The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (17 page)

On the military side, the politically appointed Joint Chiefs of Staff accepted the withdrawal policy on the condition that American support elements remain and that South Korea receive adequate compensation for the reduction in American strength. Officers in the field, however, did not disguise their opposition. Major General John Singlaub, chief of staff of the US Command in Korea, told
Washington Post
correspondent John Saar that “if U.S. ground troops are withdrawn on the schedule suggested, it will lead to war.” Stung by what he considered military insubordination, Carter summoned Singlaub to the White House, reprimanded him, and summarily removed him from Korea, reassigning him to a domestic post. The episode created a political storm, deepening the controversy over the withdrawal plan.

The opposition’s initial tactic was to seek to delay, modify, and water down the pullout plan so that the first withdrawals would be minor, leaving room for reflection and reversal. Carter, however, insisted on pushing ahead. In early May, he signed a top-secret order containing a clear timetable: one brigade of the Second Division (at least six thousand troops) to be withdrawn by the end of 1978 and a second brigade and its support elements (at least nine thousand troops) withdrawn by the end of June 1980. American nuclear weapons in Korea were to be reduced and eventually removed along with the troops. Undersecretary of State Philip Habib, formerly US ambassador to Korea, and General George Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were sent to brief the South Korean and Japanese governments.

In Seoul President Park had not taken the withdrawal idea seriously at first, telling Korean reporters in an off-the-record luncheon that “I don’t think it’s going to happen soon.” When Carter announced his decision publicly, Park summoned his national security advisers to the Blue House. Doing his best to control his emotions, the ROK president surprised his aides by saying he would not openly oppose the proposed withdrawal but would ask for compensation to maintain the North-South military balance. Park’s attitude arose from his searing personal experience in 1970, when he had passionately opposed withdrawal of the Seventh Division, only to have all his objections overridden by Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had been sent to deliver the news. Agnew had emphasized that a US president could assign his forces wherever and whenever he wished. In the
face of this White House trump card, Park decided it would be unavailing and demeaning to mount a frontal attack on Carter’s program.

Spurred on by doubts or outright opposition in the executive branch and the military, American domestic opponents of the withdrawal became more numerous and more vocal. To compensate for the withdrawal of American forces, Carter promised that $1.9 billion in military aid would be provided “in advance of or parallel to the withdrawals.” This required congressional approval, but in July 1977, when Defense Secretary Brown briefed lawmakers at the White House, not a single senator or representative spoke up in support of the withdrawal, and many expressed their opposition. “It is clear that we face an uphill battle on this issue with Congress,” Brzezinski reported to Carter.

Congressional support for South Korea had become a contentious topic independent of the troop-withdrawal issue. Human rights abuses, especially the arrest and conviction of eighteen prominent Christian leaders for issuing a manifesto complaining of the lack of freedom, provoked strong reactions from American churches and the public. In April 1976, shortly after the arrest of the Christian leaders, 119 senators and representatives had signed a letter to President Ford condemning “continuing suppression” in Korea and warning that ongoing US military support could make the United States “an accomplice to repression.” Six months later, after conviction of the Christians, 154 members of Congress wrote Park Chung Hee to protest “disrespect for human rights,” which they said was undermining American–South Korean relations. Carter, who sought to make human rights and morality central tenets of his foreign policy, found the Park regime’s abuses particularly offensive.

Another intense controversy had erupted on October 24, 1976, when the
Washington Post
reported that a Korean agent, Park Tong Sun, had distributed $500,000 to $1 million a year to bribe as many as 90 members of Congress and other officials and that US eavesdropping devices had recorded the planning for the bribery scheme. The
Post
story was based on leaks from a secret grand-jury investigation initiated by the Justice Department. Coming on the heels of the Watergate scandal, which had driven President Nixon from office, the bribery saga quickly became known as Koreagate. Carter took a posture of full cooperation with congressional probes, writing in a confidential memo to his staff that “we should move without reticence to provide all possible informations re: violations of U.S. law.”

By the end of 1977, Carter’s first year in office, four full-scale congressional investigations of Korean activities were under way, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Internal Revenue Service had launched additional investigations. Eventually, only one member of Congress, Representative Richard Hanna (D-CA), was convicted of being bribed. But
with charges of bribery and an avalanche of investigations filling the news, nobody wanted to vote for compensatory aid for the South Korean military. “By the spring of 1978,” noted Robert Rich, the State Department country director for Korea, “Congress probably could not have passed a bill stating that Korea was a peninsula in Northeast Asia.”

The showdown on the withdrawal issue came on April 11, when Brzezinski met with the secretaries of state and defense and the administration’s senior Asia experts. Brzezinski informed Carter in advance that based on his soundings, “everybody, even Vance, is against you” on the troop withdrawal. Carter pleaded with his subordinate, “Zbig, you’ve got to protect me. This is my last foreign policy proposal from the campaign I haven’t walked away from.”

Although most of the policy advisers privately had grave doubts about the US troop withdrawal, none was so bold as to say so in the White House Situation Room. They believed, as Brown acknowledged later, that officials “had either to support [Carter’s] decision or resign.” Instead, the officials made a case for delaying the withdrawal because of the unwillingness of Congress to approve funds to compensate South Korea as promised. “The issue is not the withdrawal but the Park Tong Sun affair,” Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke told the meeting. “Because of ‘Koreagate,’ congressmen fear political retribution at the polls if they vote for any sort of aid to Korea this year.” Moreover, Holbrooke said, to proceed with withdrawal without the aid package would be seen “as part of a retreat from East Asia” and could torpedo the administration’s plans to normalize American relations with China. Michael Armacost, then a National Security Council staff member and later US ambassador to Tokyo, warned of “extraordinarily adverse consequences in Japan” if troops were withdrawn without providing compensating aid as promised. The Defense Department’s Morton Abramowitz said that proceeding without the compensation package would likely bring about the resignation of General Vessey, the US military commander in Korea. He added that such a move “will lose the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” which had reluctantly accepted the withdrawal policy.

With Brown, Vance, and most of the others counseling delay or cancellation of the next withdrawal element, only Brzezinski addressed the real but unspoken issue. “This [withdrawal policy] may have been the wrong decision, but now it has been made. We cannot afford to go back on it,” the NSC adviser said. In the end, Brzezinski devised and sold Carter on a plan to water down rather than delay the first pullout of combat troops, limiting the immediate withdrawal to only one battalion of troops, about eight hundred men, plus about twenty-six hundred noncombat personnel, instead of the planned six thousand combat troops, with the rest theoret
ically to come out later. As many in the meeting hoped and assumed, the administration’s rollback signaled that further withdrawals were much less likely.

Carter reluctantly accepted the face-saving maneuver. In private he bitterly upbraided Brown for seeking to stymie his program. He expected more loyalty, he told his defense secretary heatedly. Brown was surprised at Carter’s outburst but stood his ground, saying he felt obligated to give his best advice and judgment in private, especially since he had been the administration’s point man in defending the withdrawal in congressional testimony. Having found himself earlier in his long governmental career intimidated by the powerful opinions of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Brown was determined to tell Carter what he really thought despite potential damage to their relationship. “Carter felt he was up against the establishment” on the touchy withdrawal issue, said Brown, “whereas we felt we were trying to save him from doing things that would cause big trouble with allies.”

THE VIEW FROM PYONGYANG

In Pyongyang Kim Il Sung was keenly aware of Carter’s proposal to withdraw American troops from South Korea. Such a move had long been one of Kim’s central goals, in the belief that this would lead inevitably to reuniting the peninsula under his leadership, whether by peaceful or violent means. In public and in private, Kim had made Washington enemy number one, harshly condemning the United States for a variety of real or imagined sins, from dividing the peninsula in 1945 to sustaining Park Chung Hee as a military dictator. On the eve of Carter’s inauguration, however, the harsh rhetoric softened, and the “American imperialist aggressor army” became simply “American forces” in Pyongyang’s statements. The Panmunjom incident was blamed specifically on the outgoing Ford administration rather than on the US generally, giving the incoming president a clean slate in Pyongyang.

Behind the scenes, Kim made energetic efforts to engage Carter directly. In November 1976, immediately after Carter’s election, Kim sent a personal letter through the president of Pakistan to the US president-elect at Plains, Georgia, asking for direct contact. This was followed in February 1977 by a message to Secretary of State Vance from North Korean foreign minister Ho Dam, through the US Embassy in Pakistan, expressing Pyongyang’s desire to avoid confrontation with the United States, to pursue reunification peacefully, and to open direct US-DPRK peace talks, which at least initially would exclude South Korea. The American reply expressed interest in discussions with the North, including discussions of
“more permanent Armistice arrangements,” but only if Seoul was permitted to participate fully.
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At the time, this was a nonstarter in Pyongyang. In gestures to Pyongyang, Carter lifted the ban on travel to North Korea by US citizens in March and for the first time invited North Korea’s UN representative to an official US reception.

In July 1977, in this era of high expectations, a US Army helicopter strayed over the northern side of the DMZ and was shot down, killing three crewmen and leaving the fourth a captive. In a remarkably mild reaction, Carter described the flight as a mistake and played down the conflict. In response, North Korea returned the bodies and the captured American within three days, an unprecedentedly short time for such a move.

Yet as Carter was forced to modify and stretch out his program of American withdrawal, Kim became increasingly critical. “Carter has not kept his election pledges,” Kim told visitors, charging that the withdrawal pledges were “aimed at deceiving the world.” In a talk with a Japanese editor, Kim bitterly called the US president “a con man” because of his changing stance on Korean issues.

In early-December 1977, Kim received a visit from Erich Honecker, the general secretary of the East German Socialist Unity (Communist) Party, who came to be one of Kim’s closest and most useful overseas friends. Both were lifelong revolutionaries who had advanced to high places with Soviet backing. Like Korea, Germany had been divided as a result of World War II. East Germany, like North Korea, was struggling to survive against a more populous and more prosperous capitalistic regime across a heavily militarized dividing line. Encouraged by the Soviet Union and recognizing the similarities, East Germany had been an important source of economic aid during all of North Korea’s existence. The major difference, and one that apparently worried Kim, was that East Germany was half of a divided country but did not pursue unification—the USSR’s view was that a unified Germany was a threat to the peace—whereas Pyongyang’s strongly held position was that Korea had offended no one and had been divided arbitrarily and unjustly after the war.

Kim prepared meticulously to receive Honecker, whom he had never met. To flatter his guest, he staged a mass rally of close to a half-million people, including North Korean musicians performing revolutionary German songs from Honecker’s glory days as a youth leader. “It was the biggest reception of his lifetime. This old man was in tears,” said an East German diplomat who was present.

The transcript of the confidential discussions with Honecker on December 10 provides a window into Kim’s private views in the late 1970s. While acknowledging that his country faced problems, many of which he attributed to “American imperialism,” Kim was supremely confident of his position and the ascendancy of his self-reliant
juche
ideology. Kim declared that his number-one priority was unification of the country, and he outlined three strategic directions that he had set forth in the early 1960s and adhered to for the rest of his life: “first, to successfully carry out the organization of socialism in the northern part of the country; second, to support the revolutionary struggle in South Korea; third, to develop solidarity and unity with the international revolutionary forces.”

Kim first described for his guest the extraordinary mobilization of the population, something he justified as necessary to create a powerful revolutionary base for the Korean peninsula and beyond. He told Honecker without overstatement that “everyone, apart from infants, is included in the organizational life” of the nation. Of North Korea’s 17 million people, at that time 2.2 million were in the Workers Party (a relatively high percentage compared with other communist countries),
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and except for infants all the others belonged to various organizations of children, youths, women, farmers, or workers.