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 to- ward 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), com- posed of four senior ofªcers appointed by Switzerland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, was es- tablished 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. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 14, No. 4, Fall 2012, pp. 122–166 © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 122 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00278 by guest on 30 September 2021 In the Shadow of Vietnam North Vietnamese allies or deter Washington from resorting to military mea- sures against Pyongyang similar to those used against Hanoi.3 These explanations, however, are based almost exclusively on the chrono- logical coincidence of North Korean and North Vietnamese actions and on a speech Kim Il Sung made on 5 October 1966, rather than on archival evi- dence 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 rela- tions 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 an- other 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/publica- tion/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. 123 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00278 by guest on 30 September 2021 Szalontai 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 applicabil- ity 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 tar- gets, 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.