Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (27 page)

Kim became downright nervous from the early 1960s as he was finding it difficult to get along with his Soviet allies. An opportunity for a second south-ward strike came during the confusion of the South Korean student uprising against Rhee in April of 1960. Both China and Russia urged against acting, however, according to Hwang Jang-yop’s reported later testimony. The Pyongyang leadership lacked the stomach to go it alone, particularly since it had just
finished rebuilding the country from the ruins of the first Korean War.
¹⁶

In
1962,
U.S. President John F. Kennedy went eyeball-to-eyeball with Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis; it was the Russian who blinked, agreeing to eliminate the Soviet missile bases in Cuba that had sparked the crisis. Kim Il-sung’s growing concern that he could not depend on his biggest supposed backer in the communist world inspired a major round of diplomacy to find friends among the smaller communist and Third World countries.

Just as he split with Moscow over its challenge to the doctrine of continuing revolution, so Kim eventually turned on Beijing—for failing to put aside its own disputes with Moscow in the interest of the Vietnamese revolution.
¹⁷
Before that dispute could be cooled off Chinese Red Guards would attack Kim’s very un-communist lifestyle, deriding him as “fat,” a “counterrevolutionary,” “a millionaire, an aristocrat and a leading bourgeois element in Korea.”
¹⁸

Mean-while, American attempts to remove Fidel Castro in Cuba and to defeat the Viet Cong made Kim wonder if he might be next. His attitude was not mere paranoia. In addition to whatever concern he felt over the new U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, he had to worry about less direct means the United States and South Korea were using to attack his regime. While the North Koreans hoped to subvert South Korea, that was also precisely what South Korea and its American backers hoped to do to North Korea. As a control measure, the Soviet occupation regime in the 1940s had initiated what proved to be a pattern of North Korean isolation that would last for decades. Washington sought to intensify that isolation as part of its efforts to exert pressure that might cause the Northern system to break down.
¹⁹

The installation of the new, military-backed regime across the DMZ in South Korea in 1961 certainly did not ease Kim’s worries on this score. It was around that time that Kim draped over the North a shroud of secrecy and exclusivity comparable to the centuries of isolationism that had preceded the nineteenth century opening to the West and earned Korea the sobriquet “hermit kingdom.”
²⁰
A large part of his objective clearly was to make the population inaccessible to propaganda and other subversion efforts. While the South Koreans and Americans liked to imagine that isolation would threaten his rule, Kim believed that even more isolation was the way to preserve his system. In more than four decades to come, he was never proved wrong about that.

The change Kim put into effect was dramatic. During Rumanian diplomat Izidor Urian’s first stay in Pyongyang, from 1954 to 1959, “the people in North Korea treated me kindly and I could meet people freely. At that time I was allowed to travel freely almost anywhere in North Korea.” Urian returned to Pyongyang in 1963 and found quite a different atmosphere. Even diplomats dispatched from friendly communist countries such as his were
confined to the capital and permitted only minimal contact with North Koreans. Without special permits they could visit only a few sites such as a swimming pool at Nampo, west of Pyongyang, and a Kim Il-sung museum at Mount Myohyang, some 150 kilometers north of the capital. Urian later wrote that from 1963 he “managed to meet government officials only in the Foreign Affairs Ministry and some other departments, and a few reporters.” Until he ended his duties in Pyongyang in 1983, he had no further chances to meet ordinary people in Pyongyang. Even at banquets for foreigners, the North Koreans kept to themselves instead of mixing with their guests.
²¹

If resident and visiting Rumanians and Cubans felt themselves isolated and restricted in Pyongyang, citizens of Western countries were barred, for the most part, from even entering North Korea in the first place. For them and for the South Koreans, the battles above the 38th parallel in the Korean War would prove to have been the last chance to glimpse North Korea for decades. Even if they should manage to get in, they-would encounter a population trained to tell them nothing.

Feeling a need to know what was happening in the North, but finding human intelligence increasingly hard to come by, Washington and Seoul resorted to electronic and photographic surveillance by plane and ship.
²²

Some analysts have sought to explain what was happening in North Korea almost entirely in terms of the threat facing the country from the nuclear-armed American forces and their South Korean colleagues. Indeed, the North Koreans were being pushed extremely hard. In the end, though, the argument is not convincing. Other countries have felt themselves under siege without going to such extremes of self-isolation, of one-man rule systematically built on enormous lies and on whipping up mass hatred.
²³
Whatever they were telling their people, for propaganda purposes, about diabolical American schemes, could Pyongyang’s leaders really not understand that the American nuclear weapons were in Korea to deter the North from provoking or starting another war? From the other side it seemed clear that the weapons were there precisely because the United States had no desire to fight another full-fledged war—much less (for the time being, at least) initiate one. Washington just as obviously-was determined to keep Seoul from sparking a Second Korean War.

Whatever threat he might have felt from American and South Korean subversion and espionage efforts, Kim Il-sung was doing his share of threatening. In September 1961, he sounded an anti-American theme, calling upon South Koreans to reject military service, to struggle against U.S. military bases and to shut down factories with strikes and sabotage. Simultaneously he ordered reconstruction of a communist party in the South. In 1964, an underground revolutionary group, the Revolutionary Party for Reunification, was founded in the South with a twelve-point program that read very much
like the program of South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front. The party had the mission of attracting Southerners, particularly intellectuals, to the communist movement under Kim Il-sung’s leadership.

Having failed to take advantage of the South Korean student revolution in 1960, or to prevent the military coup of 1961, Kim appears to have been determined to be ready the next time opportunity might knock. In December 1962 the North Korean party leadership formally raised military preparation to equal status with economic development, citing both the international situation and South Korea’s “acute crisis.”
²⁴

As the North Korean military built its strength, its soldiers involved themselves increasingly in small-scale assaults on the enemy along the DMZ. One theory was that those clashes were intended for domestic consumption—to keep tensions high. Thus, the regime could justify the sacrifices being made to build up the military at a time when strained relations with the Soviet Union also contributed to economic hardship.
²⁵
Border skirmishes became especially frequent starting in 1967 when the number of reported incidents exceeded 550—a tenfold increase over the 1966 figure. between 1967 and 1969, thirty-eight Americans were killed and 144 wounded, with South Korean casualties in proportional numbers.
²⁶

No doubt there was a connection between North Korea’s redoubled militancy and the Vietnam War. Kim Il-sung decried the massive U.S. commitment in Indochina as imperialism at its worst. From 1965, South Korean troops were dispatched to take some of the burden off the Americans—and to give the South Korean soldiers valuable combat experience. Kim followed suit, dispatching fighter planes and pilots to Vietnam. At the same time, though, the Vietnamese quagmire was a distraction of his enemies of the sort Kim had been awaiting. Weakening those enemies would be one dividend from his own support of the Vietnamese communists. Kim’s identification with Ho Chi Minh and his close ties with North Vietnam suggest that Hanoi’s strategy for liberating South Vietnam impressed him as valid for use against South Korea, if sufficient preparations could be made.
²⁷

Apparently hoping to reduce South Korea to leaderless chaos, and thus to set in motion a social revolution that would pave the way for unification under his regime, Kim unleashed a bold terrorist plot. In January of 1968, thirty-one Korean People’s Army commandos crossed the DMZ disguised as South Korean soldiers. Their orders were to assassinate South Korean President Park, and they had memorized the floor plans of the Blue House, the presidential palace. On the way they happened upon some South Korean woodcutters, who guessed their identities. Overruling others in the group who wanted to kill them, the commando leader let the woodcutters go with a warning not to report what they had seen. That bit of generosity proved
fatal to the mission. The woodcutters reported the sighting to the South Korean authorities. The commandos entered Seoul and got within one kilometer of the Blue House, where police intercepted them on the night of January 21. Most of the commandos were killed, with only a few escaping back through the mountains.

Earlier that same day off North Korea’s east coast port of Wonsan, a North Korean sub-chaser had spotted the
Pueblo,
a small, only perfunctorily armed U.S. Navy spy ship on its maiden voyage. Outfitted with sophisticated electronic gear, the
Pueblo
was checking up on North Korean coastal defenses, trying to pinpoint the locations, missions and frequencies of North Korean radar installations. Such intelligence could help the Americans prepare to jam or trick those radars in the event of another war. The ship was also monitoring coded communications, to gather material for code breakers in Washington, and listening in on noncoded communications that might help in evaluating North Korean forces’ order of battle, equipment and morale. Oceanographers on board were gathering information on the waters off North Korea.

Unaware of the aborted assassination attempt in Seoul and the way it had quite suddenly heightened tensions in Korea, the
Pueblo’s
skipper continued with his mission. Cdr. Lloyd M.. Bucher was confident the ship was in international waters and, therefore, in no danger. However, on January 23, North Korean warships fired on the
Pueblo.
Overwhelmingly outgunned, Bucher did not return the fire but concentrated on evasive action, while his crewmen destroyed sensitive gear and data. His radioman alerted the U.S. Air Force, and help was supposed to be on the way. However, no American rescuers were actually dispatched. President Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly said to a
Time
magazine correspondent during the first day of the crisis: “If we started sending gunboats out to protect everybody gathering information we’d have a budget of $500 billion every year. That harassment is part of the job.
²⁸

With himself and three of his men wounded, one of them so critically that he would die soon, Bucher surrendered his ship. It was the first surrender of a U.S. Navy ship in peacetime since that of the USS
Chesapeake
in 1807— and the
Chesapeake’s
skipper had given up only after firing “one gun for the honor of the flag.”
²⁹
The attackers took the
Pueblo
into port and held its crew, charging that they had been spying inside North Korean territorial waters. The crew members, blindfolded, were marched off the ship toward a waiting bus. Along the way they were subjected to the shouts and blows of hundreds of civilians lined up on either side of the road.
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In a meeting at the truce village of Panmunjom, the United States protested first the Blue House raid and then the
Pueblo’s
seizure, demanding immediate return of the vessel and men. The North Korean representative, Maj. Gen. Pak Chung-kuk, replied,

Our saying goes, “A mad dog barks at the moon.” … I cannot but pity you who are compelled to behave like a hooligan, disregarding even your age and honor to accomplish the crazy intentions of the war maniac Johnson for the sake of bread and dollars to keep your life. In order to sustain your life, you probably served Kennedy who is already sent to hell. If you want to escape from the same fate of Kennedy who is now a putrid corpse, don’t indulge yourself desperately in invective.

Rear Adm. John Victor Smith, the senior U.S. representative in Pan-munjom, at a hearing much later was to testify in kind that the North Koreans were “only one step above animals.” While meeting with Pak, though, he had to content himself for the moment with blowing cigar smoke in his antagonist’s face. Smith believed that the assassination attempt in Seoul, followed in such quick succession by the
Pueblo’s
seizure, showed that Kim Il-sung wanted war.
³¹

Higher-ranking U.S. officials, having failed to stop the seizure of the ship while it was in progress, mean-while were frustrated by their inability to come up with a plan to help the eighty-two imprisoned crewmen and, at the same time, punish Pyongyang for its effrontery. Hawkish politicians wanted to go to war.
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By 1968, to a considerable extent, the nuclear option had come to dominate American thinking about Korean security. One reported reason why the U.S. Air Force did not go to the aid of the
Pueblo
during the North Korean attack was that the seven F-4s it had based in South Korea were all loaded with nuclear weapons. But some Americans were ready to use such weapons. Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called for a nuclear bombing of one North Korean city. “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” he demanded.
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Even some of the captured crewmen said later that they had hoped for American nuclear retaliation against the North Koreans.
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In South Korea, too, newspapers and officials called upon the United States to help avenge the Blue House raid— and perhaps unify the country in the process.