CHAPTER 8
AT THE MAD HATTER’S TEA PARTY
North Korea went on red alert after taking the Pueblo, girding for a possible revenge attack. On the first night Pyongyang was blacked out. People in the capital heard artillery bellowing in the distance, but it wasn’t clear whether the guns were firing at U.S. jets and warships or just practicing.
A government radio announcer hailed the capture as a great victory over the imperialist spy dogs. North Korean waters had been encroached upon from time to time, the communist media said, but the Pueblo had gone too far. The ship was said to have fired first on North Korean patrol boats, which then shot back, killing an American gunner. The brave socialist sailors were praised and the arrogant Yankees ridiculed for surrendering in spite of their superior armaments, including “tens of anti-aircraft machineguns” and “tens of thousands of hand grenades.”
North Korean forces shifted to a war footing. Sixteen reserve army divisions were mobilized, and military jets crisscrossed the skies over Pyongyang. Troop-laden trucks rushed to and fro in the city; factory workers performed martial drills. Industrial plants were evacuated and schoolchildren sent to live in the countryside. All citizens over the age of five were instructed to carry food and other necessities in backpacks wherever they went.
Yet many North Koreans didn’t seem particularly afraid of what the United States might do. An East German diplomat in Pyongyang reported to superiors that many civilians believed their superpower ally, the Soviet Union, would fight on their side if war broke out.
The people’s defiant confidence also had roots in their boundless hatred of Americans, a sentiment carefully cultivated by their absolute ruler, Kim Il Sung. Kim had long accused his depraved archenemies of committing all manner of atrocities during the Korean War and now of plotting a new war on the peninsula. Kim told his subjects over and over that their discipline and martial spirit would prevail in any clash with the world’s most vicious capitalist power, notwithstanding its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Kim perfected over many years his methods of controlling and manipulating public opinion. The son of an herbal pharmacist and a teacher, he’d been kicked out of school at 17 for taking part in communist activities. In the early 1930s he joined Chinese guerrillas fighting the Japanese army in Manchuria, eventually becoming a commander. By 1941, however, the Japanese had crushed the partisans in Manchuria. Kim fled to the Soviet Union, where he underwent additional training in the armed forces of his hero, Joseph Stalin.
After World War II ended, Kim, wearing the uniform of a Red Army major, returned to Korea in the wake of Soviet occupation troops. The Russians touted Kim to his countrymen as a great wartime paladin and installed him as head of the communist regime that ruled north of the 38th parallel. Kim rapidly built up an army, a government apparatus, and an authoritarian political party modeled along Soviet lines. In 1950, with Moscow’s encouragement and matériel, Kim’s forces invaded South Korea in a brutal gamble to reunite north and south under communist leadership.
By the time the war ended in stalemate in 1953, much of North Korea lay in ruins. When high-ranking members of Kim’s party attempted a coup against him, he easily deflected the thrust and, after a series of show trials, executed ten conspirators. In later years he purged numerous opponents, real and imagined, arrogating all state power to himself and creating a cult of personality second only to that of Mao Zedong. Kim billed himself as North Korea’s “peerless patriot, national hero, and ever-victorious, iron-willed commander.” He was the saryong, the supreme leader, “without precedent in West or East in all ages.”
Kim proved a temperamental ally of the two communist giants with whom he shared a border, China and the USSR. Playing one against the other, he often managed to extract more economic and military aid from both. From 1953 until the early 1960s he gravitated toward China, which had saved him during the war by sending hundreds of thousands of bugle-blowing “volunteers” to battle United Nations forces after they pushed Kim’s troops nearly to the Yalu River. After Chinese Red Guards assailed him as an aristocrat and “fat revisionist pig” during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, Kim edged back toward the Soviet camp.
The Russians rewarded him by opening wide the spigots of economic and military assistance, allowing Kim to modernize and enlarge his armed forces. By the late sixties, he’d built one of the most formidable air forces in the communist world—nearly 500 aircraft, more than half of which were Soviet-built MiG fighters and IL-28 bombers. Kim’s army, consisting of about 350,000 men, also relied heavily on Soviet equipment, including medium tanks.
In spite of the Soviets’ munificence, Kim went to some lengths to demonstrate that he wasn’t their puppet. He criticized Moscow for not taking a more aggressive stance against the United States in Vietnam, even though Russian freighters were delivering a steady stream of military supplies to Haiphong harbor. When the Soviets passed along one of Lyndon Johnson’s beseeching letters, plus their own request for a detailed explanation of the Pueblo seizure, Kim didn’t bother to reply.
The North Korean leader never wavered in his efforts to reunite the sundered peninsula under his rule. For several years after the Korean War, his method was peaceful subversion. His agents merely spread propaganda in the south, particularly the idea of a loose north-south confederation. By 1961, he was convinced a revolutionary party must be organized in South Korea. Communist operatives became more militant, calling on southerners to engage in strikes and industrial sabotage, resist conscription, and expel American troops.
By 1965, however, it was clear this strategy had failed. Many South Koreans, who had vivid memories of the savagery of Kim’s soldiers and political cadres during the Korean War, despised the North Korean autocrat and wanted no part of a communist government.
Kim’s campaign turned violent. He infiltrated more and more armed agents into the south in what General Bonesteel, the U.N. commander, aptly called a “porous war.” North Korean marauders crossed the demilitarized zone to shoot up U.N. military outposts and pick off patrolling soldiers. U.S. intelligence believed Kim didn’t want outright war, but was trying to nurture a revolutionary movement in the south that one day would morph into an armed insurgency, as Ho Chi Minh had done in South Vietnam. To that end, well-trained commando teams, dropped by high-speed boats on southern beaches, set up remote inland camps and sallied forth to attack police stations and attempt to indoctrinate villagers in the gospel of Kim Il Sung. But the communists found little popular support in South Korea.
With two hostile armies facing each other at almost spit-in-the-eye range, the demilitarized zone was a tense, dangerous place. It ran the width of the Korean peninsula—151 miles—through terrain that was hilly, dense with trees, underbrush, and tall grass, and, in autumn, often shrouded in fog—an infiltrator’s dream. The DMZ’s westernmost 18 miles, directly north of Seoul, were guarded by the U.S. 2nd Division; South Korean troops patrolled the rest.
The Americans bulldozed and defoliated their sector of the 4,000-yard-wide zone into a barren no-man’s-land. Bonesteel erected a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with triple rolls of concertina wire. Just south of that barrier was a strip of carefully raked sand to record commando footprints. But the North Koreans kept coming and the number of violent clashes soared. While 50 “significant incidents” involving communist guerrillas in the south were reported in 1966, the following year saw 566 such episodes.