The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [66]
Given Washington's well-known unhappiness with Park's policies, there was immediate speculation among conspiracy-minded Koreans and some Americans that the United States had had a hand in the assassination, especially when the news of Park's death was reported by American news agencies from Washington, following the afternoon White House meeting, before it was officially announced in Seoul, where it was still in the middle of the night. Nearly a month after the assassination, Gleysteen reported in a cable to Washington that suspicion of U.S. complicity persisted in Korea, but that "I have checked with Dick Sneider [his predecessor] and can state flatly that neither of us ever signalled to Kim Jae Kyu or any other Korean that we thought the Park government's days were numbered or that we would condone Park's removal from office." In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, James V. Young, assistant military attache at the U.S. Embassy, reviewed the previous intelligence reporting and cable messages in embassy files and found nothing that indicated any physical danger to Park.
A more difficult question is whether the American clashes with Park over the withdrawal of American troops, the Koreagate scandal, and human rights abuses had weakened the Korean president in a way that contributed to his demise. Kim Kyung Won, who was special assistant to Park for international affairs, pointed out that the KCIA had full access to the barrage of negative information about Park in the U.S. administration, Congress, the press, and elsewhere. "It is not implausible to me that [KCIA Director Kim] may have convinced himself that if he got rid of this Park Chung Hee, then his action would be welcome," the former aide said. Gleysteen, while convinced that the KCIA director's violent act resulted from madness of some kind, also believes that American behavior inadvertently fed it. Kim Jae Kyu, who had been the interlocuter with Americans on human rights issues during the Carter visit and at other times, "misread us," said Gleysteen. "He thought we saw him as kind of a guy in a white hat. In a way we did, but we saw him as the KCIA director, a white hat on a black head. And I think that contributed to his crazy decision."
Immediately after the killings, Kim Jae Kyu met Army Chief of Staff Chung and tried to persuade him to join him at KCIA headquarters and declare martial law, although the assassin did not disclose that he had killed the president. Instead Chung convened a meeting at Korean military headquarters, in which Kim participated-again without disclosing his role in the president's death. The truth came out when the other surviving principal from the fatal dinner, the chief of the Blue House secretariat, Kim Kye Won, finally turned up several hours later. At that point, the KCIA-chief-turned-assassin was arrested. He was later found guilty of murder and executed, along with his aides who had killed the president's bodyguards.
An emergency cabinet meeting named Prime Minister Choi Kyu Ha, a soft-spoken former diplomat, acting president as specified in Park's yushin law constitution. With American concurrence, martial law was declared over most of the country, and Army Chief of Staff Chung was named martial-law commander.
In Pyongyang, two days after Park's assassination, Kim Il Sung addressed a military meeting, drawing a stark contrast between South Korea, "one half of our territory ... under the occupation of the U.S. imperialists and reactionaries, landlords and capitalists," and the DPRK, where "our people are enjoying a happy life to the full, without any worries about food, clothing, medical treatment and education." Kim announced, "There is no better `paradise' and no better `land of perfect bliss' than our country. Our country is truly a socialist paradise." While approving the