The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [218]
Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, on July 24, Secretary of State Christopher and his South Korean and Japanese counterparts formally agreed to supply additional food aid and ease some American economic sanctions if North Korea would participate in a joint U.S.- ROK briefing on the four-power peace plan. The same day the skies over Northeast Asia darkened again, and the heavens opened up with new torrential downpours, three to five times the normal abundant rainfall of that time of year. While the resultant flooding was not as serious as that of the year before, this time it struck more of the country's principal food-producing areas. Once more the forces of nature, compounding the failure of the juche system, had dealt North Korea a painful blow.
THE SUBMARINE INCURSION
A few minutes after midnight on the morning of September 18, 1996, a taxi driver speeding along a seaside road near Kangnung, on the east coast of South Korea, noticed a group of men crouched near the highway. Suspicious about what he had seen, cabbie Lee Jin Gyu, 31, returned to the area after dropping off his passenger and spotted a large object, which he thought at first to be a giant dolphin, in the water near the beach. On second look, it appeared to be a man-made object. Certain that it wasn't a fishing boat, he reported it to local police.
Within hours, ROK troops and police identified cab driver Lee's discovery as a thirty-seven-yard-long North Korean submarine of the Shark class that had run aground on the rocky coast and been abandoned by its passengers and crew. Before dawn came up that morning, the Defense Ministry was mobilizing 40,000 troops, helicopter gunships, and sniffer dogs in a massive search for the intruders from the North.
In midafternoon, on a mountain three miles from the landing site, an army squad came across a grisly scene: eleven bodies of North Korean infiltrators, all of whom had been executed with bullets to the back of the head, evidently with their own consent to avoid being captured. There was no sign of a struggle; one of the dead, a North Korean colonel, was armed with a pistol that was still in its holster.
About the same time, local police in a nearby area, acting on a tip from a villager, arrested Lee Kwang Su, a North Korean infiltrator from the sub, in a farmer's field. Lee, who was the only occupant of the submarine to be taken alive, said the personnel of the submarine belonged to the Reconnaissance Bureau of the North Korean People's Armed Forces, which is charged with the collection of tactical and strategic intelligence on U.S. and ROK forces. Their mission was to test ROK defenses and reconnoiter an ROK air base and radar facility near Kangnung.
In the ROK manhunt over the next two weeks, eleven submarine infiltrators were caught and killed in firefights. Two more held out for forty-eight days before being killed in early November, near the eastern end of the DMZ. This brought to twenty-five the number of North Koreans accounted for, one fewer than the lone captive believed had been on the submarine. At this point, the ROK Defense Ministry ended its intensive search and returned to normal operations. The deaths of fourteen South Koreans-four civilians, eight military personnel, and two policemen-were attributed to the infiltrators, although some apparently had been killed by friendly fire.
South Korea, with dense vegetation close to the peninsulaspanning