The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [86]
Park and Han established a direct telephone connection between their desks in Seoul and Pyongyang, on which they had frequent conversations. The two met face-to-face a total of forty-two times between May 1985 and November 1991 in a wide variety of places, including Pyongyang, Seoul, Panmunjom, Paektu Mountain in North Korea, Cheju Island in South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere. Some of the meetings lasted as long as five days, but except for a few sightings, most of this diplomacy remained secret.
Chun had repeatedly proposed a summit meeting with Kim Il Sung and recently had said he was willing to meet Kim anywhere in the North, South, or a third country, except for Panmunjom. To advance the summit diplomacy, a five-member North Korean delegation headed by former foreign minister Ho Dam and special envoy Han Se Hae secretly visited the South on September 4-6, 1985, and met Chun Doo Hwan at the private mansion of a Korean industrialist on the outskirts of Seoul. Chun had heard that Kim had seven presidential mansions in the North and wanted to show that luxurious accommodations outside the Blue House were available to him as well. The North Korean emissaries brought a letter from Kim Il Sung to Chun sending "warm regards" and saying "I sincerely hope to see you in Pyongyang." The letter from Kim to the man who had narrowly missed assassination by a North Korean bomb two years earlier ended, "Be well." In the secret talks, the former North Korean foreign minister insisted that the Rangoon killings "had nothing to do with us" and warned that if Pyongyang were required to apologize, it would mean the end of the talks.
The South Korean president spoke at length in the secret discussions about the military situation on the peninsula, including its nuclear dimensions. After taking power in 1980, Chun had decisivelysome say, harshly-shut down the clandestine South Korean nuclear program, dispersing its scientists and engineers, in response to intense American concern about the project. However, he told Ho it would not be technically difficult for either the North or the South to produce nuclear weapons, should it decide to do so. The restraining factor, he declared, was the strong desire of both the Soviet Union and the United States to prevent nuclear wars involving small countries, which inevitably would spread to the great powers. Chun urged that Kim Il Sung, then 73 years old, turn away from conflict so that North-South issues could be resolved while he was still alive.
In a return visit the following month, Chang Se Dong, chief of the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP), the renamed South Korean intelligence agency; senior emissary Park Chul Un; and three others secretly visited the North Korean president. The southerners brought a letter from Chun calling for an early summit meeting "as a shortcut to peace where both of us meet face to face and open hearts to exchange conversation, build up trust and prevent a war." Kim appeared appreciative and friendly, but on the final day of talks, his aides presented their draft of a North-South nonaggression pact, which the southerners considered full of unacceptable rhetoric. The North also demanded, as it had the previous month, that the coming U.S.-ROK military exercise, Team Spirit '86, be called off. The South rejected both proposals.
After the October meeting, the prospects of an early summit meeting between Kim Ii Sung and Chun Doo Hwan rapidly diminished. According to Sohn Jang Nae, who had returned to Seoul as a deputy director of South Korean intelligence, the summit negotiations failed because Chun lacked the strong will to proceed in the face of North Korean demands and bureaucratic rivalries in the South. "The talks bogged down in arguments over details," Sohn said in an interview for this book. An American intelligence official, who was given full access to the transcripts of the talks by Chun's government around the time that they took place, said that the two sides "got tied up in all sorts of linguistic tangles" such as