The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [64]
One of the first things Korean authorities did on the night of October 26 was to notify Ambassador Gleysteen that the Park regime had ended. General Lew Byong Hyon, the senior Korean officer in the recently established Combined Forces Command involving American and South Korean officers, came to Gleysteen's residence around midnight and reported that "there's been an accident" involving Park. Lew didn't know how much to say and, at that point, did not know all the facts himself. Gleysteen went to the embassy to use his secure line to telephone National Security Adviser Brzezinski in Washington (where it was early afternoon) and to alert the State Department.
About two hours later, when it was clear that Park was dead and that Prime Minister Choi Kyu Ha would take over, at least temporarily, as mandated by Park's 1972 constitution, Jimmy Carter's National Security Council convened at the White House. The president had left for a previously planned weekend at Camp David.
As always in moments of crisis on the peninsula, Washington's first and foremost concern was for the security of South Korea and the U.S. troops stationed there to defend it. As was the case after the DMZ ax murders, American forces and South Korean forces under U.S. operational control were placed on a higher degree of alert, and an aircraft-carrier task force was ordered to Korean waters as a show of force intended to impress and deter the North. Two Airborne Warning and Surveillance (AWACS) radar planes were placed on station to monitor North Korean military movements. The State Department quickly announced that the United States would "react strongly in accordance with its treaty obligations to the Republic of Korea to any external attempt to exploit the situation in the Republic of Korea." Washington privately passed the same message, intended for North Korea, to China and the Soviet Union. Unannounced, the United States also stepped up spy plane surveillance of North Korea and closely monitored electronic intercepts. For the moment, Pyongyang remained quiet.
In the months preceding the assassination, Park's regime had been under great strain. After a long period of rapid growth, South Korea had been afflicted by the worldwide inflation and recession, that arose from the redoubling of oil prices after the Iranian revolution early in 1979. An unprecedented wave of bankruptcies and strikes had swept the country. The large-scale release of dissidents under the unannounced agreement with Carter during his visit in early July had emboldened Park's critics, especially opposition New Democratic Party leader Kim Young Sam, who began denouncing the government in scathing terms.
On August 11, the government outraged Kim Young Sam and exacerbated its problems when steel-helmeted riot policemen invaded NDP headquarters and dragged out 190 female employees of the bankrupt Y. H. Industrial Company, who had staged a sit-in to enlist public sympathy. A month later, as part of a continuing political struggle, Kim publicly appealed to the United States in a New York Times interview to end its support of Park's "minority dictatorial regime. " In response, on Park's instructions, Kim was expelled from the Korean National Assembly, precipitating the mass resignation of opposition party deputies and plunging the country into a political crisis.
In mid-October antigovernment demonstrations in Kim's home area of Pusan spread from campuses to the rest of the city, prompting the imposition of martial law in Pusan for the first time since Park's muscular imposition of his unchallenged rule in 1972. The Pusan protests, the U.S. Embassy reported to Washington, "probably resulted from a combination of political and economic frustrations including considerable weariness with the Park government and widespread objection to the government's recent heavy-handedness." Massive