Tag: Hwang Tae-song

Here is another interesting story from the former ROK Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil who served in the Korean government through some of its most interesting times in the country’s modern history.  Here is another interesting story he tells of how a North Korean spy came to South Korea on a mission believed to be from Kim Il-sung to meet with him or Park Chung-hee:

This is the latest in a series of articles on the life and times of Kim Jong-pil, a two-time prime minister, based on extensive interviews with the 89-year-old.It was just past 3 a.m. on Oct. 15, 1961, when I received a phone call from my mother-in-law. Picking up the phone, I had a sense of foreboding. Calls at that time of the morning are rarely good news.

“Something bad has happened,” my mother-in-law, Jo Gui-bun, murmured without elaborating.

I urged her to tell me what was going on.

“I don’t think you know about him. There’s a man named Hwang Tae-song, a friend of your father-in-law’s. He went up to North Korea before the war and now he is back here in the South. He asked me to arrange a meeting with you and Park Chung Hee.” To her, Park, then-Chairman for the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, was a brother in-law.

I could sense the anxiety in her voice. It was understandable given the high sensitivity of the matter. She was calling from the Gumi Police Precinct using an emergency phone line. The head of the precinct let her use the phone knowing that her son-in-law was the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

I tried to calm her down.

I had never heard of Hwang Tae-song before. I had no idea how or why he made his way to her in the South and why he wanted to meet Park and me. There were many questions about him I had to find out right away using all of my resources as the top man at the intelligence agency.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link, but I was curious to whatever happened to Hwang Tae-song and discovered this article from the venerable Andrei Lankov that explains how Kim Il-sung thought that since Park Chung-hee was an authoritarian that he may be more amiable than his predecessors with cooperating with North Korea.  Hwang was sent to arrange a summit between Kim and Park followed by a gradual easing of tensions.  Instead of meeting with Hwang, Park had him arrested, tried, and shot as a spy.  Park wanted to erase any doubts about his own communist past and Hwang simply became the perfect example for him to show his US allies that he was all in against communism.