The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [80]
The first public revelation of the fate of KAL 007 came not from Seoul but from Washington, where Secretary of State George Shultz grimly announced that a Soviet fighter plane had shot down the airliner. Shultz called this "an appalling act" for which there was no excuse. President Reagan in subsequent statements called the action a "massacre," an "atrocity," and a "crime against humanity." The Soviet Union initially denied destroying the plane but later admitted it and justified the action on grounds that the airliner had violated its "sacred" borders on an espionage mission concocted by the United States and its South Korean ally.*
The shooting down of KAL 007, whose passengers were predominantly Koreans and Americans, soon became a white-hot issue in international politics. It drove U.S.-Soviet relations to new depths of tension at a moment when relations were already extremely tense due to the imminent deployment of American missiles in Europe. For a time, it also slowed progress toward healing the breach between the Soviet Union and South Korea, which bitterly denounced the destruction of its airliner. Prior to the shootdown, the Soviet government, over the passionate objections of the North Koreans, had for the first time quietly decided to permit Soviet trading companies to deal with South Korean firms through third parties. In a bolder move, a delegation of Soviet parliamentarians had been preparing to travel to Seoul to participate in the International Parliamentary Union convention when KAL 007 was shot down. Due to the international furor, the trip was canceled. For the time being, the warming of Soviet-South Korean ties was put on a back burner.
A second severe shock to South Korea came little more than a month later, on October 9, 1983, during the state visit of President Chun Doo Hwan to Rangoon, Burma. At the ceremonial beginning of the visit, the best and the brightest of the South Korean government stood side-by-side in the Martyr's Mausoleum at the National Cemetery, awaiting the Chun's arrival for a wreath-laying in honor of Burma's founder. Some of the Korean officials were chatting, and a few were standing with their hands by their sides, looking off in the distance. The Korean ambassador had arrived ahead of the president in his official car, with its ROK flag flapping in the breeze, and an anxious Burmese trumpeter was practicing his part in the ceremony to follow.
At that moment, North Korean army major Zin Mo, mistaking the ambassador's arrival and the bugler's call as the start of the wreath-laying ceremony, detonated a powerful bomb that he and two North Korean army captains had planted two days previously in the roof of the mausoleum. In the thunderous explosion, four members of the South Korean cabinet, two senior presidential advisers, and the ambassador to Burma were blown to bits by shrapnel and deadly steel pellets. Among those killed were Foreign Minister Lee Bum Suk, who as chief of the South Korean Red Cross delegation had welcomed and hosted the North Koreans in Seoul in September 1972; Presidential Secretary General Hahm Pyong Choon, former ROK ambassador to Washington and a leading foreign-policy intellectual; and Presidential Secretary Kim Jae Ik, an architect of South Korea's economic development. Due to his delayed arrival, Chun himself escaped injury.
Before the explosion, reclusive Burma and reclusive North Korea, each pursuing a distinctive brand of Asian socialism, had been the best of friends. High-level visits had been exchanged, and Burma had supported North Korean positions at the United Nations. This collegiality was put aside in Burma's fury and embarrassment over the deaths of seventeen visiting South Koreans and four Burmese at the nation's most revered ceremonial site. Burmese police quickly apprehended the North Korean military officers responsible for the deed. One of the North Koreans, Captain Kang Min Chul, made a full confession, which exposed the elaborate planning in Pyongyang that had gone into the attack.
Despite its earlier friendship and its neutralist