Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  22. “The highly publicized 1968 Pueblo and 1969 EC-121 incidents ’were preceded by thousands of clandestine operations and electronic surveillance missions launched from U.S. bases in Japan” (from Frank Baldwin’s introduction to Without Parallel [see chap. 4, n. 1], p. 24).

  23. An enlightening discussion of this and related issues may be found in McCor-mack, “Kim Country” (see chap. 3, n. 44).

  24. See Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, pp. 564, 590–595, 647–653.

  25. Ibid., pp. 596–597, 601, 609.

  26. Baldwin, “Patrolling the Empire” (see chap. 5, n. 23), p. 73, n. 66, citing hearings held by a Senate subcommittee. Baldwin (pp. 63 ff) asserts that the North Koreans adopted a harder-line policy in response to American and South Korean initiatives. North Korea “did increase pressure along the Demilitarized Zone from October 1966, and encouraged subversive and guerrilla activity in the South. … Nevertheless, an objective examination of the Korean situation and the Pueblo incident indicates that North Korea was reacting to … U.S./South Korean provocations” (italics in original). Besides espionage gathering, those included covert North-South warfare. Baldwin gives few details on the subject of “a private, covert war between North and South Korea,” but he cites an exchange in a hearing in which Senator J. William Fulbright asked, “Have there been no raids from the South to the North? No action?” In reply, William J. Porter, ambassador to South Korea, said, “Nothing on the scale that could be called as provocative as that which, for example, the North launched in 1968 against the residence of the President of South Korea.” Later the ambassador denied that there had been any South Korean raids on the North.

  27. Baldwin (ibid.) suggests that the American use of South Korean troops in Vietnam from 1965, with the seasoning it gave those troops, brought about “a dangerous shift in the military balance in Korea” and thus was seen by Kim Il-sung as another provocation.

  A Hanoi-datelined .March 29, 2000, dispatch by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said that Yonhap reporters, “in a joint search with the South Korean embassy here for evidence of North Korea’s participation in the Vietnamese war, found Wednesday a graveyard of North Korean soldiers killed in the war near here. … The graveyard, with a memorial monument erected in honor of 14 North Korean air force soldiers killed in the war, is located in Bac Giang, 60 kilometers north of the capital city. … The 14 North Korean soldiers killed in the war included 11 fighter pilots and three mechanics and included in the pilots were Ri Chang-il and Pak Tong-jun. People in Bac Giang said the North Korean soldiers fought against U.S. fighter-bombers during U.S. air raids on Hai Phong in 1967.”

  Scalapino and Lee (Communism in Korea, p. 595) say that, for Pyongyang, using the Vietnam strategy “would require substantial preparations. A southern branch of the Party and a substantial guerrilla force would have to be built, and the north would have to be guarded against retaliation when the military pressures upon the south mounted. In short, South Korea was not South Vietnam at this point. Kim and his generation were determined to liberate’ the south on their terms, and a full decade might be required.”

  The same authors add (p. 647) that “there is some reason to believe that the major shift in priorities undertaken in December 1962, and the new emphasis upon large-scale militarization, were directly connected with a decision that South Korea had to be liberated’ in the early 1970s at the latest. The frustration of being unable either to take advantage of Rhee’s overthrow or to prevent the subsequent military takeover undoubtedly contributed to this decision. But there was also rising concern over Japan’s potential role in Northeast Asia. Later, the increasing signs of economic growth in South Korea were to have the same effect. With respect to their public, political formula for unification, the Communists stood by their proposals at the Fourth [Workers’ Party] Congress [in 1961]. However, it was also in that Congress that Kim had called openly for the establishment of ‘a true .Marxist-Leninist Party’ in the south, and asserted emphatically that Korea would be ‘peacefully unified’ only when the Americans had been driven out of South Korea and the [Park Chung-hee] government overthrown. This, Kim certainly implied, would require a revolution, and a violent one. Thus the renewed liberation’ drive was to be conducted on the pattern of Vietnam, not the Korean War. The north would serve as a training and infiltration base while a revolutionary movement was constructed in the south. Only when that movement had become strong would further steps be taken, combinations of legal and illegal action, as well as guerrilla warfare. At this later stage, North Korea could determine its role in accordance with the circumstances, supposedly secure in the knowledge that its internal defenses were impregnable.”

  28. Biographer Robert A. Caro quotes Johnson as having made the comment to an unnamed Time correspondent on January 22, 1968 (Caro, “The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson,” The New Yorker, April 1, 2002). (The rest of the quotation, which Caro used to illustrate Johnson’s ambivalence on racial issues: “It is just like you driving home at night and you come up to a stoplight, and there’s some nigger there bumping you and scraping you.”)

  29. See Trevor Armbrister, A Matter of Accountability: The True Story of the Pueblo Affair (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970). For the basic account of events of January 21–23, including the Blue House raid and the capture of the Pueblo, see pt. 1, pp. 3–78. Reference to the Chesapeake is on p. 350. Armbrister covered the case as a journalist and interviewed a great many of the participants. Commander Bucher and his second in command also published, separately, their own memoirs.

  30. Ibid., pp. 232–233.

  31. Ibid., pp. 245–246, 381.

  32. Ibid., p. 249.

  33. New York Times, January 25, 1968, cited in Baldwin, “Patrolling the Empire,” p. 55.

  34. Armbrister, Matter of Accountability, pp. 212–214, 264, 273, 288.

  35. Ibid., pp. 259, 262, 275–277.

  36. Ibid., pp. 319–330.

  37. Ibid., pp. 335–343. Washington had warned Pyongyang after the U.S. presidential election in November 1968 that only one more effort would be made to resolve the issue before the inauguration of Richard Nixon, who was expected to take a harder line against the North. See Document 324, Foreign Relations of the United States 1964–1968, vol. XXIX Korea.

  Scalapino and Lee observe (Communism in Korea, p. 644) that getting the American letter “was the equivalent of having ‘American imperialism’ kowtow before the leaders of Pyongyang, and they were subsequently to boast repeatedly that, because of the impregnable defenses that had been created in the north, the enemy did not dare to take military action and was forced to admit his crimes before the world.”

  38. “Without recourse to North Korean or other revealing documentation from Moscow or Beijing, it is impossible to know the other side’s motivation” (Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-1968, vol. XXIX Korea, Pt. 1 [Washington, D.C.: Department of State, 1999], http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/ history/ vol_xxix/summaryhtml).

  Cdr. Richard Mobley in “ Pueblo: A Retrospective” (NWC Review, Spring 2001, http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2001/Spring/art8-sp1.htm), p. 3, quotes a February 5, 1968, Central Intelligence Agency briefing package as having given the CIA’s view that the Pueblo “was almost certainly taken as a result of a decision at the highest levels of the North Korean government. … It seems likely … that the North Koreans had identified the ship and her mission at least a day in advance. It is possible that the original intent was only to harass and drive off the Pueblo; the final decision to take the ship into Wonsan may have only been taken when it eventually appeared that U.S. forces ’were not coming to assist the Pueblo.”

  Frank Baldwin argues that “North Korea kept heavy pressure along the DMZ and increased subversive and espionage activities elsewhere in South Korea from 1966 to 1969 as a contribution to the Vietnamese war effort. The U.S. was forced to keep about 50,000 troops in South Korea and public uneasiness in South Korea inhibited the R.O.K government from further troop
dispatch to Vietnam. The sequence of these events is crucial to an assessment of North Korean motives in January 1968. The increase in North Korean guerrilla and subversive operations came after South Korea became deeply involved in Vietnam, in fact only shortly after the second South Korean infantry division was dispatched [in 1966]. The fragile, tentative detente, which had kept violence at a relatively low level in Korea since 1953, was upset by the American–South Korean escalation in Vietnam. To North Korea, the massive South Korean intervention in Vietnam was a moral challenge; sympathy for North Vietnam’s cause ensured a North Korean response.” Baldwin makes clear such considerations were not “the sole operating factors in North Korean decision making. Obviously, other policy objectives ’were intermingled; for example, North Korea’s oft-expressed intention to create a socialist revolution in South Korea” (Baldwin, “Patrolling the Empire,” p. 67 and n. 46 on p. 72).

  A more recent author argues that the key motivation for carrying out the capture could be found in Kim Il-sung’s wish to show himself domestically as a fierce nationalist, to offset popular disappointment over the regime’s failure to make adequate improvement in the people’s livelihood. See Mitchell B. Lerner, The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2002), pp. 99–122. It may be a mistake to emphasize “suffering” (p. 110) by North Koreans as an overriding political concern of Kim Il-sung’s early in 1968. It is true that some of Kim’s struggles with rivals had involved their calls for devoting more resources to providing consumer goods, less to heavy industry. Kim had resisted those demands successfully however, and had purged all overt rivals. That is not to say that spotlighting his nationalism and independence was not important for Kim. As we have noted, it had been an important factor in a great many decisions since his elevation to power courtesy of the Soviet Union. But I am not persuaded that international and inter-Korean considerations played only a minimal role in motivating the Pueblo’s capture. (Judging from the lack of a citation, it appears Lerner may not have been cognizant of Baldwin’s important arguments for an international view of the incident in “Patrolling the Empire.”)

  39. Armbrister, Matter of Accountability, pp. 263, 284. Washington claimed that the Pueblo was legally situated in international waters when captured and cited the 1958 convention on the law of the sea, which guaranteed ships on the high seas immunity from the jurisdiction of other nationalities. Pyongyang, however, had never signed the convention. Pyongyang went to great lengths to claim that the ship was inside North Korean territorial waters, and to that extent bolstered Washington’s argument that the territorial waters issue was relevant. However, in the state of war still obtaining between North Korea and the United States, peacetime rules such as the 1958 convention would hardly seem applicable to an enemy spy ship. For a discussion of these issues see Baldwin, “Patrolling the Empire,” pp. 61–67.

  40. Armbrister, Matter of Accountability, p. 285, quoting Arthur J. McCafferty. In naval regulations, destroying classified materials takes priority over saving lives (p. 371).

  41. Quotes from Vice Adm. Harold G. Bowen Jr. and Rear Adm. .Marshall W. White, respectively, in Armbrister, Matter of Accountability, p. 385.

  42. “In 1969, within a few months of Nixon’s taking office as President, the North Koreans shot down a US plane, killing all thirty-one people on board. Nixon and Kissinger at first recommended dropping a nuclear bomb on the North but later backed off” (Halliday and Cumings, Korea, p. 216).

  43. Reuters dispatch in Korea Times, April 29, 1995, reporting a visit to the ship by Mike Chinoy of CNN, the first American reporter allowed to see it.

  44. Hwang Jang-yop, cited in Testimonies of North Korean Defectors.

  45. Kim Il-sung’s report to the Fifth Korean Workers’ Party Conference, Pyongyang, November 2, 1970, cited in Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 660. It is interesting to consider the idea of arming all citizens of a totalitarian state in the light of the libertarian argument often heard in the United States that citizens’ right to bear arms prevents government tyranny.

  46. Byoung-Lo Philo Kim notes that in South Korea in 1972 “a popular referendum approved the Yushin (revitalizing) constitution that greatly strengthened presidential power. Key provisions included indirect election of the president through a new body, the National Conference for Unification (NCU); presidential appointment of one-third of the National Assembly; and presidential authority to issue decrees to restrict civil liberties in times of national emergency. President Park was reelected by the NCU and [his Democratic Republican Party] obtained a decisive majority in elections for the new National Assembly. … In South Korea, economic development was on the rise and it needed social security to attract more and more international capital when it entered a deeper level of expansive development; this necessitated a more authoritarian state. … [T]he Saemaul (New Community) .Movement, a mass mobilization measure in 1972 that took aim at rural development encouraging self-help by villages with small government grants … was probably stimulated by the nature of the early success of North Korea. … North Korea publicly called for the revolution in South Korea toward the end of the 1960s. [Such] threats stimulated South Korea to introduce a tightly controlled authoritarian state” (Two Koreas in Development, pp. 123–124).

  47. Report to the Fifth KWP Conference.

  48. James B. Palais writes that the aggressive policy had “failed to stimulate a revolutionary reaction among the generally conservative rural populace in South Korea. .Moreover, because Chinese and Russian support became less dependable in the late 1960s, the North Koreans decided to abandon their aggressive tactics in the south after 1968” (“‘Democracy’ in South Korea, 1948–72,” in Baldwin, Without Parallel, p. 340).

  Scalapino and Lee cite examples showing that that “infiltration did not cease, although it was considerably reduced from the high-tide of 1968” (Communism in Korea, p. 680).

  49. Lloyd C Gardner, Korean War (see chap. 5, n. 17), p. 7.

  50. Robert R. Simmons, “The Korean Civil War,” in Baldwin, Without Parallel, pp. 168, 170. Simmons’s suggestion that Beijing’s “liberation” of Taiwan coupled with the absorption of South Korea into North Korea would have been positive outcomes was put forth before their speedy economic development made South Korea and Taiwan the biggest and second biggest, respectively, of Asia’s “Four Tigers.” With the benefit of hindsight we now know that the four have, in turn, become the inspiration for China’s shift to the market economy, bringing rapid wealth expansion in place of the poverty and widespread starvation that had accompanied Maoist rule.

  One might ask why the term “legitimate” should apply to a nationalism that insists on placing fellow nationals under a system that is alien to them, as was the case on both sides in Korea. It was understandable, perhaps, even inevitable. But legitimate? Australian scholar Gavan McCormack wrote much later (in “Kim Country”) that “[t]he interpretation in terms of beleaguered nationalism does not distinguish (legitimate) nationalist substance from the use of nationalist symbols for other ends (maintenance of entrenched power) …”

  Simmons seemed to suggest that Kim Il-sung would not have been an autocratic ruler if only he had been permitted to absorb South Korea. The sum of available information about Kim indicates that this was wishful thinking. Modeling his rule on Stalin’s, Kim had shown, even before the invasion, many signs of developing into the complete autocrat he was to become.

  In another Vietnam-era analysis, Frank Baldwin asked (Without Parallel, pp. 15–16), “What would have happened in Korea if the United States had not intervened?” His answer: “The war would have been over in two or three weeks with total casualties of perhaps less than 50,000. Several million people opposed to communism would have come under communist rule and probably, but not certainly, there would have been reprisals. A single communist Korean state would have been established, the unity of a millennium restored, and national energies immediately dir
ected to urgent economic and social reconstruction.” Baldwin listed negative consequences of the Korean War, including: “a very costly commitment to South Korea’s security, reversal of the tentative policy of accommodation with the People’s Republic of China and the subsequent twenty years of hostility to China, domestic mobilization and the creation of a garrison economy (Pentagon capitalism). … The United States intervention prolonged the war by more than three years, bringing an estimated 4.5 million Korean, Chinese and American casualties. The United States achieved its objective of keeping the Southern half of the peninsula non-communist, but the Koreans remain divided almost three decades later.”

  51. Halliday and Cumings, Korea, p. 204. A photo caption (p. 209) reads, “Kim Il-Sung and Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, November 1958. The manifest contrast in personalities does not explain the different responses that the two leaders and the two revolutions evoked in the West. Yet the two wars had much in common, including the same enemy”

  Compare McCormack’s argument quite a few years later that the character of the Communist Party of Vietnam “has long been completely different from that of North Korea. Leninist and authoritarian, to be sure, but even during the life of Ho Chi Minh the cult of the personality was abjured, and after his death in 1969, a collective leadership brought the nation to victory in the war against the United States without resort to the dismal monolithicity of opinion so vaunted in North Korea” (“Kim Country”).

  One might argue, further, that the contrast between the personalities of the two leaders alone was sufficiently stark to explain the different responses of many Americans. While Kim Il-sung might have sought since the 1930s to emulate the Indochinese leader, in the end he was no Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh did not purge his colleagues; he won wars—instead of losing them and then concocting elaborate lies to pretend he had won them; he was a man of “goodness and simplicity” (see David Halberstam, Ho [New York: Random House, 1971], especially pp. 14–17; 42).