Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

SOUTH KOREA:

LEGACY OF THE COLD WAR

There were many differences between the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe and the United States’ satellites in East Asia, most importantly in the area of economic organization. In Europe, Stalin imposed on all seven of his “people’s democracies” (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania but not Yugoslavia, which was not created by the Red Army) a uniform pattern involving the collectivization of agriculture and an extreme centralization of economic decision making. The USSR demanded that all of these countries industrialize at the fastest possible pace, with absolute priority given to heavy industry. In the period from 1947 to 1952, the Soviet Union imposed its own economic methods uncritically and without taking any cultural or other differences into account. It was a process in some ways similar to the one the International Monetary Fund imposed on the smaller, more open economies of East Asia during and after the financial crisis of 1997—and with similar results.

In contrast with the Soviet Union, the United States was much less doctrinaire about economic arrangements in its satellites during the Cold War. In Japan and South Korea, its two main dependencies in East Asia, it insisted on the institution of private property and opposed any steps toward the nationalization of industry, but it tolerated land reform, state guidance of the economy, protectionism, mercantilism, and the cartelization of industry as long as these methods produced economic growth and blunted the appeal of communism. The United States used aid and preferred access to its vast market to bring these countries into its political orbit and keep them there. It disguised what it was doing—ultimately fooling only its own people—with euphemisms like “exportled growth” and “the separation of politics and economics.” The result was that over the years places like South Korea were able to export their way to personal incomes averaging over $10,000 per capita, a process that the Western business press invariably characterized as “miraculous.” It was not a process made available to the Latin American dependencies of the United States, because they were not of equal strategic importance in the Cold War.

When it came to the political and military dimensions of satellite creation and maintenance, the Soviet Union and the United States pursued similar policies and for similar reasons. They controlled their dependencies through single-party dictatorships (in Japan’s case a one-party “democracy”) that either the Red Army or the U.S. Army installed in power and then supported throughout the Cold War against any and all popular efforts to introduce truly democratic regimes. Although rebellions against our military presence in Japan were endemic from 1952 until after the end of the Vietnam War, we helped maintain (often through CIA funds channeled to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party) a single-party regime from 1949 to 1993, a record for stable satellite government (although identical in length to that of the government of East Germany from 1945 to 1989). During this period Japan was led by the same types of “shameless mediocrities” that the French international relations theorist Raymond Aron once said the Soviet Union relied on to govern Eastern Europe.¹

Democracy finally began to appear in South Korea only in 1987, over four decades after the country came into being, largely because the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, had attracted the Olympic Games for the following year and so had trapped himself into behaving in a civilized manner before a global audience when Koreans began to protest his rule. Much as in 1989, when the Russians did not intervene militarily to stop the East Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, the United States in 1987 did not encourage its Korean military allies to use force, as it had done in the past. One reason was that American officials still had in mind the traumatic outcome of the Iranian revolution—when their down-the-line support of the Shah’s repressive rule had only accelerated the coming to power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an implacably anti-American regime. Just the previous year, in February 1986, they thought they saw similar events unfolding in the Philippines as a popular movement swept away another U.S.-supported but corrupt and incompetent dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. In that case, the United States did not support the repression of the rebels, and the results proved relatively satisfying when Corazon Aquino, the widow of an assassinated Marcos opponent, and a group of middle-class reformers came to power, backed by military men with strong ties to the United States. Thus, the American government again showed restraint in the Korean situation, and the student demonstrators with their middle-class backers, seizing the chance, brought into being what is today the only democracy in East Asia, other than the Philippines, that rests on popular political action from below.

The end of World War II had proved no more a “liberation day” for Korea than for Czechoslovakia or other nations of Eastern Europe. The Japanese had occupied, colonized, and exploited Korea since 1905, just as the Nazis, following the 1938 Munich Agreement, had divided, occupied, and ravished Czechoslovakia. Both countries now underwent transformations into colonies of the victors of World War II. At about the same time in February 1948 when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was carrying out a coup d’état in Prague, right-wing forces in the southern half of divided Korea, then under the control of the United States, were slaughtering at least thirty thousand dissident peasants on the island of Cheju. Although the Czech events are much better known (and led to the creation of NATO the following year), the killings in Korea were of essentially the same character as those in Czechoslovakia. The Cheju massacre was part of a process by which our puppet regime in South Korea, a government every bit as unpopular as Klement Gottwald’s Stalinist government in Czechoslovakia, consolidated power. Gottwald, president of Czechoslovakia from 1948 until his death in 1953, and Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea from 1948 to 1960, were, in fact, similar figures: neither could have come to power without the aid of his superpower patron and both were prototypes of the faceless bureaucrats the Soviets and the Americans would use for the next forty years to govern their “captive nations” (a term the Eisenhower administration came to apply to the Soviet Union’s satellites).

Between Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, and the installation of Syngman Rhee (who claimed to be a former Princeton student of Woodrow Wilson’s) as president of the Republic of Korea in the southern half of that peninsula on August 15, 1948, the Koreans themselves tried desperately to create a postcolonial government of their own, just as the Czechs struggled to create a democratic government under President Edvard Benes up to February 25, 1948. They were ultimately undone by superpower rivalries. Fearing that the United States was setting up Japan as its chief client in postwar Asia, the Soviets held on to Korea above the 38th parallel as a bulwark against Japanese influence. There, they promoted and endorsed a Communist government made up of former guerrilla fighters against the Japanese.

The Americans were more ambiguous about what they were doing. General John Hodge and his U.S. Army veterans of the Battle of Okinawa were the legal successors to the Japanese in South Korea. Only in 1948 did they hand over power to Rhee, and even then they retained operational authority over the South Korean armed forces and national police for another year. Preoccupied with the security of Japan and indifferent to Korea’s status, Hodge ended up thwarting the efforts of patriots such as Kim Ku to reconcile with the North Koreans. Instead, he moved to support Syngman Rhee, who himself was supported by and who staffed his new government with numerous former collaborators with the Japanese whose main credential was their firm and reliable anticommunism. The forces under Hodge’s command then trained and supervised Rhee’s armed forces in the suppression of any and all dissenters—invariably labeled “Communists”—and waited to see whether Rhee could consolidate his power.

Following the departure of the Japanese, the people of Cheju, a remote island off the extreme southern coast of Korea, governed themselves through patriotic “people’s committees” that were socialist but not Communist in orientation, as even General Hodge acknowledged. On April 3, 1948, Rhee’s police fired on a demonstration commemorating the Korean struggle against Japanese rule. This incident led to a general insurrection on the island against the police and their attempt to integrate Cheju into the new South Korean regime. Rhee responded with a campaign similar to that of the Indonesian Army in East Timor or of the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. His police carried out a merciless assault on the people of Cheju, killing from thirty thousand to sixty thousand of them in the course of a few months and forcing another forty thousand to flee to Japan. On May 13, 1949, the American ambassador to the Republic of Korea, John Muccio, wired Washington that most rebels and sympathizers on Cheju had been “killed, captured, or converted.”²

By far the most ruthless of Rhee’s agents was a paramilitary vigilante organization called the Northwest Youth League, composed of refugees from North Korea, whom the U.S. Army tolerated with full knowledge of their reputation for brutality. The American occupation authorities, in fact, directly funded and trained a similar organization, the Korean National Youth League, under its leader Yi Pom-sok (known to the Americans as “Bum Suk Lee”), as a right-wing paramilitary organization. The “youths” were aged eighteen to fifty. Northwest Youth League members, who were not funded by the U.S. Army, were, of course, rabidly anti-Communist but they also were interested in securing their own livelihoods by acquiring wealth and wives in South Korea. They were responsible for the widely documented sadistic treatment of Cheju’s women, including forcing female survivors of families they killed to marry them and cede their land to them. Some of these men still reside in Cheju today, having profited from the island’s contemporary status as a beach and golf resort. In April 1996, when President Kim Young-sam used the beachfront Cheju Shilla Hotel as the site of his summit meeting with President Clinton, no American journalist mentioned Cheju’s past, much less the similarity between Clinton’s mindless visit to Cheju and former President Reagan’s mindless visit to a cemetery for former SS soldiers in Bitburg, Germany, in 1985.³ At an August 1998 international conference on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cheju uprising held in Cheju City, many speakers noted that Clinton had played golf on the unmarked graves of Syngman Rhee’s victims.

For at least forty-five years after the Cheju massacre, any Korean who so much as mentioned it was liable to arrest by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) or its successors, followed by beatings, torture, and a long prison sentence administered under the terms of the National Security Law, enacted in December 1948 and still on the books in 1998. Only in that year did the director of the Agency for National Security Planning, the KCIA’s successor, promise that abuse of the law for political purposes would stop and Koreans would no longer be arrested for minor violations like praising Communist North Korea.⁴ Only in 1995, after the arrests of former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo for mutiny, corruption, and murder did the Cheju Provincial Assembly finally feel secure enough to create a committee to investigate the massacre, whose research produced the names of 14,504 victims. The committee’s best estimate of the total killed was thirty thousand, about 10 percent of the island’s population. Some 70 percent of the island’s 230 villages were burned to the ground and a staggering 39,000-plus homes destroyed.

The consolidation of a pro-Soviet regime in North Korea and a pro-American one in South Korea led to a war that began in June 1950. The North Koreans have consistently claimed that this was a war of national liberation against American imperialism, while Americans have generally characterized it as an international conflict in which North Korea invaded South Korea. It was without question a civil war among Koreans, some of whom in the South had collaborated with the Japanese colonialists and some of whom in the North had fought against them. From my personal perspective as a veteran of the period immediately following the armistice of 1953, it was also clearly a war between the United States and China fought on Korean soil.

Shortly after North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, the United States intervened in force. In the autumn of that year, after American troops had invaded North Korea, China intervened in force. From June 1950 to early 1951 the war was primarily between U.S. troops and the North Korean army. Starting in March, it became a Sino-U.S. war, and its nature was transformed. The first phase of the war saw massive North Korean, American, and Chinese military movements combined with guerrilla struggles behind the lines. The later Sino-U.S. war bogged down in World War I–style trench warfare along what would later become the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Regardless of one’s view of the Korean War, the position of South Korea from the war down to the present has been that of a client of the United States.

In June 1950, the United States took its intervention against the North Korean attack to the U.N. Security Council. The USSR was then boycotting the Security Council to protest an American refusal to allow the new People’s Republic of China to occupy the seat reserved for China. On July 7, 1950, under conditions never again repeated, the Security Council, free of the threat of a Soviet veto, authorized a “unified command under the United States” to defend South Korea. Fifteen nations other than the United States contributed forces to this “unified command.” The United States on its own initiative then created the “United Nations Command” as the operational unit through which it would fight the war. The Republic of Korea also placed its troops under this American-controlled command. Thus, from 1950 to the present, the U.N. commander in Korea was and remains a United States Army general.

The United Nations itself was not, however, a party to the Korean War. There was no U.N. operational control over any aspect of the hostilities, and the United States, the designated occupant of the “unified command,” reported to the United Nations only after the fact. Cynics say that the first U.N. commander, General Douglas MacArthur, never sent the United Nations anything other than his press releases. Under international law the U.N. Command is an alliance of national armies commanded by the United States, even though there are today no other members left except for the United States and South Korea. The armistice agreement of July 27, 1953, was signed by General Mark W. Clark, the U.N. commander; Marshal Kim Il-sung of the Korean People’s Army; and General Peng Dehuai, commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers—but not by any representative of South Korea. This is one reason why today North Korea insists upon negotiating with the United States, not with South Korea.

Another important result of these arrangements is that the South Korean armed forces—today, some 670,000 men, 461 combat aircraft, and a navy that includes 44 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes as well as 4 attack submarines, with a budget of around US$16 billion—is operationally part of a military command structure headed by an American general. No matter how hard the U.S. government tries to finesse the matter, the South Korean army, except for some elite paratroop and special forces units, is as much under American military control now as it was at the time of the Cheju massacre.

When in 1961 and again in 1979 this South Korean army carried out military coups d’état and in 1980 massacred civilians protesting military rule in the city of Kwangju, ordinary Koreans inevitably saw the Americans as co-conspirators. On November 30, 1994, forty-one years after the armistice and seven years after the birth of Korean democracy, the United States finally transferred peacetime control over South Korean forces to the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff. In times of war, however, command reverts to a U.S.-dominated Combined Forces Command. China and Russia today have friendly diplomatic and economic relations with South as well as North Korea, whereas the United States still has 37,000 combat troops occupying 65,500 acres of South Korean territory at 96 bases and has no formal relations with North Korea.

In the years since the Korean War, the United States has had to deal with many difficult situations in its South Korean satellite brought about by popular demands for democracy and independence from the United States, which in many ways resembled the 1956 Hungarian and 1968 Czechoslovak uprisings for democracy and independence from the Soviet Union. The major difference was that whereas the Soviet Union relied primarily on its own armed forces to suppress these popular movements, the United States entrusted repression to the Republic of Korea army, whose leaders ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1993. The most important of these situations was the suppression of the Kwangju uprising of 1980, which bore many similarities to the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

The comparison is instructive. At the end of fascist rule in 1945, the Hungarians tried to establish a popularly supported government. In elections held late in that year, six political parties put up candidates. The Independent Smallholders Party emerged with 245 seats, the Communists with 70, the Social Democrats with 69, and the National Peasants with 23. These four major parties formed a coalition government, but power increasingly flowed to the Communists because of the presence in the country of the Red Army—exactly as happened in South Korea because of the presence of the U.S. Army. By 1948, most non-Communist leaders in Hungary had been silenced, sent into exile abroad, or arrested. In 1949, Hungary officially became a people’s democracy under Matyas Rakosi, a Communist trained in Moscow, who was secretary-general of the Hungarian Workers Party.

Hungary was, of course, not divided into Soviet and American zones. The Allied powers had concluded a peace treaty with Hungary that came into force in September 1947. It called for the withdrawal of all Allied armies except for the USSR’s. Soviet troops were to be stationed in Hungary to maintain lines of communication to Red Army units in the Soviet zone of occupation in Austria. In April 1948, Hungary entered into a treaty of “friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance” with the USSR in which both parties pledged military assistance to the other if they once again became victims of aggression from Germany or “any state associated with Germany.” The Hungarian army was expanded well beyond the limits authorized in the peace treaty.

In July 1955, the occupation of Austria came to an end; the last Soviet units left Vienna on September 19, 1955. Immediately preceding the signing of the Austrian peace treaty, the USSR and its seven people’s democracies united in the Warsaw Pact, aimed at NATO and a “remilitarized Western Germany.” Under the terms of this alliance, the Soviet Union stationed its 2nd and 17th Mechanized Divisions, with a strength of about twenty thousand men and six hundred tanks, in Hungary.

Rakosi and the Communists ruled Hungary with an iron hand, utilizing mainly the hated State Security Police (the AVH) to crush all dissent. In June 1949, in an interparty struggle, Rakosi arrested the foreign minister, Laszlo Rajk, charged him with an attempt to overthrow the “democratic” order, and had him hanged. Six years later, in March 1956, following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev revealed the extent of Stalin’s tyranny, Rakosi made a similar move to de-Stalinize his own country. He revealed that Rajk had been condemned on “fabricated charges.” No doubt Rakosi’s mistake was that he was still in political control and revealing his own, rather than someone else’s, criminality. Widespread protests followed, and the Russians ousted Rakosi in July 1956, replacing him with Erno Gero, a party hack who did not last out the year. In October 1956, Laszlo Rajk and other victims of the 1949 purge trials were ceremonially reburied, with large Hungarian crowds in attendance.

The autumn of 1956, following the Soviet 20th Congress, saw the first “thaw” in the Communist world. China launched its campaign to “let a hundred flowers bloom” (that is, to invite criticism of the regime); Poland took its first tentative steps toward greater independence from the USSR; and in Hungary, starting with Rakosi’s fall, people looked forward to a softening of the regime. This mood lasted no more than a year anywhere in the Communist world, but at the time optimism was prevalent. Gero’s regime ordered an end to the compulsory teaching of Russian in Hungarian schools and some other cosmetic reforms. Students and intellectuals felt bold enough to meet and discuss such subjects as ending single-party rule and asking Soviet troops to go home. They called for the return to power of Imre Nagy, who had been premier from 1953 to 1955, following the death of Stalin, and was reputedly a moderate. An old Communist, a member of the party since 1918, Nagy had lived in Moscow for some fifteen years and returned to Hungary with the Red Army in 1944. His moderation consisted primarily of opposition to the secret police and their activities. Rakosi had attacked Nagy as a deviationist and had him expelled from the party.

On October 23, 1956, in the new atmosphere of mild intellectual ferment and optimism, an incident occurred in downtown Budapest that led to a general insurrection and the mobilization of Russian forces in Hungary. The State Security Police, intensely unpopular and universally feared, opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators and killed a number of students. In the melee that ensued, ambulances with red crosses sped to the scene; when their doors opened, AVH reinforcements dressed in the white coats of doctors but armed with machine guns emerged from them.⁵ Outrage over the killings and deception led to the Budapest uprising.

Over the succeeding five days fighting broke out between students and workers wielding Molotov cocktails and Soviet tanks trying to negotiate the narrow streets of Budapest. Not a single instance was recorded of Hungarian troops fighting on the Soviet side against their fellow countrymen. Even the Soviet troops themselves seemed reluctant to push forward with the attack. As the U.N. report noted, “Soviet forces normally stationed in Hungary or Romania had been affected by their surroundings. . . . The civilians whom they fought included women, children, and elderly people. [Soviet troops] could see that the people were unanimous in their fight against the AVH and foreign intervention; that the men whom the Soviet Army was fighting and the prisoners who were captured were not fascists, but workers and students, who demonstrably regarded Soviet soldiers not as liberators, but as oppressors.”⁶

On the morning of October 24, Imre Nagy, having been readmitted to the party a week earlier, was elected to the Politburo and hastily appointed prime minister. It was a gesture designed to calm the crowds, which by then had broken the power of the AVH, while the Soviets were taking losses in the street fighting. The events of October 24 and 25 were extremely confused, and people did not know whether Nagy was actually in power or even whether he was fully on their side until later in the month. On October 25, Janos Kadar replaced Gero as first secretary of the party, and Gero fled to the USSR. Only on October 27 was Nagy finally able to form a government, into which he invited both Communists and non-Communists as ministers. The people of Hungary then accepted Nagy as their leader, having concluded that although he was a Communist he was also a good Hungarian. In the few days remaining to him, Imre Nagy ordered a cease-fire (which the insurgents honored), asked the Soviet Union to withdraw its forces from Hungary, ordered the AVH abolished, released all political prisoners, withdrew his country from the Warsaw Pact, and asked the international community to defend Hungary’s neutrality. This was obviously far more than Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders had bargained for or were prepared to countenance.

On November 4, 1956, at 5:20 in the morning, Nagy announced over Radio Budapest that Soviet forces in battle formation had invaded the city with the intent to overthrow the legal government of Hungary. This second Soviet attack, using troops from central Asia who had been led to believe that they were being sent to Egypt to fight against British and French “imperialists,” was swift and thorough.⁷ By eight A.M. that same morning, Soviet tanks were in control of the Danube bridges. Imre Nagy, Laszlo Rajk’s widow, and several other democrats and women and children sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. The Soviet Union promised them safe passage out of Hungary, but the bus taking them from Yugoslavia’s embassy delivered them not to the border but to the headquarters of the Soviet military command. They were never heard from again. In 1958, the Hungarian government announced that Nagy had been secretly tried and executed.

Janos Kadar entered the Hungarian capital in the baggage train of the Soviet invaders and re-created single-party rule under the Hungarian Workers Party. Kadar and the USSR announced to the world that they had successfully prevented an attempt “to overthrow socialism in Hungary and to restore the capitalists and landowners to power.” Kadar thanked the Soviet Union for its assistance in defeating the “reactionary forces.” All fighting in Hungary was over by November 6, although in the interim some 190,000 students, liberals, and intellectuals managed to flee the country via Austria. The Soviet Union also deported a large but unknown number of Hungarians to the gulags of Russia.

In Korea, the roots of the Kwangju rebellion went back to General Park Chung-hee’s coup d’état of 1961. The previous year, students protesting Syngman Rhee’s flagrant corruption and rigged elections had brought down his regime. However, the democratic government they created was ineffective. Park, a graduate of a Japanese military academy in Manchuria, staged a military coup. Once in power he announced as his goals the end of South Korea’s extreme dependence on American economic aid and restoring relations with Japan. His economic reforms succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, surprising the Americans in charge of Korean affairs, who despite the evidence from Japan refused to believe that authoritarian guidance of the market could produce high-speed economic growth.

General Park’s associate in the 1961 coup was General Kim Jong-pil, who proceeded with the help of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to create the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in order to consolidate Park’s military rule. The KCIA was and is a secret-police apparatus accountable only to the president of South Korea and has been used over the years to silence any and all calls for a genuine democracy. As the historian Perry Anderson observes, “In the mid-sixties the KCIA had 350,000 agents out of a population of 30 million, dwarfing the NKVD at its height. The dungeons were filled with opponents of every kind; torture was routine. Yet the regime, which as a front line of the Free World could not dispense with the formality of elections, was never able to crush opposition completely.”⁸

Despite Park’s unquestioned success in overseeing the rapid industrialization of South Korea, his draconian methods and the great inequities of wealth they produced led to opposition to his rule. In the 1971 elections, the dissident leader Kim Dae-jung, who would finally become president in December 1997 and who is from Mokpo, in the same South Cholla region as Kwangju, almost defeated Park. As a result, Park changed the constitution. He ended direct election of the president, allowed the president to be indefinitely reelected, and gave the president the authority to nominate one-third of the National Assembly (the organ that would reelect him). Throughout the 1970s, the KCIA enforced this new “Yushin” constitution (the Korean pronunciation of the Japanese word meaning “restoration”) while Park continued to move the country toward an industrialization that favored steel, shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and manufacturing rather than labor-intensive light industries.

Although many economists criticized his new economic initiatives, Park’s intention, not unlike that of the Stalinists in Eastern Europe, was to create the industrial foundations for South Korea’s own national defense. He deemed this necessary in view of the probable defeat of the United States in Vietnam and its possible withdrawal from Asia. He was, after all, a nationalist and an anti-Communist who did not want the United States to call all the shots when it came to protecting his country. Nixon’s opening to China worried him as much as anything the North Koreans did.

By 1979, Park’s economic “miracle” in South Korea was considered irreversible. His harsh policies nonetheless continued to elicit student protests, riots, and labor disturbances. On October 16, 1979, over dinner, his KCIA chief, Kim Jae-kyu, pulled out a pistol and shot first Park’s bodyguard and then Park himself, allegedly to end his repression of the people. Park’s assassination seriously destabilized South Korea and afforded North Korea the most propitious circumstances it had encountered since 1953 to renew the civil war. Yet North Korea did nothing. In South Korea, the United States was suspected of having ordered Park’s death, because the assassin was the chief channel of communication between the U.S. government and Park and because it was widely believed that the United States had grown tired of Park’s nascent independence.

In a secret cable to Washington, the American ambassador to Seoul, William J. Gleysteen, denied that he had ever so much as hinted to Kim Jae-kyu that his government was exasperated with Park. But the Americans did have one clear motive for wanting to be rid of him: as part of his efforts to ensure a South Korean victory in any new war with the North, Park had launched a program to build his own nuclear weapons, which the United States opposed. According to the prominent Seoul daily Jungang Ilbo, his target date for having deployable bombs was 1985.⁹ Park’s death stopped the program in its tracks. The United States and South Korea had feuded over nuclear research since the mid-1970s, and the United States has never cooperated with South Korea on atomic-power development, as it has with Japan.¹⁰ In response to Park’s initiative, North Korea also began to build its own nuclear strike force, a program that did not stop with Park’s death. By the 1990s, the possibility that the North might develop nuclear weapons had become a major source of instability in the area.

Our understanding of what happened next in the South Korea of late 1979 owes a great deal to the efforts of an American journalist, Tim Shorrock, who was raised in Seoul as the child of American missionaries. Shorrock has used the Freedom of Information Act to sue the U.S. government, forcing it to divulge some two thousand diplomatic and military cables concerning Korea to and from the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1979 and 1980. The documents still contain huge blacked-out areas, and a complete opening of U.S. secret files certainly has not occurred. Most of the cables are from a secret policy-making group that the Carter administration set up ten days after the assassination of Park Chung-hee. Its members were President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador Gleysteen, and the top intelligence official at the National Security Council, Donald Gregg. Vance gave this group the code name Cherokee.¹¹

As revealed in these documents, the primary goal of the United States was to keep South Korea from turning into “another Iran.” Toward this goal, the Americans were quite prepared to see General Park replaced by a new, perhaps more malleable general who would effectively suppress the rising calls for democracy that might prove “destabilizing.”

Martial law and an interim government under former diplomat Choi Kyu-hah followed Park’s death. Choi came up with a plan to spend twenty months writing a new constitution that would guide South Korea from authoritarian to democratic rule. This would put off political reform for a suitably long time. Washington backed the plan despite warnings that ordinary Koreans could not possibly remain politically patient for longer than a year. The extended hiatus in political leadership gave an unknown major general in the army, Chun Doo-hwan, time to prepare his own seizure of power. On December 12, 1979, General Chun, then in charge of defense intelligence at Republic of Korea (ROK) military headquarters, withdrew the 9th Army Division, whose commandant, General Roh Tae-woo, was his co-conspirator, from the demilitarized zone with North Korea and used it to assume control over the rest of the armed forces. These military movements were undertaken without formal approval from General John Wickham, the U.N. commander, but there is every reason to believe that he had been informed and assented to them. The following May, General Wickham readily gave Chun permission to use the 20th Division in the final assault against Kwangju, and at General Chun’s trial fifteen years later his main defense was that all his actions in 1979 and 1980 had been explicitly approved by Washington.

Ambassador Gleysteen’s characterization in the Cherokee cables of what happened is accurate enough: “We have been through a coup in all but name. The flabby façade 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. Major General Chun Doo-hwan, advantaged by his powers of security and investigation, seems the most important figure of a group of men who were very close to President Park. . . . The organizing group planned its actions for at least ten days and drew support throughout the armed forces among younger officers.” Gleysteen was concerned that General Chun had “totally ignored the Combined Forces Command’s responsibilities, either ignoring the impact on the United States or coolly calculating that it would not make any difference.” “At the same time,” he added, “I do not think we should treat the new military hierarchy as so bad that we decide to risk seriously alienating them.” A few days after the coup, Gleysteen wrote, “Whatever the precise pattern of events, they did not amount to a classical coup because the existing government structure was technically left in place.” And at the end of December, he added hopefully, “If the new leaders handle themselves with moderation, there may be no violent repercussions.” (These quotations are all from Shorrock’s documents.)

As the administrator of the martial law then in effect, Chun became the de facto ruler of the country. He had to move carefully, however, because he lacked legitimacy within the South Korean legal system and because he could not be certain that all of the armed forces were behind him. Not unlike the “thaw” in Eastern Europe in 1956, there was widespread anticipation that the next election, whose date had not yet been set, would usher in the democracy that had failed to develop after the overthrow of Syngman Rhee in 1960.

On April 14, 1980, acting president Choi, now totally subordinate to Chun, promoted him to the rank of lieutenant general and appointed him acting director of the KCIA. These actions prompted student demonstrations throughout the country. Molotov cocktails were hurled at police formations, and the police retaliated with hypervirulent CS tear gas (the same type used by the FBI at Waco in 1993). Everyone knew that Chun had to consolidate his position before the National Assembly convened for the first time since Park’s death on May 20, when the Democratic Republican Party, the façade behind which Park had ruled, was likely to join with the opposition in ending martial law. That would have destroyed any legal basis for Chun’s political ambitions.

In a secret cable dated May 7, 1980, preceding a scheduled meeting with General Chun, Ambassador Gleysteen wrote to his superiors in Washington: “In none of our discussions will we in any way suggest that the USG [U.S. government] opposes ROKG [Republic of Korea government] contingency plans to maintain law and order, if absolutely necessary, by reinforcing the police with the army [italics added].” The next day Warren Christopher cabled back, “We agree that we should not oppose ROK contingency plans to maintain law and order.” Pat Derien, who was President Carter’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, later said to Shorrock that this was “a green light as far as I could see then and as far as I can see now.” She went on to accuse Holbrooke of “pandering to dictators” and of “national security hysterics.”¹²

General Chun did not wait long after talking with Gleysteen to complete the coup d’état he had begun the previous December. Late on the night of May 17, 1980, General Chun expanded martial law, closed the universities, dissolved the National Assembly, banned all political activity, and arrested thousands of political leaders.¹³ Unlike Park, Chun had no following whatsoever outside the army. All Korean cities were tense with fury at his usurpation of power, but only in Kwangju did the situation explode, much in the same way it had in Budapest twenty-four years earlier. What resulted was, in the words of historian Donald Clark, “the most notorious act of political violence in South Korea’s history.” Professor Clark adds that the explicit American endorsement of Chun’s recapture of the city “forever associated the United States with the Kwangju Massacre.”¹⁴

On May 18, 1980, a few hundred demonstrators in Kwangju took to the streets to protest the imposition of martial law. They were met by paratroopers of the 7th Brigade of the Korean special forces, known as the “black berets,” who had a well-known reputation for brutality going back to their service on the American side in the Vietnam War. The 7th Brigade also included a battalion of infiltrators and provocateurs, who wore their hair long and dressed to look like students. According to eyewitnesses, the special forces troops set about bayoneting all the young men and women they could find and attacked others with flamethrowers. In a May 19 cable to Washington, Gleysteen wrote, “Rumors reaching Seoul of Kwangju rioting say special forces used fixed bayonets and inflicted many casualties on students. . . . Some in Kwangju are reported to have said that troops are being more ruthless than North Koreans ever were.”

In reaction to these acts of state terrorism, the whole population of Kwangju and sixteen of the twenty-six other municipalities of the South Cholla region rose in rebellion. They drove the paratroopers from the city, which citizens’ councils controlled for the next five days. They appealed to the U.S. embassy to intervene, but General Wickham had already released from his United Nations Command the forces Chun would use to retake the city. Gleysteen later claimed that he was unable to verify the authenticity of the mediation request and therefore decided not to act. “I grant it was the controversial decision, but it was the correct one. Do I regret it? I don’t think so.”

On Wednesday, May 21, martial law command headquarters in Seoul broke its near total censorship of what was going on in Kwangju and reported that 150,000 civilians, about one-fifth of the city’s population, had gone “on a rampage” and that they had seized 3,505 weapons and 46,400 rounds of ammunition from arsenals and had commandeered 4 armored personnel carriers, 89 jeeps, 50 trucks, 40 wreckers, 40 buses, 10 dump trucks, and 8 tear-gas-firing jeeps.¹⁵ On the same day, Ambassador Gleysteen wrote to Washington that a “massive insurrection in Kwangju is still out of control and poses an alarming situation for the ROK military.” He said that the Korean military was “concentrating defense on two military installations and a prison containing 2,000 leftists. . . . The December 12 generals obviously feel threatened by the whole affair.”

In the cables released to Tim Shorrock, there is ample evidence that the American embassy knew about the transfer of the special forces to Kwangju and what was likely to happen when they applied their well-known skills to civilians. In cables dated May 7 and May 8, Ambassador Gleysteen had gone into detail on the numbers of special forces brigades brought into Seoul and around Kimpo Airport “to cope with possible student demonstrations.” On May 8, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had sent a cable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon saying that all Korean special forces brigades “are on alert.” “Only the 7th Brigade remained away from the Seoul area,” and “was probably targeted against unrest at Chonju and Kwangju universities.”

Under the Combined Forces Command (CFC) structure, Korean special forces (as distinct from all regular army units) were outside joint U.S.-Korean control and did not need U.S. approval to be moved. However, it was routine for the Koreans to inform the CFC of any troop movements. In Gleysteen’s May 7 cable, he speculates that the Koreans might ask for approval to move the ROK 1st Marine Division. “There has been no request for such approval yet, but CINCUNC [Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command] would agree if asked.” In a May 22 cable, Gleysteen describes “the extent to which we were facilitating ROK army efforts to restore order in Kwangju and deter trouble elsewhere.” However, he told the South Korean foreign minister, “We had not and did not intend to publicize our actions because we feared we would be charged with colluding with the martial law authorities and risk fanning anti-American sentiment in the Kwangju area.”

In Washington, D.C., on May 22, the newly created Policy Review Committee on Korea met at the White House to consider what the United States should do. Its members included newly appointed secretary of state Edmund Muskie, President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the director of central intelligence Admiral Stansfield Turner, and the secretary of defense Harold Brown, plus Christopher, Holbrooke, and Gregg. Brzezinski, himself a Polish-American and an authority on the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe, summarized the consensus of the meeting: “In the short-term support, in the longer term pressure for political evolution.” According to the minutes transmitted to Gleysteen, “There was general agreement that the first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later.”

On May 23 Gleysteen met with the acting prime minister and told him that “firm anti-riot measures were necessary.” He agreed to release “CFC [Combined Forces Command] forces to Korean command for use in Kwangju.” General Wickham withdrew the Korean 20th Division from its duties on the DMZ and turned it over to the martial law authorities. General Chun broadcast news of the American decision to release the troops throughout South Korea, thus cleverly bolstering the view that the United States backed Chun. At 3:00 A.M. on the morning of May 27 the 20th Division entered Kwangju, killing anyone who did not lay down his or her weapons. This was a highly disciplined unit, and the city was quickly secured, much as Budapest had been in 1956.

The endgame of the Kwangju uprising dragged on for another two years. In the summer of 1982, two special forces brigades were moved from the border with North Korea to the cities of Kwangju and Chongju in order to hunt down rebels who had fled into the hills when the 20th Division entered the city. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that these remnants were not Communist-inspired but were reacting against the brutality of their own country’s army.

Back in Seoul, General Chun arrested dissident leader Kim Dae-jung on trumped-up charges of favoring North Korea—Kim had spoken of a federal system for the future of a unified Korea—and on May 22 charged him with instigating the protests in Kwangju even though he was in jail when they occurred. The martial law authority sentenced him to death. Richard Allen, Ronald Reagan’s first national security adviser, takes credit for saving Kim’s life. He claims that he traded a presidential invitation to Chun Doo-hwan to visit the White House—in February 1981 Chun was the first head of state to be received by the new president—in return for a life sentence. (Allen actually ended the article in which he described this achievement with the sentence “Chalk up one for the Gipper!”)¹⁶ In 1982 Chun allowed Kim Dae-jung to go into exile in the United States.

On May 24, 1980, Chun took care of some old business and had Kim Jae-kyu, Park’s assassin, hanged, since dead men tell no tales. He then put together an “electoral college” under the authority of the Yushin constitution and had himself elected president of the republic. By August 1980, the Carter administration was more than satisfied that Chun Doo-hwan would serve nicely as the leader of one of America’s oldest satellites.

It is hard to calculate how many people were actually killed at Kwangju. There was no United Nations investigation as there was into the Hungarian uprising. The United States has remained even more closemouthed about what happened there than the Chinese Communists are about the 1989 massacre in and around Tiananmen Square. There were only a few Western eyewitnesses. Jurgen Hinzpeter, a German television reporter, reached the city on May 20 and photographed bodies being loaded onto trucks, terrified citizens being led away by troops at gunpoint, and burning buildings. His films circulated underground in South Korea for years among student and Christian groups.

Norman Thorpe of the Asian Wall Street Journal was so appalled by what he saw at Kwangju that he retired from being a journalist in East Asia. In 1996, he protested Richard Holbrooke’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize stemming from his work in Bosnia. “Mr. Holbrooke argues that stability was important,” writes Thorpe about Holbrooke’s role in Korea, “because of the North Korean threat. Nonetheless, under the U.S. policies he helped develop, the military prolonged its rule in South Korea, delaying the transition to democracy and taking the lives of many demonstrators.”¹⁷

Following the attack on the city on May 27, Sam Jameson of the Los Angeles Times rented a car and driver to get to Kwangju. He reported that although there was no way to confirm a death toll, at least 200 armed insurgents were said to have made a final stand in the provincial headquarters building. He counted 61 caskets on the floor of a gymnasium across the street from provincial headquarters, victims from the early days of the protest who had been identified by relatives. Photographs placed on the coffins showed the faces of mostly young men, but there was also a middle-aged woman and a child identified as seven years old. The South Korean government later settled on a figure of at least 240 killed; Kwangju sources claim more than 3,000 killed or injured.

General Chun ruled South Korea as president from 1980 to 1988 and then was succeeded by his co-conspirator General Roh, who held office until 1993. Finally, under the subsequent civilian presidency of Kim Young-sam, prosecutors developed bribery and corruption cases against both generals. They produced evidence that while in office the two had shaken down the chaebol (the large conglomerates that dominate the Korean economy) to the tune of $1.2 billion for Chun and $630 million for Roh. In December 1995, in one of the clearest signs of South Korea’s maturing democracy, the government arrested both generals and charged them with accepting bribes. President Kim then made the decision to indict them as well for the military mutiny of December 1979 and for the massacre of hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators at Kwangju in May 1980. The South Korean state charged that their purpose at Kwangju had simply been to consolidate their own power, which they had acquired illegally.

In August 1996, a South Korean court found both Chun and Roh guilty of sedition. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh to twenty-two and a half years in prison. In December, an appellate court reduced the sentences to life for Chun and seventeen years for Roh, and in April 1997, the South Korean Supreme Court unexpectedly upheld both sentences. Only in December 1997, after Kim Dae-jung (himself sentenced to death by Chun) had been elected president did outgoing president Kim Young-sam pardon both Chun and Roh, with the new president’s consent.

When asked about the 1996 convictions of Chun and Roh, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, Nicholas Burns, replied, “This [the Kwangju massacre] is an obvious tragedy for the individuals involved and an internal matter for the people of the Republic of Korea.”¹⁸ No one in the U.S. government seemed to remember that the events in Kwangju deeply implicated them and that Messrs. Gleysteen, Wickham, Holbrooke, Christopher, and others might well have belonged in the dock alongside their Korean colleagues.

In 1989, when the Korean National Assembly sought to investigate Kwangju on its own, the Bush administration refused to allow Ambassador Gleysteen or General Wickham to testify; and the interagency task force assembled to review Shorrock’s requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act specifically refused to release any of General Wickham’s communications with his Korean counterparts or with the U.S. government, even though he was the official closest to the Korean military. The New York Times never once mentioned the results of Shorrock’s FOIA suit, and most Americans remain in the dark about what happened at Kwangju or the American role in it. They know much more about the Chinese government’s violent clearing of protesters from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 than they do about their own government’s cover-up of the costs of military rule in South Korea. Blowback from these American policies is one of the most volatile ingredients in South Korean politics today.