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The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

Page 19

by Oberdorfer, Don


  With this surprising beginning, the North and South in a period of a little more than a year held thirteen public discussions, including five economic meetings, three Red Cross meetings, three working-level Red Cross contacts, and two preliminary contacts for a North-South parliamentary exchange proposed by Pyongyang. In September 1985, thirty-five South Koreans crossed the DMZ to visit family members in Pyongyang, and thirty North Koreans crossed in the other direction to meet family members in Seoul. After years of formal meetings, most of them sterile recitations of fixed positions, the emotional reunions of even a few divided families seemed at last to be a tangible payoff for the inter-Korean talks and a promise of better times to come.

  Unknown to all but a few on each side, the progress was facilitated by secret talks at a high level, which had also resumed late in 1984 and reached a peak in the fall of 1985 as the family reunions were taking place. One of the lessons of the quarter century of North-South dialogue is that it rarely made progress unless the top leaders were involved. In the early 1970s and mid-1980s, most of the involvement of the heads of state was in secret; exchanges involving top leaders would emerge in the public arena only in the early 1990s.

  The mid-1980s secret diplomacy began on the day after Christmas 1984, when a tall, urbane Korean who had lived in the United States for many years sat down to a four-hour meeting and luncheon with Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. Channing Liem, who at seventy-four was two years older than the Great Leader, had been the South Korean delegate to the United Nations under the short-lived reform government that was toppled by the 1961 military coup. After the coup, he became a political science professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a vocal critic of the Park regime. Liem had previously visited Pyongyang in 1977 as a private citizen. This time, however, he came as an emissary of South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan, recruited for the task by Sohn Jang Nae, the activist intelligence chief in the ROK Embassy in Washington who had played a key role in negotiating Chun’s triumphal visit to Reagan.

  In his discussion with Liem, Kim Il Sung agreed to explore a North-South summit. The following week, Kim used his annual New Year’s message to the Korean people to make a pointed endorsement of North-South dialogue, saying that success in the ongoing rounds of lower-level public talks could lead gradually to higher-level talks and “culminate in high-level political negotiations between North and South.”

  The meeting with Liem was unpublicized and known only to senior echelons in North and South. But the very next day, in one of those incidents that suggest pulling and hauling in influential circles in Pyongyang, Rodong Sinmun carried an oblique and, at the time, puzzling attack on accommodation with the South. “Sacrifice” and “struggle” are the keys to the victory of the revolution, said the paper, arguing that those who retreat from this road “in fear of being sacrificed” will inevitably “surrender” or become “turncoats.”

  In Seoul the secret meeting with Kim whetted the appetite of those few who were aware of it. This was especially true of Chang Se Dong, another former general and chief presidential bodyguard who became chief of the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP), the renamed South Korean intelligence agency, in February 1985. With the confidential contacts with the North beginning to show promise, he took them under his direct control.

  To aid him in this delicate work, Chang in March 1985 brought in a rising young star from the Blue House staff, the forty-two-year-old presidential secretary for political affairs, Park Chul Un. Park soon became the South’s most energetic practitioner of secret diplomacy, not only in North Korea but in Hungary, the Soviet Union, and other countries as well, eventually earning acclaim in the Seoul newspapers as “the Korean Henry Kissinger.” Park was bright, having graduated from Seoul National University Law School at the top of his class, and also well connected, being a cousin of the wife of General Roh Tae Woo, Chun’s classmate, comrade, and eventual successor. Bold and ambitious—traits in short supply among South Korea’s cautious senior bureaucrats—Park quickly made contact with senior figures in the North.

  Within a short time, Park was authorized by Chun, and later by Roh, to be the South Korean secret channel to the North. His counterpart in Pyongyang was Han Se Hae, a fifty-year-old graduate of Kim Il Sung University who had taken part in the Red Cross talks in 1972 under an assumed name and subsequently was vice minister of foreign affairs and DPRK ambassador at the United Nations. A fluent English speaker who was considered one of the North’s most urbane and accomplished diplomats, Han became attached to the staff of the Central Committee of the Workers Party to pursue his contacts with the South.

  Park and Han established a direct telephone connection between their desks in Seoul and Pyongyang, on which they had frequent conversations. The two met face-to-face a total of forty-two times between May 1985 and November 1991 in a wide variety of places, including Pyongyang, Seoul, Panmunjom, Paektu Mountain in North Korea, Cheju Island in South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere. Some of the meetings lasted as long as five days, but except for a few sightings, most of this diplomacy remained secret.

  Chun had repeatedly proposed a summit meeting with Kim Il Sung and recently had said he was willing to meet Kim anywhere in the North, South, or a third country, except for Panmunjom. To advance the summit diplomacy, a five-member North Korean delegation headed by Ho Dam, who had been put in charge of the Workers Party department handling South Korean affairs in a shakeup following the Rangoon debacle, and special envoy Han Se Hae secretly visited the South on September 4–6, 1985, and met Chun Doo Hwan at the private mansion of a Korean industrialist on the outskirts of Seoul. Chun had heard that Kim had seven presidential mansions in the North and wanted to show that luxurious accommodations outside the Blue House were available to him as well. The North Korean emissaries brought a letter from Kim Il Sung to Chun sending “warm regards” and saying, “I sincerely hope to see you in Pyongyang.” The letter from Kim to the man who had narrowly missed assassination by a North Korean bomb two years earlier ended, “Be well.” In the secret talks, Ho Dam insisted that the Rangoon killings “had nothing to do with us” and warned that if Pyongyang were required to apologize, it would mean the end of the talks.

  The South Korean president spoke at length in the secret discussions about the military situation on the peninsula, including its nuclear dimensions. After taking power in 1980, Chun had decisively—some say harshly—shut down the clandestine South Korean nuclear program, dispersing its scientists and engineers, in response to intense American concern about the project. However, he told Ho it would not be technically difficult for either the North or the South to produce nuclear weapons, should it decide to do so. The restraining factor, he declared, was the strong desire of both the Soviet Union and the United States to prevent nuclear wars involving small countries, which inevitably would spread to the great powers. Chun urged that Kim Il Sung, then seventy-three years old, turn away from conflict so that North-South issues could be resolved while he was still alive.

  In a return visit the following month, Chang Se Dong, senior emissary Park Chul Un, and three others secretly visited the North Korean president. The southerners brought a letter from Chun calling for an early summit meeting “as a shortcut to peace where both of us meet face to face and open hearts to exchange conversation, build up trust and prevent a war.” Kim appeared appreciative and friendly, but on the final day of talks, his aides presented their draft of a North-South nonaggression pact, which the southerners considered full of unacceptable rhetoric. The North also demanded, as it had the previous month, that the coming US-ROK military exercise, Team Spirit ’86, be called off. The South rejected both proposals.

  After the October meeting, the prospects of an early summit meeting between Kim Il Sung and Chun Doo Hwan rapidly diminished. According to Sohn Jang Nae, who had returned to Seoul as a deputy director of South Korean intelligence, the summit negotiations failed because Chun lacked the will to proceed in the face of North Korean demands
and bureaucratic rivalries in the South. “The talks bogged down in arguments over details,” Sohn said in an interview for this book. An American intelligence official, who was given full access to the transcripts of the talks by Chun’s government around the time that they took place, said that the two sides “got tied up in all sorts of linguistic tangles” such as what words to use to describe the level and nature of the proposed summit meeting. It seemed from the transcripts, the US official said, that “the North was not very interested in making progress, and the South was also bringing up things that would irritate the North.”

  The final blow was the approach of the Team Spirit exercise, which under Chun had been built up to a powerful array of about two hundred thousand US and ROK troops in increasingly realistic—and threatening—military maneuvers south of the DMZ, involving ground, sea, and air forces. Chun’s intention in working with the Americans to enlarge Team Spirit, according to a former aide, was to scare the North Koreans. If so, he succeeded. Pyongyang in most years put its own forces on full alert during the maneuvers, which lasted up to two months, and acted as if it feared a real attack. “Every time the opponent carries out such a maneuver we must take counteractions,” Kim Il Sung told Erich Honecker. Citing the need to mobilize large numbers of reservists to supplement regular troops on guard against attack, Kim estimated that these annual mobilization exercises cost the country “one and a half months of working shifts . . . a great loss.” Beyond the practical considerations, the North Korean leader considered the US-ROK exercises an effort to intimidate him, and he reacted bitterly.

  On January 20, Pyongyang issued a joint statement in the name of all its public negotiating teams—economic, Red Cross, and parliamentary exchange—denouncing this “nuclear war maneuver intended against North Korea” and indefinitely postponing all further discussions. With that, talk of an early summit meeting faded from view.

  KIM IL SUNG AND THE SOVIET CONNECTION

  When Kim Il Sung boarded his special train on May 16, 1984, for an eight-day ride to Moscow, it was his first official trip to the Soviet Union since 1961. The Great Leader traveled in imperial fashion, leading a huge entourage of 250 members, including bodyguards, interpreters, pretty young female aides, and even a masseuse, as well as his prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, and other officials. His train resembled those of American tycoons earlier in the twentieth century—one railroad car was set aside for Kim’s meetings, another for his dinners, still another as his bedroom. Internal security troops were posted at frequent intervals along the route of thousands of miles in the Soviet Union, after which Kim went on by rail to Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

  Kim’s trip to the Soviet Union marked a major effort to restore relations with Moscow after two decades of cool ties. The Soviet Union had played a powerful role in North Korea, in its creation, in the selection of Kim Il Sung as its leader, and in the conduct of the disastrous 1950–1953 war. Materials from Soviet archives depict a central role for Stalin in the war, suggesting that he personally insisted on continuing the conflict for well over a year after Kim was ready to seek a negotiated way out. Then, two weeks after Stalin’s death, the Soviet leadership reversed his position and issued secret orders to communist negotiators to end the fighting.

  Following the Korean War armistice in 1953, Kim remained heavily dependent on the Soviet Union economically and militarily, and he visited Moscow often before the full onslaught, in the early 1960s, of the great schism between the Soviet Union and China. The split between the two giants of international communism, which were also his most important patrons, created enormous problems for Kim, who struggled to keep on good terms with both of them even while being denounced for his internal policies and independent stance. Kim reacted bitterly to Nikita Khrushchev’s reformist policies and his denunciations of Stalin’s “cult of personality” that Kim emulated. He was even more offended when the Chinese attacked him as a counterrevolutionary revisionist, aristocrat, and capitalist during the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution. Eventually, Kim found the silver lining, that the Sino-Soviet dispute gave him space to maneuver between the two great powers of communism, each of which was forced to tolerate his independence for fear of pushing him decisively to the opposite camp.

  Vadim Tkachenko, a leading Korea expert on the staff of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party from 1962 to 1991, said Moscow was concerned about Pyongyang’s often surprising and uncontrollable policies: “North Korea was an independent country which took the kind of actions that were difficult to explain. They would down a plane, capture a ship, join the nonaligned countries, and we would only learn of it from the newspapers.” According to Tkachenko, “We didn’t know [KCIA director] Lee Hu Rak was in Pyongyang in 1972; the Americans told us. We didn’t know about the negotiations when the [US spy ship] Pueblo* was seized [in 1968]; the Americans told us. You’d make a mistake to think that Kim Il Sung was Moscow’s man.”

  However much the Russians privately distrusted Kim and his regime, they saw North Korea as a strategic ally in Asia. A Central Committee official put it well at a closed conference in Moscow in 1984: “North Korea, for all the peculiarities of Kim Il Sung, is the most important bastion in the Far East in our struggle against American and Japanese imperialism and Chinese revisionism.” For this reason, the Soviet Union continued to fuel North Korea’s economy and military machine throughout the Cold War, although the nature and extent of the support varied over time.

  In early 1984, China’s relations with the United States were improving rapidly, with President Reagan planning a trip to Beijing in late April, and Kim was once again worried about the direction of Chinese policy. As soon as Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982, the North had begun signaling interest in improving ties with Moscow. Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, died in February 1984, before much could be accomplished, and so Kim moved quickly to get an invitation to pay an official visit in May to meet Konstantin Chernenko, Andropov’s successor.

  When the Chinese learned of Kim’s planned trip, they hurried to pay court to him. In their Beijing talks with Reagan, Chinese leaders stressed their backing for the North’s recent three-way-talks proposal, and Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang urged Reagan to withdraw US troops from Korea, saying “they could return in a day” if hostilities should start again. On May 4, three days after Reagan flew home, Hu arrived in Pyongyang for an eight-day official visit. Two million people turned out to greet him in what North Korea called “the greatest welcome in Korean history.” For Kim, Hu’s visit was an important part of his delicate balancing act between his two communist sponsors and a useful prelude to his Moscow trip.

  In the Kremlin talks with Chernenko and other officials, Kim’s central purpose was to reconnoiter the likely course of Soviet politics, according to Oleg Rakhmanin, longtime Asia expert of the Communist Party Central Committee, who took part in the talks. “Kim understood the position of Chernenko perfectly” as a transitional leader, Rakhmanin recalled. Among those on hand for the talks and related social occasions was Politburo member Mikhail Gorbachev, who received his first personal exposure to this “socialist monarchy” in Asia, as he later referred to North Korea. Kim told his Soviet interlocutors, according to a confidential report on the talks furnished to Eastern European communist officials, that he expected this to be his last foreign journey—that thenceforth his son and heir, Kim Jong Il, who this time remained behind to run the country, or Prime Minister Kang Song San would visit foreign countries on his behalf.

  Sitting with Soviet leaders in the Kremlin, Kim volunteered to discuss his relations with China and declared them to be good. Yes, it was true that China was flirting with the Americans and Japanese, but Kim declared that this was because “China is a poor country with a population of one billion people and its leadership is seeking help with modernization from the United States and Japan.” At another point in his tour, Kim said that
despite his confrontation with the United States and Japan, his greatest fear was “of socialism not being maintained in China.” With Deng Xiaoping moving rapidly into market economics and hosting Reagan, “we must all insure that they follow a socialist way and none other,” Kim told an Eastern European communist leader.

  In the Kremlin, Kim told Chernenko that North Korea had no intention of attacking the South and spoke of his recent proposal for three-way talks with the United States and South Korea. While Washington was insisting on bringing in the Chinese to make a four-party negotiation, Kim said that “China is against such an arrangement.” Kremlin officials responded that “the Americans are urging the Chinese toward a solution that suits them and their allies, but which creates the danger of the Korean problem being solved behind the backs of the Koreans themselves.” Not surprisingly in view of the acute Korean sensitivity to outside interference, “we got the impression that the approach of China to solving the Korea problem was also causing some anxiety in Pyongyang,” wrote a Soviet official who made notes on the Kremlin talks.

  Kim assured Chernenko that in the future, North Korea would give closer study to “the experience of the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union.” Then, having refurbished high-level Communist Party and government ties between the two countries, Kim asked for more Soviet economic and military assistance. He was remarkably successful.

  The Soviet Union had been North Korea’s main source of external economic support since the creation of the DPRK, regardless of the ups and downs of political relations. By 1983, however, Soviet trade had fallen to less than 40 percent of Pyongyang’s exports to all countries and about 25 percent of its imports. After Kim’s 1984 visit, the flow of goods to and especially from the Soviet Union increased rapidly. Due initially to an extensive aid package approved as a result of Kim’s visit, imports from the USSR jumped from $471 million in 1984 to $1,186 million in 1986 and $1,909 million in 1988, when they accounted for roughly two-thirds of North Korea’s imports from all countries. Moscow not only financed a growing trade deficit with Pyongyang but also provided Soviet coal and oil at cut-rate prices, well below those of the world market. Kim also achieved a long-term North Korean goal, an agreement from Moscow to supply light-water nuclear power reactors.

 

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