Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (29 page)

One pair of Korea scholars, who focused on the Vietnam comparison found it remarkable that “whereas the Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh inspired considerable sympathy in the West, the nature and credentials of the Korean revolution were completely ignored. … No students charged through the streets of Berkeley shouting, ‘Kim, Kim, Kim Il-sung.’”
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Vietnam-era critics had little but contempt for Washington’s claim that its support for South Korea equated to defending freedom in a society that was evolving toward democracy. One American scholar saw the Park Chung-hee regime as “a police state with but a few trappings—the ‘formal institutions’ of constitutional government—to avoid foreign criticism.” As for the economic gains then becoming apparent in the South, they were distributed unevenly, he wrote. “In a mixed capitalist system, without pressure from below, the chances of Korean workers and farmers getting a fair share of the increased wealth appear remote. It is more probable that they will
be caught in a police state vise, working long hours for low “wages, while the profits go to foreign capitalists and a small ruling elite in South Korea.”
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In the late 1960s, several younger-generation Korea scholars of like mind helped to form the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, challenging more conservative academic colleagues to drop their support—active or passive—for “an Asian policy committed to ensuring American domination of much of Asia.”
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In the introduction to a book of essays, several of them contributed by fellow members of the committee, a leading spirit of that group issued a blanket dismissal of the fruits of North Korea studies in the United States as of the early 1970s. “On the one hand, career anti-communists dominate the field,” he wrote. On the other hand, “the independent, objective, Korean-born researcher” would fear to tell the whole truth because of pressure from the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency, “including pressure on relatives in South Korea.” For such researchers, “self-censorship prevented unbiased or sympathetic research on North Korea.”
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A number of the concerned scholars believed that the United States must abandon South Korea. As one wrote, “The risk of being involved in another phase of the Korean civil war, the endless cost of providing weapons and military aid to South Korea and of keeping U.S. forces there, and the embarrassing dictatorial methods of the Park government all argue for an end to U.S. involvement.”
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Some Vietnam-era critics who harbored extremely negative views of South Korea adopted the logic that since the South was so horrible the North must be wonderful, or at least better than the South.
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The revisionists often started from a romantic, very ’60s and ’70s view of revolution and socialist egalitarianism. Several were scholar-activists who identified themselves with the “New Left.” Not surprisingly, their arguments resonated among anti-establishment young people, in particular. The movement was by no means restricted to the radical fringes, however. Influential establishment news media organizations that came to take critical stances against the Vietnam War also eventually adopted some of the revisionists’ positions on Korea.

The war allergy that developed in the United States during the late 1960s and became unmistakably apparent at the time of the
Pueblo
incident remained deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Dubbed “Vietnam syndrome,” it persisted as a major constraint on Washington’s policy makers at least until September 11, 2001. Only after militant Islamists in hijacked airliners killed thousands of American civilians in their suicide bombings of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington did polls finally show public opinion swinging decisively in favor of sending fighting men to risk their lives in battle.

Early in the 1970s, domestic issues began to distract Kim Il-sung from his long-term mission of unifying Korea. Economic problems were becoming more and more apparent in the North. Of even more concern to Kim, as his sixtieth birthday approached, was his determination to arrange his own succession in such a way as to ensure the survival throughout his own lifetime and afterward of the system and ideology that he had instituted.

Fortuitously in August 1971, the South Korean Red Cross proposed a meeting with its Northern counterpart to discuss the problems of divided families—locating relatives, getting information to the other side about their condition and, finally, arranging reunions. The proposal had much to do with domestic political considerations in the South, where Park Chung-hee was at a crucial stage in consolidating his regime. By showing himself ready to talk with the North, Park hoped to improve his standing with a restive South Korean populace regarding the explosive issues of unification and nationalism. Pyongyang and Seoul had been talking past each other for decades, so there was no assurance that the North would accept—or that the Southern side really expected it to accept.
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But because Kim Il-sung needed some breathing room, the Northern side did agree to meet.

After preliminary talks had proceeded for nearly a year, Park Chung-hee sent his director of central intelligence, Lee Hu-rak, on a secret mission to Pyongyang to talk with Kim Il-sung and his younger brother, Kim Yong-ju, who then ran the Workers’ Party’s powerful Organization and Guidance
Department. The North in turn sent an envoy, Pak Song-chol, to talk with the South Korean president and other officials in Seoul. On July 4,
1972,
North and South issued a joint communiqué that called for peaceful reunification without external interference and a reconciliation of North and South that would transcend ideological and institutional differences. Mean-while they pledged steps to ease tension: an end to mutual slander and abuse, prevention of inadvertent military incidents and installation of a telephone hot line between Seoul and Pyongyang. A South-North Coordinating Committee would work on carrying out these agreements.

In 1971 and 1972, the United States brought home one of its two infantry divisions based in South Korea. That was in line with President Richard Nixon’s Guam Doctrine, which held that Americans should shoulder a lesser burden in ground defense of their Asian allies—and that the allies should increase their own ground-defense preparations correspondingly. The new U.S. policy also may have reflected Pyongyang’s apparent shift toward a less confrontational policy
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The attempt to reach a North-South accommodation was short-lived. As was to become the pattern, South Korea proposed dealing first with economic and social issues. The two sides would build mutual confidence by solving some of those and then gradually work up to the ultimate, far knottier political and military issues. North Korea insisted on getting straight to the military issues. When South Korea refused to discuss the withdrawal of the rest of the U.S. troops, the North, its eyes back on the main goal, maintained that such a foreign presence interfered with the mutual pledge to unify “without outside intervention.” After three plenary sessions alternating between the respective capitals, North Korea called off the dialogue in August 1973. The United States that year toughened its standing plan for responding to any new invasion of the South.
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Kim had not given up on diplomacy. He engaged in a contest with South Korea to secure diplomatic recognition and support from as many countries as possible, useful in rounding up UN votes. To that end Pyongyang held Kim up as a beacon to the numerous underdeveloped countries of the Third World, wooing them with aid and urging them to emulate North Korean policies and practices. In 1975, North Korea managed to gain admittance to their principal forum, the Non-Aligned Movement.

Could Pyongyang really afford an extensive foreign aid program? There are indications that the regime eventually had cause to regret its generosity. Kang Myong-do, who had been a member of the Pyongyang elite, said after his defection to the South that excessive aid to Third World countries had caused an actual worsening of North Korea’s own already serious economic problems. Kim, he said, basically had given leaders of African countries such as Algeria, Tanzania and Zaire whatever they had requested—tractors and other machinery, dam construction, weapons, presidential mansions. “For
Madagascar Kim Il-sung armed the entire army,” Kang said. “That’s why they call Madagascar the second North Korea.”
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Jimmy Carter won the U.S. presidency in November 1976 after campaigning on a proposal to bring all American troops home from South Korea. Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship had achieved impressive economic development but many Southerners had been left behind, for the time being. Park’s government kept a very tight rein on protest and was growing increasingly unpopular both at home and among human-rights advocates in the United States.

The Carter troop withdrawal plan was music to Kim Il-sung’s ears. In the new atmosphere characterized by Vietnam syndrome, the American public might very well veto any proposal to go to war to defend South Korea from a second Northern attack—unless American troops were among the first casualties. The South Korean regime all through the 1970s had been lobbying hard in the United States to keep the troops. The effort was carried on with considerable savvy and backed with substantial resources. Eventually though, it became so heavy-handed as to arouse widespread American resentment at what was viewed as interference in U.S. politics.
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North Korea was carrying out its own campaign to influence American opinion. Full-page advertisements in
The New York Times
promoted Kim and his
juche
ideology. The North Korean press reported the ads as if they were news articles or editorials written by admiring foreigners. Although
Times
readers were more bemused than favorably impressed, what really put a crimp in Kim’s public relations campaign was an incident in the waning days of Gerald Ford’s presidency that reinforced the North’s reputation for bloodthirsty behavior. On August 18, 1976, axe-wielding North Korean soldiers killed American soldiers who were trimming a tree in the Demilitarized Zone. The killings outraged officials and the public in the United States. One North Korean soldier who was based at the time in a camp at the DMZ told me later, “Everybody on the base thought a real war would erupt. We were fully equipped and stayed in the tunnels about a month and a half.”
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Even before the axe killings, candidate Carter’s troop withdrawal plan had reminded South Koreans, ominously, of that earlier withdrawal in 1949 that had been followed by the Acheson speech and the North Korean invasion.
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After Carter took office in 1977, critics forced him to water down his plan for unilateral withdrawal. U.S. naval and air forces would remain, as well as logistics and intelligence units, the administration decided. South Koreans by February and March of 1978 were able to relax somewhat. The influential U.S. ambassador to Japan, former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, told me and other U.S. journalists invited to his Tokyo residence that even if the troops were withdrawn from Korea it could be assumed that
U.S. ground troops would be sent in from bases elsewhere in case of another war.
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Then U.S. and South Korean military officials held a dress rehearsal for just such an emergency reinforcement. They beefed up and heavily publicized an annual joint military exercise code-named Team Spirit, after having played the exercise down in previous years. In Team Spirit, American units practiced moving swiftly into Korea—some in an amphibious assault surely intended to rekindle memories of Inchon—-while coordinating their actions with South Korean and American units already in place. The publicity seemed partly intended to test American public backing for the commitment and prepare the way for scrapping what remained of the pullout plan. And clearly there was a message here for the Koreans, north and south alike, that the U.S. commitment to South Korean defense stood essentially unchanged.
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Pyongyang got the message and briefly returned to a hard-line stance. In the summer of 1978, it began making personal attacks on Carter and other U.S. officials. In October, it sent commandos to infiltrate into South Korea. That same month the U.S.–South Korean United Nations Command announced that a recent underground explosion sending water and debris up a borehole had enabled soldiers to pinpoint a Northern-dug infiltration tunnel under the DMZ. Cut through solid granite, this was the third such tunnel to have been discovered.

Mean-while, new U.S. intelligence data indicated that North Korea over the previous four or five years had built up its military to a much greater extent than previously believed. The United States now “tentatively” estimated that the North Korean ground force totaled between 560,000 and 600,000 men, about a fourth higher than earlier estimated. “These additional units were not added in the last year; we just found them in the last year,” an American general in Seoul said. “We really don’t know how new it is, but it’s clear you can’t organize and equip a division overnight.”
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The new figures ranked the North Korean People’s Army as the fifth largest army in the world, in a country whose population was only 17 million. The timing of the news, right when army generals needed ammunition to counter Carter’s proposal, aroused some suspicions. But in February 1979, Carter announced he was “holding in abeyance” any further troop withdrawals pending further study.
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