The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [82]
In fact, no retaliatory action was taken. When President Reagan visited Seoul the following month, he made a point of telling Chun in a private meeting that "we and the whole world admired your restraint in the face of the provocations in Rangoon and over Sakhalin Island [referring to the downing of KAL 007]." Reagan had come from Japan, where he had discussed the Rangoon bombing with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, and told Chun he was pleased to learn that the Japanese were "doing whatever they can to punish the North Koreans." Secretary Shultz informed the ROK government that Washington would lead a worldwide campaign to censure and isolate North Korea in the aftermath of the bombing.
THE NEGOTIATING TRACK
Oddly enough, as the Rangoon bombing plot developed, North Korea was simultaneously pursuing its most important diplomatic initiative toward the South in more than a decade. On October 8, 1983, the day before the bombing, Chinese diplomats passed a message to Washington from North Korea saying for the first time that it would take part in three-way talks with the United States and South Korea to bring peace to the peninsula, accepting Seoul as a full participant. For Pyongyang, this was a major departure from long-standing policies, and it established the basis for much of its diplomacy for the rest of the decade.
It was hardly surprising that Kim Il Sung decided to use the Beijing channel for his initiative toward the United States and South Korea. Since the initial breakthrough between the United States and China in 1971, Beijing had consistently played the role of diplomatic messenger between Washington and Pyongyang. Henry Kissinger had discussed Korea with Chinese premier Chou Enlai or other officials on at least eleven occasions during the Nixon and Ford administrations. In the mid-1970s, Kissinger sought secretly but unsuccessfully to use the Chinese contacts to persuade North Korea to accept the continued presence of American troops in the South "for at least the short term," in return for a commitment "to reduce and ultimately withdraw U.S. forces as the security situation on the peninsula is stabilized."
In the fall of 1983, Kim paved the way for his diplomatic bid with a speech in which he dropped his previously standard condition that the Chun regime be replaced before talks begin. In a conversation with U.S. secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger later that month, Chinese leader Deng Xioaping proposed that the United States and China work together to reduce tension and promote peaceful reunification on the Korean peninsula. Deng said that North Korea had "neither the intention nor the capability" to attack the South but that if the South attacked the North, "China will not be able to stay out." American policy makers may have been mindful of this warning when they insisted that Chun not permit military retaliation for the Rangoon bombing.
In the aftermath of Rangoon, Deng was furious at Pyongyang for staging the bombing immediately after he had passed along Pyongyang's conciliatory diplomatic initiative to the Americans. For weeks afterward, Deng refused to see any North Koreans. The controlled Chinese media did not accept its ally's denials of complicity in the bombing, giving precisely equal treatment to the North Korean denials and the damning official reports from Rangoon.
The overlapping of Pyongyang's peace initiative and Pyongyang's act of bloody terrorism is a puzzle that has never been conclusively solved. Some American and South Korean experts believe the peace offensive was a diversionary tactic aimed at avoiding responsibility for the bombing, had its agents not been caught. Others believe it was undertaken by elements in North Korea that were unaware of the Rangoon plot. Still others suggest that the juxtaposition of such disparate events reflected internal