The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (18 page)

Kim also described the social engineering that was so much a part of North Korea. To “revolutionize and reform women, according to the example of the working class,” according to Kim, they were being “freed from heavy domestic work” and placed in jobs outside the home. About 80 percent of farmworkers were women, he said, and over 90 percent of workers in light industry. Without giving numbers, he explained that this was necessary because “many young people in our country are in the army.” To compensate for the absence of mothers and to start inculcating its ideology early, North Korea had built nurseries and kindergartens for 3.5 million children so they could be “taken care of and educated by society.”

Absent from Kim’s briefing was mention of the fact that despite North Korea’s strenuous efforts, by 1977 the balance of economic power on the peninsula was shifting decisively in favor of the South. In the first decades after the Korean War, the North’s centrally directed economy had recovered from the destruction and grown faster than the South’s. But in the early 1960s, the two economies took decisive turns: the North opted for an inner-directed one, centered on building heavy industry at home
and shying away from integration with the outside; the South, guided by American-trained Korean economists and the promise of a share in the American and Japanese markets, turned toward an externally directed economy centered on exports and initially on light industry. These fateful turns eventually determined the outcome of the economic race on the peninsula, and they deeply affected the political and diplomatic spheres as well.

By the mid-1970s, by most outside estimates, the North’s
juche
economy was falling behind. The North’s GNP, adjusted for inflation, doubled between 1965 and 1976, a highly creditable performance for a developing economy. But at the same time, South Korea’s real GNP more than tripled. In the mid-1970s, as poverty was reduced below the thirty-eighth parallel, South Korea passed the North in per capita GNP for the first time since the division of the country.

Part of North Korea’s economic problem was its heavy spending for military purposes. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the North devoted an estimated 15 to 20 percent of its economy to its military. The South spent an average of 5 percent on its military, though due to Park’s massive armament program the proportion briefly jumped to near 10 percent in the mid-1970s.

In the early 1970s, with the bad timing that has often plagued its decisions, Pyongyang abruptly shifted its autarkic policies to a “great leap outward,” purchasing entire factories from Western Europe and Japan, in a burst of economic activity that matched its sudden outwardly directed drive for negotiations with the South. One Japanese-Danish venture, for example, was to provide North Korea with the largest cement factory in the world. But in the worldwide economic dislocation following the 1973 Middle East war and oil embargo, North Korea found itself unable to meet the fast-rising payments on its external debts. As a result, its access to international credit was severely restricted, whereas South Korea’s growing international trade made it a major player on the global scene.

Soft-pedaling these troubling trends, Kim reiterated his belief in the superiority of the North, notably in regard to the revolutionary struggle in the South. Referring to the fight that he and his guerrilla band had waged against the Japanese, while Park Chung Hee and others were serving in the Japanese army, Kim expressed confidence in his superiority because “the leading circles of South Korea are traitors, whereas we here are patriots.” Contrary to existing evidence and belief in the South, Kim claimed that North Korean communists had been behind the student revolution that overthrew the regime of Syngman Rhee in 1960 and that the United States had organized the military junta headed by General Park Chung Hee that took power in 1961. In all these years, said Kim, the South
Korean students had supported North Korea and “have not demonstrated against us even a single time,” although they had demonstrated repeatedly against “the puppet regime.”

Kim expressed to Honecker a hoary tenet of North Korean policy, that after the withdrawal of US troops, when the South Korean people chose their own way, “then they would choose the way of socialism.” In the meantime, he said, the crucial objective for the North was to isolate Park and his government rather than return to the 1972–1973 era of North-South dialogue. The Americans hoped to see dialogue restarted, he said, but “if we get together with Park Chung Hee and hold negotiations, there is the danger of weakening the South Korean political forces who are opposing Park Chung Hee.” This belief that their own policies had a significant impact on the possibility of revolution in the South was more central to Pyongyang’s calculations than most outsiders realized.

On the first day of his visit, Honecker committed East Germany to having “no relations” with South Korea, but Kim continued to stress the need to isolate the South, perhaps in hopes that his visitor would pass along his views to Moscow, which Pyongyang always watched nervously for signs of apostasy on the Korean question. Honecker’s pledge would prove to be costly to East Germany; over the years that followed, each time the GDR was tempted to trade with the South, a sharp protest from Pyongyang reminded Honecker of his commitment, and the proposed deal was squelched.

Honecker at the time was considered a slavish follower of Soviet leadership, and thus Kim made special efforts to persuade him that he was not leaning to the Chinese side in the decades-long Sino-Soviet split. The North Korean leader emphasized his troubles with Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, complaining that the Chinese had set up giant loudspeakers at the Sino-Korean border and delivered deafening attacks on “Korean revisionists” from 5:00
A.M.
to midnight every day. Since those days, relations had been repaired, but “we do not follow China blindly,” Kim emphasized. On the other hand, he added, “We also do not participate in the Soviet Union’s polemics against China.” Opting out of the Sino–Soviet conflict “does not mean that we are opportunists, but that the situation does not allow us anything else.”

Finally, talks dealt with Kim’s views of Japan and the United States. Although he was concerned about the danger of a revival of Japanese militarism, Kim conceded that “the Japanese nation is not as it was before” due to the lessons learned from World War II and the US atomic bomb attacks. Looking to the future, he declared that a triumph of communism on the Korean peninsula would be “beneficial for stimulating the revolution in Japan.”

As for the United States, after nearly a year of trying to make contact with the new American president, Kim was scornful about Carter. The
decision to stretch out the US troop withdrawal from South Korea was “a deceitful maneuver against the people” and an attempt to manipulate public opinion, Kim told Honecker.

Kim confided that his military reconnaissance teams constantly observed US maneuvers in South Korea. American officers were uncomfortably aware of this aspect of the secret war on the divided peninsula. In 1975 a North Korean reconnaissance team was discovered while photographing and sketching the US air base at Kwangju and a nearby ROK missile site, and in 1976 a North Korean team wearing ROK-style uniforms covered sixty to seventy miles on foot south of the DMZ before being caught. By the time of the Kim-Honecker meeting, the US Command in Seoul had acknowledged in a confidential report that “the North can infiltrate or exfiltrate its agents or special warfare units by land, sea or air to virtually any location within the ROK.” On the other hand, American and South Korean operations inside North Korea were extremely limited. US knowledge of North Korean military affairs, however, was beginning to receive much higher priority.

END OF THE CARTER WITHDRAWAL

An important assumption underlying Carter’s plan was that during and after the departure of American ground troops, the military balance on the peninsula would remain favorable to the South. Even before Carter came to office, however, this assumption was being thrown into doubt by new US intelligence estimates that depicted the North’s military forces as much more numerous and better armed than previously believed. The new estimates proved to be a fatal blow to Carter’s already embattled withdrawal plan.

The beginning of the end started with a twenty-nine-year-old intelligence analyst named John Armstrong, who in May 1975 was bent over a light table at Fort Meade, Maryland, scrutinizing aerial photographs of North Korean tanks. Armstrong, a West Point graduate who had served in Vietnam before becoming a civilian analyst for the army, had been laboriously counting the tanks when he reached a surprising conclusion: there were many more than expected on the basis of earlier reports. Within a few weeks, Armstrong identified an entirely new tank division (about 270 tanks and 100 armored personnel carriers) in a valley about fifty miles north of the DMZ.

For many years, the principal source of intelligence on North Korea had been aerial photography from American spy planes and reconnaissance satellites, augmented by electronic eavesdropping. Because the central US military concern was a surprise attack, the photographs were carefully examined for evidence of southward movement or other signs of
impending assault, then filed away. Until Armstrong came along, there was little effort to compare the overall strength of North Korean units in the latest pictures with those of previous months or years.

Armstrong’s first intensive study, completed in December 1975, reported North Korean tank forces to be about 80 percent larger than had been previously estimated. Armed with this alarming finding, he persuaded the army to assign six more full-time analysts to his project. Over the next two years, his team documented the development of North Korean special forces units and a major increase in the number and forward deployment of North Korean artillery.

When Armstrong finally took his findings to the US Command in Seoul in December 1977, he found a receptive audience in General Vessey, the US commander, and others who were fighting the Carter withdrawal program. The following month, Vessey requested a complete intelligence reassessment of North Korea’s strength, complaining to the Pentagon of the adverse effects “on overall U.S. military policy and decision-making” of overly conservative estimates of the enemy. In response, the army initiated a much more extensive study in Washington, with a reinforced team of thirty-five analysts summoned from all over the world. They went to work reexamining all the intelligence reports on North Korean forces since the armistice and scrutinizing every frame of overhead photography and all the signal intelligence obtained since 1969. The results, officially reported in classified briefings beginning in mid-1978, were startling.

Due to a strong and steady buildup since 1971–1972, North Korea was credited in the new estimate with about seven hundred maneuver battalions, nearly twice the number carried on the books a decade earlier and nearly double the size of the South Korean force structure. Moreover, the North was estimated to have many more tanks and artillery pieces than previously known, giving it a more than two-to-one advantage over the South in terms of the numbers of those weapons. The study, which eventually identified every North Korean unit down to the infantry company and artillery battery level, found the bulk of the forces positioned closer to the DMZ than had been expected. The overall size of the North Korean ground forces, previously estimated at 485,000, was now put at 680,000, an increase of about 40 percent. For the first time, the North was estimated to have more men under arms than the South, whose population was twice as large. In North Korea, according to the new data, one out of every twenty-six persons was on active duty in the army, the highest proportion of any major nation. This was the basis of Kim Il Sung’s explanation to Honecker about a labor shortage because so many “young people are in the army.”

Senior officials were quick to recognize that the new findings had tremendous implications for the withdrawal program. Nathanial Thayer,
who was national intelligence officer at the CIA, recalled that “everyone was thinking the same thing—this is a good way for Carter to get off this issue.” In early-January 1979, results of the new estimate leaked to the
Army Times
and became front-page news in other papers, including my report in the
Washington Post
.

The findings intensified congressional pressure to halt the withdrawal program. Carter was skeptical of the validity of the intelligence reassessment, and decades later he remained so. Recalling the leaks and political impact of the report, Carter wrote me while I was preparing this book, “I have always suspected that the facts were doctored by DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and others, but it was beyond the capability even of a president to prove this.”

By late-January 1979, Carter himself was just about the only person in the administration who favored continuing with the troop withdrawal, and even he was aware that support for his views on Korea—and nearly everything else—was eroding drastically. He was being battered from every side following the forced departure of the shah from Iran and the triumph of the Iranian revolution earlier in the month, which led to a redoubling of world oil prices, intensified inflation, and other economic dislocations worldwide.

On January 22, he was persuaded to authorize a new review of Korea policy, chaired by the State Department, “in the light of recent developments affecting the Korean peninsula,” including the “new judgments on North Korean order of battle.” This artful piece of bureaucratic prose never explicitly mentioned the US withdrawal as a matter for review, but everyone except Carter knew that was its central topic. Unlike most other such studies, which aimed at bringing the bureaucracy into line behind new policies, Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC-45 was aimed by the bureaucracy at persuading the president to abandon an old policy he continued to cherish.