The Fourteenth of May
May 14, 1961, was a bright, clear Sunday.
Colonel Lee Hee-young, commander of the Seoul District Detachment of the Army Counterintelligence Corps—Unit 506—accepted an invitation from Park Chung-hee and made his way to the Shindang-dong residence. At first the invitation left him dazed. Before he could even wrestle with whether a man under investigation ought to accept his suspect's hospitality, a simpler question nagged at him: how had Park Chung-hee been in any position to invite him at all?
In the end he accepted. Too many things were turning in a direction that did not sit right.
That morning word had come that Brigadier General Han Ung-jin, commandant of the Army Intelligence School, up from Yeongcheon, had been in and out of Park's house. Han was the man judged to have charge of Park's security and personal attendance—the one who, if a coup broke, would not leave his side for a single hour. At the same time, the wife of Kim Deok-seung, the coup fund-raiser the prosecutors had hauled in, had also gone into the house in Shindang-dong. Something smelled wrong.
After leaving, Han Ung-jin was tracked to the Mihwa Hotel beside Hwashin Department Store. That Park's bodyguard was not returning to Yeongcheon, but taking a room at a hotel in Seoul, was a signal that the day of the strike was close. Word had also come that several men who looked like soldiers were staying there. The odds were very high that they were Park's guards.
Under those circumstances Lee Hee-young found it hard to refuse. To catch a tiger, a man had to walk into the tiger's den—and with that conviction he knocked at the gate of the house in Shindang-dong.
"Please, come in."
It was Yuk Young-soo who opened the gate.
"Good afternoon, ma'am. Have you been well?"
Lee greeted her warmly, and Yuk Young-soo met him with a bright smile. But he knew she was no ordinary woman. When he had disguised counterintelligence investigators as roasted-sweet-potato peddlers and set them to watch the house, it was Yuk Young-soo who had photographed the undercover men and sent the pictures to Park Chung-hee in Daegu. She was a woman who had known of her husband's plotting for a long time.
Following her in, he saw three pairs of military boots. One pair was small—Park Chung-hee's, by the size of it. The other two were large. The thought that he was not the only visitor drew him tight.
Inside, he found Lieutenant Colonel Bang Ja-myeong of the 15th Criminal Investigation Detachment, the CID directly under Army Headquarters. Lee was startled all over again. Bang, like himself, was an officer responsible for investigating Park Chung-hee. What on earth was this?
"Come in, Colonel Lee."
Park Chung-hee welcomed him. There was one more man in the room: Kim Dong-ha, a reserve major general of the Marine Corps. He had thrown in with Park, though until recently he had been driving a coup of his own, independently, from inside the Marines.
Lee masked his shock behind a show of pleasure.
"General Kim—you're here as well. It's been a long time, sir."
When Lee greeted him warmly, the blunt Kim Dong-ha only nodded.
"Well. Everyone's here. Let's talk."
Park spoke with the bright face of a man whose welcome friends had all gathered.
Seated beside Lieutenant Colonel Bang of the CID, Lee stole a glance at the other man's expression. Bang, seeing him, looked no less thrown. Whether Park sensed what the two of them were feeling or not, he brought up the coup with perfect ease.
Park was citing Burma—present-day Myanmar—from among the coups that had swept the emerging nations of the 1950s. The two successful cases of that decade were Nasser in Egypt and Ne Win in Burma. After his coup Nasser had taken power and ruled himself. Ne Win had swept the politicians aside and then returned to the army, presiding like a king who had stepped down but still ruled from behind the throne, keeping watch over politics.
Lee caught the intent. If I succeed, I will sweep out the corrupt politicians and go back to the army—so look the other way. That was what Park seemed to be saying. Otherwise there was no reason to invite both Lee and Bang at once and talk like this.
Lee kept still and listened for whatever else the man meant to say.
"Before the country gets any more disordered, someone has to make a decision. Wouldn't you say?"
Lee was unsettled. The tone was as if Park already counted him and Bang as comrades of the revolution.
"I've already spoken to Chief of Staff Chang Do-young."
Lee filtered that one out. A bluff, he judged. He himself had found Chang Do-young's inscrutable attitude hard to understand, and for a time he had suspected the man—but judged by the intelligence coming in, the Chief of Staff had absolutely not climbed into the same boat.
What on earth is he banking on...
Lee studied Park. No matter how he turned it over, it seemed the preparations were not yet finished, or else Major General Park felt the pursuit closing in and was acting out of that. If this room were a poker table, Park was bluffing now.
Lee tried not to be taken in by a man who was treating him and Bang as if they were all of a piece. But Bang, seated beside him, seemed to be wavering. At first he had given off the air of a man thinking, What is this person even saying? Now he looked confused, as if asking himself, Have I been judging something wrong?
Lee could see how that might happen. Bang was Korea Military Academy Class of '48, with many points of contact with Park. Until only a few months ago he had served with the Second Army CID in Daegu and had seen Park often. So far as Lee knew, the two had not been on bad terms.
At some point a chill ran through him. Bang might have a personal tie to Park, but so far as Lee knew he was also the man who had gone in person to Chief of Staff Chang Do-young and reported the plotting. There was no difference between them. Both had been firmly convinced that Park would rise soon, and both had reported that conviction up the chain exactly as it stood. To call two such men into one room and speak as if they were of one mind, the same side—that Park frightened him.
Lee decided the man was running a scheme to rattle them and set them against each other. Knowing full well that Bang and Lee were his enemies, Park was playing truth off against falsehood, working a wedge with practiced skill.
At some point Lee stopped listening. He hoped the man beside him would reach the same judgment.
Park did not keep them long. When he had said what he meant to say, he tossed off a few jokes and let the air of a finished conversation settle over the room. Major General Kim Dong-ha, at his side, closed it out.
"Time you all headed back. I'll take it you agree with what General Park said."
Leaving the house, Lee came face to face with Yuk Young-soo again. Even the warmth of her gaze looked like calculated kindness.
Outside the Shindang-dong gate he exchanged a look with Bang of the CID. Lee gave a slight shake of the head—this isn't right. But the eyes of Bang, ordinarily so firm, had gone a little slack. Watching him lost in confusion, Lee thought that once he was back at counterintelligence he would telephone Bang and lay out what he had read of Major General Park's intent.
Even in the intelligence service, Lee Hee-young was a man of whom it was said he had no enemies. He was on easy terms with people all around, and he held himself to an extreme from speaking ill of anyone. That did not mean he was gutless, or that he deliberately avoided making enemies in order to get ahead. Right now he had judged Park Chung-hee an enemy of the Republic of Korea. He held the conviction that the army must not meddle in politics, and he firmly believed the military ought to stand guard so that a democratic government, established after twelve years, could grow.
He did not go home. He headed for Unit 506. Park would rise within days—that was certain—and Lee knew that the only one in a position to check him was himself.
After Lee Hee-young and Bang Ja-myeong had gone, Park Chung-hee moved at once. He instructed Lee Nak-sun, who served at his side, to carry his personal letters to the officers of First Army headquarters. Then he put through a call to Lee Ju-il, chief of staff of the Second Army in Daegu.
"A friend's getting married the day after tomorrow, so I can't come down."
The words were a cipher: the strike would come on the sixteenth. Knowing his calls were tapped, he had his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Kim Seong-gu, write the particulars in a note and deliver them by hand.
That night Park went over the drafts Kim Jong-pil had brought—the revolutionary pledges, the appeals, the proclamations. The papers they were preparing were many, broken out as separate messages to the people, to the students, to the veterans, to the armed forces, and to the troops and the commander of the United Nations Command. Midnight passed with no finished text, so they agreed to review them again the next day. Late that night he met Mun Jae-jun, artillery commander of the Sixth Corps, who had come to the house. Sixth Corps artillery was the core force for seizing Army Headquarters, and Park passed him detailed instructions.
The fourteenth was not busy only at Park's house in Shindang-dong. At the home of Lieutenant Colonel Kim Jae-min—the airborne battalion commander who would spearhead the breakthrough at the Hangang Footbridge—an arrest team of eleven captains, Park Jong-gyu and Cha Ji-chul among them, sketched the interior of the Bando Hotel themselves and worked through the plan to take the eighth floor, where Prime Minister Chang Myon's office lay.
The team assigned to seize Chang Myon was organized into four sections: elevators, emergency exits, stairwells, and the main entrance. Seventy men in all would be sent into the Bando Hotel to take him.
And from morning, people had been crowding the house of Kim Jong-rak, Kim Jong-pil's older brother, in Yaksu-dong. All of them were men in civilian clothes, and they had one thing in common: so many wore black sunglasses that they looked like soldiers at a glance. Kim Jong-rak, an executive at Hanil Bank, was deep in his younger brother's revolutionary plot. Strangely enough, all six of the Kim brothers had leaned toward the left since childhood. Perhaps that was why they were forever full of grievances against the government—and blood will tell. Even Kim Jong-rak, drawing a high salary in a secure post, had joined Kim Jong-pil's undertaking.
From morning he sent the children out to play in the schoolyard and let the soldiers into the house. Before his meeting with Lee Hee-young and Bang Ja-myeong, Park Chung-hee had come there as well. Twenty-five men gathered in that house alone: the commander of the Gimpo Marine Brigade, who with the airborne troops would break the Hangang Footbridge, and the officers of the coup's main-force units. There Park confirmed the plan. At three in the morning on May 16, the main force would break through the bridge over the Han.
The buildings they meant to seize came to sixteen: the Bando Hotel, the Ministry of the Interior, the Public Security Bureau, the Seoul Metropolitan Police, KBS's first and second stations, the Christian Broadcasting System station, the international telegraph office, the central telephone exchange, the Central Government Building, the Blue House, the metropolitan police arsenal, Seodaemun Prison and Mapo Prison, the Yeonhui transmitting station, and Army Headquarters.
There were three command posts. The first was the 6th District Command. The second was Namsan. The third was Army Headquarters.
In this way they had laid a plan that was, after its own fashion, meticulous and vast, and each man was to take his part of the operation and carry it.
Park Chung-hee—who even in 1952, while the war still raged, had dreamed of a coup and gone looking for men to join him. No. Perhaps because he had admired Napoleon from boyhood, the Park who in the days of the American military government had imagined shelling Gyeongmudae, then used as quarters by General John R. Hodge, the military governor, was preparing his last attempt. This plan was more aggressive than the two that had failed before it, and this time there would be no way back.