Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Kim Yong-nam repeated the point made by virtually every other North Korean I had met—that reunification was the ardent wish of the entire Korean people. The question of reunification, he said, “is an urgent one that cannot be delayed further.” Koreans are “a homogeneous people with one language, one set of customs and one territory” he said. But because of their separation for the previous thirty-four years, “the language and customs of the people are becoming different. This is the biggest tragedy for our people. Now the North and the South are in a position of military confrontation and both keep strong military forces,” he said. “To remove the danger of a new war, Korea’s reunification should be realized soon.”

  Kim complained that it appeared “the United States does not clearly understand the sincere position of our country for independent and peaceful reunification.” He said his country’s proposals had gone largely unreported in the news media of capitalist countries. Take, for example, the North’s proposals for economic cooperation with the South. The North had mineral and fishery resources and the South had surplus labor, so why not put them together? Stop the South Koreans from emigrating to places like the United States and send those people north, he said. Specifically, the North had offered to let low-income South Korean fishermen fish in North Korean territorial waters alongside North Korean fishermen. The North had even offered to build irrigation systems to help increase farm yields in the South. “But as the South Korean side rejected all those proposals, not a proposal could be realized,” Kim Yong-nam said solemnly, looking deeply sorry for the poor Southerners thus deprived of Northern economic help.

  Kim Yong-nam reprised some appeals that were standard ingredients in Pyongyang’s efforts to undermine the Washington-Seoul alliance by playing to Americans critical of the Park Chung-hee regime’s anti-democratic record. Such critics formed a large and growing group and included my newspaper’s editorial board and myself, as North Korean officials perhaps were aware. “We think the U.S. should change its policy on Korean questions, proceeding from goodwill,” Kim said. “The U.S. should not back or instigate Park Chung-hee, particularly in his maneuvers for splitting our country, his war clamor and his policy of trampling the democratic forces in South Korea. … The U.S. should come out to assist the realization of reunification. If it can’t do that, at least it should not do things which hinder and put obstacles in the way of realizing reunification.” Kim repeatedly emphasized that the improvement of U.S.–North Korean relations was “entirely up to the United States.”

  Making what he told me was a new offer, Kim Yong-nam said that if the United States would withdraw its troops from South Korea and help to achieve Korean reunification through a confederation, North Korea would guarantee not to “touch or harm” American interests in the South. He repeated the North Korean proposal for reunification, which envisioned separate governments coexisting in the northern and southern halves of the country for an indefinite period. Each could maintain its own social system with a guarantee of independent operation regarding domestic matters, he said. But the two would be united in dealing with foreign affairs, in which field the proposed Korean federation would pursue a “nonaligned, neutral policy.”

  Kim Yong-nam did not get into a detailed discussion of just what were American interests in South Korea. He did not even mention, for example, investments there by American corporations, but he did address by implication Washington’s basic Cold War–era interest in seeing that Moscow would have as few allies as possible. He repeated the argument Pyongyang had been peddling for several years: that North Korea was an independent and non-aligned country, taking orders from no great power. A reunited Korea would be like-wise, he promised. “What I want to emphasize is that even after reunification our country will stand independently, will not be a satellite of certain countries and will strictly follow a nonaligned and neutral policy,” Kim Yong-nam told me.

  Two hours and fifty minutes after our meeting had begun, Kim ended his monologue. We repaired to a lunch of several courses, lasting another couple of hours, during which he took questions. In response to a question on how the guarantees he had offered would apply, he gave no specifics but said, “That question can be discussed if the United States comes out with the intention to help the country’s reunification.”

  Kim Yong-nam offered no new proposals to get the stalled North-South talks moving again. It seemed clear that North Korea’s leaders had decided to concentrate for the time being on changing American minds in the hope the United States would resume troop withdrawal.

  As for the new U.S. intelligence reports saying the North’s ground forces numbered between 560,000 and 600,000 men, Kim charged that this was “baseless information. Even 400,000 would be a great burden for us when we think of our population and other conditions.” North Korea was “demanding the reduction of military forces in the North and South and reduction of armaments,” he said. Mean-while it had been reducing the percentage of its budget spent on the military, from 16.5 percent in 1976 to 15 percent in 1979. “And we have many times expressed and clarified our stand that we have no intention of pursuing aggression against the South.”

  The account of my interview with Kim Yong-nam was the lead article on the front page of The Baltimore Sun the next morning, and it was duly read in official Washington. The offer to guarantee “as they are” American interests in South Korea seemed intended to provide the missing quid pro quo for continued American troop withdrawal from the South. Kim Yong-nam had told me the proposed guarantees would apply not only to the United States but also to other foreign countries with interests in South Korea—specifically Japan, whose economy, as he noted, was more “organically” linked with South Korea’s than was the U.S. economy.

  But although Kim had insisted he was offering something new, Washington saw in what he had told me just a dressed-up version of Pyongyang’s unchanging line. North Korea’s military was considerably more formidable than that of South Korea alone, but the first step was for the American troops to leave—and then we would see which side could wrest control of a unified Korean foreign policy and military. If Kim Yong-nam really imagined he was offering, through The Sun, a deal that would appeal to Washington, either he did not understand American thinking or he underestimated the intelligence of U.S. officials.

  Just a few weeks later, President Carter went to Seoul to reaffirm publicly American military support for South Korea. While there, he implicitly criticized the South Korean regime for its repression of the people. Hailing “the dramatic economic progress in this booming country,” he said during a state dinner: “I believe that the achievement can be matched by similar progress through the realization of basic human aspirations in political and human rights.” Carter also spoke with opposition leader Kim Young-sam, who had aroused a storm of criticism by expressing his willingness to meet with the North’s Kim Il-sung. The U.S. president indicated that the time might be right for some such initiative. “We must take advantage of changes in the international environment to lower tensions between South and North and, ultimately, to bring permanent peace and reunification to the Korean peninsula,” he said at the state dinner.17 Carter and South Korean President Park on July 1 called for three-way peace talks with North Korea—not the talks with Washington alone that Pyongyang, forever seeking an end run around Seoul, insisted upon.

  Sorely disappointed, rejecting the presence of the South at U.S.-North Korean talks except in the capacity of an observer, North Korea called Carter a “vicious political mountebank;” his journey, “a powder-reeking trip of a hypocrite agitating for aggression and war.” But a North Korean spokesman in Tokyo said that, in the North Korean lexicon, this was a relatively moderate slur. At least the North had not called Carter an imperialist, its worst insult. North Korea would stick with its insistence on bilateral talks with Washington, the spokesman said, and “we don’t think the U.S. can oppose Pyongyang’s proposal indefinitely.” Sooner or later, “the U.S. will be forced to go along with Py
ongyang’s proposal.”18

  Carter announced on July 20, 1979, that he was “freezing” troop withdrawals until 1981. While the plan had been alive, only about 10 percent of the U.S. troops in South Korea had been removed—and U.S. aircraft based there had increased in number. Gen. John W Vessey vice chief of staff of the army, that same month warned a congressional subcommittee that “Kim Il-sung’s only remaining course of action to achieve unification on his terms appears to be the military option of large-scale attack.” Vessey’s testimony echoed a remark by a North Korean foreign affairs official who had escorted me and other American journalists on a visit to the northern side of the DMZ: “I think if this tension continues, eventually it will break out into another war.”19

  In reality Kim Il-sung had other options that Vessey did not mention. One was simply to wait, in the hope that the Southern regime would fall to a revolution and present Kim a new opportunity. As had happened in Iran—a comparison the North Koreans enjoyed making—the faster the economic growth in South Korea, the more the social fabric was rubbed raw. Southerners’ discontent was flaming up, fueled by traffic jams, pollution, double-digit inflation and the widespread perception of a growing gap between rich and poor. Democratic-minded intellectuals, social-activist Christians, students and low-paid industrial workers stirred the pot, frustrated by the regime’s police-state tactics for preventing organized protest.

  North Koreans were jubilant when, on October 26, 1979, South Korea’s intelligence chief assassinated President Park. In an atmosphere of wild excitement, the Northerners even closed their schools.20 Months of political confusion followed in the South, as the forces for democracy clashed with a new group of would-be military rulers led by Maj. Gen. Chun Doo-hwan. Making some efforts to exploit the situation politically, the North sent Seoul a rephrased proposal for North-South talks in January 1980.

  But the North did not yield to the temptation to move militarily, and some reports from Seoul to the contrary were outright lies concocted by the Chun Doo-hwan forces. The Baltimore Sun caught South Korean government officials red-handed in the fabrication of a report—intended to defuse student demonstrations—that Northern moves to invade the South appeared to be under way Briefing South Korean newsmen in Seoul on May 10, 1980, Prime Minister Shin Hyon-hwack said a “close ally” had informed the government that North Korea’s infiltration-trained Eighth Army Corps had been out of sight of intelligence surveillance for some time. The unit might surface in South Korea, perhaps between May 15 and May 20. South Korea had only two close allies at the time, the United States and Japan. Thus, it was a simple matter to check, and to report in the paper the next morning,16 that neither ally had provided this information. Instead, the Japanese said the South Koreans had been trying to peddle the “intelligence” to them, claiming it came from China—a country that certainly was not a close ally. “The South Korean inquiry appeared to be something of an advertising balloon,” a Japanese source said dryly21

  North Korean restraint was sorely tested in May 1980 when South Korean special forces, enforcing martial law in the city of Kwangju, massacred more than two hundred citizens. North Korean security and intelligence officials watched the news coverage on Japanese television. “At the time, we thought that everyone there was being killed,” a high-ranking Public Security Ministry official recalled after his defection later to South Korea. “There were some who, watching television, felt that we could not simply sit back and watch this and instead must charge on down. If the Kwangju incident had dragged out just a little bit more, then it was possible that the problem could have become a bit more complicated.22

  During the Kwangju incident a North Korean spokesman in Tokyo complained to me that the United States was “agitating us to do something.” The spokesman, a foreign affairs official of Chongryon (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), seemed to think Seoul and Washington wanted to lure Pyongyang into a military intervention that would unite the fractured South Korean society behind its defending army.

  The South Korean government at the time was accusing North Korea of controlling from behind the scenes the student rebels who fought the military in Kwangju. Later, when I had a chance to interview people in Kwangju who had been involved at the core of the uprising, I found no evidence that this charge was any more than another fabrication by the Chun regime, as in the case of the supposedly missing North Korean army corps.23

  For whatever purpose, though, the North Korean People’s Army was on full alert during and after each major crisis. Kim Kwang-il, who rose to the rank of sergeant first class, was stationed right on the border in Cholwon, Kangwon Province, manning 105-millimeter artillery that was kept in a mountain tunnel ready to be rolled out for firing on Yeoncheon in South Korea. “When Park Chung-hee was assassinated, we all waited for war, remaining on alert in the tunnel for sixty days wearing our helmets, gas masks and boots,” Kim Kwang-il told me following his 1995 defection to the South. “The high-ranking officers told us South Korea would invade, but the soldiers figured the Northern leadership would order an attack. There were six of these alerts while I was serving, following the same routine. They were prompted by the 1976 axe killings, a 1977 training exercise, the 1979 Park assassination, the Kwangju uprising in 1980, a major defection in 1981 and Kim Il-sung’s seventieth birthday in 1982. At the time of Kwangju we understood there was great instability in the South, but Chun Doo-hwan emerged and stabilized the situation. In the case of Kim Il-sung’s seventieth birthday, the authorities had hoped to be able to reunify the peninsula as a present to him. There were so many cases when alerts expired after nothing had happened that we grew accustomed to them, and indifferent: ‘Oh, it’s just another training exercise.’”

  The year 1981 came and Jimmy Carter was no longer in office to consider thawing out his “frozen” troop-withdrawal plan. Worse, from Pyongyang’s perspective, Ronald Reagan had replaced Carter—and Reagan quickly put on a showy display of support for Chun Doo-hwan, South Korea’s new dictator. Pyongyang-was not delicate about expressing its feelings. The Voice of the Revolutionary Party for Reunification, a North Korean radio station that masqueraded as an underground South Korean outlet, reported a 1982 assassination attempt against Reagan as a punishment “deserved by a warmonger and a strangler of human rights.”24

  That illustrates one of the problems a democracy such as the United States encounters in dealing with a country ruled by a single-minded, all-powerful individual. Although Carter and his foreign-policy team were gone from 1980, turned out of office by the American voters, Kim Il-sung, his son Kim Jong-il and Kim Yong-nam were still in office. More than two decades later Kim Il-sung, although dead, remained officially the president of North Korea. Kim Jong-il, alive, maintained the uninterrupted family rule. And Kim Yong-nam? For all the intervening years he had continued in key foreign relations posts, eventually becoming the titular head of state.

  Every four or eight years, as a new American administration started more or less from scratch to figure out who the North Koreans were and begin to deal with them, the ever-more experienced America-watchers in Pyongyang waited for them to fumble.25

  NINE

  He Gave Us Water and Sent Us Machines

  When Pak Song-chol returned to Pyongyang from his secret visit to Seoul before the July 4, 1972, issuance of the North-South joint communiqué, Kim Il-sung asked him how things were in the South. One story goes that Pak gave Kim an accurate report of what he had seen, one that did not conform to North Korea’s propaganda picture of a back-ward, poverty-ridden country. Thereupon Kim snapped: “You look at things that way because your ideology is wrong.” After that, Pak dropped out of sight for three or four months, having been sent off to a camp for “reeducation.”1 Needless to say other delegates made sure they were properly armed with skepticism when they went south. There is the famous story of their charge that the automobiles filling Seoul’s streets were mere props. But in fact they saw what Pak had seen in Seoul, and some of them—-w
hile no doubt softening the story to avoid informing the emperor directly that he had no clothes—dared to be bearers of bad tidings.

  Once he finally got a glimmering that the South had positioned itself to overtake the North economically, a shocked Kim Il-sung intensified his emphasis on mass mobilization. In 1973 he appointed son and heir Kim Jong-il to head Three Revolutions teams of young agitators, who would go into the factories and fields and whip up workers’ zeal to fever pitch. Even though its effectiveness was dwindling, it was understandable that the elder Kim would fall back on his favorite motivational technique. It had worked reasonably well—for a limited time. Even South Korea in the 1970s experimented with mass mobilization in its successful, government-sponsored “New Village” movement for rural self-help and development.2

  In a more substantial policy shift, the Pyongyang regime tried to change its luck by importing technology from the West. In part that was to make up for shortfalls in aid from the Soviet Union, related to troubles in the Moscow-Pyongyang political relationship. The new policy required some modification in the juche policy as the North went on a spending spree. In the early 1970s, Pyongyang borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to buy new factories from Western European countries and Japan. The plan was to repay the debts with the increased export income that the new technology would provide.3 In the process, North Korea itself was moving to an even more authoritarian system than before. The regime stepped up surveillance to make sure Western ideas would not contaminate the citizenry as the country brought in foreign capital and technology.4