The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [87]
The final blow was the approach of the Team Spirit exercise, which under Chun had been built up to a powerful array of about 200,000 U.S. and ROK troops in increasingly realistic-and threatening-military maneuvers south of the DMZ, involving ground, sea, and air forces. Chun's intention in working with the Americans to enlarge Team Spirit, according to a former aide, was to scare the North Koreans. If so, he succeeded, because Pyongyang in most years put its own forces on full alert during the maneuvers, which lasted up to two months, and acted as if it feared a real attack. "Every time the opponent carries out such a maneuver we must take counteractions," Kim Il Sung told Erich Honecker. Citing the need to mobilize large numbers of reservists to supplement regular troops on guard against attack, Kim estimated that these annual mobilization exercises cost the country "one and a half months of working shifts ... a great loss." Beyond the practical considerations, the North Korean leader considered the U.S.-ROK exercises an effort to intimidate him, and he reacted bitterly.
On January 20, Pyongyang issued a joint statement in the name of all its public negotiating teams-economic, Red Cross, and parlia mentary exchange-denouncing this "nuclear war maneuver intended against North Korea" and indefinitely postponing all further discussions. With that, talk of an early summit meeting faded from view.
KIM IL SUNG AND THE SOVIET CONNECTION
The railroad platform at Chongjin, a North Korean seaport city near the Soviet border, was decked out in festive colors as Kim Il Sung boarded a luxurious special train on May 16, 1984, for an eight-day ride to Moscow, with ceremonial stops in Siberia and European Russia. For his first official trip to the Soviet Union since 1961, the Great Leader traveled in imperial fashion, leading a huge entourage of 250 members including bodyguards, interpreters, pretty young female aides and even a masseuse, as well as his prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, and other officials. One railroad car was set aside for Kim's meetings, another for his dinners, still another as his bedroom. At North Korea's request, all other rail traffic near the train was halted to allow his unimpeded passage in the Soviet Union, as had been done decades before when Joseph Stalin traveled. Internal security troops were posted at frequent intervals along the route of thousands of miles in the Soviet Union, after which Kim went on by rail to Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania.
The Soviet Union played a powerful role in North Korea. To a great extent it had created the regime during its occupation of the northern half of the peninsula after the division of the country in 1945. The Soviet Union had selected and installed Kim as North Korea's leader, a selection that may have been made by Stalin himself. Soviet approval and support had been essential to Kim's ill-fated attempt to conquer South Korea in 1950. Materials recently made public from Soviet archives depict a central role for Stalin, suggesting that he personally insisted on continuing the war for well over a year after Kim was ready to seek a negotiated way out. Then, two weeks after Stalin's death, the Soviet leadership reversed his position and issued secret orders to communist negotiators to end the fighting.
Following the Korean War armistice in 1953, Kim remained heavily dependent on the Soviet Union economically and militarily, and he visited Moscow often before the full onslaught, in the early 1960s, of the great schism between the Soviet Union and China. The split between the two giants of international communism, which were also his most important patrons, created enormous problems for Kim, who struggled to keep on good terms