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By Root 1839 0

of Soviet leadership, and thus Kim made special efforts to persuade him that he was not leaning to the Chinese side of the Sino-Soviet struggle for leadership in the communist world, which had broken out in the 1960s and had yet to be ended. The North Korean leader emphasized his troubles with Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, revealing that the Chinese had set up giant loudspeakers at the Sino-Korean border and delivered deafening attacks on "Korean revisionists" from five A.M. to midnight every day. On a later occasion, Kim told Honecker that at the height of the Sino-Soviet conflict in 1969, Chinese troops had threatened to march into Korean territory near the Soviet border, and he had ordered DPRK forces not to shoot. The Chinese withdrew, Kim reported. Since those days, relations with China had been repaired, but "we do not follow China blindly," Kim emphasized to Honecker. On the other hand, he added, "we also do not participate in the Soviet Union's polemics against China." Opting out of the Sino-Soviet conflict "does not mean that we are opportunists, but that the situation does not allow us anything else."

Finally, the Kim-Honecker talks dealt with North Korea's great power adversaries. While he was concerned about the danger of a revival of Japanese militarism, Kim conceded that "the Japanese nation is not as it was before" due to the lessons learned from World War II and the U.S. atomic bomb attacks. Looking to the future, he declared that a triumph of communism on the Korean peninsula would be "beneficial for stimulating the revolution in Japan."

As for the United States, Kim was scornful about Carter, after nearly a year of trying to make contact with the new American president. The decision to stretch out the U.S. troop withdrawal from South Korea was "a deceitful maneuver against the people" and an attempt to manipulate public opinion, he told Honecker. While pretending to prepare to withdraw, the American military was actually "carrying out war drills and importing weapons [to South Korea] every day."

Kim confided that his military reconnaissance teams constantly observed U.S. maneuvers in South Korea but kept their spying a secret. American officers were uncomfortably aware of this aspect of the internecine war on the divided peninsula. In 1975 a North Korean reconnaissance team was discovered while photographing and sketching the U.S. air base at Kwangju and a nearby ROK missile site, and in 1976 a North Korean team wearing ROK-style uniforms covered sixty to seventy miles on foot south of the DMZ before being caught. By the time of the Kim-Honecker meeting, the U.S. Command in Seoul had acknowledged in a confidential report that "the North can infiltrate or exfiltrate its agents or special warfare units by land, sea or air to virtually any location within the ROK." On the other hand, American and South Korean operations inside North Korea were extremely limited. U.S. knowledge of North Korean military affairs, however, was beginning to receive much higher priority.

END OF THE CARTER WITHDRAWAL

An important assumption underlying Carter's withdrawal plan was that during and after the departure of American ground troops, the military balance on the peninsula would continue to be favorable to the South. In the late 1970s, however, this assumption was thrown into doubt by a new set of U.S. intelligence estimates that depicted the North's military forces as much more numerous and much better armed than previously believed. The new estimates proved to be a fatal blow to Carter's already embattled withdrawal plan.

The beginning of the end started with a 29-year-old intelligence analyst named John Armstrong, who in May 1975 was bent over a light table at Fort Meade, Maryland, scrutinizing aerial photographs of North Korean tanks. Armstrong, a West Point graduate who had served in Vietnam before becoming a civilian analyst for the army, had been laboriously counting the tanks when he reached a surprising conclusion: there were many more than expected on the basis of earlier reports. Within a few