Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
From the very first, South Korea recognized the political possibilities of hosting the Olympics. President Park Chung Hee, who had approved the plan to bid for the 1988 Games shortly before his death in 1979, specified that one of the major objectives would be “to demonstrate Korea’s
economic growth and national power,” and another would be “to create favorable conditions for establishing diplomatic relations with both communist and non-aligned nations.” The potential diplomatic payoff added a unique and powerful incentive to South Korea’s drive.
After nearly a quarter century on other continents, it was generally accepted that an Asian city would have first claim as host in 1988. For this reason, Seoul’s most important competitor was Japan’s entry, the city of Nagoya. Seoul had several advantages. Japan, a developed country, had already hosted one Olympics. Because of the intense diplomatic rivalry between the two Koreas, South Korea had embassies and consulates in nearly all third-world countries, which made up the bulk of the Olympics participants, while Japan had substantially fewer. Furthermore, many developing countries were sympathetic to one of their own.
In the end, Seoul simply worked harder. Chung Ju Yung, chairman of the giant Hyundai group, was named chairman of the committee to bring the Olympics to Seoul. As the vote approached, he and other Korean industrialists traveled widely, wining and dining Olympic committee delegates of other countries. South Korean prime minister Lho Shin Yong led an intense lobbying campaign with foreign diplomats in the corridors of the annual UN General Assembly session in New York.
In September 1981, when the Olympic delegates arrived at Baden Baden, West Germany, for the voting, they found impressive scale models of the Olympic Village that Seoul pledged to construct for the Games. They were also greeted by dazzling smiles from dozens of Korea’s most beautiful young women, including five former Miss Koreas and ten beautiful Korean Air Lines hostesses. According to a member of the victorious Korean delegation, Chung spent several million dollars in obtaining goodwill the same way he won construction contracts for Hyundai in the Middle East, with offers of airplane tickets, women, and money to any wavering delegates. Korea won over Japan by a resounding two-to-one margin.
North Korea was slow to react publicly to these developments. It took more than two months after Seoul was awarded the Games for
Rodong Sinmun
to acknowledge the South’s victory, and then it zeroed in on the political ramifications: “Recently South Korean military fascists have been mobilizing high-ranking officials and related staff of the puppet government as well as pro-government trumpeters to raise a ridiculous hullabaloo every day about the Olympics, which are said to be going to be held in Seoul in 1988. Now the puppets of South Korea are approaching socialist nations and nonaligned countries in the hope of establishing diplomatic and official relations in order to have their ‘state’ recognized as a legitimate one.”
As the time for the Games approached, Pyongyang increasingly portrayed the issue to its communist allies in momentous terms. In June 1985,
Hwang Jang Yop, then secretary for international affairs of the Workers Party, wrote the East German communist party that the Seoul Games were not merely an athletic issue but “an important political question touching on the basic interests of world revolution, of whether the attraction of socialism or capitalism will be strengthened on the Korean peninsula.” Two years later, the North was still on that wicket. In a May 1987 cable to Berlin, East German ambassador Hans Maretzki reported Pyongyang viewed the issue as “a strategic political fight against the Seoul regime and its imperialistic supporters.” With its stubborn approach, he observed, the North was “once again putting itself in self-imposed isolation.”
Following a suggestion from Cuba’s Fidel Castro, North Korea proposed that the Seoul Olympics be recast as the “Chosun Games” or the “Pyongyang-Seoul Games,” with North Korea as cohost, sharing equally in the sports events as well as the television revenues. North Korea insisted to its allies that “if the U.S.A. and the South Korean puppets do not accept our justified suggestions, then the socialist countries—as in the case of the [1984] Olympic games in Los Angeles—should collectively carry out a mighty strike and stand up against holding the games in South Korea.”
Another boycott of the Games by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, which had boycotted the LA Olympics, was never a serious possibility. Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze made it clear on a visit to Pyongyang in January 1986 that Soviet-bloc athletes were not prepared to sit out another Olympics, no matter what Pyongyang’s problems might be. In a confidential report on his visit, Shevardnadze wrote, “We have the impression that internally [North Koreans] have already come to terms with the unavoidable participation of the USSR and the other brother countries in the games.” He added that North Korea had asked him emphatically to delay announcing Soviet participation for as long as possible and to support the cohosting proposal. Moscow agreed to keep its planned participation in Seoul a secret and gave lip service to the cohosting idea. Nonetheless, Soviet Olympics officials took an active part in preparations for the Games, attending the convention of national Olympic committees in Seoul in April 1986, although they requested that their presence be given as little publicity as possible.
Meanwhile, negotiations were under way between the two Koreas, under the auspices of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), on possible North Korean participation. Full cohosting of the Games awarded to Seoul was out of the question, something Pyongyang presumably understood from the start; nevertheless, it went ahead building major facilities and churning out T-shirts, banners, and pins for the Games. According to Park Seh Jik, president of the Seoul Olympics Organizing Committee, he and IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch agreed to try to keep North Korea under control by dragging out the bargaining for as long
as possible, even though they saw little hope for final agreement. In the end, they believed, North Korea would never agree to grant full access to tens of thousands of athletes, officials, and accompanying journalists from the West. But while the negotiations continued, it was difficult for North Korea to exert its maximum pressure against the participation of its communist allies in the Games.
The negotiations came to a head in August 1987, when Pyongyang refused to accept a final IOC compromise proposal. On September 24, South Korea rejected a North Korean proposal for another direct North-South meeting on the issue. With this, in the view of the ROK Olympics chief, “North Korea was completely cornered. . . . Patience, mutual cooperation and careful planning by the IOC and South Korea for three years had finally succeeded in isolating North Korea. By the demonstration that the IOC and South Korea were doing their best to appease North Korea, the USSR and Eastern European countries were granted the option to participate freely in the Seoul Olympics.”
The North Korean version seems to confirm that the South and the IOC worked to stretch out the talks but were never serious about the discussions. In the summer of 1987, just before a crucial meeting with the IOC (July 14–15), the secretary-general of the DPRK Olympic Committee told a visiting American that the issue of cohosting the Games was discussed at Olympic Committee–related meetings in late 1984 and early 1985. In October 1985, at the first joint meeting of the IOC and the two Korean committees in Lausanne, the North put forward a proposal for free travel between Olympic sites in the two Koreas, including opening ports and airports. In that meeting, it also proposed cohosting, first calling for a fifty-fifty split of the Games (i.e., eleven events), but eventually reducing its request to eight. In June 1986, the IOC offered the North two full games (table tennis and archery) and two partial cycling events, as well as one of the preliminary soccer competitions. According to the North’s account, Samaranch presented this as a take-it-or-leave-it offer. The North’s reply was, “You shouldn’t back us into a corner.” With barely eighteen months left until the Games, Samaranch proposed another meeting in February 1987. At that meeting, a bilateral one, Samaranch told the North Koreans that if they took the offer, then there could be further talks concerning such things as the name of the Olympics, television rights, and the locale of opening and closing events. The North Koreans replied that things should proceed without conditions, so Samaranch agreed to another meeting a few months later. To the American visitor, the North Korean official said that the North could be flexible on which specific games it got, but that getting one-third of the events was “a matter of principle.” On soccer, he said, the North was inflexible—it was already building the world’s biggest soccer stadium to host the matches.
North Korea did not take South’s September checkmate lightly. Two weeks later, on October 7, 1987, two highly trained espionage agents were summoned to their headquarters in Pyongyang and assigned to destroy a South Korean airliner. They were told that the order came directly from Kim Jong Il, son of the North Korean president, and that its aim was to dissuade the nations of the world from participating in the Seoul Olympics. On November 29, a bomb planted by the two operatives destroyed Korean Air Lines flight 858, on its way from Abu Dhabi to Seoul. All 115 persons onboard, mostly young South Korean men on their way home from engineering projects in the Middle East, were killed.
Kim Seung Il, a seventy-year-old veteran North Korean espionage agent posing as a Japanese tourist, and Kim Hyon Hui, a twenty-five-year-old agent on her first espionage operation, had boarded the flight in Baghdad and disembarked at the next stop, Abu Dhabi. They left behind, tucked away in an overhead luggage rack, a time bomb concealed in the hollowed-out innards of a portable radio. The original plan called for the two to immediately board a flight from Abu Dhabi back to Rome and then Vienna, where they would meet North Korean diplomats who would arrange their trip home. However, unexpected airport procedures in Abu Dhabi forced them to fly to Bahrain instead. There they languished for two days waiting for seats on a Rome-bound flight while the world absorbed the news of the mysterious airline explosion and intelligence agencies gradually zeroed in on the father-and-daughter “Japanese tourists” who had briefly traveled on the ill-fated plane.
Japanese police determined that the young woman’s passport was a forgery. She and her companion were arrested at the airport in Bahrain while preparing to board their Rome-bound plane. As they were seized, both of them bit into poison ampules hidden in the filter tips of cigarettes they carried. The veteran agent died instantly, but Kim Hyun Hui survived, due to the quick reaction of a Bahraini policewoman who snatched the cigarette from her mouth. After Bahrain was convinced she was a North Korean, she was transported under heavy guard to Seoul, where for eight days she steadfastly held to a prepared cover story before finally confessing to her true identity and details of her act. Kim was tried and sentenced to death for the bombing but eventually received a presidential pardon on grounds that she was merely a brainwashed tool of the North Korean leadership.
Years later I sat in a downtown Seoul office with Kim, who told me the story of her life as a diplomat’s daughter, a trained terrorist, and, lately, a devout Christian who had substituted Jesus for Kim Il Sung as her savior. Although I had interviewed many defectors in the course of decades of
reporting, this interview was uniquely unnerving. I found Kim to be very beautiful, elegant, demure, and calm, tastefully dressed. I did not know then that she had been trained in North Korea to run ten miles in a single stretch, to bench-press 150 pounds, to shoot a silenced pistol with great accuracy, and to deliver karate chops that would swiftly kill. It was chilling to connect this attractive and intelligent young woman to the murder of 115 innocent people traveling home to their families.
As she had flown amid the passengers soon to be killed by the bomb in the luggage rack above her head, she did not dwell on their fate but on her challenging mission. She had been told and believed that her act “was for national unification, which was a great purpose and aspiration of the nation” and therefore justified the human sacrifices. “People in democratic countries find it hard to believe, but I thought about it as a military order, to be accepted without question,” she said.
From her youngest days, Kim had been a star. She was selected as a small child to be a leading actress in the country’s first Technicolor film. At age ten, she was chosen to present a bouquet of flowers to the senior South Korean delegate to North-South talks in Pyongyang. At age eighteen, while attending Pyongyang Foreign Language College, she was selected for espionage work, given an assumed name, and sent to a military camp for rigorous ideological and physical training. Other training in the arts of espionage followed. She was carefully molded for seven years before being assigned in October 1987 to bomb the South Korean airliner.
When she was brought to Seoul, her initial resolve was to maintain her cover story. Kim told me, “I had heard so many things about the torture and cruelty of the South Korean CIA that I was full of uneasiness and fear. I made up my mind I would have to face the worst part of this to keep my secret.” Rather than torture, however, skillful South Korean treatment had a profound effect. South Korean television and walking tours of Seoul contradicted North Korean depictions of a corrupt, poverty-stricken American colony. “I began to doubt that the order [to bomb the airliner] was for unification of the country. I discovered I had just committed the crime of killing compatriots.” After eight days of insisting she was a Chinese native residing in Japan, she spoke to her interrogators for the first time in her native Korean, “Forgive me. I am sorry. I will tell you everything.”