The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (5 page)

Until recently, the origins of the war have been a matter of intense dispute. As late as 1993, North Korea republished its version in a paperback volume titled
The US Imperialists Started the Korean War
. However, documents from the Soviet archives show clearly that in March, August, and September 1949 and January 1950, Kim implored Stalin and his diplomats repeatedly to authorize an invasion of the South, at one point telling Soviet Embassy officers, “Lately I do not sleep at night, thinking about how to resolve the question of the unification of the whole country. If the matter of the liberation of the people of the southern portion of Korea and the unification of the country is drawn out, then I can lose the trust of the people of Korea.”

On at least two occasions in 1949, Stalin turned down Kim’s requests, but the documents establish that in early 1950, he approved the war plan due to the “changed international situation.” At this writing, scholars are still unsure what led to Stalin’s reversal. Was it the victory of Mao’s Communist Party in China, the development of the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb, the withdrawal of US forces from South Korea, or Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s famous statement excluding South Korea from the US defense perimeter—all of which took place in 1949 or early 1950—or a combination of these and other causes? We still do not know.

The Korean conflict was considered the prototype of a limited war in that neither of the big powers used the nuclear weapons available to them, and the United States refrained from attacking Soviet or Chinese territory. On the peninsula, however, the war was savage in its destructiveness. Although the figures are uncertain, a widely accepted estimate is that 900,000 Chinese and 520,000 North Korean soldiers were killed or wounded, as were about 400,000 UN Command troops, nearly two-thirds of them South Koreans. US casualties were 36,000 dead.

In Korea the war devastated both halves of a country that had only just begun to recover from four decades of Japanese occupation and the sudden shock of division. Around 3 million people, roughly a tenth of the entire population of both sides at the time, were killed, wounded, or missing as a result of the war. Another 5 million became refugees. South Korea’s property losses were put at $2 billion, the equivalent of its gross national product (GNP) for 1949; North Korean losses were estimated at only slightly less.

When the fighting finally stopped in July 1953, the front line was an irregular tangent slanting across the thirty-eighth parallel very close to where it had all begun. In keeping with the Armistice Agreement, the forces on each side pulled back two thousand meters from the cease-fire lines to create the demilitarized zone. Although both sides were exhausted by three years of combat, there were fears—which have never died—that the battle might be resumed at any moment.

One of the most important consequences of the war was the hardening of ideological and political lines between North and South. The antipathy that had developed between the opposing regimes was deepened into a blood feud among family members, extending from political leaders to the bulk of the ordinary people who had suffered at the hands of the other side. The thirteen-hundred-year-old unity of the Korean people was shattered.

In the aftermath of the war, the Rhee regime in the South became increasingly dictatorial and corrupt until it was forced out of office in 1960 by a student-led revolt. After a year the moderate successor government was ousted by a military junta headed by Major General Park Chung Hee, a Japanese-trained officer who had flirted with communism immediately after the Japanese surrender. Park’s background created concern in Washington and initial hope in Pyongyang. Early on, Kim Il Sung dispatched a trusted aide to the South to make secret contact with Park. But instead of exploring a deal, Park had the emissary arrested and executed.

In the North, Kim Il Sung systematically purged his political opponents, creating a highly centralized system that accorded him unlimited power and generated a formidable cult of personality. As the great communist divide between the Soviet Union and China emerged in the
mid-1950s, Kim, though profoundly disturbed by it, learned to play off his communist sponsors against each other to his own advantage. In July 1961 he went to Moscow and finally persuaded Nikita Khrushchev to sign a treaty of “friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance,” pledging to come to Pyongyang’s aid in case of a new war on the divided peninsula. Moscow had been resisting the North’s requests for such a formal alliance since 1958, but now Khrushchev wanted to recruit Kim as an ally against China. With the new agreement in hand, Kim proceeded to Beijing and asked Chinese leaders to match the Moscow treaty, which they did by signing their own nearly identical accord.

While both North and South Korea gave lip service to eventual reunification, there was little but hostility between them in the 1950s and 1960s. In the most notable incident, in January 1968, a thirty-one-man North Korean commando team attempted to assassinate the South Korean president. The team penetrated to within a thousand yards of the Blue House, the South Korean equivalent of the White House, before being repulsed by police and security forces. The prospects for any sort of reconciliation on the divided peninsula appeared slim indeed.

THE ORIGINS OF NEGOTIATION

On July 9, 1971, Henry Kissinger landed secretly in Beijing on a Pakistani airliner to begin the historic Sino-American rapprochement that openly split the communist world and changed global politics. Access to documents from the time and new scholarship are advancing, and to some extent altering, understanding of Pyongyang’s response to this geostrategic earthquake, but the full story undoubtedly remains to be told. Some earlier accounts had suggested that Kim Il Sung was secretly in Beijing during the Kissinger visit, but that does not seem to have been the case. Nevertheless, within days of Kissinger’s departure, Zhou Enlai was in Pyongyang for two long meetings with Kim. Two weeks later, Kim sent a senior official–Kim Il—to Beijing for more discussions. In the summer of 1971, it had been only a year since Sino–North Korean relations had emerged from a serious downturn during China’s Cultural Revolution. Kim was probably not inclined to see ties fray again so soon, his relations at that point with Moscow were not very good, and, in any case, Zhou was apparently persuasive that Sino-US rapprochement represented an opportunity rather than a threat to North Korea. Kim would have perked up his ears if Zhou recited to him what Kissinger had said during the discussions in Beijing—that under certain circumstances it was “conceivable” that by the end of President Nixon’s second term, “most, if not all,” American troops would be withdrawn from Korea. Given Pyongyang’s enduring suspicions of the Chinese, Kim may not have completely bought
Zhou’s arguments. The sudden shift in Beijing’s approach effectively left Pyongyang exposed in its confrontation with the United States. But the North Korean leader was very much a pragmatist, and if anyone could make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, he could. After a few weeks’ reflection, he decided to try.

So far as can be determined, it was Vietnam rather than Korea that figured in Nixon’s desire to end the decades of hostility with China, which had begun with Chinese intervention in the Korean War. By simultaneously improving ties with both Moscow and Beijing, Nixon hoped to demonstrate that North Vietnam was vulnerable in a larger game being played by major powers. Though probably unintended, the vulnerability was felt by North Korea and, to Washington’s dismay, by South Korea as well. Both Korean regimes felt more insecure than ever before. Both, for the first time, decided to try to take the settlement of their conflict into their own hands.

Later in the year, the Chinese approved new economic aid and signed the first agreement on military aid to North Korea in fifteen years. The results began to appear the following April, when newly arrived Chinese tanks clanked through Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square in the parade for the North Korean leader’s birthday. At the same time, China began supplying North Korea with its models of Russia’s MiG-19 supersonic fighter planes.

Kim broke his public silence on Sino-American developments on August 6, 1971, at a mass rally in Pyongyang honoring his closest foreign friend, Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In a surprise move, Kim announced that “we are ready to establish contact at any time with all political parties, including the [ruling] Democratic Republican Party, and all social organizations and individual personages in South Korea.” This was an abrupt reversal of the long-standing position, reiterated by North Korea’s foreign minister only four months earlier, that the ouster of the ruling party was an essential condition for negotiations with the South.

In Seoul President Park Chung Hee was also shaken by the news of Nixon’s opening to China. Like the rest of America’s allies, Park had had no advance notice from Washington, and he too found it shocking because it raised new doubts about the constancy and reliability of his great power sponsor. To Park, the rapprochement implied US acceptance of a hostile, powerful, and revolutionary country in South Korea’s immediate neighborhood, tied by a military alliance to North Korea. Since the announcement of the “Nixon Doctrine” in mid-1969—that Asians should provide the manpower for their own wars—the United States had appeared to be moving steadily toward disengagement. Early in 1971, over Park’s vehement objections, Washington had withdrawn twenty thousand of the sixty-two thousand American troops stationed in South Korea, at the
same time that it was pulling back American forces from South Vietnam. Despite the reassuring words of US political leaders and diplomats, Park took these developments as “a message to the Korean people that we won’t rescue you if North Korea invades again,” according to his longtime aide, Kim Seong Jin. Now on top of everything else, the White House was suddenly, and without notice to him, consorting with Beijing.

Meeting privately with reporters at the Blue House on the day Kissinger’s secret trip to China was announced, the South Korean president was gloomy. “The United States has long been trying to reach a rapprochement with Red China, but China has not changed,” Park complained, suggesting that Washington had made all the concessions. In a subsequent off-the-record dinner with Blue House correspondents, Park declared that 90 percent of the Nixon visit to China was a domestic maneuver intended to aid the president’s reelection. In view of Nixon’s “low-posture diplomacy” toward Beijing, Park told reporters, the pressing question for South Korea was, “How long can we trust the United States?”

Weeks later, Park addressed his concerns directly to Nixon in a letter that was delivered to Secretary of State William Rogers by Foreign Minister Kim Yong Shik. The South Korean president was particularly worried that deals might be made about the Koreas during Nixon’s forthcoming trip to Beijing, and he wanted to discuss it with Nixon at a meeting. But in Washington Park’s concern was such a low-priority question that it took three months for the State Department and Nixon’s National Security Council (NSC) staff to frame and present a presidential reply. When it finally came, it was a ritual declaration from Nixon that during his Beijing trip, he would not seek accommodation with China at the expense of South Korea’s national interest. Park was told that a summit meeting was out of the question. Recalling his feelings about the maneuvering surrounding the US rapprochement with China years later, Park wrote that “this series of developments contained an unprecedented peril to our people’s survival. . . . [The situation] almost reminded one of the last days of the Korean Empire a century earlier, when European Powers were similarly agitating in rivalry over Korea.”

Even before Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing, North Korea had been putting forth discreet feelers for direct talks with the South, and Park’s government had been quietly discussing how to respond. After Kim Il Sung’s August 6 announcement, the South moved quickly by proposing a meeting in the context of Red Cross societies. The North immediately accepted.

On August 20, 1971, eighteen years after the armistice ended the Korean War, representatives of the two Red Cross societies met in Panmunjom for the first exploratory discussions between the two halves of the divided peninsula. To no one’s surprise, the talks did not go smoothly.

On November 20, after three months and nine rounds of fruitless sparring, South Korean “Red Cross delegate” Chong Hong Jin, who actually was deputy director of the international affairs bureau of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), handed a note proposing private and separate meetings at Panmunjom to his counterpart, North Korean “Red Cross delegate” Kim Duk Hyun, actually a senior official of the Workers Party Organization and Guidance Department, the party’s most important department. Like these two, many of the participants in the Red Cross exchanges actually were intelligence or party officials. In the decades to come, because these agencies were powerful, discreet, and tightly controlled by their respective leaders, they would become frequently used channels for the many secret communications between North and South.

The South’s bid for higher-level talks was promptly accepted. North Korean leaders were ready and very willing. Gathering in secret as the contacts were beginning, a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers Party approved a large-scale peace offensive toward the South in response to “the changing domestic and foreign political situation.” The Central Committee was composed of the top-ranking members of the party in all fields, and its plenary meetings often marked key decision points in the regime’s domestic and foreign policy. This was definitely such a moment.

On March 28, 1972, following eleven rounds of secret contacts with his counterpart, South Korea’s Chong slipped out the northern door of the North Korean pavilion of Panmunjom instead of returning to the southern side. He was taken by car to the nearby North Korean city of Kaesong and then by helicopter to Pyongyang—the first of many South Korean officials to go to that capital for talks. There it was arranged for the secret contacts to go to a higher level: the chief of South Korea’s intelligence agency would come to Pyongyang for talks, and a senior North Korean would reciprocate by making a trip to the South. In late April a direct telephone line linking the offices of the KCIA and the Workers Party was secretly installed between Seoul and Pyongyang.