The Man of Room 79
A man walked into Ki-jo's hamburger shop. The moment he came through the door, Hausman welcomed him and turned to make the introduction.
"This is the man of Room 79. Director Lee Hu-rak."
Lee Hu-rak — thirty-six, large-eared, his face cut square — looked at Ki-jo. He had expected to meet Hausman alone, and finding another man there left him faintly off balance.
"A pleasure, Director Lee. I'm Lee Ki-jo."
"P-pleased to meet you."
Ki-jo took the hand of the slightly stammering Lee Hu-rak and shook it.
"Come. Let's all sit."
The three men settled at a corner table in Mac O, and over the food the manager brought they began to talk. Ki-jo was curious why Hausman meant to put him together with Lee Hu-rak. Lee Hu-rak was at present director of the Central Intelligence Committee. The body had been formally launched in January 1959, established at the CIA's request. Once the Agency opened an official station in Korea, it needed a Korean counterpart with which to trade intelligence, and so Lee Hu-rak — a man out of Army Headquarters Intelligence, and a former military attaché at the Korean Embassy in Washington — had been named to lead it. That appointment, too, had come on the CIA's strong recommendation. The first Central Intelligence Committee, installed within the Army, was an organization into which the Agency's hand reached deep.
"Ki-jo, do you know why they call Director Lee the man of Room 79?"
Ki-jo knew. In founding the Committee, Lee Hu-rak had taken its name from his own service number, 10079.
"I don't."
"You'll learn in time. You'd do well to be careful from here on. If Director Lee ever hauls you into Room 79, you'll be in serious trouble."
Hausman broke into a rough laugh, and Lee Hu-rak smiled, sheepish.
"Now. The reason I've brought the two of you to the same table..."
Hausman explained. It was the working agreement Ki-jo had concluded with Krupp. From now on, Cheongsan technicians would be going to West Germany to learn how to repair the equipment of a fertilizer plant, and the Central Intelligence Committee judged that Koreans residing there might be recruited by communist spies. Lee Hu-rak had sought the counsel of the CIA, whose network in West Germany was strong, and Hausman, hearing of it, had arranged for the two men to meet so they might cooperate.
When the explanation was finished, Ki-jo turned to Lee Hu-rak.
"If the Central Intelligence Committee requests personnel files, I will send them to you in good faith."
"Thank you. When the technicians bound for West Germany are interviewed, may one of our people be present?"
"Of course. That will be quite all right."
"And before they depart, we would like to conduct counterintelligence training. Please send the technicians to Namsan."
"I understand."
Ki-jo accepted every concern Director Lee Hu-rak raised, and promised his cooperation. Hausman, who had been listening, spoke to the director.
"Now look here, Director Lee. Mr. Lee is a golfing friend of mine. Does this man require investigation as well?"
Lee Hu-rak answered with a smile.
"Advisor Hausman will already have finished looking into him. What need would we have to investigate him again?"
"Thank you, Director. President Lee Ki-jo has been a friend of America for a long time. There is no call for suspicion."
Hausman delivered what was not quite a warning — a warning not to handle Ki-jo carelessly — and grinned. Ki-jo was grateful to him for making such a place. It seemed he had arranged the meeting on purpose, lest the Central Intelligence Committee interfere with his business. After that, the talk turned light.
Sitting down to lunch with Lee Hu-rak, Ki-jo could not help turning the man's record over in his mind. Under Syngman Rhee he had served as the first director of the Central Intelligence Committee and done work of many kinds. In principle it was intelligence against the North, but beyond what the agents sent north — the HID — brought back, there was little that could actually be collected. The United States, by contrast, kept many spies inside China and North Korea, and so a great deal of information came from the Americans. His chief labor had been to gather what arrived through the CIA and pass it on to the military and to Gyeongmudae.
He had done stranger work besides. On Syngman Rhee's orders he had gone to Laos, where a slide into communism was feared, and proposed that Korean troops be dispatched. American opposition brought the plan to nothing in the end, but his ability in intelligence and in covert operations was recognized. He had also proved adept at keeping the work in balance between Syngman Rhee, who detested the CIA, and the CIA that supplied intelligence on the North.
Rhee's hatred had a particular root. He had set out from his villa in a fishing boat to catch fish, and a CIA party training nearby had fired warning shots to keep him from approaching. Neither side had known the other was there; it was an absurd little incident. Rhee, however, believed the Agency had done it on purpose to frighten him, and he would not trust them. There was testimony that when he spoke of the CIA he said, "Those bastards are very bad men."
The Lee Hu-rak of the present stood at a distance from Park Chung-hee. He was not a graduate of the Korea Military Academy, and he had no tie to the man. Quite the opposite: he was someone who had dug into Park Chung-hee's background and passed what he found to the CIA. In the days right after May 16 he had been tried for that and sent to prison. Yet he would catch the eye of Kim Jong-pil, then gathering talent for the revolutionary government, receive a pardon, win Park Chung-hee's recognition, and for a time rise to a seat where people called him the second man of the regime.
Watching Lee Hu-rak laugh and talk with him, Ki-jo felt the 1960s drawing near. Little by little, men bound up with Park Chung-hee were beginning to appear around him.
December 27, as 1959 drew to its close. Word reached Korea that the third repatriation ship had sailed from Shimonoseki in Japan with 991 Koreans living there aboard, bound for the North. The first ship had arrived at Chongjin on December 14, 1959, carrying 975 Korean residents of Japan; once the second and third sailings followed, even Syngman Rhee stopped protesting to Japan, and the government-staged demonstrations lost their force. Further protest, the government and the people alike had come to see, would do no good, and so they let it go. Watching the Japanese police bring out even armored cars to protect the sending of Koreans north, they understood there was nothing left they could do.
Koreans of that time looked on the people being repatriated and felt, together with pity, a hollow powerlessness. Among the surrounding powers, not one country stood with Korea. The Soviet Union provided ships to North Korea to help the repatriation along, while the United States took the position that it would not interfere in Japan's internal affairs and looked the other way. People grieved that a country without strength was made to suffer such a thing. They were bewildered, too, to find that in the world they had become more alone than the North.
The newspapers, after giving voice to the bitterness of failing to stop Koreans from being sent north, began little by little to run gossip about the families in Japan caught up in the repatriation — a man who beat his Japanese wife for refusing to go and tried by any means to drag her to the North, only to come to blows with the relatives who meant to stop him, and pieces of that sort. Ki-jo read of a man determined to haul an innocent wife down into hell, and let out a sigh.
If you mean to die, die alone...
At the foot of the article he was relieved to read that the Japanese wife who did not wish to go north was taking steps toward divorce.
Ki-jo folded the paper and set out for the Bando Hotel, to attend the technology seminar of the Republic of Korea that he himself was hosting. With 1960 at the door, he had wanted to invite the country's scientists and businessmen, let them learn one another's faces, and open a place where industry and the academy might speak of what concerned each of them. He had not launched it on any grand scale. In the name of DBC Broadcasting, invitations had gone out to figures from every field, and the evening was a dinner.
The presidents of Cheongsan Group's affiliates were there, of course. So were Cho Choong-hoon of Hanjin Trading, Chung Ju-yung of Hyundai Construction, Kim Jong-hee of Korea Explosives, and Chang Key-young, president of the Hankook Ilbo and co-president of DBC. After greeting them warmly, Ki-jo looked about to see who else had come. One man stood out: Professor Choi Hyung-sup, who taught at Seoul National University. Ki-jo went to him first.
"How do you do? I'm Lee Ki-jo, president of DBC. It's a pleasure to meet you."
Choi Hyung-sup had studied in America and returned with a doctorate in chemical metallurgy from the University of Minnesota. He belonged to the practical school. Rather than bury himself in scholarship, he moved between companies and government offices; in time he would catch Park Chung-hee's eye and become director of the Atomic Energy Research Institute, director of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology — KIST — and the second Minister of Science and Technology. His motto was to develop technology that could be put to work at once on the shop floor. He would contribute so greatly to turning Korean science toward industry that after his death he would be laid to rest in the National Cemetery.
As they talked, Ki-jo met with a question he had not expected.
"What is it Cheongsan Group does at present?"
"For now, transport and distribution are our main lines, but going forward..."
"I hear you'll do anything that makes money. Gathering up women's hair and selling it overseas — that sort of thing?"
Ki-jo knew the man's temperament, and he only smiled. What Choi Hyung-sup had just said was something he would one day say to Park Chung-hee as well. In 1965, at a gathering held to celebrate light-industry exports that had earned twenty million dollars in a year, he was the man who threw cold water on Park by demanding what there was to be proud of in money made selling girls' hair.
"Next year Cheongsan Group plans to bring out a radio as well."
"Lucky has already done that."
"Yes. We were set on making a good product, so we've fallen a little behind."
"You have to make it fast. Japan is probably earning more than a hundred million dollars on electronics exports alone, right now. We have to start thinking about how to make our living by exporting science and technology."
It was a sharp rebuke, and still Ki-jo was not put out. If anything, meeting a man of science with that kind of backbone left him thoroughly satisfied.
"Professor Choi, there is a Seoul National professor at our company. Would you care to speak with him?"
He indicated Professor Kim Moon-hwan, who was filling a plate at the buffet.
"I don't believe I've seen him before...?"
Professor Choi Hyung-sup pushed his glasses up and studied Professor Kim Moon-hwan. Having himself become a professor at Seoul National University only in 1959, it was only natural that he did not know the man.
"Talk with him, and I think you'll find you understand each other very well."
Ki-jo brought Professor Choi Hyung-sup over and introduced him to President Kim Moon-hwan, then fetched President Kim Hae-soo of Cheongsan Radio and seated the three of them at a table. Once they were gathered, the talk ran on as if gears had meshed.
"You're bringing in German technology to make bearings?"
"Professor Choi, you specialized in chemical metallurgy in America, and the work you're doing is teaching children? Leave that school at once and come out to the field!"
"I'd like nothing better. First there has to be a company that will have me."
Listening to Professor Kim Moon-hwan and Professor Choi Hyung-sup, Ki-jo felt a laugh rise in him. Choi Hyung-sup turned his interest on Kim Hae-soo as well.
"And this gentleman is the president of Cheongsan Radio?"
"Yes. At present we procure the parts from Japan and build with those."
"So Lucky took the first domestically made radio out from under you. Still, Lucky's sets, made with German technology, run a bit dear. Choosing Japan was exactly right. Whose parts do you use?"
"Mainly Hitachi and Matsushita vacuum tubes."
"Hm... And what do they cost?"
Ki-jo left the three to their talk and stepped away. He went to greet another businessman who had come to the seminar: Namkoong Ryun, who had served as president of the Korea Shipping Corporation. With him the conversation came easily. They were old acquaintances; there was the tie of Ki-jo having sought out ships in Japan and brought them to the corporation.
"It was a great help, your bringing those ships over from Japan back then."
At the praise, Ki-jo turned the subject aside.
"It's nothing beside your raising that Japanese freighter sunk off Busan and putting it to use."
"Ha ha. And that was already seven years ago."
It steadied him to look upon the businessmen and the men of science and engineering with whom he would weather the 1960s. They were still small and threadbare, yet these were the sparks that would carry Korea, in that decade, up into an industrial nation.
Watching them, Ki-jo felt his heart swell.