Eight O'Clock at the 506th
Eight in the evening, May 15, 1961.
Brigadier General Lee Sang-guk came to the 506th Detachment of the Seoul Counterintelligence Corps, across the street from the Chosun Hotel. He commanded the 30th Division, garrisoned in Susaek-dong, Seodaemun District. Brigadier General Lee Chul-hee, commander of the Counterintelligence Corps, received him. The two were classmates from the second class of the Korea Military Academy.
"What's going on? A revolt—what are you talking about?"
"Man, I'm telling you. Tonight those bastards mean to burn everything and kill us all."
"What on earth does that mean?"
"I just finished getting my family somewhere safe. I'm coming from there."
At first Lee Chul-hee could make no sense of what his academy classmate was saying. But when Lee Sang-guk kept repeating that a revolt had broken out in his division, it struck him that something truly serious had happened in the 30th. He calmed the man and went out to find Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-young.
Colonel Lee Hee-young, commander of the 506th, had watched the whole exchange. He brought a chart over to Lee Sang-guk.
"General, there's something I need to show you."
What he laid out was the command diagram of the coup force Park Chung-hee had organized. Park's name sat at the very top. Beneath it ran the roster of the four divisions the plotters meant to throw in, the 30th among them. Lee Hee-young lowered his pointer onto the 30th and asked:
"General, is the name of the officer who started this revolt somewhere on here?"
"Yes! Right there! Park Sang-hoon, that name on the list—he's the one who told me. And that bastard Lee Baek-il is the one trying to raise the revolt!"
The brigadier general's hand shook violently as he jabbed at the two names. Lee Hee-young lowered the pointer.
"What happened in the 30th was the work of officers who had already joined Major General Park Chung-hee's coup. As the chart shows, the chief of staff and the regimental commanders have all been recruited. Everyone but you, General."
"How could something like that... How could Park Chung-hee..."
Lee Sang-guk shuddered with rage at the thought that Park Chung-hee, his own classmate from the Academy, had meant to kill him in order to launch a coup. That was not, in fact, what had happened. The trouble had begun as a feud inside the coup force, and the rest was a misunderstanding. Colonel Park Sang-hoon, brought into the plot late, had taken offense at what he read as contempt from Lieutenant Colonel Lee Baek-il, and the two had come to blows. Nursing the grudge, Park Sang-hoon had gone to his division commander and exposed the plan. Hit without warning by a report of mutiny, Lee Sang-guk had leapt to the conclusion that Lee Baek-il was plotting revolt in order to murder him.
Major Gwak, standing at Lee Hee-young's side, added what else they knew.
"They had a plan to move on Seoul after a live-fire exercise on May 12. Fortunately that plan fell through. Given your temperament, General, we had already judged you were not a man who would join a coup."
Still seething, Lee Sang-guk shot to his feet and snatched up the receiver. With a badly shaking hand he put a call through to Seo Jong-cheol, commander of the 6th District Command.
"Commander, Park Chung-hee has raised a revolt inside the 6th District!"
Lee Hee-young only watched as the rattled general, thrown by the news of mutiny, delivered a report that had gone badly off the facts. Even if it wasn't quite the truth, he thought, it would still help stop Park Chung-hee's coup. Once he had seen the call through, he turned to Major Gwak.
"Where did the commander go just now?"
"To Army Headquarters, sir, to see the Chief of Staff."
Lee Hee-young glanced at the watch on his wrist.
"The Chief will be at dinner by now. He has places he goes. Try Eunseong, the Korean restaurant in Gyo-dong, and Baekyang, the private dining house in Ogin-dong. Have the chief of investigations bring him back here."
Major Gwak moved at once. Fifteen minutes later the investigations chief returned with General Chang Do-young. The moment Lee Sang-guk saw him, he could not contain himself.
"A Lieutenant Colonel Lee Baek-il, operations staff officer of the 30th Division, meant to use a night exercise as cover for a revolt and kill me and my family both. Lee Baek-il is Major General Park Chung-hee's man. Park means to murder me, move the troops, and start a military revolution."
Chang Do-young's face, the instant he heard it, said plainly that he had never heard anything so absurd.
"Park Chung-hee, start a military revolution?"
He frowned.
"Brigadier General Lee Chul-hee reported to me at lunch today. The joint military-police investigation came in. The man they arrested as the coup's financier was nothing but a swindler, and the conclusion was that the whole story of a Park Chung-hee plot is a complete fabrication."
Hearing that from the Chief of Staff, Lee Hee-young doubted his own ears. He had been reporting Park Chung-hee's coup preparations to Commander Lee Chul-hee all along, and the prosecutors' and police reports had been warning that the coup was imminent. Colonel Baek Un-sang, deputy commander of the Counterintelligence Corps, had even carried word of the plot to the Americans. And Lee Chul-hee had given Chang a report like that? Lee Hee-young could not believe it. Lee Chul-hee, he thought, was not that kind of man.
"See here, General Lee. Isn't this just bad blood between you and your subordinates?"
Chang put it to him almost as a reprimand. Lee Sang-guk swallowed his fury and looked bitterly wronged. For a moment Lee Hee-young had no idea how to take any of it.
In the meantime the Chief of Staff telephoned Provost Marshal General Cho Heung-man and gave his orders.
"I'm sending Division Commander Lee Sang-guk over to you. Detach two military-police companies, attach a colonel, and send them to the 30th Division."
He hung up and called the Counterintelligence Corps, this time for Colonel Baek Un-sang, the deputy commander.
"Deputy Commander, go to the 30th Division and look into what's actually happening."
He set the receiver down and immediately dialed somewhere else.
"Major General Seo Jong-cheol isn't there? Where did he go? The moment you locate him, have him call me. I'm at the 506th."
So he had called the 6th District Command, Lee Hee-young thought. Uneasy at having failed to reach its commander, Chang then rang Army Headquarters.
"Anything out of the ordinary today?"
Lee Hee-young guessed the duty officer at headquarters had taken the call. Listening to the voice in the receiver, Chang suddenly raised his own.
"What? The units garrisoned in the Seoul area are scheduled for night training? How is there an exercise I don't know about?"
Confusion was written all over the Chief of Staff's face. Something, Lee Hee-young thought, was going badly wrong.
"Put the duty officer in the Operations Staff on!"
When the officer came on the line, Chang demanded:
"What's this night training? Who approved it?"
His face twisted around the receiver.
"The training plan had already been issued? What kind of nonsense is that?"
He slammed the call shut in a temper and dialed again. It seemed to be the airborne.
"This is the Chief of Staff. Is the airborne conducting a night drop onto the sandbars of the Han?"
Whatever answer came back, it made him angry.
"I don't care whether it's part of Operation Pigeon or not. Cancel it immediately!"
He banged the telephone down, then called the 33rd Division in Bupyeong and ordered Brigadier General An Dong-sun to cancel training as well.
What struck Lee Hee-young as strange was that Chang, for all his anger and confusion, was picking out with perfect accuracy the very units Park Chung-hee had recruited and calling them one by one. By now it was reasonable to suspect that this "night training the Chief of Staff doesn't know about" was tied to Park's coup, and yet Chang had not said a single word about Park Chung-hee.
He dropped into a chair and spoke to the driver waiting beside him.
"Have a Chinese place nearby send over a bowl of jajangmyeon."
The driver came back to say every Chinese restaurant had already closed. Looking half-starved, Chang told him to try Eunseong, the Korean restaurant. When the driver reported that Generals Kim Yong-bae and Jang Chang-guk were there waiting, having been in the middle of a meal with him, the Chief of Staff stood.
"I'm going back to the restaurant to finish my dinner, so you may as well know it."
With that, he left the 506th.
Lee Hee-young settled in to wait for his return and took the situation apart. Even in the confusion, Chang Do-young had with uncanny precision frozen the movement of the main units Park had suborned. But he had given no order to arrest Park himself, the root of the whole problem. Lee Hee-young was on edge. Every minute mattered, every second, and the one man in a position to stop Park Chung-hee—the Army Chief of Staff—was off filling an empty stomach with his juniors from the Military English School.
He decided to reach Colonel Baek Un-sang, deputy commander of the Army Counterintelligence Corps. Baek was a man he could trust. If Baek got to the 30th, established the facts, and quickly arrested the officers there who had joined the coup, the other coup units would waver. However generously one counted them, the coup force was fewer than four thousand men. The loss of even a part of that number would hit them hard. The 30th was only a reserve division, not even a regiment in strength, but like the 33rd at Bupyeong and the Marine brigade at Gimpo it was a core unit of the coup, able to enter Seoul without first crossing a bridge over the Han. From its garrison in Susaek-dong the 30th could reach the Capitol and the Blue House in thirty minutes. If those men seized the Blue House, the Capitol, and the other key points of Seoul early, coup morale would soar, and the troops sent to suppress them might even mistake the thing for already over. Which meant the reverse as well: break the coup element inside the 30th at the outset, and the plotters' morale would crack.
He called the division and asked for Colonel Baek. The man came on almost at once.
"What is it?"
"Have you found the coup officers?"
"Caught a few. Most of them got away."
Even as he said it, Baek could not quite hold back a hollow laugh, as if the whole thing were beyond belief.
"Then it's definitely been suppressed?"
"You can take it that way. The 30th won't be moving tonight."
At that hopeful news a smile came to Lee Hee-young for the first time in a long while. He knew better than to relax.
"Deputy Commander, have you contacted the Americans?"
"Not yet. I want this place fully cleaned up first, and I need a look at the 33rd as well."
"You must. You absolutely must."
"I know. Don't worry. Is the Chief of Staff still there?"
"Yes, sir. He's out at dinner, but he said he'd come back when he's finished."
"All right. When he returns, report for me. Tell him the 30th has been stopped."
"Yes, sir."
Lee Hee-young hung up believing he had seized the advantage over the coup force.
About an hour after leaving for his meal, General Chang Do-young came back to the detachment. He was just about to call and confirm that his orders had been carried out when the phone rang from Provost Marshal Cho Heung-man.
"Yes. How did it go?"
The question had barely left him before his face twisted.
"What? Twenty officers from Army Headquarters walked into the 6th District Command? What are those bastards doing there?"
He raised his voice at the provost marshal's report.
"Get the MPs there fast! Tell them there is no such training and send those men home at once."
Lee Hee-young's heart sank again. The Army Headquarters officers who had turned up at the 6th District Command on the pretext of supervising a night exercise were all men Park Chung-hee had recruited. And the Chief of Staff was telling them simply to go home—traitors inside headquarters whom the military police ought to have arrested on the spot.
A moment later Chang himself seemed to decide the measure was too weak. He called straight through to the official residence of the 6th District commander.
"General Seo, it's me. Get to your headquarters now, put the troops on alert, and take hold of the situation. If those Army Headquarters officers are there, disperse them. If they refuse the order, arrest them immediately."
When he finished the call, Chang's face went suddenly blank. His eyes traveled to the coup command chart Lee Hee-young had shown General Lee Sang-guk. A faint mutter escaped him, thin as a sigh.
"That bastard Park Chung-hee..."
It was the face of a superior who has just understood that a trusted subordinate has a gun aimed at his back.
"Find out where Park Chung-hee is and get me a line to him!"
He snapped the order at Lee Hee-young.
"He's at home, sir."
Chang stared as if the answer made no sense.
"At home? Now?"
"Yes, sir. When you arrived at the 506th, you ordered us to tail Park Chung-hee. The surveillance team is standing by in front of Major General Park's house in Sindang-dong."
"I gave an order like that?"
"You did, General."
Lee Hee-young remembered it clearly: the man who had come to the 506th on the news of a revolt, and the order he had given to follow Park. They had already been watching him, so Lee Hee-young had issued nothing further. He found Chang Do-young almost impossible to understand. The Chief had ordered the tail the moment he arrived with word of the trouble in the 30th, and yet it had taken him two hours to grasp that Park Chung-hee was behind all of it. It simply did not add up.
Even so, there was still hope. Lee Hee-young told himself the general had taken too many shocks at once and had been briefly out of his head. From here, he thought, they only had to take Park. If anything, the advantage lay with Chang Do-young. Park ought by now to have crossed the Han around ten and been at the 6th District Command in Yeongdeungpo. Instead, with the coup attempt inside the 30th exposed, he was sitting stuck at home. A report had even come in that he was drinking in the house with other officers. Lee Hee-young turned to Chang.
"General, there's a radio mounted in the surveillance team's jeep."
He was telling him that the moment the Chief of Staff ordered Park's arrest, they could make it. The team was armed with pistols. But Chang said nothing. He looked like a man thinking hard. Lee Hee-young asked again.
"General, the radio is in the jeep. An arrest order can go out immediately."
Chang heard him, and gazed at Lee Hee-young in silence.