The Dam Before the Flood
It was the day he had met Kim Jong-pil in the small hours and sat talking.
Ki-jo went to the Bando Hotel. Business took him there constantly, but today business was not the point. He made his way to the office that managed the hotel's commercial floors.
The manager rose to greet him with open pleasure.
"Chairman Lee. What brings you in?"
"I'm thinking of taking an office in the Bando."
"Are you? We'd be delighted. We've been waiting for the day Cheongsan moved in."
He meant it. The Bando was the mecca of business, and every company of any standing in the Republic kept a liaison office under its roof. People had begun to wonder why Cheongsan had never taken space at all.
The manager spread the floor plan of the office level and set white go stones down on certain rooms.
"There aren't many vacancies. Wherever I've placed a white stone, the room is empty."
He watched Ki-jo's face as he studied the stones.
"If the locations don't suit you, we can give you guest rooms for offices instead of space on the office floor. You have only to say the word."
Cheongsan, he was sure, could pay for a suite. Ki-jo met foreign businessmen often and was in and out of the embassies and the Prime Minister's office; the manager half hoped he might take a long lease on a room he could sleep in as well.
Ki-jo looked the plan over, then pointed to rooms that bore no white stone.
"These three were empty until recently, weren't they? Which companies moved in?"
The rooms he had chosen were not popular ones. The rent was cheap, the sort of space taken by firms and individuals whose funds were none too ample.
"If those are the ones you want, we'll move the present tenants somewhere else."
He was prepared to accommodate a guest of Ki-jo's rank. Shift the existing offices to something better, then bill him for the rooms they left. That would do.
"Might I know who took them?"
Uncertain what the question was after, the manager was briefly at a loss. Even so, he answered a valued guest with courtesy and confirmed the tenants' names. Ki-jo listened, and slowly nodded.
"Is there some trouble? If one of the tenants displeases you..."
He chose his words with care. Of the three who had lately moved into the Bando, had one of them crossed Cheongsan? If so, he meant to drive that tenant out. For the hotel's good name, inferior clients were best removed quickly.
Ki-jo smiled as he answered.
"No. Nothing of the kind. I was only curious. Please don't misunderstand."
The frank explanation set the manager at ease. Cheongsan was not a company a man could afford to slight.
"If anything about the hotel is ever inconvenient, you must tell me at once."
He offered the smile of a proper hotelier. Ki-jo set a finger on the office immediately beside Room 300, where Cho Choong-hoon of Hanjin kept his rooms.
"When Room 301 comes free, please let me know."
"Ah. You want the office next to President Cho. The two of you are very close, I understand. I'll telephone the moment it's available. If you'd prefer to move in sooner..."
"No. I don't want the gentleman in 301 put out on my account."
Ki-jo had seen exactly where the offer was heading and closed the matter cleanly, and the manager smiled. It was just what one expected, by reputation, of Chairman Lee Ki-jo, a man who did not force unreasonable things.
"Understood, Chairman."
Ki-jo left the management office and went down to the hotel coffee shop.
He had checked the offices in the Bando in order to read the movements of the revolutionary camp. In the history he remembered, the core of the revolution had planned, before the deed, to take space in the hotel, the better to watch and arrest Chang Myon in Room 809. The rent had been so steep that they gave the plan up. It seemed they had failed again this time.
While he drank his coffee, two thoughts settled in him. The first was that the coup was moving forward little differently from the history he knew. The second was that their failure to get into the Bando would, in the end, serve them.
The moment the May 16 action began, Chang Myon would slip off the eighth floor of the Bando and flee in desperate haste. He would be in such a rush that he would drop the glasses from his face and leave them where they fell, and still climb into a car with his wife and run. He would make for the American Embassy. When the embassy would not open its doors, he would go on to the residence of the CIA's station chief in Korea. Failing to meet Peer de Silva there as well, he would hide himself in the Carmelite convent in Hyehwa-dong.
The coup forces would rush Cha Ji-chul and Park Jong-gyu out to find him and take him, and they would fail to lay hands on the Prime Minister. That failure would rattle them and fill them with a sense of crisis. Yet Chang Myon, buried in the convent for fifty-six hours, would for that very reason fade quickly from every mind. The man with the authority to put the coup down would not, for the sake of his own safety, tell even the Americans or the Minister of National Defense where he was, and would not so much as make a telephone call. The fact would leave everyone disappointed. After he returned, no one would spare him sympathy. They would conclude he had never been fit to be Prime Minister.
A single call to the commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, or to the Defense Minister, and May 16 would have failed. One order to suppress the coup would have ended the whole affair. His flight and his vanishing would instead leave both the American command and the Korean government paralyzed.
And if the plotters had seized him early and announced that the Prime Minister was in their hands, that would have been a problem of another kind. The Americans might have taken a far harder line against men who had kidnapped and confined him. It would have been as good as handing them a splendid pretext to move troops, in the name of rescuing the very man who commanded the armed forces.
Ki-jo drank the hot coffee slowly and turned over what would follow this day.
Tomorrow, Park Chung-hee would postpone the action fixed for May 12. The twelfth was the ideal moment to raise the "revolution." The 6th District Command was already promised to run emergency drills with the units under it and the units attached to it. On the excuse of a nighttime alert, the troops committed to the coup would cross the bridges of the Han and seize Army Headquarters in Yongsan at speed. The 30th Division and the 33rd, the airborne, the artillery of the 6th Corps, and the rest of the 6th District's strength would occupy Army Headquarters and the KBS Central Broadcasting Station, arrest and confine Prime Minister Chang Myon, secure the principal organs of Seoul without delay, finish the revolution quickly and cleanly, and make the new tide irreversible. That was the heart of the plan.
Tomorrow, something would knock the plan aside.
On May 9, Park Chung-hee would come up from Daegu to Seoul, and Kim Jong-pil would meet him with urgent news. Colonel Lee Jong-tae, who had joined the revolutionary forces, had talked, and the Counterintelligence Corps had the May 12 action exactly. That report would turn Park's mind. The next night he would gather the coup command at the Astoria Hotel and call the plan for the twelfth to a halt.
Colonel Lee Jong-tae had not set out to betray him. On a commuter bus he had denounced the Chang Myon government with great severity to a fellow officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jang Se-hyeon, and Jang, sensing that something was wrong, had carried the tale to the commander of the Seoul District Counterintelligence Corps. The "secret" of the coup was already leaking in more than one place. The last to grasp how serious the leaks had become were the plotters themselves.
Yet the Lee Jong-tae affair unsettled Ki-jo as much as it unsettled Park. Hauled in and questioned, the colonel was coaxed by the counterintelligence commander with a single line.
"We already know the coup is being prepared jointly by Chief of Staff Chang Do-young and Major General Park Chung-hee. Set your mind at ease and tell us everything."
At those words Lee Jong-tae poured the whole plan out. On that foundation the commander drew up a complete chart of the coup organization and reported it to Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-young.
And Chang Do-young, the most mysterious figure of May 16, told him this:
"I know. There is nothing to explain."
He ordered the commander to speak of it to no one. By then not only Army counterintelligence, but the prosecution and the police as well, already held information on the coup. Why had a man like Chang Do-young taken such a line?
Ki-jo did not believe that in this history, either, the success of May 16 hung on Park Chung-hee and Kim Jong-pil, or on Chang Myon and Yun Bo-seon. The man who would decide the coup was Chang Do-young. The police, the prosecution, Army counterintelligence, the U.S. military, the CIA, the American Embassy—again and again they brought him accurate intelligence. They delivered not only a full chart of the organization and a plan timed to the hour, but repeated warnings that Park Chung-hee ought to be arrested. Even so, Chang Do-young always spoke and acted as if nothing at all were amiss.
That did not mean he had drawn close to Park and conspired in the revolution with him. No one connected with the coup ever testified that Chang Do-young had moved with the plotters. Over several years Park had written to him, gone to see him in person, or telephoned, arguing the necessity of revolution and trying to bring him in. Chang Do-young had refused every time.
Ki-jo was so deep in the man that he never noticed his coffee going cold.
Chang Do-young was like a great dam standing over Park Chung-hee. The dam took, in Park's place, every pressure to remove him. By early May it was already bearing a load near the breaking point. Had he opened the sluice even a little, Park, caught below, would have been swept off and vanished from history without a trace. But had Chang Do-young perhaps seen him as a child playing, without fear, in front of the dam? A single word to the military police or to counterintelligence, ordering the arrest, and Park would have disappeared like dew on an execution ground.
Ki-jo closed his eyes, opened them, and took a mouthful of coffee gone cold. Chang Do-young had already received an order from Chang Myon, the head of state, to investigate Park—and was burying that order completely.
He had fallen silent over the black cup. When he lifted his head, two familiar faces came into view: Park Jong-gyu and Cha Ji-chul, in civilian clothes. The pair who would be sent, when the revolution broke, as the team to seize Chang Myon. They seemed to have come to learn the inside of the hotel. They entered the coffee shop at an easy pace, looked about, and drifted back out into the lobby.
It lasted only a moment, but a chill went through him. These were the two men known as the black shadows of the Park Chung-hee regime. One bore the blame for the killing of Yuk Young-soo. The other had brought on the assassination of Park himself.
As the two men who would bring death to Park and to Yuk passed before his eyes, a scene from August 19, 1974, rose in Ki-jo's mind. Park Chung-hee from behind, both hands braced on the hearse leaving the Blue House, weeping. He had followed the car that bore his wife's body, his children beside him, then sent the children back and gone on alone after his dead wife. He wiped his tears with a handkerchief, and as the car made to pass out through the Blue House gate he kept touching its rear, moving his heavy feet. It was the saddest Park Chung-hee that Ki-jo had ever seen.
A hollow feeling came over him. He could only pity the man, hurrying toward a future that would not end well and held nothing but grief. If Park knew that at the end of the road he was walking there lay a bitter future for himself, his wife, his son, and his daughter, would he still walk it in silence? Ki-jo did not think that he himself ever could.
He looked into the black coffee, cold now, and sank into a deep silence. The back of Park Chung-hee, caught in a black-and-white frame, kept flickering before his eyes.