Lee Dae-yong
Ki-jo sent the members of the Cheonwuhoe who had finished their field survey back to Korea and remained in Vietnam himself, waiting for the man he had asked Chairman Park to send.
The man he had requested was Colonel Lee Dae-yong. He wanted him because Dae-yong was the one who would become the key man in Korea's advance into Vietnam—a friend of Nguyen Van Thieu, the man who would one day be president, and, in the history Ki-jo remembered, the Korean most deeply bound to that country. Dae-yong himself, though, could not yet imagine that his fate would be lashed so tightly to Vietnam.
He was serving as commander of the 23rd Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. Even on a pittance of a salary he lived as a true soldier, uncorrupted. He was an able commander who had gone through the Korean War with a record of one hundred and ten battles and not a single defeat, yet because he would not flatter his superiors or the politicians, promotion had been blocked again and again.
Left to his own course, he would sit the examination for overseas embassy attaché sometime the following year, pass it, and be posted to Vietnam. What drove him to that examination, in the history Ki-jo knew, was sheer poverty. He had lived so cleanly that by the time he made colonel his entire fortune came to fifty thousand won. In those days, securing even a one-room house of about forty square meters in Seoul required a key-money deposit of some eighty thousand. Of the fifty thousand he had, he gave thirty thousand to a younger sibling worse off than himself and borrowed the rest to rent a room at eighty thousand—only to find that the house belonged to an army captain.
A colonel renting from a captain was awkward enough. Then one day he came home and found his own child being scolded by the captain's mother. The sight shook him. If he went on like this, he judged, he would not even be able to send his son to middle school, and he began to look for a posting that paid better. When he learned that military attachés dispatched to embassies abroad were well compensated, he sat the examination at once. He had a working command of English and French, so he passed and was assigned as resident military attaché to the embassy in South Vietnam, where French was still in common use.
That, however, was what had happened in the original history. At present he was living through the season he would later call the happiest of his life, in command of the 23rd Regiment of the 3rd Division. He set the example himself, refusing the bribes his subordinates offered, and spent on his men the fuel allowance, the provisions money, and the entertainment funds that ordinarily found their way into a regimental commander's pocket, keeping the regiment scrupulously clean.
A man like that would not have obeyed readily even if Chairman Park had ordered him to Vietnam. Right after the May 16 coup he had turned down the offer to become Park's chief of staff. He sympathized with the great cause of the revolution, but he had no interest in politics; he wanted to live out his life as a soldier preparing to fight the enemy. Knowing that, Ki-jo expected it would take some time before Dae-yong actually arrived.
He passed several days in Saigon, and at last word came from the Korean embassy. Attaché Lee Dae-yong had arrived from Korea; he was to come and meet him.
By then Ki-jo knew the streets of Saigon well enough to go alone. The embassy stood near the presidential palace and was easy to find, set in a building where Vietnamese nobility had once lived, and conspicuous for that alone. More than anything, the Taegukgi flying against the Vietnamese sky made it impossible to miss.
Stepping inside, the first thing to catch his eye was a taxidermied tiger in the entrance hall—the one Kim Tai-sung had bought at a charity auction held by the president of Vietnam and donated to the embassy. Ki-jo smiled before he knew it. It put him in mind of Yeong-jun, whose birth-dream had been a tiger. The specimen would soon be shipped to Korea and displayed at the National Science Museum, and if he took the family to see it, Yeong-jun would be delighted.
Shin Sang-chul, the ambassador to South Vietnam, welcomed him warmly. Ki-jo's visit came two years before the war began in earnest, yet the men who would distinguish themselves through the Vietnam War were already posted to the embassy. Shin was a former soldier who would hold the ambassadorship through the worst of the fighting. In the history Ki-jo remembered, he lost his life in the Aung San bombing in Burma.
Shown into the ambassador's office, he was introduced to Colonel Lee Dae-yong by Shin himself.
"This is Attaché Lee Dae-yong, newly assigned to Vietnam."
Ki-jo offered his greetings and took the colonel in at a glance. He had not come because he wanted to. He had been posted under Chairman Park's orders, half compelled, and he still looked a little dazed by it.
"A special instruction came down from Seoul," Ambassador Shin said, making it plain that Chairman Park was looking after Ki-jo. "We were ordered to assist President Lee properly while he is here."
Ki-jo spoke with the ambassador for a while, then came to his business.
"I'm sorry to impose on a first meeting, but there is someone in Vietnam I would like to see."
"Is there? Whom did you have in mind?"
"Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu."
At the name, Colonel Lee Dae-yong's eyes widened.
"Now, let me think. Nguyen Van Thieu..."
Shin Sang-chul had been ambassador for barely a month. He turned to the counselor beside him.
"Counselor—do you know a man called Nguyen Van Thieu?"
"He's the division commander responsible for the Bien Hoa sector."
"A colonel, commanding a division? Well. We were the same during the Korean War."
Still unused to Vietnam, Shin repeated it to himself, then smiled at Ki-jo.
"Very well. I'll put in a request with the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense. But why do you want to meet a South Vietnamese division commander?"
Ki-jo gave the answer he had prepared.
"I'm preparing a transport business in Vietnam, and I see Bien Hoa as the right place for it. It lies right beside Saigon, and National Route 1 runs through it, so it has every chance of becoming a logistics hub. I've also heard that communist guerrillas are stirring in the area, and I hoped to ask the local division commander for his cooperation."
"I see. Understood. We'll arrange the meeting."
As soon as the ambassador finished, Attaché Lee Dae-yong spoke.
"Mr. Ambassador, if it isn't another man of the same name, I believe I know Nguyen Van Thieu."
"You do?"
Shin looked at him, plainly pleased.
"How do you come to know a South Vietnamese officer?"
"When I took the U.S. joint staff course in Okinawa, there was a classmate by that name. He always sat beside me. We went through the classes together."
"Well, that's fortunate. You've come to exactly the right place for a mission in Vietnam. Exactly right."
Ambassador Shin praised him, and Ki-jo made his request.
"Once the attaché has shaken off the fatigue of the journey, I would like to go with him to meet Colonel Thieu. If they're friends, it will serve me better in every way than going alone."
Shin agreed at once and turned to Dae-yong.
"Yes. You'll go with President Lee. Classmates—that says everything that needs saying. Put in a word for him. Ask that our country's enterprise be looked after."
"I will, sir."
The first meeting among Ambassador Shin, Colonel Lee Dae-yong, and Ki-jo had gone smoothly.
Two days later the Korean embassy called again. They would send a car; he was to go with Attaché Lee Dae-yong to meet Division Commander Thieu.
An embassy car drew up at the lodgings where Ki-jo was staying. In it were a driver who looked to be an intelligence officer, and Attaché Lee Dae-yong.
"Please get in. There's no need to go all the way to Bien Hoa. We've arranged to see him here in Saigon."
Ki-jo took the seat beside the attaché, and they drove to a hotel—the Continental, where he had met Madame Nhu.
Nguyen Van Thieu was sitting at a table in the hotel coffee shop. The moment he saw Lee Dae-yong he sprang up, threw both arms wide, and broke into a grin.
"Dae-yong! How long has it been?"
Dae-yong could not hide his own smile. He took Thieu's hand and did not let go for a long moment.
"Have you been well? I hear you're commanding the Capital Defense Division. That's good to hear."
"I don't even know why the president put me in that post."
They were genuinely close. They talked without the least reserve, as if the affection built up while they trained together under the Americans in a foreign country had never cooled. When the greetings were done, Dae-yong introduced Ki-jo.
"Let me introduce the man who came with me. This is President Lee Ki-jo. He runs a major company in Korea."
"A pleasure, Mr. Lee. I'm Nguyen Van Thieu, Dae-yong's friend. Please, just call me Thieu."
"It's a pleasure, Mr. Thieu."
Ki-jo studied the man's face. The features were fine and neat, the impression gentle—so gentle he almost looked frail. No one, looking at him now, would have guessed that this man would survive five bloody coups and emerge the final winner. But Ki-jo knew the strength Nguyen Van Thieu possessed.
He had taken part in coups, yet he was never a man who stepped to the front. He drew quietly back and quietly did his own work, and that, in the end, proved decisive in making him president. Coup followed coup, governments changed, and the country slid deeper into confusion, until the generals of the South Vietnamese army convened to discuss how to steady the situation. If the coups went on, South Vietnam would destroy itself with North Vietnam waiting at the gate. They resolved to elevate a single leader and then stop. It was then that Thieu was put forward.
He was a man of easy relationships, with few enemies. He had been commandant of the military academy and chief of the general staff, so he had the support of many academy men. Behind his elevation, of course, lay the dark calculations of corrupt South Vietnamese generals. Those generals behaved like warlords. Each held a stretch of territory as his own domain and ruled it like a king, dipping into every concession in the region under his charge and making money as he pleased, with the power of life and death over the people who lived there. If a man displeased him, it was enough to brand the fellow a communist and have him summarily executed. Their power was such that they could ignore an operational order issued by the president in Saigon and suffer no consequences. Even at the height of the war, they often answered the government's commands with nothing more than a show of compliance. In that world, seating Thieu—who would not collide with them, and who was close to the Americans—made life comfortable, and so they raised him as a matter of course.
Seated across the table, Thieu asked Ki-jo how long he had been in the city.
"About two weeks."
"Then you were fortunate to arrive in the cool dry season. Saigon was once beautiful enough to be called the Paris of the East. Have you had your fill of it?"
"Yes. It is a beautiful place. I expect there is still a great deal more to see."
"If you have the time, you ought to see a ballet. Madame Nhu is fond of ballet, and quite accomplished performances are given here fairly often."
"If the chance comes, I certainly will."
As he talked with Thieu, Ki-jo thought of the other face this polished man concealed, the one that gave off the scent of aristocracy. Behind the gentle looks and the mannered courtesy, Nguyen Van Thieu hid a burning hunger for power and a streak of cruelty. Once he became president he did halt the persecution of Buddhists that the previous government had carried out, and he adopted a policy of social reconciliation—but that was only a passing face. Through eight years in office he devoted himself to eliminating rivals and to terror and torture against the opposition. He increased the police roughly eightfold to watch the people, and shut hundreds of thousands away in political prisons. He even claimed to be rooting out suspected Viet Cong and, at random, terrorized, tortured, murdered, and secretly buried some eighty thousand people. Small wonder that in 1975, the year South Vietnam fell, he was ranked the second-worst leader in the world. First place that year belonged to Idi Amin, a homicidal madman no one else could hope to rival. When the country collapsed, Thieu fled with an astronomical slush fund made from opium smuggling. He tried to load sixteen tons of gold bullion, amassed during his presidency, onto an American transport and escape; he succeeded in getting only part of it away.
Ki-jo judged that the surest way to capture Nguyen Van Thieu's heart was, in the end, money. But he had no margin for handing over a large sum, and he believed a gift of cash would buy only a temporary effect. What he needed was something longer, a lasting relationship of mutual interest. He was biding his time for the right offer of cooperation.
Then, in the talk between Lee Dae-yong and Thieu, a thread appeared.
"What's your older brother doing these days?"
"Teaching students at the university."
The brother Thieu meant was Nguyen Van Kieu. A university professor, he would be appointed South Vietnamese minister-counselor to Korea in 1966, serve there, and return to Vietnam the following year. Ki-jo knew an anecdote from the time Kieu spent in Korea. Used well, that alone ought to be enough to bind the Thieu–Kieu brothers to him in a lasting alignment of interests.