war against the United States, which he regarded as militarily stronger than the Soviet Union.

  “If you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger,” Stalin told Kim. “You have to ask Mao for all the help.”

  If need be, Chinese troops would fight in Korea, Stalin told Kim, while emphasizing that the Soviet Union would help with weapons and advisers but never with soldiers on the ground.

  In Stalin’s chess game, Kim was a pawn: notably ambitious, commendably aggressive, but eminently expendable. Still, during their meetings in his dacha, Stalin took time to explain to his pawn the changed international circumstances that now made it possible for him to secretly help North Korea wage war.

  The most important change, Stalin said, was that since Mao had won his civil war, his government was no longer preoccupied with an internal conflict and his troops could help in Korea without undermining Communism in China. Stalin also said the influence of the United States in Asia was fading. The American military had quietly pulled out of China, Stalin told Kim, and “did not dare to challenge the new Chinese authorities militarily.”

  The Americans, Stalin predicted, would be even more reluctant to challenge Communist states in Asia because China and the Soviets had signed a treaty of alliance and mutual assistance in February 1950. Stalin said the Soviet Union’s possession of the atomic bomb—first exploded the previous August—contributed to American timidity in Asia.

  “The prevailing mood is not to interfere,” he told Kim.

  Stalin’s guess that the Americans would not go to war over Korea was apparently based on a January 1950 speech by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, which excluded the Korean Peninsula as a Pacific territory that the United States would fight to defend. A secret U.S. National Security Council policy paper on the Far East, which had been written thirteen months earlier and which Stalin obtained with the help of his spies in Washington, said essentially the same thing. The defensive perimeter of the United States in the Pacific, it said, included Japan and the Philippines but not the Asian mainland and not the Korean Peninsula.

  But Stalin was not absolutely certain that his intelligence people had it right. In his meeting with Kim, he wondered out loud if the Americans might interfere.

  Kim was sure the Americans would not take the risk. At least, that is what he told Stalin. In a detailed and remarkably wrong analysis of how the war would unfold, he explained that North Korea’s attack would be fast and victory would come in three days. Kim also said that a powerful pro-Communist, anti-American guerrilla movement would spontaneously rise in the South to assist the North Korean military. Finally, Kim predicted that the Americans would be caught off guard and by the time they figured out what to do, the Korean people would have rallied around a new Communist government.

  As for Mao, Kim said he knew the Chinese leader would help North Korea—if necessary. But Kim was a nationalist. He was wary of China and mindful of the centuries it had dominated Korea. Back in Manchuria in the 1930s, he had personally witnessed what the Chinese were capable of, killing Korean partisans by the hundreds.

  Kim told Stalin that he wanted to unify Korea without China’s help.

  “We believe that we can do it,” he said.

  Stalin did not care what Kim wanted, telling him again that if he desired a war, he had to get approval from Mao.

  Unlike Stalin, Mao was not yet an elderly dictator with the blood of millions of his own countrymen on his hands. His image had not yet been blackened by madness and mass murder.

  That would soon come. Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–61) forced farmers to abandon their land and produce steel in their backyards by melting down pots and pans. Farmers who complained were called counterrevolutionaries and severely punished. Farmers who obeyed starved to death by the tens of millions, along with their families. As a result, an estimated thirty-six million Chinese died. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was less lethal but perhaps even more disruptive. It exiled the urban elite to the countryside, blew up the economy, and squandered a generation of China’s best minds.

  But as of 1950, Mao still seemed sane, and his reputation was near its high-water mark. At fifty-six, he was fat, suffered from insomnia, and had a neurological disorder that caused sweating, hot flashes, and soreness in his fingers and toes. Yet he worked fifteen to sixte
en hours a day and was the undisputed hero of a triumphant peasant revolution. As both a military and a political strategist, he had united the Chinese mainland after decades of civil war, routing the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek and chasing it off to Taiwan. In the process, he had transformed a semicolony into an independent global power with the world’s largest population.

  Mao did not like or trust Stalin, who he believed had tried to have him killed in the 1930s. Privately, he made fun of the Soviet leader’s “mechanical thinking.” But publicly Mao linked arms with Stalin, stamping a gargantuan Red footprint on Asia and signing a treaty that would help China industrialize and build a modern military. As one of his longtime colleagues later said, “Had Mao died [in the 1950s], his achievements would have been immortal.”

  When Stalin ordered Kim Il Sung to seek China’s approval before launching a war, Mao was well briefed on events in Korea. He knew that military action there was possible at any time. A year earlier, when Kim sent a secret emissary to China to inform leaders about the situation in Korea, Mao was sympathetic, and he owed the Korean Communists a favor. Tens of thousands of them had served in his army during the civil war against the Nationalists, fighting bravely and well.

  “If the need arises, we can quietly send Chinese troops [into the Korean Peninsula],” Mao said. “We all have black hair, no one can tell the difference.”

  Yet when Kim Il Sung came calling in Beijing on May 13, 1950, aboard a Soviet aircraft, his secret meeting with the Chinese leader was strained and ended abruptly. Mao later said he had a strong dislike of Kim, viewing him as aggressive, doctrinaire, and rash. He came to regard North Korea under Kim’s rule as “a number-one pain in the butt,” according to Sidney Rittenberg, an American scholar and linguist who lived in China from 1944 to 1979 and often worked with Mao.

  After his first meeting with Kim, Mao was furious with Stalin, who had not bothered telling him that the Soviet Union had given North Korea a conditional green light for war. For Mao, this was demeaning, disruptive, and extremely ill timed. He was then preparing to attack Taiwan. Most of his army was deployed on the southeast coast of China, within striking distance of the island. A war on the Korean Peninsula, Mao knew, would at best delay the fight for Taiwan; at worst, it could derail his most important military priority.