USAID
Having finished his business with McDonald, Lee Ki-jo returned to the hotel and waited for the rest of the delegation.
When the party came back, every one of them looked pleased. The mayor of Chicago had received the Korean visitors warmly and had even arranged a review by a military honor guard. Chairman Park, presented with a certificate of honorary citizenship from the City of Chicago, wore a bright expression, and the whole entourage was flushed with the first official welcome they had been given on American soil. No one, however, noticed that the certificate the mayor had handed over misspelled Chairman Park's name. They were all still amateurs.
The party moved on to O'Hare Airport and boarded a plane the United States government had provided. That America had at last given the Korean delegation an aircraft of its own left them genuinely moved. The plane was a medium twin-engine propeller craft, the sort cabinet-rank officials used for travel inside the country. The rear was a VIP cabin; the forward section was where the staff sat. Ki-jo took a seat up front with the press corps.
All four reporters except Lee Young-hee were saying the American visit looked likely to succeed.
"President Kennedy and Chairman Park are the same age, aren't they? Both young leaders. I expect they'll understand each other."
"Kennedy still hasn't recognized the military government, but won't this visit change his mind? What else can he do? Kim Il-sung is up there watching for any chance to communize us. The sooner America recognizes the Korean government, the better."
"Of course. That's how it has to be. America was slow to recognize the military government because it didn't come in by election, wasn't it? But America needs Korea too. They'll move to restore the relationship."
They were all buoyed by hope. Ki-jo, like Lee Young-hee sitting beside him, placed no great hope in the talks to come.
When reporters were present, Kennedy would smile and welcome Chairman Park to the White House. Behind closed doors he would become another man entirely. Every request Park Chung-hee made he would refuse outright, or else freight with conditions one by one. When Park asked for loans to support economic development, Kennedy would turn him down.
"We cannot extend loans to a country that is still receiving aid."
When Park proposed sending Korean troops to Vietnam, Kennedy would show little interest. On the question of dispatching forces he would tell Park to take it up with the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, handling him like a subordinate.
In Korea, Kennedy's image was that of a young president standing guard over the free world. In truth he was a man with scarcely any interest in Korea—indeed, with little interest in Asia as a whole, and a poor understanding of it. He had been halfhearted even about aiding South Vietnam, and a Korea that consumed so much money was, to him, a nuisance.
In 1962, when Kennedy invited Nobel laureates to the White House, he would put a question to Pearl Buck, who knew East Asia well.
"What should we do about Korea?"
Before she could answer, he would go on.
"I think the United States ought to get out of Korea. It costs far too much. It would be better, I think, to let Japan govern Korea again, as it used to."
Pearl Buck, it was later said, had been too astonished to speak. Realizing how ignorant he was of Asian politics and history, she would offer him a piece of advice.
"Proposing to hand Korea back to Japan is the same as proposing to make the United States a British colony again."
At that, Kennedy would break into a broad smile, call it a joke, and cover his ignorance. Ki-jo could not set much store by a man like that.
At four in the afternoon the plane touched down at the military terminal of Washington National Airport, and a United States Army honor guard struck up a welcome. When Chairman Park stepped off, the tall vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, came forward and offered his hand.
Once the airport ceremony was over, Ki-jo took his leave of the entourage. There was no place for him in Chairman Park's state visit. He remained at the airport alone, waiting for a man.
The man was Hugh D. Farley. He belonged to the International Cooperation Administration, the ICA—the predecessor of the Agency for International Development, USAID, which the Kennedy administration had established under the State Department. Until February 1961 he had served in Korea as deputy director of USOM. After returning to the United States he had written a report on the Korean situation and submitted it to President Kennedy. That report was the famous Farley Report, which had foreseen the possibility of a coup in Korea.
In it he judged that the Chang Myon government, installed after the fall of Syngman Rhee, was as corrupt as what had come before and exceedingly weak. South Korea, he warned, was highly likely either to collapse of its own accord into communism or to suffer a military coup. He also predicted, with accuracy, that if a coup came in the South, United States Forces Korea would be wholly unable to exercise leadership over the Korean military. He had marked April 1961 as the season when Korea would be in the gravest danger, and the May 16 coup had fallen close to the date he named.
Ki-jo took the man who had read Korea's future more clearly than anyone else to be, like Frank, either CIA himself or deeply entangled with the Agency. That Frank, still at USOM, had granted his request for a meeting with Farley without difficulty only sharpened the suspicion.
As Ki-jo waited at the airport, a man who had the look of a bodyguard approached him.
"Are you Mr. Lee Ki-jo, from Korea?"
When Ki-jo said he was, the man introduced himself as Hugh Farley's driver. Ki-jo did not believe him.
"Mr. Farley has arranged a quiet place to talk. Would you come with me?"
The manner was impeccably polite. Ki-jo went out of the airport with him.
He rode in the car the man drove, bound for somewhere he had not been told. They stopped in front of a hotel. Following his guide to a room on the eighth floor, Ki-jo stepped into 809. Three men were waiting inside.
"A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lee. Hugh Farley."
Farley welcomed him warmly. The two men with him introduced themselves as belonging to USAID at the State Department. Ki-jo did not believe that either.
Only a summary of Farley's report had been released at first, and only the passage predicting a coup had become famous. According to what would come out much later, Farley had recommended to Kennedy a scheme of rule by special envoy: send an envoy to Korea and steer Prime Minister Chang Myon from behind the scenes. Until Korea's deep and widespread corruption was entirely rooted out, he had argued, the United States should ignore the words Korean sovereignty and govern the country directly. That was not a claim a mere State Department official in charge of aid was in any position to make.
Meeting men he suspected were CIA, Ki-jo was not in the least cowed. He had sought the meeting himself, having judged that genuine USAID officials would have nothing worth taking from them. USAID was an agency that followed Kennedy's orders to begrudge the spending of American money on Korea. Appeal to these men for a steel mill and the only thing that would come back was a refusal. His thought was that he had to make use of the man who had won Kennedy's confidence by predicting May 16.
He shook hands with Farley and the others and sat in the chair they had prepared.
"I hear you're pursuing a rather special project in Korea."
Farley was the first to speak.
"I've prepared the materials in English. Would you look them over?"
Ki-jo drew the English plan from the bag he had brought and passed copies to the men. As the three of them, Farley included, read the report he had handed over, they nodded, and one of them spoke.
"Impressive."
Ki-jo knew that impressive, a word Americans were fond of, meant very little, and he did not care for it. Their faces as they read the steel-mill plan were the faces of men confirming something they already knew. He was sure the materials he had passed to Frank in Korea had already been reported to them. They seemed only to be checking whether anything had been added to what they already had.
Farley set the papers down and asked him a question.
"Has Chairman Park given you full authority over this project?"
"He has."
Farley, who had been studying him closely, put another question.
"You're not a government man, Mr. Lee."
"No. I'm a private businessman."
"Good. Be frank with me. While you've been pushing this steel mill, haven't you had the impression that it's a showpiece for the military government?"
"Not in the least. If anything, I've felt I'm receiving their full support."
He answered without a flicker of discomfort, though Farley questioned him like a prosecutor. Farley seemed to be trying to learn whether the revolutionary government was as corrupt as the governments before it. The question that followed carried the same intent.
"Which government officials are involved in the mill? Which offices have a hand in it?"
"Only Commissioner Park Tae-joon, the Supreme Council member in charge of commerce and industry. And there has been no official announcement in Korea about building a steel mill. If it were a showpiece, they would have announced it with great fanfare."
Ki-jo assumed the Americans had profiled not only the revolutionary cabinet but every member of the Supreme Council. He hoped the word that he was working with Park Tae-joon alone—a man renowned for his integrity—would set them at ease.
Farley nodded and asked again.
"Has Korea's Central Intelligence Agency involved itself? Has the director ever asked about the project, or passed along his personal views on how it ought to proceed?"
Ki-jo supposed they already had some grasp of his relationship with Kim Jong-pil. He answered honestly.
"I met him exactly once, in Pohang, the proposed site. He too was surveying the site for the mill on Chairman Park's orders, and the director said he would support my views completely."
At Ki-jo's answer, Farley exchanged a look with the other men and nodded.
"Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the KCIA proposed diverting part of the mill's budget somewhere else, or changing the construction schedule. What would you do?"
He could feel that America still suspected Kim Jong-pil of being a dangerous man. Ki-jo decided to meet the question head-on.
"I would report it directly to Mr. Hausman, or to Mr. Frank."
At those words, Farley and the two men with him let their expressions change. What Ki-jo had said was that if the Korean military government showed any improper intent, he would report it straight to the CIA operating inside Korea. It was also a way of telling them that he knew they were CIA, and that they might as well speak plainly.
The three men composed their faces by a fraction and looked at him. Farley tilted his head as if he had not understood, and asked.
"Mr. Hausman is only a military adviser, and Mr. Frank works for USOM. What good would it do to tell them?"
Ki-jo asked the men who were feigning ignorance whether he might smoke. At the question, all of them brought out cigarettes. He lit one, drew the smoke in deep, let it out, and spoke.
"Mr. Farley, I have worked with the CIA since 1954. At first it was to protect myself, my family, and my business from Syngman Rhee's corrupt government."
He looked Farley straight in the eye and went on.
"If, in seven years of working together, I had ever acted against American interests, or betrayed Mr. Hausman or Mr. Frank, I would not be sitting in this chair."
It was a request that they set their minds at ease about him.
"And I am a businessman. I intend to commit every resource my company has to building this mill. If the project goes wrong, my entire enterprise collapses. I am staking everything I have on it."
Farley nodded slowly.
"If the military government turns the mill into a showpiece, or tries to use my project to raise political funds, I will stop at once, expose the government's corruption, and request asylum in the United States. If they mean to profit by using me, I have no choice but to go under—and I have no wish to go on living in a country like that."
He spoke with finality, and Farley nodded.
Ki-jo trusted his own instinct. Even in the years when Park Chung-hee, by way of the Third-Term Constitutional Amendment, was moving toward a prolonged dictatorship, he had not laid a hand on the building of Pohang Iron and Steel. He had seen to it that no one interfered with the work Park Tae-joon was driving forward. No one had been allowed to claim a share of POSCO for himself. Ki-jo was certain it would be the same this time.
When he had finished, they all smoked in silence. Farley, the first to put his cigarette out, spoke.
"I hope, as you say, that the government just established in Korea will pursue its projects cleanly. The last two governments fell because they were corrupt and incompetent. If this one falls to corruption as well, I am convinced Korea will go communist."
Ki-jo nodded at that.
"While I was stationed in Korea, I sincerely wanted the country to do well. But no matter how much money America poured in, I watched politicians, civil servants, and soldiers siphon it off, and frankly I grew skeptical of Korea's future."
"Mr. Farley, Korea is improving. I have seen that corruption with my own eyes. It is clearly getting better."
When Ki-jo said so, Farley offered a faint smile and asked.
"Is it a little different this time?"
"So far..."
At the answer, Farley burst out laughing.
"It sounds like 'it seems clean for the time being.' How long that will last, I couldn't say..."
"That's right."
Ki-jo conceded it readily, and Farley, as if the answer pleased him, smiled brightly.
"I hear there's a saying in Korea about three chances."
Ki-jo nodded. He seemed to mean the old notion that a matter was settled only after three tries.
"I was told it means you ought to forgive a person at least three times, or give them something like three chances."
"That's right."
"Come to think of it, the military government is the third government Korea has had. Korea is a country with three chances. I hope it goes well this time. I mean that."
Ki-jo felt Farley opening. He thought he had climbed only a single step. There would be countless such steps ahead, and he did not let his guard down.
He asked Farley what he thought of forming an international steel-loan consortium.