Gusts Of Popular Feeling

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.

A number of books were released in the early 2000s which were either focused on the Kwangju Uprising or on US-ROK relations. Among them were The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, edited by Henry Scott-Stokes and Lee Jae Eui, Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising by Linda Lewis, and Ryu Shimin and Jung Sangyong’s Memories of May 1980: A Documentary History of the Kwangju Uprising in Korea.

In 1997 a book which collected accounts by foreign journalists of the Kwangju Uprising, titled Kwangju in the Eyes of the World: The Personal Recollections of the Foreign Correspondents Covering the Kwangju Uprising, was published. It can be read here. Most of these accounts later appeared, alongside accounts by Korean journalists, in The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, which was published in 2000. One account which did not was that of Henry Scott-Stokes, titled "An Observer Reports: Kwangju & U.S. Moral Responsibility." Stokes ended up playing a role as a the conduit of a request from the student leader Yun Sang-won to US Ambassador Gleysteen to mediate a settlement, though, as mentioned previously, Yun did not expect this to happen, and made the request to buoy the spirits of the others in the provincial hall so they would make a last stand with him:

Would we go to Ambassador Bill Gleysteen in Seoul with a request for him to halt the violence and declare a truce? That was the Spokesman's request that afternoon to us three, as earlier that day to Brad. I was deeply unhappy about this and I still am. A reporter is not supposed to become the story. On the other hand, how could such an appeal not be transmitted? I decided that I would do it via my story--my editors would have the last say in New York, when they received my piece which, I now saw, Jae would have to carry out of the city and dictate to Seoul (all phone lines out of Kwangju had been cut off). I would remain in Kwangju without Jae. This was, at the best, an unpalatable course of action. On the other hand if I had phoned Gleysteen myself, he or anyone who took the call would be unable to act immediately, as officials. They would not know who they were dealing with in Kwangju. And, meanwhile, the feeling in the air in Kwangju that after- noon was that the city and its few armed students--tank-less, artillery-less, machine gun-less, helmet-less--was there for the taking, whenever Chun decided it. These people I was talking to had their lives on the line. And I was not finding a way to help them.

Sometime about 5 pm that afternoon we finished our meeting, I finished my story and Jae and Philippe departed. I was left to fend for myself, Jae having found me a guesthouse about 200 yards down a narrow street from the students. [...] At one point in the evening, about 8 p.m., there was a great clumping of boots in the corridor outside my room and one of the students appeared. He was clad in uniform, without a hat. He was thickset, a rugby player build. But the innkeeper, the man in charge, popped up and led him away. He had come, if I understood the innkeeper's poor English, to make one more appeal to me to get to Gleysteen--I couldn't do that--or somehow intervene in the situation.

He also noted the role he and the New York Times played in the events leading to Park Chung-hee's assassination:

My NYT coverage of the Kwangju period--and before it for a year and after it for two years--is open to criticism on the grounds that I neglected security issues. Seventeen years later, I see that. We appear to have helped to stir up trouble, as a newspaper.

An interview that Jae and I did with Kim Young Sam in the early autumn of l979 led to his expulsion from the National Assembly. Need we have been so provocative? Mr. Kim's expulsion was followed by the outbursts of violence in Pusan and Masan that preceded the assassination of President Park. I had helped to raise the temperature. Some in Korea felt that we had stirred up emotions--our reports were immediately relayed back to Korea by phone by Korean Americans in the U.S.--and that we were (not so indirectly) responsible for Park Chung Hee's demise. There were repercussions.

He also commented on the incorrect intelligence the US Embassy was getting.

My concern at this point--and I may be in a tiny minority of querulous press people--is that the U.S. Embassy in Seoul was badly informed, both at the time of Kwangju and before and after. If you read Bill Gleysteen's dispatches to the State Department from Seoul, which we can now as they were declassified, you can see that at crucial moments he got the situation right the first time round only to muddy the waters shortly afterwards.
[...]
Immediately after the events of May l8-l9 in Kwangju, Gleysteen reported to Washington that Korean troops had been bayoneting civilians on the streets. Correct. This was the issue. Yet within days--and just before a crucial May 22nd meeting was held at the White House to decide policy on Kwangju--Gleysteen changed the whole weight of his reporting to emphasize how the situation was unraveling, and how by implication a threat existed to the whole body politic in South Korea. l50,000 people were on the loose. Property was being destroyed. Here was a hopelessly inaccurate picture of Kwangju by that time, judging by what I and other journalists saw down there.

If the last two paragraphs highlight once again the role incorrect intelligence offered by the ROK military to the US played in the ending of the uprising, the previous two paragraphs highlighted the role an American journalist played in these events, reminding us that of the various roles played by Americans beyond the US government.

If I had to recommend only one book about the Kwangju Uprising, Linda Lewis’ 2002 book Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising would likely be the one. A former Peace Corps volunteer who was doing ethnography in Kwangju as a graduate student in 1980, she witnessed the uprising, and her book examined how the uprising unfolded and how it has been memorialized. On a number of occasions in the book she commented on the expectation that the US would intervene (looked at here) and on how she was in regular contact with David Miller, the head of the American Cultural Center (ACC, also known as US Information Service, or USIS), and was passing on information to him (and he to her), but her homestay ‘father’ didn’t believe he was reporting to the US Embassy, because otherwise the US would have been intervening to stop the bloodshed.

The Embassy first learned of the situation in Kwangu from Miller on the morning of May 19 “when he told of reports that the paratroopers were responsible for numerous casualties and even some deaths,” but because this contrasted with the atmosphere in Seoul and contradicted the assertions of Martial Law Command and Korean government officials, the Embassy assumed Miller must be exaggerating. As well, “Miller's information was scanty because he was ordered, for security reasons, to remain indoors” and ofﬁcial Korean sources “either denied there was any particular problem in Kwangju or downplayed the seriousness of events there.”

As Lewis put it,

The apparent outlandishness of the hearsay, suppositions, and allegations about the paratroopers that ﬂew about in those ﬁrst days mirrored the incomprehensibility of what people saw taking place around them. Even to those who experienced it, the savagery was unbelievable. And if the vision of a soldier bayoneting a student on Kŭmnamno was beyond the imagination of my [homestay] ajumŏni, who witnessed it with her own eyes, how could such a story be credible to her fellow countrymen in Seoul - or, for that matter, be a realistic, even probable, scenario in the minds of the chronically out-of-touch diplomats in the U.S. Embassy?

After the uprising, she documented the international attention Kwangju was receiving:

I saw a rather constant ﬂow of visitors to Kwangju throughout the summer and early fall [of 1980]: journalists, human rights activists, representatives of church groups, Korean specialists, assorted friends, and even a professor of mine from Columbia University - all, in one way or another, with their own agendas concerning 5.18.

As she noted, however, while “most of us in the foreign community who had been in Kwangju in May felt an obligation to bear witness to what we had seen and to what we knew had happened,” “many of those who made the pilgrimage to Kwangju that summer came with their own ideas about the meaning of 5.18 and already knew what they wanted to hear.” As she wrote in her field journal on October 10, “I’m tired of ﬁnding things out [for people], then being treated like the information wasn’t important.” When people did not like what foreign witnesses told them, they tended to dismiss the informant. “The problem was particularly acute with reporters and with anyone connected with the U.S. government.” On October 2, she stopped by the ACC and found, as she wrote in her field journal, that

Val [the new Center director] was feeling really blue - she had had some bigwigs [US Embassy officials] down the day before from Seoul. She had some [Korean] staff over for dinner, and the bigwigs said - so what do people down here think? At which point, they got honest answers. Of course, all the Kwangjuites were accused of being emotional, too involved, etc. Val was quite disillusioned. Well, welcome to the club - it is hard being from here. People pump you, then when they don’t agree, make you feel like shit. She should have been here through the incident; then she’d really know what it felt like to be an overwrought, unobjective source. Of course, embassy personnel are beyond belief. ... I wonder if the people in Iran [in the US Embassy] were as deserving candidates for their fate as the people here would be, should a similar event take place.

Lewis's voice is similar to a number of Americans who were in Kwangju, including missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, who worked in the 1980s to highlight the human rights abuses in South Korea. As missionary Martha Huntley put it, “I wanted to share how our missionary work of 16 years in Korea had taken a radical turn, to explain that my husband, Betts, and I had not so much ‘become involved in human rights’ as we had been trapped in a situation of human wrong.” “We have seen too much, we have hurt too much to be silent.” She elaborated further:

When your friends and Christian coworkers are carted off to jail as ours have been, when your neighbors and your students are shot in front of your eyes as ours have been, when you attend 24 funerals in a single day as I have done - you are involved. This involvement is not politics; it is gospel. As eyewitnesses, we feel it is urgent that we share what we have seen and experienced. There is no way our government can respond properly if it doesn’t have the facts; neither can our church work or pray properly if it doesn't know the truth.

One other story Lewis related was that of the above-mentioned new director of the ACC, Valerie Steenson, who had planned to host a dinner for a number of local professors and civic leaders in late July 1980 but was forced to cancel it because most of the people on the guest list had been arrested.

Gathering facts and figures from official investigations like the 1988-89 National Assembly Hearings into the Kwangju Uprising, Ryu Shimin and Jung Sangyong’s Memories of May 1980: A Documentary History of the Kwangju Uprising in Korea is an invaluable source for anyone wanting to understand the uprising, but its treatment of American involvement in the uprising suffers from use of questionable sources.

Arguing that “the new military group succeeded in drawing cooperation from the U.S. government to justify the armed subjugation of the Kwangju Uprising,” it quoted two American press releases from May 22. The first was the State Department’s:

The United States expresses deep concern with regard to the revolt in Kwangju in southern Korea and urges all parties to seek peaceful solutions through maximum self-restraint and dialogue. Outside forces may make dangerous misjudgments if the condition of insecurity prevails and the violence continues to be heated. The government of the United States reemphasizes that, based on the obligations the Mutual Defense Treaty between the ROK and the U.S., it will react strongly to any attempts by outside forces to take advantage of the current situation in Korea.

If phrases like “continues to be heated” sound awkward, it is because the source cited is not an English language source but a Donga Ilbo article from May 22. Oddly enough, this immediately follows numerous examples listed in the book of the way in which the military-censored media was distorting the situation in Kwangju. While caution should be exercised when using translations of censored Korean newspapers as sources (since, censorship issues aside, it was translated into Korean before being translated back into English), in this case the report as it appeared on the front page of the Donga Ilbo on May 23 – along with 2 other articles about the US - does include all the main points of the English press release, though the line “When calm has been restored, we will urge all parties to seek means to resume a program of political development as outlined by President Choi” appears separate from the rest of the text, which could be why it does not appear in the book (as excerpted above).

The book, however, quotes another statement printed in the May 22 Donga Ilbo, asserting that Department of Defense spokesman Thomas Ross stated: “Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command and the ROK/US Combined Forces Command John Wickham has accepted and agreed to the request by the Korean government to allow the use of certain selected Korean armed forces under his operational control in operations to subdue the crowds,” and also said, “No movement or evidence has been found of an attempt by the North Korean army to take advantage of the current situation in South Korea.”

A line like “to subdue the crowds” is clearly another English to Korean to English translation, with the Korean version appearing in this article. According to the May 23 Baltimore Sun, it originally read, “Thomas B. Ross, the Defense Department spokesman, said Gen. John A. Wickham, the American in charge of joint US-South Korean forces, had agreed to the withdrawal of some Korean units from his command for riot control. They were not front line units, Mr. Ross reported, therefore no gap was left in defences at the border with North Korea. Nor had American units been placed on increased alert.”

In both the original, where it stated that Wickham had “agreed to the withdrawal of some Korean units from his command for riot control,” and the Korean version, which stated that Wickham was “allow[ing] the use of certain selected Korean armed forces under his operational control in operations to subdue the crowds,” the sentences are paraphrases of Ross’s statement, but the authors of Memories of May 1980 turned this reported speech into a direct quotation, which is, to say the least, irresponsible.

Moving on, the book then states that at the White House meeting on May 22, it was decided to dispatch planes from Okinawa and the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea to Korea to deter possible military action by North Korea. This is incorrect, however. According to this summary of the meeting, the AWACS planes arrived before the meeting took place, and no decision was made about the USS Coral Sea until after the meeting. It then asks:

Why did the U.S. administration, "with no evidence whatsoever of an attempt by North Korea to take advantage of the political instability in South Korea,” not mention a single word about the causes of the Kwangju incident, but instead "agree to the use of" the 20th Division "under the operational control” of the Combined Forces Command to ”subdue the crowds” …?

A muddled question, particularly considering a) the 20th Division was not under CFC OPCON at all at that time, and b) on May 22 Ross was not talking about the 20th Division at all but about other units which Wickham had agreed to withdraw from CFC OPCON - namely two regiments from the 30th Division for use in Kwangju (though they were never actually sent there), and two regiments of Marines who were to be used in Daegu and Busan.

It then turned to the 1989 White Paper’s explanation of how withdrawing units from CFC OPCON worked, including the sentence “In the event of notification, the Commander of the Combined Forces Command can neither approve nor disapprove, but can only point out the effect such removal.” What follows is this response:

However, this is an obvious lie. It is recorded in an operations document dated May 16, 1980, regarding a request to transfer the operational control of the 20th Division, that when the Army Chief of Staff requested the Commander of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command to transfer the operational control of the 20th Division “to maintain order in the metropolitan area where the riots have been aggravated,” the Commander of the Combined Forces Command confirmed receipt of the request document and stated: “Your request is approved.” The new military group naturally made an inquiry on this matter to the Combined Forces Command as it dispatched the 20th Division, not to the metropolitan area, but to Kwangju. However, this was an inquiry on the transfer of units, not a notiﬁcation to remove operational control.

Though the book quoted from the 1989 White Paper twice, the authors somehow missed this statement:

Also on May 16, military authorities notified CFC officials of their intent to remove the 20th Division's artillery and its 60th Regiment from CFC OPCON. The CFC received the Martial Law Command'S OPCON retrieval notification while General Wickham was in the United States on official duties. CFC Deputy Commander, Korean four-star General Baek Sok Chu, responded for the CFC[.]

While it is interesting that General Baek responded with “Your request is approved,” it was not written by Wickham. Withdrawal of units from CFC OPCON had only been used twice before this in October 1979: First to subdue the Busan-Masan uprising and then after Park’s assassination. It would be worthwhile to see the terminology used in the previous notifications. The authors also do not state whether “Your request is approved” was written in English or Korean (something worth noting considering their use of Korean-language versions of US statements that appeared in the censored media). Another request was made at this time, however, when Wickham would have been present:

The falsity of the U.S. administration's claims is also apparent in a separate instance where the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command released one battalion of the 33rd Division from its operational control clearly for the suppression of the uprising in Kwangju. On May 23 the Army Chief of Staff sent a military cooperation telegram to the Commander of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command requesting the transfer of the operational control of one battalion of the 33rd Division by noon on May 23 “in preparation for an escalation of the riot and for the maintenance of order in the Kwangju region.” In response, the Commander of the Combined Forces Command immediately sent a telegram to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Army Chief of Staff “approving the request to transfer the operational control of one battalion of the 33rd Division.”

The unit was ultimately never sent to Kwangju. Again, the source used (Army Headquarters, “Army Reference Material,” (operations orders and directions), Army Headquarters Chaksangjon No. 0-232) begs the question of what language it was in.

The book goes on to quote from the White Paper about the US deciding that use of the 20th Division would be preferable to use of the SWC troops if negotiations to bring about a peaceful resolution failed, and its comments on terminology, to which the book responds:

The explanation by the U.S. administration is mere sophistry and nothing more than a play on words. The U.S. government confounded the issue of releasing the 20th Division from its operational control with the issue of the 20th Division, already released from its operational control, moving to Kwangju to suppress the Kwangju Uprising in spite of the original goal of “maintaining order in the metropolitan area,” and patched this up as a matter of terminology. On May 16 General Wickham received a request to release the 20th Division from the operational control of the Combined Forces Command and approved the release. Then, ‘asked’ on the 20th whether the 20th Division could be dispatched to Kwangju for riot-suppression operations, unlike the original purpose, he agreed “after consulting with his own superiors in Washington.” Moreover, they claimed to have stated that it would be preferable to replace the Special Warfare Command units with elements of the 20th Division if “negotiations failed,” but this is merely a cunning lie fabricated to evade responsibility, since it was only slaughter by paratroopers, not negotiations, that was sweeping the streets of Kwangju until the night of the 20th when Major General Pak Chun-byong received orders to move to Kwangju; and since the evacuation of the airborne forces was decided only on the morning of the 21st.

Amid the “mere sophistry” and “cunning lie[s],” the authors ignore (again) that Wickham was not present on May 16. As well, though Wickham was initially asked his opinion of using the 20th Division in Kwangju (as an alternative to using the paratroopers) on May 20, by the time they arrived the next day situation had changed because the ROK military had retreated from the city; they began negotiations on May 22, so from that point on they were only to be used if negotiations failed, which explains the White Paper’s characterization of the 20th Division’s purpose.

The authors do almost ask a pertinent question: why was the ROK military asking if the US opposed use of the 20th Division in Kwangju when it already had OPCON and could do what it liked with those units? So intent are they on finding evidence of American duplicity, however, that it never seems to cross the authors’ minds that the ROK military might have been trying to manipulate the US.

The book ends its examination of the US role in Kwangju with the following paragraph:

The U.S. administration's continuous warnings that an aggravation of the Kwangju incident might lead to an invasion of South Korea by North Korean forces, even though there was absolutely no such indication, and its speedy dispatch of early-warning planes and an aircraft carrier, also created an atmosphere that led to public anxiety over the Kwangju Uprising, thereby promoting the political isolation of Kwangju and helping to justify the armed suppression. Since the power of the minjung emerged at the political forefront in the Kwangju Uprising, unlike the coup d’etat of December 12 which was a power struggle within the pro-American leadership, the U.S. administration cannot avoid criticism that it actively supported and defended the new military group. Moreover, since these steps were taken not according to spontaneous judgments by individuals such as General Wickham or Ambassador Gleysteen, but by “superiors in Washington” - including the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the PRC of the National Security Council - they elicited political consequences that were to be expressed radically throughout the 1980s. The new military group, the U.S. government, and the press - which became the propaganda machine of the new military group - formed a trinity and concentrated on isolating Kwangju politically and ideologically from the rest of the nation.

Though the book argues that US military moves in the region “created an atmosphere that led to public anxiety over the Kwangju Uprising, thereby promoting the political isolation of Kwangju and helping to justify the armed suppression,” Wickham’s book suggested otherwise. Considering the worry and tension among ROK military leadership over Kwangju that Wickham depicted in his book, American actions to deter North Korea may have helped reduce the pressure they were feeling and provided breathing room so negotiations could take place, rather than the military rushing back in to retake the city.

The above selections from this book are useful for highlighting the ROK’s military censorship and possible issues with the terminology used by the CFC, but the writers’ analysis is biased by use of Korean-language sources which themselves were designed by ROK military, via their censors, to convince Koreans that the US unequivocally backed them. Ironically, these writers who championed the struggle of the minjung against the military dictatorship ended up parroting the same narratives used by that dictatorship in regard to US responsibility for 5.18. The analysis also suffers from the authors’ cherry picking of information from the White Paper, making it appear that in writing this section of the book they worked their way backwards from an already-arrived-at conclusion. The next part will examine more closely another paper constructed in the same manner.

Continue to Part 9

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

My experience in Washington gave me an appreciation for American intelligence gathering that I could not have developed otherwise. Information was available from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), State Department, and other sources that could be analyzed rapidly. Often desk officers and analysts in Washington or in other major headquarters knew more about a situation than the commanders and ambassadors in the ﬁeld, for they had a lot more information available and more means with which to analyze it. I formed the opinion then that you could probably ﬁnd enough reporting information to reach almost any conclusion, including one that totally contradicted another. There was simply an enormous amount of reporting coming in—often too much. Each morning there was a large stack of intelligence reports just in my Northeast Asia area alone at least several inches of paper every day. Later, when some individuals claimed they had had no prior warning about such events as occurred in Korea in 1979-80. I had to believe that the warning signs had been there in intelligence reports all the time, if someone had been doing proper analysis. But such scrutiny was not easy, given the volume and diversity of evidence available.

When he served as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in 1979, his “duties were to inform the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency of all appropriate matters concerning the Korean military situation and to keep the Washington intelligence community informed on the Korean situation in general.” His immediate superior was the embassy's defense attache, and he was especially expected to work closely with the Special Assistant's Ofﬁce and Political Section, and with U.S. Forces Korea. He considered Bob Brewster, special assistant to the ambassador, the strongest of the senior embassy staff. He did additional research in early 1978 before his posting and submitted a lengthy report, which he paraphrased:

There is now a growing division in the ROK Army, which while not yet serious, may be so in the future. The senior leadership of the army, which is composed of those officers commissioned during the Korea War, is mostly from Class 7 and earlier. These officers will soon be leaving, but their departure will not signiﬁcantly improve the promotion prospects for the youngest and perhaps most capable officers, those from Class 11 and later. These officers, who are only now reaching General officer rank, are increasingly frustrated. They see themselves as better educated, more seasoned, and more modern in their outlook and behavior than their predecessors, yet the path to the top is blocked.

Most of the Class 11 and later groups’ frustration is aimed at Class 8. This group, many of whom have been General Officers for many years, is well organized and powerful. Their primary sponsor is Kim Jong Pil, and they are presently concentrated at the two-star level. The Class 11 and younger group sees Class 8 as a direct challenge and impediment to their career progression. If they are forced to wait until this group has had its opportunity to lead the army, they will be approaching normal retirement age without having the chance to reach their full potential. This factor alone seems to indicate that there will ultimately have to be a solution to this issue.

Another section of the report read:

There are several leaders of the Class 11 group who will likely play a major role in this process. Major General Chun Doo Hwan, presently commanding the 1st ROK Division near Munsan is one. Others include his classmates Roh Tae Woo and Chung Ho Young. As the leaders of the four-year KMA graduates, this group bears responsibility to see that those who follow them, and themselves, of course, are treated fairly in the future promotion process.

After Park Chung-hee’s assassination,

it was obvious to even the most unsophisticated observer that the focus of power in South Korea remained with the military. Yet the State Department and the U.S. Embassy felt they had no real choice but to deal with the legal government of President Choi, who, although ﬁrst in the line of succession to Park under the Yushin Constitution, was a career bureaucrat with weak credentials for top leadership. U.S. diplomats ignored the opportunity to expand direct contacts with the ROK military, seeking instead to use every opportunity to convince the Choi government to make sweeping changes even though it had no real power to do so. Some of us believed that a better choice would have been to accept the power situation as it really existed by opening up a more direct channel. It was clear that under martial law Choi was only a ﬁgurehead. Even after martial law was lifted, the military would still hold the ultimate political power. Yet the State Department continued to play the charade that it was making progress on the political reform issue through the “legitimate authorities.”

Young suggested the idea of establishing a direct channel with ROK Army chief of staff Chung Sunghwa, who seemed a moderate and “had a reputation as a thoughtful, well-read, nonpolitical, and conservative ofﬁcer.” However, “the plan was disapproved after objections by the Political Section, objections supported by the ambassador.” Young assumed this was because of Chung’s associations with Park’s assassination (he was present in another building that night but was not involved) and perhaps because the use of the intelligence channel rather than the diplomatic channel may have caused concern at the State Department that it “would lose control of what it viewed as an essentially political matter.” As a result, however, a “channel to the military moderates was never opened.”

Because of his presence the night of Park’s assassination, Chun, as the head of Defense Security Command (DSC), was under pressure to investigate Chung. The DSC was “Park’s watchdog to prevent coup attempts and had agents in every military unit” and “was even more powerful under martial law.” When he heard from the State Department that they didn’t know who Chun was (though the CIA and DIA did), he worried about Washington’s “superficial understanding of the situation.”

On the night of the 12.12 coup by Chun, Wickham was at first told by his ROK counterparts that all ROK troops were in place, but later amended this to say several units had moved towards Seoul, leaving Wickham “visibly angered.” He quoted the State Department statement in response to 12.12:

During the past few weeks we had been encouraged by the orderly procedures adopted in the Republic of Korea to develop a broadly based government following the assassination of President Park. As a result of events today in Korea we have instructed our Ambassador and the Commander of U.S. Forces in Korea to point out to all concerned that any forces within the Republic of Korea which disrupt this progress should bear in mind the seriously adverse impact their actions would have on the ROK's relations with the United States.At the same time, any forces outside the ROK which might seek to exploit the current situation in Seoul should bear in mind our warning of October 27.

As Young put it,

From a practical standpoint, this statement had almost no effect. Since the embassy had no control over the local media, which were controlled by the ROK military, the only course of action was to release the statement in Washington. Few if any people in Seoul were ever aware of the position of the U.S. government, a condition that would continue and even grow worse during the days ahead. Indeed, to the average Korean. It even appeared that the United States was actually favoring the renegade generals since there was no evidence of disapproval expressed in the Korean media.

He wrote, “For all the concern expressed and effort expended on the American side, it was apparent that we had had little influence on the outcome” of 12.12, and argued that if the ROK, with far more resources on hand than the US, could not prevent the coup, there was little the US could have done.

In the aftermath of 12.12, General Wickham and his staff were left suspicious of their counterparts and the coup “reduced the general’s own credibility in Washington. In my personal opinion, General Wickham was a ﬁne officer and true gentleman, but his effectiveness as CFC commander was probably diminished as a result of 12/12.” The other result was Chun’s purge of the army:

On December 14 sweeping changes were announced in the ROK Army hierarchy. Officers loyal to Chun were placed in key commands and staff positions, particularly in those units that were politically sensitive and might have the capability to launch an attempt at a countercoup. For example, 9th Division commander Major General Roh became commander of the Capital Defense Command, which included most of the combat forces in the Seoul area, and other classmates or trusted ofﬁcers were placed in command of the Special Warfare Command, Third ROK Army, and several other units. In turn, these new commanders ensured that officers loyal to themselves were placed in command of subordinate regiments and battalions. Ofﬁcers from Korean Military Academy Classes 11 and 12 moved ahead of their seniors in certain key staff positions as well.

Widespread and wholesale retirements were ordered by the end of the month, especially among Class 8 ofﬁcers. It was clear that the army was being purged and that Chun and his followers would now be in total effective control. To my way of thinking, the events of December 14 were more signiﬁcant than those of December 12 for at least three reasons. First was the consolidation of the army under Chun's control. Second and more importantly, these actions provided the ﬁrst indication that Chun might have more on his mind than simply carrying out his investigatory responsibilities under martial law. After all, if his intention on 12/12 had been only to investigate President Park's assassination, why was it necessary to take complete control of the army? Third, it was conﬁrming evidence, if indeed any was necessary by now, that the Choi government was incapable of exerting control over the new army leadership. Clearly Ambassador Gleysteen’s meeting with President Choi [the day after 12.12] had had no positive effect. From that point on it was obvious that civilian control of the military was a pipedream.

There was debate over whether or not to meet Chun, but Ambassador Gleysteen finally decided to meet him. “He expressed the U.S. government's deep concern over the events of 12/12. Much of his rhetoric was directed at the factionalism and disunity in the army, which invited North Korea to take advantage of the situation.” As well, he “stressed the importance of maintaining constitutional order and continuing the democratic reforms that would result in political liberalization.” Chun replied to these concerns and said that the movement of troops had not been pre-planned, it was not a coup, and he had no personal ambitions outside the army. As Young put it, however,

This meeting remained somewhat controversial even after it was finished. From the American perspective, we could now send a cable to Washington indicating that Chun had heard directly from the ambassador of our deep concerns and had been suitably warned and American concerns “put on the record." But I believe that in retrospect the meeting was more useful to Chun than to the United States. This was because Chun was now able to go back to his supporters and say that he had personally met with the US. ambassador and that his explanation of events had been understood and accepted. Of course it was true that his reasons had been understood, but they certainly were not accepted. Nonetheless. Chun used this meeting to suggest to his followers and others that the U.S. Embassy was now not opposed to his power move; perhaps he even implied that the United States supported him. In the days ahead, many Koreans approached me and other embassy staff asking if it were true that the U.S. government now supported Chun, and if not, why had Chun and Ambassador Gleysteen had such a "cozy" meeting? The fact that the meeting had taken place had unfortunately become more important than what was said at it, especially given the inability of the U.S. Embassy to get its message out to the public through the government-controlled Korean media.

Chun also requested a meeting with General Wickham, but Gleysteen asked him not to. Young assumed this was because Chun was recognized as the real power and the embassy wanted to run the show.

At a full scale policy review in Washington, a number of options were considered. “[T]roop withdrawal, pushed by those who wanted to return to Carter’s original plan to withdraw troops and saw another chance, was briefly considered, but was discarded as a viable option.” They also considered cancelling or postponing the annual security consultative meeting, but “the Defense Department was strongly opposed to canceling or postponing the annual meeting […and] made an aggressive argument that it was a mistake to link security policy with our political objectives to expand democracy in Korea”; this option was also rejected. Economic sanctions were also considered, but rejected because “any actions that would make the [economic] situation worse would likely cause additional social unrest, more demonstrations, and ultimately result in an even more severe crackdown by the military.” Thus it became clear that the US “had very limited options to inﬂuence the situation.”

The policy adopted was little different from that prior to 12.12.

- Attempt to preserve momentum toward a broadly based democratic government under civilian leadership.
- Continue to deter North Korean aggression.
- Strive to keep the new ROK military leadership focused on its primary role of defending the country against attack.

The US military instituted a gag order under which officers were not to discuss 12.12 with Korean counterparts and avoid political discussions in order “to demonstrate the non-political nature of the military and set the example of a professional officer corps.” Unfortunately, this let them think all was well and it was once again “business as usual” and cut Korean officers off from a source of accurate information amid intense censorship. “The true situation at the time was that some of these men were opposed to Chun Doo Hwan and his group, and others might have been if they had known the full story.” Young was also approached by a Korean officer who raised the possibility of a countercoup, something the US refused to support.

Despite 12.12, the constitutional order had been preserved, some political prisoners had been released, controls were relaxed on campus political activities, and Kim Dae-jung’s civil rights were restored. As well, “Chun himself was quite skillful at convincing the US Embassy that democracy was still possible. By late January 1980, Bob Brewster had established direct contact with Chun” and met “often enough for Brewster to form some opinions as to future developments” which seemed “generally optimistic.” Wickham finally met Chun in February:

The American and Korean sides had somewhat different accounts of this meeting. The Americans felt that it had been generally satisfactory, although Wickham reported later to Washington that he was not certain that he had made any positive impression on Chun. The Korean version of the meeting was that it was dominated by Chun, who despite his status as the junior ofﬁcer, lectured Wickham about the realities of the Korean peninsula, dismissed his concerns somewhat abruptly, and was condescending and almost arrogant in his manner. I was not personally present, but from discussing the meeting with others, I tend to believe that the Korean version is more accurate. At any rate, the talk was hardly a success from any perspective and probably only served to make worse the personal relationship between the two men, which was not good to begin with.

As Young put it, perhaps if they had met in December, they “could have worked more closely together, and Wickham might have had more influence on Chun’s actions. But by Feb it was too late.”

On April 14 Chun was appointed KCIA director and quickly “began purging many positions at the KCIA in the same manner he had done in the army during the days following 12/I2.” As it was clear that Chun's ambitions had expanded, “the prevailing feeling in Washington was that it would be necessary for the US government to take positive action in order to oppose this move.” A move to cancel the security consultative meeting was opposed by the Defense Department, so as a result it was indeﬁnitely postponed. While this was meant to “demonstrate that failure to implement political reform, and further attempts to consolidate power by Chun would have a negative effect on U.S.-ROK relations,” the watered-down nature of the postponement “gave the correct impression that the U.S. government was not united in its desire to punish Chun.” Young argued that this “move by Washington was totally ineffective: indeed, it served to make Chun stronger. It also tended to split the embassy and USFK, since USFK blamed the State Department and by extension the embassy for supporting the postponement.”

Young also described the difference of opinion that arose between the embassy and the military as to the prospects for political development. When Gleysteen met Chun on May 8, he came away feeling optimistic due to Chun’s calm demeanor and his playing down of the student demonstrations and assertion that the use of troops to suppress them would likely not be necessary. On the same day, however, Young was invited to see Roh Tae-woo, who argued that no patriotic officer could allow instability in the name of political freedom due to the threat from North Korea. Young noticed that his troops, while not on full alert, seemed ready to be deployed in short order. He wrote a report which caused some controversy since it contradicted Gleysteen’s hopeful predictions. When Wickham met Chun on May 13 and Chun spoke of communists organizing the students and argued North Korea was moving to take advantage of this; Wickham quickly stated there was no evidence of such North Korean moves. As Young put it, “by this time the relationship between Chun and Wickham had deteriorated to a point where neither man had much inﬂuence on the other.” As well, “For the ﬁrst time, Wickham stated his frank opinion that Chun intended to use these arguments as a pretext to take those steps that would allow him to move directly into the Blue House.” Young spent that same day at the intelligence center in the Yongsan bunker, personally monitored DPRK forces, and came to the same conclusion. As he put it, “it was clear that the stories about North Korea were being cooked up in order to justify further domestic crackdowns and related activities.”

After the crackdown of May 17, rumors began to trickle in of violence in Kwangju on the 19th. On the 20th, because the Korean authorities were not sharing any information, Young turned to another source to find out what was happening in Kwangju:

In the afternoon I dropped by unannounced at the office of a Korean Army lieutenant colonel who was a native of Kwangju and had formerly been on the staff of Chun Doo Hwan. This officer took me aside, and we walked outside together to the parking lot, where he told me what was happening in Kwangju. Earlier he had called his home there and had received a firsthand report from his parents. They had said the situation was terrible and that the special warfare soldiers had lost control. His parents had seen several bodies, including one almost on their own doorstep. He told me that the Ministry of National Defense and official ROK military sources were concealing this information from U.S. officials and were downplaying the extent of the problem. He also said there were other riots and violence in the cities of Mokpo and Naju. I had known this officer well for several years and believed him to be trustworthy and truthful. His close association with Chun meant that he was taking a big chance in giving me this information. “Please have your government get this stopped,” he pleaded.

Despite his reporting immediately on this as soon as he returned to the embassy, “there was some disbelief that things could really be that bad. It was the next day before the true dimensions of what had happened were fully accepted.” The next day, he tried to take action:

On the morning of May 21, I proposed to Colonel Blottie that I go personally to Kwangju to assess the situation and see what we could do to help. We had arranged for a U.S. military aircraft to ﬂy me into the U.S. air base, and from there I would try to enter the city, which was blocked off by ROK Army forces. This mission was given some consideration but eventually disapproved by Gleysteen, who was concerned about the danger. To me, it was just part of being a soldier and certainly no more dangerous than what I had experienced previously in Vietnam, but I respected the ambassadors wishes. Soon thereafter the embassy ordered a total evacuation of all American citizens from Kwangju.

Young provided background on Special Warfare Command troops whose brutality set off the uprising:

Although these troops were highly trained for the behind-the-lines operations directed at North Korea and, therefore, should logically have been under CFC authority, the Korean leaders had consistently resisted such suggestions. Quite frankly these forces were considered by most serious Korea-watchers to be earmarked for political-type activities such as anticoup protection. Also, they were often among the ﬁrst units called out during martial law. The special-warfare commander was always personally approved by the president as were the heads of the Defense Security Command and Capital Defense Command. In I980 these commanders were all close associates of Chun Doo Hwan.

He also commented in detail on the use of the 20th Division:

In later ofﬁcial statements on this, the U.S. government maintained that it had no power to refuse the use of the 20th Division because, under the terms of the CFC charter, either country could withdraw its own forces upon notiﬁcation—no approval was necessary or required." This is technically and legally true, but in this case my recollection is that we participated very much in the decision process.

Indeed, I believe that it was the preplanned intention of Chun and his followers to involve the United States as much as possible in the events in Kwangju. As a result, the same Korean military authorities who a day or two before were concealing information from us now were eager to share every detail concerning the 20th Divisions movements and operational plans. They went so far as to directly ask the U.S. leaders if they objected to use of the 20th.

After consultations with Washington, both General Wickham and Ambassador Gleysteen agreed to its deployment. I do not mean to imply in any way that the American side "ordered" or "approved" this decision, but it has always seemed to me that, in later attempts to explain this issue, we tried to hide behind technical and legal provisions of the CFC charter, when ethically and morally we were obligated to explain this situation more frankly to the Korean people. The fact was that we were consulted in great detail on this issue and reached the same decision, although perhaps more reluctantly, than ROK authorities.

As Young critically described the episode in which the ROK army failed to distribute leaflets with the US position on them in Kwangju,

We had the capability to deliver leaﬂets and handbills independently, but we instead depended on the martial-law authorities and ofﬁcial government outlets to deliver a message that was directly against their own interests and then complained when they failed to pass it along to the people.

The ROK military instead spread rumors that the US had approved the initial crackdown, but, Young criticized,

in many cases we let distortions of our position remain unchallenged. We also failed to keep an accurate account of these false stories and. by the summer of 1980. had lost almost any ofﬁcial record of exactly what tales were being spread. Even the most ridiculous and unbelievable account will eventually gain some credibility if no one denies it. yet this was the situation we allowed to happen.

They also did not make their feelings clear with the international community in Seoul. A series of policy meetings continued in Washington into late June but were hamstrung because "[t]he Carter administration did not want to send any signals that would imply support for Chun and the generals, yet it was reluctant to take the type of ﬁrm actions that were necessary to express direct opposition." One reason these meetings produced

such a mild and ineffective result was the manner in which they were conducted. Because any decision on our Korea policy would necessarily involve security, foreign policy, economic, and other considerations, several departments of the government were involved. [...] The customary approach was that when one agency objected to a particular course of action, it was usually “watered down." [...] This is what happened in the aftermath of Kwangju, and it resulted in a continued weak and ineffective Korea policy.

Gleysteen met Chun three times in June and early July, each time arguing Chun should drop martial law and move toward elections. During the last meeting he complained about Chun abusing the ROK-U.S. security relationship in order to advance his own political ambitions. As Young put it, “There is no evidence that any of these meetings resulted in any positive results from the American viewpoint. In fact, since the American ambassador was now meeting him regularly, they tended to legitimize Chun’s authority.”

In late June as well he began to hear rumors of a possible countercoup, this time coming from younger officers, including SWC officers who “felt that their leadership had misled them about the Kwangju situation and the motivation of the resistors. Now their national leaders were not supporting them adequately while the special warfare units were being widely criticized.” This was ultimately handled within the ROK army.

Of the US attempt to save Kim Dae-jung’s life, he wrote that Chun was “successful in blackmailing the United Slates, and from that time forward our relations were essentially normalized.”

To summarize his criticisms of Carter Administration policy, he thought it was too focused on North Korea and maintaining stability so as to not create opportunities for invasion. There were also fears among some in Washington that Korea might disintegrate the way Iran had, so Washington was “prepared to live with another military regime before they would take a chance of further instability. In this regard, the Kwangju incident had truly shaken the conﬁdence of the Carter government.”

He also thought that “USFK's considerable inﬂuence with the ROK military was never used to its full potential - perhaps because of institutional jealousy and the embassy's desire to be “in charge" of some- thing that it could never really control.” Additionally, he thought Wickham was largely “out of the loop” and criticized the embassy for rarely consulting experienced Korea hands such as Spence Richardson in the political section and himself. He concluded with the following:

Had we had a more focused administration in Washington and less-cautious leadership in Korea, we might have made a stronger attempt to work closely with the military moderates after the Park assassination, taken a stronger anti-Chun posture immediately after 12/12, or even as late as the end of May, 1980, in accordance with the plan suggested by some of the younger embassy members. [… H]ad the United States chosen a bolder course, democracy might have blossomed nearly a decade earlier than it actually did. At the very least the United States would have communicated its views to the Korean people in a manner that would have averted many of the hard feelings that linger to this day.

Continue to Part 8

Monday, June 11, 2018

General Wickham's account of the rise of Chun Doo-hwan

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999

In 1999, General John Wickham's book Korea on the Brink: A Memoir of Political Intrigue and Military Crisis, was published. It covers ground similar to that of Gleysteen’s book. At times, such as when he covers his being approached by a Korean officer suggesting a counter-coup after 12.12, as well as the use of the 20th division during the Kwangju Uprising, he provides less detail than Gleysteen. What he does provide is a close-up look at relations with, and the attitudes of, officers of the Korean military.

It should be noted that Wickham's first meeting with Chun after the 12.12 coup did not come until late February. However, on the day after the coup, he met Defense Minister Rho at the bullet-pocked Ministry of Defense where Rho openly tape recorded their conversation, which Wickham assumed was because “Chun and his clique wanted to hear firsthand what the American commander had to say.”

The 12.12 coup had been carried out by Chun and other generals in part because they wanted to replace the older generation of generals who were blocking their advancement. As the first class at the 4 year Korean Military Academy, Chun, Roh Tae-woo, and other generals of the KMA's Class 11 believed they were better educated and more deserving of command roles. After leaving the US bunker at Yongsan against Wickham’s advice, Defense Minister Rho had been seized by the officers carrying out the coup and forced to retroactively approve the arrest of martial law commander Jeong Seung-hwa (in part because he planned to transfer Chun). After hearing the excuses Rho made for Chun's coup, Wickham replied to him:

I told Rho that his explanation was duly noted, but entirely implausible and unconvincing. The actions initiated by the group of generals not only jeopardized the political progress of recent weeks, they also threatened the internal stability of the republic and opened very real risks of a North Korean attack. Thereby, they raised deep concerns about the future relationship between the United States and the Republic of Korea. Those concerns could lead to a full review of all American policies toward Korea, including policies concerning troop withdrawal, technology transfer, missile development cooperation, foreign military sales of U.S. equipment to the ROK, economic assistance, and several current proposals to increase the authority and responsibility of the Combined Forces Command.

Rho was shocked by this response and insisted it was all a misunderstanding. After the meeting, Wickham cabled Washington:

It is clear that we are in a hard ball game with professionals who feel they can run the country better than their peers and are ﬂush with the ﬁrst round of victory. In my judgment the course of political events has been fundamentally and unalterably changed. We now must work closely with the emerging leadership to see how much of the recent political progress can be restored, and to assure that internal political as well as military stability is maintained thereby denying North Korea any incentive to intervene.

Chapter 4 of his book, in which he was approached by a Korean officer who told him a countercoup to oust Chun was being planned, can be read here. In short, he quickly told the officer the US would not support any coup, as “it would have been wrong to meddle in our ally’s political fate. We could protest and cajole, but a direct intervention or an alliance with an internal conspiracy was out of bounds.” Jeong Seung-hwa, the former martial law commander arrested in the coup, may have been saved from execution, however, by Wickham's “meddling” when he sent, as was his practice, a birthday card to his colleague Jeong [Chung] :

My note to Chung reached him in prison. According to eyewitnesses Chung and his wife wept after reading the note. For them the note meant that a “lifeline” existed to an important military friend and government. […Chun also perceived it as a message that he] could not deal harshly with Chung. In fact, Chun became so incensed with the note’s import that he went to see Ambassador Gleysteen and complained bitterly about my “upstart action.” Chun said that I was interfering with the Korean legal process and that I had absolutely no right to communicate with someone Koreans regarded as a “non-person in prison.” Bill brushed off Chun’s complaint with the explanation that my note was merely a personal birthday greeting and that, as a matter of fact, if it were Chun who was in prison instead of General Chung, that perhaps he would have received a similar note. Chun was not at all amused.

Wickham also related a number of meetings with retired General Mun Hyong-tae, chairman of the National Assembly Defense Committee and a former Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Chairman, who sought Wickham out to offer his help. Mun told him he had lectured Chun and the generals and explained the threat to foreign loans their actions might have caused and otherwise urged moderation. At a later meeting he communicated to Wickham that he had heard rumors Wickham was to be replaced due to the 12.12 incident. Wickham was surprised but wondered if this rumor was started by Chun’s side in the hope Wickham would be replaced by someone more pliable.

By this point Wickham had discovered Chun was writing letters to a number of US generals who had served in Korea, including General Vessey (Wickham’s predecessor) in the hope Chun would be invited to the US or that they would visit him in Korea, and even sent a personal emissary to the US. When Wickham asked JCS Chairman Rhu about this, he said he was irritated by it since it bypassed the chain of command. One US general (Stillwell, though he is not named) did visit in May when Wickham was in the US and “left a trail of venom” as he “excoriated the current US leadership in Korea.” General Mun’s response to the letter-writing campaign was to shake his head in disgust and to criticize the move because “it violated established channels of authority and reflected gross ignorance by Chun about the role played by the US Ambassador and CINC in Korea.”

Mun warned Wickham that when 370,000 students returned to campuses in the spring there would likely be protests in response to Chun’s coup, all while the economic situation looked bleak. He worried that North Korea might instigate an incident to cause international concern so as to dry up foreign investment. Mun also was troubled by the sight of “many senior officials trooping to Chun and showing abject deference to him,” which Chun seemed to enjoy. Though Wickham noted that Mun was one of the officials visiting Chun, he concluded that “Like everyone in Seoul in those days, he was trying his best to walk a straight line on a curvy road. He knew Chun could not be stopped and was worried that America might try to punish the ROK by lessening its support for his country’s defense.”

Wickham related the following about his meeting with Chun in late February 1980:

In preparation for this meeting, Steve Bradner* gave me a remarkable memorandum of conversation (memcon) between a former CINC, General Carter Magruder, and Lieutenant Colonel Kim Jong-pil. The latter, as mentioned earlier, had been the mastermind behind the coup staged in May 1961. It was not clear whether Kim had been summoned by Magruder or had come of his own volition. In any event Kim was there to explain the actions of the coup leaders, including Major General Park Chung-hee, who eventually dominated the coup group and became president. A feeling of déja vu came over me as I read the memcon; virtually all of the reasons given for the coup in 1961 were reﬂected in what Chun and his associates said about their actions.

In the conversation, Kim apologized to Magruder for violating the chain of command by using ROK forces without CINC authority. Kim respectfully explained that the coup leaders had no political goals; their actions were to oust the corrupt, aging military leaders who blocked promotion opportunities of more able officers, and to “clean up” the government, which had grown so inefﬁcient and corrupt that the people were not well served. Kim assured Magruder that after he and his associates had achieved their limited objectives, they would return promptly to the barracks. “Trust us,” said Kim. The thought crossed my mind that I could change the date of Magruder’s memcon and use it as a record of my discussion with Chun.

Wickham included this excerpt of his report to Washington of his meeting with Chun:

Chun impressed me as a ruthlessly ambitious, scheming and forceful man who believes he is destined to wear the purple. His manner was cocky and self-assured despite extreme nervousness in smoking almost a pack of cigarettes. I found him unsophisticated in his knowledge of the United States and of the international consequences that could result from instability in his country. There is a hint of anti-U.S. attitude in his intensely nationalistic and conservative views. Without lecturing him, I reaffirmed U.S. concerns over the December 12 incident and the fact that we would not tolerate further instability from any group. In addition, I made it clear that the best course of action for the ROK military would be to stay out of politics entirely and devote themselves to defending the nation. After reﬂecting carefully on the lengthy meeting I remain suspicious of Chun. He is on the make, has a taste for power, knows how to use it, and does not strike me as a man to be trusted. He recognizes that he will have to earn our trust by actions, not rhetoric.

(In the next post reference will be made to this meeting from Chun’s point of view.)

The third time he met Chun, on May 13, 1980, was after Chun had been made head of the KCIA. Wickham wrote that upon arriving there, “The thought crossed my mind that it was almost like a visit with the president in the Blue House.” He also wrote that “It did not escape my notice that he was speaking for the government.” Interestingly, when it came to the student protests, “Even Chun’s son was telling him that the peer pressure was so strong that he had no choice but to join the protests.” Wickham then left Korea on May 14 for the US for meetings and his son’s graduation, and returned May 19. During that time he was absent for the declaration of emergency martial law on May 17. Upon his return to Korea, unaware of what was happening in Kwangju, he met Defense Minister Chu.

Chu mentioned a secret meeting he held with more than 40 senior generals and admirals on May 17. These officers had voiced bitterness over the “drift in the Korean society and the absence of effective leadership in the government.” They had been very critical of efforts to foster political liberalization. In their words: “Democratic values cannot be achieved all at once, and we have been trying to go too fast, partly by pressure from the United States.” In their view, the military was the only organized body which was capable of providing crisis leadership, and it was time to take strong measures to preclude instability.

In his cable to Washington that day, he discussed the implications of the military takeover of May 17:

We must recognize the reality of control by Chun and his associates. It is clear now that the group’s ultimate objective is total power. The only issues are the speed of consolidating power and the form in which it takes place. The form could be the facade of a civilian government and controlled elections, or it could be a military council chaired by Chun. We have to accept this reality of control by Chun and work with it because we are in no position to unhorse Chun and his group.

While we can work with Chun in shaping political development that is minimally acceptable to the United States, we must recognize the limitations on our leverage and therefore resist adopting actions which could jeopardize fundamental U.S. security interests in the ROK. [...] In short, then, our leverage is relatively limited and we must take care how it is used, lest we undermine our ability to communicate openly and effectively with Chun who today controls power, and tomorrow may overtly run Korea.

Days later he reiterated the danger of trying to “unhorse” Chun, arguing that it would “probably would beget us only another Chun and the black eye of meddling in Korean affairs.”

Upon hearing about fighting in Kwangju, on May 21 he talked to chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Rhu Byong-hyun, who gave him a rather skewed description of events in Kwangju:

Rhu told me that the number of casualties was still unknown, but that the number of fatalities should be low because the soldiers had avoided shooting. He said that rioters had broken into homeland defense force armories and explosive storage bunkers and were in possession of more than 2,000 military weapons as well as a supply of demolitions. Considerable destruction had already occurred, and mobs were directing particular violence against Special Forces soldiers, whom the mobs were mocking as “Chun Doo-hwan’s troops.”

Wickham passed over the use of the 20th Division with little comment, writing “My permission to withdraw these units was neither sought nor required under the terms of the CFC agreement” Rhu told him he was trying to moderate the generals “panic” and desire to retake the city and was trying to work out a ceasefire. The next day, May 22, he told Wickham that

His plan for moderation seemed to be working, although Kwangju was still in the hands of local residents, and there had been some shooting and property destruction during the night. He told me that eyewitnesses had been reporting shooting by youngsters and drunken men, and that large crowds and vehicle movement were also jamming the streets. [...] Rhu estimated that as many as 60 civilians were dead and more than 400 seriously injured and said the numbers could rise. Four soldiers and four policeman had also been killed.

Rhu then conﬁded to me that the martial law command was developing a contingency plan to assault the city with several infantry regiments, in the event that the violence could not be contained. He told me that Chun and his group wanted such a plan, just in case events turned sour. We discussed the concept of an assault on the city, reviewing the dangers peculiar to urban hostilities, where block-to-block ﬁghting inevitably would result in many casualties on both sides. [...] Any plan to undertake such a high-risk operation would have to be carefully organized [. ...] Rhu agreed with me that all of this detailed preparation would lake time and acknowledged the wisdom of delaying an assault on the city. He also agreed that such an operation would require great restraint lo avoid a major confrontation between the army and Korean citizens. I told Rhu that a large number of casualties would have serious implications for the rest of the country, and that Bill Gleysteen and I strongly urged a restrained approach.

He wrote back to Washington that

voices of moderation seem to have prevailed over Chun and his group. [...] Chun and his generals appear willing to heed Rhu’s advice, at least for now. This is encouraging. Naturally Chun and his group feel very threatened by the Kwangju situation which could escalate and unseat them[. ...] Fear is one reason why they have been arguing for hawkish, swift solutions. Minister Chu told me that he too is trying to emphasize the rule of reason and moderation. But Chu does not inspire conﬁdence for he seems emotionally distraught, probably reﬂecting Blue House and Chun’s anxiety. Rhu on the other hand appears cool and conﬁdent and is exercising thoughtful initiative in a reasoned, moderate way. Bill Gleysteen and I have been trying to reinforce Rhu in this restraining role.

On May 23 he met Rhu again, who told him that “While events in the city were relatively quiet, there appeared to be some friction between the radical and moderate groups in the city. Some of the radicals were escaping. In one instance, a truck ﬁlled with weapons and explosives ran into a military roadblock, 17 civilians were killed as a result. In the city itself, citizens were organizing restoration committees, and cleanup work was already underway.” The 17 dead in a truck likely refers in a very twisted way to one of the city buses upon which the military opened fire on the outskirts of the city.

On May 25 Wickham was told that

Late on the 24th, more than 10,000 rioters had demonstrated near the capitol and radical elements forcibly turned away citizens trying to turn in weapons. The radical group now consisted of student leaders, including some from Seoul, criminals, and poor people who had little to lose. The hardcore radical group was estimated to number about 500. They were wearing army fatigues, were heavily armed, and were quite willing to shoot. The group had begun to organize a city-wide control mechanism and were employing intimidation, in the form of kangaroo courts and quick sentences, to force innocent people into complying with their directives. Rhu said the police were hopelessly inadequate against the rioters. The capitol had been occupied by the radicals, and provincial leaders had ﬂed for their lives. It was estimated that some 5,600 weapons and more than 350,000 rounds of small arms ammunition were unaccounted for, so a dangerous situation existed. […] Rhu told me that local citizens were clamoring for the government to return with superior military force to restore law and order.

By May 26 it was clear to Wickham that the patience of Chun and other generals had been exhausted, and that they feared that the instability in Kwangju could spread, threatening their positions. He was told stories of communists controlling the radicals there but was reassured that the army would be magnanimous in paying reparations and offering amnesties to offenders. He was also told the 20th Division would carry out the operation to retake the city, and that they would only shoot in self defense. The Special Forces units that had set off the uprising would be held in reserve only.

[It is worth noting that none of these promises were kept. The SWC troops, wearing 20th Division uniforms, were used to storm the provincial office (where they fired on journalists in a nearby building), and hundreds of survivors and other participants were hunted down in house to house searches, imprisoned, and tortured.]

The formation of the Special Committee for National Security Measures was explained to Wickham as a necessity, legal under martial law, and not at all a power grab; the next president would be popularly elected. Wickham referred to this as “just talk” that he’d heard repeatedly. But as he put it, “Our leverage was limited because of our security commitment, and because the Koreans, particularly the military, were increasingly intolerant of U.S. intervention in their domestic affairs.” He also wrote, “We probably had little if any real inﬂuence over ROK internal developments, and we were little more than helpless bystanders as Chun shrewdly maneuvered toward total power.”

Wickham went on to describe his ill-fated interview (mentioned here) and the fallout from it, such as finding out about it upon arriving in Washington for meetings and being diverted to Hawaii on his way home all the while fearing for his career.

In addition to his description of events from the US and ROK military's point of view, he also quotes in full (or at least "fuller" than elsewhere) pertinent quotations, such as the Korean government’s statement about Martial Law on May 17:

When we review the situation at home, the maneuvers of the North Korean Communists have been stepped up with each passing day to communize the South by taking advantage of continuous social disturbances. . . . They are maneuvering to create a decisive moment for a southward invasion by inspiring and agitating disturbances on the campuses.

At this critical moment the irresponsible rash attempts and blind behavior of some politicians, students, and workers have converted this society into a lawless one of chaos, disorder, agitation and subversion. Moreover, the aftermath of social disturbances has resulted in slowing down of exports and creating an economic depression, thus increasing labor disputes and unemployment and further increasing social unrest. Our country is faced with a grave crisis.

He also provided a full(er) quotation from a statement made by President Carter about Korea at an August 21, 1980 press conference:

We have been deeply concerned about Chun and some of the policies he’s put forward. I understand now he might step down as general to become president. We also are concerned about the upcoming trial of Kim Dae-jung. Under the new leaders in Korea our inﬂuence is limited, and we’ve got the option of expressing our extreme displeasure by withdrawing our forces, which might destabilize that whole region of Asia, or accepting some political development of which we disapprove. We would like to have a complete democracy with full and open debate, free press and elected leaders. The Koreans are not ready for that, according to their own judgment, and I don’t know how to it explain it any better.

The book ends with a reprint of the 1989 White Paper.

* Stephen Bradner's fascinating career is detailed here. He played an important role in keeping the US out of the April 19 student protests in 1960:

In 1960, he was an eyewitness to the popular uprising against Syngman Rhee, the authoritarian and deeply corrupt South Korean president. On 18 April of that year, Bradner shinned up a tree to see what was happening and spotted US military police patrolling in Seoul alongside South Korean military police (MPs). “I was worried that our MPs would be dragged into fighting against Korean student protesters for democracy if any violence broke out,” Bradner told this writer many years later. “So, I went to see the commander of the US intelligence unit on the US Army base in Seoul, and told him of my fears that something was about to happen.”

That officer not only listened to Bradner, but persuaded the military police commander to order his men to return to barracks. The next day, 19 April, was a milestone in Korean history. Thousands of university and high school students swarmed the streets of cities to protest against Rhee. Police opened fire. Bradner was a witness to the tragedy. As police bullets cracked past, he dashed to the British Embassy and heaved himself over its protective wall to escape the fusillade. But dozens of students were killed; many more were wounded. But there was no US military involvement – thanks in part, to Bradner’s counsel.

Continue to Part 7

Friday, June 08, 2018

William Gleysteen's account of the rise of Chun Doo-hwan

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background
Part 2: Expectations of US intervention and Chun Doo-hwan’s manipulations
Part 3: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju and US government responses, 1980-1999
Part 4: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju, 1998-1999
Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003
Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.
Part 9: Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing “Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising”

Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999

In 1999, books by former Ambassador Gleysteen and General Wickham were published. Both should be read by anyone seeking to understand this period. Wickham’s book, Korea on the Brink: A Memoir of Political Intrigue and Military Crisis, is more focused on military matters, while Gleysteen’s book, Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis, is more wide-ranging in its focus. Needless to say, two 200+ page books (Gleysteen’s features 11 Cherokee cables in the appendix) contain more than can be adequately covered here, but a summary of pertinent points and quotations follow.

Gleysteen’s thesis is contained in his book’s title, and asserts that US security and economic commitments to the ROK prevented US officials from seriously considering threatening military cuts or economic sanctions that would have threatened US security interests or the viability of Korea’s economy. The first section of the book focused on Carter’s plan to withdraw US troops from Korea, before moving into Park Chung-hee’s assassination.

After discussing conspiracy theories which suggested the US played a role in Park Chung-hee’s assassination, Gleysteen considered “whether the sum total of US actions and words unwittingly contributed in a significant way to Park’s downfall” and wrote, “I believe our behavior had this effect, adding rather thoughtlessly to Park’s problems and reducing his room for maneuver.” Gleysteen noted how the Nixon Doctrine, change in China policy, the criticism aimed at Korea during Koreagate, and Carter’s plans to withdraw troops aggravated Park’s feelings of insecurity and paranoia. He thought human rights criticism had “contributed to moderation in Korea” but that the summit meeting with Carter (which included him meeting opposition figures) and the release of many political prisoners, had “emboldened Park’s opposition and may have accelerated the day of reckoning, but it did not cause Park’s death.”

The day after the 12.12 coup he met with President Choi to issue a formal protest:

Beginning with this meeting, Political Counselor Clark and I would appear at each juncture in the progressive erosion of Choi’s presidency to make a strong protest, the president knew would be less important than our parallel presentations to the real power holders. Choi would always hear us out and provide a rationalization that we (and probably he) found unconvincing. He was polite, despite the painfully blunt comments I felt forced to make. I suspect that he often agreed with me but could not say so, and I know he sometimes quoted me when talking to Chun and others. Nevertheless, he seemed to have a high tolerance for being pushed around by powerful Koreans, so long as the people pushing followed proper procedures and forms.

The next day, December 14, he met Chun Doo Hwan for the first time at his request.

He came to the embassy residence in combat gear accompanied by a few aides and a contingent of about forty armed soldiers, presumably to make sure I was not up to any tricks. In any event, if trouble had broken out, my only companion, Bob Brewster, and I were no match for his ﬁrepower. With his huge contingent of bodyguards arrayed all around the grounds of our residence, Chun strode into the Korean-style building as though he were a victorious battleﬁeld commander - brusque, self-conﬁdent, and clearly relishing his new role as the center of attention.

They talked for about two hours, during which Gleysteen argued that “for reasons of political stability Korea had to maintain a civilian government and could not afford to lose the support of the US military and business community.” For Chun’s part, his “long, self-serving account of his actions on December 12 made them appear reactive or spontaneous.” He also accused the US of having been linked to Park Chung-hee’s assassin, something Gleysteen angrily described as “baseless.” Gleysteen also met with the new prime minister, Shin Hyon Hwack, on December 18 in the hope of enlisting his aid in shoring up the civilian government and urging the government get on with political reform.

Gleysteen also went into a great deal of detail about the US government’s response, after Chun Doo-hwan’s coup of December 12, 1979, to being approached by military officers offering to carry out a counter coup. Wickham mentioned this briefly, but Gleysteen made clear the government mulled it over before dismissing the option, because “to encourage a struggle within the Korean army would have been madness.” As well, “after the abortive counter-coup, Chun called for tightened security procedures within Korean units, presumably to limit our knowledge of politically sensitive information.” Apparently, the idea of a counter coup lingered in Washington. Speaking of an assessment of the situation he wrote in mid-March, 1980, Gleysteen wrote that since “the idea still seemed to intrigue a few people in Washington,” he reiterated his opposition to any attempted removal of Chun and other officers because:

As a practical matter we have been so unsuccessful in other efforts - for example, in Korea during the Rhee era and later in Vietnam. The odds of being exposed are great, and anyone being hurt in the process could stir up a virulent nationalistic reaction. Above all, I doubt we would ﬁnd any completely reliable white hats to replace the black hats which we wished to remove.

When, on April 14, 1980, Chun Doo-hwan was appointed head of the KCIA, the US received 30 minutes notice, “[p]resumably to prevent [the U.S.] from trying to block it.” As Gleysteen put it, this appointment “allowed Chun to lunge into the civilian sphere through leadership of the most powerful and ubiquitous mechanism of control in Korean society. To me, this sudden, ill-advised move was by far the most important reason that tensions escalated, erupting four weeks later in mid-May.” As he put it in a cable to Washington, “Overnight he has gone from the ofﬁcial obscurity maintained since December 12 to front-page news and Davy Crockett-style descriptions of his noble character.”

In response to this, it was decided to postpone the annual security consultative meeting (which included a meeting between the ROK defense minister and US Secretary of Defense). When the scheduling of this meeting (for June 1980) was delayed after 12.12, it led to complaints from ROKA officers since it served as an “annual seal of approval” the US extended to the Korean armed forces. Though it was done quietly, news of this was heard in Korea through the Japanese press, “which sparked a nationalistic reaction among Korean military officers. I had the impression, but cannot prove, that Chun’s group encouraged this in an attempt to deﬂect Korean anger away from Chun himself and onto the United States.” Defense Minister Choo told Wickham that this treatment of the security consultative meeting “amounted to intervention in Korean domestic politics,” and complaints were made in Washington as well. It was during this time that a Korean delegation was sent to Washington to recruit General Stillwell and others to try to pressure the Carter Administration to change this decision.

As well, when Gleysteen asked to meet Chun (their first meeting since after the 12.12 coup) to protest his appointment to the KCIA in person, Chun postponed the meeting for two-and-a-half weeks, finally scheduling it for May 9, but which point student protests were growing against Chun and calling for the lifting of Martial Law. It was at this meeting that Gleysteen did not oppose plans to reinforce police with the military, if needed to keep order. He also warned Chun about arresting politicians, and then had a conversation with President Choi in which he voiced the same concerns. Chun suggested that it would be unlike the military would be needed, and didn’t see the student protests as a serious problem. On May 13, however, Chun met Wickham and told him that North Koreans were behind the student protests, and brought up rumors that a North Korean invasion was imminent. To discount this, the US carried out an investigation and after informing the ROK, they conﬁrmed in public that “we see no movement [in North Korea] which would lead us to believe that some sort of attack upon the south is imminent,” which led Koreans to complain “that this publicity caused them to lose face.” It was also clear that the military was using media censorship to its benefit. Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam both told Gleysteen that, as the protests grew larger, they had spoken out against excess and violence, but their comments were prevented by censors from appearing in the press.

Though Gleysteen had been told the military would not be used during the student protests on May 14 (which featured around 40,000 students) and May 15 (which featured 80,000 – 100,000), he saw Special Warfare Command paratroopers standing on the edges of the protest, but despite protesters driving a bus into police lines and killing an officer at one point, they were never used. When walking through the protesters at one point, he noted the absence of visible support from citizens. Gleysteen also tried to prod Choi into action before he left – just as the crisis seemed about to peak – for a trip to the Middle East:

Another source of friction was my effort to get President Choi to drop the fuzzy haze around his political program. I argued that contingency planning for maintaining law and order should be accompanied by a forthright presidential statement of intent to lift martial law promptly and allow new elections on an accelerated schedule. This would, I said, appeal to moderate protesters, even if the president conditioned his promise on maintenance of public order.

In the late afternoon of May 17, the head of the political section, Bill Clark, called him to convey news of riot police storming a meeting of student leaders at Ehwa University, and at 9:30 pm the Embassy was told martial law would be expanded nationwide at midnight. Shocked by the political crackdown (arrests of the three Kims and closure of the National Assembly), the next day he met with the president and the martial law commander, conveying the US’s shock and advising President Choi free the three Kims and open the National Assembly on May 20 as previously planned. In a message to Washington, Gleysteen wrote, “The Korean military have all but formally taken over the government.” In the midst of dealing with the fallout of the crackdown in Seoul, the embassy was slow to grasp what was happening in Kwangju.

In regard to the CFC decisions regarding the use of the 20th Division, the troops were removed while Wickham was in the US (he returned May 19) and some were likely already in Kwangju by May 20. The Korean military consulted Wickham on their use in Kwangju, arguing that, having been trained in riot control, they would be better to use than the SWC soldiers, whose brutality had set off the uprising, if talks failed. Wickham agreed with this reasoning and consulted Gleysteen, who called Washington to consult his colleagues, who agreed:

In talking to Koreans, we both agreed to stress negotiations, not reentry. At the time l thought we (Wickham and I as well as the defense and state departments) had “approved” or “agreed” to a Korean request concerning the Twentieth Division, and l later talked in these terms when explaining to Koreans and Americans what we had and had not done during the Kwangju crisis. The connotation of my words did not cause any problem in Korea at the time, but when I ﬁrst wrote publicly about the issue in 1986, Pentagon lawyers straightened me out. The Koreans were not required to seek Wickham’s “approval” for these deployments, only to notify him and to carry out any compensating measures he might require. Whatever the precise provisions of our command arrangements, I believe that both the Koreans and we understood that, in order to sustain our operational cooperation, the Koreans needed a positive American reaction when making significant deployments of forces affecting national defense.

Gleysteen continued:

In conversations with Koreans and inquiring foreigners, I tried to be as frank as possible about Kwangju. For example, during my backgrounder with foreign journalists on May 21, when I sharply criticized Korean behavior and completely disassociated the United States from the brutality in Kwangju, I also acknowledged that the Korean government could not allow chaos to develop in Korea and that the United States could not properly oppose the use of military forces, if necessary as a last resort, to maintain public order. On subsequent occasions, I explained that our approval (technically, our “nonobjection”) to the contingent use of the Twentieth Division in Kwangju stemmed from our humanitarian wish to minimize further use of the special forces. After the crisis subsided and misinformation continued to spread like weeds, I stepped up our educational effort, trying to distinguish two phases of military action in Kwangju: (a) the brutal actions of the special forces that triggered the uprising and (b) the military reentry on May 27 that was conducted with little loss of life. We knew nothing of the former and were appalled by it, while the latter was discussed with us in advance.

He also added that

The United States was handicapped in efforts to facilitate a peaceful outcome in Kwangju. Not only were we unable to communicate freely with the people, but our views were frequently distorted and, in one key instance, deliberately blocked by the Korean security apparatus. Moreover, we lacked effective ofﬁcial representation in Kwangju, leaving us ill-informed and dependent on untested sources. This combination of circumstances was extremely frustrating and sometimes infuriating. We knew that Korea was going through a momentously important event, yet for the most part we were held to the sidelines.

Despite this, we did about as well as we could. We made a major effort to urge patience and moderation, to encourage a negotiated settlement, and to minimize bloodshed if talks failed and troops had to reenter the city.

He went on to describe how this effort was carried out. While Wickham stayed in touch with his Korean military counterparts, Gleysteen had conversations with General Lew (mostly by phone), meetings with other military officials, and “worked desperately to prod civilian officials into taking a stand with their military colleagues.” When he “bitterly criticized the government’s actions in Seoul and Kwangju” to Foreign Minister Park, Park “agreed but lamented the lack of anyone with the stature [in the government] to talk to the generals.” He also met with Blue House Secretary Choi and the new Prime Minister, Park Choong-hoon, but,

Although we found him sympathetic, we concluded from this meeting and a subsequent one, during which I pushed hard for a formal government apology to the people of Kwangju, that he was not going to confront the soldiers. This reticence of civilian officials compounded my worry about the outcome of negotiations dominated on the government side by the military and on the other side by militants in Kwangju.

He went on to discuss American limitations in seeking a peaceful solution:

in retrospect I recognize clearly that we would have been better informed, and certainly less frustrated, if we had had an authoritative presence in Kwangju, someone who knew the local leaders and could keep us accurately informed on a timely basis, and not had to depend on secondhand reports from miscellaneous sources. We had a strong, Korean-speaking ofﬁcer in the political section, Spence Richardson, who visited Kwangju after the crisis and prepared a solid report. I now fault myself for not sending him or someone else to Kwangju as soon as I learned about the severity of the crisis. Instead, we struggled to exercise our inﬂuence largely by remote control, targeting our efforts on military and civilian leaders in Seoul, certain missionaries in Kwangju, and Protestant as well as Catholic church leaders, particularly Cardinal Kim who was in close communication with Archbishop Yun in Kwangju.

Gleysteen also described the request to mediate that he received:

Just before the Korean army reentered Kwangju, we received a last- minute request on May 26 from unnamed student leaders in Kwangju that Washington “instruct” me to mediate a truce. The students made their re- quest to the New York Times correspondent, Henry Scott-Stokes, that after- noon. Rather than try to contact me, he passed it indirectly through the copy he was ﬁling to New York. The story surfaced the same evening in a newscast from our own armed forces station about 10 p.m., and I ﬁrst heard of it around 11 p.m. after I had been ofﬁcially informed that Korean forces would reenter Kwangju within two or three hours. I was unable to discover essential details or the context of the request; I was certain I could not succeed because Korean troops were already authorized and poised to move into Kwangju. So I declined the request when it was forwarded to me from a journalist by way of the embassy press attache. At the time, the decision tugged at my conscience, since I obviously did not want to blight any serious peace initiative. Later, when the request was linked to one of the militant holdouts in the provincial capital building, I was reassured that I had made the right decision. The individual who made the request was identiﬁed as Yun Sang Won, an apparently dedicated antigovernment activist and theoretician who had hardened under Park Chung Hee’s regime to the point where he opposed compromise.

He went on to describe the attempts to counter Chun’s public distortion of US statements (described here), and quoted from a cable he sent to Washington on May 29:

We have been demonstrably unsuccessful in trying to stop the march of these self-appointed leaders [Chun and company] or even to slow them down. . . . Members of the Chun group both underestimate and discount our reactions because they believe we have no options. They can be disconcertingly arrogant. . . . Unfortunately, we have been constrained by our own interests in South Korean security to pull our punches and permit this dangerous arrogance to grow. We have not threatened to modify our security relationship, our basic policy towards North Korea, or our economic support, because we have calculated that the threat to do so would be counterproductive and alarming to the populace in general. I continue to believe this basic premise is correct.
[...]
Given the essentially unchanged nature of our security interests, the key variable for us will be the real reaction of the Korean public. If by a reasonable test, most Koreans seem willing to live fairly comfortably with the newly emerging political structure, I think we should be able to also. If the people manifestly cannot tolerate the new leadership and resort to confrontation, we will be forced, whether we like it or not, either to try to bring about change or to disengage. [Emphasis added later.] I urge that we not jump too quickly to conclusions, because we are faced with a society which contradictorily wants both law and order and change.

Shortly before the end of the Kwangju Uprising, the US Embassy learned informally that President Choi would soon announce the “formation of a Special Committee for National Security Affairs to facilitate ‘interaction’ between the martial law commander and President Choi’s cabinet,” which would be made up of key cabinet members and all senior commanders and would last the length of martial law. While Choi was the titular head of the committee, the head of its steering committee was Chun Doo Hwan. Now that he was in charge of this “supragovernment structure,” as well as the DSC (and essentially the military as well), Chun resigned from the KCIA.

Much of the criticism of the US at this time is directed at its lack of criticism of Chun Doo-hwan and its appearance of working with him. Gleysteen wrote that he made recommendations that during a US government policy review of relations with the ROK in June, they should think about threatening the reduction of military support, but was unintentionally undercut by President Carter’s interview on CNN on May 31, 1980, in which he said:

We are urging the military leaders and the elected civilian leaders of South Korea to move as rapidly as possible toward a completely democratic government. In the meantime we are making sure that Korea is kept secure . . . I would like to see every nation on earth democratic . . . But we can’t sever our relationships with our allies and friends and trading partners and turn them all over to Soviet inﬂuence, and perhaps even subversion, simply because they don’t measure up to our standards of human rights.

As Gleysteen put it,

I could hardly fault the president’s choice of words (ironically so different from those he used during his confrontation with President Park a year earlier), but in the immediate context they seemed to foreclose the option of threatening some attenuation of our military cooperation with Korea. In fact, Chun mentioned Carter’s interview to me approvingly when I saw him a few days later. (I had to remind him that the president had also talked of setbacks to democratic government in Korea.)

As part of the cool, reserved stance the Carter administration chose to follow, they agreed to continue the indeﬁnite postponement of the security consultative meeting, to postpone policy planning talks, and to "defer, delay, or downgrade a number of non-critical economic missions."

On June 21, ahead of a meeting between Gleysteen and new Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, Gleysteen was sent a preliminary briefing:

Having concluded that General Chun Doo Hwan…and his colleagues have successfully established military control of the Korean government and that the army is presently united behind the measures being taken, we have determined that we must at the present stage focus our inﬂuence on moderating the regime’s unacceptable behavior and moving it toward constitutional government, a reduction of military involvement in politics and administration, implementation of sensible economic policies, and restraint in dealing with political opponents. Simultaneously, we seek to avoid over-identiﬁcation with the present Korean regime and its excesses and indicate that we are waiting to see whether its actions will warrant a fully normal US-ROK relationship.

The cable also suggested economic pressure may have been brought to bear on Chun as well. Gleysteen was told “you will receive instructions to inform the Korean Government Monday that we will abstain in Manila on Tuesday when the Asian Development Bank brings a Korean loan to a vote.” Gleysteen wrote that he told the foreign minister that this was “a response to events in Korea.” He was also told to convey to Chun that “Korea’s long-term economic well-being depends heavily on the conﬁdence of international bankers, investors, and traders. They believe that a healthy economy with stable growth prospects can only be forged with the uniﬁed support of the Korean people.” Also, Chun was to be told: “If a more broadly based support is not visible, the necessary public and political support in the United States for our presence in Korea could be weakened.”

Gleysteen was also advised that “you should then state to General Chun that there are two matters involving immediate issues” they should discuss: “the question of the political leaders and others who have been imprisoned since May 17, and the linkage of the Combined Forces Command with domestic political structures. Of these two, the issue of the arrested political leaders is by far the most important.” The linkage that was spoken of was of the Combined Forces Command to the new Special Committee for National Security Affairs due to CFC deputy commander Baek Seok-ju to the latter committee; he was later removed from that committee.

Secretary Muskie and Gleysteen were able to talk for several hours, including time spent at Yokota airbase in Japan where General Wickham joined them. “After listening to my fairly systematic review and replies to his questions, Muskie commented that he felt Chun Doo Hwan was abusing the American security commitment to Korea. I thought this was an apt characterization, and we agreed that I should tell this to Chun under instruction.”

After this meeting with Secretary Muskie, Gleysteen was told to meet Chun and

emphasize that while our security commitment to the ROK is ﬁrm, Chun and his group are abusing that commitment in ways that will undermine Korea’s long-term stability. In talking to Chun you should reafﬁrm our security commitment forcefully but indicate I lack conﬁdence that what he and his group are doing to establish a government will have the support of the Korean people and thus be consistent with our mutual security interests. […]

In previous conversations we have made clear what issues are the subject of our special concerns. Actions, not words, will determine the degree of American conﬁdence and reactions in the weeks to come. If Chun asks, you should remind him that the issues about which you have conveyed our concern are:
—efforts toward resumption of political development and accommodation;
—the establishment of a constitution which will permit broadly based government through free, popular elections;
—the adoption of a new constitution under conditions which allow public discussion and free choice;
—concern for the handling of political prisoners in accordance with humane and internationally accepted standards of due process of law, including family and legal access and veriﬁcation of their welfare, and with full consideration of the impact of political amnesty on international public opinion; and
—efforts to reduce rather than exploit the resentment and frustration which exist in some Korean circles toward the U.S.

As Gleysteen explained it, the US strategy at the time was to deprive Chun of an American stamp of approval:

Although we were handicapped by being unable or unwilling to reinforce our policy with powerful military or economic leverage, we had some success in consciously exploiting the new regime’s eagerness to be accepted as a fully legitimate government. With a seal of approval from Korea’s ally, Chun knew that he would ﬁnd it easier to enlist domestic support, engage the international community, and compete with North Korea. […] The Carter administration withheld these signs of approval. The security consultative meeting with its attendant session of defense ministers was indeﬁnitely postponed. No cabinet-level meetings took place. Only a few friendly Korean official visitors were received in Washington, where they were subjected to ﬁrm American “advice,” and no major American official came to Korea except a few persons on economic missions, the U.S. army chief of staff, and, after the U.S. elections, the secretary of defense on a special mission.
[…]
Granting my subjectivity as one of the principal architects and implementers of it, I think this policy of reserve toward Chun was more successful than mounting heavy rhetorical assaults without the backing of major sanctions that we deemed (correctly, I believe) too dangerous. Our stance probably contributed to some of the constitutional improvements. It helped to prevent the holding of the new presidential election under martial law […and] it was a critical aspect of our effort to spare the life of Kim Dae Jung. To be sure, the longer Chun was in power without revolt from the Korean people, the harder it was for us to hold the line against normalized relations. Moreover, once bargaining began over the Kim issue, willingness to normalize our behavior was inherent to a successful resolution.

Gleysteen’s book finishes with a detailed description of the US attempt to save Kim Dae-jung’s life. When the visit to Reagan’s white house – the unstated quid pro quo for sparing Kim’s life - ultimately occurred, Gleysteen was disappointed that Reagan made no mention of the talking points that Gleysteen and others had prepared (particularly about the need for democracy) and instead spoke only of their common struggle to defend against communism. As Gleysteen wrote,

Although some years later President Reagan redeemed himself in my estimation by taking a stand against Chun’s excesses, in 1981 I felt he was wrong - very wrong - to adopt such an uncritical stance during his ﬁrst meeting with a man who had seized power in a coup, presided over a brutal suppression of Kwangju citizens, and usurped the presidency of Korea. The words and the pictures flashed back to Korea tarnished the image of the United States in Korea, and to the people of Kwangju they reinforced a wide- spread misperception that we had colluded with Chun’s forces. Obviously, this was not President Reagan’s intent, but it was an unfortunate by-product of his not wanting to be associated with the outgoing administration. I would have recommended a slightly slower schedule and less warmth in Reagan’s embrace.

A summary of Wickham's book will be looked at in part 6.