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:
A photo of Hwang Tae-song released by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, now called the National Intelligence Service, on Sept. 27, 1963. “Spy Hwang Tae-song” is written below. All trials of Hwang were closed to the public. [JoongAng Photo]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.
Shown is former President Park Chung-hee’s house in Shindang-dong, eastern Seoul. The Seoul metropolitan government said on March 16, 2015, it had renovated the house for opening to the public starting the following day. (Yonhap)
In the continuing series of interviews that the Joong Ang Ilbo is publishing with former ROK Prime Minister, this next article describes how he first met former Korean strongman Park Chung-hee:
A 34-year-old Park Chung Hee, far right, a colonel serving as head of the Army intelligence school, poses for a photo with other officials at the military intelligence bureau in Daegu in late 1951. Park was reinstated in the Army in 1950. [JoongAng Photo]Looking back, there was nothing special in my first meeting with Park Chung Hee. But on the cusp of turning 90, when I recall my first encounter with him, it comes back to me vividly.
I began my military career as a commissioned officer assigned to the Army headquarters’ intelligence bureau after I graduated from the military academy in June 1949. I was assigned to a strategy intelligence unit with seven of my fellow graduates. We reported our appointment to Col. Paik Sun-yup, who was director of the intelligence bureau. He said there was one more person we need to report our appointment to in an operations room.
We did as told, reporting for duty to a man dressed in a black suit. The man had a small figure and looked tanned. He smiled shyly as he said in a humble manner, “Hello. I am Park Chung Hee. You don’t need to report for your duties. I am not that important here. Please take a seat.”
I shook hands and sat down. He told me he was stripped of his uniform because he got in trouble, without divulging any details. “I heard you guys graduated at the top of the class from the military academy. Welcome to the unit,” Park said.
Park was working as a civilian officer after his dismissal earlier that year. I had heard his name when I was in the military academy. He was a company commander overseeing military academy cadets. I had also heard that sometime in 1948 he was taken somewhere.
It was only later that I found out that he almost landed on death row for being a member of the outlawed communist Workers Party of South Korea tasked with recruiting party members. A military court spared his life in February 1949 by giving him a suspended jail term. Shortly after his release, he had no choice but to leave the Army. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more about Kim Jong-pil’s interactions with Park Chung-hee at the link such as this nugget that is was famed Korean general Paik Sun-yup that worked to get Park Chun-hee’s death sentenced revoked.
Former Korean Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil has his second tell-all interview published in the Joong Ang Ilbo which discusses the details before the 1961 military coup led by Park Chung-hee:
Former President Park Chung Hee, third from left, then-chairman of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, made his first official inspection of the main spy agency, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, which is now called the National Intelligence Service, on Jan. 20, 1962, accompanied by agency chief Kim Jong-pil, far left. Provided by Kim Jong-pil’s secretary’s office
I asked my wife to bring me military uniforms on the night of May 14, 1961. It was a cocky color uniform that I was stripped of three months earlier for demanding the dismissals of military leaders [for corruption and incompetence]. I was forcibly discharged from the military as a result. The next morning, I was about to embark on a journey wearing this uniform – not knowing whether I would make it back home.
I was overwhelmed by a feeling I couldn’t even describe. On a fine spring day, I was determined to put my life on the line to make the revolution successful. I was so filled with a sense of determination that I was ready to sacrifice my life.
I was only 35 and yet my mind bore a maturity from having experienced Japan’s 36-year-colonial rule on the peninsula, a bitter division of the Korean Peninsula and the subsequent 1950-53 Korean War, which I went through as a military official. And yet, I was heavy-hearted because I could lose everything, including my life.
I spent the two previous nights staying awake writing. It was a composition in which I poured my whole life into. It was a declaration of promises by the revolution to the nation.
It was a set of promises declaring the demise of old rules and the establishment of new ones. I kept repeating a saying to myself: “History is not to be read but to be written.”
I was known as a good writer by many at the time. But it took me two days to finish the fateful declaration.
A year earlier, students took to the streets for the April 19 revolution. But that stopped short of fixing the social ills brought in by the ruling Liberty Party under the Syngman Rhee government [Korea’s first elected government]. The Chang Myon administration, which took power following the collapse of the Rhee administration, was utterly incompetent in managing state affairs.
It did not govern the country in a way that would liberate it from chaos and the damages caused by the Korean War. The military, the cornerstone of national security, was ridden with corruption but showed no sign of shame. A wave of student-led protests filled the streets nationwide and the civilian government just stood by.
A sense of chaos and confusion consumed the country. In June 1960, police officers organized a rally against the government. In March of the following year, citizens in Daegu took to the streets carrying torches demanding the repeal of anti-Communist laws. University students organized a rally at Seoul Stadium calling on the authorities to arrange a meeting of students from Seoul and Pyongyang.
All of this was happening less than 10 years after the Korean War, which left the country in total ruins. I was getting more and more anxious every day. A majority of the public felt the same way and hoped for decisive change. Painful memories of the war had faded into oblivion, putting national security at grave risk. But I was not one of those who forgot the pains of the war. I lost half of my fellow 1,300 military academy schoolmates during the war. I was growing firmer in my belief that I could not let incompetent and corrupt politicians govern the country anymore – that I must bring an end to this.
Before moving into action, I concentrated all of my strength to the tip of a pen. I was reminded of a maxim by Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who said, “Life is too short to be little,” which impressed me deeply in my late teens. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but it is incredible how much history Kim Jong-pil was part of dating all the way back to the Japanese colonization of Korea to where the country is today.
