The North Korean version seems to confirm that the South and the IOC worked to stretch out the talks but were never serious about the discussions. In the summer of 1987, just before a crucial meeting with the IOC (July 14–15), the secretary-general of the DPRK Olympic Committee told a visiting American that the issue of cohosting the Games was discussed at Olympic Committee–related meetings in late 1984 and early 1985. In October 1985, at the first joint meeting of the IOC and the two Korean committees in Lausanne, the North put forward a proposal for free travel between Olympic sites in the two Koreas, including opening ports and airports. In that meeting, it also proposed cohosting, first calling for a fifty-fifty split of the Games (i.e., eleven events), but eventually reducing its request to eight. In June 1986, the IOC offered the North two full games (table tennis and archery) and two partial cycling events, as well as one of the preliminary soccer competitions. According to the North’s account, Samaranch presented this as a take-it-or-leave-it offer. The North’s reply was, “You shouldn’t back us into a corner.” With barely eighteen months left until the Games, Samaranch proposed another meeting in February 1987. At that meeting, a bilateral one, Samaranch told the North Koreans that if they took the offer, then there could be further talks concerning such things as the name of the Olympics, television rights, and the locale of opening and closing events. The North Koreans replied that things should proceed without conditions, so Samaranch agreed to another meeting a few months later. To the American visitor, the North Korean official said that the North could be flexible on which specific games it got, but that getting one-third of the events was “a matter of principle.” On soccer, he said, the North was inflexible—it was already building the world’s biggest soccer stadium to host the matches.
THE BOMBING OF KAL FLIGHT 858
North Korea did not take South’s September checkmate lightly. Two weeks later, on October 7, 1987, two highly trained espionage agents were summoned to their headquarters in Pyongyang and assigned to destroy a South Korean airliner. They were told that the order came directly from Kim Jong Il, son of the North Korean president, and that its aim was to dissuade the nations of the world from participating in the Seoul Olympics. On November 29, a bomb planted by the two operatives destroyed Korean Air Lines flight 858, on its way from Abu Dhabi to Seoul. All 115 persons onboard, mostly young South Korean men on their way home from engineering projects in the Middle East, were killed.
Kim Seung Il, a seventy-year-old veteran North Korean espionage agent posing as a Japanese tourist, and Kim Hyon Hui, a twenty-five-year-old agent on her first espionage operation, had boarded the flight in Baghdad and disembarked at the next stop, Abu Dhabi. They left behind, tucked away in an overhead luggage rack, a time bomb concealed in the hollowed-out innards of a portable radio. The original plan called for the two to immediately board a flight from Abu Dhabi back to Rome and then Vienna, where they would meet North Korean diplomats who would arrange their trip home. However, unexpected airport procedures in Abu Dhabi forced them to fly to Bahrain instead. There they languished for two days waiting for seats on a Rome-bound flight while the world absorbed the news of the mysterious airline explosion and intelligence agencies gradually zeroed in on the father-and-daughter “Japanese tourists” who had briefly traveled on the ill-fated plane.
Japanese police determined that the young woman’s passport was a forgery. She and her companion were arrested at the airport in Bahrain while preparing to board their Rome-bound plane. As they were seized, both of them bit into poison ampules hidden in the filter tips of cigarettes they carried. The veteran agent died instantly, but Kim Hyun Hui survived, due to the quick reaction of a Bahraini policewoman who snatched the cigarette from her mouth. After Bahrain was convinced she was a North Korean, she was transported under heavy guard to Seoul, where for eight days she steadfastly held to a prepared cover story before finally confessing to her true identity and details of her act. Kim was tried and sentenced to death for the bombing but eventually received a presidential pardon on grounds that she was merely a brainwashed tool of the North Korean leadership.
Years later I sat in a downtown Seoul office with Kim, who told me the story of her life as a diplomat’s daughter, a trained terrorist, and, lately, a devout Christian who had substituted Jesus for Kim Il Sung as her savior. Although I had interviewed many defectors in the course of decades of reporting, this interview was uniquely unnerving. I found Kim to be very beautiful, elegant, demure, and calm, tastefully dressed. I did not know then that she had been trained in North Korea to run ten miles in a single stretch, to bench-press 150 pounds, to shoot a silenced pistol with great accuracy, and to deliver karate chops that would swiftly kill. It was chilling to connect this attractive and intelligent young woman to the murder of 115 innocent people traveling home to their families.
As she had flown amid the passengers soon to be killed by the bomb in the luggage rack above her head, she did not dwell on their fate but on her challenging mission. She had been told and believed that her act “was for national unification, which was a great purpose and aspiration of the nation” and therefore justified the human sacrifices. “People in democratic countries find it hard to believe, but I thought about it as a military order, to be accepted without question,” she said.
From her youngest days, Kim had been a star. She was selected as a small child to be a leading actress in the country’s first Technicolor film. At age ten, she was chosen to present a bouquet of flowers to the senior South Korean delegate to North-South talks in Pyongyang. At age eighteen, while attending Pyongyang Foreign Language College, she was selected for espionage work, given an assumed name, and sent to a military camp for rigorous ideological and physical training. Other training in the arts of espionage followed. She was carefully molded for seven years before being assigned in October 1987 to bomb the South Korean airliner.
When she was brought to Seoul, her initial resolve was to maintain her cover story. Kim told me, “I had heard so many things about the torture and cruelty of the South Korean CIA that I was full of uneasiness and fear. I made up my mind I would have to face the worst part of this to keep my secret.” Rather than torture, however, skillful South Korean treatment had a profound effect. South Korean television and walking tours of Seoul contradicted North Korean depictions of a corrupt, poverty-stricken American colony. “I began to doubt that the order [to bomb the airliner] was for unification of the country. I discovered I had just committed the crime of killing compatriots.” After eight days of insisting she was a Chinese native residing in Japan, she spoke to her interrogators for the first time in her native Korean, “Forgive me. I am sorry. I will tell you everything.”
In the wake of Kim’s confession, Washington assigned a senior diplomat to make sure her story was true and had not been coerced. Once satisfied, the United States placed North Korea on its list of countries practicing state terrorism, triggering new economic and political sanctions, and it instituted an interagency drive to assist the South in sophisticated security arrangements for the upcoming Olympics. President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz personally took up the threat of North Korean efforts to disrupt the Games with Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze in March 1988. “Do not worry,” Shevardnadze told Reagan and Shultz. “We [the Soviet Union] will be in Seoul to compete. There will not be any terrorism.” He proved to be right.
THE RISE OF NORDPOLITIK
The Twenty-fourth Olympiad, September 17–October 2, 1988, provided the pivot for South Korea’s foreign policy at the end of the 1980s. Roh’s “northern politics” shifted South Korea’s declared policy toward Pyongyang and eventually launched new rounds of public and secret negotiations with North Korea’s leaders. More immediate, dramatic, and lasting were the fruits of Roh’s drive to establish relations with the allies of North Korea, as a new pragmatism and efforts at reform swept over communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. In time, these changes would alter the strategic alignments aro
und the Korean peninsula in historic fashion.
Washington Post Tokyo correspondent Fred Hiatt and I interviewed Roh on July 1, 1988, midway between his February inauguration and the opening of the Olympic Games in September. In this first meeting with Roh as president, I found him more relaxed and confident than he had been before, even though the government party had surprisingly lost its parliamentary majority in April elections and he was undergoing a rough political shakedown. Roh described to us a fundamental change in policy toward North Korea. In the past, Roh noted, Seoul and Pyongyang had tried hard to isolate each other, each doing all in its power to interfere with the adversary’s relations with outside powers. “We have changed this,” he said. “We will ask our allies, our friends, to induce North Korea to come out into international society as a regular member of the international community.”
Roh’s effort to establish relations with North Korea’s allies followed a previously established path. Contacts with the Soviet Union and China had long been a goal of Seoul governments, in the belief that such relationships would enhance the South’s security and potentially undercut the North. In June 1983, Foreign Minister Lee Bum Suk declared the effort to normalize relations with the Soviet Union and China to be a formal objective of South Korean diplomacy. Lee, who was killed in the Rangoon bombing four months later, called the policy Nordpolitik, after the West German Ostpolitik policy with East Germany. In early 1985, specialists from several ROK ministries systematically studying the issue concluded that for the Nordpolitik policy to succeed, it was necessary to synchronize it with a more positive effort to negotiate with North Korea, lest it merely alarm Pyongyang as well as its allies. The task of implementing a more assertive negotiating strategy toward both North Korea and its allies was placed in the hands of Park Chul Un, the ambitious relative-by-marriage of Roh Tae Woo, who was made a special assistant to the chief of the ROK intelligence agency.
During his campaign for the presidency in 1987, Roh pledged to pursue a northern policy vigorously, declaring in a speech at Inchon that “we will cross the Yellow Sea” to China in order to resume a historic relationship with Korea’s neighbor and promising new prosperity to the country’s west coast areas. Whereas on the surface China was cool to Roh’s entreaties, Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms in China augured well for eventual success, as did Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist “new thinking” in foreign policy that was sweeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
To implement his policies, Roh recruited as his special assistant for foreign affairs Kim Chong Whi, a fifty-two-year-old US-educated defense intellectual who had strong ideas about both the conception and the execution of South Korea’s external affairs. With Roh’s consistent backing, Kim steadily increased the authority of his office to hold sway over diplomacy, defense issues, and eventually North-South relations as well. During five years at Roh’s side, Kim energized previously reactive South Korean policy, seizing the initiative on a variety of issues regarding North Korea and its communist allies, while taking advantage of Seoul’s swiftly growing economic strength and the approaching end of the Cold War.
The first high-profile public initiative was Roh’s Nordpolitik speech on July 7, 1988, announcing a new policy toward the North and an intensified effort to establish relations with North Korea’s communist allies. Addressing himself to “my sixty million compatriots,” a figure that included the people of both North and South, Roh unveiled a six-point program, including promotion of trade, exchanges of visits at all levels, and humanitarian contacts between the two Koreas. He also announced that Seoul would no longer oppose its allies engaging in nonmilitary trade with North Korea and that Seoul would cooperate with the North in its efforts to improve relations with the United States and Japan. In parallel, he announced, “We will continue to seek improved relations with the Soviet Union, China and other socialist countries.” Although he made no mention of the Olympics in his announcement, Roh’s aides said at the time that the northern policy was explicitly designed, in part, to smooth the way politically for communist nations to participate in the Seoul Games.
North Korea’s first reaction to the new policy directions was negative, though with signs that Pyongyang was not closing the door to dealing with Roh. When the South Korean president in an October 4 speech proposed an inter-Korean summit, the North “welcomed” his offer to travel to Pyongyang, though laid down its own conditions.
The first benefits of South Korea’s intensified effort to establish relations with North Korea’s allies came in Hungary, whose pragmatic “goulash communism” made it the least ideological of the Eastern European countries. A pathfinder for this breakthrough was a businessman, Chairman Kim Woo Choong of the giant Daewoo group, an energetic and successful salesman who became increasingly close to Roh during his presidency. Always looking for new fields to conquer, Kim had pioneered the establishment of business deals and official ties with several countries who previously had relations with Pyongyang but not with Seoul. In the early 1980s, he began knocking on the door of China but concluded that an early breakthrough was too difficult, whereupon he turned his attention to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
In December 1984, the Daewoo chairman flew to Budapest aboard his private jet for conversations that broke the ice between the two countries. With Hungarian government and party acquiescence, a series of business exchanges took place, culminating in an agreement between the two chambers of commerce and the opening of trade promotion offices in each other’s capitals in late 1987 and early 1988.
As Roh’s Nordpolitik drive gathered force, Seoul pressed for full diplomatic relations with Hungary. Its timing was fortunate. In May 1988, a new and more Western-oriented team of officials took office. The following month, word came to Seoul from the chairman of the newly organized Hungarian Credit Bank, Sandor Demjan, that Hungary would be willing to establish diplomatic relations before, during, or after the Olympics on the condition that Korea provide $1 billion in economic aid. The Hungarians were also very interested in increased trade with Korean firms.
Demjan’s proposition touched off a series of secret negotiations between the two governments, in which financial aid was a key element. From July 5 to 14, a Korean team headed by Park Chul Un, Seoul’s special negotiator with communist countries, visited Budapest, staying in a guarded villa on the outskirts of the capital. In the talks, the Koreans offered $400 million in loans, while Hungary reduced its asking price to $800 million. Then Hungary agreed to establish an official mission in Seoul short of full relations in return for $400 million in loans, and to go all the way to diplomatic relations in return for an additional $400 million.
A second round of secret talks in Seoul, August 8–12, produced a tentative agreement to establish consular-level missions before the Olympics and full diplomatic relations within six months. An announcement of a breakthrough with at least one communist country before the Olympics was important to Seoul, which believed this would improve the political atmosphere for the Games and lead to progress with other nations afterward.
To finalize the deal, a third round of secret diplomacy in Budapest, August 22–27, with meetings sometimes lasting long past midnight, was necessary. In the end, Hungary settled for $625 million in loans, mostly on a commercial basis, to take the first dramatic step. The exchange of ambassadorial-level missions was announced by the two nations on September 13, just four days before the opening ceremonies for the Seoul Olympics. Full diplomatic relations were established less than five months later, on February 1, 1989.
The reaction from North Korea was vehement and bitter. Pyongyang recognized that Hungary’s act would have important significance for other East-bloc countries. Natalia Bazhanova, a Russian researcher who has studied the record of secret policy making in Moscow regarding Korea, reported that as North Korea suspected at the time, Hungary did consult the Soviet Union before establishing relations with Seoul and obtained approval. After the September announcement, an authoritative “Comme
ntator” article in Rodong Sinmun accused Hungary of committing “a treacherous grave act against the principles of Marxism-Leninism and the revolutionary cause of the working class.” The lengthy denunciation asked, “Is Hungary so strapped that it has no choice but to beg for a few dollars even from the South Korean puppets, breaching faith with a friend to survive?”
Only two weeks before the announcement of ties with the South, Kim Pyong Il, the younger half-brother of Kim Jong Il, had arrived in Budapest as North Korean ambassador, whether sent into the looming disaster by Kim Jong Il to embarrass him or to get last-minute traction with the Hungarians is an interesting question. North Korea downgraded its relations after the establishment of full Seoul-Budapest diplomatic relations but did not break them off. Moreover, barter trade between the two countries continued to flourish. “North Korea is very pragmatic” when its economic interests are concerned, commented a Soviet bloc diplomat from Pyongyang.
Not surprisingly, as athletes of 160 nations marched into Olympic Stadium in Seoul for the opening ceremonies of the games on September 17, Hungary’s Olympic team was deliriously cheered by the predominantly Korean audience. Cheers were also notably enthusiastic for the groundbreaking appearance by athletes of the Soviet Union. Korean spectators cheered wildly for the Soviet basketball team as it vanquished the American team, to the shock and dismay of many American viewers.
The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Page 23