Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

General Park’s associate in the 1961 coup was General Kim Jong-pil, who proceeded with the help of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to create the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in order to consolidate Park’s military rule. The KCIA was and is a secret-police apparatus accountable only to the president of South Korea and has been used over the years to silence any and all calls for a genuine democracy. As the historian Perry Anderson observes, “In the mid-sixties the KCIA had 350,000 agents out of a population of 30 million, dwarfing the NKVD at its height. The dungeons were filled with opponents of every kind; torture was routine. Yet the regime, which as a front line of the Free World could not dispense with the formality of elections, was never able to crush opposition completely.”⁸

Despite Park’s unquestioned success in overseeing the rapid industrialization of South Korea, his draconian methods and the great inequities of wealth they produced led to opposition to his rule. In the 1971 elections, the dissident leader Kim Dae-jung, who would finally become president in December 1997 and who is from Mokpo, in the same South Cholla region as Kwangju, almost defeated Park. As a result, Park changed the constitution. He ended direct election of the president, allowed the president to be indefinitely reelected, and gave the president the authority to nominate one-third of the National Assembly (the organ that would reelect him). Throughout the 1970s, the KCIA enforced this new “Yushin” constitution (the Korean pronunciation of the Japanese word meaning “restoration”) while Park continued to move the country toward an industrialization that favored steel, shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and manufacturing rather than labor-intensive light industries.

Although many economists criticized his new economic initiatives, Park’s intention, not unlike that of the Stalinists in Eastern Europe, was to create the industrial foundations for South Korea’s own national defense. He deemed this necessary in view of the probable defeat of the United States in Vietnam and its possible withdrawal from Asia. He was, after all, a nationalist and an anti-Communist who did not want the United States to call all the shots when it came to protecting his country. Nixon’s opening to China worried him as much as anything the North Koreans did.

By 1979, Park’s economic “miracle” in South Korea was considered irreversible. His harsh policies nonetheless continued to elicit student protests, riots, and labor disturbances. On October 16, 1979, over dinner, his KCIA chief, Kim Jae-kyu, pulled out a pistol and shot first Park’s bodyguard and then Park himself, allegedly to end his repression of the people. Park’s assassination seriously destabilized South Korea and afforded North Korea the most propitious circumstances it had encountered since 1953 to renew the civil war. Yet North Korea did nothing. In South Korea, the United States was suspected of having ordered Park’s death, because the assassin was the chief channel of communication between the U.S. government and Park and because it was widely believed that the United States had grown tired of Park’s nascent independence.

In a secret cable to Washington, the American ambassador to Seoul, William J. Gleysteen, denied that he had ever so much as hinted to Kim Jae-kyu that his government was exasperated with Park. But the Americans did have one clear motive for wanting to be rid of him: as part of his efforts to ensure a South Korean victory in any new war with the North, Park had launched a program to build his own nuclear weapons, which the United States opposed. According to the prominent Seoul daily Jungang Ilbo, his target date for having deployable bombs was 1985.⁹ Park’s death stopped the program in its tracks. The United States and South Korea had feuded over nuclear research since the mid-1970s, and the United States has never cooperated with South Korea on atomic-power development, as it has with Japan.¹⁰ In response to Park’s initiative, North Korea also began to build its own nuclear strike force, a program that did not stop with Park’s death. By the 1990s, the possibility that the North might develop nuclear weapons had become a major source of instability in the area.