The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (21 page)

Gleysteen and Wickham, sitting at the worn wooden table in the VIP section of the bunker, received fragmentary reports of ROK troops moving in and around Seoul and of a shoot-out at the residence of General Chung. American and South Korean officers were unable to contact some major units, which did not answer telephones or radios, but Washington came through loud and clear on a secure telephone line from half a world away, demanding to know what was happening and offering advice. From time to time, the occupants of the bunker could hear shooting nearby. Out of growing concern for the security of the ambassador and the US commander, a detail of American troops was summoned for guard duty around the underground facility.

Powerless to command a halt to the action, Gleysteen and Wickham drafted a statement in the name of the US government, warning “any forces within the ROK” that disruption of progress toward a broadly based government would have a “seriously adverse impact” on US-ROK relations. The statement was conveyed to the Blue House and both factions of the Korean military and was broadcast by Voice of America and other official American media, but it had no effect. Most Koreans were not aware of it because all Korean news outlets had been seized by the insurgents. Ignoring calls from the US commander, the CIA station chief, and others, the coup leaders refused direct contact with the Americans until they had established effective control.

In midevening South Korean defense minister Ro Jae Hyun and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Kim Chong Hwan, both looking pale and nervous, arrived at the bunker. Using US communications, they tried to establish the loyalty of their subordinates, with mixed
results. Wickham urged them not to order an attack on the insurgents at least until daybreak, fearing a nighttime battle with bloody and even more divisive results. Later Ro left for his headquarters nearby, where he was seized by plotters and compelled to assist in obtaining ex post facto authorization from President Choi for the arrest of the martial-law commander.

The nighttime takeover was in part a generational battle within the military. The deposed army chief of staff and many other occupants of top military posts were members of the eighth class of the Korean Military Academy; Chun Doo Hwan and his coconspirators were largely members of the younger eleventh class. To the shock and dismay of Wickham, who was charged with operational control of US and ROK forces defending South Korea, part of a front-line division headed by Chun’s classmate and close friend General Roh Tae Woo had left its positions near the DMZ without authorization to take part in the showdown in Seoul.

“We have been through a coup in all but name,” Gleysteen reported to Washington when the morning dawned. “The flabby facade of civilian constitutional government remains but almost all signs point to a carefully planned takeover of the military power positions by a group of ‘Young Turk’ officers,” the ambassador cabled Washington. As to his first “groggy conclusions,” Gleysteen wrote:

The December 12 incident is bad news from our point of view. The military of Korea who have remained remarkably united for 18 years under the firm, authoritarian hand of Park Chung Hee have now engaged in actions of insubordination which have not only generated animosities that may take years to work their way out but have also set a precedent for others to follow. In doing so, they totally ignored the Combined Forces Command’s responsibilities, either ignoring the impact on the U.S. or coolly calculating that it would not make a difference. By their actions they have also run a serious risk vis-à-vis North Korea without giving it much thought.

The events of 12/12, as the night of the generals came to be called in Korean lore, cut short the reemergence of democratic and civilian rule, to which South Korea aspired after nearly two decades of domination by Park and his uniformed friends. Over the coming months, as the military again took power, many Koreans felt that, once more, the government had been hijacked by a new and unknown ruling group using force rather than the mandate of heaven or the consent of the governed. The showdown between opposing forces illuminated the real political landscape of South Korea as in a flash of lightning: US control of the ROK military was purely nominal in a domestic struggle for power, civilian control over the
military under President Choi was nonexistent, and a little-known figure named Chun was now the man to see in South Korea.

Chun Doo Hwan was born on January 18, 1931, in a village near Taegu, a major city in southeastern Korea, the home region of Park Chung Hee and many other political leaders of modern Korea. Chun’s father, a Confucian scholar, was forced to flee with his family to Manchuria in 1939 because of a violent feud with a Japanese policeman. After returning to Korea, Chun’s family was poor but proud. Chun graduated from Taegu Technical High School in 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, and joined the Korean Military Academy. He graduated in 1955 in the academy’s eleventh class—the first class to receive a full four-year military education and the first to have its curriculum based on an American rather than a Japanese model.

As a junior officer in 1959–1960, Chun spent a year in American military schools at bases in North Carolina and Georgia, which left him with a tenuous command of English and a sense of easy familiarity with the United States. Unlike Park Chung Hee, who was Japanese educated and never entirely comfortable with Americans, Chun felt he knew Americans and could deal with them without complexes. As a foreign military student, he bought a used car, obtained a US driver’s license, and often traveled on weekends. He was fond of telling aides his surprise one night in seeing a car ahead of him stop for a traffic light, even though no police or anybody else could be seen for miles. This impressed Chun with the law-abiding spirit of the American people, a trait he proclaimed was “essential for freedom and democracy.”

After Park’s military coup in 1961, Chun served for a year as a secretary for civil affairs at the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, the official name of the ruling junta. Turning down Park’s suggestion that he embark on a political career, Chun returned to army duty. Nonetheless, his military duties were often entwined with politics. In 1964 he, Roh Tae Woo, and a handful of other Korean Military Academy graduates formed a secret club within the military that they named Hana-hoe, or “One Group,” devoted to solidarity and patriotism and, as it turned out, self-advancement. Park gave the members of the club, which was headed by Chun, fast promotions and special perks. Hana-hoe members made up the core of the group that took power by force after Park’s death.

As a battalion commander of the politically sensitive Capital Security Command in 1968, Chun led the chase against North Korean commandos who had attempted to attack Park’s Blue House. After a tour as regimental commander of ROK forces fighting in Vietnam, he moved to the presidential security force at the Blue House, where he had frequent personal contact with Park. In February 1979, eight months before Park’s assassination, he became commanding general of the Defense Security
Command, which Park used for political control and as a check on his politically active bodyguard force and the KCIA.

On December 14, two days after his midnight takeover of the military, Chun engineered sweeping changes in the ROK army, moving the old guard aside and placing his classmates and close friends in sensitive posts. Roh became commanding general of the Capital Security Command; others of the Taegu Seven Stars, as the innermost group of insurgent generals were called, became commanders of the Special Warfare Command, the ROK Third Army, and other key units.

The same day, Chun held his first meeting with Gleysteen, coming at the ambassador’s invitation to the US Embassy. In response to Gleysteen’s plea for a return to constitutional order, Chun insisted that he supported President Choi, that the events of December 12 were an accidental outgrowth of his investigation of Park’s assassination, and that he harbored no personal ambition. The purge of the army, which resulted in Chun’s unchallenged control of the most important levers of power, was a glaring contradiction of this claim. While recognizing his intelligence and drive, Gleysteen came to distrust Chun and eventually consider him “almost the definition of unreliability . . . unscrupulous . . . ruthless . . . a liar.”

The events of December brought American officials face-to-face with the limited extent of their leverage on South Korean political developments. As in the 1961 military coup that brought Park to power, the military showdown of December 1979 was an accomplished fact before the United States could react. The US Embassy had sought briefly but unsuccessfully to reverse the 1961 coup by announcing its continuing support of the elected government, but the effort was an embarrassing failure, a cautionary reminder to officials who came later. When a Korean academic urged Gleysteen to “nullify what General Chun did and kick him out . . . teach Koreans a lesson that the United States does not support just anyone,” the ambassador rejected the idea out of hand. “Cannot act as a colonial governor,” Gleysteen responded.

American officials, realizing it would be fruitless, made no effort to undo what Gleysteen privately called Chun’s “power grab.” Gleysteen explicitly told Chun’s military colleagues that “we are not trying to reverse the events of December 12.” Instead, the United States pressed Chun to refrain from interfering with the Korean political process or taking political power in his own right, which he soon did anyway.

No one could deny that the United States had important stakes in the future of South Korea, but by 1979 it was unclear how far Washington could go in shaping that future. American diplomats relied mainly on persuasion, telling Chun and his colleagues that their takeover threatened national security and economic growth, in which the United States had major interests. In arguments often repeated later, Gleysteen told Chun in
their initial meeting that “the [December 12] actions had set a dangerous precedent within the ROK military, run great risks in light of the North Korean threat, and raised further questions internally about the ability of the Choi government to sustain progress toward orderly political liberalization, and externally about the prospects for stability.” Gleysteen stressed that “the ROK had to maintain a civilian government and could not afford to lose the support of the U.S. military and businessmen who were deeply disturbed by what had happened.”

Chun received these arguments politely, but was not swayed. He and his fellow generals believed they knew more about the North Korean threat than the Americans did, and they did not consider it an imminent danger. Indeed, in view of the recently proposed US pullout, it was arguable how much danger the United States actually perceived from the North. As for economic issues, the economy was still in trouble, but it was questionable whether US business leaders seeking profits had clear-cut views on who should lead the country. The generals also sensed correctly that Washington, obsessed by the plight of American diplomats held hostage in Tehran since November 4, felt under great pressure not to push so hard in Seoul that they created “another Iran.”

In an effort to press Chun and deny him full legitimacy, Gleysteen and Wickham, with Washington’s approval, avoided meeting with him on a regular basis and sought to do as much business as possible through the official channels of the Choi government. The embassy and the State Department pressed Choi to take bolder steps to assert his authority, without success. He was increasingly a figurehead. Nonetheless, Carter sent a personal letter to Choi in early January saying he was “deeply distressed” by the events of December 12 and that any similar actions “would have serious consequences for our close cooperation.” In an unusual gesture, the embassy distributed the letter widely throughout the ROK government and military establishment.

In a message to Washington at the end of January, Gleysteen summed up the dilemma he felt in accepting “an unprecedentedly activist role” in Korean domestic affairs. “If we don’t do enough, dangerous events could occur; if we try to do too much, we may provoke strong, chauvinist reactions.” This is particularly difficult, he observed, because “most Koreans sense a reduction in the real power of the U.S. and are increasingly concerned over what they perceive as our unwillingness to face up to the Soviet challenge, and they are also somewhat skeptical of our ability to handle Beijing.” Apparently referring to the Iran hostage crisis, Gleysteen added that Koreans “suspect that we may be too preoccupied elsewhere to respond resolutely to difficulties on the peninsula.”

Nevertheless, he concluded, “All significant political elements seek the image of U.S. support and many seek rather crude U.S. intervention to
shore up their weaknesses; ultimately we will therefore be criticized for undue interference in domestic affairs by those who see our support for them as less helpful than desired. Few of them realize that our influence is limited in large part by the fact that we could not pull our powerful security and economic levers without risk of destroying the ROK’s stability.”

THE KWANGJU UPRISING

In early 1980, with the economy sagging and the country still under partial martial law, the South Korean government modestly began to relax the repression. Opposition politicians began to speak up, and student demonstrations, traditional in the spring, began on an increasingly large scale to demand that martial law be lifted and an early date be established for a presidential election. Well-known political figures began maneuvering publicly with an election in mind. Chun, operating with the immense power of martial law, was at the same time extending his personal network throughout the armed forces from his post as chief of the Defense Security Command. In mid-April he had Choi name him acting KCIA director, an act that provided him immense new authority and that convinced the US Embassy that he was bent on taking over the presidency. In a gesture of disapproval of Chun’s move, Washington “indefinitely postponed” the annual Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) between the top defense officials of the two countries and informed ROK officers of its reasons for doing so.