The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [85]
The mid-1980s secret diplomacy began on the day after Christmas 1984, when a tall, urbane Korean who had lived in the United States for many years sat down to a four-hour meeting and luncheon with Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. Channing Liem, who at 74 was two years older than the Great Leader, had been South Korean delegate to the United Nations under the short-lived reform government that was toppled by the 1961 military coup. After the coup he became a political science professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a vocal critic of the Park regime. Liem had previously visited Pyongyang in 1977 as a private citizen. This time, however, he came as an emissary of South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan, recruited for the task by Sohn Jang Nae, the activist intelligence chief in the ROK Embassy in Washington who had played a key role in negotiating Chun's triumphal visit to Reagan (and who had arranged my earlier meeting with Chun).
In his discussion with Liem, Kim Il Sung agreed to explore a North-South summit. The following week, Kim used his annual New Year's message to the Korean people to make an unusual endorsement of North-South dialogue, saying that success in the ongoing rounds of lower-level public talks could lead gradually to higher-level talks and "culminate in high-level political negotiations between North and South."
The meeting with Liem was unpublicized and known only to senior echelons in North and South. But the very next day, in one of those incidents that suggest pulling and hauling in influential circles in Pyongyang, Nodong Sinmun, the Workers Party newspaper, carried an oblique and, at the time, puzzling attack on accommodation with the South. "Sacrifice" and "struggle" are the keys to the victory of the revolution, said the paper, arguing that those who retreat from this road "in fear of being sacrificed" will inevitably "surrender" or become "turncoats."
In Seoul, the secret meeting with Kim whetted the appetite of those few who were aware of it. This was especially true of Chang Se Dong, another former general and chief presidential bodyguard who became director of the ROK intelligence apparatus in February 1985. With the confidential contacts with the North beginning to show promise, he took them under his direct control.
To aid him in this delicate work, Chang in March 1985 brought in a rising young star from the Blue House staff, the 42-year-old presidential secretary for political affairs, Park Chul Un. Park soon became the South's most energetic practitioner of secret diplomacy, not only in North Korea but in Hungary, the Soviet Union, and other countries as well, eventually earning acclaim in the Seoul newspapers as "the Korean Henry Kissinger." Park was bright, having graduated from Seoul National University Law School at the top of his class, and also well connected, being a cousin of the wife of General Roh Tae Woo, Chun's classmate, comrade, and eventual successor. Bold and ambitious-traits in short supply among South Korea's cautious senior bureaucrats-Park quickly made contact with senior figures in the North.
Within a short time, Park was authorized by Chun and later by Roh to be the South Korean secret channel to the North. His counterpart in Pyongyang was Han Se Hae, a 50-year-old graduate of Kim Il Sung University who had taken part in the Red Cross talks in 1972 under an assumed name and subsequently was vice minister of foreign affairs and DPRK ambassador at the United Nations. A fluent English speaker who was considered one of the North's most urbane and accomplished diplomats, Han became attached to the staff of the Central Committee of the Workers Party to pursue