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By Root 1785 0

DMZ and fifteen hundred miles of irregular coastline dotted with offshore islands, is highly vulnerable to infiltration. North Korea has penetrated the South's defenses on many occasions. In the 1970s, as noted in Chapter 3, Kim Il Sung had boasted that his military reconnaissance teams kept American maneuvers in the South under surveillance, and the U.S. Command had concluded that "the North can infiltrate and exfiltrate its agents or special warfare units by land, sea or air to virtually any location within the ROK." By the mid1990s, only modest gains against these operations had been accomplished. According to a Chinese military publication, North Korea equipped itself with at least forty-eight minisubmarines to transport undercover agents and disturb South Korean shipping lanes.

What made the September 1996 incursion different from those of the past was the fact that it was a spectacular failure, putting two dozen North Korean combatants into the countryside to fend for themselves and threaten ordinary citizens; its discovery, embarrassingly, by a cab driver rather than by coastal defenses; and the edgy political situation involving North Korea and the United States.

For the first time in such a conflict, Washington found itself positioned between the two Koreas, with important interests on both sides. On the one hand, it was seeking to protect its new relationship with North Korea, to keep the freeze of the DPRK nuclear program, and to advance peace negotiations on the peninsula, while on the other hand it was seeking to maintain solidarity with its longtime ally in the South and protect the security of ROK territory and U.S. troops. The ROK, which had received unqualified U.S. backing in military disputes in the past, was disappointed and angered by the altered American posture, all the more so because policy toward the North-once a taboo subject-had become a central political issue in Seoul.

After alternating for months between taking a hard line against the North, calculated to bring about its early collapse, and backing an accommodation to bring about a "soft landing," Kim Young Sam shifted powerfully to the hard side. He declared on September 20 that "this is an armed provocation, not a simple repeat of infiltration of agents of the past" and began almost daily condemnations of the North, eventually declaring that any further provocation against the South-which he said was likely-would bring a "real possibility of war." Announcing that his government was reconsidering its entire northern policy, Kim suspended inter-Korean economic cooperation and halted ROK activities in the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), which was charged with providing the light-water reactors under the 1994 Agreed Framework. In an interview with Kevin Sullivan of The Washington Post in early November, Kim said he would not proceed with the four-party peace proposal or provide aid to the DPRK until its leaders apologized for the submarine incursion.

North Korea initially issued a remarkably gauzy statement that "as far as a competent organ of the Ministry Ministry of the People's Armed Forces knows," the submarine encountered engine trouble and drifted south, leaving its crew "with no other choice but to get to the enemy side's land, which might cause an armed conflict." As the clash over the incursion deepened, however, the North's rhetoric hardened into threats of retaliation "a hundred or a thousand fold" against the killing of its personnel. When the activities of KEDO were halted by ROK objections, Pyongyang publicly threatened to abandon the Agreed Framework and resume its nuclear program at Yongbyon.

In diplomatic meetings, North Korea notified the United States that it was ready to express regret about the submarine incident and to accept a U.S.-ROK briefing on the proposed four-power peace talks, but it insisted on a package of economic benefits in return. A package deal including the briefing arrangement had been extensively discussed in U.S.-DPRK talks in May and June 1996 and virtually agreed to at