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By Root 1717 0

positive aspects of North-South relations. Kim and his political managers feared that continuation of the North-South euphoria of earlier months would benefit his old political rival, Kim Dae Jung, who was shaping up as once again his principal competitor, this time as opposition presidential candidate. As the political authority of Roh as a lame duck president began to ebb and that of his chosen successor grew in the late summer of 1992, South Korea slowed down its normalization process with the North, and its officials urged Americans to do the same.

In early October, as a part of a campaign of pressure and linkage, the U.S. and ROK defense ministers announced in Washington that they were resuming preparations for launching a new 1993 installment of the U.S.-ROK Team Spirit military exercise, "in the absence of meaningful improvement in South-North relations, especially on bilateral nuclear inspections." The 1992 exercise had been canceled in the period of mutual accommodation that led to the IAEA inspections of Yongbyon.

The South Korean military took the lead in demanding a renewal of Team Spirit, which was deemed important for readiness as well as a potent pressure point against the North. The U.S. Command, under General Robert RisCassi, was determined to go ahead with the exercise unless countermanded by higher-ups for political reasons. Surprisingly, interagency policy committees in Washington were neither informed nor consulted before the politically explosive decision was made in the defense ministers' annual meeting. To Korea experts in Washington and to Donald Gregg, U.S. ambassador to Seoul, it was an unpleasant bolt from the blue-he later called it "one of the biggest mistakes" of Korea policy on his watch.

For North Korea, the cancellation of the 1992 Team Spirit exercise had been the most tangible evidence of its improved relationship with the United States and the U.S. concession of greatest immediate benefit to the North Korean military establishment. While Americans tended to scoff at Pyongyang's fears that the annual field exercise was a threat to its national security, the landing of large numbers of additional American troops in South Korea by sea and air, the profusion of flights near the DMZ by American nuclear-capable warplanes, and the movement of heavily armed ROK and U.S. ground troops made a powerful impression on the North-as Team Spirit's planners had hoped from the start, nearly two decades earlier. Moreover, Team Spirit was personally important to Kim Il Sung, who had been complaining bitterly about it publicly and privately for many years. A U.S. official who visited Pyongyang in 1993 said the Great Leader's voice quivered and his hands shook with anger when he discussed Team Spirit in a conversation with Representative Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), calling it "a dress rehearsal for an invasion."

In a public statement, North Korea described the threat to resume the maneuvers in 1993 as "a criminal act" designed to "put the brakes on North-South relations and drive the North-South dialogue to a crisis." Within weeks, Pyongyang, citing the Team Spirit issue as the reason, abruptly canceled all North-South contacts in every forum except for those in the Joint Nuclear Control Commission. A short time thereafter, those talks also collapsed. For the first time, North Korea warned that it might refuse to continue the IAEA inspections, declaring that the decision to revive the Team Spirit exercise is "an act of provocation breaking the U.S. promise not to make nuclear threats."

The day before the U.S.-ROK Team Spirit announcement, the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP), Seoul's renamed domestic and foreign intelligence agency, announced the arrest of sixty-two people in what it charged was the largest North Korean espionage ring in the history of the republic. More than three hundred others were implicated, the agency claimed, including a female member of the North Korean Workers Party hierarchy who had lived in the South under false identities several times in earlier decades. While