52. Baldwin, Without Parallel, pp. 23–24.
53. From the “Statement of Purpose” of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, adopted March 28–30, 1969, in Boston. The group sought “to develop a humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront such problems as poverty, oppression and imperialism.” The committee reportedly argued in 1970 (this according to op-ed contributor Stephen B. Young, “Vietnam War: Washington Was Right” [The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1995, p. 6]; I have not found the original source document) that “communism has generally proved itself dynamic and viable in developing nations.” Regarding North Korea, that was a defensible argument in 1970.
54. Baldwin, Without Parallel, pp. 31–32.
55. Ibid., p. 35.
56. Journalists and other writers who visited the North got encouragement for such logic from North Korean officials. The officials made it very clear that if they should judge one’s work unfair, one would not be welcome back in the country. Quite a few reporters failed the test and never ’were permitted to return. On the other hand, the officials were understandably pleased that several reporters and researchers who visited North Korea returned home to write almost unremittingly glowing accounts of the brave new world they had witnessed there. I think, for example, of a pair of Tokyo-based researcher-activists who campaigning for U.S. troop withdrawal from South Korea and reconciliation with the North. I have lost my copy of their report for an American church group of a 1980 North Korea visit (they likewise misplaced their only copy as I learned when I contacted them in 2003); but I clearly recall reading it at the time with a feeling of amazement that so little about the country seemed to have troubled them.
However, sympathy with the North Koreans’ revolutionary society did not always or necessarily translate into unstinting praise of the regime. As Frank Baldwin noted, “the apparently totalitarian controls and the personality cult of Kim Il-sung left even empathetic foreign observers puzzled and ambivalent about North Korea” (Without Parallel, p. 31).
8. Flowers of His Great Love Are Blooming.
1. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea (see chap. 2, n. 28), p. 677.
2. “Very recently, some reduction of military expenditures appears to have been undertaken” in the North, Scalapino and Lee wrote just after the joint communiqué appeared (p. 684). They argued however (pp. 678–679) that “current North Korean policy does not represent an abandonment of past pledges to liberate’ the South. In intent, at least, the shift is a tactical one, with greater emphasis to be placed in the immediate future upon a political-diplomatic offensive designed to put the [Park Chung-hee] government on the defensive with its own people by making a strenuous bid for the ‘peace, unification and national independence’ vote in the South. Thus, the Communists advance a liberal exchange program, advocate substantial military reductions, emphasize peaceful unification, and focus attention upon getting rid of the American presence in South Korea. All available evidence suggests that Kim Il-song hopes to utilize the new era to penetrate the South more deeply politically, setting aside military efforts at this point. If this accords with the present international environment, it also accords … with the current needs of the North—where intensive militarization and extreme tension had reached a point of greatly diminished returns. Secure in the control of their own society, with a complete monopoly of organization and media in the North, the Communists hope to cultivate ‘people to people’ relations so as to exploit the looser, more open political system of the South. Already they have caused a considerable tightening of the latter system in response.”
3. Selig S. Harrison argues on pp. 118–119 of Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002) that the “danger of a war triggered by ‘misunderstanding and inadvertence’ has been magnified by a basic transformation that has taken place in Operations Plan 5027, the Pentagon’s official scenario for the conduct of any new conflict in Korea. During the first decades after the 1953 armistice, Op Plan 5027 envisaged a replay of the Korean War. The United States and South Korea had a limited objective: repelling a North Korean invasion and reestablishing the DMZ at the thirty-eighth parallel. In this defensive strategy, Seoul was to be evacuated. American and South Korean forces would pull back in phases to the Han River, which bisects the capital. In 1973, however, the United States proclaimed a new “Forward Defense” concept in which U.S. forces would seize Kaesong, a key North Korean city close to the DMZ, while round-the-clock B-52 strikes would stop a North Korean advance north of Seoul, ending the war in nine days. In response to this new strategy and the accompanying forward deployment of U.S. and South Korean artillery along the southern edge of the DMZ, North Korea moved its own artillery forward, where it has remained ever since.” (A further, “more dramatic” shift in the U.S. strategy was to come in 1992, as Harrison notes.)
4. Kang Myong-do’s testimony in JoongAng Ilbo (see chap. 2, n. 7).
5. See Nathan N. White, U.S. Policy Toward Korea: Analysis, Alternatives and Recommendations (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1979), pp. 58 ff
6. Author’s August 1996 interview with Ahn Choong-hak. For a U.S. Army Korea specialist’s description of the response to the axe-killings, see James V Young, Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations, edited and with introduction by William Stueck (College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University Press, 2003), pp. 21–26.
7. “Such shifting policies as those of President Carter’s zigzag on maintaining American ground forces in South Korea have reminded [South Koreans] of Truman-Acheson’s lukewarm commitment to the defense of South Korea, which was at least partly responsible for the Korean War of 1950 to 1953. .Many Koreans think it terribly ironic and inconsistent for the United States to divide the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel in 1945, then fail to unify the country, refuse to train and equip South Korean troops (unlike the Soviets in North Korea), and withdraw its troops and phase out its commitment in South Korea— then get reinvolved when the North attacked the South and modernize the South Korean forces (under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon), then cause anxiety about the reliability of the American commitment (under Carter) and, finally, reassert a firm pledge for the security of their country (under Reagan)” (Wayne Patterson and Hilary Conroy “Duality and Dominance,” in Patterson and Lee, One Hundred Years [see chap. 2, n. 6] pp. 10–11).
8. Bradley K .Martin, “Mansfield Says Troops Would Go to Korean War,” Baltimore Sun, March 2, 1978.
9. Bradley K Martin, “Korea Maneuvers Test U.S. Mood,” Baltimore Sun, March 19, 1978. The United States always insisted that Team Spirit was not provocative but essentially a defensive type of exercise.
10. Bradley K. Martin, “U.S., South Korea ‘Kind of Outflanked’ by North’s Willingness,” Baltimore Sun, March 1, 1979.
11. “Suddenly the estimate of North Korean capabilities was almost doubled,” Carter told Harrison in an interview in 2000 (see Korean Endgame, p. 179). “I have always felt that the intelligence community played fast and loose with the facts, but I couldn’t prove it.” Carter earlier had said much the same to Don Oberdorfer (The Two Koreas [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley 1997], p. 103).
Young (Eye on Korea, pp. 39–56) provides a detailed account of officials’ ultimately successful effort to derail the troop-withdrawal plan. He offers no support for the proposition that the intelligence was doctored: “The findings were initially challenged by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, but in every case our army analysts ’were able to conclusively defend their findings, methodology, and conclusions” (p. 42). Young proudly acknowledges, nevertheless, that the effort to persuade Carter to change his mind was an all-out one. Among the civilians involved, notably Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, a bureaucratic strategy emerged: “declare support for Carter’s plan officially and publicly while delaying its actual implementation”
to buy time for Congress to put its foot down (p. 48).
12. The Chinese example already may have inspired Kim to seek accommodation with Seoul in the early 1970s. See Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 678.
13. Bradley K. .Martin, “North Korea Eyes Ping-Pong Diplomacy,” Baltimore Sun, April 22, 1978. Nearly a year later, as the tournament opening approached, the same operative told me, “Whether some important persons are included in your delegation, we don’t know.” Clearly he hoped that there would be. And he volunteered a suggestion that U.S. congressmen visiting China that month might drop into Pyongyang. Bradley K .Martin, “Side Visit to North Korea Suggested for Congressmen Who Will Be in China,” Baltimore Sun, April 20, 1979.
14. Bradley K Martin, “North Korea Asks South to Talk Unity” (February 6); “Korean Reunification-Talk Furor May Produce at Least New Meetings” (February 13); “North, South Korea Agree on Time for Talks” (February 14); “North and South Korea Agree on Meeting Site” (February 16); “Friendly Approach Taken by North Koreans at Talks” (February 18); “2 Koreas Talk Detente” (February 23); “Big Question: Is North Korea’s ‘Smile Offensive’ More than Skin Deep?” (March 3); “The Two Koreas Play Diplomatic Ping-Pong” (April 15), Baltimore Sun, 1979.
15. Editor-in-chief Andre Fontaine of Le Monde, visiting Pyongyang in 1974 along with a French television crew, had heard similar stories of divided families. Some North Koreans told Fontaine their parents ’were on the other side of the DMZ—whether dead or alive, they did not know. Fontaine’s party, planning to go on from there to Seoul, asked if the North Koreans had messages they would like to have passed on to relatives in the South. “Don’t do that!” they responded. Fontaine assumed their alarm at the notion showed their fear of “the consequences of any attempt to establish contact with family in South Korea” (Andre Fontaine, “A Postcard from Pyongyang,” Japan Times, July 24, 1994).
16. Bradley K. Martin, “Pyongyang Offers U.S. Guarantees,” Baltimore Sun, May 8, 1979.
17. Bradley K. Martin, “U.S. Joins Appeal to North on Korea Unification Talks” and “South Korean Leader Park, like Carter, Finds Support Eroding,” Baltimore Sun, July 1, 1979.
18. Bradley K. Martin, “Seoul Could Attend Talks, North Says” (July 11) and “North Korean Voices U.S.-talk Confidence” (July 25), Baltimore Sun, 1979.
19. Bradley K Martin, “Quick Resolution of Korean Standoff Unlikely,” Baltimore Sun, August 12, 1979.
20. The recollection is from a North Korean defector to the South, who is quoted in The Korea Times, July 12, 1994.
21. Bradley K Martin, “Where Is the Large North Korean Army Unit?” Baltimore Sun, May 11, 1980. For this report I contacted U.S. officials in Seoul and Hideko Takayama in Tokyo contacted Japanese officials. On May 13, the U.S. Department of State issued a statement to the press dismissing the South Korean claims: “From our information we see no movement of troops in North Korea out of the usual and we see no movement which would lead us to believe that some sort of attack upon the South is imminent” (Young, Eye on Korea, p. 98).
22. The former official was Kim Jong-min, quoted in Cho, “Interview of Former High-level Official of DPRK Ministry of Public Security Who Defected to South Korea” (see chap. 6, n. 88).
One aspect of U.S. policy after the incident began was to “[c]ontinue signals that the U.S. will defend South Korea from North Korean attack.” U.S. forces in Korea were beefed up with AWACs early warning aircraft and naval units. (Young, Eye on Korea, p. 103).
23. Bradley K .Martin, “Kwangju Revisited,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 26, 1994, and Bradley K. .Martin, “Yun Sang Won: The Knowledge in Those Eyes,” in Henry Scott-Stokes and Lee Jai Eui, eds., The Kwangju Uprising (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), pp. 87–105.
24. Bradley K. Martin, “N. Korea Halts U.S. Courtship with Anti-Reagan Blast,” Baltimore Sun, April 15, 1982.
25. If it is any consolation for Washington, outgoing U.S. officials have had the opportunity to use an impending change of administration as an opportunity to try to wring concessions from Pyongyang by playing “good cop/bad cop,” warning that the next administration would be tougher so it would be wise to make a deal immediately. Democrats have tended to take advantage of such opportunities. This is precisely what the Johnson Administration did to win the release of the Pueblo crew after the 1968 election. And it is what the Clinton Administration attempted late in 2000 as the inauguration of George W. Bush loomed—but without great result.
Part of the problem for the United States has been that very few of its officials have focused entirely on North Korea, even for the length of their time in office. And officials with responsibilities covering the larger Asian region often have had other things on their minds. I met then–Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke at a Tokyo reception shortly after my 1979 North Korea trip and immediately mentioned the trip, naively thinking he might be interested in hearing about it since very few Americans then could claim such an experience. Holbrooke didn’t miss a beat. He gazed past me, spied someone more important across the room, turned and strode rapidly away.
9. He Gave Us Water and Sent Us Machines.
1. Katsumi Sato, editor of Gendai Korea and a leading Japanese Korea-watcher, told me the Pak story in a 1991 interview. Sato said he had heard from several North Korean sources that the vice-premier was sent to a Workers’ Party school for ideological reeducation; if he had not been a relative of President Kim’s, his punishment would have included loss of his job and authority. Sato suggested, “The point is, everybody has seen this sort of thing happen, and therefore nobody working for Kim and his son will tell them the truth.”
2. “One of the important factors in South Korean success is the introduction of the mass mobilization movement in the 1970s, which South Korea probably borrowed from the successful experience of the North Korean mass movement during the 1950s. This moral incentive worked quite well because it was practiced for a relatively short period of time. Through the measure, the gap between urban and rural income narrowed. Both Korean experiences suggest that a mass mobilization technique based on moral incentive can be a successful measure, as long as it is only implemented for about seven to ten years. The idea is that in human nature any firm determination cannot last too long a time. … Mobilization of the general populace, even if successful for a short period, has economic limitations in the long run. It proves to be more advantageous at the early stage development where development can be achieved by expansion of the utilization of natural resources and unemployed labor. Except in the areas of such highly labor-intensive projects as food processing, irrigation facilities, and construction of unpaved roads, continued substitution of labor for capital will produce, after a point, very small or near-zero marginal output, so that it seems to fall behind in productivity and efficiency at the later stage of intensive development where productivity must be raised through more advanced technology” (Kim, Two Koreas in Development [see chap. 1, n. 2], pp. 147–149).
3. “[T]he critical factor for the failure in the first seven-year plan in the 1960s was troubled relations with the Soviet Union, the major capital and technology supplier to Pyongyang. Under the six-year plan in the 1970s, North Korea brought in capital from Western countries, including West Germany, France and Japan.” See “Pyongyang Continues to Rely on Juche Economic Policy,” Vantage Point (August 1994): p. 3.
Sweden was a major supplier, receiving orders for hundreds of millions of kroners’ worth of goods. Besides factory equipment, the North Koreans ordered 1,000 Volvo sedans (including the one I rode in for most of my 1979 visit, after rejecting as too expensive to rent a higher-status black .Mercedes that my hosts first provided). Swedish companies pressed successfully for the establishment of an embassy in Pyongyang. For a delightful and informative account of the first ambassador’s two tours of duty, see Eric Cornell, North Korea Under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise, translated by Rodney Bradbury (London: Rout-ledgeCurzon, 2002).
4. South Korean scholar Byoung-Lo Philo Kim observes, “Both South and North Korea experienced an authoritarian transformation of the constitutions and states in 1972. … In North Korea, a new ‘socialist’ constitution was promulgated. The new constitution declared Kim’s political thought, juche, to be the ideology of the state. The formal authoritarian adaptation of both Korean states in 1972 was the result not only of the economic situation per se of each side in the late 1960s, but of the ‘comparison effect’ formed by the awareness of each other through the Red Cross Conference in 1972. … North Korea contrasts with South Korea in that economic growth slowed down in the late 1960s. Economic activity, which depended on only mass mobilization, needed to be revitalized by introducing Western capital, which led to a more authoritarian transformation of and surveillance within North Korea so as not to be exposed to the external world” (Two Koreas in Development [see chap. 1, n. 2], pp. 123–124).
5. “The economists are considered to be fulfilling only secondary and administrative functions,” said a former North Korean newspaper editor, who had defected to the South and become a prominent analyst of Pyongyang affairs (Kim Chang Soon, “Korea Today” Vantage Point [.March 1979]: p. 12).
6. “Except for minor and scattered cases of innovations which tend to be stop-gap devices, the North Korean system has not diverged fundamentally from the Sta-linistic command system. …” (Chung, North Korean Economy [see chap. 6, n. 16], p. 155). “Unlike the Soviet Union and other East European countries which tended to decentralize business management gradually, North Korea adopted in 1961 a policy of further centralizing and tightening up entrepreneurial control and management” (Cha, “Financial Structure of North Korea” [see chap. 7, n. 13], p. 3).
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