The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (7 page)

Because his many directives took on the aura of holy writ, they proved difficult to change if they became outdated or were mistaken from the start. Even Politburo members and government ministers were forced to undergo “self-criticism,” and some were ousted from their jobs, for making proposals that inadvertently breached policy lines previously laid down by
the Great Leader. “Once said by Kim, it is said forever,” according to a diplomat who spent four years in Pyongyang. “Nobody is allowed to change anything; the smallest sign of deviation means the system has developed a dangerous crack.”

In the spring of 1972, Kim had just celebrated his sixtieth birthday with great fanfare, a traditional milestone for Korean elders, after which they are greatly venerated. Kim’s
hwangop
birthday was the occasion for the opening of the ninety-two-room Museum of the Revolution, devoted to glorifying him, and the unveiling of his sixty-six-foot-high bronze likeness, painted in gold, on a scenic spot overlooking Pyongyang, where a shrine had been erected for worship of the Japanese emperors during the Japanese occupation. It was the largest statue ever built by Koreans for any leader in their long history. Still in his physical prime, Kim was a burly man with a rolling walk and heavy-rimmed glasses.
New York Times
correspondent Harrison Salisbury, the first American correspondent granted an interview with the Great Leader, called him “a big, impressive man with a mobile face and a quick chuckle” and nearly constant gestures to emphasize his words. At this point in his long career, Kim turned his attention and his considerable charisma to creating his first political opening to South Korea.

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE SOUTH

The historic initial secret meeting between Kim Il Sung and the second most powerful figure in the South began with an exchange of pleasantries and assurances of trust. In the early-morning hours of May 4, 1972, Lee Hu Rak, director of the ROK intelligence agency, broke the ice by praising the achievements of construction he had been shown on his first day in Pyongyang. Kim Il Sung responded by praising the South Korean president for sending Lee as “an expression of his trust,” and he commended Lee as “a very bold person” and “a hero” for making the journey to the opposite camp.

The meeting, whose record was kept by Lee’s aide and not disclosed until seventeen years later, was remarkable for the shared antipathy to the major powers and the heavy emphasis by both sides on reaching accords and eventual reunification.

       
LEE
: President Park Chung Hee and I believe unification should be achieved by ourselves without interference of the four powers [the United States, China, Japan, and the Soviet Union]. . . . We are never front men of the United States or Japan. We believe we should resolve our issues by ourselves. . . .

       
KIM
: Our position is to oppose reliance on external forces on the issue of unification. This is where I agree with Park Chung Hee. . . .

       
LEE
: I’d like to tell you that President Park is a person who detests foreign interference most.

       
KIM
: That being so, we are already making progress to solve the issue. Let us exclude foreign forces. Let’s not fight. Let’s unite as a nation. Let’s not take issue with communism or capitalism. . . .

       
LEE
: A nation with 40–50 million people is a powerful country. [The population of the South in 1972 was 32 million, that of the North 14 million.] One hundred years ago we yielded to big powers because we were weak. In the future the big powers will yield to us. I’d like to make it clear to you, the big powers only provide lip service to our hope for unification. But in their hearts, they don’t want our unification.

       
KIM
: Big powers and imperialism prefer to divide a nation into several nations.

In a further attempt to clear the air, Kim apologized for the actions of the North Korean commando team that had attempted to assassinate Park in 1968. Kim suggested, improbably, that he did not know of the famous Blue House raid in advance, blaming it on “leftist chauvinists within our structure” and saying that when he had learned of it, he fired his chiefs of espionage and security. (In fact, there was a purge of military and paramilitary officials afterward.) “Tell President Park I feel very sorry,” said Kim.

After the secret return visit to Seoul by DPRK deputy premier Park Sung Chul, who conferred with President Park, North and South Korea surprised the outside world by publicly issuing a joint statement on July 4, 1972, a date that seemed to have been chosen to illustrate their independence from the nation that celebrates its own independence then.
*
The statement declared that the two sides had reached full agreement on three principles:

First, unification shall be achieved through independent efforts without being subject to external imposition or interference.

Second, unification shall be achieved through peaceful means, and not through use of force against one another.

Third, a great national unity, as a homogeneous people, shall be sought first, transcending differences in ideas, ideologies, and systems.

As part of the joint statement, the two sides agreed “not to defame and slander one another” and to take positive measures to prevent inadvertent military incidents. In order to avoid officially granting recognition to each other, however, the statement was not signed by the two governments but simply by KCIA director Lee Hu Rak and Director of Organization and Guidance Kim Young Joo, Kim Il Sung’s brother, “upholding the desires of their respective superiors.”

In a press conference, Pyongyang’s emissary to the South, Deputy Premier Park, announced the North’s interpretation of these accords. He declared, “Now that there exists no threat of aggression in South Korea from the North, nor . . . any need of protection and [because] our nation is settling its internal problems according to its own faith, the U.S. imperialists must no longer meddle in the domestic affairs of our country; they must withdraw at once, taking with them all their forces of aggression.”

Kim Il Sung saw the North-South dialogue as a way to wean the South Korean regime away from the United States and Japan and to bring about the withdrawal of US troops. Shortly after the July 4, 1972, joint statement, Kim’s ambassador in Berlin, Lee Chang Su, in a confidential presentation to the East German Politburo, explained Pyongyang’s engagement of its longtime enemies in Seoul this way: “The [communist] party and government of North Korea will concentrate on forcing South Korean leaders into agreement, to free them from U.S. and Japanese influence and to allow no U.S. intervention.” He revealed that a North Korean peace offensive had been authorized in meetings of the Workers Party in November 1971 and July 1972, and he said the effort had “undermined the attempts of the U.S. imperialism to retain its troops in Korea, as well as the attempts of the Japanese imperialists to invade Korea again. . . . The Park Chung Hee clique will capitulate to this peace offensive. The tactical measures we adopted proved successful with the holding of talks with the enemy.”

President Park, according to his longtime aide, Kim Seong Jin, saw the dialogue as a helpful tactic in a harsh environment in which North Korean military power was a serious threat. “As long as you can touch an opponent with at least one hand,” said Park, “you can tell whether he will attack.” Park had no belief or interest in unification in his lifetime, his aide said, and little interest in making compromises to bring fruits from the North-South contacts. Unlike his successors, Park also expressed no interest in meeting Kim Il Sung. “He told me directly, I have no intention at all [to meet Kim Il Sung],” said his aide. “Why should I meet that fellow?”

Most of the world, however, greeted the surprising news of the conciliatory joint statement with soaring optimism about the chances for a rapprochement between the two bitter enemies. Among those most fascinated were the veteran correspondents who had covered the Korean War and were still following events on the divided peninsula. Keyes Beech, Tokyo correspondent of the
Chicago Daily News
, was among the most eminent of these. At the outset of the war in 1950, Beech had telephoned NBC correspondent John Rich in the Japanese capital to tell him that hostilities had broken out at the thirty-eighth parallel. “We’d better get over to Korea, there’s a war on,” said Beech. Twenty-two years later, after hearing the dramatic news of the North-South joint statement, Beech again telephoned Rich and reminded him of their 1950 discussion. This time it had a different twist. “We’d better get over to Korea,” said Beech, “there’s a peace on.” Both men were in Seoul within days.

__________

*
The ROK government notified the US Embassy in Seoul several days in advance of the announcement and gave American diplomats an advance look at the text. Although supposedly a state secret, news of the statement circulated freely in Seoul. The twenty-one-year-old son of Francis Underhill, the deputy US ambassador, shocked his father the night before the announcement by telling him he had heard about the secret diplomacy and the impending joint statement from Koreans at a tea shop along the main street in Seoul.

2

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

T
HE FIFTY-FOUR MEMBERS OF
the North Korean Red Cross delegation, each wearing a Kim Il Sung badge and some dressed in the high-necked cadre suits typical of the Chinese communists, walked across the dividing line at Panmunjom a few minutes before 10:00
A.M
. on September 13, 1972. As they stepped into the South for the first time since the bloody war that had left millions dead, the northerners were greeted with embraces, handshakes, and laughter from their southern counterparts and bouquets of flowers from pigtailed schoolgirls. For one emotional moment, the two delegations seemed to transcend the bitter ideological and political conflict that had plagued the peninsula for decades. Suddenly, they showed themselves to be brothers, sisters, and cousins—all Koreans.

The first visit of North Koreans to the South, openly and in peace, since the Korean War came two months after the July 4 joint statement, which had surprised Koreans on both sides and the rest of the world. Although their leaders were privately cynical, for the ordinary people of the two Koreas, this was among the most hopeful moments in the second half of the twentieth century. There was widespread popular anticipation that the beginning of the North-South dialogue could mean the dawning of an era of peace and the reuniting of divided families and the nation.

On the roadsides leading to the center of Seoul, hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, people turned out to stare and wave at the visitors from across the lines. Streets and roadways along the route had been washed and swept, new shrubs planted, and anticommunist signs taken down or painted over. Very few of the forty-three thousand American troops who were then in Korea were in evidence; only ten, many fewer than usual, were on duty at Panmunjom, and the rest had been instructed to stay out of sight.

The first exchange of North-South Red Cross delegations had taken place two weeks earlier in the North. There everything had been meticulously
prepared: people along the route to Pyongyang had lined up to greet the visitors dressed in their Sunday best, shops in the capital had been specially stocked for the occasion, and public buildings illuminated. It was all too perfect for Chung Hee Kyung, the principal of Ehwa Girls High School in Seoul, and the only woman among the southern delegates. The North Koreans she saw and met seemed to her dolls who had been programmed to say and do as they were told. When she returned to a large, loud, and unruly welcome in the South, to her own surprise she began weeping uncontrollably with relief and joy to be among familiar human beings with human reactions. “It was my most genuine experience of patriotism,” Chung recalled.

The North Koreans who came to Seoul, following an afternoon of leisure, were taken to an elaborate reception at historic Kyongbok Palace, the seat of the Choson dynasty, the country’s long-lasting and final royal kingdom. With an eye to history, the ROK government staged the reception in the Pavilion of Joyous Meeting, first built in 1412 as a greeting place for diplomatic delegations and royal visitors to the Korean court.

Inside the historic two-story pavilion, which is anchored in a pond near the former quarters of the Korean queens, were banks of colorful flowers, a sumptuous buffet, and several dozen gorgeous young women, many wearing filmy dresses, miniskirts, or other alluring modern garb. I walked up to one of the beautiful hostesses and asked who she was and why she was there. “I’m a Red Cross volunteer,” she replied firmly, refusing to answer further questions. After receiving the same answer from another hostess of stunning beauty, I turned to a South Korean journalist familiar with the preparations. From him I learned that the KCIA, which had devised the program of the North Koreans, had asked for and received the services of some of the country’s most beautiful young women from the national airline, modeling firms, and television companies and provided each one with a substantial sum of money to buy whatever dress she thought showed off her features best. In return, she was to show up as a hostess for the North Korean visitors, without revealing how this had come about.

The communist visitors professed to be unimpressed by the glamour of the hostesses or the symbolism of the reception in the historical surroundings. An austere man wearing a Mao jacket and a Lenin cap to complement his Kim Il Sung button, Yun Ki Bok, who was the chief political adviser of the North Korean delegation, observed sourly that the palace buildings were “outright testimony that the ruling class in the past exploited the people.” The following night, the visitors were guests at a risqué display of bikini-clad, high-kicking South Korean dancers at Walker Hill, which had been built as a rest-and-recreation center for American troops. Some of the North Koreans, whose society was officially prudish, covered
their faces or averted their eyes. They complained that the show was “the result of American imperialism” and lodged an official protest about the sexy display.