Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (31 page)

Pak said he hoped I would learn from my visit about the Korean people’s craving for independence. This got us to specifics, and it was troop withdrawal that he emphasized. I gave Pak my assessment that the Carter administration had drawn back from its troop withdrawal commitment at least partly because it would have amounted to a unilateral giveaway of bargaining chips, with nothing demanded in return. I spoke of the skepticism of U.S. allies, especially Japan. I mentioned the new intelligence estimates of North Korea’s military strength—agreeing with Pak that the timing of the revelation, in the heat of the troop-withdrawal debate, did seem a bit strange. Pak made a few perfunctory attempts to arouse my outrage that Carter would go back on his campaign promise. I steered the conversation back to the real world by emphasizing that the United States had to look at such matters in the light of its role as a world power.

Pak finally rephrased what I had been saying: “So it’s a bargain that the United States wants now?” I agreed that this was the assessment I would make, as a mere newspaper reporter. As the meal ended, Pak delivered a flowery fare-well speech in which he said we would talk again.

I made a reply speech (at lunch in North Korea one often made speeches instead of conversation) in which I attempted to state my understanding of American opinion regarding Korea. By the 1970s, I told Pak, many Americans including myself had come to wonder if Washington had been mistaken to get the country involved in Korea’s affairs in the first place. (I had never fully bought into the argument that the United States should have stayed home in the post–World War II period. But my personal views—I didn’t tell Pak this part—had been influenced by the arguments of revisionist historians, starting with college exposure to William Appleman Williams’s
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.)
And maybe, I told Pak, the United States had learned in Vietnam a hard lesson about the consequences of injecting ourselves into Asian civil wars. But, wisely or unwisely, we
had
gotten involved in Korea, and a society had been building in the South for more than thirty years. We had to consider carefully how to phase out our intrusion honorably—doing violence to neither our idealism nor our loyalty.

Pak was visibly displeased by this—as displeased, apparently, as he had been when I said that South Korea’s human rights record was better than Iran’s. But he said we would have further talks. I assumed Pak’s report to his colleagues and higher-ups would determine whether I would get more access to foreign-affairs officials.

Some fellow journalists and I had been speculating whether Washington might have empowered any member of the U.S. table tennis delegation to deal with the Northerners on political issues. Pyongyang, eager to talk, clearly hoped that was the case. Looking over the group, however, we came up with no obvious CIA types or others who seemed like they might fill the role. I had the impression the North Koreans, like-wise coming up empty-handed, might have decided to feel out the journalists accompanying the delegation to see if any of us might have pipelines to the White House more direct than mere presidential readership. I certainly was not reporting to the U.S. government or, indeed, to anyone except my editors back in Baltimore, and did not pretend otherwise. I was not sure whether the North Koreans knew of the American law that forbade intelligence agencies from recruiting journalists on the staffs of American news organizations. Whatever my hosts might imagine, however, I hoped they would decide that sending a message through me and my newspaper would be an efficient way to reach people in high places in Washington.

When I visited So Tong-bong, an editor of the Workers’ Party newspa-per
Nodong Shinmun
(Workers’ Daily), he told me that North Koreans “want the United States not to put obstacles in the way of reunification. So we hope the U.S. will withdraw American troops from the South and give a good atmosphere to create favorable conditions for reunification.” Improved U.S. relations with communist China had blunted the old justification that American troops were in the South to contain communist expansion, he observed—but still the troops remained, with the excuse of deterring North Korean aggression. “As you know, so many times we have clarified our position that we have no aggressive designs on South Korea,” the editor said. “War will not break out even if U.S. troops withdraw from South Korea.” (Seoul and Washington, of course, had plenty of doubts on that point. “They’ve got an awfully big military force for a country of peaceful intentions,” as one American official observed.)

So Tong-bong told me that Americans should understand Koreans’ desire for unification. After all, our own Civil War had been fought over the question of unity. Nice try. But North Korea and the capitalist South, during the thirty-four years since the division of the country, had grown into societies differing from each other far more profoundly than the Union differed from the Confederacy. North and South Korea both talked a lot about unification, but it seemed that each wanted it only if its own system would rule on the united peninsula. Pyongyang wanted to reunify quickly while it still held the stronger hand—but Seoul wanted to obtain world recognition of two Koreas for the time being, and delay reunification for long enough to build the South into a position of potential dominance.

The editor insisted that North Korea would not force South Koreans to live under the North’s system, and he added that Northerners had no
thought of living under the South’s bourgeois system. In that case, I asked, how could the mere presence of U.S. troops in the South be blamed for preventing reunification—the sort of reunification he claimed he wanted, with the two Korean systems remaining mutually exclusive? “I think you know the answer,” he replied, in what I found to be a typical North Korean rhetorical device. He added, “We are insisting that reunification should be done by the Korean people themselves. If foreign interference exists, independent reunification is impossible.”

That was a reference to the longstanding North Korean position that the Seoul government was not a true representative of the South Korean people but merely a puppet of the United States, cruelly repressing the people, keeping power and maintaining national division with the backing of American troops. I had spent enough time in South Korea to know that this was a crude caricature. The South Koreans in general very much liked the wealth and opportunities their system was bringing them. Their complaints arose from uneven distribution of those gains, the dizzying pace of social and economic change and Park Chung-hee’s determination to stay in power without holding democratic elections.

The sentimental appeal of the idea of reunification remained potent—and the Seoul regime was finding it difficult to reconcile that with its de facto policy of “two Koreas.” Nevertheless, having experienced North Korean rule briefly in wartime 1950 and 1951, South Koreans hardly wished to replace their lot under a merely authoritarian regime with the North Koreans’ fate under the totalitarian Kim Il-sung regime. Thus, I was not convinced that removal of U.S. troops from the South would aid the cause of reunification— except, perhaps, by enabling Kim Il-sung to impose his will upon the South.

As the time for my departure drew near, I got word that I was to be granted a major interview. I would meet Kim Yong-nam, secretary of the Workers’ Party in charge of foreign affairs, who ranked in the top ten in the party hierarchy. I was to submit some questions in advance.

Kim Yong-nam smilingly greeted me in a Workers’ Party guest house on the outskirts of Pyongyang. A slender, strong-jawed man of fifty with a mobile mouth and straight, bushy Groucho Marx eyebrows, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a well-tailored gray plaid suit, with the requisite gold-framed portrait of the Great Leader pinned to his lapel. After some pleasantries, he proposed first to tell me about North Korea’s reunification policy. What would I think of that? “I think that would be an excellent procedure,” I replied, deferring to my host. Despite his superficial resemblance to Groucho, he offered no one-liners (and no cigar). Instead, he launched into a monologue, which dragged on, long enough to make me regret my politeness.

Kim Yong-nam repeated the point made by virtually every other North Korean I had met—that reunification was the ardent wish of the entire Korean people. The question of reunification, he said, “is an urgent one that cannot be delayed further.” Koreans are “a homogeneous people with one language, one set of customs and one territory” he said. But because of their separation for the previous thirty-four years, “the language and customs of the people are becoming different. This is the biggest tragedy for our people. Now the North and the South are in a position of military confrontation and both keep strong military forces,” he said. “To remove the danger of a new war, Korea’s reunification should be realized soon.”

Kim complained that it appeared “the United States does not clearly understand the sincere position of our country for independent and peaceful reunification.” He said his country’s proposals had gone largely unreported in the news media of capitalist countries. Take, for example, the North’s proposals for economic cooperation with the South. The North had mineral and fishery resources and the South had surplus labor, so why not put them together? Stop the South Koreans from emigrating to places like the United States and send those people north, he said. Specifically, the North had offered to let low-income South Korean fishermen fish in North Korean territorial waters alongside North Korean fishermen. The North had even offered to build irrigation systems to help increase farm yields in the South. “But as the South Korean side rejected all those proposals, not a proposal could be realized,” Kim Yong-nam said solemnly, looking deeply sorry for the poor Southerners thus deprived of Northern economic help.

Kim Yong-nam reprised some appeals that were standard ingredients in Pyongyang’s efforts to undermine the Washington-Seoul alliance by playing to Americans critical of the Park Chung-hee regime’s anti-democratic record. Such critics formed a large and growing group and included my newspaper’s editorial board and myself, as North Korean officials perhaps were aware. “We think the U.S. should change its policy on Korean questions, proceeding from goodwill,” Kim said. “The U.S. should not back or instigate Park Chung-hee, particularly in his maneuvers for splitting our country, his war clamor and his policy of trampling the democratic forces in South Korea. … The U.S. should come out to assist the realization of reunification. If it can’t do that, at least it should not do things which hinder and put obstacles in the way of realizing reunification.” Kim repeatedly emphasized that the improvement of U.S.–North Korean relations was “entirely up to the United States.”

Making what he told me was a new offer, Kim Yong-nam said that if the United States would withdraw its troops from South Korea and help to achieve Korean reunification through a confederation, North Korea would guarantee not to “touch or harm” American interests in the South. He repeated the North Korean proposal for reunification, which envisioned separate
governments coexisting in the northern and southern halves of the country for an indefinite period. Each could maintain its own social system with a guarantee of independent operation regarding domestic matters, he said. But the two would be united in dealing with foreign affairs, in which field the proposed Korean federation would pursue a “nonaligned, neutral policy.”

Kim Yong-nam did not get into a detailed discussion of just what were American interests in South Korea. He did not even mention, for example, investments there by American corporations, but he did address by implication Washington’s basic Cold War–era interest in seeing that Moscow would have as few allies as possible. He repeated the argument Pyongyang had been peddling for several years: that North Korea was an independent and non-aligned country, taking orders from no great power. A reunited Korea would be like-wise, he promised. “What I want to emphasize is that even after reunification our country will stand independently, will not be a satellite of certain countries and will strictly follow a nonaligned and neutral policy,” Kim Yong-nam told me.

Two hours and fifty minutes after our meeting had begun, Kim ended his monologue. We repaired to a lunch of several courses, lasting another couple of hours, during which he took questions. In response to a question on how the guarantees he had offered would apply, he gave no specifics but said, “That question can be discussed if the United States comes out with the intention to help the country’s reunification.”

Kim Yong-nam offered no new proposals to get the stalled North-South talks moving again. It seemed clear that North Korea’s leaders had decided to concentrate for the time being on changing American minds in the hope the United States would resume troop withdrawal.

As for the new U.S. intelligence reports saying the North’s ground forces numbered between 560,000 and 600,000 men, Kim charged that this was “baseless information. Even 400,000 would be a great burden for us when we think of our population and other conditions.” North Korea was “demanding the reduction of military forces in the North and South and reduction of armaments,” he said. Mean-while it had been reducing the percentage of its budget spent on the military, from 16.5 percent in 1976 to 15 percent in 1979. “And we have many times expressed and clarified our stand that we have no intention of pursuing aggression against the South.”

The account of my interview with Kim Yong-nam was the lead article on the front page of
The Baltimore Sun
the next morning, and it was duly read in official Washington. The offer to guarantee “as they are” American interests in South Korea seemed intended to provide the missing quid pro quo for continued American troop withdrawal from the South. Kim Yong-nam had told me the proposed guarantees would apply not only to the United States but
also to other foreign countries with interests in South Korea—specifically Japan, whose economy, as he noted, was more “organically” linked with South Korea’s than was the U.S. economy.