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

Our understanding of what happened next in the South Korea of late 1979 owes a great deal to the efforts of an American journalist, Tim Shorrock, who was raised in Seoul as the child of American missionaries. Shorrock has used the Freedom of Information Act to sue the U.S. government, forcing it to divulge some two thousand diplomatic and military cables concerning Korea to and from the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1979 and 1980. The documents still contain huge blacked-out areas, and a complete opening of U.S. secret files certainly has not occurred. Most of the cables are from a secret policy-making group that the Carter administration set up ten days after the assassination of Park Chung-hee. Its members were President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador Gleysteen, and the top intelligence official at the National Security Council, Donald Gregg. Vance gave this group the code name Cherokee.¹¹

As revealed in these documents, the primary goal of the United States was to keep South Korea from turning into “another Iran.” Toward this goal, the Americans were quite prepared to see General Park replaced by a new, perhaps more malleable general who would effectively suppress the rising calls for democracy that might prove “destabilizing.”

Martial law and an interim government under former diplomat Choi Kyu-hah followed Park’s death. Choi came up with a plan to spend twenty months writing a new constitution that would guide South Korea from authoritarian to democratic rule. This would put off political reform for a suitably long time. Washington backed the plan despite warnings that ordinary Koreans could not possibly remain politically patient for longer than a year. The extended hiatus in political leadership gave an unknown major general in the army, Chun Doo-hwan, time to prepare his own seizure of power. On December 12, 1979, General Chun, then in charge of defense intelligence at Republic of Korea (ROK) military headquarters, withdrew the 9th Army Division, whose commandant, General Roh Tae-woo, was his co-conspirator, from the demilitarized zone with North Korea and used it to assume control over the rest of the armed forces. These military movements were undertaken without formal approval from General John Wickham, the U.N. commander, but there is every reason to believe that he had been informed and assented to them. The following May, General Wickham readily gave Chun permission to use the 20th Division in the final assault against Kwangju, and at General Chun’s trial fifteen years later his main defense was that all his actions in 1979 and 1980 had been explicitly approved by Washington.

Ambassador Gleysteen’s characterization in the Cherokee cables of what happened is accurate enough: “We have been through a coup in all but name. The flabby façade of civilian constitutional government remains but almost all signs point to a carefully planned takeover of the military power positions by a group of ‘young Turk’ officers. Major General Chun Doo-hwan, advantaged by his powers of security and investigation, seems the most important figure of a group of men who were very close to President Park. . . . The organizing group planned its actions for at least ten days and drew support throughout the armed forces among younger officers.” Gleysteen was concerned that General Chun had “totally ignored the Combined Forces Command’s responsibilities, either ignoring the impact on the United States or coolly calculating that it would not make any difference.” “At the same time,” he added, “I do not think we should treat the new military hierarchy as so bad that we decide to risk seriously alienating them.” A few days after the coup, Gleysteen wrote, “Whatever the precise pattern of events, they did not amount to a classical coup because the existing government structure was technically left in place.” And at the end of December, he added hopefully, “If the new leaders handle themselves with moderation, there may be no violent repercussions.” (These quotations are all from Shorrock’s documents.)

As the administrator of the martial law then in effect, Chun became the de facto ruler of the country. He had to move carefully, however, because he lacked legitimacy within the South Korean legal system and because he could not be certain that all of the armed forces were behind him. Not unlike the “thaw” in Eastern Europe in 1956, there was widespread anticipation that the next election, whose date had not yet been set, would usher in the democracy that had failed to develop after the overthrow of Syngman Rhee in 1960.