Blowback - S3 Episode 10 - "The Host"

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

The armistice in Korea is supposed to be temporary. But a peace treaty never comes. As decades roll on, the war becomes permanent.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

North Korea is a problem and we're going to continue to do it so we can control them. We're going to make sure we can control them and make sure they cannot hurt us. We're not going to legitimize you and we're going to continue to put stronger and stronger sanctions on you. He who can destroy a thing controls a thing. Speak about this love sign. Speak about this love sign. Speak about this love sign. Welcome to blowback.

I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Coleman. And this is episode 10, the host. Last episode, we witnessed in July of 1953, the signing of the armistice in Korea. This was a military agreement expected to be temporary, expected to lead to a real and lasting peace treaty. That treaty never came. In this episode, we'll embark on a speed run of the years since the war of 1950-to-53. We'll see the demise of figures like Singman Re and Joe McCarthy, the rise of military junta's, and the extension of the Kim line.

We'll see the North rebuild and develop a modern economy and society. We'll see the South struggle and then come back strong, in fact becoming a capitalist powerhouse while remaining a military dictatorship for many decades. We'll see spy missions, assassination plots, mutinies, and the near breakout of another wide-scale war. We'll see the introduction of nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, and they may not come from who you would expect. We'll see a succession of U.S. and Korean leaders attempt to alternatively build and destroy chances for lasting peace. And finally, in this last episode of the season, we will catch up to the more recent years, the attempts at and sabotage of reconciliation and the broader legacy of the Korean War. The Armistice Agreement in Korea was finally reached on July 27, 1953. As the U.S. National Archives' own website reads,

The Korean Armistice Agreement is somewhat exceptional in that it is purely a military document. no nation is a signatory to the agreement, end quote. This is true, but as one historian elsewhere writes, the forces of the southern regime, quote, had refused to sign the armistice and wanted a military solution to the divided peninsula, end quote. In the north, the armistice was understood as a political reality, a way to stop the bloodshed,

a concession to the enemy who had held on to the border at the 38th parallel. But among Singman Rhee, South Korean right-wingers, and a good chunk of the American military brass, the armistice was a disaster. On June 9, 1953, the Associated Press reported that a crowd of 500,000 people in Seoul, quote, demonstrated feverishly today against an armistice. And nine days later, writes Grace Che in the Journal of American East Asian Relations, quote, under the cover of night on June 18th,

Singman Released nearly 25,000 non-repatriate North Korean POWs, meaning that is, anti-communist POWs, in order to jam up the armistice process. And then, less than two weeks before the armistice itself was signed that July, a United Press headline ran, quote, A-bombes may be used if truce efforts fail, reporting that using American atomic weapons, quote, is a possibility, if, if they elect to continue the Korean War instead of signing an armistice. Plans envisioning large-scale use of A-bombs were prepared in the Pentagon, but shelved prior to the current series of truce talks, military sources revealed today.

So the armistice now that holds in Korea is a negotiated ceasefire, but it is not a peace treaty. This distinction might seem hazy in 2022, but in 1953, most people considered the armistice quite temporary. There were a large number of provisions and sub-provision in the agreement, but there were three major components that will be relevant to our story. First was the establishment of the neutral nations supervisory committee, the NSCC, an international body to monitor things that's still around today. Second was the transformation of the area along the 38th parallel itself, into the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, that we know today.

And within the DMZ is the joint security area, infamously the only place where North and South Korean soldiers actually stand in front of one another. The whole zone, the DMZ, is about four kilometers, or two and a half miles wide. And from west to east, it runs about 250 kilometers or 160 miles long. The Korean peninsula's narrow waste. And third, there was Article 2, Paragraph 13D of the Armist Disagreement, which, to use the phrasing of University of British Columbia historian Stephen Lee, quote, stipulated that no new weapons should be introduced to the peninsula.

Yet, in just a few years, there would be nukes on that peninsula, and they would not come from the northern side. Last season, we talked about the Eisenhower administration's new look, the strategy spearheaded by now Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. It was the strategy of nuclear deterrence, above all else, or, also known as, massive retaliation. And this, the threat of nuclear annihilation, would do the job that stationing thousands of troops used to do.

And in Korea, it appeared to Dulles that it was Singman Rhee and the South, not the communists in the North, who were most likely to set things off, should conflict start back up again. In fact, in November 1953, Richard Nixon, now Vice President, visited South Korea in a failed attempt to secure from Rhee a written promise. Vice President Nixon receives a cordial welcome from President Singman Rhee as he visits Seoul on his round-the-world goodwill tour. What Eisenhower wanted, Dulles instructed Nixon, was that Rhee, quote, not start the war up again on the gamble that he can get us involved in his effort to unite Korea by force.

In December 1956, writes Stephen Lee, quote, Eisenhower agreed to a memo from the Pentagon that recommended a cut in the American Army from 19 to 17 divisions in Korea, along with the modernization of, those divisions to include atomic weapons. This would provide for the deployment of nuclear missiles to Korea. Some of these nuclear missiles, Lee notes, had been designed by the Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun, after he settled in America in Huntsville, Alabama. Noting that Chinese forces were withdrawing from North Korea and that any communist buildup was for defensive purposes, Lee concludes that the decision to station atomic weapons in South Korea was thus escalatory, far beyond the kinds of violations that the communists had made, and seemingly even beyond the bounds of existing national security policy.

With all its allies, the U.S. followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying its intention to station atomic warheads in Korea. These American nuclear warheads came before even the deployment of the job. Jupiter missiles at the western edge of the Soviet Union later in the 1950s. After obliterating the North and ravaging the South, the U.S. would cast the shadow of nuclear apocalypse over Korea for many years to come. Senator Joe McCarthy died of liver failure at age 48 in May 1957. Two and a half years earlier, he had been formally censured by the Senate.

The peak of the Red Scare on the surface had come and gone. The attention-seeking Charlotton McCarthy, it was agreed, was a disgraced figure in those final years. But while McCarthy had died, McCarthyism lived on. Richard Nixon and John Foster Dulles, who had collaborated on the Alger Hiss case, they were now in power. The Rosenbergs, convicted for espionage, were dead. And there was still the House on American Activities Committee. In North Korea, as we've seen, the old class of landlords was swept away by social revolution.

In the South, the same class was undone by a more tepid, but still powerful redistribution of land that was overseen by the Singmanree government. In their place rose the new class of South Korean entrepreneurs, men who bowed. built their fortunes off of the misery of the war and its aftermath. One of these men was Chong Chu Yong, who began as the owner of a small auto repair shop, but thanks to his work trucking supplies to U.S. bases, he amassed a fortune that created the Hyundai Corporation and made him a billionaire. Chung was one of several.

This was a good time for the Korean monopolies, the Chebel. The war's destruction cleared the way for new capital, new inventory, and new markets as foreign cash poured into South Korea. The wealth of these new entrepreneurs, however, did not exactly trickle down. For decades in South Korea, quote, extreme privation and degradation touched everyone, writes Bruce Cummings. Orphans ran through the streets, forming little protective and predatory bands of 10 or 15. Beggers, with every affliction, importuned anyone with a wallet,

often traveling in bunches of maimed or starved adults holding children or babies. My father worked as a carpenter at the American base, Anjongyo, a popular southern writer wrote, and mother ran a small shop at a nearby intersection of a three-forked road. Every day I used to go to the garbage dump a little distance off from my house. Often my foot was cut by a used razor blade on the sharp teeth of a broken saw or a jagged lid of a can. But the cuts were worth it, because the whole family could feast on pig soup at dinner if I happened to find a piece of meat among the garbage. Compare this to the life of your average South Korean politician.

Who would, per Bruce Cummings, quote, rise in the morning and have breakfast, while his driver warmed up his slick black war surplus Jeep, dusted off the metal canopy on top, and straightened out the white linens on the seats. Soon they would motor down to the local tea room for some serious, curious gossiping. Off they would go in a cloud of dust, various and sundry servants bowing low. And of course, the occupying Americans, be they military officers, consultants, or

advisors, all of them held far greater personal wealth than any of your average South Koreans. Armed forces of Korea paid tribute to the republic's president, Singman Rhee, on his 81st birthday. All join in honoring President Singman Rie, a proud spectacle for Korea's elder statesman. As South Korea's new classes, both owners and workers, set on a long road to building what someday would be a robust outpost of state-led capitalism, Singman Rhee staggered through the 1950s on borrowed time. Rhee had always been good at playing the Americans to get what he wanted, perhaps because he was their only real option in South Korean politics. But Rhee didn't spend the rest of the 1950s, after the war, making any new friends. His old buddy,

John Foster Dulles called Rhee a quote-unquote Oriental bargainer. His pal Richard Nixon labeled him a gambler, a communist, or some of both. But here's what his former comrades didn't appreciate. Re, corrupt as the next guy, was still a nationalist at heart. He, unlike his American colleagues, was not content for South Korea to be just another import suck, another underdeveloped sponge for Japanese goods. Rhee wanted to turn his own country into a modern industrial powerhouse.

He looked to the north and saw his communist countrymen achieving just that, with good old-fashioned Stalinist breakneck industrialization. And so, Sigmund Rie did his duty and sucked billions out of the American teat. Somebody had to do it. Throughout the 1950s, American aid made up almost the entire South Korean budget. Ree's moves to set up South Korea's economic success, however, did not change the fact that he presided over a police state, operating with next to no political legitimacy. The CIA recorded that after the war.

Rhee had only grown fonder of such tactics as, quote, stringent censorship, police terrorism, and deploying extra-governmental agencies such as youth gangs and armed patriotic societies to terrorize and destroy non-communist opposition groups and parties. Rhee executed political opponents at will, after rigged trials, of course, and he ran a personal ring of corruption and treated the prime minister like a personal assistant. The agency even thought that Rhee had crossed into senility or insanity. As the years went on, he attempted to squeeze only more power out of institutions like the national security law, which had by then been used to,

prison hundreds of thousands of people on political crimes. But in 1960, the corruption, the ballot stuffing, the political murders, and in particular, the discovery of a body of a middle school boy who had been tortured by the government goons, this all kicked up a popular revolt. Seoul, capital of Southern Korea, riots on the scale of revolution. More was to follow, but it already looked like the end of the road for President Singman Reed. Led particularly by students and the young. The state police had no problem mowing down people by the hundreds, which only swelled the ranks of the demonstrators. In earlier rioting, police killed 130 people, wounded close on 1,000. That only incensed the population. By now 30,000 risked battle with the police.

Not even a tyrant like re could go on ruling in face of this. By April 1960, tens of thousands poured through Seoul streets. Crowds swarmed the vice president's house, and literally tore it down. The American overlords themselves fed up with Rhee told him to resign. This time, the police were once again too much for the people, but later, when half a million made a mass revote, President Rhee said he'd resign. And he did.

On April 29, 1960, Singhman Ree boarded a plane to Hawaii with his wife, Francesca. In the wake of Rhee's door. demise. South Korea enjoyed a flash of hope. The new National Assembly, writes Bruce Cummings, quote, became a forum for diverse views. The press was free and sophisticated schemes for building the economy came from economic planners. The more open the system got, the more bickering dominated the National Assembly, and the more independent thinkers began to call for a new approach toward reunification with the North. Few days passed without street demonstrations,

and sometimes the students came into the National Assembly to browbeat cowarding politicians. Then began the ordeal that sent shivers up the spines of Seoul's ruling groups. A move to the left. The North, too, had been dipping its feet in ideas of reunification. In August, Kim Il-sung had tabled a proposal for a confederal system with representatives of both regimes, and students began marching in the streets of Seoul, or planning to meet counterparts from North Korea at Pen Mujam. Organizations advocating a North-South merger started to pop up among the very groups

that had toppled Singman Rhee. South Korea, though poor, though unstable, and though still indebted to America, was staggering toward a peaceful coexistence, perhaps even reunification with the North. And this simply could not be allowed to happen. In first pictures from Seoul following the pre-dawn military coup that overthrew the South Korean government, troops guard public buildings in the early hours of martial law proclaimed by the Army Hunter that took over the country. On May 16, 1961, R.O.K. Army General Pak Chonghi led a group of officers in a coup that snuffed out the runaway democracy in South Korea. The new junta, which made Pak dictator, shut down the national.

Assembly and outlawed any political opposition to the new regime. It announced a program of national renewal, a patriotic renaissance, anti-communism, and a strong, self-reliant South Korean economy. To battle against communism and poverty, and to end the corruption with which he charges the administration of depot's premier John M. Chang. The United States held back and let the junta have its way. New president, Pak Chung-hee, was born a peasant, and actually was once targeted as a leftist by Singman Rhee's regime. He had for years worked in military intelligence. Upon leafing through their files for info on the new dictator Puck, the CIA actually worried he may have been a

crypto-communist. They need not have worried. Under Pach and his colonels, there would be a new anti-communist law to supplement Rie's old national security law. regime would label all socialist countries in the world enemy states. Under a law enforcing quote political purification, the regime arrested thousands of politicians, thousands more civil servants, and yet thousands more civilians labeled hooligans. Much like Japan years before, South Korea had become a state where military and business leaders called the shots. But compared to the decadent and kleptocratic re-government, it was not entirely unpopular, for a time, at least. The junta allowed some political freedom for the small class of Korean bourgeoisie,

creating the appearance of a bustling national legislature. It even maneuvered through several intense student uprisings against South Korea's Treaty of Normalization with Japan in the mid-1960s. Once the tear gas had cleared, quote, the period from 1965 to 1971, writes Bruce, was one of rapid economic growth and comparative political stability. Despite the ominous growth of the K-CIA, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, this period was, quote,

one of relative freedom and prosperity. It was, by the way, the Korean CIA that gave a certain Reverend Sung Myung Moon his big break, helping him create the Unification Church. This right-wing Christian cult would soon balloon into a global, network of political and cultural power, with deep ties to leaders in the South, in Japan, across Europe, and in the US of A. The junta counted on America's support as a bulwark against communism in Asia.

Pax government even contributed to the American war in Vietnam. Over the years, sending around 320,000 South Korean troops, the most sent by any country, aside from the U.S. itself. South Korea holds its first political election since the military junta took over the government two years ago. If the turnout was enthusiastic, the government was not. It took prodding by the United States whose aid supports the country to have it called. Winner by a surprisingly narrow margin is General Chunhee Park, who headed the junta.

Had two minor candidates surrendered their votes to Yun, he would have won. Despite charges of fraud, this is a remarkably clean election. One of the earliest shocks of the turbulent year of 1968 was the assassination attempt of South Korean President Pock on January 21st. A 31-man North Korean commando raid on the Blue House, South Korea's presidential palace. It was a stab right at the heart of the junta government. After a standoff with U.S. and South Korean forces,

all but two of the North Korean assassins died. These two men lived out very different lives. One returned to the North and rose to the rank of general. And the other, named Kim Sinjo, stayed in the South, eventually defecting and becoming, in the words of Bruce Cummings, quote, an all-purpose source for exaggerated and inflamed propaganda about the North, as well as a well-known alcoholic. He later tried to re-defect back to the North. Now, this failed attempt, this raid on the Blue House, it was not an isolated gamut.

at taking out a hated enemy. Instead, Stephen Lee argues, North Korea's aggressive strategy in the 1960s culminated in the Blue House raid. This strategy, quote, paralleled American and South Korean military aggression in Vietnam. Roger, that was some sort of rifle grenade and came all the way through the building hit over the line.

In January 1968 also saw the execution of the Tet offensive of the Tet Offensive, the North Vietnamese effort to force the U.S. into winding down the war. Hormon! Have you pushed the bow? In the front ranks of the Marines, a man is suddenly wounded. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Blue House, the Johnson administration threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea if the R.O.K. did the same in Vietnam. On January 23rd, 1968, only two days after, after the failed Blue House raid, the North Korean government seized an American and naval spy ship,

the USS Pueblo, on the North Korean eastern coast, citing both this intrusion and various armistice violations. The crew and the ship were brought to the port city of Wansan. The South Koreans, meanwhile, were angry at perceived American in action over the Blue House raid. Quote, what would the U.S. do? The South Korean Prime Minister asked the U.S. ambassador, if Cuba raided Washington and attacked the White House. And then South Korea began separate talks with Cuba. President Pak Chung-hee was, quote, drinking heavily at this time, and the following day he urged the UN command to blow up the North Korean Commando training sites.

Quote, though intent on constraining Poc from responding provocatively to the crisis, the Johnson administration, in response to the loss of the USS Pueblo, took provocative military action of its own. This was Operation Combat Fox, what Stephen Lee terms, the largest ever Air Force exercise of its kind, a show of force that featured 300 F-4 fighter jets, three nuclear aircrew craft carriers and nuclear-equipped B-52 bombers. There was also this. According to a Hungarian diplomat,

the American representative had conveyed an ultimatum to his North Korean counterpart at the end of January 1968, which threatened military intervention and the use of atomic weapons if the sailors of the Pueblo were not returned. Following some back-channel talks with the Soviets, who had no interest in going to war for Kim again, The U.S. pulled back.

After the U.S. apologized to the North Koreans, and after Richard Nixon was elected president, in December 1968, the sailors were returned home. And for good measure, the U.S. government later publicly took back its apology. But things didn't end there. South Korea's regime had devised its own plan of revenge for the Blue House raid. The same year as that raid, the South Korean Air Force organized what was supposed to be its own elite hit squad to assassinate Kim Il-sung. For years, they trained on an island

off of Incheon, where seven of the 31 members of this crack team died. At least one died of fatigue during training. As for the others, according to the defense ministry, reports CNN, two men were executed for desertion. Another man was executed for threatening a trainer. Three others were executed or died after an incident in which they escaped the island and raped a local woman. Then, after years of training and mistreatment, in August 1971, the would-be-crack team was told that they would not be sent to Pyongyang after all. And so, Unit 684, as they were known by now, mutinete. You bloody bastard.

You'll not put your foot on me again. Quote, at first I thought the North Korean special forces were here to take over this island, said one of the unit's trainers. Before he realized what was happening, he was shot in the neck. After killing 18 of their handlers, unit 684 traveled to mainland South Korea, hijacked a bus to the capital, and discovered by security, ended up in a standoff with soldiers and police. All but four members of the unit died. they were either shot or, as they were piling into their bus, killed from detonating their own hand grenades,

and the surviving members were executed. The whole story was covered up for decades. Despite being leveled by U.S. bombs from 1950 to 1953, the DPRK roared back to life with rapid development and better living conditions for its people. It was North Korea in those days, that was sending food aid to the south. The popular institutions that made up

the North Korean social revolution were in the brutal years of the war condensed and systematized by the state. The issue of the day in North Korea, not unlike Cuba following that country's confrontation with the American superpower, the issue was developing a strong and modern economy and building military strength sufficient to protect it

from any future bloodbath akin to what the North experienced during the Korean War. In 1965, Cambridge economist Joan Robinson described the North Korean economic recovery as a miracle. Eleven years ago in Pyongyang, there was not one stone standing upon another. Now a modern city of a million inhabitants stands on two sides of the wide river, with broad, tree-lined streets of five-story blocks, public buildings, a stadium, theaters, one underground surviving from the war, and a super deluxe hotel. The industrial sector comprises a number of up-to-date textile mills and a textile machinery plant.

The wide sweep of the river and little tree-clad hills preserved as parks provide agreeable vistas. There are some patches of small gray and white houses hastily built from rubble, but even there the lanes are clean and light and water are laid on. A city without slums. All of this, while mixing post-colonial Marxism, with the rather more traditional Korean concepts of self-reliance and veneration of the beloved and paternal leader. By the 1970s, the DPRK had, quote, invested billions to bring its economy up to world's standards,

writes Bruce. Huge amounts of foreign equipment, including entire factories, had been imported from Western Europe and Japan. They had the finest Siemens medical equipment at the top hospitals, fleets of Mercedes and Volvos, and entire Pandeos factories, for urban women and very expensive monumental buildings and theaters in the capital, with heat, air conditioning, and electricity of these vast emporiums, computer monitored from elaborate central control rooms.

North Korea's trading pattern had actually diverged remarkably from the Soviet bloc, bringing its trade with non-communist countries almost up to the level of its socialist block trade. The Swedish envoy in North Korea, visiting in 1975, noted, quote, the achievements of the regime in rapid industrialization, building enormous complexes of housing from the ashes of the Korean War, providing free education and health care to everyone,

achieving standards of living in the 1970s that he thought were higher and more equitably distributed than in the South, and certainly lacking in the widespread poverty and homelessness. visible in South Korea at the time. Of course, for a government suspicious of Western meddling and sensitive to its portrayal outside of the peninsula, the DPRK would always take care to control these visits from the outside. The North Korean guides did not, however, steer the envoy away

from their homegrown propaganda glorifying North Korean progress and, of course, Kim Il-sung himself. This aspect was a bit much for the visitor's Nordic sensibilities. Now, one of the possible reasons that Unit 684's hit on Kim was called off was that by the early 1970s, the conflict in Korea had become less hot. President Nixon's detente policy, in particular his rapprochement with China, cooled everything down in Asia for a little while. The north and south, after much haggling behind closed doors,

also announced a mutual pledge to work toward reconciliation and even reunification. 1976, however, was another dangerous inchpoint. That August, a mixed South Korean-American crew, without North Korean permission, began cutting down a tree in the joint security area within the DMZ. At first, when told to stop, they did. But 12 days later, on August 18th, U.S. and South Korean workers, again returned to cut the tree, and this time they did not stop. A fight broke out.

Two American officers were killed, Stephen Lee writes, quote, with clubs and the blunt side of the axes that were carried into the area by the soldiers to chop the trees. Lee writes, quote, the tree trimming event was not an innocuous act of gardening, but a calculated provocation, repeated twice. It had the effect of shaking things up. The military alert level was raised to DefCon 3, the stage below war, and nuclear bombers were dispatched to coincide with new tree cutting as part of, quote, Operation Bunyan. Military plans were drawn up to prepare for, quote, a rapid extraction of forces, followed

by a high-level Washington decision. Not familiar. The scaremongering worked. One American intel analyst listening to North Korean communications later said the operation, quote, blew their fucking minds. We scared the living shit out of them, end quote. As we discussed last season, the 1970s also coincided with a rising tide of congressional scrutiny of the activities of both American clandestine services, as well as the spy agent. of American friends and allies. The first ever issue of the Socialist magazine in these times,

published just after Jimmy Carter's election in November 1976, featured a cover story with the headline, Politicians Get Foreign Aid from the Korean CIA. A memo obtained by U.S. customs from a K-CIA-backed businessman, quote, contained a list of 90 members of Congress who were apparently marked for contributions. And at a hearing on the lack of human rights in South Korea, one of the congressmen who got K-CIA payoffs had said,

quote, I don't think we need to spend too much time debating what the government is doing in Korea. And among the other beneficiaries of K-CIA money, Richard Nixon, via an intermediary, of course. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the World Unification Church had staged several pro-Nixon rallies, which had been paid for by the K-CIA, according to the Washington Post.

The 1970s, in fact, brought a much crueller period of military rule in South Korea, with a K-CIA that had become a quote-unquote rogue institution. The regime was spooked by a growing labor movement, bubbling discontent, popular opposition, and a distinct American aloofness about these problems, even when South Korean troops were aiding the U.S. and Vietnam. Here's Bruce, quote, Pachung-hee had his scribes write a new constitution, removing all limits on his tenure in office, and giving him powers to appoint and dismiss the cabinet, and even the prime minister.

Quote, emergency decrees flew out of the blue house like bats at dusk in the early 1970s. One 1973 decree declared all work stoppages to be illegal, and the infamous order number nine in 1974 made any criticism of the regime a violation of national security. The Korean CIA, the sorcerer's apprentice to America's own, was described by the New York Times in 1973, thusly, quote,

the agents watch everything and everyone everywhere. The agency once put a telephone call through from Seoul to a noodle restaurant in the remote countryside where a foreign visitor had wandered on a holiday without telling anyone. And average Koreans avoided getting in trouble by, quote, not talking about anything at all to anybody. Running a foul of the secret police earned you a trip to the South Mountain,

the agency's headquarters, and a nexus of torture. By this time, the foundations for an upstart South Korean economy had been laid. The junta set the scene back when it had come to power in the 60s, arresting import-substituting businessmen, and, quote, marching them through the streets, cultural revolution style, with dunce caps and sandwich placards that said, quote, I am a corrupt swan. and, quote, I ate the people.

More concretely, the regime cleaned house, arresting Rhee-era cronies and black marketeers. It adopted economic planning and a strong handle on the markets. It created a virtual paradise for Korean firms by issuing loans at quote-unquote negative interest for industries such as steel and electronics. The state paid the chibals to make themselves money, and in so doing, develop a modern economy. None of this was exactly unique to South Korea. What was special is that in South Korea, it really, really worked. The ideological sheen put on all of this was that of a national family. Workers and owners, labor and management, they would cooperate in national solidarity

to produce a strong, forward-looking South Korean economy. But despite economic progress in the 1970s and onward, this idea of labor and management as one happy family would be one thing that was actually very difficult to sell. We've seen the sweetheart deal that South Korean big business got under Pock. Labor, however, had quite a different time. Unions had since the days of Rhee been state sanctioned and tightly controlled if they existed at all. In the 1960s, the Federation of different trade unions, steel, transportation, and chemicals were managed by the K-CIA. Unions were allowed in politics if they supported the junta. As the economy grew, South Korea became home to, quote, a vast warren of sweatshops, and according to a 1970 investigation

by Quakers into the notorious peace market sweatshop, young girls, 14 to 16 years of age, had to work kneeling on the floor for an average of 15 hours a day from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. They were entitled to two days off not per week but per month. When there was a great deal of work to do, they were forced to work throughout the night and to take amphetamines to stay awake. Their daily wage was the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee at a tea room. Laborers who worked in the peace market area for more than five years suffered without exception from such afflictions as anemia, poor digestion, bronchitis, tuberculosis, eye problems, arthritis, neuralgia, and irregular menstruation.

Given the dictatorship's limits on union activity, Labor had to fight its way into politics in South Korea. But those fights came year after year, from the late 60s into the 70s, first an electronics corporation, then metal workers at a shipbuilding site, then chemical workers at a Pfizer plant, and then workers at a General Motors factory in 1971. The K-CIA was working.

overtime to enforce President Pak's vision of one big happy Korean family. By the end of the 1970s, labor action was put down violently anywhere that had cropped up, earning the regime a tut-tutting from the Carter administration. Soon there were huge protests in the South's urban areas, including Busan, led by workers and students. This and other challenges to the Pock regime led to the dramatic demise of Puck himself. On the night of October 26, 1979, at a dinner at a K-CIA safe house, Pock argued with the head of the K-CIA about what to do about all this unrest. You could do something, I guess.

You could die, Julie. The argument became significantly more. intense when the intelligence chief pulled out his pistol and shot Pock's bodyguard, and then Pock himself. And before blowing Pock away, Korea's top spook reportedly shouted, How can we conduct our policies with an insect like this? It is still unclear whether this was a spontaneous murder or a planned coup. If it was meant to be the latter, it failed miserably, as the entire South Korean leadership dissolved into panic, until a new set of military men took control and the offending K-CIA chief who shot Pak was executed.

So began the next South Korean administration and the 1980s. The 1980s would be the decade that South Korea, the Republic of Korea, would finally break out of the cycle of military regimes and begin its own long project of democratization. It was not a development that came about cleanly. Friend of the show, Tim Sharrock, was a journalist in East Asia in the 1980s, reporting on increasing tensions between students and other demonstrators and the repressive military government, still bankrolled by the U.S. The bloody path to democratic change climax with the Guangzhou uprising of 1980. In 1980, you know, when there was this coup by Chandhu Juan, who was a special aid, he was the intelligence chief for Pachenghi, the dictator who had been

assassinated. And Chundu Wan began to accumulate power and carried out a sort of three-stage coup. When first took control of the Korean military, then he took control of the Korean CIA. And then he declared martial law and took over the whole government. And the day after his military coup, in the southwestern city of Guangzhou, people kept demonstrating, against chunduan and the military dictatorship. And they were stomped and slaughtered in the streets for three days. There was terrible, attached by these special forces

that Chon had sent into the city. People were just massacred in those couple of days. And on the third day, the army, Korean army force, they were surrounded by tens of thousands of Huangju people. And the army just opened fire. And that's what's known as the Kuanju Massacre. The simple fact that the United States had literal control, the final cut, over the ROK's military, meant that anti-Americanism was a key ingredient in the growing discontent, the South Korean masses.

Well, what I found was that the U.S. has basically given them a green light to use military force against students who are basically peaceably demonstrated. right and so that part of this my story where I got these documents was very shocking to Koreans and then also I got the minutes to a very high level the White House meeting in the middle of the Kwongju uprising went one day after that massacre took place there was this high level meeting led by the vice president Husky at the time it was Jimmy Carter was the president and Brzezinski was there and Holbrook and all the top officials that CIA had

the Harold Brown Secretary of Defense and they decided at that point they knew there had been a military massacre. They knew that at least the day before, at least 100 people had been shot to death in

the main city square. They had that information and they knew that Chundu Wan, this general, was behind it. But They still decided that they would support a military takeover of this city to put down the uprising. And they cleared the way for Chun to do that. And they also released certain troops under the Joint Command to be used to go into Tongue. When the minutes from that story came out in my stories, it was, you know, well, I've never had a story where the next day people demonstrated at the U.S. Embassy in Korea.

But that happened. And, you know, I later learned that my stories and further stories I did after that really changed the viewpoint of a lot of Korean leftists, you know. Like they had sort of, in the past, they had had more trust of the U.S. After this, they realized that, you know, the U.S. had no real interest in democratization. It was there. It was U.S. interests that always predominated. The summer of 1987 saw him.

huge demonstrations that finally forced the dictatorship's hand, and Chun's savvy successor announced a plan for free elections. On June 29, 1987, President Roe-Tay-Wu publicly initiated the constitutional reform process that would partially democratize the country. Another breakthrough came when the Republic of Korea extended diplomatic ties for the first time with the People's Republic of China, formally ending hostilities. At the same time, and despite the blood, sweat, and tears of South Koreans thus far, this was not a simple snap to insta democracy. Politics were changing, but some things, like the rebranded K-CIA, now called the Agency for National Security planning, some things state put. North Korea, meanwhile, was still accumulating press,

prestige and the trappings of a modern society. In the 80s, there was, quote, a more relaxed scene, says Bruce Cummings, the population better and more colorfully dressed, people more relaxed around foreigners, and many new stores full of imported consumer goods, so-called paradise stores, end quote. On the cultural side, this was the golden age of North Korean cinema. The 70s and 80s saw not only a boom of celebrated North Korean films, especially after the young cineast Kim Jong-il had entered the world, but also joint productions with Italian or German film companies, which produced a unique flavor of international collaboration. Here is filmmaker and North Korean movie connoisseur Anna Barnowski. The golden age of North Korean cinema in terms of

exposure to the wider world and films that won awards and perhaps films that almost caught the zeitgeist that were not seen as dated were actually, you know, widely applauded when they managed to get outside North Korea and play at movie festivals was the 70s and 80s, no question. Cummings, who visited the DPRK in the 80s, continues. Honesty was the rule. No one accepted tips, whether taxi drivers, waitresses, or hairdressers. Crime was non-existent.

There was no squalor, no begging, and extraordinary public civility. A foreigner encountering little kids on the street would get a quick and pleasant jackknife bow. The people were friendly, courteous, gentle, with an air of unassuming dignity. Those are the words of another visitor, Englishman Andrew Holloway, who worked as a kind of translator for the DPRK. He wrote that the average North Korean lived an incredibly simple and hardworking life, but also has a secure and happy existence, and the comradeship between the highly collectivized people was moving. One American journalist simply compared the society to one big kibbutz. It has survived a century of colonization, war and division, come through a bloody struggle

against military dictatorship and arrived as a first class economic power. That is South Korea's proud achievement. But it remains economic progress without contentment. Even today's prosperity is haunted by state violence and passion. The democratization movement in South Korea in the 1990s coincided with the growth of a genuine South Korean middle class. Democratization was shaped, according to anthropologist Jasuk Tsong, by civil society organizations. Quote, thus the democratized era provided an opportunity to explore such freedom, both within and

outside social activism, as both consumers and entrepreneurs. Now, unlike the former Soviet bloc, for whom the loss of the Cold War was economically ruinous, the 1990s were a boom time for East Asian markets. That is, until the 1997 financial crash. After decades of investing in heavy industry, South Korea was among the countries now overburdened with too much, quote-unquote, hot money, foreign capital. With demand slackening and more loans going bad because the Chables soaked up investment, South Korea, like Thailand and Hong Kong, took a major economic hit.

After years of growth in state development, mass layoffs came to South Korea, and further, neoliberal, social, and economic reform. 1.5 million South Korean workers lost their jobs in 1998, and 12% of the country lived in poverty, up from 8.5% in 1996. Today, many years of IMF policy later, that figure is a real. Around 15%. In that same decade, South Korea released the world's longest-serving political prisoner. His name was Kim Sung-myung, and he'd been in jail since October of 1950. A southerner who had supported the DPRK, Kim was picked up by American intelligence, and handed

over to the re-regime back then. He was declared a spy, which, despite his support for the North, Kim denied. He was tortured and threatened with death and still refused to confess to any spying. Then the southern government executed his father and his sister in an effort to loosen Kim's tongue. Still no confession. Kim spent the next 44 years in solitary confinement,

quote, forbidden to speak to anyone, to meet relatives, or to read anything, beaten frequently, and surviving somehow on a prison starvation diet. He remained incarcerated because he would not convert and give up his political support of North Korea. He entered prison at 29 and came out at 73, still unrepentant. Kim Song Myung may have been the longest serving political prisoner, but many more like him remain in South Korea's jails. The National Security Act, used to jail still more, continues to exist as of this recording in 2022. Such is the unfinished business of the war.

If South Korea began to exit the wilderness in the 1990s, then it was the north turn to enter. Some may have sensed an omen in 1994 when the maximum leader and founder of the country Kim Il-sung died. Their own experience makes the Korean people can feel that They are blessed with the leadership of Kim Jong-il, who takes over the revolutionally cause the president, Kim Il-sung. His son, Kim Jong-il, would not officially assume the office of General Secretary for several years. So long was the morning period for the elder Kim.

But in fact, even before Kim's death, things had already begun to sour. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, countries such as North Korea that had belonged to the socialist trading network or the socialist bloc, they saw their economies spiral into chaos. This was bad enough in Cuba, as we saw last season. And like Cuba, North Korea was doubly smashed not only by the disappearance of trade, but by further, newer, harsher sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies. But even on top of that, things were made even worse by massive floods in the north in the middle of the 1990s, followed by an equally devastating drought. This series of natural disasters produced a famine in North Korea, which, according

to scholar Meredith Jung and Wu, led to the deaths of as many as half a million people in that country. A documentary called Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang and Seoul by David Yun features an interview with, among others, a North Korean woman who lived through this famine. She said, because of the U.S. The U.S.S. landings of not downed, not oiled or so, monstonged don't grow, monst, monstongue can't stop, and the market in 70%

stopped. She's describing here how the U.S.-led sanctions targeted key resources in North Korea, such as fuel, like oil to power factories and transportation, which would prevent the North from many effective responses to such a catastrophe. Bruce writes, quote, Washington likes to claim that it is the biggest aid donor to the North, but U.S. aid has not been

nearly as substantial as it claims. Under the Framework Agreement, which we'll get to in a bit, the U.S. sent $400 million in energy assistance, mainly heating oil, from 1995 to 2003. This was not aid, but compensation for the shutdown of the North's nuclear facilities. And furthermore, that oil that the United States sent, it never amounted to more than 2% of North Korea's energy needs. Quote, the main American aid has come in the form of food assistance. The biggest bundle came in the Clinton years with 965,000 metric tons of food.

The Bush administration cut back to 200,000 tons in 2002 and drastically cut it to 40,000 through the first half of 2003, while claiming all the while it was not using food as a weapon. Meanwhile, China, a much poorer country at the time, provided half a million to a million tons of food annually from 1995 onward. In this 1990s atmosphere of crisis, the government under Kim Jong-il had moved resources previously spent on social or cultural projects over to military buildup.

And as a kind of northern counterpart to the South's political prison system, hundreds of thousands of prisoners populated labor camps in different parts of the country. At the time of a population of around 23 million, people, as many as a hundred thousand people were imprisoned, half of whom were so-called political cases. Bruce Cummings takes an example of someone sent off to the mines, written in a book called The Aquariums of Pyongyang. Kang Chihuan was held in the Yodok labor camp for 10 years, and like most other prisoners, he went there with his family, a common practice in an odd aspect of the DPRK's belief in the family as the core unity of society. Mutual

family support is also the reason that many survive the ordeal of prison. The conditions were primitive and beatings were frequent, but the inmates were also able to improvise much of their upkeep on their own. The natural environs meant that small animals could be surreptitiously caught and cooked, and death from starvation was rare. Kang's uncle had worked in a brewery for many years and soon had his own rudimentary still, churning out liquor. Upon the family's return from the camp, soon they were accepted back into the community. The family prospered, mainly because of cash coming in from relatives in Japan. This story is an interesting and believable one, precisely because it does not on the whole

make for the ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers in France meant it to be. Instead, it suggested that a decade's incarceration with one's immediate family was survivable and not necessarily an obstacle to entering the elite status of residence. in Pyongyang, an entrance to college. Meanwhile, we in America have a long-standing, never-ending gulag, full of black men in our prisons, incarcerating upward of 25% of all black youths." And the North Koreans have suffered because the United States has done everything we possibly could

to destroy the economy of North Korea. We've done everything we possibly could to boost the economy of South Korea. And then we condemn them because they are backward in... backward and because their people are starving. That, of course, was the voice of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Much as we saw in Cuba last season, out of pure desperation, in this period of crisis of the 90s, the northern government attempted to open up its economy and increase market activity, but with next to no interest in the leader of the post-Soviet global economy, the United States.

Loans, the kind the South Koreans got, for better or for worse, from institutions like the IMF would not make their way to North Korea. The justification for all of this, of course, is North Korea's nuclear program. Early in the week, the tension reached a peak as South Korea held air raid and civil defense drills. North Korea withdrew its membership in the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday, and the U.S. drew up a draft United Nations sanctions resolution against North Korea. The standoff between the U.S. and the DPRK over North Korea's nuclear program has played out twice now.

First is tragedy and then as farce. It starts in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. As we discussed in our first season on Iraq, the vanishing of the Cold War and its attendant villain of Soviet communism required the creation of new villains. Colin Powell, we remember, told the press that after Trounsson's, Saddam, he was, quote, running out of villains, running out of demons. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il-sung. The concept of the rogue or renegade state, usually a small and weak post-colonial country that America had been meddling with for a while. It was now in vogue. Take this snippet from

Leslie Gelb, then the head of the Council on Foreign Relations. In a 1991 New York Times editorial titled The Next Renegade State. What country with 23 million people run by a vicious dictator has missiles, a million men under arms, and is likely to possess nuclear weapons in a few years. It's not Iraq anymore. Not Syria, which has not entered the nuclear race, nor any other Mide. The renegade, and perhaps the most dangerous country in the world today, is North Korea. The world community, and especially Japan, has the opportunity to stop it from becoming the

next Iraq. As we've already mentioned, following the Korean War, in 1958, the United States placed nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula, targeting the DPRK, the Soviet Union, and China. And of course, these were under American, not South Korean control. By the late 1960s, Pentagon War plans made explicit the early resort to nuclear weapons in case of another Korean flare-up. By the 1970s, there were nearly 700 nukes on hand. US helicopters carrying nuclear weapons actually flew near the DMZ, providing many an occasion for a Korean war-style border incursion.

To all of this, the North's response was not to develop its own nukes, but to continue to build underground facilities in case of an attack. Then in the 70s and 80s and against U.S. wishes, President Puk Chung-hee puts South Korea on track to secretly develop its own nuclear weapons and corresponding missile technology. quote, South Korea also garnered a reputation as a renegade arms supplier toward pariah countries such as South Africa and Iran and Iraq during their war, writes Bruce. Much of this reads as if it were written about North Korea, not South Korea, and puts Pyongyang's activity in perspective.

Much of it was responsive to U.S. pressure and R.O.K. initiatives. Then, finally, in the 80s, the North Koreans debuted a nuclear reactor. at Nyangbon, about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. Despite nuclear threats from the United States and the ROK by this point, the purpose of Nyeongbong was clear. The north, in an effort to shake off dependence on foreign oil and domestic coal, was imitating the South, Japan, and others in the West in producing an alternative fuel to sustain its considerable energy levels.

Considering the subsequent post-Soviet crisis of the 1990s, this concern of theirs in the 80s was not off base. The distance between North Korea and the United States seemed a chasm. At this point, it is entirely up to North Korea that defuse the situation. The solution entirely depends on the United States. The accusations that proliferated in the 1990s in venues like the New York Times, accusations that North Korea had been long working toward a bomb, these ignore all kinds of basic indicators about the nature of the Nyangman facility,

like how often the fuel load was removed, which was blatantly inconsistent with a weapons facility. And even more than this, sheer common sense would suggest that the North, quite aware that U.S. surveillance could capture every inch of the Nyangban facility, knew and in fact desired for it to be public knowledge. If they wanted to secretly develop their own bomb at this point, the DPRK would have taken on the Israeli method and done so underground. What's more? The North Koreans, in fact, invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to come and visit

the facilities, only to be denied by the IAEA. They had missed an application deadline. In fact, in a post-Soviet world, Kim Il-sung had planned to normalize relations with the U.S. and the South and marketize the economy at home. More hopeful news. In late 1991, the H.W. Bush administration withdrew all of those nukes from South Korea. It also suspended war games against North Korea

that were known as Team Spirit. Why? The Gulf War age of smart bombs implied a logic of removing these hot potatoes from the mainland of South Korea, especially since the U.S. if it wanted to could still drive its nuclear submarines right up to the coast of Korea, as one analyst put it.

Still, the moment offered the potential for some normalization. Not only did North Korea host six inspections in 1992, it showed the inspectors' facilities they hadn't even known existed. But just as quickly, things devolved. The H.W. Bush administration opted for a hard line, unimpressed with the North Koreans' opening gambit. As we saw in seasons one and two, U.S.-led weapon inspectors are often a backdoor for CIA surveillance,

which was, once again, the North's reason for resistance. and was, once again, in fact, exactly what was going on. And so came the nuclear crisis. The West fears the North is taking plutonium from its nuclear power plant to make bombs. North Korea denies it, but has refused full access to international monitors that could verify the claim. And the IAEA says the North has removed fuel rods from the reactor, effectively destroying evidence of any past plutonium diversion. Average Americans were made aware of an impending nuclear North Korea in a flurry of headlines and broadcasts.

Because the DPRK had announced it would leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. U.S. politicians and public intellectuals got to work, advising a strike on Pyongyang if it did not allow immediate inspections. In a distinctly 2003-esque tone, it was suggested that North Korea may in fact now be just about ripe for regime change. But let's rewind the tape. It was, in fact, two months earlier, in January, 1993, that President Bill Clinton announced the U.S. would resume the mammoth war games against North Korea known as Team Spirit, which simulated nuclear-tipped attacks on the DPRK. The very next month, Strategic Command announced it would be, quote, retargeting nuclear weapons

meant for the old Soviet Union on North Korea. And an old friend of the show, James Woolsey, the CIA-Durals. who accused Saddam of doing 9-11 the day after the attacks, Woolsey christened the DPRK the greatest threat to America, the world. As Bruce Cummings points out, it's a general principle of the non-proliferation treaty that a member cannot threaten another member with nukes. These war games, specifically targeting the DPRK,

convincingly violated that. What's more, the North's announcement to withdraw from the NPT was shrewdly timed, as the treaty was up for negotiation in less than two years, with major countries such as Japan and India unhappy with it. Even still, the North was so set on improving relations with the United States that once these war games ended, the DPRK put its exit from the treaty on pause, holding out for a diplomatic breakthrough.

Instead, it got a 16-month saga that brought things closer to war than they had been in decades. In recent weeks, we have been consulting with our allies and friends on the imposition of sanctions against North Korea because of its refusal to permit full inspections of its nuclear program. By 1994, it had been a year of back and forth, including the U.S. threat of sanctions and a circulated, quote, taken out of context, in which the U.S. press accused North Korea of saying, quote, Seoul will be a sea of fire. and China had begun to quietly mediate in hopes of bringing North Korea and the U.S. to an agreement. More visibly, Jimmy Carter, perhaps now alarmed at how openly the U.S. was preparing for war, flew to North Korea himself and met with Kim Il-sung. Former President Jimmy Carter appeared to get North Korea, as well as the international community, to step back from the brink of war this week.

The two agreed on a framework. North Korea would freeze its facility at Nyeongban, which it had actually already done. done, and in return receive a project to build light water reactors for energy and cooperative treatment from the U.S. This, at long last, would become the basis of successful talks between the two countries. That produced the 1994 Framework Agreement. Into the Gulf stepped Jimmy Carter. He walked across the demilitarized zone on Wednesday to become one of the highest ranking

Americans ever to visit North Korea. His discussion centered on North Korea. Korea's nuclear program. A ray of sunshine arrived in the late 1990s. In fact, it was called the Sunshine Policy. In 1998, longtime South Korean opposition figure Kim DeJung, the K-CIA had once gone so far as to run him over with a truck, Kim DeJung assumed the presidency of South Korea. This was a true break with the past.

In another unprecedented move, Kim DeJuang announced what would be known as the Sunshine Policy. He credited the North for pursuing better relations with the U.S. and Japan, and pledged that his administration would in turn pursue the long-term and long-overdue reunification of the two Korean states. He backed this up by, quote, approving large shipments of food aid to the North, lifting limits on business deals between the North and Southern firms, and calling for an end to the the American economic embargo against the North during a visit to Washington in June 1998.

This combined with the North's restraint in not testing any missiles for six years, there was nothing short of monumental. A few months later, almost as if on Q, American press reports alleged that the North had been caught, building nuclear weapons. But the next year, quote, the North surprised everyone and opened up the site to unprecedented U.S. military inspection. There was no evidence any nuclear activity had taken place there. In another broadside against the North, a scandal played out when, in August of 1998,

the DPRK launched a rocket into space to commemorate the state's 50th anniversary. U.S. intelligence knew that it was a commemorative display, and that, in fact, the rocket satellite failed to reach orbit. But it became the latest obsession of the North Korea Hawks, including one Don Rumsfeld, who in 1990s, 2008 chaired a task force on missile defense. What's more as the 1990s closed, and despite the framework agreement that was soon to die a quick death under George W. Bush, threats against North Korea by America had not, in fact, stopped.

In 1995, quote, the North lifted its trade and investment barriers, but the United States did nothing about the embargo it slapped on the North during the Korean War. That same year, presidential hopeful, Colin Powell, said that if the DPR case stepped out of line, the U.S. would turn the country into, quote, a charcoal briquette, a threat he later repeated. And more concretely, Cummings reports, In October 1998, Marine Lieutenant General Raymond P. Ayers spoke publicly, on a not-for-attribution basis, about plans for rolling back North Korea, installing a South Korean occupation regime, and possibly beginning the whole thing preemptively

if they had, quote, unambiguous signs that North Korea was preparing to attack. He said the entire resources of the U.S. Marines would be sent into the battle. They would abolish North Korea as a state and reorganize it under South Korean control. We'll kill them all, end quote. But still, a thaw was in progress.

The State Department sent a team to North Korea, which was treated well and came back to the U.S. with a policy of engagement. In June of 2000 came a summit between Kim Jong-il and Kim Dejun in Pyongyang. And then, in October, came Madeline Albright's visit to Pyongyang. These goals will benefit all Koreans and all Americans. We must move in steady strides away from the bitterness of the past and persist in the search for common ground. Kim Jong-il portrayed like his father as an irrational psychotic in the U.S. press.

He had even gone on the record saying that he did not oppose continued American troop presence on the Korean Peninsula. In fact, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, American advisors were confident that Kim Jong-il would not only submit on nukes, but also on control of his missiles in general if the U.S. agreed now to summit in Pyongyang. The president's bags, apparently, had been packed. But in November... The end of an election is the beginning of a new day. Together, we can make this a positive day of hope and opportunity for all of us who are blessed to be Americans.

Thank you very much, and God bless America. The summit in Pyongyang, as you may have all, already guessed, would not happen. As I began, I thank President Clinton for his service to our nation. Even before George W. Bush assumed office, his transition team made it clear to the outgoing Clinton people that they disapproved of the 1994 Framework Agreement and the Pyongyang Summit and that they would undo whatever came of either of them. President Clinton, who would have been the first American leader to travel to North Korea while in office,

struck the summit from his calendar. Following Bush's election victory, as the Sunshine Policy was spreading good vibes on the peninsula, South Korean President Kim DeJung spoke to President Bush on the phone. Bush, disgusted with Kim's talk of peace, put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to his aides, quote, who is this guy? I can't believe how naive he is. In March 2001, the script was flipped. Kim DeJung was the first foreign leader to visit the White House, and Bush lectured him that the DPRK was, in fact, a public enemy.

And the South Korean president shuttled home, cursing Bush to his own advisors. Even before September 11, 2001, and certainly after it, the Bush administration was dead set on scrapping the plans for Korea normalization that had almost come to fruition. This was best encapsulated by North Korea's inclusion in Bush's Axis of Evil in the President's State of the Union address in January 2002. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an access of evil by seeking weapons of mass destruction. The underlying logic to American policy in these years could be summed up by a quote that Seymour Hirsch got from a U.S. intelligence official who attended Bush administration meeting. quote, Bush and Cheney want that guy's head, Kim Jong-il's, on a platter.

Don't be distracted by all this talk about negotiations. There will be negotiations, but they have a plan, and they're going to get this guy after Iraq. He's their version of Hitler. Fearing an attack from America, the North Koreans sprung into action with fresh talks with the South, making progress on connecting railways between the two countries and establishing new. trade agreements. The DPRK also worked hard to improve relations with other governments in Asia, as well as Western and Eastern Europe. All that preceded the delicate but relatively successful September 2002 summit between Kim Jong-il and Japan's Prime Minister.

These regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. The next several years of Bush administration policy were incoherent, confused, but always aggressive. There were lurches toward and then away from negotiations, exaggerated and doctored intel, and of course a press campaign to paint the DPRK as ultimately too irrational and bloodthirsty to even exist in the 21st century. All of this detonated a second nuclear crisis.

Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th, but we know their true nature. In 2002, the Bush administration accused the North of violating the framework agreement, the one Bush had already declared dead on arrival, by citing evidence that North Korea was producing uranium. This was not actually a violation of the agreement, which governed plutonium, and the Bush people's forecast of a North Korean bomb did not make sense to experts. Quote, the Bush administration, without proof, had decided that the DPR

R.K. had a secret program, writes scholar James Metray. That summer, quote, the president finally decided at his Texas ranch that it was time to overthrow the regime, waving his finger in the air and shouting, I loathe Kim Jong-il. In summer 2003, with mediation from the People's Republic of China, along came the so-called six-party talks, the United States, North Korea, China, and then Russia, South Korea, and Japan. To varying degrees, each of these parties, except the U.S. were pro-engagement with the DPRK, and deeply worried about a U.S. strike on the country. Every serious proposal from the United States required North Korea to surrender what it considered its one deterrent, its nuclear potential, and give the United States unfettered access to every nook

and cranny of the country. Quote, if the DPRK accepted the U.S. proposal, writes Metre, its survival would depend on the fulfillment of promises coming from a government dedicated to its destruction, end quote. Despite all of this, a thaw continued between North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. At times, to shake things loose, the Bush administration resorted to an old chestnut. Early in 2005, Maitre writes, quote, Washington presented evidence to Beijing that Libya had received nuclear material from North Korea. The Washington Post reported, however, that the Bush administration had misrepresented intelligence on the supposed transfer, as it had done to support claims of WMDs in Iraq, end quote. Through these years, the United States, almost daring Pyongyang to bail

on talks, would freeze the country's assets, agitate for sanctions, and in fact, opened the second Bush term labeling North Korea not as a negotiating partner, but a, quote, outpost of tyranny, end quote. It's in the world's interest that this happened. It's also in our interest that we continue to work together to solve the problem. I see a peninsula one day that is united at peace. By 2008, the North Koreans had retreated back to a hyper-defensive position, and in fact, They announced that they had begun testing missiles again and would continue to work toward their own nuclear guarantee. North Korea was now certain, writes Matre, that even if it ended its nuclear weapons program, the Bush administration would still work to destroy its communist government,

just as it would have invaded Iraq regardless of the existence of WMDs. Undersecretary of State John Bolton confirmed this intent in a 2002 interview. He took a book titled The End of North Korea, off a shelf and slapped it on the table. That, he said, is our policy. First, I want to thank the president and the people of this wonderful country for sending more than 3,000 troops to Iraq to help that democracy flourish. If the approach of the Bush years was to push for talks and repeatedly blow them up,

the approach under the Obama administration was to bypass diplomacy altogether. This was branded strategic patience. North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs pose a grave threat to the peace and security of the world, and I strongly condemn their reckless action. Publicly, the administration hand-waved the Korean issue, such as in 2015, when President Obama, quote, predicted that a state like North Korea would collapse over time, saying that the Internet would inevitably penetrate North Korea. Highlighting this policy of inaction, the death of Kim Jong-il in 2011,

did not even prompt an official statement from the White House. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the administration, instead of proposing talks, pursued covert action against North Korea, ordering Pentagon officials to, quote, step up their cyber and electronic strikes against North Korea's missile program in hopes of sabotaging test launches in their opening seconds. Soon, a large number of the North's military rockets began to explode, veer off course, disintegrate in mid-air, and plunge into the sea.

New York Times reported. Obama also deployed new missile defense systems to South Korea. In fact, the only proposal for talks in this era came from the new government of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il's son and successor. The Obama administration not only rejected them, but made sure to clarify that it was never their idea in the first place. Quote, to be clear, it was the North Koreans who proposed discussing a peace treaty, said a State Department. spokesperson. The Obama administration's stated reason for rejecting talks was the same given by the Bush administration. The DPRK would not offer up its entire nuclear program from day one. Even though, as the New York Times reported, quote, North Korea offered to suspend its

nuclear tests if the United States and South Korea canceled their annual joint military exercises. Rejected by the Americans again, the North tested a missile shortly at. after on January 6, 2015. Obama himself also carried on the tradition of casually reminding North Koreans that the United States could at any time reduce them to, as Colin Powell had put it, a charcoal briquette. We could obviously destroy North Korea with our arsenals.

Before Donald J. Trump ever grasped the hand of Kim Jong-un, a process of reconciliation was once again at play between North and South Korea. In 2017, South Korea elected a new president, Moon Jain, who revived the Sunshine policy in a big way. The two nations' athletes marched together at the Seoul Olympics. in February 2018. K-pop stars played Pyongyang. And then, after an invitation from Kim Jong-un to visit the North, the two leaders met for the first time in April 2018

in the Joint Security Area. We are awaiting a historic meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The leaders of these two nations have not met in more than a decade. Their summit comes just one week after Kim announced that North Korea would suspend its nuclear and missile testing. They signed the Pen Mung Jam Declaration, pledging to wind down military standoff, sending the South Korean president's approval ratings up. This

new period of warming relations culminated months later when Moon delivered a speech in Pyongyang to a standing ovation in a stadium of up to 150,000 North Korea. The South Koreans. The year of people, people, the South Korean people, the South Korean

for so welcome to . The year after that, the South Korean

President would actually catch flack for shipping oil to North Korea. Donald Trump, on the other hand, began his presidency bashing North Korea the same way most Americans were used to. But with his own unique spin on it, of course. And we can't have madmen out there shooting rockets all over the place.

But if it is forced to defend itself for its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. And by the way, rocket man should have been handled a long time ago. Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime. But, to the surprise of all, perhaps spying an opportunity with the talks between North and South, it was Donald Trump who proved to yield the biggest diplomatic breakthroughs with North Korea in decades. There's Kim Jong-un right there, live on your screen right now, walking into position. Obviously, he is alone, unintended. Coming Eve, here comes the president of the United States.

States. And here are the two gentlemen. Let's watch the moment. And just like that, history has been made. Trump's summits with Kim Jong-un, first in Singapore, then in Hanoi, were heavily scrutinized and often criticized by American politicians and the press. What has he done to earn that sort of international acceptance and that treatment as a legitimate leader as the dictator of the most totalitarian regime owner. He has done nothing. Nuclear missiles. Well, yes, he did have to develop, but that's what made him a pariah.

What brought him into, he was not having these meetings before Donald Trump started calling. You start developing nuclear weapons and usually you get isolated. In this case, what happened to turn that around was we got a new president. They didn't change anything. Some in the Democratic Party, particularly those who were planning on or already running for president, President savaged the diplomatic push by the Trump administration, almost in the exact same language that hardline Republicans had once announced Obama's repression with Cuba. The Biden campaign called Trump's diplomacy, quote, coddling dictators at the expense of

American national security and interests. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted, quote, Our president shouldn't be squandering American influence on photo ops and exchanging love letters with a ruthless dictator. In fact, the unbelievers were not limited to the Democrats. Here's what we have from the State Department. Officials believed national security advisor John Bolton wanted to deliberately blow up those talks with North Korea.

This was all, of course, ahead of this June 12 summit. Perhaps one reason these talks would not go the distance may have been that some of the DPRK's harshest critics were running key branches of U.S. foreign policy under Trump. Notably, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had long run his mouth on North Korea as an ugly and evil kingdom, and for whom the North Koreans had very little taste whatsoever. And of course, John Bolton, whose self-declared goal had always been an end to North Korea.

He was later fired, but long after the damage had been done. According to sources, Bolton's concern was that the talks would not go in the right direction for the United States. So we're learning this was all on purpose. Michelle Kaczynski is joining me now. Michelle, this is significant. And so perhaps it was not a surprise that after another Trump Kim's summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2019, there was a familiar refrain. Quote, at the Hanoi summit, Trump rejected North Korea's offer to dismantle its prominent

Yongbian nuclear facility in exchange for the lifting of sanctions imposed on North Korea since 2016, as reported by America's own state media, Voice of America. Trump had cut the talks short and walked out. The North Koreans resumed nuclear testing. Trump, perhaps thinking he could keep putting symbolism over substance, asked Kim for a photo op at the DMZ that summer. Though further talks were discussed, real progress never resumed after the American rejection at Hanoi.

By July 2020, not long before Trump was voted out of office, the North Koreans were reportedly down on any more Trump-Kim meetings, unless the Americans changed their approach. From Cho-Sung-Hun in the New York Times in March 2020, North Korea said on Monday that it had lost all appetite for dialogue with the United States because of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's continuous pressure on the country to give up its nuclear weapons program. The world does not know well why the DPRK-U.S. relations remain amiss,

despite the special personal relations between the top leaders of the two countries, said North Korea's foreign ministry in its statement, Secretary of State Pompeo gave a clear answer. They added. North Korea is a problem, and we're going to continue to do it so we can control them. We're going to make sure we can control them and make sure they cannot hurt us.

And so if you want to do something about it, step up and help. If not, it's going to continue. What has he done? He's legitimized North Korea. He's talked about his good buddy, who's a thud. a thug, and he talks about how we're better off, and they have much more capable missiles.

As of this recording in 2022, the Biden administration has not made any significant moves regarding Korea. The administration's quote-unquote highly anticipated policy review, reports ABC News, produced a new path that is, get this, somewhere in between the approach of Obama and the approach of Trump. Let me follow up with you, Vice President Biden. You've said you wouldn't meet with Kim Jong-un without preconditions. Are there any conditions under which you would meet with him? On the condition that he would agree that he would be drawing down his nuclear capacity to get that the Korean Peninsula should be nuclear-free zone. Quote, if the Trump administration was everything for everything and Obama was nothing for nothing, this is something in the middle, a Biden

official told the Washington Post. All right, let's move on to American families. They tried to meet with him. They tried to meet with him. He wouldn't do it. He didn't like Obama. He didn't like him. He wouldn't do it. Okay, I got to give him a chance to respond to that before we move on. And that's okay.

You know what? North Korea, we're not in a war. We have a good relationship. You know, people don't understand. Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing. We have a lot of questions to get to. You're responsible. We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded Europe, the rest of Europe.

Come on. Christine Hahn, you're a peace activist specifically on Korea. What do you think things look like right now? You know, for people that have never been to South Korea or North Korea, and even like the K-pop and the BTS, and in many ways it just invisibleizes the kind of like undercurrent that is in the water on the Queen Peninsula. And you see it most starkly in North Korea.

since basically all trade has been cut off, since that country has not had the health or medical capacity to deal with a pandemic. And so it's a struggle for life in North Korea because of our policy against that country, our orientation against that country. And then I look at South Korea where we have the world's largest military base in South Korea. in Pyongtek at Camp Humphreys. This is like five central parks, you know. It has like golf courses, Starbucks, like, you know, water slide parks. This is for the 30,000 U.S. troops in their families. Like, why does that exist?

That costs U.S. taxpayers so much money. When you just had a president in South Korea with the leader in North Korea, that has said, we want peace. And yet we're spending more than $3 billion of taxpayer money to maintain that presence. And what is it about? It's the legacy of the unresolved war. In 2021, Becky Juan died of pneumonia. Beck was a teacher, writer, organizer, and fighter for Korean unification.

He had been one of the thousands of young people in the streets that turned out to rid South Korea of Singman Rhee. He fought the dictatorship of Pachung He and was tortured and imprisoned several times over several decades. He fought for the rights of the working and the poor in Korea. In his later years not resting a bit, Peck protested and denounced South Korea's support of the Iraq War as the government sent troops to aid the U.S. occupation, and until his last days, he pushed for peace between north and south, for reunification between the DPRK and the Republic of Korea. Before he died, Beck asked that any money spent on a funeral instead go to aiding the working people and the poor. And once upon a time,

Beki-Wan wrote this. When the unified life of Korea is cut in two, our country, our country will be like a nail, stuck in the flow of history. What do we learn, Palmer? I don't know, sir. I don't fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again. Yes, sir. That just about does it for our third season.

We'd like to thank all of our guests. Susie Kim, Bruce Cummings, Tim Shoreock, Monica Kim, Christine On, Anna Brunowski, Michael Brennis, Elizabeth Beaver's, Jeffrey Kay, and Thomas Powell. We'd also like to thank Matthew Giles, our fact-checker. Davidson Barski, our archival assistant, and Jesse Gorosha, who saved my bacon this season as assistant editor. Now, since you are a beloved subscriber, if you haven't already, enjoy the 10 bonus episodes that are included in your subscription feed, as well as the extra music. And don't forget, you can also use your discount code as a subscriber to buy a blowback poster.

We appreciate all your support, and we'll see you next time. Adios. Speak about this last sign Speak about this last sign Speak about this last sign Oh!