Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (15 page)

In 1948, the Soviet Union—confident that the North Korean People’s Army had been well trained—announced that it would withdraw all its troops that year. Despite warnings that the United States was planning for the wrong war, and must leave some of its troops to deter a North Korean invasion,
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all U.S. combat troops like-wise were out of Korea by the end of June 1949. “We seemed to want no part of the country, and yet we had planted the flag,” as David Halberstam has written. “The American century was about to begin, but clearly no one wanted to pay for it.”
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U.S. officials the following January enunciated a policy of declining (both publicly and privately) to guarantee the American defense of either South Korea or Taiwan. In a news conference on January 5, 1950, Harry S. Truman said there would be, “at this time,” no American defense of Taiwan. The remark had considerable impact—and not only on the Chinese nationalists and their communist foes. Russian scholar Sergei N. Goncharov saw in the Russian archives an intelligence report on a secret meeting of the South Korean cabinet the day after the Truman press conference. The report quoted worried South Korean officials expressing the opinion that the United States, as in the case of Taiwan and China, would stay out of the fight if North Korea invaded South Korea. Goncharov believes that this Soviet
intelligence report was “the triggering information” that persuaded Stalin to unleash Kim Il-sung.
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The question is whether Pyongyang and Moscow failed to read all of Washington’s signals. Understanding the professional soldiers’ reluctance to get bogged down in Korea, did they miss some other, ultimately stronger currents in Washington thinking—such as the view promoted by the State Department as early as 1947 that Soviet domination of Korea would amount to “an extremely serious political and military threat” to U.S. interests in Japan and elsewhere in the region? Indeed, considerable evidence indicates that Washington really did not intend to let South Korea fall into hostile hands, and was in fact prepared to lead an international coalition to prevent such an outcome in case of an invasion.
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The policy of “containment”—blocking the advance of communism beyond existing borders—had been gaining ground. In his ambitious two-volume work on the origins of the Korean War, Bruce Cumings shows that the logic for applying containment to Korea followed from a pair of premises. First, Washington wanted to maintain the prestige of its commitments. The United States had, after all, encouraged the formation of a noncommunist government in South Korea; abandoning that government would signal allies elsewhere not to put their trust in America. Second, Washington in response to the onset of the Cold War had decided to stop punishing Japan’s wartime leaders and encourage them to rebuild their country’s economy as the engine of growth for noncommunist economies in Asia. Historians now call that the “reverse course.” A total revival of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was, of course, out of the question. But American planners believed that Japan, to take on its assigned role, did need at least an industrial hinterland and military buffer just across the straits in southern Korea.

Containment was the State Department’s policy for Korea, and remained the policy even after the removal of U.S. troops.
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Moreover, in June 1949, as the troops were leaving, the Pentagon in a top-secret study reluctantly agreed that the response to a full-scale North Korean invasion of the South might include returning—with a military task force under the aegis of the United Nations—if “all else fails.”
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However, in a speech on January 12, 1950, at the Washington National Press Club, Secretary of State Dean Acheson described the American “defense perimeter” in the Asia-Pacific region as running from the Aleutian Islands to Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines. Generations of commentators have wondered since then: Why did he not mention Korea? The best answer now available is that Acheson wanted to keep secret the American commitment to Korea’s defense, to avoid revealing Washington’s cards not only to Moscow but also to South Korean President Rhee. He feared that Rhee, if he knew, would take advantage of that guarantee of protection to charge off
into the very military struggle with the Northern communists that Washington wanted to avoid.

Historians continue to debate whether some on the communist side took the Acheson speech as a signal that the coast was clear for an invasion. Even taking into account Acheson’s wish to keep Rhee guessing, if deterrence was his goal it would seem strange for so skilled and experienced a diplomat not to make Moscow understand that the United States would not sit still for an invasion of South Korea. If what happened was indeed such a failure of deterrence, it may have been one of the most expensive cases of crossed signals in the history of-warfare.
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On the other hand, revisionist historians starting with I. F. Stone suggested that elements in the United States and some of their allies in Asia
wanted
a war, somewhere in the world—as a means of rallying the American people for active opposition to communism—and were happy to maneuver the other side into striking first. That way Americans would feel they were fighting a just war. Acheson, if in tune with such an effort, would have wanted Moscow to misjudge American intent. That theory came with even less hard evidence to back it than the similar and persistent minority view that the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration intentionally maneuvered Japan into attacking first at Pearl Harbor.
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One report does say the Acheson speech persuaded Kim Il-sung that Washington would not be eager to protect the Rhee government. Whether Kim actually believed it or not, he may well have pressed that interpretation upon Stalin while trying to persuade the Soviet leader to come to his aid.
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Mao Zedong, too, following the Acheson speech, said in a message to Stalin that he doubted the United States would defend South Korea from a North Korean attack.
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That brings up another important change in the international situation that may have affected Stalin’s thinking. The Soviet leader was in the process of trying to tie newly communist-controlled China firmly to the anti-Western camp—as Goncharov and colleagues John W Lewis and Xue Litai have shown by marshaling important Russian and Chinese documentary evidence and interviews with key surviving figures. “By ‘drawing the line’ in Asia, Stalin was carrying out his ideas on how to prepare for a third world war,” they argue.
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It would help that process along to create a situation pushing Mao to take sides with Kim Il-sung militarily against the American-backed Rhee regime.

In fact, as a condition for granting his approval of the invasion, Stalin insisted that Kim get Mao’s backing. Kim visited Mao in May of 1950. Mao was inwardly reluctant, since his real priority was an invasion of Taiwan to reunify his own country. It would be impractical to try to invade Taiwan while simultaneously sending troops to help Kim—-which Mao would have expected to do should the Korean invasion lead to American intervention.
But with China’s Soviet aid at stake, Mao signed on. Only then did Stalin give his final approval.
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Stalin showed diplomatic deftness in maneuvering China into taking big risks while the USSR stood in the background, but he was not the only clever one. Kim Il-sung also got what he wanted at the time (not knowing then that the war he wanted would prove to be a disaster far beyond anything he could handle on his own). Kim “was able to use Stalin’s trust for his own aims even as Stalin was using him,” say Goncharov and his coauthors. The North Korean leader “managed to make Moscow see the situation on the peninsula through his own eyes.” He persuaded Stalin that a Southern invasion of the North was imminent and would overthrow the communist regime—but that if Kim invaded first, large numbers of South Korean leftists would greet his troops by rising to overthrow the Southern leaders.
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Soon after the 1950 Stalin-Kim meetings, Tom Connally chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, improved Kim’s case by saying the United States would “abandon” South Korea. The Soviet Union “can just overrun Korea just like she probably will overrun Formosa,” he said. South Koreans, understandably, were in shock. Rhee accused Connally of issuing the communists “an open invitation” to invade.
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Although Acheson declined to take issue publicly with Connally’s remarks,
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in the end the secretary of state could assert that his own press club speech had provided a fairly straightforward description of just what American policy makers intended. While not mentioning Korea specifically in the speech, he spoke of areas that he had not enumerated as part of the “perimeter” and said that no one could guarantee those areas against attack. However:

Should such an attack occur … the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations, which so far has not proved a weak reed to lean on by any people who are determined to protect their independence against outside aggression.

As late as June 19, 1950, less than a-week before the North Korean invasion, Acheson’s representative, John Foster Dulles, reminded the South Korean National Assembly that the United States already had intervened “with armed might” twice in the twentieth century “in defense of freedom when it was hard pressed by unprovoked military aggression. We were not bound by any treaty to do this.”
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Presumably Stalin and Kim Il-sung were aware of the warnings implicit in such comments. One explanation as to why they would ignore them comes
in Yu Song-chol’s recollection that Kim, in Moscow in the spring of 1950, convinced Stalin that the North Koreans had the elements of military superiority, surprise and speed on their side—to the extent that Washington would be unable to intervene before the North had occupied the entire peninsula.
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Yu was no mind-reader, and we need not accept his conclusion that Kim’s argument was what really convinced Stalin. The Soviet leader could very well have been lulled more by the efforts he himself had made to ensure that it would be the Chinese, not the Soviets, who would join the fight if the Americans intervened.
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As for Kim Il-sung’s thinking, if Kim himself really believed the argument Yu quotes him as having delivered, all the old questions about U.S.
intentions
tied to the Truman press conference, the Acheson speech, the Connally interview and so on, decline in relative importance as factors in the decision to invade. A roughly equivalent or perhaps even more important factor becomes the matter of
capability:
the North Korean leader’s judgment that Washington might wish to respond but would be too late. It is not yet known precisely how Kim Il-sung might have arrived at such a conclusion. After the June 1949 withdrawal of American troops from Korea, did Kim’s intelligence apparatus fail him regarding the U.S. capability to return in force— because, perhaps, of lack of access and familiarity, the wages of that isolation from the West that Moscow had engineered and the Cold War perpetuated? Or was this, rather, a simple matter of Kim’s ambition and desperation overcoming facts and reason—“adventurism” and “reckless war-making of the worst kind,” as Goncharov, Lewis and Xue phrase it?

A secret now, the answer may emerge if and when the doors to the North Korean archives swing open someday
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In May of 1950, while preparing its army for the invasion, Pyongyang publicly called on the South to join in peaceful unification, urging that a unified national assembly be established by the time of the August anniversary of liberation from Japan. It was a totally cynical proposal. Kim Il-sung harbored no expectation that the wary Southerners would accept the North’s terms. As planned, the propaganda offensive helped disguise the North’s intentions.

That same month the Soviet Union started sending new military advisors to North Korea: “individuals with extensive combat experience,” as Yu Song-chol described them. The new Soviet advisors drew up a draft of a “preemptive strike invasion plan.” The assignment to translate and refine the plan went to Yu and three other ethnically Korean officers who, like him, had grown up speaking Russian in the Soviet Union. After preparing troop movements disguised as training exercises, the plan called for mounting an invasion all along the 38th parallel. Blocking any Southern advance, the Korean People’s Army would move on to take the Southern capital of Seoul in four days.