The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (20 page)

Moreover, by the end of the 1970s, the balance of power between the two countries had shifted dramatically. No longer an economic-aid client of the United States, South Korea had emerged as a rising middle power with a large and complex economy. The United States was still expected to deter the North by stationing troops that would guarantee automatic US involvement in case of war, but nearly all the Americans had been pulled back to reserve positions, leaving South Korean troops to defend most of the DMZ front line. Reflecting these changes, Ambassador Gleysteen reported to Washington in one of his first dispatches after the killing, “We should keep in mind that the Korea of 1979 is not the Korea of the early ’60s when we were able to bully the early Park regime into constitutional reforms.”

One of the first things Korean authorities did on the night of October 26 was to notify Gleysteen. General Lew Byong Hyon, the senior Korean officer in the recently established Combined Forces Command, came to the ambassador’s residence around midnight and reported that “there’s been an accident” involving Park. Lew didn’t know how much to say and, at that point, didn’t know all the facts himself. Gleysteen went to the embassy to use his secure line to alert Washington (where it was early afternoon).

About two hours later, when it was clear that Park was dead and that Prime Minister Choi Kyu Ha would take over, at least temporarily, as mandated by Park’s 1972 constitution, the US National Security Council convened at the White House. The president had already left for a previously planned weekend at Camp David.

As always in moments of crisis on the peninsula, Washington’s foremost concern was for the security of South Korea and the US troops stationed there to defend it. American forces and South Korean forces under US operational control were put on a higher degree of alert, and an aircraft-carrier task force was ordered to Korean waters as a show of force to deter the North. Two Airborne Warning and Surveillance (AWACS) planes were placed on station to monitor North Korean military movements. The State Department quickly announced that the United States would “react strongly in accordance with its treaty obligations to the Republic of Korea to any external attempt to exploit the situation.” Washington privately passed the same message, intended for North Korea, to China and the Soviet Union. Unannounced, the United States also stepped up spy-plane surveillance of North Korea and closely monitored electronic intercepts. For the moment, Pyongyang remained quiet, apparently unclear about events and not wanting to be accused of having a hand in the assassination.

GROWING DOMESTIC TENSIONS

In the months preceding the assassination, Park’s regime was under great strain. After a long period of rapid growth, South Korea had been afflicted by the worldwide inflation and recession that arose from the redoubling of oil prices after the Iranian revolution early in 1979. An unprecedented wave of bankruptcies and strikes swept the country. The large-scale release of dissidents under the unannounced agreement with Carter during his visit in early July had emboldened Park’s critics, especially opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Kim Young Sam, who began denouncing the government in scathing terms.

On August 11, the government outraged Kim and exacerbated its problems when steel-helmeted riot policemen invaded NDP headquarters and dragged out 190 female employees of the bankrupt Y. H. Industrial Company, who had staged a sit-in to enlist public sympathy. A month later, Kim publicly appealed to the United States in a
New York Times
interview to end its support of Park’s “minority dictatorial regime.” In response, on Park’s instructions, Kim was expelled from the Korean National Assembly, precipitating the mass resignation of opposition-party deputies and plunging the country into a political crisis.

In mid-October antigovernment demonstrations in Kim’s home area of Pusan spread from campuses to the rest of the city, prompting the imposition of martial law in Pusan for the first time since Park’s muscular imposition of his unchallenged rule in 1972. The Pusan protests, the US Embassy reported to Washington, “probably resulted from a combination of political and economic frustrations including considerable weariness with the Park government and widespread objection to the government’s recent heavy-handedness.” Massive protests also erupted in the nearby industrial city of Masan.

As a show of American disapproval of Kim Young Sam’s ouster from the National Assembly, Ambassador Gleysteen was briefly but publicly recalled to Washington. But on October 18, Gleysteen was back in Korea to accompany Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who was in Seoul for annual high-level military consultations, to an intimate meeting with Park. There they presented a personal letter from Carter expressing concern about the political developments. Brown warned Park that security ties with Seoul could be affected if he did not return to a more liberal path. In this period, Gleysteen reported to Washington, “I was struck by the pervasiveness within the establishment of worry about where the government’s hardline policies were leading Korea. People in almost all sectors and all levels told us of their anxiety and were becoming increasingly bold in identifying President Park as the man making the wrong decisions, listening to advisors who were telling him what they thought he wanted to hear.”

In the last years of his life, especially after the assassin’s bullets in 1974 that narrowly missed him and killed his wife, Park was the subject of extraordinary security measures imposed to protect him from outside threats. A half mile from the presidential mansion, windows in hotels were taped or shaded to obstruct outsiders from getting a view of the Blue House. When Park appeared in public, guests were required to be in their places an hour before he appeared. Because of these draconian measures, Park was increasingly cut off from normal human contact. But as it turned out, not even these measures could provide absolute security for a chief executive who had outlived his welcome.

By the time of his death, Park’s regime was held together by fear and force. With his popularity waning and the economy faltering, Park was in trouble even in his own entourage. Seemingly immune to all external pressures to step aside, Park was removed by a privileged insider across the dinner table in his own presidential compound. When American officials, headed by Vance, flew into Seoul for Park’s funeral, which was attended by huge crowds, they initially found surprisingly little sincere grief in the general public or among the officials who had served the late president. “His time had come,” a senior ROK official told Assistant Secretary of State Holbrooke privately. “There wasn’t a wet eye in Seoul,” Holbrooke observed.

The motives of Kim Jae Kyu, Park’s assassin, have never been fully established. Kim had been considered a close friend of the president. His selection in 1976 to head the KCIA, the most sensitive instrument of Park’s personal control, testifies to their intimate relationship. Like a number of other senior officers and officials, however, Kim felt increasingly alienated from Park’s policies. At his trial, he told the court he had decided to kill Park years earlier in order to end the dictatorial
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system, and claimed that his objective was “a revolution for the restoration of democracy.” On the basis of conversations with Kim, his lawyer, Kang Sin Ok, told me that Kim had decided a few weeks earlier to kill Park at his first opportunity.

On the other hand, there were signs that Kim’s plot was hastily improvised. The first pistol had not been used for a long time and misfired. More telling, Kim had not devised a serious plan for taking over the government. There had been rumors that Kim would soon be ousted from his job by the dissatisfied president, giving rise to the theory that he had acted in part from fear of dismissal or worse. Along with several other officials, Kim had clashed bitterly with chief bodyguard Cha in the past, adding a personal factor to their policy dispute.

Given Washington’s well-known unhappiness with Park’s policies, there was immediate speculation among conspiracy-minded Koreans and some Americans that the United States had had a hand in the assassination, especially when the news of Park’s death was reported by American news
agencies from Washington before it was officially announced in Seoul, where it was still in the middle of the night. Nearly a month after the assassination, Gleysteen reported in a cable to Washington that suspicion of US complicity persisted in Korea, but that “I have checked with Dick Sneider [his predecessor] and can state flatly that neither of us ever signaled to Kim Jae Kyu or any other Korean that we thought the Park government’s days were numbered or that we would condone Park’s removal from office.”

A more difficult question is whether the American clashes with Park over the withdrawal of American troops, the Koreagate scandal, and human rights abuses had weakened the Korean president and contributed to his demise. Kim Kyung Won, who was special assistant to Park for international affairs, noted that the KCIA had full access to the barrage of negative comment about Park in the US administration, Congress, the press, and elsewhere. “It is not implausible to me that [KCIA director Kim] may have convinced himself that if he got rid of this Park Chung Hee, then his action would be welcome,” the former aide said. Gleysteen, while convinced that the KCIA director’s violent act resulted from madness of some kind, also believed that American behavior inadvertently fed it and that Kim Jae Kyu, who had been the interlocutor with Americans on human rights issues during the Carter visit and at other times, had “misread us.”

Immediately after the killings, Kim Jae Kyu met Army Chief of Staff Chung Seung Hwa and tried to persuade him to go to KCIA headquarters and declare martial law, although the assassin did not disclose that he had killed the president. Instead, Chung convened a meeting at Korean military headquarters, in which Kim participated—again without disclosing his role in the president’s death. The truth came out several hours later when the other surviving principal from the fatal dinner, the chief of the Blue House secretariat, Kim Kye Won, finally turned up. At that point, the KCIA chief-turned-assassin was arrested. He was later found guilty of murder and executed, along with his aides who had killed the president’s bodyguards.

An emergency cabinet meeting named Prime Minister Choi Kyu Ha, a soft-spoken former diplomat, acting president, as specified in Park’s
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law constitution. With American concurrence, martial law was declared over most of the country, and Army Chief of Staff Chung was named martial-law commander.

In Pyongyang, two days after Park’s assassination, Kim Il Sung addressed a military meeting, drawing a stark contrast between South Korea, “one half of our territory . . . under the occupation of the U.S. imperialists and reactionaries, landlords and capitalists,” and the DPRK, where “our people are enjoying a happy life to the full, without any worries about food, clothing, medical treatment and education.” While approving the
elimination of “traitor” Park Chung Hee, the North Korean leader cautiously told the military assembly, “We must wait and see what change this will bring about in the revolutionary situation in South Korea.” Other than this, North Korea said and did very little, except to heighten the readiness posture of its armed forces, probably in response to similar actions south of the DMZ. The US Command in Seoul and officials in Washington, however, remained concerned that the North might seek to take advantage of turmoil in the South.

With the demise of Park and the nominal passage of power to a civilian authority, South Korea entered a delicate transitional period. Acting president Choi, taking US advice, repealed Park’s emergency decree forbidding criticism of the constitution and released the most prominent opposition leaders and dissidents from house arrest or prison. An outpouring of ideas and emotions came from an uncertain yet excited populace. Apparently becoming ambitious in his own right, Choi spurned US advice that he announce he would serve as interim president for only a year—which American officials had hoped would buttress his standing and encourage a peaceful transition.

Although both Washington and a Korean consensus favored changes in the constitution, the government and military leaders insisted that Park’s discredited
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charter remain in effect through the selection of Park’s successor rather than open the process to the popular political contenders. Using
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’s easily controlled procedures, Choi was elected to the presidency on December 6. Choi, who had no independent political backing, was not a forceful leader. It seemed likely that the military leadership was the real power. The question was, which military leaders?

THE COMING OF CHUN DOO HWAN

The answer came suddenly on the night of December 12, when a group of generals headed by Chun Doo Hwan shifted troops into key positions and used force to depose the existing military authorities. Moving without warning, they arrested the martial-law commander and army chief of staff, General Chung Seung Hwa, and commanders loyal to him and occupied army headquarters, the Defense Ministry, media outlets, and key bridges and road junctions. The takeover was so swift and decisive that there were few firefights or casualties.

The justification for the mutinous action was suspicion that General Chung had had a hand in Park’s assassination, which Chun Doo Hwan, as defense security commander, was charged with investigating. Another reason, more cogent to US military officers, was that the established army leaders were making plans to rid themselves of the ambitious and
troublesome Chun Doo Hwan by reassigning him to a distant command. Chun and his coconspirators moved first.

Ambassador Gleysteen and the senior US commander in Korea, General John Wickham, spent a tense and surreal night in the fortified command bunker at Yongsan, headquarters of the joint US-ROK Combined Forces Command headed by Wickham and created a year earlier to provide continued American military leadership even if US ground troops were withdrawn. In theory, the underground bunker was the most important control center for military forces in South Korea. The bunker had been built by the Japanese army during its long occupation of Korea and was inherited, along with the base where it sat, by the US Army after World War II. Nearly thirty-five years later, the Americans still commanded both base and bunker, but on this night their influence did not go much further. The US ambassador and senior commander were onlookers as power was wrested from one Korean group by another almost before their eyes, with massive implications for the future of the country.