Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  Earlier that same day off North Korea’s east coast port of Wonsan, a North Korean sub-chaser had spotted the Pueblo, a small, only perfunctorily armed U.S. Navy spy ship on its maiden voyage. Outfitted with sophisticated electronic gear, the Pueblo was checking up on North Korean coastal defenses, trying to pinpoint the locations, missions and frequencies of North Korean radar installations. Such intelligence could help the Americans prepare to jam or trick those radars in the event of another war. The ship was also monitoring coded communications, to gather material for code breakers in Washington, and listening in on noncoded communications that might help in evaluating North Korean forces’ order of battle, equipment and morale. Oceanographers on board were gathering information on the waters off North Korea.

  Unaware of the aborted assassination attempt in Seoul and the way it had quite suddenly heightened tensions in Korea, the Pueblo’s skipper continued with his mission. Cdr. Lloyd M.. Bucher was confident the ship was in international waters and, therefore, in no danger. However, on January 23, North Korean warships fired on the Pueblo. Overwhelmingly outgunned, Bucher did not return the fire but concentrated on evasive action, while his crewmen destroyed sensitive gear and data. His radioman alerted the U.S. Air Force, and help was supposed to be on the way. However, no American rescuers were actually dispatched. President Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly said to a Time magazine correspondent during the first day of the crisis: “If we started sending gunboats out to protect everybody gathering information we’d have a budget of $500 billion every year. That harassment is part of the job.28

  With himself and three of his men wounded, one of them so critically that he would die soon, Bucher surrendered his ship. It was the first surrender of a U.S. Navy ship in peacetime since that of the USS Chesapeake in 1807— and the Chesapeake’s skipper had given up only after firing “one gun for the honor of the flag.”29 The attackers took the Pueblo into port and held its crew, charging that they had been spying inside North Korean territorial waters. The crew members, blindfolded, were marched off the ship toward a waiting bus. Along the way they were subjected to the shouts and blows of hundreds of civilians lined up on either side of the road.30

  In a meeting at the truce village of Panmunjom, the United States protested first the Blue House raid and then the Pueblo’s seizure, demanding immediate return of the vessel and men. The North Korean representative, Maj. Gen. Pak Chung-kuk, replied,

  Our saying goes, “A mad dog barks at the moon.” … I cannot but pity you who are compelled to behave like a hooligan, disregarding even your age and honor to accomplish the crazy intentions of the war maniac Johnson for the sake of bread and dollars to keep your life. In order to sustain your life, you probably served Kennedy who is already sent to hell. If you want to escape from the same fate of Kennedy who is now a putrid corpse, don’t indulge yourself desperately in invective.

  Rear Adm. John Victor Smith, the senior U.S. representative in Pan-munjom, at a hearing much later was to testify in kind that the North Koreans were “only one step above animals.” While meeting with Pak, though, he had to content himself for the moment with blowing cigar smoke in his antagonist’s face. Smith believed that the assassination attempt in Seoul, followed in such quick succession by the Pueblo’s seizure, showed that Kim Il-sung wanted war.31

  Higher-ranking U.S. officials, having failed to stop the seizure of the ship while it was in progress, mean-while were frustrated by their inability to come up with a plan to help the eighty-two imprisoned crewmen and, at the same time, punish Pyongyang for its effrontery. Hawkish politicians wanted to go to war.32 By 1968, to a considerable extent, the nuclear option had come to dominate American thinking about Korean security. One reported reason why the U.S. Air Force did not go to the aid of the Pueblo during the North Korean attack was that the seven F-4s it had based in South Korea were all loaded with nuclear weapons. But some Americans were ready to use such weapons. Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called for a nuclear bombing of one North Korean city. “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” he demanded.33 Even some of the captured crewmen said later that they had hoped for American nuclear retaliation against the North Koreans.34 In South Korea, too, newspapers and officials called upon the United States to help avenge the Blue House raid— and perhaps unify the country in the process.

  Johnson called up reserve military units but in the end decided against a military response. Top officials dismissed not only nuclear warfare but also even conventional options—bombings, shellings, unleashing the angry South Koreans for a battalion-sized raid across the DMZ. Any such action would be unlikely to help get the Pueblo’s crew back safely, and would risk inspiring Soviet or Chinese retaliation that could lead to another world war. The South Koreans considered attacking with their own aircraft, but the problem was that their airfields were “soft”—unprotected, vulnerable to attack—-while the North’s airfields had been hardened. In the end Seoul agreed to exercise restraint in exchange for a U.S. promise of $100 million in aid, which was directed mainly to preventing future infiltration from the North.35

  After thirty-six hours of imprisonment, beatings and torture, Bucher signed a “confession” that the North Koreans had written in stilted English. The captors were not satisfied with that early effort. Backing their demands with coercion, for the next eleven months they kept insisting on increasingly abject confessions and statements. The Americans sometimes submitted— but they inserted inside jokes in those documents to reassure people at home that their confessions were not sincere but coerced. Required to list partners and mentors in espionage, they kept straight faces as they named the likes of comic strip character Buzz Sawyer and television spy Maxwell Smart. One statement purporting to admit that the Pueblo had violated North Korean waters was, unbeknownst to the North Koreans, a direct quotation from the legal definition of rape: “Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the act.”

  In what could pass as a metaphor for the decades-long history of Americans and North Koreans talking past one another, Pueblo crew members in a press conference mimicked the bombastic formulations of their captors to poke fun at the uncomprehending North Koreans. The Americans spoke longingly of “our motherland,” of returning to “the bosom of the fatherland.” Such stunts backfired when Time ran a photo of Pueblo captives extending their middle fingers. The magazine explained that this was “the U.S. hand signal of derisiveness and contempt.” That was an unpleasant surprise for Pyongyang, since crewmen had described the gesture as a Hawaiian good-luck sign. The crew’s treatment during the following week, according to its commander, was “the most concentrated form of terror that I’ve ever seen or dreamed is possible.”36

  The Pueblo’s crew members finally got their freedom on December 23, 1968, after U.S. officials hit on a formula for agreement with North Korea. It was a bizarre formula indeed. Maj. Gen. Gilbert H. Wood-ward, the senior U.S. representative at Panmunjom, signed a document that day admitting illegal intrusion and espionage in North Korean waters, apologizing for the Pueblo’s actions and assuring Pyongyang that no U.S. ships would intrude again. But before signing it, the American general announced:

  The position of the United States government with regard to the Pueblo … has been that the ship was not engaged in illegal activities and that there is no convincing evidence that the ship at any time intruded into the territorial waters claimed by North Korea, and that we could not apologize for actions which we did not believe took place. The document which I am going to sign was prepared by the North Koreans and is at variance with the above position. My signature will not and cannot alter the facts. I will sign the document to free the crew and only to free the crew.

  In other words, General Woodward was telling the world that the document he was about to sign was nothing but an expedient lie. But the North Koreans did not mind that part. “It satisfied their one condition, a signature on a piece of paper,” the general explained to an interviewer later. “Never m
ind the oral repudiation. In the Orient, you know, nothing is more important than the written word. Besides, the North Korean people would never hear about that repudiation. Their propaganda boys would take care of that. As for the rest of the world, well, they just didn’t care.” Or as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it, “Apparently the North Koreans believe there is propaganda value even in a worthless document. It is a strange procedure. The North Koreans would have to explain it. I know of no precedent in my nineteen years of public service.37

  Why did Pyongyang seize the Pueblo? Perhaps fear of retaliation for the Blue House raid further inflamed an already increasingly bellicose attitude in Pyongyang. Or was the seizure coolly calculated, as a diversionary maneuver and perhaps as a test of U.S. resolve? Even declassified U.S. government documents from the period have failed to clarify North Korean motivation. State Department historians can only note that some U.S. intelligence estimates and reports “suggest that Pyongyang saw the Vietnam War as an opportunity to challenge the United States, knowing that the United States was overextended in Southeast Asia and lacked the ability to respond. The North Koreans could have hoped to disrupt relations between Washington and Seoul or, perhaps, to have started a series of events that might have paved the way for the collapse of South Korea, thus succeeding where the Blue House raid failed.”38

  Perhaps it is more useful to ask what the North Koreans gained from the incident, regardless of whether they planned it that way Besides humiliating the United States and distracting attention from their own deadly intrusion into South Korea, they were able to drive at least a small wedge between Seoul and Washington. That came about when the United States—-which did not officially recognize their country’s existence—negotiated with North Korean officials directly on the issue at Panmunjom, without South Korean participation.

  No doubt, too, Kim Il-sung and company learned several very important lessons about American preparedness, unity and resolve. One was that Washington’s trigger finger—seventeen years after Truman had intervened in the Korean War, and mid-way through a new and more frustrating and divisive Asian land war—-was not as itchy as some might have imagined. When it came to nuclear weapons, there was much greater reluctance to push the button, even with provocation. It was possible from Pyongyang’s perspective to see in the United States a muscle-bound opponent, a foe unable to use his strength effectively. Over time, with cleverness and patience, even American nuclear weapons could be made to lose their deterrent power.

  Another lesson was that the U.S. government was in such bad repute with its own people, over Vietnam especially, that some Americans were ready to believe the North Korean version of events, including the Pueblo crew’s coerced confessions. Never mind that the official U.S. denials were backed by radio intercepts, in which North Korean ships about to be involved in the attack on the Pueblo gave their locations as outside North Korean waters.39 In coming years, segments of American public opinion could (and did) prove more receptive than in the past to viewpoints at least somewhat sympathetic to North Korea.

  Pyongyang surely pondered with great interest the overriding American concern for the safety of the crew. No doubt an element of timing heightened that concern. The Pueblo incident began just as public protest over the war in Indochina was reaching a peak of intensity. Americans were in no mood to send young warriors to die in another part of far-off Asia, and especially without clear purpose. The priority that the United States put on safeguarding its military men found reflection in actions ranging from Bucher’s decision to surrender the ship—-without firing even one shot, and before the last of the sensitive materials aboard could be destroyed—up to Washington officials’ shying away from any military action that might endanger the captives. As President Johnson heatedly vowed to an aide, the United States would “do anything to get those men back—including meeting naked in the middle of the street at high noon, if that’s what it takes.40

  A country may be more civilized when the safety of members of the armed forces starts to become more important than the policy objectives they are sent to fight for, but there is a price to pay: Even the might of a superpower loses deterrent value. That is especially true regarding an enemy who has no qualms about sending men on a virtual suicide mission, such as the Blue House raid.

  No wonder navy traditionalists were dismayed with Bucher’s conduct. The commander “could have been the greatest hero in the history of the U.S. Navy,” said one American admiral who participated in the navy’s court of inquiry into the Pueblo case. “For a commanding officer to do anything other than guard his ship with his life is indefensible. I’ll admit it takes guts; that’s what you gotta have. The thought of saving his crew is interesting, humane, but it had nothing at all to do with the job he was assigned to do.” Said another: “If he had only fired one shot it would have made all the difference. Just one little bitty squirt of machine-gun fire, and that whole thing might have been over. They might not have had that boarding party in the first place.41

  They did have that boarding party, however, and the most immediate lesson Pyongyang apparently drew from the Pueblo incident was that it could mount a significant but limited attack on American forces and get away with it. Fifteen months after the capture of the Pueblo, North Korean forces shot down an unarmed American EC-121 reconnaissance plane.42 For decades the North Korean regime would show off the Pueblo as a shrine recalling its triumph over “the most vicious enemy in the world.43

  Both the seizure of the Pueblo and the shooting down of the EC-121 were high-risk gambles in which Kim was prepared to deal with whatever response might issue from the United States. In both cases, according to reported later testimony by a North Korean official who defected to the South, the authorities believed war might be imminent, sent civilians to shelters and prepared the military to fight.44

  By 1970, although he had gotten nowhere with his efforts to undermine and “liberate” the South, Kim Il-sung was determined that his people must try all the harder and must be ready to “battle staunchly at any time to force the U.S. imperialists out of South Korea and carry the revolutionary cause of national unification through to the end.” Mean-while, he was able to report that the North had been thoroughly fortified and its entire people armed. “In our country, everyone knows how to fire a gun and carries a gun with him,” Kim boasted.45

  Concern over the North’s machinations helped to stimulate an authoritarian crackdown by the Park regime on the South Korean populace.46 There was a chance that the South, under too tight a lid, would boil up. Kim Il-sung needed to ensure that American support for the South would not be automatic, in case a popular uprising against Park Chung-hee or other signs of Southern weakness should make South Korea once again a tempting target for Northern military intervention.

  Kim knew that removing South Korea’s U.S. protection would also remove the restraints the Americans exerted on the South’s military. Yet he wanted the Americans out. Clearly he was willing to risk the chance that their absence would encourage Southern generals to choose war as the means of uniting their fractious populace. Having hardened his defenses in an effort to make them impenetrable, he would hope to repel any Southern attack, quickly shift to the offense and prevail—in a straight North-South fight, with no meddling by foreign forces that might be inclined to turn the Second Korean War into a nuclear war.

  It is not that Kim actively sought another war at the time, after the years of grueling effort his subjects had put into rebuilding their shattered country. Plan A, apparently, still was to reunify via subversion of the South. But if Plan A should fail and Plan B, another war, be required, sooner was better than later for Kim. He could not afford to wait too long while an advancing Southern economy overtook the North. “The whole party and the entire people should buckle down to a further acceleration of war preparations,” he said. They must strictly guard against the “trend of war phobia, to prevent it from infiltrating into our ranks.”47

  The Vietnam-inspired “wa
r phobia” that was developing in the United States, on the other hand, seemed a favorable development for Kim, to the extent it would require Washington to rethink its global policeman role. Korea became a focal point of the U.S. debate, as the only place in Asia besides Indochina where Americans had fought a land war and one of the most likely places for another to break out. Hoping to help the Americans talk themselves out of Korea, Kim adopted—for outside consumption, especially—a less confrontational stance.48

  Among American scholars of the period, intellectual heir’s to ’50s revisionist I. F. Stone advanced the argument that Truman and his aides had intentionally exaggerated the danger posed by the June 1950 North Korean invasion of the South. Some critics spied a conspiracy to win popular and congressional support for a war that was—like Vietnam—peripheral to genuine American security interests (not to mention unwinnable). Truman had “deliberately created a sense of impending disaster,” one historian charged.49

  The parallels between the wars in Korea and Vietnam, wrote another scholar-critic, “are numerous. In both cases the United States backed corrupt and unpopular governments, preferring to believe that ‘international order’ was more important than the legitimate nationalism of the peoples involved.” In Korea, from an American standpoint, “non-intervention would have brought welcome consequences. First, the Chinese civil war would have ended with the liberation of Taiwan. And then, in all probability, Washington and Peking would have reached a-working relationship. …” Instead, “the political price that Koreans have paid for the American intervention has been autocracy throughout the peninsula based upon the mutual fears of the two governments.”50