The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [30]
As the dissident movement broadened and deepened, the government periodically cracked down with detentions and arrests. Virtually no news of this confrontation between Park and the most politically active portions of his populace appeared in the tightly controlled Korean press. However, due to the international press and the many outside connections of regime opponents, the struggle was well publicized outside Korea. The governments of the United States, Japan, and a number of European countries were uncomfortable and made their views known in official demarches and unofficial statements urging Seoul to take a path of caution and moderation.
In Washington, congressional criticism of Park's human rights policies and the activities of the KCIA in intimidating Korean Americans led to Capitol Hill hearings and congressionally mandated cuts in U.S. military aid to South Korea. Seoul's response to these political pressures was to try, in time-honored Korean fashion, to purchase favor in ways that presaged scandals in the 1990s over Asian efforts to influence U.S. politics.
One major effort was led by Park Tong Sun, a young Korean graduate of Georgetown University who had set himself up as a Seoul government-backed dealmaker and agent of influence in Washington. The payoffs to members of Congress he arranged would later blow up into an influence-peddling scandal that, following the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon, was given the name Koreagate.
Direct government efforts to curry favor with American officials were equally lacking in subtlety. When Nixon aide John Niedecker came to Seoul in May 1974 as the official U.S. representative to a Korean presidential prayer breakfast, he was handed a sealed envelope just prior to his departure by President Park's powerful chief of presidential security, Park Jong Kyu. To Niedecker's surprise and discomfort, the envelope contained $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He quickly turned the money over to the U.S. Embassy, which returned it to the security chief in short order with a stern rebuke for attempting to bribe an American official. Later Niedecker was offered political money from Seoul of up to $5,000 for each U.S. House of Representatives candidate selected by the Nixon administration and up to $30,000 for each U.S. Senate candidate. Niedecker rejected the offer and reported the approach to his superiors.
Early in 1974, Park used his martial-law powers to issue emergency decrees making criticism of the constitution a crime and outlawing a student federation on the grounds it was subversive. Violators faced trial by closed military courts. A U.S. military assessment, which was kept confidential at the time, quoted intelligence sources as saying that "there was little or no validity to the charge of communist activity by the students" but that the accusation appeared to be designed "to tarnish opposition to the government with a communist image and to justify the repressive measures."
By the time of the August 15 Independence Day celebration, nearly two hundred people had been sentenced to death or long prison terms under the emergency decrees. Among those found guilty were a prominent Roman Catholic bishop, a popular dissident poet, and the only living former president of South Korea, Yuri Po Sun. The struggle within the South, added to the permanent conflict with the North, made the city as tense as a war zone. When Park moved from room to room in his presidential mansion, the corridors were cleared of all but essential people because of what a senior U.S. Embassy official called his