Nothing Amiss in the Army
On the night of May 12, Kijo could not sleep.
He had been lying beside Sunrye. Quietly he rose, opened the door, and stepped out into the courtyard.
For him the yard was a small space of freedom. Since liberation, Korea's nights had belonged to the curfew; the courtyard inside one's own walls was a precious place, the one patch of ground a man could still walk at night as he pleased. Kijo sat on the wooden platform, lit a cigarette, and turned over what had happened on this day in the history he remembered.
That afternoon Park Chung-hee had gathered the officers committed to the coup at a Japanese restaurant called Namgang and announced the date of the uprising. Kim Jae-chun, notified late and the last to arrive, started violently the moment he stepped through the door. Brigadier General Lee Chul-hee, chief of the Army Counterintelligence Corps, was dining there, and with him Lee Hee-young, commander of the 506th District.
Kim Jae-chun slipped into the private room where Park and the core officers waited and said the counterintelligence commander and the chief of the Seoul detachment were right outside — the plan, he feared, had been blown. Park Chung-hee only grinned.
"It's nothing. They'll have come to eat among themselves."
The head of the very unit charged with stopping a coup was sitting in the place where the coup was being plotted, and that was Park's answer. History's irony could hardly have cut deeper. It was hard to believe that the men preparing the coup and the men trying to prevent it had shared one room, each quietly tending to his own business over a meal.
Kijo smoked slowly and looked across at the neighboring yard. The house next door was dark and still. Kim Jong-pil would have been at Namgang today as well, and there he would have heard Park say something like this.
"Whether General Chang Do-young agrees or not, we go ahead as planned. Only the revolution will be carried out in General Chang's name."
Song Chan-ho had gone to draw Chang Do-young into the revolution and come back saying he simply could not get through to the chief of staff. Those had been Park's words in reply. Chang had not joined the revolutionary camp, but they would borrow the name of the Army's highest commander all the same and secure their justification that way.
Kijo ground out the cigarette and thought of Chang Do-young. The man had not consented to the coup, and yet he would not arrest Park Chung-hee either. What, to him, had a coup really been? He was a man whose insides no one could read.
Kijo stayed in the courtyard, the one place the curfew could not touch, for as long as he wanted. Then he went back inside.
On May 13 Kijo went to Room 300 of the Bando Hotel, where the Hanjin office was, and sat down with Cho Choong-hoon. He asked how the air-taxi business was faring, and whether the introduction of passenger aircraft for Choong-hoon's Air Korea was coming along.
"Ah, well. I never thought the thing would take off overnight. Air-taxi fares are still terribly expensive. But there's a future in it. Look at the state of our transport. Have we got a highway? Are the trains fast? Highways, railways — both of them swallow money. This country hasn't got the funds to lay that kind of grand infrastructure. The answer is airplanes."
Choong-hoon warmed to it and kept going. Well versed in Japan, he reached for a Japanese example.
"Even Japan started developing an ultra-high-speed train back in '59. The plan is to lay the world's first — the Shinkansen."
Kijo let him talk.
"Those Japanese are really something. I've got an acquaintance over there, you know. Do you remember a Mr. Osano Kenji?"
"Yes. The man who helped us buy those surplus U.S. Army commuter buses cheap."
"Right. According to him, Japan was already planning a bullet train — what they called a dangan ressha — back in the 1930s, when they held Manchuria and were invading China. Losing the war set them back thirty years, he says. Frightening people."
Listening, Kijo felt once again the distance between Korea and Japan. Choong-hoon, who had been running on about Japan, circled back and pressed the case for aircraft one more time.
"Listen, Kijo. Even the military alone — you wouldn't believe how many liaison planes they put up. Lately our air-taxi pilots say they're spotting military liaison aircraft all the time."
In those words Kijo felt Park Chung-hee's shadow again. Among the planes Choong-hoon's pilots had seen, some must have been carrying Major General Park and the men of the revolutionary faction. Through April and May, Park and the provincial generals committed to the revolution had been busy making use of military liaison flights.
Kijo told him that the American businessman who had promised to recruit pilots in Japan had sent word he would enter the country on May 17. That was why he had come.
"Will he really bring pilots? I still don't believe it. If he does, let's test them right there at Gimpo. We'll know soon enough whether those fellows are frauds or the genuine article."
Kijo said they would do just that.
After leaving Choong-hoon he returned to headquarters and met Lee Man-ik of Cheongsan Construction. Man-ik had come up from Incheon to report trouble at the port's No. 1 dock. The dock Cheongsan had won in 1959 was a job worth a full 1.19 million dollars, the largest construction contract since the founding of the nation. Less than a year after Cheongsan had finished it, something had gone wrong with the lock gate that held the water back.
"The gate wouldn't open, and we had a hard time of it, but we had operations back to normal within a day. At first they claimed it was a defect — that Cheongsan had botched the work — but I brought them around to see that the fault lay with Incheon Port itself."
"What kind of fault?"
"The harbor is shallow, and the tidal range is large, so sediment had piled up thick around the lock. I even brought in divers to prove it. Once we dredged the mud around the gate with a crane, it worked as it should. The port people couldn't say a word."
"Well done. You had a hard job of it."
Kijo praised him for handling it so cleanly, then told him that a British warship would enter No. 1 dock on May 30.
"I'll be on station at Incheon when she comes in. If something goes wrong for no good reason, they'll find a way to blame Cheongsan again."
"Please do. Thank you."
"Building a lock dock at Incheon was the right decision, but unless they dredge the inner harbor properly and clear out the mud, I expect the same trouble will keep coming back. We warned them plainly. They keep putting it off, saying there is no money, and that worries me."
"I'll take it up with the Ministry of Transportation."
With the report finished, Lee Man-ik turned to a private matter. A graduate of the Korea Military Academy's fifth class, he spoke of a senior two classes above him, from the third.
"Do you remember Colonel Baek Un-sang, over at counterintelligence?"
"I do."
Baek Un-sang of the Counterintelligence Corps was a man who had helped whenever trouble arose with the military, and being close to Man-ik he had extended various small favors besides.
"Lately Senior Baek has not been in good shape. He said he was running a joint investigation with American counterintelligence, and the whole business feels thoroughly uneasy...."
"Uneasy how?"
Man-ik lowered his voice a little.
"The last time we met, Senior Baek said he was investigating Major General Park Chung-hee."
"Major General Park?"
Kijo made a show of surprise.
"Yes. He says it is certain the general has other intentions. He told me he was reporting the information he had gathered to U.S. counterintelligence, and he looked quite anxious."
"Anxious about what?"
Kijo asked, though he already knew the story of Colonel Baek Un-sang. When May 16 broke, Baek would go to the Americans and confess his fear over having reported Park Chung-hee's coup plan. The U.S. military would move him to a base in Okinawa. The CIA protected its informant to the end, and in time would even spirit him and his family safely away to the United States.
"He seemed anxious about having cooperated so actively with the Americans. He opened up over drinks. No matter how often he reported on Major General Park to his superiors, no action ever came down. He said that if they did not move at once something would blow, and the silence from above was driving him mad."
Kijo nodded.
"Senior Baek said that if Major General Park's coup succeeds, he himself will not survive......"
Having gone that far, Lee Man-ik added a caution.
"It may have been nothing but drunken talk, so please do not take it too gravely."
He paused to order his thoughts, then came to why he had raised Baek's name at all.
"I tell you this because you have a relationship with General Park. If he launches some reckless business and it fails, I fear the sparks will fly your way as well. Please be prepared, sir."
"I understand. I'll keep it in mind."
Kijo thanked him, and smiled. Man-ik, lighter now that he had set down what had been worrying him, spoke with a bright face.
"I will be in Gunsan for a few days. I want to see whether the American officers' quarters are coming along properly. If we build the B.O.Q. — the bachelor officers' quarters — as it ought to be built, the American officers will look kindly on Cheongsan, will they not?"
"Have a good trip, President Lee."
Kijo saw him off and sat alone in his office, thinking. In a single day, two separate accounts tied to Park Chung-hee's coup had come to his ears. That no one was taking action even in a situation like this was simply past belief.
He turned over what was due to happen today. Once again, decisive word of the coup would reach Prosecutor General Lee Tae-hee. The police had been wiretapping military telephones, and they had caught, beyond any doubt, the signs of a unit believed to be in on the coup beginning to move for it. Receiving that report, Lee Tae-hee decided he could stand by no longer and went straight to the Bando Hotel, where Prime Minister Chang Myon was staying.
Chang Myon heard him out and summoned Chang Do-young. Pressed by the prime minister, Chang waved his hands and answered like this.
Hearing that, Prosecutor General Lee Tae-hee said to Chang Do-young, there in front of the prime minister:
"I have no authority over the military. You must take the measures."
Even so, Chang Do-young would not bend from his insistence that the army was sound. Unable to endure that indecision, Lee Tae-hee went that evening to the 506th Counterintelligence Detachment and demanded that its commander, Lee Hee-young, arrest Park Chung-hee.
"Park Chung-hee is in Seoul right now. Seize him at once."
Colonel Lee Hee-young, hearing it, answered:
"Arresting an active-duty general is possible only with the permission of the minister of national defense or the chief of staff."
Lee Tae-hee had no choice but to go back to Chang Do-young and press him again to order the arrest. Chang Do-young said only this.
"Let us watch a little longer."
In the end, Prosecutor General Lee Tae-hee's last effort came to nothing. There was, besides Chang Do-young, a defense minister who could have ordered Park's arrest, but Minister of National Defense Hyun Seok-ho — perhaps because he was a civilian — left every judgment about seizing an active-duty general in Chang Do-young's hands. Every road that might have stopped Park Chung-hee wound around and led back to Chang Do-young.
Even so, Colonel Lee Hee-young of the 506th did not give up the pursuit. From May 12 through the day of the coup itself, he organized shadow teams of four and set them to watch Park's every move around the clock. He had even planted an informant among the officers plotting the revolution. Park Chung-hee's true counterpart was no longer Chang Do-young, nor Prosecutor General Lee Tae-hee, but Colonel Lee Hee-young of the 506th Counterintelligence Detachment.
Kijo thought the current of history was laying far too heavy a weight on the field-grade working officers of the Army's investigative organs. The men who would run to the very end to stop Park Chung-hee were field-grade officers of the Army. The names he remembered were three: Colonel Lee Hee-young of the 506th Counterintelligence Detachment; Baek Un-sang, deputy commander of the Army Counterintelligence Corps; and Lieutenant Colonel Bang Ja-myeong of the Criminal Investigation Detachment — the CID — directly under Army Headquarters.
If Park Chung-hee had the eighth class of the Military Academy, the Chang Myon government of the Republic had these men.