The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [11]
Even before Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing, North Korea had been putting forth discreet feelers for direct talks with the South, and Park's government had been quietly discussing how to respond. After Kim Il Sung's August 6 announcement the South moved quickly by proposing a meeting in the context of Red Cross societies. The North immediately accepted.
On August 20, 1971, eighteen years after the armistice ended the Korean War, representatives of the two Red Cross societies met in Panmunjom for the first exploratory discussions between the two halves of the divided peninsula. To no one's surprise, the talks did not go smoothly.
On November 20, after three months and nine rounds of fruitless sparring, South Korean "Red Cross delegate" Chong Hong Jin, who actually was deputy director of the international affairs bureau of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), handed a note proposing private and separate meetings at Panmunjom to his counterpart, North Korean "Red Cross delegate" Kim Duk Hyun, actually a senior official of the Workers Party Organization and Guidance Department, the DPRK control mechanism. Like these two, many of the participants in the Red Cross exchanges actually were intelligence or party officials. In the decades to come, because these agencies were powerful, discreet, and tightly controlled by their respective leaders, they would become frequently used channels for the many secret communications between North and South.
The South's bid for higher-level talks was promptly accepted. North Korean leaders were ready and very willing. A plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers Party, gathering in secret as the contacts were beginning, approved a large-scale peace offensive toward the South in response to "the changing domestic and foreign political situation."
On March 28, 1972, following eleven rounds of secret contacts with his counterpart, South Korea's Chong slipped out the northern door of the North Korean pavilion of Panmunjom instead of returning to the southern side. He was taken by car to the nearby North Korean city of Kaesong and then by helicopter to Pyongyang-the first of many South Korean officials to go to that capital for talks. There it was arranged for the secret contacts to go to a higher level: the chief of South Korea's intelligence agency would come to Pyongyang for talks, and a senior North Korean would reciprocate by making a trip to the South. In late April, a direct telephone line linking the offices of the KCIA and the Workers Party was secretly installed between Seoul and Pyongyang.
The man in charge in the South was Lee Hu Rak, a former noncommissioned officer in the Japanese army and former chief of staff to President Park before being named to head the KCIA. While it took its name and some of the functions from its U.S. model, in many respects the KCIA was more like the prewar Japanese kempeitai or the Soviet KGB in its unbridled power in the domestic as well as the foreign arena. The former U.S. diplomat and Korea scholar Gregory Henderson called the KCIA "a state within a state, a vast shadowy world of ... bureaucrats, intellectuals, agents and thugs." By the early 1970s, the director of the KCIA was more powerful and more feared at home than the prime minister or any other governmental figure except the president himself.
After receiving written instructions from the president about visiting the "special zone," Lee traveled secretly through Panmunjom to Pyongyang in early May. Looking back on it, Lee recalled that "I felt the kind of anxiety that is quite indescribable" because "we simply had no ghost of a precedent to guide me as to how to open up some sort of mutually acceptable communication." He was also mindful that, as the chief of intelligence for the Republic of Korea (ROK), he was the person the northern communists would like most to get their hands on, after Park himself.
His hosts took him to see the sights of Pyongyang and to a revolutionary opera extolling