Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Read Online Free PDF Page A

very tight rein on protest and was growing increasingly unpopular both at home and among human-rights advocates in the United States.
    The Carter troop withdrawal plan was music to Kim Il-sung’s ears. In the new atmosphere characterized by Vietnam syndrome, the American public might very well veto any proposal to go to war to defend South Korea from a second Northern attack—unless American troops were among the first casualties. The South Korean regime all through the 1970s had been lobbying hard in the United States to keep the troops. The effort was carried on with considerable savvy and backed with substantial resources. Eventually though, it became so heavy-handed as to arouse widespread American resentment at what was viewed as interference in U.S. politics. 5
    North Korea was carrying out its own campaign to influence American opinion. Full-page advertisements in
The New York Times
promoted Kim and his
juche
ideology. The North Korean press reported the ads as if they were news articles or editorials written by admiring foreigners. Although
Times
readers were more bemused than favorably impressed, what really put a crimp in Kim’s public relations campaign was an incident in the waning days of Gerald Ford’s presidency that reinforced the North’s reputation for bloodthirsty behavior. On August 18, 1976, axe-wielding North Korean soldiers killed American soldiers who were trimming a tree in the Demilitarized Zone. The killings outraged officials and the public in the United States. One North Korean soldier who was based at the time in a camp at the DMZ told me later, “Everybody on the base thought a real war would erupt. We were fully equipped and stayed in the tunnels about a month and a half.” 6
    Even before the axe killings, candidate Carter’s troop withdrawal plan had reminded South Koreans, ominously, of that earlier withdrawal in 1949 that had been followed by the Acheson speech and the North Korean invasion. 7 After Carter took office in 1977, critics forced him to water down his plan for unilateral withdrawal. U.S. naval and air forces would remain, as well as logistics and intelligence units, the administration decided. South Koreans by February and March of 1978 were able to relax somewhat. The influential U.S. ambassador to Japan, former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, told me and other U.S. journalists invited to his Tokyo residence that even if the troops were withdrawn from Korea it could be assumed thatU.S. ground troops would be sent in from bases elsewhere in case of another war. 8
    Then U.S. and South Korean military officials held a dress rehearsal for just such an emergency reinforcement. They beefed up and heavily publicized an annual joint military exercise code-named Team Spirit, after having played the exercise down in previous years. In Team Spirit, American units practiced moving swiftly into Korea—some in an amphibious assault surely intended to rekindle memories of Inchon—-while coordinating their actions with South Korean and American units already in place. The publicity seemed partly intended to test American public backing for the commitment and prepare the way for scrapping what remained of the pullout plan. And clearly there was a message here for the Koreans, north and south alike, that the U.S. commitment to South Korean defense stood essentially unchanged. 9
    Pyongyang got the message and briefly returned to a hard-line stance. In the summer of 1978, it began making personal attacks on Carter and other U.S. officials. In October, it sent commandos to infiltrate into South Korea. That same month the U.S.–South Korean United Nations Command announced that a recent underground explosion sending water and debris up a borehole had enabled soldiers to pinpoint a Northern-dug infiltration tunnel under the DMZ. Cut through solid granite, this was the third such tunnel to have been discovered.
    Mean-while, new U.S. intelligence data indicated that North Korea over the