In the Shadow of Vietnam a New Look at North Korea's Militant Strategy

SzaIn tlhontaie Shadow of Vietnam

In the Shadow of Vietnam A New Look at North Korea’s Militant Strategy, 1962–1970

✣ Balázs Szalontai

After the North Korean navy captured the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo on 23 January 1968, many U.S. policymakers concluded that Pyong- yang’s belligerent act, committed just a week before the start of North Viet- nam’s Tet Offensive, must have been a calculated attempt to divert Washing- ton’s attention and resources from South Vietnam. Ironically, this view was at least partly shared by ofªcials in the Soviet bloc. As far back as December 1966, the Czechoslovak members of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Com- mission (NNSC) speculated that North Korea’s provocative actions along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of the Korean peninsula were aimed at thwarting the deployment of South Korean troops to Vietnam.1 Scholars who have analyzed the militant strategy adopted by North Ko- rean leader Kim Il Sung (Kim Ils6ng) in 1966–1968 also have sought to place the Pueblo seizure into the context of the Vietnam War.2 Some, such as Chuck Downs, Barry Gills, B. C. Koh, Narushige Michishita, Donald Zagoria, and Young Kun Kim, have maintained that the North Korean leader “deliberately decided to exploit the Vietnam War situation in order to act aggressively toward South Korea and the United States.” Others, including Frank Baldwin, Vandon E. Jenerette, and Yongho Kim, claim that Kim wanted to assist his

1. Report from the Hungarian Embassy to the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 29 Decem- ber 1966, in Hungarian National Archives (MOL), XIX-J-1-j Korea, Top Secret Documents (KTS), 1967, 61. doboz, 1, 001202/1966. The Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), composed of four senior ofªcers appointed by Switzerland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, was established by the Korean Armistice Agreement of July 1953 to supervise, observe, and inspect post- armistice relations between North and South Korea. 2. To describe the policies the North Korean leaders pursued vis-à-vis South Korea and the United States in 1962–1970 (including both intense military preparations and actual armed violence), I use the term “militant strategy,” which I consider more comprehensive and less pejorative than “military adventurism,” a term used by some other authors.

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North Vietnamese allies or deter Washington from resorting to military measures against Pyongyang similar to those used against Hanoi.3 These explanations, however, are based almost exclusively on the chronological coincidence of North Korean and North Vietnamese actions and on a speech Kim Il Sung made on 5 October 1966, rather than on archival evidence or a detailed examination of the relationship between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Few, if any, attempts have been made to analyze North Korea’s relations with Southeast Asia in such an elaborate way as Robert M. Blackburn, Jiyul Kim, Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, and others have done with regard to South Korea’s contribution to U.S. military efforts in Vietnam.4 For this reason, several historians have questioned the validity of a Viet- nam-centered hypothesis. Among others, Sarantakes points out that in another portion of Kim Il Sung’s October 1966 speech, “Kim makes it clear that he wanted other countries to send combat troops to Southeast Asia.”5 Mitch- ell B. Lerner argues that the Pueblo incident was not coordinated with the Tet Offensive, because neither the circumstances under which the ship was cap-

3. Barry K. Gills, Korea versus Korea: A Case of Contested Legitimacy (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 110. See also Frank Baldwin, “Patrolling the Empire,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer 1972), pp. 66–68; Chuck Downs, Over the Line: North Korea’s Negotiating Strategy (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1999), pp. 118, 123; Vandon Jenerette, “The Forgotten DMZ,” Mili- tary Review, Vol. 68, No. 5 (May 1988), pp. 32–43; Yongho Kim, “North Korea’s Use of Terror and Coercive Diplomacy: Looking for Their Circumstantial Variants,” The Korean Journal of Defense Anal- ysis, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 8–9; B. C. Koh, “The Pueblo Incident in Perspective,” Asian Survey, Vol. 9, No. 4 (April 1969), pp. 271–272; Narushige Michishita, North Korea’s Military- Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966–2008 (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 22–23; and Donald Zagoria and Young Kun Kim, “North Korea and the Major Powers,” Asian Survey, Vol. 15, No. 12 (December 1975), pp. 1018, 1021–1022. 4. The most detailed publications on this subject are Merle Pribbenow, “North Korean Pilots in the Skies over Vietnam,” North Korea International Documentation Project E-Dossier No. 2 (Washing- ton, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2011), available online athttp://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/nkidp-e-dossier-no-2-north-korean-pilots-the-skies-over-vietnam; and Kook-Chin Kim, “An Overview of North Korean–Southeast Asian Relations,” in Park Jae Kyu, Byung Chul Koh, and Tae- Hwan Kwak, eds., The Foreign Relations of North Korea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987). For cur- sory references to North Korea’s attitude toward the Vietnam War, see Adrian Buzo, The Guerrilla Dy- nasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 68–69, 73, 261; Taik- young Hamm, Arming the Two Koreas: State, Capital and Military Power (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 73; and Bernd Schaefer, “North Korean ‘Adventurism’ and China’s Long Shadow, 1966–1972.” Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Working Paper No. 44 (Washington, DC: CWIHP, October 2004), pp. 11–12. On South Korea’s involvement in the war, see Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean, Filipino, and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994); Jiyul Kim, “U.S. and Korea in Viet- nam and the Japan-Korea Treaty: Search for Security, Prosperity and Inºuence,” M.A. Thesis, Harvard University, 1991; Se Jin Kim, “South Korea’s Involvement in Vietnam and Its Economic and Political Impact,” Asian Survey, Vol. 10, No. 6 (June 1970), pp. 519–532; and Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “In the Service of Pharaoh? The United States and the Deployment of Korean Troops in Vietnam, 1965– 1968,” Paciªc Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (August 1999), pp. 425–449. 5. Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “The Quiet War: Combat Operations along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, 1966–1969,” Journal of Military History, Vol. 64, No. 2 (April 2000), p. 440.

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tured nor U.S. reactions to the seizure were particularly favorable from Ha- noi’s perspective. That is, the one-week period from the capture of the Pueblo to the start of the offensive was inadequate to reduce U.S. capabilities in Viet- nam. On the contrary, Pyongyang’s action triggered a surge of U.S. forces in the Far East, enabling the U.S. military command in Vietnam to bring in much-needed reinforcements during Tet.6 Later, after reviewing translations of Soviet-bloc archival documents, Lerner extrapolated his observation: “Kim was certainly aware of the American escalation of the [Vietnam] War, and was greatly troubled by it. But there seems to be little concrete evidence connect- ing the two escalations. A coincidence in timing does not necessarily indicate causation.”7 These arguments reveal the inconsistencies in the original “coordination hypothesis.” Nonetheless, the refutation of this hypothesis, whose applicability is limited by certain presuppositions, does not automatically rule out the possibility of other forms of coordination between North Vietnamese and North Korean actions. The “coordination hypothesis” focuses on two speciªc events (the Pueblo incident and the Tet Offensive), which were linked with each other but were much less clearly linked with other Korean and Vietnam- ese events. That is, Lerner’s analysis does not indicate whether Vietnamese Communist policies might have inspired North Korean steps other than the seizure of the Pueblo. A preoccupation with the Pueblo case may hinder us in discerning Kim Il Sung’s motives and intentions. In the United States, this event understand- ably has attracted far more attention than the other confrontational measures Kim took in the 1960s, but the North Korean leader’s own priorities were not necessarily identical to those of U.S. observers. If we focus solely on the Pueblo incident, we may fail to grasp that the manifestations, objectives, and targets of North Korea’s militant strategy changed several times in the period from 1962 to 1970. In certain years, sharp increases in DPRK defense spend- ing were accompanied by a similar intensiªcation of armed incidents or a greater emphasis on heavy industry, but on other occasions they were not. In some periods, attacks were directed against both U.S. and South Korean targets, whereas in other instances the attacks were more selective, concentrating mostly on the United States or South Korea. Nor did the Pueblo and EC-121 incidents put an end to North Korean militancy. In 1970 a brief but dramatic renewal of border provocations and terrorist attacks occurred against South

6. Mitchell B. Lerner, The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy (Law- rence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), pp. 100–122, 172. 7. Mitchell B. Lerner, “‘Mostly Propaganda in Nature:’ Kim Il Sung, the Juche Ideology, and the Sec- ond Korean War,” North Korea International Documentation Project Working Paper No. 3 (Wash- ington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, December 2010), pp. 5–6.

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Korea, but these incidents have generally received little attention among U.S. scholars. The dynamic nature of North Korea’s militant strategy suggests that Kim Il Sung’s confrontational actions were inºuenced by varying combinations of multiple factors rather than by any single cause or static ideological tenet. The Vietnam War was a major factor, but its role in certain incidents seems to have been far more marginal than in others. Furthermore, its importance rela- tive to other factors varied. These changes resulted partly from the war’s own internal dynamics and partly from the shifts in South Korean domestic politics and U.S.–South Korean relations that alternately increased or reduced Pyongyang’s chances to gain a foothold in the South, isolate the authoritarian regime of Park Chung Hee (Pak Ch6ngh1i), and achieve the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Republic of Korea (ROK). Decisive changes in Viet- namese Communist strategy usually produced a perceptible effect on DPRK- DRV relations by either reinforcing or weakening their cooperation, and Pyongyang would express its agreement or disagreement with Hanoi’s actions. By all indications, Kim Il Sung attributed great signiªcance to the Viet- nam War and regarded certain aspects of the conºict as advantageous to North Korean interests. In this light, the fact that various important events in Indochina were closely followed by changes in North Korean external and domestic policies seems to indicate more than mere chronological coincidence. However, only under speciªc and temporary circumstances did the “Vietnam factor” play a crucial role in the strategy of the North Korean leader, who, in any case, proved as unwilling to subordinate his Südpolitik (southern policy) to the interests of his North Vietnamese allies as the latter were to adjust their military strategy to his priorities.8 In essence, Kim Il Sung sought to achieve his own aims in the shadow of the Vietnam War.

DPRK-DRV Relations and the First Stages of Kim Il Sung’s Militant Strategy

The North Korean and Vietnamese Communist leaders, like their non- Communist adversaries, became ideological and diplomatic allies in the early years of the Cold War. On 31 January 1950, North Korea established diplomatic relations with the DRV, and on 8 March the South Korean government recognized the French-controlled Bao Dai regime. Despite the geographical

8. The term Südpolitik, which I have coined, is patterned on the term Nordpolitik (northern policy), a word commonly used for the policies that South Korean President Roh Tae Woo (No T’aeu) and his successors pursued toward the DPRK. The latter term was inspired by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik (eastern policy).

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distance, conditions in one of the two countries could already inºuence events in the other. In August 1950, France informed the United Nations (UN) that because of the war in Indochina, it was unable to send more than a single battalion to the defense of South Korea. Koreans and Vietnamese gradually became aware of each other’s plight. In August 1950, the Viet Minh launched a “Korean week” solidarity campaign. Facing French air raids of growing intensity, a North Vietnamese delegation visited the DPRK in August–September 1951 to inspect the effects of U.S. saturation bombing and to learn from the experi- ences of North Korean air defense.9 Still, in the 1950s and early 1960s North Korean and North Vietnamese foreign policies seem not to have been closely coordinated with each other. The occasional visits by high-ranking leaders of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) and the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP)—such as Ho Chi Minh (July 1957), Kim Il Sung (November–December 1958), and Pham Van Dong (mid-1961)—constituted but one leg of their multicountry tours. Economic relations between the two states also remained meager. In February 1961, they signed an agreement on scientiªc and technical cooperation.10 That year, the total volume of North Korean–North Vietnamese trade did not exceed 4.7 million rubles. Of the 4,000 metric tons of steel Pyongyang exported to the DRV in 1963, Hanoi accepted only 700 tons because of the poor quality of the rest.11 The ªrst signs of a pronounced North Korean tendency to regard Viet- namese events as being particularly relevant for Korea appeared in 1962, a period when Kim Il Sung’s earlier hopes of achieving rapprochement with South Korea were shattered and when Nikita Khrushchev’s renewed push on de- Stalinization induced Pyongyang to adopt an increasingly anti-Soviet and pro-Chinese stance. In January, Kulloja, the KWP’s theoretical monthly, published an overview of the previous year’s international events that made no reference to Soviet foreign policies and instead concentrated on Third World liberation movements (including the struggle of the South Vietnamese Com- munist guerrillas). In 1962–1963, the North Korean media paid particular attention to Chinese, North Vietnamese, and Albanian news. If an article

9. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 23 August 1950, in MOL, XIX-J-1-k Korea, Administrative Documents (KA), 1945–1964, 6. doboz, 11/f, [no reference number]/1950; and Re- port from the Hungarian Legation in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 26 October 1951, in MOL, KA, 1945–1964, 6. doboz, 11/f, 01935/1952. 10. Report from the Hungarian Embassy to the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 5 May 1961, in MOL, XIX-J-1-j Vietnam, Top Secret Documents (VTS), 1945–1964, 3. doboz, 5/a, 004573/1961. 11. Balázs Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953–1964 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005), p. 205.

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published a list of other Communist countries, the DRV was usually listed second, preceded only by China.12 These lists symbolically expressed where North Korea’s interests and sym- pathies lay, thus revealing that in this period the “Vietnam factor,” though its importance for Pyongyang was growing, was still overshadowed by the “China factor.” In 1962–1964 the DPRK’s foreign policy was of a more pro- Chinese than pro-Vietnamese nature. Notably, on 19–29 June 1963 a North Korean parliamentary delegation visited the DRV and tried, unsuccessfully, to win the VWP leaders over to China’s cause. The public speeches of the North Vietnamese hosts, unlike the ones made by the DPRK delegation, did not mention the Sino-Soviet conºict.13 In one important respect, however, the guerrilla struggle in South Viet- nam did provide crucial inspiration for Kim Il Sung’s post-1962 militant strategy. Having concluded that the Soviet conception of “peaceful coexis- tence” was no longer applicable to inter-Korean relations, the KWP leaders initiated a rapid military build-up and uttered increasingly bellicose statements about the “liberation” of South Korea. Even so, they were acutely aware that U.S. nuclear weapons in the ROK would thwart any North Korean plan based on a large-scale offensive of regular troops. To circumvent this obstacle, Pyongyang opted for another type of offensive strategy that did not carry the risk of U.S. nuclear retaliation: low-intensity irregular warfare, implemented by the special forces of the Korean People’s Army (KPA). Hungarian diplomats discovered in early 1963 that

the Koreans propagated a theory that cited the South Vietnamese events as an example. In that country, there is essentially a war against the government of [Ngo Dinh] Diem and the American imperialist troops, and, as is well known, the guerrilla units have succeeded in liberating more and more territory from the inºuence of the Diemist puppet government. In spite of all this, the Americans make no attempt to use atomic bombs. Does anything support the assumption that the Americans would act otherwise in case of a war in South Korea? It is obvious that there is nothing to support such an assumption.14 Nevertheless, in the ªrst stage of Kim Il Sung’s militant strategy (1962– 1965) the inspiration drawn from the struggle of the South Vietnamese Na- tional Liberation Front (NLF) did not lead to an organized campaign of armed confrontation with South Korean or U.S. forces. Apart from a few iso- lated incidents in the DMZ and its vicinity, North Korea’s massive military build-up, the construction of a vast system of fortiªcations and air-raid shel-

12. Ibid., pp. 184, 203. 13. Ibid., p. 200. 14. Ibid., pp. 188–195.

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ters, and the slogans to “liberate” the South were still mostly unaccompanied by actual violence. KWP leaders already regarded Vietnam as a potential model for an offensive strategy, but its example was not yet sufªcient to per- suade them to cross the threshold between planning and implementation. The ambivalent nature of the ªrst stage of Kim’s militant strategy probably reºects the complexity of conditions in South Korea at that time. On the one hand, the constellation of local and international factors was already becoming unfavorable for a uniªcation strategy aimed at gaining political inºu- ence in the South through inter-Korean rapprochement. On the other hand, KWP leaders still could see certain opportunities to prevent the domestic and diplomatic consolidation of Park Chung Hee’s regime by alternative means, whereas some necessary preconditions of a confrontational strategy were still absent. In 1963, Pak Kum-ch’ol, then one of the most prominent members of the leadership, told the Soviet ambassador that Pyongyang no longer attached hopes to the emergence of an intellectual and student opposition in South Korea. “Park Chung Hee has even succeeded in improving the country’s economic situation to a certain extent,” he complained. “In these circumstances one cannot negotiate with the fascist dictatorship on peaceful uniªcation.” South Korean exports, which had stagnated throughout the 1950s, started to increase in the early 1960s, raising the specter that North Korea’s earlier economic lead over the ROK might be in jeopardy. Probably this is why Kim Il Sung, having reduced investments in heavy industry in the ªrst two years of his military build-up (1962–1963), decided to raise them again in 1964–1965. The KWP leaders were similarly worried by the absence of a viable Communist movement in the South. In February 1963, Yi Hyo-sun— the Central Committee ofªcial in charge of the regime’s Südpolitik—declared that because there was no revolutionary party in the ROK, the leadership’s next task was to create one.15 South Korea’s international relations were also in a process of expansion. Abandoning Syngman Rhee’s anti-Japanese attitude, Park Chung Hee made determined efforts to achieve a normalization of relations with Tokyo, not least because such a step would lead to considerable economic beneªts for the ROK. In June 1965 the two countries signed a treaty on basic relations. The treaty was ratiªed in December. From North Korea’s perspective, this step— which recognized the ROK as “the only lawful government in Korea” and obtained Japanese grants and soft loans for Park’s modernization program—was a highly unwelcome development, all the more so because the United States had played an important role in brokering the agreement.

15. Ibid., pp. 194–198; Buzo, The Guerrilla Dynasty, p. 259.

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At the same time, the Japanese-ROK normalization talks, which were un- popular in South Korea, also offered some temporary hope to the DPRK, for in 1964–1965 the talks generated considerable resistance, both among students and Park’s parliamentary opposition. For Pyongyang, a particularly en- couraging phenomenon was that U.S. efforts to speed up the normalization process were frequently regarded as interference in Korea’s domestic affairs in favor of Japan and thus gave rise to anti-American sentiments in South Korea. In April–June 1964, massive student demonstrations against the treaty forced the Park administration to postpone the talks temporarily.16 Under these conditions, a strategy of open confrontation may have appeared premature to the KWP leaders. In any case, the post-1962 deterioration of Soviet-DPRK relations temporarily blocked Pyongyang’s access to up-to-date Soviet weaponry, and the KPA’s obsolete armaments greatly hindered the effective implementation of an offensive strategy.17 Nor had the conºict in Vietnam reached such an intensity that it would have seriously hindered the United States in using military force against North Korea. As late as December 1964, U.S. personnel strength in South Vietnam was no more than 23,300, and the cumulative U.S. casualty toll since 1961 was 267 killed and 1,531 wounded.18 Even if Kim Il Sung harbored growing doubts about the feasibility of a non-offensive strategy, he could not easily switch to an offensive one. The escalation of the Vietnam War seems to have played a major role in breaking this deadlock. Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964), the U.S. Congress authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia, whereupon the VWP leaders decided to start sending North Vietnamese regular troops to the South. Soon thereafter, the replacement of Khrushchev in October led to a change in the Soviet Union’s attitude toward Vietnam. In December, Moscow began to provide the North Vietnamese armed forces, known as the People’s Army of Viet- nam (PAVN), with advanced surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and other weaponry. The USSR’s growing commitment to Hanoi was also clearly expressed by Premier Aleksei Kosygin during his visit to North Vietnam in February 1965.19

16. J. Mark Mobius, “The Japan-Korea Normalization Process and Korean Anti-Americanism,” Asian Survey, Vol. 6, No. 4 (April 1966), pp. 241–248. 17. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 15 May 1965, in MOL, KTS, 1965, 73. doboz, IV-20, 003662/1965. 18. Michael Clodfelter, Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History of the Indochina Wars, 1772–1991 (Jef- ferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1995), p. 55. 19. Ilya Gaiduk, “The Vietnam War and Soviet-American Relations, 1964–1973: New Russian Evi- dence,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Vol. 6/7 (Winter 1995), pp. 249–250.

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These developments had a far-reaching effect on both DPRK-DRV and Soviet–North Korean relations. Pyongyang began to forge a “special bond” with Hanoi. In November 1964, Kim Il Sung, anxious to investigate both the prospects of armed conºict between Hanoi and Washington and the extent of Soviet and Chinese military assistance to Vietnam, visited the DRV. At the end of the year, a North Korean military delegation led by Minister of De- fense Kim Ch’ang-bong also traveled to Hanoi.20 Unlike the earlier visits of high-ranking KWP and VWP leaders, these trips were aimed at developing bilateral relations between North Korea and North Vietnam. In November 1964, the two countries concluded a new agreement on technical assistance.21 In May 1965, North Korean Deputy Premier Kim Kwang-hyop ofªcially announced that the DPRK considered the NLF the sole legal representative of South Vietnam, and on 1 July 1966 the diplomats of a permanent NLF representation arrived in Pyongyang.22 Second, the North Korean leaders, displeased by Khrushchev’s reluctance to confront the United States on behalf of the DRV, welcomed his successors’ increasing willingness to assist Hanoi. In November 1964, Deputy Premier Kim Il met Kosygin in Moscow and told him that the KWP leaders did not consider the USSR a reliable ally, because “the Soviet Union had betrayed Cuba during the Caribbean crisis, and later it also betrayed the Vietnamese. For instance, it occurred as late as eight days after the Tonkin provocation that the Soviet government made a mild pro-DRV statement.” Kosygin rebuffed this charge by highlighting the Kremlin’s readiness to provide military aid to the beleaguered DRV:

The Korean leaders once again turned out to be ill-informed, for instance, they did not know that right after the Tonkin provocation, the leaders of the Soviet state, having received a request from the government of the DRV, paid particular attention to the situation in Vietnam, and resolved that efªcient modern arms should be urgently provided to the Vietnamese comrades as aid. As a conse- quence of this decision, an adequate quantity of various military equipment was sent to Vietnam. ...Tohisknowledge, Comrade Kosygin said, the airborne units had already arrived in Vietnam, while the trains transporting other military equipment were on their way. Then he enumerated everything that had been sent to Vietnam in recent weeks. After that, Comrade Kosygin said that he

20. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 6 February 1965, in MOL, KTS, 1965, 73. doboz, IV-103, 001823/1965. 21. Kim, “An Overview of North Korean–Southeast Asian Relations,” p. 365. 22. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 15 No- vember 1968, in MOL, KA, 1968, 25. doboz, 312, 7063-1/1968.

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was sorry to see that the Korean comrades, ill-informed as they were, raised the issue of distrusting the Soviet Union for no reason.23 The signiªcance of the “Vietnam factor” in Soviet-DPRK rapprochement may be gauged from the fact that on 7 February 1965—that is, during Kosygin’s visit to the DRV—the KWP leaders invited him to visit North Ko- rea as well.24 Kosygin’s meeting with Kim Il Sung opened new avenues for the DPRK. The Soviet premier, who was anxious to offset China’s inºuence in North Korea, expressed willingness to supply Pyongyang with up-to-date arms similar to those provided to North Vietnam—particularly SAMs and other defensive weapons. Installation of the new armaments and the training of North Korean personnel to operate them took somewhat longer than expected, and North Korean leaders for the time being had to refrain from confrontational acts, but over time Soviet assistance greatly enhanced the KPA’s capabilities facilitating the rise of a militant strategy—which was the opposite of Moscow’s intention. The Chinese ªrmly rejected Soviet proposals for joint Sino-Soviet action to assist Vietnam, and they pressured their allies to condemn Moscow’s alleged collaboration with Washington against Hanoi. Hence, Kim Il Sung became increasingly unwilling to take a pro-Chinese position in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Indirectly rejecting Chinese charges about Soviet unwillingness to support Vietnam, in early July he told a group of Cuban journalists that

he had asked a Vietnamese delegation visiting Korea whether the assistance the DRV received from the Soviet Union and the other European socialist countries was sufªcient or not. The Vietnamese replied that this assistance was actually more than the amount they had asked for. Kim Il Sung added that he also thought that the Soviet Union gave sufªcient support to Vietnam.25 Hungarian Foreign Minister János Péter, who visited the DPRK on 7–15 September, also noted that the North Koreans criticized China’s inºex- ible Vietnam policy in a “subdued but passionate” tone.26 Pyongyang and Hanoi started to adopt a similar attitude toward the Sino-Soviet conºict. On 13 February, Kim Il Sung told Kosygin that because

23. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 8 January 1965, in MOL, KTS, 1965, 73. doboz, IV-100, 001819/1965. 24. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 19 Febru- ary 1965, in MOL, XIX-J-1-j Soviet Union, Top Secret Documents (STS), 1965, 103. doboz, 1, 001820/1/RT/1965. 25. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 26 July 1965, in MOL, XIX-J-1-j China, Top Secret Documents (CTS), 1965, 72. doboz, 1, 002649/3/1965. 26. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 20 September 1965, in MOL, KTS, 1965, 73. doboz, IV-135, 004605/1965.

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the CCP did not plan to attend the consultative meeting of Communist parties in Moscow on 1–5 March, neither the KWP nor the VWP would send a delegation.27 This decision displeased Soviet leaders, but, to the chagrin of Beijing, the North Koreans were unwilling to condemn the meeting. As For- eign Minister Pak Song-ch’ol later told a Hungarian delegation, the deterioration of Sino-DPRK relations had begun in March 1965 when the KWP refused to criticize the Moscow meeting.28 When the Chinese students in Moscow attempted to discredit the meeting by attacking the U.S. embassy (and thus provoking a violent clash with Soviet police), the North Korean and North Vietnamese diplomats accredited to Beijing did their best to avoid taking a stand on the incident.29 During the 23rd CPSU Congress (29 March–8 April 1966), DPRK- DRV cooperation reached a new stage. In deªance of Chinese leaders, who again refused to attend, both the KWP and the VWP sent delegations this time. As indicated by the following statement of a North Vietnamese diplomat, the similar standpoint of the two parties was not simply a coincidence but reºected consultations between Pyongyang and Hanoi:

China did its best to prevent the VWP from participating in the 23rd Congress of the CPSU. However, the Vietnamese were unwilling to [stay away], precisely because they intend to improve their relations with every socialist country. He also mentioned that there were some problems in the relationship between Viet- nam and China. Among other things, the DRV disagreed with Zhou Enlai’s four-point proposal concerning relations with the USA. For this reason, Zhou Enlai’s declaration was not even published in Vietnam. Hoang [Muoi] added that the DPRK also supported the Vietnamese standpoint, they similarly refrained from publishing the aforesaid declaration.30

In 1966, both North Korean and North Vietnamese cultural policies were inºuenced by the two countries’ deliberate efforts to distance themselves from China’s Cultural Revolution. In mid-1966 a North Korean newspaper published a series of historical articles about how the Chinese emperors had made repeated attempts to subjugate Korea, and other articles declared that the use of Chinese ideographs in Korean language symbolized linguistic backwardness. In

27. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 19 Febru- ary 1965, in MOL, STS, 1965, 103. doboz, 1, 001820/1/RT/1965. 28. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 2 July 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 2, 002374/1968. 29. Report from the Hungarian Embassy to the PRC to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 28 March 1965, in MOL, STS, 1965, 103. doboz, 1, 002648/1/1965. 30. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 11 July 1966, in MOL, VTS, 1966, 114. doboz, 1, 004068/1966; emphasis added.

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the DRV, exhibitions of the newly opened Museum of Fine Arts downplayed China’s historical inºuence on the evolution of Vietnamese culture.31 The special signiªcance of these analogous North Korean and North Vietnamese steps lies in the fact that their anti-Chinese aspects did not reºect a pro-Soviet orientation pure and simple. Instead, they constituted elements of a sophisticated policy aimed at reinforcing DPRK-DRV cooperation, adopting a militant line toward the United States, and keeping both Commu- nist giants at arm’s length. In 1966–1967, both Pyongyang and Hanoi sought to demonstrate that their quarrels with Beijing were unrelated to the Sino- Soviet dispute. If the Chinese provoked conºicts with the Soviet diplomats at the receptions held by Chinese embassies and the Soviet-bloc ofªcials collec- tively left in protest, their North Korean and North Vietnamese comrades did not join the walkout.32 The Cuban leaders held similar views. For instance, the Cuban media carefully refrained from covering the Sino-Soviet dispute, but in 1967 the Cuban authorities let the North Korean ambassador hold a press conference on the recent Sino-DPRK conºicts.33 The Hungarian embassy in Cuba described the trilateral cooperation between Pyongyang, Ha- noi, and Havana as follows:

It is doubtless the issue of Vietnam that plays the greatest role in Cuban foreign policy. The Cuban leadership views it as a manifestation of its own policy. It can illustrate the idea of direct struggle against imperialism with the example of the DRV, and in the case of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the ideal of the guerrilla struggle also comes true. Apart from the Vietnamese question, it is Korea that plays the greatest role in Cuban foreign policy. In the last year [1967], efforts to achieve this political aim assumed the shape and character of an organized campaign. . . . The Cubans devote the greatest care possible to the maintenance of relations [with the DPRK]. In all fairness, it must be noted that the Koreans return this favor, and they also take maximum advantage of it. To the question why the friendship with Korea was so important for the Cu- ban political leadership, Foreign Minister Raúl Roa gave an indirect reply in his most recent speech that he made at a [Cuban-]Korean friendship rally. The For- eign Minister declared that now there existed a great triangle in world politics,

31. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 14 July 1966, in MOL, KTS, 1966, 74. doboz, IV-18, 004069/1966; and Report from the Hungarian Em- bassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 13 September 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 95. doboz, 1, 004434/1967. 32. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 2 October 1967, in MOL, CTS, 1967, 58. doboz, 162, 003537/11/1967. 33. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in Cuba to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 2 April 1967, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 61. doboz, 1, 002397/1967.

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and this was Cuba–Vietnam–Korea. These three countries were the sole true manifestations of armed revolution.34

This posturing annoyed the leaders in Moscow. In 1969, during a consultation with the Hungarian ambassador to the DPRK, Soviet Foreign Ministry ofªcials

made critical comments on the Korean party’s standpoint on the issues of war and peace, and on the Korean conclusion drawn from [this standpoint], according to which “there are some truly revolutionary parties: the Korean, the Cuban, and the Vietnamese one; there is a leftist deviationist party: the Chinese one; and ªnally there are the rightist opportunists: the Soviet party and the parties of the other socialist countries.” They also highlighted the dangerous and unacceptable nature of that Korean view which declared that American imperialism should be dismembered “limb from limb,” a process that would be carried out by the small countries, and therefore there should be even more Vietnams, etc.35

The “dangerous and unacceptable” views were openly expressed by Kim Il Sung at a KWP conference held on 5–12 October 1966. This conference marked a turning point in North Korean foreign policy, heralding a new stage of Kim’s militant strategy in several ways. First, the composition of the top party leadership underwent a perceptible change in favor of the armed forces. Of the twelve newly co-opted members and alternate members of the Polit- buro, six (Yi Yong-ho, Ch’oe Hyon, Ho Bong-hak, Ch’oe Kwang, O Chin-u, and Sok San) represented the military and state security sectors, and Minister of Defense Kim Ch’ang-bong was promoted to full Politburo member and deputy premier. Second, the share of military expenditures in the budget was increased from the already high level of 30 percent to 50 percent.36 Third, Kim Il Sung’s call for striking blows at “American imperialism” on every con- tinent was soon followed by violent action. In the second half of October and early November, North Korean commandos launched a series of well- planned, deadly attacks on South Korean and U.S. soldiers in the DMZ. The view that Kim Il Sung’s post-1966 militant strategy against South Korea was at least partly aimed at hindering the deployment of Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) troops to South Vietnam was expressed both by contemporaneous observers and in later scholarly publications. At ªrst sight, this conclusion appears to be conªrmed not only by Pyongyang’s propaganda at-

34. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in Cuba to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 25 January 1968, in MOL, XIX-J-1-j Cuba, Top Secret Documents, 1968, 59. doboz, 1, 001121/1968. 35. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 12 Novem- ber 1969, in MOL, KTS, 1969, 59. doboz, 1, 001607/4/1969. 36. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 18 No- vember 1966, in MOL, KTS, 1966, 74. doboz, IV-250, 005007/3/1966.

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tacks against Seoul’s involvement in the war but also by the steps the ROK government took in the aftermath of the ªrst North Korean commando raids across the DMZ. As early as November 1966, Park Chung Hee rejected Presi- dent Johnson’s request for additional ROKA troops, and in the following years he stuck to this position. South Korean leaders speciªcally cited the increasing threat from the North to justify their unwillingness to make further military contributions to U.S. operations in Vietnam. A conditional commitment to send a third ROKA division to Vietnam in exchange for additional U.S. assistance against North Korean inªltration, made by Park in December 1967, was revoked after the raid by North Korean commandos against the South Korean presidential mansion (commonly known as the Blue House) in January 1968, which will be discussed below.37 In other respects, however, South Korean and North Korean actions seem to have been asynchronous. On the one hand, neither the deployment of a 2,000-strong ROK engineering unit to Vietnam in February–March 1965 nor the arrival of the ªrst South Korean combat troops (the Capital Division) in October 1965–April 1966 triggered a forceful North Korean reaction along the DMZ. By the time the North Korean commandos crossed the DMZ, the South Korean government, having been authorized by the Na- tional Assembly in March, was already dispatching a second division to Viet- nam. On the other hand, Park’s November 1966 decision to put a ceiling on this policy did not lead to any decline in North Korean militancy. On the contrary, the intensity of the North’s commando raids dramatically increased in 1967—at the very time that Seoul was repeatedly rejecting Washington’s requests for additional troops.38 In light of this asynchronicity, the notion that diverting South Korean resources away from Vietnam played a major role in Pyongyang’s militant strategy seems doubtful. As Daniel Bolger writes, “Johnson’s conviction that Kim Il-sung acted to spur an ROK withdrawal from Southeast Asia makes little sense. More ROK infantry on the Korean peninsula surely was the last thing Kim wanted.”39 Kim’s negative reaction to the post-1968 process of de- escalation in Vietnam also raises questions about the validity of the notion that his confrontational acts were motivated by a desire to reduce U.S. pressure on Hanoi. It certainly suited the KWP leaders to attribute such motives to their policy—an argument that could both reinforce DPRK-DRV coopera-

37. Blackburn, Mercenaries, pp. 58–60; Kim, “U.S. and Korea in Vietnam,” pp. 246–249; and Michishita, North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, pp. 27–29. 38. Blackburn, Mercenaries, pp. 46–59, 159. 39. Daniel Bolger, Scenes from an Unªnished War: Low-Intensity Warfare in Korea, 1966–1968, Leavenworth Papers No. 19 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1991), pp. 70.

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tion and alleviate Soviet suspicions—but this was not necessarily the principal objective of their strategy. To be sure,the issue of South Korean involvement in the Vietnam War does seem to have inºuenced Kim’s militant strategy—but in a different way. The ROKA’s involvement was an important element of U.S.-ROK alliance politics and a veritable quid pro quo by which the Park Chung Hee administration sought to prevent a possible decline in the U.S. commitment to the defense of South Korea. Worried by the prospect that the number of U.S. troops stationed in the ROK, or the level of Washington’s military aid to Seoul, might be reduced—as the U.S. Department of Defense occasionally suggested in 1962–1964—South Korean leaders in 1964–1965 showed great willingness to dispatch troops to Vietnam, but only if the U.S. government fulªlled their requests for military and economic assistance. The U.S.–South Korean agreements reached in July 1965 and March 1966 brought considerable beneªts for Seoul, including not only increased military aid and a wide range of economic opportunities but also a U.S. pledge not to make any troop reductions without prior consultation.40 Furthermore, South Korea’s contribution to the U.S.-led war effort seems to have greatly facilitated Park’s efforts to conclude a Status of Forces Agree- ment (SOFA) with the United States. The earlier agreements on the station- ing of foreign troops in the ROK were signed during the Korean War and ac- corded a wide range of special privileges to the forces under UN command. The South Korean government sought to replace these agreements with a treaty that recognized South Korean administrative sovereignty over U.S. troops. The SOFA was ªnally signed on 9 July 1966 and ratiªed by the South Korean National Assembly on 14 October by a vote of 67 to 23.41 Because the negotiation process had started as far back as 1962 and lasted for four years, the act of ratiªcation constituted a watershed in the history of U.S.-ROK military cooperation. The agreements reached in the spring, summer, and fall of 1966 resulted in the consolidation and reinforcement of the U.S.–South Korean military alliance and at least temporarily solved several thorny problems that had repeatedly caused friction between the two sides. South Korea’s position in the U.S.- led multilateral alliance system was also reinforced by the choice of Seoul to host the inaugural meeting of the Asia Paciªc Council (14–16 June 1966), Park Chung Hee’s participation in the Manila Conference at which President

40. Sarantakes, “In the Service of Pharaoh?” pp. 428, 433–440. 41. Kim, “South Korea’s Involvement in Vietnam,” pp. 529–530; Kim, “U.S. and Korea in Vietnam,” pp. 255–256; and Glenn D. Paige, “1966: Korea Creates the Future,” Asian Survey, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Jan- uary 1967), p. 26.

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Johnson met the leaders of the countries that had sent troops to Vietnam (24– 25 October), and Johnson’s visit in South Korea (31 October–2 November).42 The timing and targets of North Korea’s ªrst commando raids across the DMZ seem to indicate that they were directed speciªcally against the alliance relationship between the ROK and the United States. The ªrst fatal attacks on South Korean soldiers occurred from 15 to 19 October—that is, in the im- mediate aftermath of the SOFA’s ratiªcation by the ROK National Assem- bly.43 It appears likely that “the abnormal period of inactivity in September and early October,” as a U.S. intelligence memorandum put it, reºected North Korean intentions to refrain from provocative acts during the National Assembly debates over ratiªcation inasmuch as some deputies were still critical of the agreement.44 (It is telling that later on—speciªcally in 1969– 1970—Kim Il Sung explicitly stated that the DPRK would adopt a peaceful attitude before the next elections in order to prevent Park Chung Hee from playing the “northern threat” card.) When the raids started in October 1966, they at ªrst targeted only ROKA troops. The ªrst ambush of a U.S. patrol took place on 2 November, during Johnson’s visit.45 The targets were exclusively of a military nature, and their geographical range remained conªned to the DMZ. Unlike the later raids in 1967–1968, the attacks of October– November 1966 did not strike at the South Korean political and administrative system. Thus the initial attacks may have been motivated by efforts (1) to demonstrate Pyongyang’s ªerce opposition to the consolidation of the U.S.–South Korean alliance; (2) to demonstrate the inefªcacy of this alliance system; (3) to generate friction between the two partners; and (4) to present the alliance as a source of conºict on the Korean Peninsula. Indeed, North Korea’s initial selective attacks on ROKA soldiers did soon provoke South Korean counterraids that caused disagreements in U.S.-ROK relations and that provided the DPRK with examples it could cite as evidence of the other side’s culpability. The coincidence of the 2 November ambush with Johnson’s visit may also have reºected a North Korean effort to portray the U.S. commitment to South Korea as a factor aggravating tension. In April 1967, Major General Pak Chung-guk, the head of the DPRK delegation in the Military Armistice Commission (MAC) in Panmunjom, told a Hungarian journalist

42. Kim, “U.S. and Korea in Vietnam,” pp. 256–257. 43. Michishita, North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, p. 17. 44. Intelligence Memorandum, No. 1620/66, 8 November 1966, in U.S. Department of State, For- eign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Vol. I, p. 210 (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, with appropriate year and volume numbers). 45. Sarantakes, “The Quiet War,” pp. 441–443.

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that “following Johnson’s visit, armed provocations have become more frequent and severe in every respect.”46 Although the “Vietnam factor” probably did not play a decisive role in motivating the North Korean commando attacks, it seems to have facilitated them. Not long after the outbreak of armed clashes in the DMZ, the Czecho- slovak NNSC members concluded that “the USA, partly because of Vietnam, needs tranquility in Korea.”47 By September 1966 the nature and extent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War had undergone a profound change. U.S. ground forces outnumbered the regular troops of the South Vietnamese army and were expected to rise to 385,000 by the end of the year.48 This is why the United States was so eager to have additional South Korean troops: “With the planned massive increase in the U.S. troop commitments to South Vietnam in 1966—more American combat troops . . . were sent to Vietnam in 1966 than in any other single year of the war—Washington’s search for foreign troops to ªght there became even more frenetic.”49 Under such circumstances, the likelihood of U.S. military retaliation against a North Korean provocation was much lower than in 1965, when U.S. troops were still playing a more limited role in the war. Pyongyang thus had a stake in helping Hanoi withstand the U.S. onslaught. The more successfully the North Vietnamese fought, the more U.S. troops were tied down in Vietnam, and the less able Washington was to resort to military measures in other countries. The applicability of Kim Il Sung’s famous statement at the October 1966 party conference (“in the present situation, the US imperialists should be dealt blows and their forces dispersed to the maximum in Asia and Europe, Africa and Latin America . . . and they should be bound hand and foot everywhere they are”) was thus not conªned to lessening U.S. pressure on Vietnam.50 From Kim’s perspective, it was equally valid for Korea, too. Cuba’s espousal of this conception was similarly inºuenced by the goal of achieving a breakthrough in regions of its own strategic interest. As the Hun- garian embassy in Havana stated,

According to the Cuban conception, the realization of the slogan “Two, three, many Vietnams!” would fundamentally undermine the military strength of the USA, which would create an opportunity for the liberation of the Latin Ameri-

46. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 9 May 1967, in MOL, KA, 1967, 25. doboz, 1, 1/11-1/1967. 47. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 29 De- cember 1966, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 61. doboz, 1, 001202/1966. 48. John C. Donnell and Charles A. Joiner, “South Vietnam: ‘Struggle’ Politics and the Bigger War,” Asian Survey, Vol. 7, No. 1 (January 1967), p. 60. 49. Blackburn, Mercenaries, pp. 53. 50. Jenerette, “The Forgotten DMZ,” pp. 32–37.

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can peoples, even for the liberation of the entire Third World. That is, the Cuban ideas of fostering a world revolution would have come true only with a ªghting Vietnam.51

To achieve this aim, the DPRK was ready to provide North Vietnam with substantial quantities of material assistance. In 1966, Pyongyang gave Hanoi a total of 12.3 million rubles of economic and military aid such as steel, diesel engines, explosives, iron plates, tractors, power generators, and irrigation equipment. In 1967, the value of North Korean aid rose to 20 million rubles, including arms, pontoons, and military uniforms. North Korea also accom- modated North Vietnam in foreign trade. In 1966, the DPRK fulªlled 80 percent of its export obligations (2.6 million rubles, composed mostly of lead, zinc, medicinal herbs, ginseng, and ammonium sulfate)to the North even though Hanoi’s wartime difªculties meant that North Vietnamese exports were less than one-third of the expected amount. In January 1968, roughly 2,000 North Vietnamese students and trainees received education for free in the DPRK.52 In April 1968, Foreign Minister Pak Song-ch’ol told a Hungarian delegation that North Korea had sent ªghter pilots to the DRV but that because of Chinese obstruction they had to ºy MiG-17 planes rather than MiG-21s.53 The North Korean request to dispatch pilots to North Viet- nam was approved by the VWP leadership on 21 September 1966, that is, in the same period that was a turning point both in the Vietnam War and in Kim Il Sung’s militant strategy.54 Kim Il Sung’s decision in the fall of 1966 to launch the second stage of his militant strategy, which included both a further massive increase in military expenditures and deliberate attacks on South Korean and American soldiers, was evidently motivated by a combination of factors. Of these, the most important were (1) the rapid economic and diplomatic consolidation of South Korea; (2) the ratiªcation of the Japanese-ROK treaty; (3) the reinforcement and stabilization of the U.S.-ROK military alliance; (4) the inabil- ity of Park Chung Hee’s domestic opposition to thwart these developments; (5) the increasing availability of modern Soviet arms; and (6) Washington’s decision to assume the main burden of the war in Vietnam. Some of the fac-

51. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in Cuba to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 29 January 1969, in MOL, VTS, 1969, 91. doboz, 1, 00412/3/1969. 52. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 9 March 1967, in MOL, KTS, 60. doboz, 503-1, 002127/1967; Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 3 January 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 57. doboz, 1, 00345/1968; and Report from the Hungarian Trade Ofªce in Pyongyang to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Trade, 31 March 1969, in MOL, KTS, 60. doboz, 5, 001690/1969. 53. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 2 July 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 2, 002374/1968. 54. Pribbenow, “North Korean Pilots in the Skies over Vietnam.”

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tors had been in operation as early 1963–1965, whereas with others, such as the ratiªcation of the SOFA and the U.S. buildup in Vietnam, the threshold was crossed only in September–October 1966. North Korea’s close ally Cuba seems also to have considered the fall of 1966 a watershed in the common struggle against the United States. To elevate the trilateral cooperation between Havana, Hanoi, and Pyongyang to the highest level, on 26–29 Octo- ber, a Cuban delegation headed by President Osvaldo Dorticos and Raúl Cas- tro visited the DPRK, from which they traveled to North Vietnam.55

The Road to the Blue House Raid

In the spring of 1967, Kim Il Sung’s militant strategy entered a third phase that differed from the previous stage in three important respects. First, from mid-March the number of DMZ incidents increased dramatically, reaching about 360 by September (compared with a total of 42 in 1966). Second, the commando raids of October–November 1966 had been conªned to the DMZ area, whereas in May–June 1967, North Korea started to conduct actions well below the DMZ, attempting to ªnd suitable mountainous areas as bases for future guerrilla operations.56 In July, a special squad of the KPA’s re- cently established elite Unit 124 was entrusted with the task of making preparations for the assassination of Park Chung Hee.57 Third, the spectacular as- cendancy of military cadres within the KWP leadership in October 1966 was not accompanied by the large-scale removal of other high-ranking ofªcials, but in April–May 1967 Kim Il Sung purged several prominent party leaders. Both stages of militancy seem to have been inspired by a similar combination of factors: a decrease in North Korean chances to thwart the domestic and diplomatic consolidation of Park Chung Hee’s administration by alternative means; and a new escalation in Vietnam. Pyongyang’s growing preference for a strategy of violent confrontation was at least partly motivated by the view that South Korea’s non-violent domestic opposition forces no longer constituted a serious challenge to Park’s rule. In June 1967, the head of the Youth League’s International Liaisons Ofªce told a Hungarian diplomat that

55. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 4 Novem- ber 1966, in MOL, KA, 1966, 27. doboz, 1, 7504-1/1966. 56. CIA, “North Korean Intentions and Capabilities with Respect to South Korea,” Special National Intelligence Estimate No. 14-2/67, 21 September 1967, pp. 2–3, in CIA Electronic Reading Room (CERR). 57. Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 231–233.

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“the South Korean situation is becoming more and more complicated, both in an internal and an international sense,” because

a certain political passivity is characteristic of the working class and the peasantry,...[and] the increasing inºow of foreign capital has somewhat lessened unemployment. . . . While previously only the USA was present in South Korea, now Japan has also intruded, and she is playing an increasingly important role. In the last analysis, the three strongest imperialist powers—the USA, Japan, and West Germany—have completely gotten hold of South Korea in a political, economic, and—last but not least—military sense. These conditions make the cause of revolution difªcult, and create additional problems for the DPRK.58 Pak Yong-ho, the head of the Foreign Ministry’s Department of Interna- tional Organizations, similarly complained about the political apathy of the South Korean workers and peasants, remarking that “one could hardly notice any anti-Americanism in the course of the latest student demonstrations.”59 He had every reason to be pessimistic. Thanks to Park Chung Hee’s successful economic policies, he and his Democratic Republican Party (DRP) scored bigger victories than ever before (or after) in the South Korean presidential and National Assembly elections held on 3 May and 8 June, respectively. Whereas in 1963 Park could achieve only a 1.5 percent lead over opposition candidate Yun Bo Sun (Yun Posôn), in 1967 he increased it to 10.5 percent. North Korean ofªcials were sufªciently familiar with Southern conditions to foresee Park’s victory.60 For Kim Il Sung, the DRP’s electoral victory may have been the last straw inducing him to opt for a strategy of armed struggle. On 28 June–3 July, the KWP CC held an extended plenum at which Kim called on the cadres “to prepare to give assistance to the struggle of our South Korean brethren.” An Min-su, a DPRK diplomat, informed the Hungarians about the plenum. His references to the recent raids of North Korean commandos (whom he por- trayed as Southern guerrillas) reveal that DPRK leaders had armed struggle in mind.61 It is unclear whether these commando operations were intended to stim- ulate the emergence of a local armed resistance movement, or merely to create the impression that such a movement did exist, and thus place the planned as-

58. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 22 July 1967, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 61. doboz, 200, 001202/3/1967. 59. Ibid. 60. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 10 May 1967, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 61. doboz, 1, 001202/1/1967. 61. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 23 August 1967, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 60. doboz, 146, 00421/5/1967.

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sassination of Park Chung Hee and other armed attacks into a domestic rather than international context. The agents sent to the South in this period were almost all native Northerners who often lacked adequate local knowl- edge and whose accent revealed their origin. “This limited piece of evidence points toward a tactic of terrorism rather than political persuasion,” the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded.62 “We are aware of several North Korean direct threats against the life of President Pak and the dispatch of occasional agent teams charged with this mission,” the agency reported on 23 June 1967. “The political gains for the North could be considerable; Pak provides the only real cement for whatever degree of political stability exists in South Korea.”63 At the same time, conditions in Vietnam were becoming increasingly favorable for a military option in Korea. In the last week of February, the war reached a new stage of escalation. For the ªrst time, U.S. ground artillery ªred across the DMZ; the Air Force began bombing major industrial plants and mining rivers in the DRV; and the Navy started to subject North Vietnamese supply routes to unrestricted shelling.64 This new challenge induced the VWP leaders to ask the Soviet bloc for even more military aid than before. As in 1966, they acted in concert with the North Koreans. In March 1967, both Hanoi and Pyongyang asked Hungary to send a military delegation headed by Minister of Defense Lajos Czinege to the DRV and the DPRK in May or June. His visit was to be followed by that of an East German military delegation, and the North Koreans also sought to invite delegations from Poland and Romania.65 During Czinege’s visit in North Vietnam (15–24 May) and North Korea (25 May–4 June), the host authorities did their best to please the Hungarians.66 North Korean–North Vietnamese concord was also reºected in the two countries’ identical responses to a proposal made by the Hungarian delegation. When Czinege asked the VWP leaders to set up a commission to coordi- nate the storage and distribution of the aid provided by the various Commu-

62. CIA, “Confrontation in Korea,” Special National Intelligence Estimate No. 14-2/69, 30 January 1969, p. 8, in CERR. See also CIA, “North Korean Intentions and Capabilities,” p. 3. 63. Report Prepared by the Ofªce of National Estimates of the CIA, 23 June 1967, in FRUS, 1964– 1968, Vol. I, p. 259. 64. Theodore Draper, Abuse of Power: U.S. Foreign Policy from Cuba to Vietnam (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 194–195. 65. Memorandum by the Hungarian Ministry of Defense, 31 March 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 93. doboz, 41, 002414/1967; and Memorandum by the Hungarian Ministry of Defense, 10 April 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 93. doboz, 41, 002414/1/1967. 66. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 24 June 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 93. doboz, 41, 002414/4/1967; and Report from the Hungarian Em- bassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 20 July 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 93. doboz, 41, 002084/1/1967.

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nist states, First Secretary Le Duan rebuffed his suggestion. Later, Czinege raised the issue in Pyongyang, whereupon Minister of Defense Kim Ch’ang- bong told him that only the “Vietnamese comrades,” and no one else, should be in charge of issues related to Vietnam: “If the Vietnamese comrades support this proposal, the Koreans will also give their consent to it.”67 Taking these circumstances into consideration, we may reasonably conclude that the KWP leaders were well aware of the military situation in Viet- nam and were supportive of the steps Hanoi intended to take. From Kim Il Sung’s perspective, escalation of the Vietnam conºict seems to have appeared doubly advantageous because it enabled him to request additional supplies of up-to-date Soviet weaponry and further lessened the risk of U.S. retaliation by increasing the U.S. government’s preoccupation with the Vietnam War. Still, a strategy aimed at destabilizing the South Korean administration and possibly assassinating the head of state carried greater diplomatic and military risks and was more likely to alienate Southern public opinion than the deliberate but small-scale attacks carried out on U.S. and ROK soldiers the previous fall. For that reason, Kim Il Sung’s decision to cross this threshold probably generated more tension within the KWP leadership than did the resolutions passed at the October 1966 conference. The organizational measures taken at the conference had greatly increased military representation in the leadership, but the actual or potential rivals of the new appointees, such as Vice-Chairman Pak Kum-ch’ol and Yi Hyo-sun (who was in charge of the regime’s Südpolitik), were not removed until after the 15th Plenum of the KWP Central Committee in March 1967. Several scholars have attributed the removal of these leaders to their (real or alleged) disagreement with Kim’s new militant strategy. However, this in- terpretation may not explain the purge in its entirety; nepotism and factional rivalries may also have been at work. For instance, the replacement of Pak Kum-ch’ol and his comrades seems to have been intertwined with Kim Il Sung’s efforts to promote his relatives: Kim Yong-ju (his younger brother) and Kim Jong Il (Kim Chôngil, his eldest son). Nonetheless, the purge does ap- pear to have been strongly inºuenced as well by Kim’s new, belligerent Südpolitik. In October 1968, a DPRK diplomat named U Hwa-chun told a Hungarian colleague that Yi Hyo-sun had poorly led the Southern “resistance movement” but that “after his dismissal, even armed guerrilla actions started to occur in South Korea.”68

67. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, [no date], in MOL, VTS, 1967, 93. doboz, 41, 002414/13/1967; and Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian For- eign Ministry, 24 June 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 93. doboz, 41, 002414/4/1967. 68. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 16 October 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 57. doboz, 1, 003041/9/1968.

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In September 1967, two South Korean trains were damaged by North Korean sabotage actions, and in October the KPA used artillery against ROKA troops—the ªrst acts of this kind since the end of the Korean War. In response, the South Korean military forces stepped up their retaliatory commando raids, going so far as to blow up a KPA division headquarters in No- vember. These clashes foreshadowed a fourth, even more explosive phase for the inter-Korean conºict and Kim Il Sung’s militant strategy. On 17 January 1968, 31 North Korean commandos crossed the DMZ into the South on a mission to attack the Blue House and assassinate Park Chung Hee. They reached Seoul on the night of 20 January and began their ªnal advance toward the mansion on the evening of the next day. They managed to avoid detection until they encountered a police checkpoint roughly 800 meters from the building. The resulting ªreªght prevented them from carrying out their mission, and in the following days most members of the squad were killed in clashes with South Korean forces. From Pyongyang’s perspective, the failure of the raid was compounded by the fact that one commando was captured alive. By 22 January his interrogators had succeeded in obtaining his confession about the purpose of the mission.69 A successful Blue House raid likely would have triggered a South Korean reprisal of unprecedented magnitude (and possibly even U.S. retaliation). Why did Kim conclude that Pyongyang could, and should, take the risk of carrying out such a highly provocative act? Answering this question requires an analysis of the contemporaneous situation in Vietnam. The Blue House raid closely coincided with certain important events of the Vietnam War and shared signiªcant similarities with the measures the Vietnamese Communist leaders took in January–February 1968.70 The timing of the Blue House raid (17–21 January) diverged from earlier patterns of North Korean commando operations. “Normally, agent operations during the November–February period are infrequent because of bad weather,” a U.S. intelligence memorandum written on 8 November 1966 states.71 In the periods of December 1966–January 1967 and November 1967–January 1968, the intensity of raids decreased. For example, no U.S. soldiers were killed in North Korean attacks during these months. This de-

69. CIA, “Kim Il-Sung’s New Military Adventurism,” Intelligence Report, 26 November 1968, p. 35, in CERR; Michishita, North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, pp. 37–39; and Sarantakes, “The Quiet War,” pp. 447–448. 70. For a study emphasizing the possibility of coordination between the Blue House raid and Viet- namese Communist actions, see Gills, Korea versus Korea, pp. 110–111. 71. Intelligence Memorandum, No. 1620/66, 8 November 1966, in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. I, p. 210.

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cline seems to have been of a seasonal nature. Winter conditions such as snow and the absence of thick foliage hindered inªltration operations, whereas conditions in spring, summer, and fall increased the commandos’ chances of avoiding detection by ROKA and police forces.72 Because the Blue House was tightly guarded on a permanent basis and the public signs of North Korean bellicosity remained conspicuous, the element of surprise resulting from the unusual timing of the raid was presumably limited (though it may have facilitated the crossing of the U.S. sector of the DMZ). Despite the unfavorable conditions associated with the winter season, KWP leaders elected to go ahead with the raid rather than wait for better conditions in another season. In Vietnam, however, January is in the middle of the dry season (which extends from November to April) and is thus a far more suitable time for combat operations than the rainy season. Hence, both the Vietnamese Com- munist forces and their U.S. opponents regularly launched “winter-spring campaigns.” In October–November 1967, for the ªrst time since the begin- ning of the war, the NLF and the PAVN carried out several simultaneous, well-coordinated attacks in areas far from each other, taking the U.S. troops by surprise. These attacks constituted a prelude to the Tet Offensive, whose basic conception was approved in October. Once the Tet Offensive started, U.S. combat fatalities rose to an unprecedented level. The Battle of Khe Sanh, which began on 21 January—the same day that North Korean commandos launched their attack on the presidential mansion—preoccupied the U.S. Air Force to such an extent that over a period of 70 days it launched a daily aver- age of 300 tactical air strikes and 45 B-52 sorties against the North Vietnam- ese troops involved in the siege.73 Under such circumstances, the likelihood of U.S. military retaliation against the DPRK was lower than ever. On 25 January, during the Pueblo crisis, when President Johnson asked General Earle G. Wheeler about the availability of U.S. military aircraft for possible action against North Korea, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff remarked: “I do not think we can take the B-52s away from Vietnam. ...Itwould be imprudent to draw down on Westmoreland’s supply of B-52s. He is about to have the most vicious battle of the Vietnam war.”74 If the timing of the Blue House raid was really inºuenced by such calculations, the KWP leaders were soon proven right. In January–February 1968 Washington did put strong pressure on Seoul not to

72. Sarantakes, “The Quiet War,” p. 444. On U.S. combat fatalities in the DMZ per month, see Ko- rean War Veterans National Museum and Library, “Summary of Events on Korean DMZ: Chronology of Incidents,” available online at http://imjinscout.com/DMZ_History2.html. 73. Clodfelter, Vietnam in Military Statistics, pp. 123–124, 134–135. 74. Notes of Meeting, 25 January 1968, in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. I, p. 511.

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launch a reprisal attack. As Bolger notes, Cyrus R. Vance, the president’s envoy, “laid out his position frankly. First, there would be no wider war in Korea—period; the U.S. already had its hands full in Vietnam.”75 The KWP and VWP leaders are known to have coordinated their actions on several occasions in 1966–1967; for example, their participation in the 23rd CPSU Congress and their simultaneous invitation of a Hungarian military delegation. In this light, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Blue House raid’s coincidence with the start of the siege of Khe Sanh—a battle to which the U.S. high command in Vietnam paid at least as much attention as to the Tet Offensive—reºected the North Koreans’ familiarity with Hanoi’s plans to launch an offensive of unprecedented magnitude that month. It is less certain whether they were also aware of such a speciªc detail of the PAVN’s battle plan as the starting date. The fact that the Khe Sanh battle and the North Korean raid on the Blue House occurred on the same day may have been accidental. One possible argument against the likelihood of coordination between Khe Sanh and the Blue House raid is the fact that the PAVN leaders, because of internal disagreements, failed to make a ªnal decision on the start date of the Tet Offensive until 15 January.76 Hence the North Koreans, even if they were in close contact with Hanoi, could not have planned their raid well in advance. However, the precise date of the attack on the presidential mansion may not have been set, or fully authorized, until mid-January. The assassination squad underwent ªnal training in Sariwon on 5–10 January and received a high-level brieªng on 13 January at a base of the 124th Army Unit near Yonsan before being transported from the base to the border city of Kaesong on 16 January (or possibly 17 January according to some sources).77 The days of apparent inactivity between the end of the training, the brieªng, and the start of the mission are compatible with a hypothesis suggesting coordination with Vietnamese actions because the procrastination may have resulted from Pyongyang’s need to wait until North Vietnamese leaders reached consensus over the starting date of Tet. But even if the North Koreans’ insight into Ha- noi’s plans was limited to their general awareness of a coming massive offensive, they had good reason to expect that it would make a sufªciently strong impact on U.S. military planning to suit their purposes. Another point worth stressing is that the objectives of the Blue House raid had much in common with those of the Tet Offensive. In particular, both

75. Bolger, Scenes from an Unªnished War, pp. 74–75. 76. Merle L. Pribbenow, “General Vo Nguyen Giap and the Mysterious Evolution of the Plan for the 1968 Töt Offensive,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 18–19. 77. Joseph S. Bermudez, Terrorism: The North Korean Connection (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1990), p. 29.

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operations sought to achieve regime change by forceful means. The Tet Of- fensive, in addition to its military, diplomatic, and propaganda objectives, was also aimed at undermining, paralyzing, and, if possible, toppling the Saigon regime. As early as November 1967, the Soviet ambassador in Hanoi, Ilya Shcherbakov, got wind of an NLF plan to “liberate” the city of Hue during the coming dry season so as to set up a Front-dominated “coalition” government. To carry out this plan, the guerrillas intended to destabilize the Saigon regime through the assassination of a high number of government ofªcials.78 They went too far, however, and even the Soviet authorities grew tired of the violence engulªng South Vietnam during Tet. As the Hungarian embassy in Moscow reported,

Our [Soviet] comrades say that on the basis of the information available, in those rural areas which temporarily came under NLF control during the offensive, our friends, while taking repressive measures against the members of local authorities, overstepped the necessary and desirable limits....iftheterror is extended, for instance, to the family members [of policemen or local administrative leaders], intimidation will no longer yield positive results.79

It was not only the policy of political assassinations but also the selection of targets and the method of attack that made the Blue House raid similar to the Tet Offensive. The NLF intended to assassinate President Nguyen Van Thieu and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky because the Vietnamese Communists expected that the simultaneous death of the two highest leaders would incapacitate the South Vietnamese government and create a political vacuum that might be ªlled by a newly created rival government. An NLF unit composed of 34 spe- cially trained guerrillas managed to penetrate the grounds of the presidential palace before being rebuffed.80 The Blue House raid was likewise directed against a presidential mansion and carried out by an almost identical number of commandos, who were presented by North Korean propaganda as South- ern guerrillas. By contrast, later North Korean attempts to kill Park Chung Hee (in 1970 and 1974) and Chun Doo Hwan (Ch6n Tuhwan) in 1983 involved no more than three assassins per mission. The marked similarity between the Blue House raid and the attack on the Independence Palace in Saigon probably does not indicate any sort of joint

78. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 15 Novem- ber 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 87. doboz, 1, 002868/6/1967; and Report from the Hungarian Em- bassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 2 May 1968, in MOL, VTS, 1968, 88. doboz, 4, 001578/4/1968. 79. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 21 March 1968, in MOL, VTS, 1968, 88. doboz, 43, 00631/13/1968. 80. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 2 May 1968, in MOL, VTS, 1968, 88. doboz, 4, 001578/4/1968.

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planning, for the Vietnamese Communist leaders doubted that their experi- ences were applicable to the much different conditions in South Korea.81 It is more likely that the North Koreans simply drew inspiration from the Tet Of- fensive and sought to carry out their mission in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Finally, both the decision to launch the Blue House raid and the timing of the mission were probably inºuenced by the calculation that conditions in Vietnam—which, from a North Korean perspective, were optimal in Janu- ary–February 1968—might soon undergo a change that would considerably hinder the implementation of such a high-risk strategy. In the fall of 1967, VWP leaders tentatively surmised that a protracted war no longer served their interests. Having started to bomb targets around Hanoi in August, the U.S. Air Force on 24 October embarked on systematic bombing of the North Viet- namese capital.82 On 28 October, Premier Pham Van Dong told a group of Soviet-bloc journalists: “Strictly between you and me: We would like to win in a shortened time. We have immense difªculties, in both an economic and a military sense.” He predicted that U.S. air raids would soon increase further, and he lamented the havoc done to the DRV’s transport system. But he expressed conªdence that U.S. resources were also becoming more and more strained. “Both sides must use all of their available forces if they want to win,” he said, and therefore the struggle would enter a new and even more ferocious stage.83 In November 1967, Le Duan told Soviet leaders that the PAVN-NLF forces needed four or ªve months to achieve military successes impressive enough to give Hanoi the opportunity to open negotiations from an advantageous position.84 To underline this intention, Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh repeatedly made statements in December 1967 and January 1968 suggesting greater North Vietnamese interest in a negotiated settlement.85 The existing evidence indicates that the Blue House raid was motivated by a combination of factors:

81. Telegram from the Romanian Embassy in the DPRK to the Romanian Foreign Ministry, 19 Feb- ruary 1968, in Archive of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Political Affairs Fond, Tele- grams from Pyongyang, Top Secret, 1968, No. 76.047, in North Korea International Documentation Project e-Dossier No. 5: New Romanian Evidence on the Blue House Raid and the USS Pueblo Incident (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2012), available at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/ publication/nkidp-e-dossier-no-5-new-romanian-evidence-the-blue-house-raid-and-the-uss-pueblo. 82. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 3 November 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 93. doboz, 146, 001025/20/1967. 83. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 29 October 1967, in MOL, VTS, 1967, 95. doboz, 84, 004435/1967. 84. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 2 May 1968, in MOL, VTS, 1968, 88. doboz, 4, 001578/4/1968. 85. Robert K. Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 68–74.

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First, in 1967 the likelihood of an emerging domestic opposition to Park Chung Hee’s rule was remote. Before May, Pyongyang largely refrained from carrying out armed raids in South Korea’s populated areas. This lull may have reºected an intention not to take excessively provocative steps in the pre- presidential election period. Notably, in June–July 1967 Park used the threat of “Northern intrusions” to ward off the criticism the DRP had come under from opposition parties for its fraudulent electoral practices.86 However, such considerations were presumably no longer deemed valid after the major electoral victories gained by Park and the DRP. Possible concerns about making a negative impression on public opinion in the South were probably overruled on the grounds that the much-lamented “political apathy” of the South Ko- rean population prevented the implementation of a feasible alternative strategy and because the rapid economic and diplomatic consolidation of the ROK meant that the longer the DPRK waited the less chance it would have to destabilize and topple Park’s regime. Second, the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Khe Sanh created unprece- dentedly favorable conditions for a militant North Korean strategy because U.S. forces were, more than ever, preoccupied by the ªghting in Vietnam. Third, the KWP leaders must have known that their North Vietnamese comrades had decided “to win in a shortened time.” This decision was public enough to have been told to a group of Soviet-bloc journalists. Hanoi’s gradual abandonment of the doctrine of protracted war and its growing interest in a negotiated settlement heralded the possibility that the Vietnam War might wind down in the near future, in which case the United States would be increasingly able to take military action in Korea. For this reason, the North Ko- rean leaders probably felt compelled to act swiftly and decisively before the Vietnam War decreased in intensity. Now or never, Kim Il Sung seems to have thought.

The Pueblo Incident and the Start of De-Escalation in Vietnam

If North Korea’s early commando raids were often regarded as attempts to inºuence the military situation in Vietnam, this was doubly true for the capture of the USS Pueblo. Because the seizure of the ship occurred only two days after the Blue House raid, the Pueblo crisis likewise coincided with the Battle of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive. Therefore, it would be tempting to argue

86. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 22 July 1967, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 61. doboz, 200, 001202/3/1967.

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that the seizure of the vessel was as closely linked as the attempted assassination of Park Chung Hee to the events in Vietnam. Nevertheless, various pieces of evidence indicate that the Pueblo incident and Pyongyang’s subsequent handling of the crisis were not coordinated with Vietnamese actions and instead had a dynamics of their own, largely unaf- fected by the process of escalation and de-escalation in Vietnam. The various confrontational steps the DPRK took in 1966–1970 were not necessarily rooted in a single strategic conception or motivated by only one objective. The ªrst and clearest piece of evidence against the thesis of coordination is provided by the DRV leaders themselves. To be sure, on 26 January the North Vietnamese media denounced the United States over the Pueblo incident, and Hanoi also issued a government declaration to express its solidarity with Pyongyang.87 This gesture was more committal than the reactions of other Soviet-bloc governments (which refrained from making such statements), though it was more reserved than the party declaration issued by the Cuban Communist leaders.88 However, by early February, a North Vietnam- ese cadre named Vu Quoc Uy was telling two Hungarian visitors that the capture of the ship had negatively inºuenced the situation in Vietnam. “We do not know what the Korean comrades want,” Uy complained.89 North Viet- namese anxieties about the adverse consequences of Pyongyang’s action were probably motivated by calculations similar to those expressed by Soviet For- eign Ministry ofªcials in late January:

The Johnson administration already took advantage of the Korean crisis to draft reservists, that is, to take a step it had not dared take for long years because of the [prospective] reaction of public opinion. In this sense, one can hardly exclude [the possibility] that the Korean crisis might reinforce the [inºuence of the] hawks on the further course of American policies toward the Vietnam War.90

The second piece of evidence against the claim that the seizure of the Pueblo may have been aimed at alleviating pressure on Hanoi is the mani- festly unfavorable reaction that the start of U.S. and North Vietnamese de- escalation elicited from KWP leaders in the spring of 1968. An analysis of Pyongyang’s response to this shift allows us to subject my original hypothesis to an additional test. If the war’s escalation is supposed to have inºuenced the de-

87. “Hanoi Sees ‘Fitting Lesson,’” The New York Times, 26 January 1968, p. 8. 88. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 3 February 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 3, 00854/9/1968. 89. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DRV to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 16 April 1968, in MOL, XIX-J-1-k Vietnam, Administrative Documents [henceforth VA], 1968, 38. doboz, 162-81, 1501-3/1968. 90. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 30 January 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 3, 00894/8/1968.

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cisions taken by the KWP leaders, then, if the hypothesis is correct, the process of de-escalation must have also made a signiªcant impact on their policies. On 31 March, President Johnson announced that the United States would conªne its bombing of the DRV to the area just north of the DMZ and expressed his commitment to seek a negotiated settlement, prompting Hanoi to issue a statement on 3 April accepting his offer to negotiate. On 13 May, peace talks opened in Paris. The VWP leaders seem to have expected the war to end in the relatively near future. As early as 29 June–16 July a North Vietnamese planning delegation visited Hungary to discuss the tasks of postwar industrial reconstruction and modernization.91 Judging by the KWP’s propaganda, North Korean leaders in the spring of 1968 also started to pay increasing attention to economic issues. In a perceptible contrast with the war psychosis of the ªrst three months of the year, the public atmosphere became more relaxed. The resolutions passed at a spring- time session of North Korea’s Supreme National Assembly (SPA) dealt solely with the 1968 budget.92 These changes must have been at least partly inºuenced by the gradual easing of the Pueblo crisis, but the next step toward de-escalation in Vietnam was also closely followed by a shift in North Korean policies. On 31 October, Johnson ordered a total bombing halt over the DRV, and soon thereafter an NLF delegation left for Paris. Less than two weeks later, the KWP Central Committee held a major plenum. On 8 January 1969, Deputy Foreign Min- ister Kim Chae-bong informed the Czechoslovak chargé d’affaires about the new guidelines adopted by the KWP:

The Korean Workers’ Party opposes any attempt, either domestic or external, that would try to identify the South Korean situation with the South Vietnam- eseone....Thepuppet regime in South Korea is, for the time being, stronger. At the moment the role of the Americans, and particularly the nature of their activity, is different in South Korea, nor can one identify the extent and organization of the South Korean guerrilla struggle with that of South Vietnam. ...In South Korea, there are no jungles, and conditions are unfavorable for hiding. In addition, there is no revolutionary situation in South Korea for the time being, it is just in the process of ripening. For the time being, there is no political and military organization comparable to the NLF.93

91. Memorandum by the Hungarian State Planning Ofªce, 31 July 1968, in MOL, VA, 1968, 38. doboz, 162-512, 4425-3/1968. 92. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 5 May 1968, in MOL, KA, 1968, 25. doboz, 52, 1/26-1/1968; and Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 20 June 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 57. doboz, 1, 002813/1968. 93. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 28 January 1969, in MOL, KTS, 1969, 60. doboz, 001360/1969.

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These guidelines were underlined by a massive purge of the KPA and the security services—the main instruments of Kim Il Sung’s earlier Vietnam- oriented strategy—in the winter of 1968–1969. The most prominent of the ousted ofªcials were Minister of Defense Kim Ch’ang-bong; KPA General Chief of Staff Ch’oe Kwang; Ho Bong-hak, the head of the KPA Main Politi- cal Directorate; Deputy Premier Kim Kwang-hyop; and Minister of Public Security Sok San. Simultaneously, extensive reshufºes and replacements occurred in the sphere of economic management. Of the eleven ministers who—because of dismissal, transfer, or death—lost their seats from late 1967 through mid-1969, as many as nine had held economic positions. Yi Chong- ok, who had overseen heavy industrialization since 1960, disappeared from public view in 1969–1971.94 These patterns suggest that not only were the commando raids critically reexamined by Kim Il Sung but so was the entire military and economic strategy of the previous years. Apart from the realization that the militant Südpolitik had failed to yield the desired results, Kim’s decision to initiate such a policy shift was probably also motivated by his sense that the United States might not remain bogged down in Vietnam for a substantial time. The negative change in Pyongyang’s attitude toward Hanoi in 1968–1969 indicates that the North Korean leader strongly disagreed with the DRV’s decision to start negotiations with the United States, presumably because he considered the process of de-escalation inimical to the DPRK’s strategic interests. As early as May 1968, the Hungar- ian embassy in Moscow reported that Soviet ofªcials believed

the Korean leadership has found itself in a somewhat uncomfortable situation when the DRV showed willingness to establish contacts with the Americans. Namely, the DPRK, on the basis of its standpoint about the international situation, obviously disapproves a negotiated settlement of the Vietnamese question. But since in the past it very frequently emphasized that only the Vietnamese comrades were entitled to make decisions about the Vietnamese problem, and every other Communist party was to adopt the same standpoint on Vietnam that the Vietnamese comrades adopted, it would have been difªcult for them to directly oppose the DRV’s readiness to enter talks with the Americans. For this reason, the DPRK side does not make any ofªcial declarations on this issue; they express it only through certain newspaper articles, etc., that they doubt if the Vietnamese question could be solved through negotiations.95

94. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 4 June 1969, in MOL, KTS, 1969, 60. doboz, 1, 002219/1969; and Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 14 June 1973, in MOL, KA, 1973, 30. doboz, 1, 836-2/1973. See also Hamm, Arming the Two Koreas, pp. 143–144. 95. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 16 May 1968, in MOL, STS, 1968, 81. doboz, 145-1, 002454/1968.

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The occasional laconic news coverage in the North Korean press about the Paris peace talks in June was not accompanied by comments.96 When in September 1968 a Soviet delegation informed Kim Il Sung about the progress of the talks, he remained conspicuously silent.97 On 16 January 1969, a DRV diplomat named Tran Van Thanh told a Hungarian colleague that “you Hun- garians probably also noticed that the Korean comrades publish press reports about every important event of the armed struggle in Vietnam, and they even make comments on them, but, for instance, they publish very little, only fac- tual communiqués, about the Paris peace talks.”98 In the pre-1968 years neither the North Vietnamese nor the North Koreans were inclined to criticize the other country in the presence of Soviet-bloc diplomats. Hence, the mere fact that Thanh drew a Hungarian’s attention to this phenomenon implies the emergence of veiled discord between Hanoi and Pyongyang. Furthermore, the cause of this discord—and the tone of North Korean news coverage— seem to conªrm that in 1966–1967 Kim Il Sung considered the escalation in Vietnam advantageous to North Korean interests rather than a threat. Other- wise he would have welcomed the start of de-escalation. Because Cuban leaders also disapproved of the U.S.-DRV negotiations, the following report on Cuban-Vietnamese relations may provide insight into North Korean motives as well: The leadership of the PCC [Cuban Communist Party] repeatedly explained to both the head of the [NLF] mission and the DRV representative how important it was to continue armed struggle and achieve a military victory over the USA in Vietnam. The Cuban leaders offered every kind of assistance to the continuation of the struggle, and at the same time they did their best to prove that the negotiations, on the one hand, served merely as a U.S. electoral maneuver and, on the other hand, they would demoralize revolutionary spirit in Vietnam, of which the USA would take advantage in a military sense. The Cuban arguments made no impression on the Vietnamese, which gradually produced a [negative] effect on the relationship between the two countries. . . . The various posters about Vietnam, which had virtually ºooded Havana and other cities early in 1968 and which declared full solidarity with the ªghting Vietnamese people, gradually disappeared.99

96. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 20 June 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 57. doboz, 1, 002813/1968. 97. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 16 Sep- tember 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 57. doboz, 1, 002816/2/1968. 98. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 21 January 1969, in MOL, KTS, 1969, 60. doboz, 001359/1969; emphasis in original. 99. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in Cuba to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 29 January 1969, in MOL, VTS, 1969, 91. doboz, 1, 00412/3/1969.

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The North Korean and Cuban attitudes indicate that Kim Il Sung’s efforts to cause difªculties for the United States outweighed his desire to support and assist the DRV. North Korean aid to Hanoi began to decline as soon as de-escalation started in Vietnam. In contrast to the 20 million rubles provided in 1967, Pyongyang gave only 12.5 million rubles per annum in 1968– 1969. In 1969, the North Koreans supplied the DRV with a few new prod- ucts, but the volume of many staple goods underwent a marked decrease.100 In light of Kim Il Sung’s dissatisfaction with the process of de-escalation in Vietnam and his coolness toward his war-weary Vietnamese allies, he probably did not take the risky step of capturing the Pueblo for the purpose of hindering the deployment of South Korean troops to Vietnam, diverting U.S. attention from the Tet Offensive, or otherwise alleviating pressure on Hanoi. Instead, the seizure of the ship seems to have served primarily Kim’s own interests. The third piece of evidence against the thesis of coordination is that the stance the DPRK adopted with regard to the preferable resolution of the Pueblo crisis did not substantially change in accordance with the ebbs and ºows of military operations in Vietnam, although other spheres of North Ko- rean policy seem to have been considerably affected by the dynamics of the war. Neither the process of escalation in the ªrst three months of 1968 nor the subsequent de-escalation induced Pyongyang to harden or soften its earlier conditions. As early as 24 January, the PDRK issued its demand for a U.S. admission of, and apology for, the Pueblo’s alleged violation of North Korean territorial waters, and throughout the subsequent eleven months North Ko- rean leaders made no serious attempt to speed up or slow down the pace of negotiations by modifying their conditions or making additional demands. Nor were they interested in extracting other concessions or accepting a U.S. proposal that offered to “express regret for any violation of orders by the USS Pueblo that may have resulted in the ship’s approaching closer than twelve nautical miles to North Korea” (but that did not unequivocally conªrm North Korea’s claim about the ship’s intrusion).101 By contrast, signs of Wash- ington’s readiness to make an admission and apology promptly elicited manifestations of cooperativeness from the North Korean side. Pyongyang’s single-minded preoccupation with extracting a U.S. admission of “guilt” and apology deserves attention not only because it contradicts

100. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 25 Feb- ruary 1969, in MOL, KTS, 1969, 60. doboz, 5, 001359/2/1969; and Report from the Hungarian Trade Ofªce in Pyongyang to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Trade, 31 March 1969, in MOL, KTS, 60. doboz, 5, 001690/1969. 101. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 16 May 1968, in MOL, STS, 1968, 81. doboz, 145-1, 002454/1968.

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the thesis of DRV-DPRK coordination but also because it probably constitutes the key to Kim Il Sung’s real motives for capturing the Pueblo and pro- longing the crisis. Kim’s aim was not simply to demonstrate North Korea’s ability and willingness to defy U.S. might but also to produce written evidence of American culpability and thus ex post facto to justify the seizure of the ship and, by implication, Pyongyang’s earlier confrontational actions. From the Pueblo’s arrival in the area of the DPRK on 16 January to 22 January, the North Koreans did not subject it to any form of harassment. On 23 January, however, they seized the ship outright, without trying to chase it away or disrupt its activity.102 This seems to indicate that Pyongyang’s principal aim was not the obstruction of the Pueblo’s intelligence operations or the prevention of possible intrusions. The North’s ªrst close inspection of the Pueblo took place as late as 22 January—a day after the Blue House raid and the same day the UN Com- mand in Korea (UNC) requested that a MAC meeting be held to discuss the raid.103 The UNC requested the meeting for 23 January, but the North Kore- ans asked for a day’s delay. Consequently, the agenda of the meeting held on 24 January was no longer conªned to the raid but included the Pueblo’s capture as well.104 The complete absence of harassment before the failure of the Blue House assault indicates that from Pyongyang’s perspective the Pueblo was at best a secondary target: the primary target was the South Korean head of state. (A premature attack on the ship would have alarmed U.S. and ROK forces, complicating the Blue House raid even further.) The subordination of the Pueblo operation to the Blue House raid lends credence to the view that the capture of the ship was motivated by Kim Il Sung’s intention to offset the spectacular failure of the raid.105 At a time when Kim’s economic policies and his uniªcation strategy were not yielding the desired results, a propaganda victory over the United States via the seizure of the Pueblo was a much-needed boost for the KWP regime’s prestige.106 However, the claim that “North Korea wanted a formal apology...for domestic propaganda purposes” does not fully explain Kim’s exclusive focus on this speciªc concession.107 From the perspective of North Korea’s popula-

102. Lerner, The Pueblo Incident, pp. 14–15, 40, 61, 72–77. 103. Ibid., p. 73. 104. Downs, Over the Line, p. 122. 105. Schaefer, “North Korean ‘Adventurism,’” pp. 22–23; Kathryn Weatherby, “Enigma of the North Korean Regime: Back to the Future?” in Challenges Posed by the DPRK for the Alliance and the Region (Washington, DC: Korea Economic Institute, 2005), p. 49. 106. Lerner, “‘Mostly Propaganda in Nature,’” pp. 29–47. 107. Charles Armstrong, “Necessary Enemies: Anti-Americanism, Juche Ideology, and the Torturous Path to Normalization,” U.S.-Korea Institute’s Working Paper 08-3 (Washington, DC: U.S.-Korea In- stitute at SAIS, 2008), p. 8.

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tion, which was regularly bombarded with crudely fabricated stories about all sorts of imaginable and unimaginable U.S. atrocities and intrusions, the ªne distinctions between one or another type of U.S. concession or written declaration were presumably irrelevant. By contrast, Soviet-bloc diplomats did pay attention to the issue of whether the Pueblo had been attacked in the DPRK’s territorial waters. Second, the patterns of North Korean alliance politics suggest that if the Blue House raid had been successful the DPRK would have had equally strong reasons to capture the Pueblo. As Chuck Downs argues, the seizure was “a cunning move” that “shifted attention from [Pyongyang’s] treacherous attempt to assassinate a head of state and focused it instead on a superpower’s efforts to spy on the North.”108 A shift of attention was also necessary to bolster the prospects of getting external support. Recent publications based on declassiªed Soviet-bloc archival documents usually highlight the lack of prior consultation between Pyongyang and its Communist allies and the DPRK’s unwillingness to heed Soviet advice about how to solve the crisis.109 The declassiªed documents do convincingly refute the earlier hypotheses about an international Communist conspiracy, but the emphasis given in recent publications to Kim’s disregard for the concerns of his allies obscures a fundamental paradox of the Pueblo crisis: North Korea captured the ship without the consent of the Communist powers, yet its formal alliance with Moscow and Beijing is what allowed it to take this step without running the risk of U.S. retaliation. A comprehensive analysis of Hungarian archival documents reveals substantial evidence that the KWP leaders, despite their frequent invocation of the juche principle, paid considerable attention to the “alliance factor” both before and during the Pueblo crisis. Unwilling to abandon their militant strategy in favor of a policy more amenable to their allies, they nevertheless realized that this strategy could not be successfully implemented unless the “fraternal” countries gave the DPRK at least a modicum of political, military, and economic assistance. For this reason, North Korea resorted to a variety of tactics to present its policies as compatible with the interests of its allies, to retain their support, or to create the impression that the USSR and China stood be- hind Pyongyang. Paradoxically, U.S. engagement in Vietnam, which created new opportunities for Kim Il Sung to pursue a confrontational policy toward South Korea, hindered his efforts to convince his Communist allies of the North’s claims

108. Downs, Over the Line, p. 122. 109. Lerner, “‘Mostly Propaganda in Nature,’” pp. 46–47; Sergey S. Radchenko, “The Soviet Union and the North Korean Seizure of the USS Pueblo: Evidence from Russian Archives,” CWIHP Working Paper No. 47 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, March 2005), pp. 12–20; and Schaefer, “North Korean ‘Adventurism,’” pp. 21–23.

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that the post-1965 clashes along the DMZ were provoked by the United States. In late 1966 the Czechoslovak NNSC members, having observed the recent border incidents, concluded that “the USA, partly because of Vietnam, needs tranquility in Korea.” Worse still, the Czechoslovaks went so far as to question the accuracy of North Korea’s narrative of these events: “The DPRK tries to justify its claims about American imperialism [by aggravating tension along the DMZ], but the U.S. side wants to maintain tranquility.”110 The U.S. government even called on the head of its MAC delegation, Major General Richard Cicolela, to prevent the occurrence of armed incidents. In November 1966, Cicolela told a Czechoslovak NNSC member that the commander of the U.S. 8th Army had instructed his troops to do their best to avoid using ªrearms in response to the KPA’s provocative acts. This attitude did not suit the North Koreans, who needed to provide their Commu- nist allies with evidence of U.S. belligerence.111 At ªrst, Pyongyang’s manipulative efforts were focused on alleviating So- viet suspicions about North Korean intentions. This strategy achieved a degree of success. The KWP conference held in October 1966 was evaluated by Moscow in a surprisingly favorable way, not least because, compared to previous years, Kim Il Sung spoke considerably less about charyok kaengsaeng (self-reliance) and more about economic cooperation with the Soviet-bloc countries.112 According to Soviet diplomats, the KWP leaders

disassociated themselves from the Chinese standpoint that stressed the necessity of launching a guerrilla war in South Korea in order to create a situation comparable to the present South Vietnamese conditions. The Koreans emphasize that the situation in South Korea greatly differs from the one in South Vietnam, and therefore the methods of liberation also must be different. Besides armed struggle, it is also possible, and necessary, to use the widest variety of ªghting methods.113 In the spring of 1967, when Kim Il Sung’s militant strategy entered a new phase, the KWP leaders resorted to more sophisticated tactics to present the border incidents as manifestations of U.S. aggression. Disguised as a defector, Yi Su-gun, the deputy director of the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), inªltrated South Korea in March 1967 and provided detailed information about North Korean commando operations in the DMZ. His account made

110. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 29 De- cember 1966, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 61. doboz, 1, 001202/1966. 111. Ibid. 112. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 18 No- vember 1966, in MOL, KTS, 1966, 74. doboz, IV-250, 005007/3/1966. 113. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 20 Octo- ber 1966, in MOL, KTS, 1966, 74. doboz, IV-250, 005007/1966.

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U.S. soldiers so vigilant and nervous that they often started shooting when the North Koreans came near the demarcation line. North Korea’s tactics seem to have worked, at least temporarily, because this time even the Czecho- slovak ambassador went along with Pyongyang’s version: “By resorting to such provocations, the United States obviously aims to aggravate tension, though for the time being it does not want to start a new Korean War.”114 Still, the fact that the DPRK started to conduct commando raids well below the DMZ was bound to cause friction with its Soviet bloc allies sooner or later. Soviet leaders had little interest in pursuing the violent overthrow of Park Chung Hee’s regime. Similar to the Czechoslovak NNSC members, Leonid Brezhnev, who met SPA President Ch’oe Yong-gon in November 1967, took the Vietnam War into consideration when evaluating U.S. intentions and capabilities in Korea:

Basically the Soviet Union does not accept the DPRK’s standpoint on the cause of tension along the Demilitarized Zone. [The Soviet Union] believes—and lets the Korean comrades know about this—that the United States does not intend to increase tension in this region, and that nothing suggests [the United States] really aims at starting a new Korean War. It is obvious that the various factors of the USA’s international situation, such as the Vietnam War, do not make the perspective of a new Asian war attractive for the United States. On the basis of the available evidence—for example, the statements made by the Czechoslovak and Polish members of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission—the Soviet Union has concluded that the majority of the incidents along the Demilitarized Zone are initiated by the DPRK. . . . [T]he Soviet side doubts that armed struggle is an appropriate method for the reuniªcation of Korea.115 Pressed for time, Kim Il Sung did not intend to call off his campaign against the South lest he miss his last chance before the start of de-escalation in Viet- nam, but he also knew that he could not afford to lose Moscow’s friendship. The only option left for him was to ªnd, or possibly manufacture, some kind of evidence demonstrating Washington’s culpability—in the same way Yi Su- gun’s fake defection had done. Following the Blue House raid, Kim was even more in need of such evi-

114. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 8 May 1967, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 60. doboz, 346, 002844/1967; Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 11 May 1967, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 60. doboz, 432, 002842/1967; and Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 17 July 1967, in KTS, 1967, 60. doboz, 250, 003437/1967. On Yi Su-gun’s subsequent rev- elation by the South Korean security services, see Joungwon Alexander Kim, “Divided Korea 1969: Consolidating for Transition,” Asian Survey, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January 1970), p. 32. 115. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 25 No- vember 1967, in MOL, KTS, 1967, 61. doboz, 5, 002126/3/1967; emphasis added.

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dence against the United States because the Kremlin did not approve of his attempted assassination of Park Chung Hee. Soviet ofªcials recognized that the DPRK sought to take advantage of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but the conclusions they reached diverged from the ones drawn by Pyongyang: The Soviet Foreign Ministry is of the opinion that our Korean comrades, in many respects, have an erroneous view about the situation in South Korea and the possible consequences of their policy toward South Korea. First of all, [the Soviets] emphasize that it is absolutely wrong to draw such a conclusion from the United States’ engagement in Vietnam that the Americans would be unable to prevent the victory of a potential military action against South Korea, [and such a conclusion] might lead to unforeseeable consequences. Nor can one draw such a conclusion from the available objective information that there is any substantial progressive movement in South Korea. No matter which version of [the story about] the assault on the South Korean presidential palace is to be accepted, it is obvious that this [action], and the other actions of this type, cannot be regarded as serious. Nor is there any basis to draw such a conclusion that the South Ko- rean peasantry, which constitutes the largest section of the population, is not loyal [to the government]. For this reason, in South Korea one should create a basis for progressive democratic movements through slow and gradual work, rather than promote armed struggle, which, due to the absence of a sufªcient basis, can be only of an adventurist nature.116 The capture of the Pueblo seems to have been subordinated to the Blue House raid, and the measures the North Koreans took after the seizure indicate that they were in great haste to obtain compromising evidence against the United States by wringing an admission of intrusion from Commander Lloyd Bucher. Although the KCNA had announced the event as early as 23 January, Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Chae-bong did not inform the Soviet-bloc am- bassadors about the capture of the ship until 24 January—by which time North Korean interrogators had obtained Bucher’s “confession.”117 The KWP leaders sought to use Bucher’s manipulated confession to de- pict the capture of the ship as an act beneªcial for both the DPRK and the So- viet Union, or at least to create an impression of close relations between Mos- cow and Pyongyang, thus using the USSR as a shield. Describing the targets monitored by the Pueblo, Bucher named not only the DPRK but also the USSR (four times) and various unspeciªed “socialist countries” (two times), and he claimed that his ship had entered the area of North Korea via the So-

116. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 27 March 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 3, 00894/30/1968; emphasis added. 117. Lloyd M. Bucher with Mark Rascovich, Bucher: My Story (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1971), pp. 212–214; and Mitchell B. Lerner, “A Dangerous Miscalculation: New Evidence from Communist-Bloc Archives about North Korea and the Crises of 1967,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 2004), p. 10.

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viet Maritime Province.118 A CIA analysis of Bucher’s statements, which pointed out that the Pueblo had actually sailed directly from Japan to the DPRK, concluded: “The North Koreans perhaps hoped that such a charge would make it difªcult for China and the Soviet Union to withhold full public support for their position.”119 The North Koreans also had good reason to produce “evidence” of the Pueblo’s violation of their territorial waters because from Moscow’s perspective the occurrence or non-occurrence of the intrusion was a question of para- mount importance. If the ship really had committed the act of which it was accused, then its seizure had at least some justiªcation, even if Soviet ofªcials considered it “an excessively radical step that is out of proportion to the violation of laws committed by the Americans.”120 The Soviet Union provided only limited diplomatic support to the DPRK over the Pueblo incident, but even this was better than its categorical opposition to the Blue House raid. At a UN Security Council meeting held on 26 January, the Soviet delegate rebuffed U.S. protests over the Pueblo incident by stressing that “the United States Secretary of State had been unable to assert categorically that the Pueblo was on the high seas at the time of its seizure,” but he declined to respond to U.S. charges about the Blue House raid.121 Had the North Koreans—explicitly or implicitly—admitted that the ship was in international waters at the time of the attack, they could not have expected a similar degree of support from Moscow. Because Soviet-bloc diplomats had been increasingly reluctant to endorse Pyongyang’s claims about U.S. provocations, Kim Il Sung had a strong stake in compelling the United States to make an unequivocal written admission of the intrusion. Probably this is why the DPRK authorities, though they frequently expressed their gratitude for the articles in Soviet-bloc newspapers about the incident, did not allow the “fraternal” journalists to interview the crew until September, by which time the U.S. side was showing tentative readiness to acquiesce in North Korea’s demands for an admission and apology.122

118. Bucher, Bucher, p. 411. 119. CIA, “A Psychological and Political Analysis of Commander Bucher’s Statements,” 29 January 1968, in CERR, p. 8. 120. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the USSR to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 30 Janu- ary 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 3, 00894/8/1968. 121. Yearbook of the United Nations, 1968 (New York: United Nations Ofªce of Public Information, 1971), p. 172. 122. Memorandum from the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 3 February 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 3, 00894/9/1968; Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 2 March 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 3, 00894/28/1968; Report from the Hungarian embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 12 September 1968, in MOL, XIX-J-1k United States, Administrative Documents, 1968, 6. doboz, [no reference number]/ 1968; and Lerner, The Pueblo Incident, pp. 205–206.

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All in all, it seems that Kim Il Sung did take the “alliance factor” into consideration both before and during the Pueblo crisis, making various attempts to use his Communist allies as a shield against U.S. might but in effect pursuing his own agenda. In 1966 and early 1967, Kim was still partly able to conceal his belligerent intentions from his allies, but by the winter of 1967– 1968 his principal responsibility for the inter-Korean clashes—in which the Communist powers did not want to get involved—had become all too obvious. Thus the KWP leaders faced a serious strategic dilemma. The dramatic intensiªcation of North Korean commando raids (and particularly the attempted assassination of Park Chung Hee) increased the risk of South Korean or U.S. reprisals and also reduced the willingness of the DPRK’s allies to support Pyongyang against Washington and Seoul. Had the Blue House raid resulted in the killing of the South Korean president, the international repercus- sions would have been even more serious. The seizure of the Pueblo thus brought considerable beneªts for Kim Il Sung, creating a situation in which the USSR and China were relatively more willing to provide him with at least limited diplomatic support than during his earlier confrontational actions. Annoyed as Soviet ofªcials were by the capture of the ship and the prolonged talks over the release of the crew, they found it easier to reach common ground with Kim on this matter than on the issue of the DMZ provocations or the Blue House raid. The North Korean leader, for his part, eagerly exploited the opportunity. As the DPRK chargé d’affaires in Budapest put it on 29 January: “For us, the most important issue now is to get political support.”123 It is still unclear whether this objective played a major role in the seizure of the Pueblo, but once the crisis broke out, Kim Il Sung deªnitely used it for this purpose.

Epilogue: From Vietnam to Cambodia

The impact of the Vietnam War on North Korean decision-making varied from case to case. Certain North Korean actions, such as the Blue House raid, seem to have been extensively inºuenced by the military operations in Viet- nam, whereas others, such as the Pueblo incident, were not. Furthermore, in some cases the events in Indochina produced a considerable effect on North Korean policies, but the effect proved ephemeral, soon to be overshadowed by new developments in South Korea. North Korea’s engagement in Cambodia illustrates the complexity of the situation. Kim Il Sung’s eagerness to get in-

123. Memorandum from the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 3 February 1968, in MOL, KTS, 1968, 58. doboz, 3, 00894/9/1968.

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volved in the new war that ºared up in Cambodia in 1970 was combined with a temporary renewal of his militant strategy against South Korea and provides additional evidence for the hypothesis that the North Korean leader sought to achieve his own aims in the shadow of the Vietnam War. The DPRK had maintained friendly relations with Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk since 1962 and regarded his overthrow by the U.S.- backed coup of Premier Lon Nol on 18 March 1970 as an unfavorable development. In early April, during a visit by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, the two sides published a joint communiqué condemning Lon Nol’s coup and ap- proving Sihanouk’s call for armed resistance.124 On 5 May, Sihanouk announced the establishment of a China-based exile government, whereupon Pyongyang immediately recognized the Cambodian’s Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea (known by its French abbreviation, GRUNK) as the sole legitimate government of Cambodia.125 When Sihanouk visited the DPRK from 15 June to 1 July 1970, Kim Il Sung urged the creation of a united front of the so-called ªve revolutionary Asian countries (China, Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam, and North Korea). Sihanouk claimed that Kim even offered to dispatch North Korean volunteers to Cambodia.126 The 5th KWP Congress, held on 2–13 November, also called for a front of revolutionary Asian countries.127 In August 1971 an unofªcial KPA delegation visited the “liberated areas” of Cambodia. In subsequent years, the DPRK also provided military aid, mainly submachine guns, automatic riºes, handguns, and clothes worth roughly $1 million per annum, to the Cambodian guerrillas.128 Kim Il Sung’s readiness to get involved in the Cambodian crisis can best be understood by quoting a diplomat from Albania, a country whose ªrm opposition to a negotiated settlement in Vietnam and support for the GRUNK had much in common with Pyongyang’s standpoint. “The Cambodian crisis

124. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 17 April 1970, in MOL, KTS, 1970, 54. doboz, 81, 00843/1/1970. 125. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 1 June 1970, in MOL, XIX-J-1-j Cambodia, Top Secret Documents (CATS), 1970, 50. doboz, 73-146, 001590/53/1970. 126. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the PRC to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 18 July 1970, in MOL, KTS, 1970, 54. doboz, 81, 00843/8/1970. 127. Memorandum from the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 17 November 1970, in MOL, KTS, 1970, 55. doboz, 81-25, 002263/3/1970. 128. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the PRC to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 31 August 1971, in MOL, CTS, 1971, 64. doboz, 78-10, 00569/44/1971; Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 9 May 1974, in MOL, CATS, 1974, 61. doboz, 73- 10, 003699/1974; and Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 13 December 1974, in MOL, CATS, 1974, 61. doboz, 73-10, 001499/9/1974.

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is a very good thing,” the Albanian envoy declared after Lon Nol’s coup, “because it boosts the revolutionary situation in Cambodia. If the USA inter- venes, that will be even better because if it cannot cope with a single Vietnam, it will be even less able to cope with several Vietnams.”129 Left frustrated by Hanoi’s decision to enter negotiations with the United States, Kim seems to have hoped that the outbreak of armed struggle in Cambodia might delay U.S. disengagement from Indochina. If the United States stayed bogged down in Vietnam and Cambodia, it would not be able to put strong pressure on the DPRK even if the latter resumed its confrontational acts against South Korea. In mid-1970 Kim Il Sung’s Südpolitik entered a new militant phase. On 2 June, DPRK Ambassador Yi Tong-son informed the Hungarian Foreign Ministry about the reemergence of the so-called Revolutionary Party for Re- uniªcation (RPR), a clandestine organization purportedly composed of Southern guerrillas who had played a major role in the North Korean raids of 1967–1968.130 On 20 June, the North Korean media announced the reestab- lishment of the RPR Central Committee.131 The participation of RPR dele- gates Yi Ch’ong-hyok, O Ch’ang-su, and Yi Mun-u in the 5th KWP Congress was also an ominous sign, all the more so because the congress declared that the peaceful uniªcation of Korea would be impossible as long as Park Chung Hee remained in power.132 North Korean leaders had already attempted to put this principle into practice. In early June, three northern agents inªltrated Seoul on a mission to assassinate Park Chung Hee by means of a remote-controlled bomb that was to be detonated on 25 June. The accidental explosion of the bomb aborted the mission.133 Conºicts of a military nature also occurred. In June, North Korean patrol boats sank a South Korean naval ship and seized a broadcast vessel.134 From

129. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the PRC to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 7 April 1970, in MOL, CATS, 1970, 50. doboz, 73-146, 001590/10/1970. 130. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 4 June 1970, in MOL, KTS, 1970, 55. doboz, 81-146, 00345/7/1970. 131. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 24 June 1970, in MOL, KTS, 1970, 56. doboz, 82-25, 002343/1970. 132. Memorandum by the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 17 November 1970, in MOL, KTS, 1970, 55. doboz, 81-25, 002263/3/1970; and Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 15 December 1970, in MOL, KTS, 1970, 55. doboz, 81-25, 002263/5/ 1970. 133. Bermudez, Terrorism, p. 37. 134. Robert Simmons, “North Korea: Silver Anniversary,” Asian Survey, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 1971), p. 107.

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December 1970 to January 1971, border incidents multiplied.135 However, there was a major difference between these clashes and the earlier commando raids on ROKA and U.S. targets. This time, the KPA units attacked only South Koreans and seem to have carefully avoided killing U.S. soldiers. Even as ROKA casualties increased from 47 in 1969 to 55 in 1970, U.S. casualties dropped from eleven to zero. This shift was likely inspired by President Richard Nixon’s decision to reduce the U.S. forces stationed in South Korea by 20,000 troops—a step that was ofªcially announced in July 1970 and led to long and difªcult negotiations between Washington and Seoul until the two sides issued a joint com- muniqué in February 1971.136 North Korean leaders were anxious not to provoke a direct conºict with U.S. forces lest Nixon’s troop withdrawal policy be slowed down or reversed, but at the same time they undoubtedly were hoping to increase South Korean feelings of vulnerability and thereby cause friction in U.S.-ROK relations. The North’s efforts paid off: Park Chung Hee did blame the troop reductions for Pyongyang’s growing belligerence and bitterly criticized Nixon’s disengagement policy.137 Nonetheless, provocative acts were only one element of the newest phase of Kim Il Sung’s Südpolitik. As early as May 1969 he told a Soviet delegation that in the period before the next South Korean elections the DPRK would adopt a peaceful attitude toward the ROK to prevent Park Chung Hee from using the “northern threat” as a justiªcation for his authoritarian rule. Such tactics, the North Korean leaders hoped, might help the southern democratic opposition to gain votes.138 In November 1970, Kim informed the Bulgarian ambassador about his plans:

The KWP does not want a world war to break out over [the issue of] Korea.... If Kim Dae Jung [Kim Taejung], the presidential candidate of the oppositional New Democratic Party, wins next year’s presidential elections, we will negotiate with him. Although Kim Dae Jung is also an anti-Communist, his ofªcial and unofªcial plans are the following: creating a democratic power structure in South Korea, guaranteeing the democratic rights of the population, establishing contacts with the Soviet Union and China, initiating talks with the DPRK

135. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 29 Janu- ary 1971, in MOL, KTS, 1971, 67. doboz, 82-61, 001013/1971. 136. Victor D. Cha, Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 62–64. 137. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton & Com- pany, 1997), p. 446. 138. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 22 June 1969, in MOL, KTS, 1969, 59. doboz, 001365/4/1969.

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about peaceful uniªcation, and pursuing a neutralist foreign policy. And if all this can be realized, it will be indeed unnecessary to wage war to solve the Korean question.139

North Korea did change its tune. In mid-April 1971, about two weeks before the southern presidential elections, the SPA adopted a program that called for direct negotiations between the two Koreas, proposed economic cooperation and the establishment of a North-South confederacy, and declared that Pyongyang would be willing to negotiate with any southern politician save Park Chung Hee.140 Although this gesture failed to yield the desired results, its cooperative nature stood in sharp contrast to Kim Il Sung’s post- 1966 militant strategy and foreshadowed the inter-Korean talks held in 1971–1973. In 1970 the new militant phase of Kim’s Südpolitik, limited in both length and scope, had been spurred by a combination of factors that differed from those shaping his militant strategy in 1966–1968. On the one hand, the resurgence of armed struggle in Indochina—which he deªnitely welcomed— probably emboldened him to take new confrontational actions against Seoul. On the other hand, he also realized that the chances of achieving his aims by alternative means were becoming more favorable than in 1966–1967. Earlier, neither South Korean domestic politics nor the status of U.S.-ROK relations offered substantial opportunities for him to attain his chief objectives: the overthrow of Park Chung Hee’s regime and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea. In 1970, however, some major changes occurred in both spheres. South Korea’s democratic opposition party—now headed by Kim Dae Jung, a more popular and less conservative politician than Yun Bo Sun— began to gain strength, and Nixon decided to withdraw one-third of the troops stationed in the ROK, regardless of what Park wanted. Under these new conditions, Kim Il Sung had more room to maneuver than before, and he eagerly seized the opportunity. Consequently, Pyongyang’s Südpolitik underwent a process of gradual de- coupling from the events in Indochina, all the more so because the post-1968 trend toward de-escalation in Vietnam, which Kim heartily opposed from be- ginning to end, proved irreversible. By 1973, the mutual estrangement of the two former comrades in arms had reached such an extent that the North Ko- rean media, as the Hungarian diplomats noted, reacted to the conclusion of

139. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 12 De- cember 1970, in MOL, KTS, 1970, 54. doboz, 81-108, 002584/3/1970. 140. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 14 May 1971, in MOL, KTS, 1971, 67. doboz, 81-20, 002308/1971.

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the Paris Agreements, which ensured the full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, with “frosty silence.”141

Acknowledgments

When writing my article, I accumulated debts to numerous friends and col- leagues who provided invaluable assistance, including Changyong Choi, Joanna Kirkpatrick, Mitchell B. Lerner, Liang Zhi, Narushige Michishita, Ed- ward G. Miller, Ryan Nelson, John Prados, László Ritter, Shin Jongdae, and Chris Springer. My research was supported by the Kwangwoon University Industry-Academic Collaboration Foundation.

141. Report from the Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 19 March 1973, in MOL, KTS, 1973, 68. doboz, 10, 003613/3/1973.

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